Any conventional list of the great modernist poets would begin with Eliot and Pound, Rilke, Valery, and Rirnbaud. These were not the only important poets of their era, possibly not even the greatest. One thinks of such others as Stevens, Frost, Montale, and Yeats. But the ones designated as modernist are credited with changing our whole mode of feeling, the voice and vocation of poetry itself. It is therefore sur- prising to recall that in 1926 two by no means negligible poets and com- mentators...