Imagism was a brief, complex yet influential poetic movement of the early 1900s,
a time of reaction against late nineteenth-century poetry which Ezra Pound, one
of the key imagist poets, described as 'a doughy mess of third-hand Keats, Word
sworth ...half-melted, lumpy'. In contrast, imagist poetry, although riddled wit
h conflicting definitions, was broadly characterized by brevity, precision, puri
ty of texture and concentration of meaning: as Pound stated, it should 'use no s
uperfluous word, no adjective, which does not reveal something...it does not use
images as ornaments. The image itself is the speech'.
It was this freshness
and directness of approach which means that, as Peter Jones says in his invaluab
le Introduction, 'imagistic ideas still lie at the centre of our poetic practice
'.
