ABSTRACT
The French Symbolist poets, popularized by F. S. Flint, brought new life to a waning formal poetry, just as realism and its resulting naturalism invigorated the popular novel. It was 1913 when Ezra Pound began coining terms. He chose to publish his first statements about what he called Imagism in the young Chicago journal, Poetry. For the American writer more interested in fiction than in the poem, Pound's principles about Imagism could easily be translated. When Prufrock and Other Observations, Eliot's first collection of poems, was published in 1917, Pound's review was ecstatic. He pointed out that Eliot had come to Modernism "on his own". Following in the patterns established by Robert Browning, Eliot here constructed Prufrock's dramatic monologue. Pound appreciated the quality of surprise that Frost achieved: if not humor, there was often irony. There was sometimes satire; more often there was the hint of anti-intellectualism.
