During his 12 years in London, Pound had completely transformed himself as a poet. He had arrived a Late Victorian for whom love was a matter of “lute strings,” “crushed lips,” and “Dim tales that blind me.” Within five or six years he was writing a new, adult poetry that spoke calmly of current concerns in common speech. In this drier intellectual air, “as clear as metal,” Pound’s verse took on new qualities of economy, brevity, and clarity as he used concrete details and exact visual images to capture concentrated moments of experience. Pound’s search for laconic precision owed much to his constant reading of past literature, including Anglo-Saxon poetry, Greek and Latin classics, Dante, and such 19th-century French works as Théophile Gautier’s Émaux et camées and Gustave Flaubert’s novel Madame Bovary. Like his friend T.S. Eliot, Pound wanted a modernism that brought back to life the highest standards of the past. Modernism for its own sake, untested against the past, drew anathemas from him. From this struggle there emerged the short, perfectly worded free-verse poems in Lustra. In his poetry Pound was now able to deal efficiently with a whole range of human activities and emotions, without raising his voice. The movement of the words and the images they create are no longer the secondhand borrowings of youth or apprenticeship but seem to belong to the observing intelligence that conjures up the particular work in hand.