“Not all objects are equal”: the poetics of New York imagism

The paper focuses on the poetic community associated with a New York little magazine, Alfred Kreymborg’s Others (that saw its publishing peak at around 1915). The poets in question include E. Pound, A. Lowell, O. Johns, A. Kreymborg, S. Cannell, W.C. Williams. The author concentrates on a peculiar device that is noticeable if we take into account a corpus of published poetry. Namely, it is the expression of an affective state through a reference to an object, a household item. Drawing on late formalism (“the literary everyday” concept proposed by Tynianov and Eykhenbaum, literary sociology avant la lettre) and newer literary trends (media- and sociologically-oriented approaches to literature, represented by B. Herzogenrath), the author outlines a way of establishing a correspondence between a literary technique and its context. The author suggests that we trace the genesis of a literary structure back to the communicative exchanges and practices embedded in the poetic community, thus factoring out the form-content distinction in favor of media-oriented accounts of literary texts. Here the poetic community is conceived of as a medium, the literary everyday constitutes a force acting upon that medium in order to produce a literary form, and a literary form emerges in the process of tight coupling between the two. Giving an account of the literary everyday of the magazine community and its material and social contexts (apartments, cafés, bars), the author posits that this interaction between the community as a “medium” and its literary everyday had shaped a speech orientation toward friendly, informal communication in which the emphasis is placed on understatements and non-verbalized implications. That led to the emergence of a new poetic technique: using a reference to an object as a vehicle of affective experience.