Explaining Imagism

Book excerpt: In the present study, the innovative and cerebral poetry of the Imagist movement, which revolutionized modern English and American poetry, has been analyzed in its contextual and inter-textual relationships with other arts. Consequently, the book is like the texts it attempts to investigate, a peculiar hybrid, a collage of three basic materials or analytical perspectives: an excerpt from an Imagist manifesto sketched out in handwriting (context), a torn out printed page from a first edition of Des Imagistes (text), and a photograph of a museum installation of a room devoted to Modernist art (intertext).