Previous Next

Imagism

Imagism was a short-lived avant-garde poetry movement that had its heyday in the mid-1910s. Important figures in this movement included Ezra Pound, Hilda Doolittle (who published as H.D.), and William Carlos Williams. By the early twentieth century, these and other poets had grown weary of the sentimentality and artifice that characterized the previous century’s poetry. Moving beyond the poetry of recent generations, this group of poets explored a new kind of verse that emphasized economy of language and directness of presentation. Key to this new form of poetry was a radical simplification of subject matter and scope. Instead of pursuing ambitious themes about love, life, death, and everything in between, these experimental poets sought to focus on a single image—or scene, or experience—and reveal something essential about it. This focus on a single image gave birth to the new movement’s name: Imagism. There is perhaps no more famous example of an Imagist poem than Pound’s haiku-like verse, “In a Station of the Metro.” In his own accounts of Imagism, Pound stressed the importance of not understanding images as ornaments or as symbols, but as itself a form of speech: “The image is the word beyond formulated language.”

Previous section About Ezra Pound Next section Related Works on SparkNotes

Take a Study Break