In the following essay, de Sola Pinto summarizes the contributions of T. E. Hulme, Ezra Pound, and D. H. Lawrence to the development of modern English poetry.

SOURCE: "Trench Poets, Imagists and D. H. Lawrence," in Crisis in English Poetry: 1880-1940, Hutchinson's University Library, 1951, pp. 151-157.

In the years immediately preceding the First World War there was a group of poets in London working on principles almost diametrically opposed to those of the Georgians. The Georgians had assumed that there was still an upper middle class with a living poetic culture, and that it was possible by means of a few minor reforms to achieve a renewal of the classic English poetic tradition comparable with that effected by Dryden in the sixteen-sixties, by Wordsworth in the seventeen-nineties or by Tennyson in the eighteen-forties. The Imagists, although they were only minor poets, had the merit of perceiving and declaring...