Imagism began as a reaction to the abstract language and themes of romanticism and the Victorian era. According to Ezra Pound, who is considered the founder of this movement, the tenets of imagist poetry consisted of “treating a thing in a direct manner,” avoiding redundancy in language, and experimenting with rhyme and rhythm.
To accomplish these ideals of imagism, writers of this movement used simple language. They chose their words carefully and used language as a means to convey and describe a precise moment in time, which is evidenced in Pound’s economical use of words in his two-line poem “In a Station of the Metro.”
The imagists also experimented with new rhythms to create new moods. For example, read this excerpt from "The Great Figure" by William Carlos Williams:
Among the rain
and lights
I saw the figure 5
in gold
on a red
fire truck
Note how the short lines and lack of punctuation in the poem help to create the mood of urgency, which you would relate with the movement of the fire truck. Also notice that the poem is in free verse. Most imagist poets wrote in free verse, and their poems followed a natural rhythm, going against the consistent meters and flowery language of the romantics. The imagist poets tried to depict the images of the objects that they wrote about in the most real and factual ways, and to describe things as they were. Imagists didn’t write to beautify or elevate objects, as seen in how William Carlos Williams describes mundane everyday objects like a red wheelbarrow and a white chicken in his poem “The Red Wheelbarrow.”
