ABSTRACT
Ezra Pound's Imagism has come a long way from its debut earlyin the 20th century as a poetry of small, tersely worded perceptions of form in nature to the sprawling, colloquial humor of Philip Whalen's "manufactured" poems. One thing remains constant across the century of avant-garde poetry, however: the use of imagination as a faculty for tuning into nature's own creativity. Whalen's breezier versions of this kind of lyric testimony to the unity of the natural world do not depart from early Imagism so much as festoon the process with more atmosphere and chitchat, much of it funny, outrageous, or merely witty.
