At the turn of the twentieth century, Ezra Pound demanded that American poets “make it [poetry] new.” If Walt Whitman laid the groundwork for modern poetry, Pound ushered it into the new century with an insistence that form should be as modern as poetry’s subjects.

Pound was antipathetic to Whitman, possibly because they were both too alike in their mission to break existing literary molds and create a new poetics. Pound was also a generous and keen-eyed supporter of rising talent; among his protégés were Robert Frost and T. S. Eliot.

Pound’s verse was fast, glancing, and imagistic. He wrote the shortest great poem ever, “In a Station of the Metro,” which reads: “The apparition of these faces in the crowd; / Petals on a wet, black bough.”

His great work was the impossibly sprawling Cantos, which he began in 1917 and finished in 1969, with a total of 109 works. It is a modern epic that begins with allusions to the Odyssey (“And then went down to the ship / Set keel to breakers, forth on the godly sea”), surveys world and American history, sets out Pound’s ill-considered (and anti-Semitic) economic schemes, and ends in confusion and incoherence, mirroring Pound’s own personal fate.