Imagist Poetry

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, Wordsworth … half-melted, lumpy.’ In contract, imagist poetry, although riddled with conflicting definitions, was broadly characterised by brevity, precision, purity of texture and concentration of meaning.