Ezra Pound edited the Catholic Anthology in 1915 as an answer to the first Some Imagist Poets anthology. Even though the Catholic Anthology did not sell well, it did feature some classic pieces, such as Pound’s “Contemporania” and Eliot’s “Prufrock.” Several other American authors who published in Poetry also graced the volume, but the Amygists were deliberately excluded.
The four Imagist anthologies, published annually between 1914 and 1917, promoted Imagism as an avant-garde movement and helped turn Imagism into an important force in modern poetry. The first volume, Des Imagistes, was organized and edited by Ezra Pound; the MJP is making available three versions of this 1914 anthology—its initial appearance as a special issue of the literary magazine The Glebe, and the subsequent book editions published in New York and London. Some Imagist Poets (1915) was organized and edited by H. D. and Richard Aldington, while its 1916 and 1917 successors were edited by Amy Lowell. In 1915, Pound edited the Catholic Anthology in response to the 1915 anthology edited by H. D. and Aldington. The main contributors to the anthologies were Richard Aldington, John Gould Fletcher, F. S. Flint, H. D., D. H. Lawrence, Amy Lowell and Pound, with incidental poems by Skipwith Cannell, John Cornos, Ford Madox Hueffer, James Joyce, Allen Upward, and William Carlos Williams. The May 1921 issue of Chapbook featured a section parodying Imagism and its anthologies, called “Pathology des Dommagistes.”
The Modernist Journals Project would like to thank the Brown University library for allowing us to reproduce its original copies of the Imagist anthologies in our digital edition.