1920's The Arts | Poetry

Pound.

Major poems were written during the 1920s by poets who were publishing before the war: Robert Frost (1874-1963), Ezra Pound (1885-1972), Edwin Arlington Robinson (1869-1935), Carl Sandburg (1878-1967), Vachel Lindsay (1879-1931). It is therefore misleading to identify the poets who began appearing in the 1920s without acknowledging their senior colleagues, especially Pound. Although Pound published his first book of verse in 1908, he was the most influential poet of the 1920s in terms of both his own work and his assistance to other writers. He encouraged gifted writers as different as Ernest Hemingway and T. S. Eliot; he edited journals, drafted manifestoes, and arranged for the publication of other poets' work. As a leader of the Imagists, Pound wrote a perfect Imagist poem, "In a Station of the Metro":

The apparition of these faces in the crowd,
Petals on a wet black bough.

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