Imagism in poetry

[milo]

I enjoy them, but as I’ve written elsewhere, you can have too much of a good thing.
I had written a poem about it a while ago (apologies for plugging my pome in): https://www.pigpenpoetry.com/thread-26404.html

But I would definitely like to write like a William Carlos Williams or an Ezra Poind. It may not be my cup of tea, but it’s a skill that should be learnt.

I wonder though, if poetry loses its spontaneity with too much learning. There is the craftsman and there is the creator. Ideally, you can be both, but perhaps being very good at one necessarily comes at the expense of the other. Like an LLM, you get too well trained on a narrow dataset

It may be impossible to separate Ezra Pound from the personality that is Ezra Pound but WCW is exactly the type of poetry that I am talking about.  Everyone seems to love him, I just don't get him.  Here is the famous plum poem:

This Is Just To Say
By William Carlos Williams

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox
and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast
Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold

For me, it is like empty calories.  It is like life savers for dinner when I want Beef Borbuignon.  I actually just looked up the analysis to it, that helps a little but I still get almost nothing from it.

One of the lines is "that were in"