Imagism

Imagism, poetic movement that flourished in the U.S. and England between 1909 and 1917. The movement was led by the American poets Ezra Pound and, later, Amy Lowell. Other imagist poets were the English writers D. H. Lawrence and Richard Aldington and the American poets John Gould Fletcher and Hilda Doolittle. These poets issued manifestos and wrote poems and essays embodying their theories. They placed primary reliance on the use of precise, sharp images as a means of poetic expression and stressed precision in the choice of words, freedom in the choice of subject matter and form, and the use of colloquial language. Most of the imagist poets wrote in free verse, using such devices as assonance and alliteration rather than formal metrical schemes to give structure to their poetry. Notable collections of imagist poetry are Des Imagistes: An Anthology (1914), compiled by Pound, and the three anthologies compiled by Amy Lowell, all under the title Some Imagist Poets (1915, 1916, 1917). Americans Marianne Moore, William Carlos Williams, and Carl Sandburg were among the many important writers to be influenced by imagism.