In 1919, when the first version of "Poetry" was published in the journal Others, people were still figuratively—and some literally—shell-shocked from World War I, which ended the preceding year. In literature, poets and novelists experimented with form and subject matter, trying to craft work that embodied the uncertainty, fear, and anxiety that consumed people. T. S. Eliot's poems in his collections Prufrock and Other Observations (1917), Poems (1920), and The Wasteland (1922) accomplished this through use of fragmentation, allusion, irony, myth, and symbolism. Ezra Pound, an important influence on many modernist poets, exhorted poets to "make it new" and claimed the image as the cornerstone of his poetics. In addition to publishing and translating works such as The Sonnets and Ballate of Guido Cavalcanti (1912), Hugh Selwyn Mauberly (1920), and Personae (1926), Pound mentored numerous writers including Eliot, William Carlos Williams, and James Joyce, and supported new...