page_title: Imagism
section_title: Early publications and statements of intent
hierarchical_section_title: Imagism / Early publications and statements of intent
caption_attribution_description: Depicted person&#58; &#32;H.D.&#32;– American Imagist poet
context_page_description: Imagism was a movement in early-20th-century Anglo-American poetry that favored precision of imagery and clear, sharp language. It has been described as the most influential movement in English poetry since the Pre-Raphaelites. As a poetic style it gave modernism its start in the early 20th century, and is considered to be the first organized modernist literary movement in the English language. Imagism is sometimes viewed as "a succession of creative moments" rather than a continuous or sustained period of development. René Taupin remarked that "it is more accurate to consider Imagism not as a doctrine, nor even as a poetic school, but as the association of a few poets who were for a certain time in agreement on a small number of important principles".
  The Imagists rejected the sentiment and discursiveness typical of much Romantic and Victorian poetry, in contrast to their contemporaries, the Georgian poets, who were generally content to work within that tradition.
context_section_description: In 1911, Pound introduced two other poets to the Eiffel Tower group: his former fiancée Hilda Doolittle (who had started signing her work H.D.) and her future husband Richard Aldington. These two were interested in exploring Greek poetic models, especially Sappho, an interest that Pound shared. The compression of expression that they achieved by following the Greek example complemented the proto-Imagist interest in Japanese poetry, and, in 1912, during a meeting with them in the British Museum tea room, Pound told H.D. and Aldington that they were Imagistes and even appended the signature H.D. Imagiste to some poems they were discussing.
  When Harriet Monroe started her Poetry magazine in 1911, she had asked Pound to act as foreign editor. In October 1912, he submitted thereto three poems each by H.D. and Aldington under the Imagiste rubric, with a note describing Aldington as "one of the 'Imagistes'". This note, along with the appendix note ("The Complete Works of T. S. Hulme") in Pound's book Ripostes (1912), are considered to be the first appearances of the word "Imagiste" (later anglicised to "Imagist") in print.
  Aldington's poems, Choricos, To a Greek Marble, and Au Vieux Jardin, were in the November issue of Poetry, and H.D.'s, Hermes of the Ways, Priapus, and Epigram, appeared in the January 1913 issue; Imagism as a movement was launched. Poetry's April issue published what came to be seen as "Imagism's enabling text", the haiku-like poem of Pound titled "In a Station of the Metro":
  The apparition  of these faces  in the crowd :
  Petals  on a wet, black  bough .
  The March 1913 issue of Poetry contained A Few Don'ts by an Imagiste and the essay entitled Imagisme both written by Pound, with the latter being attributed to Flint. The latter contained this succinct statement of the group's position:
  Direct treatment of the "thing", whether subjective or objective.
  To use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation.
  As regarding rhythm: to compose in sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of the metronome.
  Pound's note opened with a definition of an image as "that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time". Pound goes on to state,"It is better to present one Image in a lifetime than to produce voluminous works". His list of "don'ts" reinforced his three statements in "Imagism", while warning that they should not be considered as dogma but as the "result of long contemplation". Taken together, these two texts comprised the Imagist programme for a return to what they saw as the best poetic practice of the past. F. S. Flint commented "we have never claimed to have invented the moon. We do not pretend that our ideas are original."
  The 1916 preface to Some Imagist Poets comments "Imagism does not merely mean the presentation of pictures. Imagism refers to the manner of presentation, not to the subject."
caption: H.D. (Hilda Doolittle)
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