Glossary of Poetic Terms

An early 20th-century poetic movement that relied on the resonance of concrete images drawn in precise, colloquial language rather than traditional poetic diction and meter. T.E. Hulme, H.D., and William Carlos Williams were practitioners of the imagist principles as laid out by Ezra Pound in the March 1913 issue of Poetry (see “A Retrospect” and “A Few Don'ts”). Amy Lowell built a strain of imagism that used some of Pound's principles and rejected others in her Preface to the 1916 anthology, Some Imagist Poets. Browse more imagist poets.