Imagist Poetry
by Peter Jones
2020-11-20 07:42:45
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 âa doughy mess of third-hand Keats, Wordswort...
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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 âa doughy mess of third-hand Keats, Wordsworth ⦠half-melted, lumpyâ. In contrast, imagist poetry, although riddled with conflicting definitions, was broadly characterized by brevity, precision, purity of texture and concentration of meaning: as Pound stated, it should âuse no superfluous word, no adjective, which does not reveal something ⦠it does not use images as ornaments. The image itself is the speechâ. It was this freshness and directness of approach which means that, as Peter Jones says in his invaluable Introduction, âimagistic ideas still lie at the centre of our poetic practiceâ.
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