ROBERT FROST AND EZRA POUND: COMPLEXITY OF THOUGHT AND IMAGISTIC PRECISION
ROBERT FROST AND EZRA POUND: COMPLEXITY OF THOUGHT AND IMAGISTIC PRECISION

Summary/Abstract: The American poetry of roughly the first half of the twentieth century is unexcelled in its richness, inventiveness, and diversity. The variety of poetry written and published in the United States in the last century represents a unique explosion of literary creativity. Its range of forms, styles, and preoccupations are in a fundamental sense uncontainable. They exceed any single story one might try to tell about them. However, it is a field that continues to change, not only because poetry long out of print is being made available again and given thorough analysis but also because scholars continue to discover important early and mid-twentieth-century poetry that missed being published for various reasons. It was not until the second decade of the century that poets began to come to terms with the important social and economic changes of the modern era, such as the introduction of new technologies into all areas of industry and commerce and the increasingly urban character of American life. The first generation of American poets to respond to this modern world included Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, T. S. Eliot, E. E. Cummings and Marianne Moore. It was with this generation (having published their first books between 1908 and 1923) that the true artistic achievement of American poetic writing was clearly established.

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