In the following essay, Skaff focuses on the importance of metaphor and the unconscious in the poetic theories advanced by Ezra Pound and the Surrealists.

SOURCE: "Pound's Imagism and the Surreal," in Journal of Modern Literature, Vol. 12, July, 1985, pp. 185-210.

I

In an essay of 1937, "D'Artagnan Twenty Years After," in which Ezra Pound reminisces of the few years when Imagism came to maturity, soon to be subsumed by Vorticism, two topics continually recur: Surrealism and metaphor. Since Blast, 1914, and in particular, The Little Review, 1917/19, Pound finds "very little news intervening between that date and the present on the literary frontier." He then mentions what might possibly have been considered innovative: "1923 winter of the same periodical showed a fair list of surrealists with all the subsequent features of that little coterie."¹ But Pound proceeds to assert that the Surrealist program was not new: "so unmoving was the air in...