Some Imagist Poets, 1916: An Annual Anthology

In 1916, amid the carnage of the Great War, a small group of poets offered something startling: clarity. This anthology gathers the Imagists, those radical early modernists who believed that language should render experience with the precision of a photograph, not the blur of sentiment. H.D. crystallizes desire and loss in fragments that cut like glass. D.H. Lawrence brings fierce sensuality to the page. Amy Lowell, the movement's unapologetic American voice, experiments with polyphonic structure. John Gould Fletcher captures the decay and beauty of a changing world. F.S. Flint contributes his spare, precise verses. These are poems that refuse to explain themselves; they present, they do not argue. The Imagist credo was simple: direct treatment of the thing, no word that does not contribute, rhythm as it corresponds to the sequence of the music of the metrical speech. A century later, that simplicity remains revolutionary. This is poetry for readers tired of noise who want to feel something sharply, exactly, now.