Modernism

War Poetry
Free verse
Imagism
 Break of Day in the Trenches

By Isaac Rosenberg

The darkness crumbles away.

It is the same old druid Time as ever,
Only a live thing leaps my hand,
A queer sardonic rat,
As I pull the parapet’s poppy
To stick behind my ear.
Droll rat, they would shoot you if they knew
Your cosmopolitan sympathies.
Now you have touched this English hand
You will do the same to a German
Soon, no doubt, if it be your pleasure
To cross the sleeping green between.
It seems you inwardly grin as you pass
Strong eyes, fine limbs, haughty athletes,
Less chanced than you for life,
Bonds to the whims of murder,
Sprawled in the bowels of the earth,
The torn fields of France.
What do you see in our eyes
At the shrieking iron and flame
Hurled through still heavens?
What quaver—what heart aghast?
Poppies whose roots are in man’s veins
Drop, and are ever dropping;
But mine in my ear is safe—
Just a little white with the dust.

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 Ezra Pound and Imagism
https://www.loa.org/writers/103-ezra-pound

Ezra Pound is generally considered the poet most responsible for defining and promoting a modernist aesthetic in
poetry. In the early teens of the twentieth century, he opened a seminal exchange of work and ideas between
British and American writers, and was famous for the generosity with which he advanced the work of such major
contemporaries as W. B. Yeats, Robert Frost, William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, H. D., James Joyce,
Ernest Hemingway, and especially T. S. Eliot.
His own significant contributions to poetry begin with his promulgation of Imagism, a movement in poetry
which derived its technique from classical Chinese and Japanese poetry—stressing clarity, precision, and
economy of language and foregoing traditional rhyme and meter in order to, in Pound's words, “compose in the
sequence of the musical phrase, not in the sequence of the metronome.” His later work, for nearly fifty years,
focused on the encyclopedic epic poem he entitled The Cantos.
Retrieved from https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poet/ezra-pound

Past into Present:An Anthology of British and American Literature. Longman

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H.D. and 'Oread'

Hilda Doolittle, who wrote under her initials, was one of the founding members of Imagism. She was
once engaged to Ezra Pound, but they didn't end up getting married. Even so, he helped launch her
career and often saw her as one of the best Imagist poets.

Perhaps her most famous poem is called 'Oread.' The title is the name of a mountain nymph, and the
poem is the nymph ordering the sea around.

'Oread’

Whirl up, sea -

Whirl your pointed pines,

Splash your great pines

On our rocks,

Hurl your green over us -

Cover us with your pools of fir.

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