Conclusion: Pound and Criticism

What Eliot said about Pound’s criticism —‘Pound’s literary criticism is the most important contemporary criticism of its kind’ and owes its permanence to his having seen so clearly ‘what needed to be said at a particular time’— has been vindicated by the subsequent history and development of literary criticism. And in so far as, of all modern English and American poets and critics, it is Eliot who, perhaps, owes most to Pound, much of what is permanently vital and relevant about his own criticism bears an indirect testimony to Pound’s influence on modern criticism. Even Leavis, who was by no means sympathetic to Pound’s poetry outside Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, acknowledged Pound’s critical insight that was implicit in the valuable help and encouragement he gave Yeats, Joyce and Eliot. Whatever stimulus Leavis himself may have got from Eliot at least in the earlier stages of his criticism, cannot be separated from the nature and extent of Pound’s impact on Eliot as a critic.