In an article in La France , 1915 , the French critic , Remy de Gourmont described the Imagists as descendants of the French Symbolistes and in a 1928 letter to the French critic and translator René Taupin , Pound was keen to emphasise another ancestry for Imagism , pointing out that Hulme was indebted to a Symbolist tradition , linking back via William Butler Yeats , Arthur Symons and the Rhymers ' Club generation of British poets to Mallarmé. and the Symbolist source was amplified further in Taupin 's study published in 1929 , in which he concluded however great the divergence of technique and language ' between the image of the Imagist and the ' symbol ' of the Symbolists there is a difference only of precision ' . In 1915 , Pound edited the poetry of another 1890s poet , Lionel Johnson for the publisher Elkin Mathews . In his introduction , he wrote