My epigraph, from a chapter in The Man without Qualities titled “Cultural Revolution,” has an equivocal tone that would appear to be lacking in Ezra Pound’s exhortation “Make It New.” Of the three terms, new seems concrete and unambiguous. The verb is forceful (action verbs were an idée fixe for Pound). But what is “it”? Squeezed between make and new, those brawny avatars, it would be ludicrous to suppose some veiled reference to aura or star power of the sort that made flapper and film star Clara Bow the “‘It’girl” on the strength of pulp novelist Elinor Glyn’s thesis in It (1927). One would more sensibly take it to be an artwork, given Pound’s avocation. But considering the ubiquity of references to this famous phrase, it’s surprising to realize that Make It New was not published until 1934, when Pound was immersed in politics and economics. In Canto LIII, he commemorated the Chinese emperor Tching Tang [Ch’êng T’ang], founder of the Shang Dynasty in the eighteenth century, who in Pound’s account “wrote MAKE IT NEW/on his bath tub/Day by day make it new.” 2 In this context, the it in question concerns statecraft. Pound’s—or Tching Tang’s—adage has populated countless accounts of modernism, and it may be the most frequently repeated quip of the early twentieth century. It’s succinct, memorable, and relevant. But it’s also slightly anachronistic, for the steady drumbeat of The New preceded Make It New by several decades—during which Pound himself