BH. John Gould Fletcher

12. ‘The Impulse of Poetry’. In American Caravan IV, edited by Alfred Kreymborg. New York: Macauley, 1931.

	Reprinted in Selected Essays.

In a long second section Fletcher contrasts two seascapes, by Winslow Homer and Ogata Kôrin (Ap, see also 4b), and describes the principles he finds at work in each, in the realism of the former the qualities of ‘uniqueness, power, [and] self-reliance’ valued in the West, and in the ‘study in spaced forms’ of the latter the ‘Buddhist doctrine’ of ‘endless flux and flow’. Fletcher’s attempt to derive ‘counterparts in poetic technique’ relies on stipulative definitions that are somewhat obscure, but he arrives at the conclusion that in its ‘static statements’ and ‘plasticity’ Imagism is comparable to the techniques of Kôrin. Reprinted in 21.