Critical Essay | Vivian de Sola Pinto

Vivian de Sola Pinto

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 that...
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