In the following essay, Martin locates sources of lmagist aesthetics in theories of philosophy and psychology that were current in the early twentieth century.

SOURCE: "The Sources of the Imagist Aesthetic," in PMLA, Vol. 84, No. 2, March, 1970, pp. 196-204.

When subjected to scholarly scrutiny, literary revolutions usually prove less novel than they appear to be. We now know that the twentieth-century reaction against Romanticism was largely based on Romantic principles, and a number of writers have argued that Aestheticism, Symbolism, Imagism, and Surrealism are essentially extensions of the literary revolution that began in the eighteenth century. At the same time, these movements do embody distinctive features that cannot be explained by reference to their literary tradition. For an understanding of innovation in aesthetic theory, we often must turn to intellectual history. The influence of Schopenhauer and Hartmann on Symbolism, and that of Bergson and Freud on Surrealism, did not...