How Did Ezra Pound Influence Modernism

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Ezra Pound and his influence on modernism Ezra Weston Loomis Pound was an emigrant American poet and critic who was a key figure of the early modernist movement. Pound promoted, and also sporadically helped to shape, the work of different poets and novelists such as William Butler Yeats, Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, D.H. Lawrence, Robert Frost, and T.S. Eliot. His influence on poetry began with his development of “Imagism”, a movement stressing clarity, carefulness and conciseness of language. Modernism is a movement that arose from wide-scale and far-reaching transformations in Western society in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Modernism rejected the certainty of Enlightenment thinking. Modernist poetry refers to poetry written, mainly in Europe and North America, between 1890 and 1950 in the tradition of modernist literature. It is characterized by a self-conscious break with traditional styles of poetry and verse. Modernists experimented with literary expression and form, stick to Ezra Pound 's maxim to “Make it new”. This paper examines different methods that Ezra Pound used to break the boundaries of traditional poetry and the techniques he used to pave the way for later poets. To …show more content…

He supported the free verse and skillfully practiced the techniques of collage and allusion. Pound placed a value on novelty and experimentation that helps define what we see as the avant-garde today (Lewis and Domestico). Pound had the most contentious career of any twentieth-century poet, and his overall place in American literature is more controversial than that of any other modernist. As a poet, a critic, and a promoter of other writers, Pound was crucial to the growth of modernist poetry. T. S. Eliot, in dedicating his poem The Waste Land to Pound, called him “the better craftsman” (“il miglior

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