Singing School

This chapter recovers conversations in Rapallo about the ballad form and how it could be “made new.” It looks closely at the Rapallo poets’ ideas about Robert Burns as a “national poet” and as an important innovator of the ballad form. The chapter considers the political and literary implications of the ballad for the Rapallo poets, looking at the “democratic” ballads of Basil Bunting’s early poems and at the politically complex broadside ballads that W.B. Yeats produced for Cuala Press. The chapter also examines Burns’s emphasis on poetry as a celebration of life, which appealed to the poets of Rapallo in their mobilization against the growing threat of literary censorship in Ireland.

Making Living History

This chapter focuses on the reading and reception of Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West among the Rapallo poets. It shows how Spengler’s ideas resonated in W.B. and George Yeats’s A Vision, and—less obviously—in Dorothy Pound’s ideas about the capacity of aesthetic form to manifest a metaphysical idea. The chapter looks at Yeats’s essays for Dublin Magazine about the roles of state-sponsored institutions and Dorothy Pound’s attention to fascist architecture in her letters and drawings, showing how their work was responding to the large-scale cultural projects of the regime.

Primavera 1928

This chapter begins by examining the periodical culture of the Rapallo poets: Ezra Pound’s magazine The Exile and the literary supplement to Il Mare. It considers the machismo that Pound cultivated in these magazines and how his ideas about masculinity relate to the masculine public sphere encouraged by the fascist state. It looks closely at Bunting’s contributions to Il Mare’s literary supplement. The chapter concludes by addressing the anthologies that Pound produced and the collaboration of Bunting and Zukofsky on the post-Rapallo Workers Anthology, considering the pedagogical aims of these projects and their political implications.

Accounting for Rapallo

The outbreak and aftermath of the Second World War meant that Ezra Pound’s political allegiances became undeniable, and writers who had been in Rapallo felt compelled to account for their proximity to Pound and their presence in Italy during Mussolini’s regime. This chapter interrogates the way that the poets of Rapallo represented Pound and Rapallo’s importance to their development, and it challenges critics’ convenient acceptance of these narratives. This chapter places particular importance on the lives of George Yeats, Dorothy Pound, and Brigit Patmore, challenging Virginia Woolf’s idea of the “totalitarian man” by showing the multifarious political alignments of Rapallo’s women.

The Roads to Rapallo

This chapter charts the arrivals of the poets to Rapallo, beginning with Pound and Yeats, and extending to Richard Aldington, Thomas MacGreevy, Basil Bunting, and Louis Zukofsky. It surveys the complex history of Pound and Yeats’s relationship, their individual motivations for going to Italy, and their ideas about Mussolini’s promise as a political and cultural leader.

Shell-Shocked Walt Whitmans

Chapter 2 begins with a dinner party at which W.B. and George Yeats, Richard Aldington, and Brigit Patmore were present. Closely reading Aldington’s poetry as well as his novel, Death of a Hero (much of which was written in Rapallo), this chapter considers Yeats’s attitude to the postwar poets whom he derided as “shell-shocked Walt Whitmans.” The chapter also looks at connections between Aldington’s poem The Eaten Heart and Pound’s The Spirit of Romance, and their surprising relationship to W.B. Yeats’s poem “Parnell’s Funeral.” The chapter concludes with Yeats’s address of “war poetry” in The Oxford Book of Modern Verse and his inclusion there of another of Rapallo’s visitors: Siegfried Sassoon.