In both of these books there was evident Pound’s erudition—a familiarity with mediæval literature, Provençal singers, Troubadour ballads—that, later on, was to degenerate into pedantry and become hard and dry. Too often in his later work, Pound seems to be more the archaeologist than the artist, digging with little energy and less enthusiasm. _Canzoni_ (1911) and _Ripostes_ (1912) both contain much that is sharp and living; they also contain the germs of desiccation and decay. Pound began to scatter his talents; to start movements which he quickly discarded for new ones; to spend himself in poetic propaganda for the Imagists and others (see Preface); to give more and more time to translation (_The Sonnets of Guido Cavalcanti_ appeared in 1912) and arrangements from the Chinese (_Cathay_, paraphrased from the notes of Ernest Fenollosa, was issued in 1915); to lay the chief stress on _technique_, shades of color, verbal _nuances_. The result was a lassitude of the creative faculties, an impoverishment of emotion. In the later books, Pound begins to suffer from a decadence which appraises the values in life chiefly as æsthetic values. And this decadence expresses itself in a weariness, a sterility of the imagination. Real feeling becomes rarer in his work and the poet descends to flashy trivialities, vagaries of assertion or sheer _bravado_ of expression—wasting much of his gift in a mere tilting at convention. But though this is true of a great quantity of his recent work, though he often seems a living anachronism, drawing life not from life itself but only from books, many of the poems in _Lustra_ (1917) yield a hard brightness. The influence of Browning and the pre-Raphaelites is less pronounced and reflections of his earlier energy stand out with a peculiar brilliance. Too special to achieve permanence, too intellectual to become popular, Pound’s contribution to his age should not be underestimated. He was a pioneer in the new forms; he fought dullness wherever he encountered it; under his leadership the Imagists became not only a group but a protest; he helped to make many of the paths which a score of unconsciously influenced poets tread with such ease and nonchalance. Much of his poetry gesticulates instead of speaking, a great portion of his art is poetry in pantomime. And yet, without Pound, American poetry would scarcely have been the many-voiced, multi-colored thing that it is. A GIRL The tree has entered my hands, The sap has ascended my arms, The tree has grown in my breast Downward, The branches grow out of me, like arms. Tree you are, Moss you are, You are violets with wind above them. A child—so high—you are; And all this is folly to the world.