Poetry to 1920

Pound's early work consists of rewriting and making new earlier forms of poetic expression. The sestina, Provençal lyric and dramatic monologue are three particular examples of his effort to unite detail and justice, form and ethics. He replaced Swinburne's arabesques with Arnaut Daniel's precision, Pre-Raphaelite elaborations with Imagism's exactness, the “Blaze of color intermingled” with the detail of “Green arsenic smeared on an egg-white cloth” (CEP 261; EPEW 84). Pound writes in color, with definiteness, elaborating a statement by the American photographer Paul Outerbridge (1896–1958) who said “with black and white you can suggest, but with colour you have to be certain, absolutely certain.” In his poetry and criticism, Pound was, without a doubt, certain.

Pound's encounter with the exactness of Chinese poetry at the time he was working out his poetic practice, expressed through Imagism (c. 1912), and then through his re-vision of Chinese poetry in Cathay (1915), reaffirmed his drive toward precision. His editing and publishing Fenollosa's “The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry” (1919) further clarified this poetic which Dante, Arnaut Daniel, the Provençal poets and the Chinese had advanced. His early, lyrical work, with overtones of Romanticism and the Pre-Raphaelites, culminates in the satiric and multi-voiced “Homage to Sextus Propertius” (1919) and Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1920).