Robert Kelly is among the major postmodern American writers and editors who are the second-generation inheritors of a great modernist tradition and the founders of a methodology for composition that incorporates principles of depth psychology. The example of his writing in more than fifty books, as well as his influence as a teacher of English over three decades, has helped to liberate the next generation of writers. Kelly's modernist origins can be traced to the years before World War I, to Ezra Pound's imagist experiments and the expansion of hard-image poems to include history and gnostic learning. The line of tradition beginning with Pound was advanced between the world wars most specifically by William Carlos Williams, Louis Zukofsky, George Oppen, and other objectivists and was repostulated at the time of the Korean War by Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, Robert Creeley, and the practitioners of "open" composition, known collectively...