In the nineteenth century, poets like Whitman and Dickinson seemed to thrive on the impulse to push at boundaries and to seek out new idioms for an American vernacular poetics. In reaction to the weary genteel romanticism of much poetry at the turn of the nineteenth century, this transgressive impulse became more pronounced with the innovations generated by modernist poets such as William Carlos Williams, T. S. Eliot, and especially Ezra Pound, whose mantra “make it new” encapsulates this energetic thrust. While modern American poetry is indeed a broad, disparate field, embracing a range of practices and styles, nevertheless, no study of American poetry in the twentieth century can legitimately ignore the signal contributions of the modernists T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, Robert Frost, and Wallace Stevens. Many of the driving formulations and elaborations of contemporary poetics owe themselves to Pound's intervention in what he saw as the dilapidated and dead-end poetics of late-nineteenth-century romanticism.