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William Carlos Williams, “This Is Just to Say”

Though written about three decades after the movement’s heyday, “This Is Just to Say” nonetheless bears many of the hallmarks of Imagism. For this reason, it makes a worthy companion to “The Red Wheelbarrow,” which Williams drafted eleven years prior.

Ezra Pound, “At a Station of the Metro”

Like “The Red Wheelbarrow,” Pound’s 1913 poem is a landmark artifact of the Imagist movement. Both poems feature an especially impressive economy of language, even as they are quite different in form. Pound’s haiku-like poem contains fourteen words split across just two lines. By contrast, Williams’s sixteen-word poem is meticulously organized into four stanzas of two lines each.

Robert Burns, “To a Mouse”

Burns’s poem, though written in 1780s, shares with Williams’s poem a concern with the future of country life. Burns was concerned with the Scottish Agricultural Revolution, which had progressively decimated the rural poor in Scotland, uprooting them from their land and displacing them into the city. Although Williams’s concerns are less specific and pointed, it seems clear enough that he feels perturbed by the encroachment of twentieth-century modernity.

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