Perhaps H. D. is the purest Imagist of the group. To the uninitiated she is the most obscure because the most abstract. She loves the sea and high, windy places and her poems catch something of the freshness one feels standing on a headland, beaten and buffeted by the wind and the salt spray. Nature is to her as a living presence, sometimes gentle, more often cruel. She vibrates to beauty as sensitively as a Greek dryad, and in reading her poems one has a curious sense of a worshipper offering incense to the gods. Here are some lines from the last one of the four poems she contributes. It is called _Temple—The Cliff_: High—high and no hill-goat Tramples—no mountain-sheep Has set foot on your fine grass. You lift, you are the world-edge, Pillar for the sky-arch. The world heaved— We are next to the sky. Over us, sea-hawks shout, Gulls sweep past. The terrible breakers are silent. Shall I hurl myself from here. Shall I leap and be nearer you? Shall I drop, beloved, beloved. Over me the wind swirls. I have stood on your portal And I know— You are further than this, Still further on another cliff. In their passion for clearness, for the exact word, Imagists often use certain words which sound ugly. In this poem of fourteen stanzas, the word “lurch” occurs three times. It is not a pretty word, it does not suggest a graceful action, yet apparently no other will do. John Gould Fletcher is, first of all, pictorial. His conception of Imagism differs slightly, it would seem, from his confreres. His imagination is so strong he sees significance in every changing image of this changing world. His rhythm is so vague that sometimes it is hardly discoverable. His poetry could be printed about as well in block as in line, as doubtless he would admit. He loves color—revels, glories, riots in color; and he has a way of seeing resemblances to dragons and serpents and other ungodly things in the simplest of natural phenomena—trees or clouds or rain or even sunrise. His vocabulary is astonishing. He plunges into a sea of words and plays with them, tossing them up like jewels to sparkle in the sun, or burying them in pits to see if they will still shine. He loves words, caresses them with a lover’s touch, kisses them for luck, and then hurls them together in such an incredible combination that the critics blink. A serious workman withal, with much to say seething in his mind and a determination to say it in his own way. There is perhaps no line in the six poems in this Anthology equal to the much-quoted “Vermillion pavilion against a jade balustrade.” _The Mexican Quarter_ is a poem of forty-two lines wherein is depicted and symbolized the very spirit of Mexican life and love. It ends with an unexpected little lyric. One can almost hear the twang of the guitar. Here is Fletcher’s picture of _An Unquiet Street_: