The Embroidery of Things— “Objective Imagism” In the Poetry of Al Purdy

In the poetry of Al Purdy, objects inform the imaginative process through a technique I am terming “Objective Imagism”, which follows from the ideas of T.S. Eliot\u27s Objective Correlative, and Ezra Pound\u27s Imagism. The goal of this paper is to explain first how Objective Imagism follows out of Eliot\u27s Objective Correlative and Pound\u27s Imagism, and second to lay out how Objective Imagism functions in Purdy’s work; specifically how the speaker’s poetic inspiration comes from physical objects described within the poem, and leads to these objects becoming images within the speaker\u27s imagination before finally describing how through the process of writing, the images become physical objects once again—re-created in the text the author produces