Imagist Poetry

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 .