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Impressionist painting was the dominant art form of its time, and one to which English-speaking poets were profoundly responsive. Yet the relationship between impressionism and poetry has largely been overlooked by literary critics. After Impressionism rectifies this oversight by offering the first extended account of impressionism's transformative impact on anglophone verse. Through close readings of the creative and critical writings of Arthur Symons, W. B. Yeats, Ford Madox Ford, the Forgotten School of 1909 and Ezra Pound, it argues that important ideas in the history of modern poetry-ideas such as decadence, symbolism, vers libre and imagism-were formulated as expressions of (or sometimes as antidotes to) impressionist aesthetics. In doing so, it suggests that impressionism was one of the crucial terms-often the crucial term-through and against which English verse of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was defined. This title is also available as open access on Cambridge Core.
List of contents
Introduction: impressionism and irregularity; 1. 'Insane thinking': the impressionism of Arthur Symons; 2. Escaping impressionism: Titian, Manet, early years; 3. On or about 1909: Ford Madox Ford, the forgotten school and vers libre; 4. 'Not impressionism': the imagisme of Ezra pound; Afterword; Bibliography.
About the author
Dr Rob Harris is Fellow by Examination at Magdalen College, Oxford, where he specialises in the fields of Victorian and modernist art and literature. He was previously Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Bristol.
