Stone Cottage

Readers of modern literature have long known that W.B. Yeats and Ezra Pound worked closely together, yet the three winters they spent in Stone Cottage, Sussex, from 1913 to 1916 have stayed largely unexplored. James Longenbach draws on a large body of material, much of it never published before, to tell this hidden chapter for the first time.

Within that household, Pound's Imagist poetry grew alongside Yeats's investigations into spiritualism and magic. Early drafts of The Cantos show that the poem first took shape in response to the same esoteric writings that informed Yeats's visionary system. Meanwhile, Yeats's autobiographical writing and his plays in the Noh style developed with Pound's help.

Both men had withdrawn to Sussex to get away from the turmoil of wartime London. From there they followed the course of the First World War and wrote poems, some still unpublished, that engage directly with the role of the poet in politics.

The book looks beyond the friendship itself, placing the Pound and Yeats relationship within the wider currents of modern literature and culture. It shows how the work produced at Stone Cottage stands among the most important achievements of modernism.