While Imagism is typically given foundational status in the modernist line of anglophone poetry, it was produced by a grouping as confected and irregular as any in the long history of twentieth-century avantgardes. Ezra Pound, obviously, is central to this conversation, but in this chapter I will also pay close attention to H.D., whose poetry was the most rigorous exemplar of imagist practice (even if Pound remained for many poets of the modernist line the pre-eminent model). I discuss austerity, clarity and directness in this writing, and the complex relationship that Imagism has with figures of the inexpressible, both in its highly mediated adaptations of poetry of the French symbolist tradition and in the literature of ancient Greece, China and Japan.

The relationship between the empirical and short form is usually taken as implicit by poets of the imagist and post-imagist line: a reduced style becomes an inevitable concomitant of this mode of writing. Yet the use of ellipsis and the handling of the linebreak in this poetry go a long way beyond the eschewal of ornamentation. There is a contradiction between the reduced style and the empirical ambitions of such poets – the desire for direct statement as a means of forging a relationship between object and artwork that is unmediated by the artifice of poetic language. The compression and ellipsis that characterises such writing, even at the level of the sentence, works against conventional sensemaking, preventing the poetry from representing the things of the world with anything approaching directness.

However, the presentation of a demystified and unvarnished image of the world – Pound's ambition for a literature of ‘precision’ in the rendering of ‘external nature, or of emotion’ – remained integral to the stated ambitions of many poets of the post-imagist line. In 1934, Pound wrote as though lack of precision in language use was ultimately responsible for the political catastrophes of his time: