The Birth of Modernism: Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, W.B. Yeats, and the Occult

333 Pages·1993·18.842 MB·English

by  Leon Surette

The Birth of Modernism
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The Birth
of Modernism
Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot,
W.B. Yeats,
and the Occult
LEON SURETTE
McGill-Queen's University Press
Montreal & Kingston • London • Buffalo
© McGill-Queen's University Press 1993
ISBN 0-7735-0976-3 (cloth)
ISBN 0-7735-1243-8 (paper)
Legal deposit second quarter 1993
Bibliotheque nationale du Quebec
Printed in Canada on acid-free paper
First paperback edition 1994
This book was first published with the help of a grant from the Canadian
Federation for the Humanities, using funds provided by the Social
Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Publication was
also supported in part by the Smallman fund administered by the
Faculty of Arts, The University of Western Ontario.
Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data
Surette, Leon, 1938-
The birth of modernism: Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, W.B. Yeats, and the occult
Includes bibliographical references and an index.
ISBN 0-7735-0976-3 (bound)
ISBN 0-7735-1243-8 (pbk.)
1. Modernism (Literature) - Europe. 2. European literature - 2oth century
- History and criticism. 3. European literature - 19th century - History
and criticism. 4. Pound, Ezra 1885-1972 - Criticism and interpretation.
5. Eliot, T.S. (Thomas Stearns), 1888-1965 - Criticism and interpretation.
6. Yeats, W.B. (William Butler), 1865-1939-Criticism and interpretation.
7. Theosophy in literature. I. Title.
PN56.M54S771993 809'.91 C92-090710-5
Typeset in Palatino 10/12 by Caractera production graphique inc.,
Quebec City
Grateful acknowledgment is given to New Directions Publishing
Corporation and Faber & Faber Ltd for permission to quote from the
following copyrighted works of Ezra Pound: The Cantos (copyright
© 1934,1937/1940,1948,1956,1959,1962,1963,1966, and 1968 by Ezra
Pound); Guide to Kulchur (copyright © 1970 by Ezra Pound); Pavannes and
Divigations (copyright © 1958 by Ezra Pound); Selected Prose 1909-1965
(copyright © 1960,1962 by Ezra Pound, copyright © 1973 by the Estate of
Ezra Pound); The Spirit of Romance (copyright © (1953 by the Trustees of
the Ezra Pound Literary Property Trust; used by permission of New
Directions Publishing Corporation agents).
Grateful acknowledgment is given to Faber and Faber Ltd and Harcourt
Brace Jovanovich for permission to quote from the following material by
T.S. Eliot: Collected Poems 1909-1962, Knowledge and Experience in the
Philosophy of EH. Bradley, Notes Toward the Definition of Culture, Selected
Essays and The Waste Land: A Facsimile and Transcript of the Original Drafts,
ed. Valerie Eliot.
To my father, Rudy Surette,
and the memory of my mother, Agnes Surette
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Contents
Preface ix
Introduction 3
1 Discovering the Past 37
2 The Occult Tradition in The Cantos 96
3 Nietzsche, Wagner, and Myth 157
4 Pound's Editing of The Waste Land 231
Conclusion 280
Bibliography 291
Index 307
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Preface
I wrote The Birth of Modernism during a sabbatical leave I enjoyed in
the academic year of 1989-90. It represents a radical revision of the
standard view of literary modernism. When I wrote A Light from
Eleusis: A Study of the Cantos of Ezra Pound in the mid-1970s, I held
the conventional view that literary modernism belonged to twentieth-
century scientific materialism. On this view, the mythological and
Eleusinian elements of such representative modernist works as The
Waste Land and The Cantos were considered to be factitious formal
and thematic devices. This aestheticization of the apparently mystical
or noumenal content of literary modernism was achieved through
the tactic of Joyce's so-called mythological method. The argument of
The Birth of Modernism is that the ubiquity of myth in modernist
literature must be attributed at least in part to the occult belief that
myths represent a record of contact between mortals and the au dela.
I would probably have persisted in a secular and aesthetic reading
of modernist discourse to this day were it not for a series of phone
calls and letters I received in 1980 from William French of Vienna,
Virginia. French had been a member of Pound's entourage during
his St Elizabeth's years. He was then, and is today, an unashamed
occultist. He phoned me to discover if I, too, was an initiate into
arcane wisdom. He apparently thought that I must have been to have
penetrated the arcanum of The Cantos to the degree I had done in A
Light from Eleusis. When I assured him that I was just a literary
scholar without any knowledge of arcana, he enjoined me to read
H.P. Blavatsky and Annie Besant where all would be made plain.
I have not followed Bill French's advice for a research program, but
his intervention did cause me to re-examine those mythical and
visionary elements of Pound's work that - like everyone else - I had
thought to be factitious and rhetorical. I could hardly do otherwise,
since French pointed out that G.R.S. Mead, whose influence on