Document Type
Article
Publication Date
2018
Abstract
In the poetry of Al Purdy, objects inform the imaginative process through a technique I am terming “Objective Imagism”, which follows from the ideas of T.S. Eliot's Objective Correlative, and Ezra Pound's Imagism. The goal of this paper is to explain first how Objective Imagism follows out of Eliot's Objective Correlative and Pound's Imagism, and second to lay out how Objective Imagism functions in Purdy’s work; specifically how the speaker’s poetic inspiration comes from physical objects described within the poem, and leads to these objects becoming images within the speaker's imagination before finally describing how through the process of writing, the images become physical objects once again—re-created in the text the author produces.
Notes
Regional Winner in the Literature Category.