SOURCE: WIKIPEDIA

 1) The origin of Imagism can be found in the two poems by T.E Hulme- Autumn and A City Sunset. These were published in a booklet called 'For Christmas MDCCCCVIII' in January 1909 by Poets' Club in London.

2) Hulme had been involved in the setting up of the Poets' Club in 1908. He presented his paper A Lecture on Modern Poetry at one of the club's meetings. Critic F.S Flint was critical of the group's publication in A.R Orage's magazine The New Age. 

3) With the ongoing debate, Hulme and Flint became close friends. In 1909, Hulme left the Poets' Club and started meeting Flint and other poets at the Eiffel Tower restaurant in London's Soho. He started referring to the new group as the 'Secession Club.'

4) F.S Flint, is a British poet of distinguished worth in using free verse and modern French poetry. He is famously known for his participation in the 'School of Images' with Ezra Pound and T.E Hulme. He gave an account of his participation in the 'Poetry Review' which served as the theoretical basis for the Imagist School. In 1914, he was influenced by Pound in Des Imagists.

5) The central idea of the literary meetings was to transform contemporary poetry with free verse, tanka and haiku, and also the removal of unnecessary verbosity. The interest in Japanese verse forms in the late Edwardian and Victorian period can be indirectly attributed to the influence of woodblock painting in Van Gogh, Monet and such others. Direct literary models can be found in F.V Dickins's 1866 Hyakunin Isshu or Stanzas by a Century of Poets, the first English Language version of the Japanese Classic. 

6) The American poet Ezra Pound on being introduced to the group in April 1909 found his ideas close to the group. His admiration of Romantic literature for its direct expression can also be found in the writings of Arnaut Daniel, Dante, and Guido Cavalcanti. 

7) Arnaut Daniel has been lauded by Pound to be the greatest poet ever lived in The Spirit of Romance(1910). Praised by Dante as the 'greatest smith' and the 'grandmaster of love' by Petrarch, he was a 12th century Occitan troubadour. Guido Cavalcanti was an Italian poet and an intellectual influence on Dante.

8) Directness, clarity, and lack of rhetoric- the ideas central to imagists-  made the French critic Remy de Gourmont describe them to be the direct descendants of Symbolists in a 1915 article La France. Hulme owed to the prominent figures of the Symbolist tradition through W.B Yeats, Arthur Symons, and the Rhymers Club( founded by Ernest Rhys and W.B Yeats). 

9) Hilda Doolittle and her future husband Richard Adlington were introduced by Pound to the Eiffel Tower Group in the year 1911.

10) The first anthology of the imagist movement, Des Imagistes. This work was the result of his determination to promote the imagists, particularly the works of Aldington and Dolittle.

11) Des Imagistes was first published in Alfred Kreymborg's small magazine The Glebe. It became one of the most important and influential works in modernist verse. It included the works of Flint, Skipwith Cannell, Amy Lowell, William Carlos William, James Joyce, Ford Maddox Ford, Allen Upward and John Cournos. 

12) Richard Adlington and Hilda Dolittle were interested in the Greek poetic model. The condensed style of expression in the Greek poetic models, especially of Sappho's complemented with the Japenese poetry. Pound also shared the same interest with them and during the meeting with them in the British Museum in 1912, he told them that they were Imagistes and also attached the signature H.D Imagiste.

13) In the year 1911, Harriet Monroe, an American editor, started her magazine called 'Poetry'. She asked Pound to be the foreign editor of her magazine. Afterwards in October 1912, he submitted three poems by H.D and Adlington under the heading of Imagiste. Alongwith the poems, there was an attached note which described Adlington as ' one of the Imagistes.' 

14) This note along with ' The Complete Works of T.S Hulme' in Pound's book Ripostes (1912), are considered to be the first appearance of the term, 'Imagiste'. 

15) The magazine, Poetry, issues and respective poems:

a) November Issue- Aldington's poem: Choricos, To a Greek Marble, Au Vieux Jardin

b) January Issue (1913)- Hermes of the Ways, Priapus, and Epigram

c) March 1913 Issue contained 'A Few Don'ts by an Imagiste'.  

d) April Issue published Pound's Haiku-like poem ' In a Station of the Metro.'

16) The comment presented in 1916 preface to Some Imagist Poets is, ' Imagism does not merely mean the presentation of pictures. Imagism refers to the manner of presentation, not to the subject. 

17) Published in May 1915 in The Egoist was the history of Imagism by F.S Flint. Pound disagreed with Flint's recording of events as well as the aim of the group. This created a rift between the two and Pound went ahead to collaborate on the founding of Vorticists with Wyndham Lewis. 

18) American Imagist, Amy Lowell in her determination to promote the work moved to London. Lowell considered Pound to be more autocratic and patronizing. She wanted the publications to be more liberal and democratic in nature. The result was a series of Imagist anthologies under the title 'Some Imagist Poets'. The first came in 1915 and the next two appeared in 1916 and 1917. These three volumes did not publish any of the works of Pound. 

19) Scornful of the treatment at the hands of Amy, Pound asked her to drop the name Imagism from her works. Refusal to do so, he derisively described the phase Amygism.

20) For her 1915 and 1916 publications, she convinced D.H Lawrence to contribute poems. This made him the only writer to publish both as a Georgian and an Imagist. 

21) Pound declined to be a part of new Imagist Anthology published in 1930. Collecting all the contributions in previous four anthologies, with a few prominent writers missing owing to multiple reasons, made the critics question the future of Imagism. 

22) Despite the Imagist Movement's short life, it left a considerable effect on Modernist Poetry. The American poet Wallace Stevens said: " Not all objects are equal. The vice of Imagism was that it did not recognize this. 

23) Marianne Moore (1887-1972) was an American modernist poet. Her poetry was known for innovation and accurate description. Her poems first appeared in 'The Egoist' and 'Poetry'. She also translated the poems of La Fontaine. She won the Pulitzer Prize Award for Collected Poems in 1951. 

24) Marianne influenced the young bunch of budding poets :

a) Elizabeth Bishop-  Pulitzer Prize (1956)

b) Allen Ginsberg- Beat Generation ( Among the Beats, Gary Snider and Allen Ginsberg were influenced by the Imagist emphasis on Chinese and Japanese poetry).

c) John Ashbery  - He won Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for Self- Portrait in a Convex Mirror (1975)

d) James Merill- Pulitzer Prize for Poetry 1977 for Divine Comedies

25) Imagism made free verse a legitimate poetic form. It influenced many poetry circles and movements. Its influence can be seen in the works of Objectivist Poets. Louis Zukofsky, one of the major theorist of this movement influenced Language Poets and also Charles Olson of Black Mountain Poets.