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| IMAGISM |
| Imagism is free verse poetry of precise, vivid images, patterns and rhymes of everyday speech, and sparse adjective use. |
| Imagism is a style poetry developed by Ezra Pound. Along with H.D. (Hilda Doolittle), William Carlos Williams, and others, Pound established the characteristics of Imagism. |
| "Willow Poem" It is a willow when summer is over, a willow by the river from which no leaf has fallen nor bitten by the sun turned orange or crimson. The leaves cling and grow paler, swing and grow paler over the swirling waters of the river as if loath to let go, they are so cool, so drunk with the swirl of the wind and of the river-- oblivious to winter, the last to let go and fall into the water and on the ground. --William Carlos Williams |
| "Heat" O wind, rend open the heat, cut apart the heat, rend it to tatters. Fruit cannot drop Through this thick air-- fruit cannot fall into heat that presses up and blunts the points of pears and rounds the grapes. Cut the heat-- plow through it, turning it on either side of your path. --H.D. |
| "The Skaters" Black swallows swooping or gliding In a flurry of entangled loops and curves; the skaters skim over the frozen river. And the grinding click of their skates as they impinge upon the surface, Is like the brushing together of thin wing-tips of silver. --John Gould Fletcher |
| "The Red Wheelbarrow" so much depends upon a red wheel barrow glazed with rain water beside the white chickens. --William Carlos Williams |
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| "The Silver Plough-Boy" A black figure dances in a black field. It seizes a sheet--from the ground, from a bush--as if spread there by some wash woman for the night. It wraps the sheet around its body, until the black figure is silver. It dances down a furrow, in the early light, back of a crazy plough, the green blades following. How soon the silver fades in the dust! How soon the black figure slips from the wrinkled sheet. How softly the sheet falls to the ground! --Wallace Stevens |
| "Summer" A butterfly, Black and scarlet, Spotted with white, Fans its wings Over a privet flower. A thousand crimson foxgloves, Tall bloody pikes, Stand motionless in the gravel quarry The wind runs over them. A rose film over a pale sky Fantastically cut by dark chimneys; Candles winking in the windows Across an old city-garden. --Richard Aldington |
| "Au Vieux Jardin" ("With the Old Garden") I have sat here happy in the gardens, Watching the still pool and the reeds And the dark clouds Which the wind of the upper air Tore like the green leafy boughs Of the diver-hued trees of late summer; But though I greatly delight In these and the water lilies, That which sets me nighest to weeping Is the rose and white colour of the smooth flag-stones, And the pale yellow grasses Among them. --Richard Aldington |
| "This Is Just to Say" I have eaten the plums that were in the icebox and which you were probably saving for breakfast Forgive me they were delicious so sweet and so cold --William Carlos Williams |
| "Cones" The blue mist of after-rain fills all the trees; the sunlight gilds the tops of the poplar spires, far off, behind the houses. Here a branch sways and there a sparrow twitters. The curtain's hem, rose-embroidered, flutters, and half reveals a burnt-red chimney pot. The quiet in the room bears patiently a footfall on the street. --F.S. Flint |
| "The Swan" Under the lily shadow and the gold and the blue and mauve that the whin and the lilac pour down on the water, the fishes quiver. Over the green cold leaves and the rippled silver and the tarnished copper of its neck and beak, toward the deep black water beneath the arches, the swan floats slowly. Into the dark of the arch the swan floats and into the black depth of my sorrow it bears a white rose of flame. --F.S. Flint |
| "Evening" The chimneys, rank on rank, cut the clear sky; the moon with a rag of gauze about her loins poses among them, an awkward Venus-- And here am I looking wantonly at her over the kitchen sink. --Richard Aldington |
| "In a Station of the Metro" The apparition of these faces in the crowd; Petals on a wet, black bough. --Ezra Pound |
| "November Night" Listen. . . With a faint dry sound, like steps of passing ghosts, the leaves, frost-crisp'd, break from the trees and fall. --Adelaide Crapsey |