The First World War shattered the Victorian and Edwardian belief in progress and moral stability. The unprecedented scale of mechanized slaughter forced poets to abandon traditional forms and romanticized language, as these were deemed inadequate to capture the reality of industrial warfare. Both the collapse of cultural values and the critique of technological advancement were central to the emergence of the Modernist poetic sensibility.

'Lord Jim' is a modernist novel written by the Polish-British author Joseph Conrad, first published in 1900. The story follows a young British seaman who becomes haunted by a moment of cowardice and spends the rest of his life seeking redemption. Conrad is celebrated for his complex narrative structures, psychological depth, and exploration of moral ambiguity, all of which are central to the thematic concerns of 'Lord Jim.'

Imagism, a movement in early 20th-century Anglo-American poetry, prioritized clarity, precision, and the use of exact imagery. Imagists advocated for the use of common speech and freedom in subject matter. They explicitly rejected the use of traditional, conventional poetic forms and flowery, decorative language, favoring instead a direct, concise, and hard-edged style that focused on the object itself rather than abstract sentiment.