Lexicon of beautiful is elastic, but
walla-walla not yet poetically possible.
—T. E. Hulme, "Notes onLanguage and Style"

For a long time, supported both by Eliot's remark that the Imagists were the point de repère of modern poetry and by anthologists of Imagist verse, literary historians took the "modernism" of that English school as given. William Pratt, anthologizing Imagist poems in 1963, adopted Eliot's line: they wrote, he said, "the first 'modern' poems in English." Peter Jones, presenting them anew for Penguin ten years later, said that their ideas "still lie at the centre of our poetic practice." The Imagists themselves, of course, made "modernism" a key element in their platform, and they defined it largely as reaction. T. E. Hulme dismissed virtually the whole of the last century when he named Henley as the single English poet who was "perhaps" a worthwhile model for what...