"The Doctrine of the Image" analyzes the meaning of Pound's "Doctrine" for Imagisme, his first modern aesthetic movement, and for his poetics thereafter. It concentrates, initially, on the moment of Imagisme- -published as what he called The Platform of the Image in Harriet Monroe's Volume I of Poetry magazine. My dissertation stays closely with this Platform, which I believe guides the development of the poetic beyond its origination point: I contend the Platform presents two versions of the image which diametrically oppose one another, the three tenets of Imagisme, and the Doctrine of the image, respectively. The tenets are objectivist and are publicized, as they represent Pound's choice for modernizing the poem in the linguistic sense.;Most Pound scholarship to date which has explicated the Imagisme moment has read Pound's image as the objective image, the Utopian image free of excess verbiage. But the Doctrine has gone virtually ignored, except for the occasional allusion to it. It is my view that it reflects the opposing allure--for Pound--of a subjectivized image. I devote the majority of the dissertation to proving this thesis of bipolar sympathies and to exploring their theoretical ramifications, as the radically objective image is propounded because of a real belief in the possibility of referential language, a belief I discuss against the backdrop of current theory of language; while the subjective image is gradually liberated in moments of self-reflexive eruptiveness.
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