Pound’s importance to Literature has three facets to it: First, as part of the Modernist poetry movement, he perfected many modernist techniques, such as blank verse, experimental scansions, and fresh imagery.  Second, he used the form and content of classical literature (Dante’s Inferno inspired Pound’s great work, Cantos) to write his own poetry, helping to bridge the gap between neoclassical and modernist impulses.  But perhaps his greatest contribution lies outside his own complex creative work, in his befriending, editing, and promoting all other modernist poets – Yeats and Eliot are excellent examples, both of them personal friends with Pound, as well as contributors to the many small journals and magazines that Pound edited and sustained (The Egoist, Poetry, etc.) in those experimental years at the beginning of the 20th century. Finally, Pound’s discovery and promotion of non-Western poets and poetry must be mentioned; Rabindranath Tagore is an excellent example.

Pound’s international travels and influences made Modernism an international movement, despite claims about his sympathies toward Fascism.