The Imagist Movement

The Imagist movement, deriving from Hulme and Pound (who soon lost interest) and others, demanded clear and precise images, elimination of every word "that did not contribute to the presentation," and a rhythm freed from the artificial demands of metrical regularity. The French Symbolists had taken a similar view of metrical regularity and it was their invention of verse libre that was adopted by the Imagists. The Symbolists wanted to be precise in order to be properly suggestive; precision, individuality, "the exact curve of the thing" and maximum symbolic projection of meaning were seen as going together. But Imagism even with this symbolist extension was only a brief stopping place for the new poetic movement. The turn away from the Tennysonian elegiac mode to the more complex and intelectual poems of Donne, the insistance that intellect and emotion should work together in poetry and that one should seek to recover the "unfied sensibility" of the metaphysical poets which had been lost to English poetry since the latter part of the 17th century, the proclamation of the absolute difference "between art and the event"—all this is seen in Eliot’s criticism as it can be seen working in his poetry. “Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality; but an escape from personality," Eliot wrote in his essay "Tradition and the Individual Talent" (1917), one of the most influential critical essays of the century. It was in many respects the manifesto of the new poetic theory and practice. Eliot’s long poem The Waste Land (1922) was the first major example of the new poetry, and its remains a watershed in both English and American history.