The 'Image'

There is a sort of poetry where music, sheer melody, seems as if it were just bursting into speech. There is another sort of poetry where painting or sculpture seems as it were 'just coming over into speech'. The first sort of poetry has long been called 'lyric'... The other sort of poetry is as old as the lyric and as honourable, but until recently, no one named it. Ibycus and Liu Ch'e presented the 'Image'. Dante is a great poet by reason of this faculty, and Milton is a wind-bag because of his lack of it. The 'Image' is the furthest removed from rhetoric. Rhetoric is the art of dressing up some unimportant matter so as to fool the audience for the time being... As a 'critical' movement, the 'Imagism' of 1912 to '14 set out 'to bring poetry up to the level of prose'.

Ezra Pound, The Fortnightly Review, 1914, p. 468.