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�.