The Birth of Modernism: Ezra Pound, TS Eliot, WB Yeats, and the Occult

Dennis Denisoff teaches English at McGill University and is the author
of Dog Years.

The influence of mysticism and forms of spirituality on various
modernists has been acknowledged before. What is unique about the book
under review is that the author, rather than focus on the familiar line
of influence from decadence and symbolism, looks much further back for
the origins of the influence on Ezra Pound and, to a lesser degree, on
T.S. Eliot and W.B. Yeats. In order to accommodate this broader temporal
and thematic spectrum, Surette also adopts a definition of the occult
that is more general than one might expect to find. For Surette, the
occult refers to a tradition of concealed wisdom strongly connected to
Madame Blavatsky and theosophy. This book examines the influence of this
particular notion of the occult on three canonical poets.

The author’s research into the history of the occult is thorough and
well organized. His analysis of Pound’s writing, which takes up the
major portion of the book, is also meticulous and well argued. However,
to imply as he does that the occult is the central issue in the Cantos
is to overstate the case. Surette’s analysis of Eliot’s relation to
the occult (discussion is limited to The Wasteland) is less rigorous
than his treatment of Pound, and certain crucial segments of his
argument (e.g., the reasons behind Pound’s editing choices with regard
to Eliot’s work) are purely speculative. The section on Yeats is
cursory, possibly because so much material on Yeats’s relation to
mysticism has already been published. While Surette makes the influence
of the occult on Yeats and Eliot (and modernism in general) seem greater
than his own evidence would suggest, his book does offer useful
information on the influence of the occult on Pound.