Imagism

Surrealist movements shared the modernist method and ideal of blurring boundaries between subjects and objects. The symbolist descendants of Baudelaire and Poe--Dadaists, Vorticists, and Imagists--all prized the Surrealistic effects that resulted from dissolving grammatical or conceptual distinctions between subjects and objects. They felt that such effects could counteract the impulses of naturalism, which threatened to turn art into documentation, and thus could help save art from Philistine referentiality. Imagism epitomized this characteristically modernist enterprise.

"In a Station at the Metro," "Oread"--fused poetic speaker with poetic topic until "the man is abridged into mere vision, and the object contracts into pure visibility" -- seemed contextless. Disembodied and sourceless, isolated from social and political particularity.