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’.

Over 180 well-chosen Imagist gems appear in this tribute to an important and influential poetic movement of the 20th century. Includes short verse by Pound, Lawrence, Hilda Doolittle, Joyce, Stevens, others.

In the present study, the innovative and cerebral poetry of the Imagist movement, which revolutionized modern English and American poetry, has been analyzed in its contextual and inter-textual relationships with other arts. Consequently, the book is like the texts it attempts to investigate, a peculiar hybrid, a collage of three basic materials or analytical perspectives: an excerpt from an Imagist manifesto sketched out in handwriting (context), a torn out printed page from a first edition of Des Imagistes (text), and a photograph of a museum installation of a room devoted to Modernist art (intertext).

First published in 1999. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.