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 Eliots 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. Eliots 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.