Ezra Pound 's influence on the development of poetry in the twentieth century has unquestionably been greater than that of any other poet. No other writer has written as much poetry and criticism or devoted as much energy to the advancement of the arts in general. Nor has any writer been the focus of so much or such heated controversy. More widely recognized than any other writer by his poet-contemporaries for his influence on their work, he has at the same time been the most widely and bitterly condemned by critics. Opinions about Pound run the gamut from uncritical adulation to vituperative hatred.

Pound's energy was prodigious, and he applied it to his self-appointed mission of revitalizing poetry and the arts in general with an almost obsessive single-mindedness. As the artist and novelist Wyndham Lewis said of him in Blasting and Bombardiering (1937), "there was nothing social for him...