Pound/Stevens: Whose Era?

Abstract

Time for you and time for me-it seems that neither Pound nor Stevens could allow for it. We, reading these two great Modernists in the late decades of the twentieth century, tend to ignore such mutual distrust, positing that of course Pound and Stevens are among the four or five great American poets of the century. Literary historians and anthologists continue to give them roughly equal time, thus following the practice established by the New Criticism in the forties and fifties: Randall Jarrell, R. P. Blackmur, Allen Tate, and such of their followers as William Van O'Connor, Babette Deutsch, and Sr. Bernetta Quinn wrote respectfully-if also quite critically-about both poets.3 So, for that matter, did the great counter-critic of this period, Yvor Winters.4 Yet by the late sixties, the very real gap between Pound and Stevens-a gap that perhaps no inclusive definition of Modernism can quite close-had become apparent; the alliance posited by the critics but never by the poets themselves was falling apart. The Pound Era, Hugh Kenner called the first half of our century, dismissing Stevens

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