A Comparative Analysis of Imagism in the Poetry of Thomas Ernest Hulme and Bijan Elahi

The formation of the idea of a school called Imagism in the early 20th century in Hulme, after studying Bergson, and Pound, after getting to know Fenollosa and studying Japanese poetry, created a leap in European poetry and paved the way for a new kind of poetry that after Arthur Rimbaud and Charles Baudelaire drew careful attention to the specifity of images and language. Imagism focuses on a specific object or image as the main subject of the poem with clear and concise language. This school is a subset of modernism that focuses on the skillful presentation of objective images, does not waste time talking about the subjects behind the images, and lets the image speak for itself. Examining the imagistic solutions of Hulme, as the father of Imagism provides a suitable opportunity for researchers of modern poetry. Bijan Elahi, a contemporary Iranian poet, due to his translations of modern European and American poems, was able to reflect the features of this school in his poems. The simultaneous analysis of the artistry of these two poets in their poetic style leads to the clarification of their intellectual, philosophical, and cultural backgrounds. Elahi and Hulme were successful poets in Imagism, and the difference between these two poets, in addition to their cultural context and mental background, was that Hulme, as the pioneer of this school, adhered more to the framework of its ideas, but Elahi, having passed through She’r-e-no and Moj-e-no, was faithful to the tenets of the school only partially and in certain periods of his development. Hulme’s mental background was philosophy, old laws, and a new point of view towards the world, whereas Elahi was more influenced by eastern mysticism.