Ralph Cheever Dunning's brief renown in Paris during the twenties was perhaps more a result of his mysterious personality and preoccupations than of his poetry. Although his work was the subject of a heated debate in 1926 on the Left Bank, it was the man himself who was most scrutinized. A native of Detroit, Dunning arrived in Paris around 1905. By 1910 his first volume of poetry, Hyllus, had been published in London by John Lane, despite the poet's noted apathy toward publication. Little more of his work appeared until the early twenties when, under Ezra Pound's influence, Dunning was persuaded to release his manuscript "The Four Winds" to Poetry and the transatlantic review, each of which published large portions of it in 1924 and 1925. The event delighted Pound but stirred his friend and protege little. (In 1929 the poems were published as Windfalls by Edward Titus's Black Manikin Press.)

It was enough...