I continue to be fascinated by the reputation of imagism in later decades. Folks less rather than more knowledgeable about poetry - and who are also suspicious of modernism - tend to let imagism stand in for all of modernism. So no matter how inaccurate such substitution is, imagism, that fleeting movement, has had a disproportionate effect, less perhaps on later poets themselves than on poetry's reputation.
Robert Pinsky in The Situation in Poetry (1976) is an antimodernist. He's not adamant or overt about it, except at moments. One such moment is his assessment of imagism. He looked around at poetry in the 1970s and sadly found imagism's influence. "[T]he techniques of 'imagism,' which convey the powerful illusion that a poet presents, rather than tells about, a sensory experience" are "tormented premises" for poetry. Yet such premises have "become a tradition: a climate of implicit expectation and tacit knowledge" and this "aspect of modernism...effaces or holds back the warmth of authorial commitment to feeling or idea, in favor of a surface cool under the reader's initial touch."*[] Some imagist materials.
* p. 3; thanks for Robert Archambeau's "Roads Less Traveled: Two Paths out of Modernism" in The Mechanics of Mirage: Postwar American Poetry (2000).
"I teach horizontally, meaning that while I might begin with a fixed idea of what I'm going to teach that day, I let it drift rhizomatically way off topic, often pulling it back when it gets too far. I rely on non-fixed materials to teach this way; the whole world is at my fingertips. Should I go off on a tangent about John and Rauschenberg and their love relationship as expressed in Rauschenberg's bed, an image of that bed is always a click away. From there, we can head anywhere into the non-fixed universe, be it film, text or sound. And of course, that always takes us elsewhere. As Cage says, 'We are getting nowhere fast.'" 
that anyone has yet got the imaginative measure of that terrifying day six years ago. Certainly our Tolstoy has not crawled out of the rubble. The closest we have, Don DeLillo, succeeded as an essayist-journalist ("In the Ruins of the Future: Reflections on Terror and Loss in the Shadow of September,” Harper’s, December 2001) but, to my mind, failed as a novelist ("Falling Man"). One reason, perhaps, is that the remembered emotion was instantly buried under a pile of cultural junk.' - Tod Gitlin in his review of Susan Faludi's The Terror Dream (written for 
