Imagism was a poetic movement that flourished between the years 1912 and 1917. Ezra Pound, the first leader of the movement, was soon succeeded by Amy Lowell; other leading participants in the movement were Hilda Doolittle, D. H. Lawrence, William Carlos Williams, John Gould Fletcher, and Richard Aldington.
They defined poetry, “as the presentation of visual situation in the fewest possible concrete words, lightened of the burdens of conventional adjectival padding and unhampered by general ideas or philosophical or moral speculations. Imagism helped break down merely conventional metrics and allowed poets to write a poem as it came, to let theme and mood take their natural shape. The chief modern poets Yeats and Eliot had a great deal in common with the imagists.
The typical Imagist poem is written in free verse, and undertakes to render as exactly and tersely as possible, without comment or generalization, the writer’s response to a visual object or scene; often the impression is rendered by means of metaphor, or by juxtaposing a description of one object with that of a second and diverse object.
The founder of this school T.E. Hume (1833-1917) and his most illustrious disciple Ezra Pound insisted that “poetry should restrict itself to the world perceived by the senses and to the presentation of its themes in a succession of concise, clearly visualized, concrete images, accurate in detail and precise in significance.”
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Imagism was too restrictive to sustain long as a concerted movement, but it proved to be the beginning of modern poetry. Almost every major poet up to this day, including W.B. Yeats, T.S.
Eliot, and Wallace Stevens, felt strongly the influence of the Imagist experiments with precise, clear images, juxtaposed without any express connection.