Stone Cottage: Pound, Yeats, and Modernism

Stone Cottage: Pound, Yeats, and Modernism by Longenbach, James. hardcover edition. ISBN: 9780195049541.

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 Working from a large base of previously unpublished material, James Longenbach presents for the first time the untold story of these three winters.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, Pounds Imagist poems were inextricably linked to Yeatss 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 Yeatss visionary system. At the same time, Yeatss autobiographies and Noh-style plays took shape with Pounds 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escape the flurry of wartime London, both poets tracked the progress of the Great War and in response wrote poems--some unpublished until now--that directly address the poets political function.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.