Context

One of the famous maxims of twentieth-century poetry is Ezra Pound’s directive to “Make it new.” He didn’t mean invent something out of thin air. That middle word, it, is the key, reminding us that something exists already and we need to see it again, for our own time, with our own eyes. For Pound, the “it” was a long history of civilizations, East and West, but also the tiny details of everyday life, a series of faces glimpsed in the Paris Metro, for example. So it can be very helpful to see a poem among other poems, to see what is shared and what has been made new.

-The Norton Anthology of Poetry