In the following essay, Pratt focuses on the Imagist and ironic qualities of Ezra Pound's works as seminal to defining the Modern Age in English poetry.

SOURCE: "Imagination and Irony: The Shaping of International Style," in The South Atlantic Quarterly, Vol. 83, No. 1, Winter, 1984, pp. 91-102.

"Two basic literary qualities," Charles Baudelaire noted in his journals, "super-realism and irony. An individual way of seeing also a satanic things turn of mind."…¹ The French poets who followed him tranlated these qualities into Symbolism, the first movement in modern poetry, and Ezra Pound made a further translation into Imagism, which was the second movement. Imagism certainly was "an individual way of seeing things," though of course it was a good deal more. In an effort to define the characteristics of the Imagist poem that are basic to Modernism, I once listed what might be called the "Five I's of Modernism":

1. Instantaneity...