Ezra Pound’s exhortation to “make it new” has proved to be one of the most destructive aesthetic formulae ever to come along. Had he had an inkling of what grotesque lengths his successors would resort to in their feverish quest to make it new and ever newer, he might have hesitated, for Pound was no disrespecter of literary traditions.

And while Pound, Eliot, and Joyce certainly set out to revolutionize Western literature, it is doubtful whether they meant to end it. Yet for the better part of a century, the experience of reading the great modernists has had a paralyzing or deleterious effect on younger writers. After Finnegans Wake, what next? In a well-known 1967 essay in The Atlantic, John Barth coined a term which still has resonance: “The Literature of Exhaustion.” Joyce and the other major modernists, he wrote, had given future writers nowhere to go. There seemed no way to make literature more innovative, newer, more “modern.” There seemed no way now to astonish, at least not to the extent that the modern masters had astonished.

As a result we have witnessed a century-long effort by the highbrow and the would-be avant-garde toward a state of permanent revolution. In the hands of second- and third-rate talents, the quest for innovation at any cost has produced results that can be seen as depressing or laughable, depending on your mood. Unfortunately, a few genuinely gifted writers (and artists) have fallen victim to the same delusion.