As we read through the original verse of Ezra Pound (as distinct from his "translations") from the beginning of his career until the end, that is, from A Lume Spento to the final Cantos, we become convinced that Pound was a poet not for all time but for an age. We must hasten to add, however—what an age! The complexity, depth, and brilliance of the poetry written during the first six or seven decades of this century will rival that of any other period of comparable length in the history of English and American literature. And yet something went wrong. The Experimentalist Movement—of which Pound was the founder and leader—ended in the Cantos, many of which (let's face it) are unreadable, and in the prose of Joyce's Finnegans Wake, which for the most part is also unreadable.

The final failure of the Experimentalist Movement was...