Imagism

Imagism, a movement of English and American poets in revolt from Romanticism, which flourished c.1910–17, and derived in part from the aesthetic philosophy of T. E. Hulme. Its first anthology, Des Imagistes (1914), edited by Pound, had eleven contributors: R. Aldington, H. Doolittle, F. S. Flint, Skipwith Cannell, A. Lowell, W. C. Williams, Joyce, Pound, ( F. M. Hueffer Ford), Allen Upward, and John Cournos. Some of D. H. Lawrence's poems of this period may also be described as Imagist. The characteristic products of the movement are more easily recognized than its theories defined: they tend to be short, composed of short lines of musical cadence rather than metrical regularity, to avoid abstraction, and to treat the image with a hard, clear precision rather than with overt symbolic intent. The influence of Japanese forms (tanka and haiku) is obvious in many. Amy Lowell succeeded Pound as spokesperson of the group, and was responsible for several Imagist anthologies.