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 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 Imagist 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 in six
articles of faith, was as follows:
1. To use the language of common speech, but to employ always the
_exact_ word, not the merely decorative word.
2. To create new rhythms—as the expression of new moods. We do not
insist upon “free-verse” as the only method of writing poetry ... We
do believe that the individuality of a poet may often be better
expressed in free verse than in conventional forms.