The Poets of Rapallo

A new story about the relationships between major twentieth-century English-language poets.

Why did poets from the United States, Britain, and Ireland gather in a small town in Italy during the early years of Mussolini's regime? These writers were--or became--some of the most famous poets of the twentieth century. What brought them together, and what did they hope to achieve?

The Poets of Rapallo is about the conversations, collaborations, and disagreements among Ezra and Dorothy Pound, W.B. and George Yeats, Richard Aldington and Brigit Patmore, Thomas MacGreevy, Louis Zukofsky, and Basil Bunting. Drawing on their correspondence, diaries, drafts of poems, sketches, and
photographs, this book shows how the backdrop of the Italian fascist regime is essential to their writing about their home countries and their ideas about modern art and poetry. It also explores their interconnectedness as poets and shows how these connections were erased as their work was polished
for publication.

Focusing on the years between 1928 and 1935, when Pound and Yeats hosted an array of visiting writers, this book shows how the literary culture of Rapallo forged the lifelong friendships of Richard Aldington and Thomas MacGreevy--both veterans of the First World War--and of Louis Zukofsky and Basil
Bunting, who imagined a new kind of "democratic" poetry for the twentieth century. In the wake of the Second World War, these four poets all downplayed their relationship to Ezra Pound and avoided discussing how important Rapallo was to their development as poets. But how did these "democratic"
poets respond to the fascist context in which they worked during their time in Rapallo? The Poets of Rapallo discusses their collaboration with Pound, their awareness of the rising tide of fascism, and even--in some cases--their complicity in the activities of the fascist regime.

The Poets of Rapallo charts the new direction for modernist writing that these writers imagined, and in the process, it exposes the dark underbelly of some of the most lauded poetry in the English language.


"Lauren Arrington writes a literary history at once super-informed and consistently surprising, even to those who think they know the territory. Ezra Pound's colony-village-retreat-beachhead-Utopia-publishing venture at Rapallo, under Arrington's scholarly scrutiny--and in her welcome, lucid
prose--turns out to be the semi-hidden hinge for modernist journals, for Basil Bunting (who did more work there than Bunting fans suppose), and above all for the later intellectual and artistic developments in the work of W. B. Yeats. Ballads, collaborations, the afterlife of Robert Burns, and--most
of all--the still-contested legacies of Italian fascism shape Arrington's persuasive introductions and discussions, while contested or underappreciated artists and writers--Aldington, Stokes, and especially Dorothy (Shakespeare) Pound--receive their moments in the Italian sun. This is a book to
recommend." -- Stephanie Burt, Professor of English at Harvard University

"This is essential reading on Ezra Pound and W. B. Yeats. It is also indispensable in its balanced approach to the wider coterie drawn to Pound in Rapallo, including Richard Aldington and the younger poets Zukofsky and Bunting. Of particular value is the book's focus on the women of the
group--Dorothy Pound and George Yeats, among others, are given their due as individuals--as culpable as the men in their engagement with fascist aesthetics. Arrington deftly balances lively biography with an astute contribution to debates on Late Modernism. This book presents its impressive and
extensive research in a clear and scrupulous manner, offering valuable arguments and opening doors to an objective and fuller understanding of fascism and modern art. The result is often discomforting, at times devastating, and always enormously readable." -- Alan Gillis, The University of
Edinburgh