On the evening of 17 July 1914, Ezra Pound and Amy Lowell faced each other from opposite ends of a long dinner table in the Dieu-donné restaurant in London. The occasion brought together most of the poets included earlier that year in the anthology Pound had titled (in pseudo-French) Des Imagistes: H.D., Richard Aldington, F. S. Flint, Allen Upward, and Ford Madox Hueffer (Ford), among others. The celebratory feeling turned to ritual toasts, but the accomplishments of Imagism(e) gave way in short course to questions about its identity. Hueffer confessed that he was ignorant of what an Imagist was, or could possibly be (even so, he professed his doubts that Lowell qualified as one). Upward joked that all it took to be an Imagist was to be named one by Pound. Then Aldington objected that Imagism certainly existed, but only in the signal instance of H. D. (also his wife), whose work discovered its proper company, not among the representatives of the contemporary avant-garde (vorticism had also gathered its members in the Dieu-donné), but with a classical prosody, with archaic Greek poetry in particular.

The scene survives as an emblem of Imagism and, as a narrative for literary history, its parabolic fable. Here Pound and Lowell, sometimes behaving politely in public but usually not, face off in a test of strength for control over an initiative whose defining quality remains indeterminate. Any representative anthology of Imagism would reflect this uncertainty, showing more as a miscellaneous array than a coherent school. Even within the (assignably) Imagist oeuvre of individual poets, the inconsistency is striking. Hueffer alternates a verse of horrible doggerel with poems of exquisite urban impressionism. Aldington shifts from the songs of a neo-Hellenic ritual myth, which are remarkably adequate to a feeling of “primitive” simplicity and impersonality, to lyrics of the sheerest personal grievance only a few rhythmic beats away from prosaic complaint. A vatic minimalism in H. D. is incandescent with vision in some poems; small, uninteresting things clot the prosody in others. Even the term “Imagism,” which frames a visual picture as the likely center of poetic attention, fails to define the emphasis in much of the verse actually written under its name.