Many a critic, determined to speak with clarity and certitude upon the dauntingly ambiguous subject of modern poetry in English—or upon modernism in general, for that matter—has found himself invoking the famous words of Virginia Woolf, who, in her 1924 lecture “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown,” claimed to know precisely when the modern era began. “On or about December, 1910,” she declared firmly, “human character changed.” Meaning what? Meaning that sometime around 1910, many men and women of intelligence and culture—traumatized by, among other things, the technological revolution, Darwin’s challenge to conventional notions about the sacredness and significance of the human condition, and Freud’s teachings on consciousness and sexuality—found themselves groping toward a somewhat different understanding of the nature of reality, a new means of responding aesthetically to life. A number of cultural events helped them to find their way. In London alone, for instance, there was the 1910 Post-Impressionist Exhibit (which provided many Englishmen with their first look at the canvases of Picasso, Cézanne, and Matisse) and the 19 n debut of Diaghilev’s Russian ballet; at about this time, too, readers who had been weaned on Meredith and Kipling were able to read Dostoevsky and Freud in their first English translations.

It was in this atmosphere of artistic revolution that modernist poetry was born. The simplest way of describing modernist poetry is to say that, in subject matter, in language, and in form, it sought to conquer territory that poetry had rarely if ever entered. To Pound