After finishing "Hugh Selwyn Mauberley," Pound stopped writing short poems and focused his literary attention almost exclusively on The Cantos, a series of longer poems that he ultimately finished in the late 1960s. The poems are difficult and at times obscure.

Perhaps a more immediately rewarding Pound book would be his ABC of Reading, a sort of textbook/literary manifesto that Pound first published in 1934.

A movement that was dissimilar to modernism in its formal features but provided many modernist writers with a model of artistic rebellion was the so-called "decadent" movement of the 1890s. One of the best-known decadent writers was the Anglo-Irish poet and playwright Oscar Wilde, whose Importance of Being Earnest (1895) and "Ballad of Reading Gaol" (1898) are hallmarks of the decadent movement.

In France, literary decadence also took hold. Among dozens of other writers, the novelist J...