It is significant that Helen Carr opens her account of the Imagist movement with a personal detail: the moment in 1912 in the British Museum tea-room, when Ezra Pound read his one-time fiancée, Hilda Doolittle’s completed poem, “Hermes of the ways”, and, on the strength of it, pronounced her, “HD Imagiste”. Whether or not this really marks the beginning of the Imagist movement, literary history hasn’t been too concerned to investigate – the romance and drama of it have been enough.
But this moment is significant for Carr’s magnum opus (and at almost 900 pages, her study is just that), as it is an emphasis on the personal throughout that gives her work depth as well as breadth.