It does not seem possible that these six obvious and almost platitudinous principles, which the Imagists so often neglected in their poetry, could have evoked the storm of argument, fury and downright vilification that broke as soon as the militant Amy Lowell began to champion them. Far from being revolutionary, these principles were not new; they were not even thought so by their sponsors. The Imagists themselves realized they were merely restating ideals which had fallen into desuetude, and declared, “They are the essentials of all great poetry, indeed of all great literature.” And yet many conservative critics, joined by the one hundred per cent reactionaries, rushed wildly to combat these “heresies”! They forgot that, in trying to protect the future from such lawlessness as “using the exact word,” from allowing “freedom in the choice of subject,” from the importance of “concentration,” they were actually attacking the highest traditions of their enshrined past. The controversy succeeded in doing even more than the work of the Imagists themselves. “H. D.” remained in England, perfecting her delicate and exquisitely finished designs. John Gould Fletcher, a more vacillating expatriate, continued to strengthen his gift and shift his standards; his later and richer work is in almost flat opposition to the early pronouncements. Miss Lowell was left to carry on the battle single-handed; to defend the theories which, in practice, she was beginning to violate brilliantly. By all odds, the most energetic and unflagging experimenter, Miss Lowell’s versatility became amazing. She has wielded a controversial cudgel with one hand and, with the other, she has written Chaucerian stanzas, polyphonic prose, monologs in her native New England dialect, irregular _vers libre_, conservative couplets, translations from the French, echoes from the Japanese, even primitive re-creations of Indian folk-lore! The work of the Imagists was done. Its members began to develop themselves by themselves. They had helped to swell the tide of realistic and romantic naturalism—a tide of which their contribution was merely one wave, a high breaker that carried its impact far inshore. THE NEW FOLK-POETRY