Ford Madox Ford is one of the important novelists of the century and one of the creators of modern literature. The Good Soldier (1915) is one of the indisputable classics in the modern idiom. The tetralogy Parade's End (1950) looms increasingly large as perhaps the finest English novelistic treatment of World War I. Ford's Fifth Queen trilogy (1963) will stand comparison with the best of the historical fiction of the past. Ezra Pound gave Ford credit as an important influence in taking poetry away from the high and artificial rhetoric of the Victorians and into the more natural and conversational style of modern poetry. Ford is acknowledged as having created and edited for a year the finest literary journal England ever had: the English Review. In the Paris of 1924 the Transatlantic Review under his editorship served the cause of avant-garde literature (as did a good many other short-lived journals), but did it without losing sight of the great tradition of literature and civilization the journal both derived from and served.
