The blindness of hindsight: Irish and British poets look back on early fascist Italy



Arrington, Lauren ORCID: 0000-0002-0228-7805
(2018) The blindness of hindsight: Irish and British poets look back on early fascist Italy. IRISH POLITICAL STUDIES, 33 (2). pp. 246-258.

[img] Text
Arrington_IPS_template_submission.docx - Author Accepted Manuscript

Download (48kB)

Abstract

In the interwar period, the small town of Rapallo, Italy, was the year-round home of Ezra and Dorothy Pound and a seasonal retreat for W. B. Yeats and George Yeats. The promise of good company, the hope of good weather, and the potential for poetic collaboration drew to Rapallo a number of poets who were influential in shaping twentieth-century poetry. However, Pound’s virulent fascism and the Pact of Friendship and Alliance between Germany and Italy (1939) meant that writers were loathe to recognise the degree to which Rapallo was instrumental to late modernist networks. For the most part, biographers have followed suit. This essay attends to memoirs written by Nancy Cunard, H. D., Richard Aldington, and Thomas MacGreevy to illustrate post-war aversions to acknowledging the importance of Rapallo and to demonstrate how writers negotiated their relationship to Pound in constructing their own literary biographies in the shadow of the Second World War.

Item Type: Article
Uncontrolled Keywords: Autobiography, modernism, Richard Aldington, Thomas MacGreevy, Ezra Pound, W. B. Yeats, Italian fascism, Nancy Cunard, life writing
Depositing User: Symplectic Admin
Date Deposited: 21 Mar 2018 11:18
Last Modified: 19 Jan 2023 06:38
DOI: 10.1080/07907184.2018.1454667
Related URLs:
URI: https://livrepository.liverpool.ac.uk/id/eprint/3019292