"Towards a Drier, More Objective World": The Statehood Generation's Poetic Ideology and the Social Meanings of Imagism

In: Shofar: a quarterly interdisciplinary journal of Jewish studies ; official journal of the Midwest and Western Jewish Studies Associations, Band 42, Heft 2, S. 88-113

Abstract

Abstract: This paper challenges the dominant historiographic narrative of the Statehood Generation of the 1950s, according to which the emergence of this poetry is a moment of rebellion and liberation — both from its poetic symbolistic predecessors and from nationalism and collectivity. Focusing on Nathan Zach's influential and authoritative critical writings on poetry, I argue that the two major poetic ideals of the Statehood Generation — individuality and concreteness — are not as consistent and complementary with one another as they usually seem, since the ideal of concreteness does not involve the subjective presence of the speaker, but is rather "dry" and impersonal, focusing on the object itself (following the model of the Anglo-American Imagist poets). I also point out that Zach posits concreteness as the poetic ideal, and yet his poetry itself — as well as most of Israeli poetry of the 1950s and 1960s — does not fulfill this ideal. In order to explain this tension between the two poetic ideals, and the historical process by which the concrete image is posited as an ideal but is not yet fulfilled, I propose to depart from the dominant historiographic narrative, whose major and only horizon is the nation, and to embrace a social-economic narrative, which also takes into account the development of capitalist society, as part of a modern global development. Following the books by Cohen-Lustig and Nir, I argue that the ideal of the Imagist image designates, in fact, a pursuit of autonomy — not only autonomy of the individual but also of the object — which is part of a process of autonomization as an element of capitalist social development. This narrative also explains why, in the 1950s, in which capitalism is still bound up with (and reined in by) nation-building, the ideal of concreteness emerges but cannot yet be fulfilled; while in the 1970s, in which capitalism becomes global and overcomes the state, autonomization that accelerates the Imagist ideal can be fulfilled, taking the shape of Hebrew Imagist poetry of different types.