Matthew Caley on Modernism, the mainstream...

It starts, as most things start, with Ezra Loomis Pound. Pound, the irascible, volcanic centre of the Modernist project, abandoned as many movements as he started, leaving the beginnings of multiple possible paths barely touched on. His own development rapidly ran through the Georgian lyric, neo-Troubadour poetry, ballads, sestinas, Anglo-Saxon voyage poems, Imagism, haiku and Chinese translations - amongst other things - before hitting the ‘major’ works Mauberley and Propertius and of course, the Cantos, sixty years in the making and abandoned, not finished. Yet he is a contemporary -