Humberston Skipwith Cannell established himself as one of the more promising of the early imagists sponsored by Ezra Pound before World War I. But Cannell's life as a poet was one of great promise followed by many disappointments. Although he lived sixty-nine years and his poems began to appear in print when he was twenty-four, his career as a publishing poet lasted only three years. Cannell's literary work did not end when his last published poem appeared in 1917, however, although he disappeared from the literary world for forty years. When he died in 1957, he left behind him other remarkable documents: the submission manuscript of a long dramatic poem (a characteristically "proletarian" work of the 1930s which was entitled "By the Rivers of Babylon"), a number of later poems, and fragments and an outline of an unfinished and untitled religious poem based on the Old Testament story of David...