The Political Aesthetic of Yeats, Eliot, and Pound

The politics of Yeats, Eliot, and Pound, have long been a source of discomfort and difficulty for literary critics and cultural historians. In The Political Aesthetic of Yeats, Eliot, and Pound, Michael North offers a subtle reading of the issues by linking aesthetic modernism with an attempt, in all these writers, to resolve basic contradictions in modern liberalism. Though Yeats, Eliot, and Pound certainly attempted to resolve in art problems that could not be resolved in actuality, their very attempt resulted in a politicized aesthetic, one that confessed their inability to do so. The book includes accounts of the specific political activities of the three writers, reinterpretations of their critical theories in light of their politics, and rereadings of some of their major works, including The Tower, The Waste Land, and Pisan Cantos.

Preface and acknowledgements; Introduction; Part I. W. B. Yeats: cultural nationalism: 1. The isle of freedom; 2. The success and failure of the Irish revival; 3. Major Gregory’s responsibilities; 4. The leaning tower; 5. Senator and blueshirt; Part II. T. S. Eliot: conservativism; 1. Prufrock, philosophy, and politics; 2. The critic and the crisis of historicism; 3. The Waste Land; 4. Eliot’s conservatism; 5. ‘Little Gidding’; Part III. Ezra Pound: Fascism: 1. Politics and the luminous detail; 2. History, value, and The Cantos; 3. The fascist bargain; 4. The Pisan Cantos; Conclusion; Notes; Index.