The charge of obscurity has been raised at regular or irregular intervals since the stone age, though there is no living man who is not surprised on first learning that Keats was considered “obscure.” It takes a very elaborate reconstruction of England in Keats’ time to erect even a shaky hypothesis regarding the probable fixations and ossifications of the then hired bureaucracy of Albemarle St., London West.

—Ezra Pound, in the Preface to George Oppen’s “Discrete Series.”