ABSTRACT
A summary statement of mission was made by Wallace Stevens in 1946, just after the Second World War, when he called for "the highest poetry", at a time in modern history "that challenges the poet as the appreciatory creator of values and beliefs". For poets of the order of Stevens, Eliot, Pound, and Williams the chief threat was the loss of confidence in their own vocation, constantly subject to its negative dialectic in modern reductionist or scientistic thinking and the pressures of quotidian reality. Culture became a totem word for a system of values, an attitude and way of life in the earliest youth of Eliot and Pound, and it also became a theme of conflict, a "clash of civilizations". The keynote of cultural exile marks the background in the lives and works of the Americans Eliot and Pound, and certainly both were American poets in a deeper sense than mere nativity.
