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

xi, 320 pp. n The Birth of Modernism, Leon Surrete offers a radical revision of our understanding of high modernism. He develops a portrait of Modernism that demonstrates its continuity with American transcendentalism, French symbolisme, and English aestheticism and documents, for the first time, the origins of modernist aesthetics in the occult. Yeats' occultism has long been acknowledged, but this is the first study to show that Pound's early intimacy with Yeats was based largely on a shared interest in the occult sciences, and that Pound's epic of the modern age, The Cantos, is a deeply occult work.