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Cover image for book The Birth of Modernism

The Birth of Modernism

Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, W.B. Yeats, and the Occult
By:Leon Surette
Publisher:ACP - McGill Queen's University Press
Print ISBN:9780773512436
eText ISBN:9780773563773
Edition:0
Format:Page Fidelity

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While W.B. Yeats' occultism has long been acknowledged, Surette is the first to show that Ezra Pound's early intimacy with Yeats was based largely on a shared interest in the occult, and that Pound's The Cantos is a deeply occult work. Surette argues that Pound's editing of T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land was not motivated primarily by stylistic concerns, as has generally been contended by the New Critics, but by thematic considerations. In fact, it was precisely because Eliot knew Pound to be well informed about the occult that he asked for Pound's assistance with The Waste Land.