In the following essay, Wagner discusses the influence of Ezra Pound's Imagist aesthetics on the early works of Ernest Hemingway, in particular his novel The Sun Also Rises (1926).

SOURCE: "The Sun Also Rises: One Debt to Imagism," in The Journal of Narrative Technique, Vol. 2, No. 2, May, 1972, pp. 88-98.

Ernest Hemingway's appreciation for Ezra Pound is widely known—his constant praise for Pound during a life marred by broken friendships and bitter words; his 1956 check for $1000, sent to Pound seemingly in lieu of the Nobel Prize medal. Yet Hemingway's fiction is rarely read as having benefited from his intense relationship with the older writer in the early 1920's. We know the legends of the young Hemingway in Paris, apprentice to Stein, Joyce, and Pound, but we have never known what happened to Hemingway's early work. John Peale Bishop remembers, however, that the early manuscripts went to Pound and "came...