Imagist Poetry: Fragmentation and the Wish for Wholeness

Presenter: Alex MacDonald


This illustrated talk was read in February of this year as part of the University of Regina lecture series commemorating the centenary of the start of World War I in 1914. The talk begins with the observation made in many histories of the period, that the Great War was a cultural watershed, and that a characteristic feature of this watershed was the fragmentation of old ways of seeing the world. While fragmentation is certainly evident in Imagist poetry of the years from about 1910 to 1918, the other side of the binary is also present -- the wish for wholeness