20th-Century American Poetry

“Make it new,” the poet and sometime evangelist of the
literary avant garde Ezra Pound insisted, as the 20th
century was under way. “Literature is news that stays
news” was another of his formulations meant to exhort
poets to find their own path, to break ground, to put a
literary tradition in its proper perspective. Eras do not
neatly begin and end on time; the fact of a new centu-
ry, as told by a calendar, does not necessarily change
how people think and feel. Even so, in January 1900
Americans must have felt excitement at the thought of
a new kind of life ahead of them (calendars do lend
meaning, after all). For Pound, as well as for other
artists and intellectuals, it was easy to imagine that
their new century was to be one of great promise. The
object of Pound’s imperatives was poetry, but, whether
he meant it or not, he was also putting a broader
national impulse into words.