Entertainment / Literature / Imagism: An early twentieth-century artistic movement in the United States and Britain. Imagists believed poets should use common, everyday vocabulary, experiment with new rhythm, and use clear, precise, concentrated imagery. Ezra Pound, Richard Aldington, Amy Lowell, Carl Sandburg, and T. E. Hulme are all poets who were adherents of imagism and were known as imagists. Carl Sandburg's 'Fog' is an example of an imagist poem, and T. E. Hulme's 'Above the Dock.' Here are the opening lines to 'Above the Dock': Above the quiet dock in midnight, Tangled in the tall mast's corded height, Hangs the moon. What seemed so far away, Is but a child's balloon, forgotten after play. Likewise, the concrete imagery is clear in Sandburg's opening lines to 'Fog': The fog comes / on little cat feet. Imagism had its heydey slightly before World War I, but the emphasis on strong, concrete imagery appears in other literary periods as well. One could argue that Anglo-Saxon poetry with its emphasis on concrete language rather than abstraction is similar to twentieth-century imagism, for instance. The imagist movement was strongly influenced by the early translations of haiku into English. Cf. Haiku, imagery, and concrete diction.
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