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To get at what Ezra Pound is and was, we have to see him as one of the leaders of a revolution in aesthetic sensibility, his talent geared to it and even created by it. This revolution of the 20's brought into modem English literature the ferment of other cultures, an awareness of its own remote past, and the new effects developed in 19th-century French verse. It seems clear by now that, whatever his greatness, Pound's work falls largely within a derivative category which in almost any other period would have been the province of second-rate personalities. It is only the importance of this category at a particular time that accounts for the phenomenon of a genius developing within it.

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