Short, sweet, and fleet of meter, Imagism burst forth from the self-protective womb of nineteenth-century poetic formalism, ushering in a new language for a new era. By boldly blending their fascination with the Japanese haiku, medieval philosophy, and ancient Greek lyrics,... [more]

Short, sweet, and fleet of meter, Imagism burst forth from the self-protective womb of nineteenth-century poetic formalism, ushering in a new language for a new era. By boldly blending their fascination with the Japanese haiku, medieval philosophy, and ancient Greek lyrics, the Imagists concocted an innovative verse based on musicality and phrasing as opposed to traditional meter. Ezra Pound inaugurated the movement, which was later taken over by Amy Lowell. Poets such as Ford Madox Ford, H. D. (Hilda Doolittle), D. H. Lawrence, and William Carlos Williams avoided the abstract concept and elevated the immediate, concrete image. Imagists created a poetry of clarity, compression, and precision, in which images were the 'essence of an intuitive language.' Their pared-down, tightly worked verse stood in stark contrast to the rhapsodic, emotion-drunk verse of Pre-Raphaelites, or the self-satisfied stultification of the Georgian poets. The sharply-etched single image, precision of language, singular, radical metaphors, and free-form cadences, all directly influenced an entire generation of poets, including e.e. cummings, T. S. Eliot, and Wallace Stevens. Imagism altered poetic conventions so completely in its brief heyday as to fling open the floodgates for the new poetic currents of Modernism, which needed such an abrupt alteration of form to fully realize the flow of its gestating genius. [show less]