Dorothy Livesay is a poet who has remained within a single convention, though with modulations…. Miss Livesay is an imagist who started off, in Green Pitcher (1929), in the Amy Lowell idiom:

     I remember long veils of green rain
     Feathered like the shawl of my grandmother—
     Green from the half-green of the spring trees
     Waving in the valley.

The virtues of this idiom are not those of sharp observation and precise rhythm that the imagists thought they were producing: its virtues are those of gentle reverie and a relaxed circling movement. With Day and Night (1944) a social passion begins to fuse the diction, tighten the rhythm, and concentrate the imagery…. From "Prelude for Spring" on, the original imagist texture gradually returns, and is fully re-established by the end of the book…. (pp. 84-5)

Imagism tends to descriptive or landscape poetry, on which the moods of the poet are projected...