Some Imagist Poets: An Anthology

In 1915, a small book detonated under English poetry. Richard Aldington assembled the first major anthology of the Imagist movement, gathering work from poets who believed that precision was rebellion. These were writers who discarded Victorian ornament for raw, hard-edged seeing: H.D.'s sea poems that reduce the ocean to its essential geometries, D.H. Lawrence's verdant sensuality before he became Lawrence, Amy Lowell's bold American voice, and Aldington's own miniature monuments to childhood and the natural world. Free verse was not yet respectable. The Imagists made it inevitable. This collection gathers poems that had never appeared in book form, each one a small, perfect object, built to evoke not explain. The reader encounters snow falling on a faun, a woman beside her dead husband, fireflies in corn at dusk. The collection captures a moment when poetry reinvented itself in miniature, when the radical act was to look closely and name what you saw with absolute honesty.