Explains Pound's early non anti-Semitic beliefs and why his views changed to anti-Semitic.

While W.B. Yeats' occultism has long been acknowledged, Surette is the first to show that Ezra Pound's early intimacy with Yeats was based largely on a shared interest in the occult, and that Pound's The Cantos is a deeply occult work. Surette argues that Pound's editing of T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land was not motivated primarily by stylistic concerns, as has generally been contended by the New Critics, but by thematic considerations. In fact, it was precisely because Eliot knew Pound to be well informed about the occult that he asked for Pound's assistance with The Waste Land.

Leon Surette's new study of T. S. Eliot and Wallace Stevens, "The Modern Dilemma", challenges the received view that Stevens' poetry expresses a Humanist world view, and - more surprisingly - documents Eliot's early Humanist phase when Eliot and his bride shared Bertrand Russell's tiny London flat, and later rented a country house together (1914-17). Eliot's poetry of that time - up to "The Waste Land" is seen to reflect his Humanist phase, closed by his conversion, poetically documented in Ash Wednesday. Where Eliot's poetry is dominated by cultural, religious and philosophical angst,...