'For the best part of a thousand years English poets have gone to school to the French, ' declared Ezra Pound in 1913. Whatever the truth of this assertion for all of English literature its accuracy for Pound's own period is well established. Both he and T. S. Eliot wrote frankly of the debt which they owed to their French predecessors and this fact has long been recognised by students of English literature. With the recognition of this influence went the assumption that Eliot and Pound were themselves responsible for its transmission from France to England. That this was not so is...