‘An Atmosphere of Parody’

Abstract Chapter 3 explores how Pound’s journey of discovery with parody shaped the course of Imagism, focusing particularly on ‘Contemporania’ (1913) and Des Imagistes (1914). It examines his efforts to inaugurate an ‘atmosphere of parody’ so that the new school might flourish under the same conditions that had animated recent European avant-gardes. In doing so, it argues that Imagism was not nearly so earnest as its various pronouncements on the timeless qualities of good poetry might otherwise suggest. It concludes by investigating the parody that sustained the contradictions inherent in Blast (1914–15), the magazine of the first English avant-garde movement, Vorticism, which was itself widely parodied in little magazines and intellectual weeklies.