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

Although W. B. Yeats's participation in seances and spirit manipulation is well known, critics tend to dismiss this as peripheral to his writing. Not so, according to Surette, an English professor at the University of Western Ontario, who views Yeats's poetry as steeped in the occult. A radical revision of the standard interpretation of literary modernism, this scholarly, intricate study argues that Ezra Pound was as thoroughly imbued with the occult as Yeats was. Pound's mentors included Yeats and A. R. Orage, a London occultist and Nietzschean from whom Pound imbibed Madam Helena Blavatsky's theosophical wisdom. In Surette's reading, Pound's Cantos articulate a theosophical vision of history. Surette is less successful in fitting T. S. Eliot into his overarching thesis that modernism has roots in the occult. He detects pagan, gnostic and Hindu sources in Eliot's The Waste Land , which he reads as an anguished exploration of religious doubt. (Apr.)