Although readers of modern literature have always known about the collaboration of W.B. Yeats and Ezra Pound, the crucial winters these poets spent living together in Stone Cottage in Sussex (1913-1916) have remained a mystery. Working from a large base of previously unpublished material, James Longenbach presents for the first time the untold story of these three winters. Inside the secret world of Stone Cottage, Pound's Imagist poems were inextricably linked to Yeats's studies in spiritualism and magic, and early drafts of The Cantos reveal that the poem began in response to the same esoteric texts that shaped Yeats's visionary system. At the same time, Yeats's autobiographies and Noh-style plays took shape with Pound's assistance. Having retreated to Sussex to escape the flurry of wartime London, both poets tracked the progress of the Great War and in response wrote poems--some unpublished until now--that directly address the poet's political function. More than the story
of a literary friendship, Stone Cottage explores the Pound-Yeats connection within the larger context of modern literature and culture, illuminating work that ranks with the greatest achievements of modernism.
Industry Reviews
"Longenbach engages in some fine historiography....Establish[es] him as one of his generation's closest students of poetic modernism, a critic whose patched histories we can look forward to reading with pleasure in the coming years."--Modern Language Quarterly
"An excellent study of early modernist poetry."--Vincent Quinn, Brooklyn College
"Has already revised our sense of modernist literature and will endure to prove one of the seminal texts of the history of modernism."--Paideuma
"Longenbach's account of the relation between Pound and Yeats, during and after the Stone Cottage winters, is far more detailed and intimate than any previous version....Contains much detail of interest...including several hitherto unpublished poems and fragments by Pound and by Yeats."--The New York Review of Books
"Longenbach has gone back to the day-to-day records of Pound and Yeats during what were perhaps the crucial years of modernism--the years when Pound was drafting his first set of Cantos and Yeats was remaking his early style. What he's found is extraordinary: a record of spiritualist interest and experimentation that will force all of us to reconsider our understanding of the Cantos and rethink the rationale of modernism. That along with the
group of unpublished works Longenbach has unearthed and his picture of Pound and Yeats at work (which takes us well beyond Ellmann's Eminent Domain) add up to an unusually valuable piece of work."--Ronald Bush,
California Institute of Technology
"In its judiciousness, humaneness and gracefully borne learning [the book] calls to mind the late Richard Ellmann at the height of his powers. It is at once an imposing piece of research, a fundamental contribution to the study of early modernism, and a deftly told narrative that abounds in pathos, irony, and outright comedy. This book will permanently and radically alter the received wisdom about Pound's relation to Yeats."--Frederick Crews, University
of California, Berkeley
"Literary criticism of the highest order....Longenbach means not only to revalue the roots of modernism but the way in which such evaluations should be made."--Virginia Quarterly Review
"A refreshingly empirical and substantive contribution....His study consolidates between hard covers, and with vastly more information, insights into the Pound-Yeats relationship that have been appearing piecemeal here and there for a decade or so."--The Kenyon Review
"Throws genuine light on the history of modernism....Provid[es] a fascinating account of the creative dialogue and collaboration between the two poets....An elegantly argued revision of modernist history."--Times Literary Supplement
"An excellent contribution to what is already known about a great literary friendship."--Choice
"[A] taut and lucid study."--Library Journal
"A useful specialist monograph, with its deliberately limited focus throwing light back and forward on the development of both writers."--Notes and Queries
"For the first time, the interrelationships that marked the two poets' collaboration are placed in the context of their final contributions to the Modernist movement. Working in large part from previously unpublished material, Longenbach exposes the roots of Pound's later disastrous espousal of Fascist racial theories and, just as interestingly, comments on the flirtations of Yeats and T.S. Eliot with the same sort of ethno-elitism....The author is equally
convincing in his investigations of the effects of Yeats' studies of the occult on Pound's work and of Pound's encouragement of the older poet to move from the fin-de-siècle world of Pater and Wilde into
the 20th-century poetic avant-garde....This [book] proves to be a work of major importance in evaluating the strengths and weaknesses of a pair of Modernism's most controversial (and fascinating) figures."--Kirkus Reviews
