Screenwriter, poet, and essayist Chris Semansky 's most recent collection of poems, Blindsided, has been published by 26 Books ofPortland, Oregon. In the following essay Semansky examines the imagery in Stephen Crane's "War is Kind, " linking it to the Imagist movement of the twentieth century and to the poetry of World War I.

Stephen Crane's title poem from his second collection, War is Kind and Other Lines, is representative of his best work. It prefigures many of the modern imagist poets such as Amy Lowell and William Carlos Williams in its concise and hard-edged descriptions and focus on the "thingness" of the world, yet retains some of the didactic and sentimental qualities of nineteenth-century verse. Combined with a piercing ironic tone, these qualities add layers of complexity to a poem which on first reading appears relatively simple.

Imagism emerged at the beginning of the twentieth century, just a...