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What literary movements affected poets writing in the early 20th century?

The "Imagists" were some of the first truly modern poets of the early 20th century. The poem below by Ezra Pound is called "In a Station of the Metro." It was published in 1913, and it's still considered one of the defining poems of Imagism. It won't take you very long to read.

crowd

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.

That's the entire poem. Do you think fourteen words spread over two lines can be properly classified as a poem? (To the Imagists and others, the better question is "why not?") Like other Imagist writings, "In a Station of the Metro" was a deliberate break from the poetic style of the previous decades, which favored long works and excessive use of flowery language. Unlike most poets of late 19th century, the Imagists wanted to say as little as possible.

One reason for that abrupt change in style was the influence of Asian poetry, especially Japanese forms like the haiku and the tanka. In addition to the short lengths and the economy of words, the Imagists also adapted the same intense focus on nature that haiku and other Asian poems used. The goal was to isolate one moment in time and capture it as succinctly and vividly as possible, leaving readers to construct their own meanings.

Imagism was not exactly an organized movement—the poets we call "Imagists" today didn't necessarily agree on all of the basic principles of their movement. For example, Ezra Pound believed that poems should be purely visual, whereas Hilda Doolittle wanted to apply the spare style to mythology and other literary subjects. Still, after the movement got its start in London in 1908, most poets who considered themselves Imagists adhered to this core principle, at least: "to use the language of common speech, but to employ always the exact word, not the nearly-exact, nor the merely decorative word."

Most Imagists abandoned the less central ideas of the movement within a few years—including William Carlos Williams, an American poet who began as an Imagist but evolved into a more complicated voice. What made Williams unique was his deep connection to urban New Jersey; many scholars saw him as a regional poet with a special appreciation for the communities he served as a doctor.

Question

Why do you think the Imagist movement was so short-lived?

By definition, Imagist poetry was so very simple that poets eventually felt too restricted by its rules and wanted to address subjects that would have been too broad or complicated for Imagism to accommodate.