Essayist: Lessing contended that an art form's medium dictates the kind of representation the art form must employ in order to be legitimate; painting, for example, must represent simultaneous arrays of colored shapes, while literature, consisting of words read in succession, must represent events or actions occurring in sequence. The claim about the imagists' poems, which consist solely of amalgams of disparate images.
What this question is testing
The Argument
Lessing said literature must represent events in sequence. The essayist wants to reject that claim by pointing to imagist poetry — poems that are just amalgams of disparate images and are still considered legitimate.
Evaluate
For imagist poetry to actually disprove Lessing, it has to be (a) legitimate literature and (b) not representing events in sequence. We are told it is legitimate. But the essay does not say whether amalgams of disparate images can represent sequences. If they can, then imagist poetry would still be following Lessing's rule, and the rejection would not work.
Goal
The right answer should plug that hole — say that an amalgam of disparate images cannot represent a sequence of events. With that, imagist poetry becomes the genuine counterexample the essayist needs.
Reading along? Open the full official question in LawHub — we show a fragment here and keep the reasoning in our own words.