Ezra Pound
E. PouncTs "In a Station of the Metro" (1913) with the title serving as the poem's first linę
William Carlos Williams (1883 - 1963)
• he was a doctor wrlting short stories, poems
• "The Red Wheelbarrow" (1923)
• Yet Imagism from the outset never quite held to thls model of concision and descriptive neutrality. John Gould Fletcher is a elear example of lmagism's less violently recognized, loosely descriptive, and impressionistic modę.
Amy Lowell (1874 - 1925)
• "Peace" - anti-war poem ?
• the beginnings of formulating the principles of imagism may be traced to Nov 1908, when E. Pound outlined them in a letter to W.C. Williams
1. "to paint the thing as I see it
2. beauty
3. freedom from didacticism
4. it's only good manners if you repeat, a few other men at last do it better or morę briefly"
Imagism
• in 1911, Pound was looking for some good poems to send to Harriet Monroe in Chicago for her "Poetry: A Magazine of Verse" (Pound was both a contributor to the magazine and the editor of its London edition)
• he found the poems in the work of Hilda Doolittle (American) and Richard Aldington (British). In 1912, to their surprise, Pound informed them that they were Imagists.
• in the January 1913 edition of "Poetry", "Three Poems" were published by Hilda Doolittle underthe pseudonym H.D. Imagiste
• two months later, again in "Poetry", F.S. Flint wrote "Imagisme" ?, known as the "Imagist Manifesto". It defined the new movement and elaborated the rules:
1. "direct treatment of the "thing" whether subjective or obJective
2. to use absolutely no word that doesn't contribute to the presentation
3. as regarding rhythm: to compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of a metronome"
Foliowing Flint's artlcle in the same issue was "A Few Don'ts by an Imagiste", an article written by Pound in which he defined the image as "that which presents an emotional and intellectual complex in an instant of time"