Imagisme essay

Imagism was a short-lived but influential movement in English and American poetry that flourished during the years 1912 to 1917. Self-consciously modernist in their aesthetic outlook, the Imagists sought to dislodge the diction, sentimentality, moralizing tone, and conventional forms of Victorian poetry,...

Another potential claimant is Ezra Pound ’s short essay ‘A Few Don’ts by an Imagiste’, which was published in Poetry magazine in 1913 and does have the right to the title ‘Imagist manifesto’. Since Imagism was the starting-point for much modernist English poetry, ‘A Few Don’ts by an Imagiste’ is worth exploring, summarising, and analysing here.

Together Flint and Pound devised the three primary precepts of Imagism, calling for conciseness, musical rhythm, and "the direct treatment of the 'thing' whether subjective or objective." These theories were soon after put into practice in the first Imagist anthology, edited by Pound and entitled Des Imagistes (1914).

Pound coined the term in 1912 to assist Hilda Doolittle (H.D.) in the marketing of some of her poems. Doolittle was an unknown author, and Pound decided that her work would be accepted more easily if she were identified with a group of poets (Dettmar/Watt), such as Richard Aldington and F.S. Flint (“Imagists”).