This article considers the evolution of Hulme’s thought from his ‘Lecture on Modern Poetry’ to ‘Romanticism and Classicism’, including the development of his belief in poetry as a visual language, why he defines the ‘aesthetic emotion’ in such a limited way, and why he links these ideas to the Classicism of Action Franc ̧aise. What it demonstrates is that William James’s description of the distinc- tion between Romantic and Classical art in Principles of Psychology played a part in helping Hulme to reduce Bergson’s concept of ‘aesthetic emotion’ to sensation, and to see such effects as pertaining to Classical, rather than Romantic art. However, Hulme failed to realise that Bergson’s ideas on art were in fact incompatible with William James’s. This incompatibility caused tensions between the theory and practice of the Imagist movement inspired by Hulme’s ideas. The conflict was caused partly by James’s denial of the uniqueness of aesthetic emotion, and partly because, in reducing the aesthetic emotion to sensation, he negates the im- portance of memory and association to the image’s aesthetic effect, which is by its very nature temporal in manifestation. The piece concludes by demonstrating how the poem ‘Hermes of the Ways’, by H.D., does not concord with Pound’s doctrine of image as an ‘intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time’, and needs memory and association to unravel if the image is to work. This critique demon- strates the divergence between genuine Imagist practice and William James’s prioritisation of immediate sensation, which Hulme had communicated to Imagist theory.