In 1912 Ezra Pound formulated the foundations of a new aesthetic direction - imagism.

Imagists
- among them Hilda Doolittle, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, part of Thomas
Stearns Eliot - opposed the romantic naivety of classical poetry, allow themselves to be
incredibly blurred, approximate. The ability to produce images that do not carry a specific
content was almost the main inspiration criticized Imagists classical poetry. Pound and his
associates took over the principle used in the poetic works of everyday language and the most
precise words to described the pictures, disclaims any vague and incomprehensible, the
maximum concentration of content. Imagists, wanting to get rid of verbiage, wrote very accurate,
exhaustive concise, mathematical formulas like poetry. Here is an example of such a poem
written by Pound in 1913 - "In a Station of the Metro":

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;

Petals on a wet, black bough.

The first sentence describes the appearance of the girls coming out of the subway - that caught my
eye, moving from the invisible (dark subway) to the visible (on the streets of Paris). Then we see the
girl's face (the rest conceals clothes), which whiteness and freshness stand out in a stream of people,
dressed in a dark and damp (cloaks) clothes. As third element - the "crowd" - is censorship,
separating and joining the two symmetrical parts of the poem: "the phenomenon of people" opposed
to a faceless mass, pulled out of the metro station of the branch blackened rain. But this same crowd-
branch blooms delicate petals of young people.

It is rather a picture than a poem. Maximum image visualization. These two lines of Ezra Pound
wrote a year - to find exactly those words was not easy. The original version of the poem, consisting
of thirty lines, was written rather quickly, but a year went to format it to two lines. Pound evaporates
from the text of all the excess, cleaning out traces of any multi-storey and ambiguous metaphors.
Face - petals. All. The picture is ready.

Following the Eastern tradition, Pound cut off particle "how", and using the contrast and the
method of "extension" (parataxis), in fact, only emphasized the similarity of images: the
phenomenon of luminous beautiful people in a faceless crowd and the appearance of the leaves
on the bare black branches. While working on this poem Pound for the first time formulated the
theory of contrast as a structural reception in poetry, and then described his experience, first in
periodicals "T.P's Weekly" (June 6, 1913) and "Fortnightly Review" (September 1, 1914 g .),
and then the article "Vorticism":

Unilateral poem "is a form of extension that is a situation where one idea is superimposed on
another. With it, I got out of the impasse, which has brought me my Parisian experience. I
sketched 30-lined poem, and destroyed it, because it turned out to be what we call the product
of a "second rate." I dare to say that these words seem meaningless unless the reader is not going
into a definite train of thought. In the poem of this kind is an attempt to capture the exact
moment when something external and objective transformed or erupts into something internal
and subjective