Modern American Poetry - 1921 Author:Louis Untermeyer Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: THE IMAGISTS Sandburg established himself as the most daring user of American words—rude words ranging from the racy metaphors of the soil to the slang of the... more » street. But even before this, the possibilities of a new vocabulary were being tested. As early as 1865, Whitman was saying, " We must have new words, new potentialities of speech—an American range of self-expression. . . . The new times, the new people need a tongue according, yes, and what is more, they will have such a tongue—will not be satisfied until it is evolved." It is curious to think that one of the most effective agents to fulfil Whitman's prophecy and free modern poetry from its mouldering diction was that little band of preoccupied specialists, the Imagists. They were, for all their preciosity and occasional extravagances, prophets of freedom—liberators in the sense that their programs, pronouncements and propaganda compelled even their most dogged adversaries to acknowledge the integrity of their aims. Their restatement of old truths was one of the things which helped the new poetry out of a bog of rhetorical rubbish. Ezra Pound was the first to gather the insurgents into a definite group. During the winter of 1913, he collected a number of poems illustrating the Imagist point of view and had them printed in a volume: Des Imagistes (1914). A little later Pound withdrew from the clan. The rather queerly assorted group began to disintegrate and Amy Lowell, then in England, brought the best of the younger members together in three yearly anthologies (Some Ima- gist Poets) which appeared in 1915, 1916 and 1917. There were, in Miss Lowell's new grouping, three Englishmen (D. H. Lawrence, Richard Aldington, F. S. Flint), three Americans (" H. D.," John Gould Fletcher, Amy Lowell), and their creed, summed up...« less