The occult has been a source of both ideas and images for modern poets from W. B. Yeats to James Merrill. Poets as diverse as Ezra Pound, H.D., Sylvia Plath, Robert Duncan, and Ted Hughes were both fascinated by, and skeptical of, such phenomena as alchemy and astrology, Ouija boards and Tarot cards, Indian mysticism, the kabbalah, and gnosticism. All of these poets, Timothy Materer says, approached the occult with a modernist sophistication and a self-consciousness that are not entirely credulous nor entirely skeptical. Modernist Alchemy takes a close look at the work of twentieth-century...

This volume of letters between the poet Ezra Pound and New York lawyer and collector John Quinn provides a first-hand survey of the arts and literature during a crucial period in modern culture, 1915-1924.