The blindness of hindsight: Irish and British poets look back on early fascist Italy

Abstract

ABSTRACTIn the interwar period, the small town of Rapallo, Italy, was the year-round home of Ezra and Dorothy Pound and a seasonal retreat for W. B. Yeats and George Yeats. The promise of good company, the hope of good weather, and the potential for poetic collaboration drew to Rapallo a number of poets who were influential in shaping twentieth-century poetry. However, Pound’s virulent fascism and the Pact of Friendship and Alliance between Germany and Italy (1939) meant that writers were loathe to recognise the degree to which Rapallo was instrumental to late modernist networks. For the most part, biographers have followed suit. This essay attends to memoirs written by Nancy Cunard, H. D., Richard Aldington, and Thomas MacGreevy to illustrate post-war aversions to acknowledging the importance of Rapallo and to demonstrate how writers negotiated their relationship to Pound in constructing their own literary biographies in the shadow of the Second World War.