Ezra Pound
Poetry magazine, Ripostes, Imagism

In May 1911, H.D. left Philadelphia for London. She was accompanied by the poet Frances Gregg and Gregg's mother; when they returned in September, H.D. stayed on. Pound introduced her to his friends, including Aldington, who became her husband in 1913. Before that, the three of them lived in Church Walk, Kensington—Pound at no. 10, Aldington at no. 8, and Doolittle at no. 6—and worked daily in the British Museum Reading Room.

At the British Museum, Laurence Binyon introduced Pound to the East Asian artistic and literary concepts Pound used in his later poetry, including Japanese ukiyo-e prints. The visitors' book first shows Pound in the Prints and Drawings Students' Room (known as the Print Room) on 9 February 1909, and later in 1912 and 1913, with Dorothy Shakespear, examining Chinese and Japanese art. Pound was working at the time on the poems that became Ripostes (1912), trying to move away from his earlier work. "I hadn't in 1910 made a language", he wrote years later. "I don't mean a language to use, but even a language to think in."

In August 1912 Harriet Monroe hired Pound as foreign correspondent of Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, a new magazine in Chicago. The first edition, in October, featured two of his own poems—"To Whistler, American" and "Middle Aged". Also that month Stephen Swift and Co. in London published Ripostes of Ezra Pound, a collection of 25 poems, including a contentious translation of The Seafarer, that demonstrate his shift toward minimalist language. In addition to Pound's work, the collection contains five poems by Hulme.

Ripostes includes the first mention of Les Imagistes: "As for the future, Les Imagistes, the descendants of the forgotten school of 1909, have that in their keeping." While in the British Museum tearoom one afternoon with Doolittle and Aldington, Pound edited one of Doolittle's poems and wrote "H.D. Imagiste" underneath; he described this later as the founding of a movement in poetry, Imagisme. In the spring or early summer of 1912, they agreed, Pound wrote in 1918, on three principles:

Poetry published Pound's "A Few Don'ts by an Imagist" in March 1913. Superfluous words, particularly adjectives, should be avoided, as well as expressions like "dim lands of peace". He wrote: "It dulls the image. It mixes an abstraction with the concrete. It comes from the writer's not realizing that the natural object is always the adequate symbol." Poets should "go in fear of abstractions". He wanted Imagisme "to stand for hard light, clear edges", he wrote later to Amy Lowell.

The apparition of these faces in the crowd: Petals on a wet, black bough.

— Poetry (April 1913)

An example of Imagist poetry is Pound's " In a Station of the Metro ", published in Poetry in April 1913 and inspired by an experience on the Paris Underground. "I got out of a train at, I think, La Concorde ", he wrote in "How I began" in T. P.'s Weekly on 6 June 1913, "and in the jostle I saw a beautiful face, and then, turning suddenly, another and another, and then a beautiful child's face, and then another beautiful face. All that day I tried to find words for what this made me feel.... I could get nothing but spots of colour." A year later he reduced it to its essence in the style of a Japanese haiku.
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