After Impressionism

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 various 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.

Rob Harris is Fellow by Examination in English at Magdalen College, University of Oxford.