Yeats, Pound, and the Little Review, 1914-1918

Abstract

Yeats made a small but interesting set of contributions to the avant-garde US periodical the Little Review, a journal for which Ezra Pound acted as ‘Foreign Editor’ and an important locus for modernist literature. My essay explores the range of Yeats’s contributions, and Pound’s rationale for being editorially involved. It examines editorial attitudes to the First World War, particularly in 1917, and the version of ‘In Memory of Robert Gregory’ which Yeats placed in the journal. By focusing on such specific moments and small textual details, the essay close reads what Sean Latham has described as “emergence,” “a particular kind of complexity that arises not from the individual elements of a system, but only from their interaction.”