The book, _Des Imagistes_, is an anthology, presumably of Imagist (let us, once for all, Anglicize the French word and have done with it) poetry. Yet, one of the foremost imagists, Richard Aldington, in a critique of this book,--comparatively modest, owing to the fact that his own poems formed a sumptuous fraction of the volume,--says that five of those whose poems are there included are not true Imagists. These are Cournos, Hueffer, Upward, Joyce, and Cannell. Mr. Aldington says he doesn't mean that these poems are not beautiful--on the contrary, he admires them immensely--but they are not, "strictly speaking," Imagist poems. I agree that the poems of these five men are beautiful, especially the _I hear an army_ of James Joyce and the _Nocturnes_ of Skipwith Cannell; and I also maintain that, all unconsciously, the publishers of _The Glebe_ have dealt a deadly blow to sectarian Imagism by including these non-Imagist poems in their anthology. Because, unless a school can prove that it alone has that unnameable wonder which excites us to deepest emotional turmoil, and which we call poetry, it has but little right to isolate itself or to separate its adepts from the bulk of poets. This may sound sententious, but is, nevertheless, true. Speak you in whatever mode or meter you will, if you arouse me to exultation, or to horror, or to the high pitch of any feeling,--if in me there is that responsive vibration that only true art can produce--then are you a poet. Whitman does it to me. Poe does it to me. Baudelaire and Henley do it. To all of these there is in me a response. I'm awfully sorry, but that's how it is. I think them all poets. The Imagists believe in the direct presentation of emotion, preferably in terms of objectivity. They abhor an excess of adjectives, and, after a satiety of the pompous Victorian stuff, I am much inclined to sympathize with that tenet of their faith. I wish, however, to make clear my own position, which is the one that most counts when I am writing. I am an anarchist in poetry: I recognize no rules, no exclusions. If the expression of a certain thought, vision, or what not, requires twenty adjectives, then let us have them. If it be better expressed without adjectives, then let us abjure them--temporarily. I am myself a poet (whether performance equals desire is doubtful). My object as a poet is to express the things which are closest to me. This sounds banal, but is better than rhetoric; words exist not with which to define with superclarity the poet's function, source, and performance.