Marianne Moore was not officially an Imagist poet, although there are moments in her verse that show the influence of its style. Many of her poet friends and peers were, however, and a look at this brief poetic movement can shed light on how Moore crafted her work.
The movement was primarily comprised of English and American poets. It derived from the ideas of T.E. Hulme, who helped establish a Poets’ Club in London in which members would compose poems that accurately presented their subject without superfluities. The first part of the Imagist manifesto was “To use the language of common speech, but to employ always the exact word, not the nearly-exact, nor the merely decorative word.” Hulme encouraged likeminded poets to look to the French Symbolists and Japanese haiku writers for inspiration.
In 1912 Ezra Pound reviewed and edited a poem of Hilda Doolittle’s, and sent it along to Poetry Magazine with the signature of “H.D. Imagiste;” he claimed later to have done this to jumpstart Doolittle’s career. Pound and Doolittle favored poetry that veered away from the excesses of Georgian romanticism and instead focus on precise details and metaphors as well as sparse language. They did not want to create “genteel” work that was sentimental and cloying. Pound stated that the image was “that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time” and that Imagist poetry must treat its subjects directly, not use useless words, and compose rhythm according to the musical phrase rather than the metronome. As scholar Al Filreis writes, “The Imagists wrote succinct verse of dry clarity and hard outline in which an exact visual image made a total poetic statement. Imagism was a successor to the French Symbolist movement, but, whereas Symbolism had an affinity with music, Imagism sought analogy with sculpture.”
In 1914 Pound compiled and edited a collection of Imagist works entitled Des Imagistes: An Anthology. The featured writers included H.D., James Joyce, William Carlos Williams, and D.H. Lawrence, among others. Trying to define a movement was not without problems, as scholar Timothy Materer writes: “From the success of imagism as a movement, however, there emerged a problem that even Pound's advertising genius could not surmount. He had invented a name for a new poetic technique, but of course he could not patent, franchise, or in any way control its use. Would-be imagists who wrote bad verse were more of a problem for the movement than those who attacked it for its obscurity or free-verse rhythms.”
Not long after the work’s publication the poet Amy Lowell catapulted to the vanguard of the movement. She published a collection in 1916 entitled Some Imagist Poets; she directly critiqued Pound’s explanation of the movement and offered her own understanding of Imagism. Pound hated Lowell and insulted her frequently. He deemed her version of Imagism “Amyism.”
The movement was effectively over by 1917, with Pound moving on to what he deemed “Vorticism” and the rest of the talented poets moving further away from the two-bit ones.
