In the following essay, Duffey traces the development of Pound's Imagist aesthetics through an examination of his early critical writings.

SOURCE: "Ezra Pound and the Attainment of Imagism," in Toward a New American Literary History: Essays in Honor of Arlin Turner, edited by Louis J. Budd, Edwin H. Cady, and Carl L. Anderson, Duke University Press, 1980, pp. 181-94.

There is evidence that when Ezra Pound arrived in London in the fall of 1908 he was ready to inaugurate a poetic career. During the three months or so in Venice which had intervened between his discharge from the faculty of Wabash College and his appearance in the English capital, he had employed a Venetian printer to put together the seventy-two-page volume, A Lume Spento (he translated the phrase, "With Torches Quenched"), which would be his first book of poems. He promptly dispatched some forty copies to his father in Philadelphia...