19 ŠTÚDIE / ARTICLES World Literature Studies 3  vol. 10  2018 (19 – 29) Metaphor in the poetry of Imagists ANTON POKRIVčáK Te early 20th century is usually characterised as the time of the emergence of a new literary response towards reality. Tere is a general agreement that the response was provoked by great changes in the social fabrics of individual societies, caused by the development of natural and social sciences, rapid progress in technologies, growth of the cities and corresponding loss of traditional values in the midst of “unnatu- ral” urban settings, as well as by the progressing opening of traditional conscious- ness to all kinds of previously unheard of stimuli. To deal with, or depict, life in the changed conditions, literature responded by a variety of methods, most of them departing from the objectivity of the narrative modes of 19th-century prose or from the Romantic fusions of lyrical subjects wandering aimlessly amidst natural beauty. While in prose we get literary works like James Joyce’s Ulysses or Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, at least as far as the Anglophone literature is concerned, the poetic response ranged from the national symbolism of William Butler Yeats, through T. S. Eliot’s Te Waste Land, to the poetry of the artistic avant-gardes. Te Anglo-American Imagists were one such avant-garde approach attempting to poetically depict contemporaneous reality. What made them unique among other movements was their efort to distance themselves from the past through a new use of language (like Wordsworth before them), using words to create mental pictures, images – which was, in a sense, a proto-typical creative activity, ut pictura poesis – and seeing verbal meaning visually, fguratively. Such seeing has always been the domain of metaphor, for as W. J. T. Mitchell claims, “to compare poetry with paint- ing is to make a metaphor” (1986, 49). Te aim of the article is to draw attention to the metaphorical quality of the Imagists’ experimentation with the fguration of their deeply ontological and existential anxieties, resulting from the poets’ life in the changed world. WHAT IS METAPHOR? Every discussion of metaphor should begin by pointing to a truth “universally acknowledged” not only in literary studies, but across the entire spectrum of human sciences, i. e. that it is one of the most common devices of fgurativeness, if not the device of fgurativeness, and that it is not used only in literary works, especially poems, in which fgurativeness is essential, but that it occurs even in seemingly “non-fgu-