The Imagists: A poetry collection of the hugely influential early-20th-century Anglo-American poetry movement.

Written by Amy Lowell, Hilda Doolittle and Ezra Pound

Narrated by Richard Mitchley, David Shaw-Parker and Ghizela Rowe

In the early 1900s a new movement in poetry began. With the new century came new thinking, a reaction to both romanticism and the more formal, structured poetry of the Victorian era. Here was poetry designed to be simple, clear and precise, rather than be adorned and encrusted with more from the lexicon than what was actually needed.

The original ideas sprang from T. E Hulme and from these Ezra Pound created the structure for its development. Akin to the Ancient Greek lyricists and the Japanese Haiku poets who went from fixed meters to free verse.

I. Direct treatment of the “thing," whether subjective or objective. II. To use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation. III. As regarding rhythm: to compose in sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of the metronome.

Hilda Doolittle (H.D.) William Carlos Williams, Richard Aldington and James Joyce added their talents to an anthology edited by Pound, swiftly followed by Amy Lowell assuming leadership and adding both monies and 3 further anthology volumes. By the end of the Great War in 1918 the movement was being absorbed into the broader modernist movement. Its time may have passed but its indelible mark was made.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The Copyright Group
• Release date: Jul 7, 2020
• ISBN: 9781839676345

Amy Lowell

Amy Lowell (1874-1925) was an American poet. Born into an elite family of businessmen, politicians, and intellectuals, Lowell was a member of the so-called Boston Brahmin class. She excelled in school from a young age and developed a habit for reading and book collecting. Denied the opportunity to attend college by her family, Lowell traveled extensively in her twenties and turned to poetry in 1902. While in England with her lover Ada Dwyer Russell, she met American poet Ezra Pound, whose influence as an imagist and fierce critic of Lowell’s work would prove essential to her poetry. In 1912, only two years after publishing her first poem in The Atlantic Monthly, Lowell produced A Dome of Many-Coloured Glasses, her debut volume of poems. In addition to such collections of her own poems as Sword Blades and Poppy Seed (1914) and Men, Women, and Ghosts (1916), Lowell published translations of 8th century Chinese poet Li Tai-po and, at the time of her death, had been working on a biography of English Romantic John Keats.