Ezra PoundEzra Pound is widely considered one of the most influential poets of the 20th century; his contributions to modernist poetry were enormous. He was an early champion of a number of avant-garde and modernist poets; developed important channels of intellectual and aesthetic exchange between the United States and Europe; and contributed to important literary movements such as Imagism and Vorticism. His life’s work, The Cantos, remains a signal modernist epic. Its mix of history, politics, and what Pound called “the periplum,” that is a point of view of one in the middle of a journey, have given countless poets permission to develop a range of poetic techniques that capture life in the midst of experience.
