The fact that they are sinning against themselves must be its own punishment. The tendency of _The Egoist_ towards Imagism flowered in the May issue. This issue was in fact “organized” (if I may use a trade term) from cover to cover to provide an honest and profitable discussion of the so-called “new” thing in poetry. As if poetry can be new. I had an idea that God made poetry when the world was very young indeed. Well, I turned to the May _Egoist_ in order to rediscover my emotion. I found the journal comprised an admirable treatise on the theory and practice of Imagism with some uncritical praise and a strong note of criticism thrown in. I read the prose with a good deal of interest, particularly Mr. Harold Munro’s history, origin and criticism of Imagism. It seems Mr. Munro objects to Imagism on the general ground that it is not inspired by the High Muses. It is rather the work of poets on the way to Parnassus who have stopped half-way to chase hares. The fact of the matter is that if an Imagist has a passionate instantaneous impression to start with he does not end with it. He simply destroys it before he has got very far with intellectual or technical theories. In Mr. Munro’s very words, “poets of the Imagist and other kindred modern schools are no longer visited by the Muses: they are not at home to them.” How far this is true one may learn from the Imagists themselves. Here are some extracts from their contributions to the said “Special Imagist Number:” “Somewhere in the gleam of the year 1908, Mr. T. E. Hulme, excited by the propinquity, at a half-a-crown dance of the other sex ... proposed to a companion that they should found a Poets’ Club. The thing was done, there and then. The Club began to dine.... In November of the same year, Edward Storer, ... published the first book of “Imagist poems.” This statement that the Imagist movement was started by Edward Storer and T. E. Hulme, was subsequently refuted by Mr. Allen Upward who it seems received the Imagist message in 1900 from “a poet named Cranmer Byng,” who had received it from Professor Giles, who had brought a tablet of China from the East with all sorts of wonderful little poems painted thereon. Later, Mr. Ezra Pound made for Mr. Allen Upward the Imagist garland to deck his forehead in the Court of Eternity. To continue the extracts, “Mr. Storer ... was in favor then of a poetry ... described ... ‘as a form of expression, like the Japanese, in which an image is the resonant heart of an exquisite moment.’” “I (the writer) had been advocating ... a poetry in _vers libre_, akin in spirit to the Japanese.” ... “A dissatisfaction with English poetry as it was then being written” led to a desire “to replace it by the Japanese _tanka_ and _haika_.” “He (Hulme) insisted on absolutely accurate presentation and no verbiage” ... “used to spend hours each day in the search for the right phrase.” ... “We (the