stance. He uses words to convey impressions more often expressed in music or in painting.
Perhaps that is why he, along with other Imagists, has been accused of a lack of passion. It all depends upon what one means by the word. The emotion of color or the emotion of sound is sufficient for the musician or the painter. Mr. Fletcher sees nature very much as the painter or the musician, and that is the way I think he means us to feel nature in his poems, with, however, the addition of one element which belongs pre-eminently to poetry—the gift of creative metaphor. In many of his poems Mr. Fletcher is entirely successful. If one must look for weakness in his method, I think it is in a certain tendency to pile too many sensations one upon another. There is a certain cumulative effect, but the clear image is blurred. One retains not so much a definite impression of the whole, as a succession of impressions, like a threading of beads that never complete the circle of a necklace. Occasionally single lines or groups of lines are perfect in themselves. I remember particularly certain passages from his Blue Symphony, published in Poetry:
O old pagodas of my soul, how you glittered across green trees!
or this:
And a heron that cries out from the water . . .
and this:
Now in my palace
I see foot-passengers
Crossing the river:
Pilgrims of autumn
In the afternoons.
[45]
