Asian Social Science; Vol. 13, No. 7; 2017 ISSN 1911-2017 E-ISSN 1911-2025 Published by Canadian Center of Science and Education 62 “Sniffing the Trace of Air”: The Creativity of Influence in Ezra Pound’s “The Return” Sumaya M. Alhaj Mohammad 1 1 The Department of English Language and Literature, Zarqa University, Zarqa, Jordan Correspondence: Sumaya M. Alhaj Mohammad, The Department of English Language and Literature, Zarqa University, Zarqa, Jordan 13132 P.O. Box 132222. Tel: 96-27-7871-2193. E-mail: sumaya2003@hotmail.com Received: April 2, 2017 Accepted: April 10, 2017 Online Published: June 23, 2017 doi:10.5539/ass.v13n7p62 URL: https://doi.org/10.5539/ass.v13n7p62 Abstract This study aims at exploring the concept of influence in modernity, based on Ezra Pound's perception of composing modernist poetry. Pound insightfully regards modernist poetry as connected to other previous texts due to the poets’ entangled web of ideas inspired by their readings. The study focuses on Pound’s poem "The Return (1912), which consciously imitates “Medailles d’Argile," (1900); a poem by the French symbolist Henri de Régnier. The study proves that this technique is intentional, as it enriches the poem by returning readers to previous works. It also affirms that Pound's influence is a process of creativity rather than "anxiety" as Harold Bloom suggests. This creativity is realized because Pound alters the impact of the French poem from a symbolist to an imagistic one through the uncanny use of imagery and rhythm, as well as presenting an image that amalgamates the abstract and the concrete, rather than representing an abstract thought. Keywords: Ezra Pound, Imagism, Symbolism, Influence, Henri de Régnier, "The Return" 1. Introduction “Be influenced by as many artists as you can, but have the decency either to acknowledge the debt outright, or to try to conceal it.” Ezra Pound/ A Retrospect (Pound, 1954, p.5). Modernist poetry is replete with examples of overt and covert influence. Techniques such as allusion and intertextuality are omnipresent in modernists' writings, as they portray the influence either by previous or contemporary works. The concept of return, therefore, is an intricate one that is not merely grasped through its denotative meaning; it is rather pregnant with connotations that refer to the zeitgeist of the era of modernism as a whole, since modernism emphasizes re-employing the previous archetypes in new texts. Jeffrey Perl clarifies that while “[t]o some critics, modernism was a massive cultural deconstruction; other scholars have argued that modernism was entirely a creative phenomenon” (Perl, 1984, p. 12). The idea of the return, therefore, can be perceived as a deconstructive process of texts to come up with new ones imbued with influence. Perl also argues that “[f]or the modernists, the process of return was not only a means of understanding history and not only an artistic technique, it was a condition of the psyche and perhaps (the same thing) a world view” [emphasis added] (ibid, p. 14). That is to say that the term has value as it becomes an approach to writing modernist texts. The psychological aspect of the return is investigated profoundly in Harold Bloom’s theory of “the anxiety of influence,” which argues that poets are haunted by the works that they read, and that the sediments of such an influence can be found in their poetry. The last Chapter of Harold Bloom’s The Anxiety: A Theory of Poetry (1973) is titled “Apophrades: Or the Return of the Dead,” which stresses the idea of the psychological influence by previous works on modernist poets. This highlights that the return in modern poetry is a well-grounded basis that characterizes the literature of the era. As a prominent figure who has shaped the major tenets of modernism in English poetry, Ezra Pound calls modernists to “make it new;” a call that encourages writers to renew the past. Remarkably, this call or motto is a translation from an “inscription on an ancient Chinese emperor’s bathtub” (Pratt, 2000, p. 2), which implies that authors are allowed to reveal their influence by others, and to re-contextualize their ideas and phrases. In the manifesto of Imagisme, Pound encourages artists to be inspired by others’ works, whether diachronically or synchronically, i.e. by previous works, or the contemporary works of other cultures. Pound himself is influenced