Imagism was one of the small detonations of early twentieth-century poetry: a movement built against Victorian overgrowth, rhetorical fog, and the idea that a poem needed to arrive dressed for church.

Its preferred weapons were compression, clarity, hard image, direct treatment of the thing itself. Pound, H.D., Amy Lowell, Richard Aldington and others wanted poetry stripped back to the charged object, the moment seen sharply enough that it no longer needed explanation.

This Penguin anthology gathers the movement as both method and argument, placing the poems beside Peter Jones’ introduction to their formal and historical force. It is a useful, compact entry point into modernist poetry before it fully becomes the difficult furniture of the twentieth century: image over ornament, precision over mood, the poem as a thing cut clean enough to draw blood.

Penguin paperback, first published in Penguin Books 1972. Introduced and edited by Peter Jones. Light shelf wear and creasing to cover, with some age-toning to pages. Binding intact; a good reading copy with a great cover.