In the following essay, Perkins discusses the development of the Imagist movement, offers examples of poetry embodying Imagist principles, and discusses the works of Richard Aldington, H.D., John Gould Fletcher, Amy Lowell, and Herbert Read in relation to Imagism.

SOURCE: "Imagism," in A History of Modern Poetry: From the 1890s to the High Modernist Mode, The Belknap Press of the Harvard University Press, 1976, pp. 329-47.

Imagism has been described as the grammar school of modern poetry, the instruction and drill in basic principles. The metaphor greatly exaggerates—neither Yeats nor Eliot were ever Imagists, for example, though both were occasionally claimed for the group—but among the several modern movements in English and American poetry just before World War I, the Imagists probably had a more distinct impact than any other group on the style of American poets. The reasons for this were partly the shrewdness with...