About

This project was created by the MIT Comparative Media Studies graduate class of 2010 for Nick Montfort's Fall 2008 Workshop course.

The untitled poem on the first page of this website is comprised of our favorite lines from Des Imagistes. It provides an alternate way to navigate these poems.

  • Project Team:
  • Jason Begy
  • Audubon Dougherty
  • Madeleine Clare Elish
  • Florence Gallez
  • Madeline Flourish Klink
  • Hillary Kolos
  • Michelle Moon Lee
  • Elliot Pinkus
  • Nick Seaver
  • Sheila Murphy Seles

Des Imagistes is the first anthology of so–called imagist poetry. Imagism was conceived by Ezra Pound, H.D., and Richard Aldington in 1912. Pound explains the tenets of imagism as the following:

  1. Direct treatment of the 'thing' whether subjective or objective.
  2. To use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation.
  3. As regarding rhythm: to compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in the sequence of a metronome.

Though a relatively short-lived poetic movement, imagism was central in defining English–language modernist poetry.

Des Imagistes was first published in the periodical The Glebe in 1914. It was reissued later in 1914 by The Poetry Bookshop in London and by Charles and Albert Boni in New York. This online edition is a transcription of the Boni edition. Des Imagistes is no longer in print and rarely circulates in library collections. We hope that this online edition will prove useful to those who wish to access this material.

This online edition is a transcription of the Boni edition. A pdf of the original book is also available.

This website uses a font stack of "Futura, Tahoma, Arial, sans-serif." Futura was designed between 1924 and 1926 by Paul Renner, and while Renner was not associated with the Bauhaus school of design, Futura is frequently used in connection with Bauhaus-related topics. The Bauhaus school was founded two years after Des Imagistes' publication, and its aesthetics harmonize well with the nature of imagistic poetry.

This website uses valid XHTML and complies with Section 508 and W3C accessibility standards. It has been cross-browser tested for the following browsers: Firefox 2 (Mac & PC), Firefox 3 (Mac & PC), Safari, IE7, IE6, and Chrome. It was developed collaboratively using tools such as Google Docs, Dropbox, and TextWrangler.

Correction: In the fifth stanza of Skipwith Cannell's poem Nocturnes, despite the spelling popies in the original text, we have corrected the typo to poppies.

CMS10 is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

Website published on: December 1, 2008