Briefly, the doctrine we call Imagism has four cardinal points or principles. The first of these concerns presentation of the subject. The Imagist aims to present his subject as an image; that is to say, he presents the sum-total of the emotions in any given subject in such a way that the reader experiences the self-same emotions from them. To do this it is necessary for the Imagist to regard his subject-matter from its most imaginative aspect, and to present it visually. For the reader, not having experienced the emotion which moved the author to create his poem, is incapable of grasping that emotion save through a direct and complete appeal to his imagination through his higher senses of sight and hearing. By stimulating these senses, through appropriate choice of words, the Imagist aims to arouse the reader to such a pitch that the reader re-creates imaginatively for himself the emotional complex which gave birth to the poem. Imagism is, therefore, first of all a means of arousing the emotions through the imagination. The Imagists must therefore be sharply distinguished from the realistic school, and also from the symbolists of the nineteenth century, from which latter they have, in some sense, derived. Through the constant insistence on emotion as the underlying essence of poetry, the Imagists approach closely to the Elizabethans of the sixteenth and the early romantics of the nineteenth century. The second principle of Imagism concerns style. The Imagists desire to accomplish that renovation of the English language which is always periodically necessary if good poetry is to continue to be created in it. The Imagists have certain prejudices against inversions, clichés, journalese, highfalutin bombast, literary jargon, messy padding with adjectives. Each word must be an exact word, that is to say the sole word necessary for its particular place and purpose in the poem. This careful consideration for style relates the Imagists to the classicists of the eighteenth century, who undoubtedly rescued the English language from the absurdities of the “metaphysical” school. The Imagists also insist on it as a useful check to too great an exuberance of imagination. The third principle of Imagism concerns form. The rhythmical form of the poem should not be a mere empty pattern, but should follow, as far as possible, the ebb and flow of the emotion throughout the poem. It should be an integral part of the poem itself, as indissoluble from it as the substance of the words themselves. Therefore the Imagists hold that the theory and practice of vers libre is necessary, although they do not go so far as to demand it in every case, or to say that rhyme and metre have not their uses. In their desire to create a full emotional range of rhythmical nuances, inclusive of both rhyme and metre as well as freer rhythmical figures, the Imagists derive direct from the first great romantic poets of England—Blake and Coleridge.