A dead movement is one which never had or can have a real place in the history of poets and poems. It occurs because some passing or hitherto unrealized psychological mood in the public offers a new field for exploitation, as sudden fashion crazes come and go, leaving no trace but waste material. In poetry such dead movements do not even survive as literary curiosities. From the ’eighties onward the writing of real poetry has been postponed by an increasing succession of such dead movements: the use of playful French forms for drawing-room occasions, of which the triolet became the most popular, by Austin Dobson, Arthur Symons and Sir Edmund Gosse; the wickedness movement of the ’nineties, also of French origin, the characteristic words of whose poetical vocabulary were _lutany_, _arabesque_, _vermilion_, _jade_, _languid_, _satyr_; then a long end-of-the-century lull; then a new train of dead movements, only more interesting because they belong to a more alarming phase of world history. None of these movements which we call ‘dead’ because they never had any real poetic excuse for being, made any lasting contribution to English poetry: they were all merely modernized advertisements of the same old product of which the reader had grown tired. Imagism is one of the earliest and the most typical of these twentieth-century dead movements. It had the look of a movement of pure experimentalism and reformation in poetry. But the issuing of a public manifesto of Imagism, its massed organization as a literary party with a defined political programme, the war it carried on with reviewers, the annual appearance of an Imagist anthology--all this revealed it as a stunt of commercial advertisers of poetry to whom poetic results meant a popular demand for their work, not the discovery of new values in poetry with an indifference to the recognition they received. The Imagists had decided beforehand the kind of poetry that was wanted by the time: a poetry to match certain up-to-date movements in music and art. They wanted to express ‘new moods’, and in free verse (or cadence). They _believed_ in free verse; and to believe in one way of writing poetry as against another is to have the attitude of a quack rather than of a scientist toward one’s art, to be in a position of selling one’s ideas rather than of constantly submitting them to new tests. That is, they wanted to be _new_ rather than to be poets; which meant that they could only go so far as to say everything that had already been said before in a slightly different way. ‘Imagism refers to the manner of presentation, not to the subject.’ Authentic ‘advanced’ poetry of the present day differs from such programmes for poetry in this important respect: that it is concerned with a reorganization of the matter (not in the sense of subject-matter but of poetic thought as distinguished from other kinds of thought) rather than the manner of poetry. This is why the plain reader feels so balked