Des Imagistes: An Anthology

Before T.S. Eliot rewrote poetry, before William Carlos Williams revolutionized American verse, before James Joyce remade the novel, there was this: a slim, revolutionary pamphlet published in 1914. Des Imagistes is the opening shot of Imagism, the movement that stripped poetry down to its bones and demanded that every word earn its place. The eleven poets gathered here, many still in their twenties, would become pillars of modernism. Pound, H.D., Aldington, Lowell, Williams, Joyce. Here are their earliest experiments in precision, in the direct treatment of the thing itself, in the belief that a poem could be as clear as a photograph and as lasting as Greek marble. These are poems of startling clarity: a frozen moment, a line of dialogue, a landscape stripped to its essential colors. They wrote in common words about uncommon feelings, and in doing so, they invented the poetry you still read today.