Des Imagistes

This modernist anthology gathers poems that make intensity out of brevity, turning a few vivid images into worlds of longing, loss, and revelation. From Richard Aldington's erotic and elegiac lyrics to H. D.'s luminous invocations of Greek gods, sea-winds, orchards, and sacred landscapes, the collection fuses classical myth with emotional immediacy and spare musical form. Ezra Pound's compressed meditations on vanished presences and returning souls deepen the sense of memory's fragility, while F. S. Flint brings a sharper urban note, mixing satire, dream, and existential reflection with moments of transcendence. Across the book, beauty is at once alluring and painful: swans, doves, moonlight, marbles, flowers, and the sea become emblems of desire, pride, and time's erosion. Playful Chinese-inspired scenes, symbolic prose poems such as "The Swallow Tower" and "The Rose," and witty attacks on literary pretension widen the range without breaking the anthology's core commitment to direct perception, cosmopolitan voice, and the radical modernist art of the image. This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design.