Wallace Stevens was an American modernist poet, he was a “late bloomer” amongst other poet of the modernism era. Stevens was born and raised in Pennsylvania, he attended the New York Law School, and spent the majority of his life working at an insurance company as an executive. Stevens began his poetry career with one of his most notable works, Harmonium, which was published in 1923. Stevens was also a philosopher of aesthetics which critics believe heavily influenced his unique writing style. He mastered the art of inputting unusual yet extraordinary vocabulary in creating his poems. Though, Stevens is known as a “difficult poet” because his work encompasses extreme thematic and mechanical complexity in his work. Additionally, he is known as a provocative and abstract thinker, and this reputation continued even after his death. After Stevens left his career as a lawyer, he began to tap into his writing. He rose to fame for his most notable work, Collected Poems. Stevens the won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1955, along with the Bollingen Prize and the National Book Award. Before this, Stevens traveled to Casa Marina Hotel located in the Key West, Florida. There his thirst for writing increased and that when he came to publish Ideas of the Order book. He also met Robert Frost during his time in Key West in the year of 1935. Moreover, Stevens admitted other poets such as Carlos Williams, Hart Crane, and Carlos Williams. Stevens’s work explores interactions with reality and what a man can make of reality. An article from The New Yorker states that during the time in which Stevens began to write, he would compose poems on piece of paper as he walked to his office then his secretary would type them. It is rumored that some of these poems were used in “Harmonium”, his first book comprised of 85 poems.

Moreover, Ezra Pound is another poet that advanced the modern movement in English and American literature. He attended Hamilton College in Clinton, New York where he earned his bachelor’s degree in philosophy. Pound studied literature and languages in college and during 1908 Pound moved to Europe, where he wrote and published many successful books of poetry. Pound authored well over seventy books and promoted many other famous poets such as T.S. Eliot, Robert Frost, and Ernest Hemingway. Pound also was a well-established journalist. He held pro-Fascist broadcasts in Italy during World War II and was arrested and jailed until 1958. Much of Pound’s success was gained overseas, he produced three books, “Personae, “Exultations”, and “The Spirit of Romance”. In addition to the books, he also wrote several critiques and reviews for publications agencies such as the Egoist, Poetry, and New Age. Pound also assisted with writing “Imagism”, which created a movement for a new literary direction in poetry. Essentially, Imagism was a push towards a direct course with language, with would shed the sentiment that had practically shaped Romantic and Victorian poetry. Precision and economy was something that was of high valued for Pound and the other advocates of the movement, which included F.S. Flint, William Carlos Williams, Amy Lowell, Richard Aldington, and Hilda Doolittle. With its focus on the “thing” as the “thing,” Imagism reflected the changes happening in other art forms, most notably the Cubists and painting. Pound introduced the world to rising poets such as Robert Frost, D.H. Lawrence, and he also was T.S. Eliot’s editor. In fact, Pound edited Eliot’s “The Waste Land”, which is considered to be on the greatest works created during the modernist era. Ultimately, Pound is considered to most responsible for defining and stimulating a modernist aesthetic in poetry.