Book description
Imagism was a brief, complex yet influential poetic movement of the
early 1900s, a time of reaction against late nineteenth-century poetry
which Ezra Pound, one of the key imagist poets, described as a doughy
mess of third-hand Keats, Wordsworth half-melted, lumpy . In contrast,
imagist poetry, although riddled with conflicting definitions, was
broadly characterized by brevity, precision, purity of texture and
concentration of meaning: as Pound stated, it should use no superfluous
word, no adjective, which does not reveal something it does not use
images as ornaments. The image itself is the speech . It was this
freshness and directness of approach which means that, as Peter Jones
says in his invaluable Introduction, imagistic ideas still lie at the
centre of our poetic practice .
