In April 1913, Ezra Pound had two major pieces published in Poetry: A Magazine of Verse that would become major works in the canon of imagism. In his essay, “A Few Don'ts by an Imagiste,” Pound lays out a sort of manifesto on writing imagiste poetry by initially defining an image as “that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time.” An image is then something which evokes a certain response in the reader, intellectually as well as emotionally. Further down, he also defines an image and complex as creating a “sense of freedom from time limits and space limits,” presenting imagist poetry as almost sublime and emancipating from tradition.

  His advice can be laid out in two main parts. The first is to keep it simple and concrete. Pound strongly advises against abstract language, stating that the employment of prose will not hide the poet's attempt “to shirk all the difficulties of the unspeakably difficult art of good prose by chopping your composition into line lengths.” The second is to use free verse and freedom of rhyme as a “rhyme must have in it some slight element of surprise if it is to give pleasure.” With language and rhyme, Pound encourages poets to read other poetry and learn their techniques, but then advises against reproducing those techniques. The poet should be like a scientist, studying what others have done and making their own discoveries. 

In his famous poem, “In a Station of the Metro,” Pound encapsulates imagist poetry through a title and two lines:

The apparition of these faces in the crowd:

Petals on a wet, black bough.

The most obvious component of this poem is its short and succinct length. This is where his advice shines: Pound does not use superfluous or abstract language, instead he is straightforward and concrete. Through these two lines, Pound ensures that every word has importance and meaning. The modernist movement strived to move away from tradition, and imagism had the same goal with the rhyme and rhythm. The focal point of the poetry is the concrete image presented, with some attention but not all on the meter and rhyme. In his essay, Pound expands on this by comparing writing imagist poetry to music, which is that the rhyme and rhythm should not determine the language. In the poem above, Pound does not restrict the poem by changing the wording to match a certain rhyme. Once again, we see how the image and the words used to provide that image are the focal point. 

Sources:

“A Brief Guide to Imagism.” Poets, 4 Sept. 2017, https://poets.org/text/brief-guide-imagism.

Pound, Ezra. “A Few Don’ts by an Imagiste.” Poetry Foundation, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/articles/58900/a-few-donts-by-an-imagiste.

Pound, Ezra. “In a Station of the Metro.” Poetry Foundation, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/12675/in-a-station-of-the-metro.

Tearle, Oliver. “A Short Analysis of Ezra Pound’s ‘A Few Don’ts by an Imagiste’.” Interesting Literature, 2017, https://interestingliterature.com/2017/01/a-short-analysis-of-ezra-pounds-a-few-donts-by-an-imagiste/.