The new age demanded proper literary expression to express the modern spirit, the sense of fragmentation and dislocation. Imagism movement was one.
 Image: a writer’s description of specific concrete objects in a poem which strengthens our sense that what we are being told is real.
The Imagism Poem: It was the invention of a small group of English and American Poets who came together in the first years of this century to work out some new way of writing poetry. It is free verse, clear, accurate, concrete and full of beauty of music. It often contains a single dominant image or a succession of related images and enables readers to see the physical thing rather than put his thought through an abstract process.
e.g.
The apparition of these faces in the crowd  (人群中幽然浮现的一张张脸庞)
Petals on a wet, black bough           （黝黑的湿树枝上的一片片花瓣）
Faces here refer to the faces of a few pretty women and children in a crowd hurrying out of the dim, damp, and somber station. The dominant image is flower petals on a wet, black bough.
Ezra Pound （埃兹拉.庞德）
Volunteer of Imagism movement
Life story:
Born in Hailey, Idaho, and brought up in Pennsylvania. In 1908, sailed to Europe. Then arriving in London, founded Imagism together with H.D and Richard Aldington.
He leaned in the direction of Mussolini’s墨索尼里 fascist totalitarianism and broadcast over radio Rome, during the Second World War, Against the Allies. At the end of the war he was arrested by the U.S military authorities, and then brought back to the States to stand trial for treason. but was sent, instead, to hospital, after being declared insane. With the effort of some influential people like Hemingway, he was released. Hugh Selwyn Mauberly （休.希尔文.毛伯莱）The longest poem in his early days. It consists of 18 poems, 400 lines. ( main character in Chapter 4-13: E.P)
1.It is a poem about the commercialization and debasement of art, about the feeling of frustration and failure on the part of the artist, about the poet himself.
2.He makes attack on commercialism, mechanism., complains the decay of value which sacrifices youth in the mass slaughter of the World War I.
3. It is a painful record of the growth of Pound as a poet from his refusal to write “socially useful” to his final realization that aestheticism will not work in the modern world. It reveals the dissatisfaction of the intellectuals to the society per-war and post-war.
Cantos（诗章）
It’s Pound’s intellectual diary from 1915 to 1969. It contains a total of 117 poems and a mixture of different cultures and languages (18 including Chinese). Its subjects shift from America to Italy, from Europe to china, and return to America again: from ancient times to modern, from modern to ancient.
Comment:
1. It is social history, a poet’s attempt to impose, through art, order and meaning upon a chaotic and meaningless world. The world of the Cantos is indeed cheerless.
2. A major thematic concern of the Cantos is the treatment of usury which in Pound’s eyes, like a beast with a hundred legs, blasts light, life and love out of existence.
3. He makes a contrast between his idealized Confucius doctrine and west modern commercialized civilization to expose the latter’s corruption. He holds that Confucius doctrine leads to the prosperity in China, and he sees it as a source of strength and wisdom.

Chapter 12
T.S. Eliot  Stevens

T.S. Eliot (艾略特)
Life:
 Born in ST. Louis, Missouri. His grandfather had helped to found the University of Washington. Both of his parents were cultured people so that young Eliot received a good education, especially in classic literature. After he received his M.A. degree in Harvard University and had studied in Paris and Oxford, he settled down in 1915 in England, teaching, working as a bank clerk, writing book reviews while composing poetry.
His poetry was famous for its fresh imagery, its flexible tone and highly expressive rhythm. He was one of the first to sense the futility and fragmentization of modern and see modern society at its most disgusting.
The Love song of J. Alfred Prufrock (杰.阿尔弗瑞德.普鲁弗洛克的情歌)
 It depicts a timid middle-aged man going (or thinking of going) to propose marriage to a lady but hesitating all the way there. Prufrock is the image of an ineffectual (lacking confidence, unable to get things done), sorrowful, tragic twentieth century western man, possibly, the modern intellectual who is divided between passion and timidity, between desire and impotence. His tragic flaw is timidity, and his curse is his idealism. Knowing everything, but able to do nothing, he lives in an area of life and death, and caught between the two worlds, he belongs to neither. He craves love but has no courage to declare himself. He despairs of life. He discovers its emptiness and yet has found nothing to replace it. So the poem develops a theme of frustration and emotional conflict.
Masterpiece:
 The Waste Land  （荒原）
It is a milestone of the modern western poetry.
It is a concise summary of the spiritual state commonly felt in the postwar Europe. It describes the gloominess of the modern man full of desires but without passions, expresses the sense of disillusionment of the whole generation and reveals the spiritual crisis. It was the poem of despair for the 1920s and 1930s.
There are 5 sections. It dramatizes the plight of modern civilization.
1. Burial of the dead. It introduces the problems of the wasteland as they’re symbolically related to the failure of the quest.
2. A game of chess. The subject is sex without love, especially within marriage.
3. The fire sermon. The subject is horror of loveless sex outside marriage.
4. Death by water. Death of sailors.
5. What the thunder said.. The quester tries to achieve peace through religion but fails.
 It reflects a declining morale of the intellectuals, and expresses their desire to look for an outlet from religion. “Waste land” itself becomes a symbol of the declining western civilization.
  The poem moves through recurrent reminders of the modern waste land toward a hope of regeneration and builds toward the possibility of restoring order and life. There is an underlying desire on the part of the poet to help create order and sense out of a disorderly and senseless existence.

Wallace Stevens (华莱士.斯蒂文斯)
He began publishing at 44. He was successful in two fields: a very successful man, rising to the position of vice-president in an insurance company, a father-figure among contemporary poets. So, he was a poet living in two worlds: the world of reality and the world of imagination.
Poetic ideas:
  In his opinion, a poet should find beauty and pleasure and excitement and meaning in the sordidness of reality. Poetry is a major modern form to reveal the heroism of modern man who, even though recognizing the nothingness of modern existence, yet brings order and meaning to its chaos and meaninglessness. Therefore, his poem has a tone of optimism.
 Famous poem:
Anecdote of the Jar (的传说)
Summary: “I” of the poem places a tall, round jar, a man-made object , a symbol of art in the wild, chaotic and formless rural Tennessee（田纳西），a symbol of the world of nature. Then a miracle happens: the jar controls the whole disorderly landscape.
Theme: It talks about the relationship between art and nature, and exalts the role of art and imagination. The world of nature, shapeless and slovenly, takes shape and order from the presence of the jar. The world of art and imagination gives form and meaning to that of nature and reality. It suggests that any society without art is one without order and that man makes the order he perceives, and the world he inhabits is one he half creates.