“Make it new!” he cried, and then to show it’s
That important, promptly quoted
A dozen lines from a dozen noted
Long-dead poets.

Image: Ezra Pound photographed in Kensington, London, October 22, 1913. Photograph by Alvin Langdon Coburn, first published in Coburn’s More Men of Mark (New York: Knopf, 1922). This image is in the public domain in the United States, at least; the original is in the National Portrait Gallery in London.

 

The title of the poem is, of course, in parody of one of Pound’s best known poems, E.P. Ode Pour L’Election de Son Sepulchre, the first section of his long poem Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, which begins with a grand (and wholly accurate) statement of Pound’s ambition: “He strove to resuscitate the dead art / Of poetry…”