“T S Eliot ends [the] idea of poetry for ladies,” James Joyce wrote in one of his notebooks from the early 1920s. Joyce's private assessment of Eliot's poetry is in keeping with the publicly stated aims of many writers of the period. It is, moreover, in agreement with the generally accepted judgment of Anglo-American high modernism as marking the demise of an increasingly enfeebled Victorian and Georgian poetic tradition.

The pronouncements of such influential figures as Ezra Pound, T. E. Hulme, and Wyndham Lewis make clear that one of the chief aims of the modernist movement, as they defined it, was the restoration of virility to poetry. Despite the variety among and the shifts within the views of individual writers, the rhetoric of modernist polemics often endorsed implicitly masculine aesthetic values. Pound praised “hard” poetry, “as much like granite as it could possibly be,” as opposed to “soft” poetry with “mushy technique” and “emotional slither.”