Imagism was the poetry of directness and distillation championed by Ezra Pound and Amy Lowell in the first years of the 20th century, reacting against the flowery verse of late Romanticism and urging poets to look to earlier models—like Sappho in ancient Greece and Li Po in 8th century China—to create a poetry of precise and powerful images, without any superfluous words or ornaments.
Pound wrote the first “manifesto” laying out the principles of Imagism, published in the March 1913 issue of Poetry, and when she came across that article, Lowell was mightily impressed and came to London to join the movement. Pound also edited the first published collection of Imagist poets, but by the time that book appeared in print, he had already clashed with Lowell—she thought he was a dictatorial autocrat and he saw her as a naive and noisy poetry booster who didn’t meet his high intellectual standards. Pound labelled Lowell’s version of Imagism “Amygism” and broke away to lead another art/poetry movement he called “Vorticism.” Lowell went on to edit three succeeding volumes of Imagist poets.
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