William Butler Yeats and Ezra Pound

Extract

[...] Both Pound and Yeats felt that Joyce was a good friend. He was strongly against authorities controlling avenues of public taste,” like Yeats, and like Pound, he opposed the economic and social systems of that time that “forced the artist into silence.” In a letter Pound wrote to Joyce, he said that it was Yeats' personal opinion that Pound and Joyce would get along well as they had hate or two in common” (Longenbach 44). That same year, Ezra Pound married Dorothy Shakespear, the daughter of Yeats' friend Olivia Shakespear. [...]

[...] Her letters reminded Yeats and Pound how quickly the soldiers' lives could come to an end. Military orders came from the regiment for lights to be shut off after five o'clock in the evening. One night, against these regulations, Yeats and Pound went outside at midnight and started fencing, but to their disappointment, no authorities came to stop them. Later, the regiment came over the hill to Stone Cottage and drank the poets' cider. whole battle of artillery deployed for our benefit,” the poets said. [...]

[...] Yeats died at the Hôtel Idéal Séjour, in Menton, France on January Ezra Pound went on to proclaim his pro-Axis beliefs on the air during a radio broadcast in 1945. He was arrested and sent to a military prison outside Pisa. After being incarcerated for treason in what Pound called death the poet had a mental breakdown. Pound was transferred to a better facility where he was allowed to write. This was where he published his Pisan Cantos and kept in touch with his wife. [...]