Although readers of modern literature have always known about the collaboration of W.B. Yeats and Ezra Pound, the crucial winters these poets spent living together in Stone Cottage in Sussex (1913-1916) have remained a mystery. Working from a large base of previously unpublished material,

James Longenbach presents for the first time the untold story of these three winters. Inside the secret world of Stone Cottage, Pound's Imagist poems were inextricably linked to Yeats's studies in spiritualism and magic, and early drafts of The Cantos reveal that the poem began in response to the

same esoteric texts that shaped Yeats's visionary system. At the same time, Yeats's autobiographies and Noh-style plays took shape with Pound's assistance. Having retreated to Sussex to escape the flurry of wartime London, both poets tracked the progress of the Great War and in response wrote

poems--some unpublished until now--that directly address the poet's political function. More than the story of a literary friendship, Stone Cottage explores the Pound-Yeats connection within the larger context of modern literature and culture, illuminating work that ranks with the greatest

achievements of modernism.

Between 1913 and 1916, W.B.Yeats and Ezra Pound spent three winters together in a cottage in rural Sussex. This volume documents those years and attempts to show how the interaction of the two men was a seminal part of the rise of Anglo-American modernism.

Ezra Pound and W.B. Yeats spent the winters of 1913-16 living together in a Cottage in Sussex. During that period, Yeats, with Pound's help, developed his autobiographies and Noh-style plays. Pound, similarly, under Yeats's influence, experimented with esoteric texts in the development of his own Imagistic theory. Drawing on extensive literary scholarship and previously unpublished work by Pound and Yeats, Longenbach's book breaks new ground in the study of this critical period in the rise of Modernism.