Not long ago, modern poetry - Yeats, Pound, Eliot, Stevens - seemed to occupy an enormous territory on the literary-historical map. But as the twentieth century comes to an end, the Modernism that once loomed so large now seems startlingly diminished. Beginning in the late 1950s, critics began to see through the smoke screen of New Critical antiromanticism, uncovering the important affiliations between romantic, Victorian, and modern poetics. Today, in the wake of pioneering work by Frank Kermode, Robert Langbaum, and especially Harold Bloom, Eliot not only seems indebted to Tennyson; his Modernism makes most sense when we understand it as part of a continuum beginning with the publication of the Lyrical Ballads.

And if the historical integrity of Modernism has been encroached on by romanticism, an increasingly powerful postmodernism has exerted equal pressure from the opposite side. Certain modern poets - for Marjorie Perloff, Pound but not Stevens - are claimed as proto-postmodernists, leaving the impression that the remaining Modernists are a hapless, ineffectual lot. And what makes this remapping of the moderns all the more complicated is that the various cartographers narrow the Modernist field in different ways. For some, Stevens is in while Pound is out; for others, H. D. or Gwendolyn Brooks hold our attention at the expense of both Stevens and Pound.

Whatever else he was, Yeats was a great Victorian poet who lived long enough to become a great modern poet. Notoriously, like Beethoven, he was an artist who changed. Sometimes Yeats was forced to change by the events of his time but, more profoundly, Yeats forced change upon himself, refusing ever to sound the same way twice but never sounding like anyone other than Yeats.

This is how the twenty-seven-year-old Yeats sounded in 1892, when he published his second book of poems, The Countess Kathleen and Various Legends and Lyrics. The poem is called ‘The Sorrow of Love’.

This poet has absorbed the music of Rossetti and Swinburne, late nineteenth-century English poets who shied away from the gregariousness of Tennyson and Browning, preferring an incantatory utterance distilled from the larger discursive pool of the dramatic monologue. This poet is also aware of contemporary French poetry, of Mallarmé’s call for a poetry of suggestion, of Verlaine’s desire to wring the neck of rhetoric.

“I have done more log rolling and attending to other people's affairs, Joyce, Lewis, Gaudier, etc. (don't regret it),” wrote Pound to Margaret Anderson, the editor of the Little Review in 1921. “But I am in my own small way, a writer myself” (EPLR, 266).

This is not a tone one often hears from the mastermind of the Great English Vortex, who thought of himself as an inventor, an instigator, an artist who caused the careers of other artists to flourish because he himself was flourishing. But by the time his London years were drawing to a close (he would move to Paris at the end of 1920), Pound was deeply worried that he was known not primarily as an artist but as a patron, a facilitator, an influencer. Although he had offered crucial aesthetic and economic support to T. S. Eliot, Ford Madox Ford, H. D., Robert Frost, James Joyce, Wyndham Lewis, Marianne Moore, William Carlos Williams, and W. B. Yeats, his early Cantos were languishing.

“I am wracked by the seven jealousies,” wrote Pound to Eliot after they had worked together on the manuscript of The Waste Land, “and cogitating an excuse for always exuding my deformative secretions in my own stuff, and never getting an outline” (SL, 169). Eliot took pains to honor Pound’s crucial contribution to The Waste Land, not only dedicating the poem to him but with the phrase “il miglior fabbro” (the phrase Dante used to describe the Provenc¸al poet Arnaut Daniel) associating Pound with an artist whom Pound himself considered one of the greatest inventors in Western literature. Privately, however, Eliot was worried. “He is becoming forgotten,” he wrote of Pound to a mutual friend. “I am worried as to what is to become of him.”

Back in the twentieth century, when such distinctions seemed to matter, readers often paired Wallace Stevens with other poets in order to highlight their differences. Hugh Kenner summed up Stevens' relationship with William Carlos Williams as “one of the most extraordinary misunderstandings in literary history.” Marjorie Perloff asked the question “Pound/ Stevens: Whose Era?” Many people delighted in repeating this anecdote about Stevens and Robert Frost: “The trouble with you is you write about things,” Stevens said to Frost. “The trouble with you is you write about bric-a-brac,” Frost retorted.

Why the need to make Stevens stand apart? Stevens and Williams first met in New York in 1915, became close friends for the next decade and, despite the pressure of diverging careers, remained supportive of each other's work until the end of their lives. Stevens and Frost were not close friends, but both poets attended Harvard in the late years of the nineteenth century, absorbing there the pragmatist philosophy of William James. Marianne Moore, friend of both Williams and Ezra Pound, admired Stevens' poetry from its beginnings; by the time they finally met face to face in 1943, each poet had written crucial accounts of the other's career. Elizabeth Bishop, Randall Jarrell, James Merrill, John Ashbery - major figures from each subsequent generation of American poets - have been shaped by Stevens' seriously playful sensibility.

Not long ago, modern poetry - Yeats, Pound, Eliot, Stevens - seemed to occupy an enormous territory on the literary-historical map. But as the twentieth century comes to an end, the Modernism that once loomed so large now seems startlingly diminished. Beginning in the late 1950s, critics began to see through the smoke screen of New Critical antiromanticism, uncovering the important affiliations between romantic, Victorian, and modern poetics. Today, in the wake of pioneering work by Frank Kermode, Robert Langbaum, and especially Harold Bloom, Eliot not only seems indebted to Tennyson; his Modernism makes most sense when we understand it as part of a continuum beginning with the publication of the Lyrical Ballads.

And if the historical integrity of Modernism has been encroached on by romanticism, an increasingly powerful postmodernism has exerted equal pressure from the opposite side. Certain modern poets - for Marjorie Perloff, Pound but not Stevens - are claimed as proto-postmodernists, leaving the impression that the remaining Modernists are a hapless, ineffectual lot.

“The borrowed jewels he has set in its head do not make Mr. Eliot's toad the more prepossessing”: so wrote an early reviewer of The Waste Land, affronted by the bold allusions from which Eliot's poetry was built. Those allusions, reinforced by Eliot's own notes to The Waste Land, have never ceased to affront; even today they account for Eliot's still formidable reputation as a “difficult” poet, and several generations of sourcehunting critics have reinforced that impression. Eliot sometimes played this game himself (“Immature poets imitate,” he quipped early in his career, “mature poets steal” [SE [1950], p. 182]), but other times he was dismayed that readers found the surface difficulties of his poems prohibiting. And while it's true that knowledge of Eliot's models and sources does enrich a reading of his poetry, it is ultimately more important to understand the nature of Eliot's allusive practice - to ask not only what is the source? but why does Eliot allude? and how do we experience the allusion?