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영어

Early in his career, Ezra Pound concerned himself with the precise and succinct expression in poetry. It was in some way a prescription against his contemporary verse that was too vague and decorative, and too much given to generalization. His enthusiasm in the exactness and economy of expression in verse led him to initiate the Imagist movement in modern English poetry. This precision produced the effectiveness in expression. This effectiveness could be accomplished by Image, which was a means to produce the totality of a poem with metonymy. An examination of the development of his earlier poetry, therefore, is a study on the concept of Image and its metonymic use of language. This thesis explicates the development of the early poetry of Ezra Pound from the time when he first arrived in Europe to the period of the Imagist movement, comparing the two poems of Daphnic metamorphoses. The first of these poems, “The Tree,” published in the earliest stage of his poetic career, explains the speaker’s experience of metamorphosis and the knowledge from it. This poem is very prosaical with its assertive use of copula and generalization, which Pound tried to eschew. “A Girl”, written around the period of his Imagist movement, on the other hand, presents the same subject with economy and directness. The effectiveness of expression in this poem comes from Image and its metonymic use of language. The metonymic organization of words which employed Image was thus the pith of Pound’s Imagist poetry.