In the following essay, Firchow locates the poetics of Imagism as advanced by Ezra Pound within the classical tradition in poetry.

SOURCE: "Ezra Pound's Imagism and the Tradition," in Comparative Literature Studies, XVIII, September, 1981, pp. 379-85.

Only from about the year 1926 did the features of the post-war world begin clearly to emerge—and not only in the sphere of politics. From about that date one began slowly to realize that the intellectual and artistic output of the previous seven years had been rather the last efforts of an old world, than the struggles of a new."

—T. S. Eliot, "Last Words" (1939)

In some ways, I ca n think of no one whom he resembled more than Irving Babbitt—a comparison neither man would have relished. Perhaps the backgrounds were not unlike; perhaps if Pound had stopped at home, and become, as he might have become, a professor of...