Stone Cottage: Pound, Yeats, and modernism

Abstract

Between 1913 and 1916 Ezra Pound and W.B.Yeats spent three winters living together in a small cottage at the edge of Ashdown Forest in Sussex. The chronicle of these years is the story of how the interaction between Pound and Yeats was a seminal part of the rise of Anglo-American literary modernism. Together, they established many of the practices and, more importantly, the aristocratic tone that would characterize modernist literature for many years to come. Working from a large base of unpublished material, this study will force us to alter some of the most established aspects of the mythology of literary modernism: in particular, Yeats is shown to have been the prime mover in the effort to it new; in more general terms, the book reveals how the rise of literary modernism became inextricably bound with contemporaneous developments in twentieth century politics. Unpublished letters and poems , for example, make explicit for the first time the two poets' direct reaction to the first World War. Along with such events, the state of literary modernism as a whole is considered, along with authors such as Eliot, Joyce, Blunt, Lowell, Moore and Stevens. Readership: those interested in the history of twentieth-century literature