Personæ: The Shorter Poems

If James Joyce T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound are often credited with creating literary modernism it was Pound alone who offered (in Hugh Kenner's words) the synergetic presence) to turn individual experiment into a global movement. In order to best demonstrate the concentration of force economy of means and habit of analysis that in Pound's opinion were the distinguishing features of the new style he painstakingly shaped his body of shorter poems into a definitive collection in 1926. Personae is the name of a collection of Pound's writings in which he adopts many personas or masks to express himself.