The Poem as Object

Abstract

Although lines of continuity can be drawn from poetry of the nineteenth century to that of the twentieth, and indeed from poetry earlier than the nineteenth century to what is called ‘modem poetry’, the movement centring around Ezra Pound in the years 1908 to 1920 was by nature more of a revolution than a continuing of the nineteenth-century tradition.¹ Imagism was the most clearly defined movement connected with the poetic revolution of the time, but it would be misleading to categorise all the poets experimenting with new forms as Imagist poets or to use Pound’s Imagist doctrines as more than convenient simplifications for aspects of what was most remarkable in modem poetry.²