SOURCE: “Prufrock and Other Observations,” in Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, Vol. 10, 1917, pp. 264-71.

In the following essay, Pound reviews “Prufrock and Other Observations,” finding in it some of the best poetry of the time.

Il n'y a de livres que ceux où un écrivain s'est raconté lui-même en racontant les moeurs de ses contemporains—leurs rêves, leurs vanités, leurs amours, et leurs folies.

—Remy de Gourmont

De Gourmont uses this sentence in writing of the incontestable superiority of Madame Bovary, L'Éducation Sentimentale and Bouvard et Pécuchet to Salammbo and La Tentation de St. Antoine. A casual thought convinces one that it is true for all prose. Is it true also for poetry? One may give latitude to the interpretation of rêves; the gross public would have the poet write little else, but De Gourmont keeps a proportion. The vision should have...