In 1972, Ezra Pound made one of his rare comments, that "Hem did not disappoint." Craftsman that Pound had consistently been, his admiration for Hemingway grew at least partly from the younger writer's accomplishments in his writing. Forty-two years earlier, in 1930, Pound had himself classified Hemingway's writing style as "Imagist," describing the younger man as

accepting the principles of good writing that had been contained in the earliest imagist document, and applying the stricture against superfluous words to his prose, polishing, repolishing, and eliminating, as can be seen in the clean hard paragraphs of the first brief In Our Time, in They All Made Peace, in The Torrents of Spring, and in the best pages of his later novels.

Of all Hemingway's critical statements, the most adamant do relate to this "stricture against superfluous words."… Hemingway preaches concision…. The good writer, according to Hemingway, is seldom satisfied; surrounded by...