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In his exploratory study of modern American poets, economist David Galenson limited his analysis to 11 outstanding innovators who averaged more than three poems per anthology. This winnowed out several prominent poets, including W.H. Auden, John Berryman, Hart Crane and James Merrill. Of the remaining 11, five were finders and six were seekers. The five conceptual poets range from level-headed Richard Wilbur to suicidal Sylvia Plath and institutionalized Ezra Pound, but they all achieved their greatest successes at a young age. Typical traits of finders that can be found in this group’s reliance on literary traditions, focus on the poet’s interior life, and works based on the poet’s distinctive ideas about what poetry should be like.
Ezra Pound, 1885-1972: conceptual innovator and ‘poet’s poet’
As a young man, Ezra Pound was an influential and controversial literary theorist, marketer of modern writers and editor of T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land. As a typical finder, Pound did his greatest work early in his career, long before he drifted into Fascist propaganda and then mental illness.
He was still a young man when he wrote the t
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Ezra Pound,
young genius
This brief haiku-like poem, written by Pound at age 28, is tied for seventh most popular in anthologies.
In a Station of the Metro
The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.
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wo pieces that landed on the list of the top 20 most-anthologized poems. Those two are “In the Station of the Metro” (tied for seventh), written at age 28, and “The River-Merchant’s Wife: A Letter” (tied for fifth) from age 30. Overall, the anthologies contain a total of 237 examples of Pound poems -- more than 60 percent of them from before age 32. Poems that he wrote after age 36 show up rarely.
He also exercised his conceptual approach to poetry by drafting rules to define the types of poetry that he wanted to write and promote.
The first of these was Imagism – free verse in colloquial language with clear images, no symbolism and no romantic claptrap -- which was practiced both by conceptual innovator Pound and by experimental innovator William Carlos Williams, among others.
The following comments from critics and f ellow poets make clear the conceptual nature of Pound’s work, particularly the importance he placed on technique and literary tradition rather than subject matter:
•“I confess that I am seldom interested in what Pound … is saying, but only in the way he says it,” said T.S. Eliot.
•“Pound is more interested in the technical elements of the poem than its subject,” said critic Alan Shucard.
•“Everything in life only serves to remind him of something in literature,” said critic Edmund Wilson.
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