The precise, Imagist technique of these poems, in Pound's rendition, can be seen in "The River-Merchant's Wife: A Letter." The speaker is a young wife, married at fourteen, who expresses, largely through images, the loneliness and isolation she feels in separation from her husband, absent on a five-month business trip, and her eagerness to be reunited with him. . . .

The effect of an intense, repressed emotion is conveyed through carefully selected images and minimal statement -- a method productive of the kind of poetry at which the Imagists were aiming: a precise, objective rendering.

|

From American Free Verse: The Modern Revolution in Poetry. Copyright © 1973 by Walter Sutton.