In the following essay, Ramsey discusses such qualities as immediacy and precise imagery in an examination of common traits shared by Imagist poetry and the works of nineteenth-century literary Symbolists.

SOURCE: "Uses of the Visible: American Imagism, French Symbolism," in Comparative Literature Studies, Vol. IV, Nos. 1-2, 1967, pp. 177-91.

The actual landscape with its actual horns
 Of butcher and baker blowing, as if to hear,
 Hear hard, gets at an essential integrity.

—Wallace Stevens

What were the common qualities, if any, of literary symbolism of the later nineteenth century and Imagism—meaning by the latter an idea of a contemporary rightness in English verse that began to come clear around T. E. Hulme, F. S. Flint, and Ezra Pound about 1910? The question is not easy to answer. If one begins with Flint's recollection, "We were very much influenced by modern French symbolist poetry,"¹ that was shortly before Pound's...