Critical Essay | Cyrena N. Pondrom

Cyrena N. Pondrom

In the following essay, Pondrom discusses the contributions of H.D. to the theory and practice of Imagism.

SOURCE: "H.D. and the Origins of Imagism," in Sagetrieb: A Journal Devoted to Poets, Vol. 4, Spring, 1985, pp. 73-97.

At the conclusion of his book, Noel Stock, the biographer of Ezra Pound, summarized: "With Yeats, Joyce, Lewis and Eliot dead he was the last survivor among the leading men of the formative years of the 'modern movement' in English literature—the movement in which he himself had played an important part, not only as innovator and renewer of language, but as impresario and publicity-agent, fund-raiser and office boy."¹ One could easily conclude from Stock's summation that modernism was a movement which owed its foundation and its characteristics to men alone. His emphasis is hardly atypical, even today, when a rapidly swelling scholarship on women writers makes only the least informed unaware that modernism...
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