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


    Arrington, Lauren (2018) The blindness of hindsight: Irish and British poets look back on early fascist Italy. Irish Political Studies, 33 (2). pp. 246-258. ISSN 0790-7184

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    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
    Keywords: Autobiography; modernism; Richard Aldington; Thomas MacGreevy; Ezra Pound; W. B. Yeats; Italian fascism; Nancy Cunard; life writing;
    Academic Unit: Faculty of Arts,Celtic Studies and Philosophy > School of English, Media & Theatre Studies > English
    Item ID: 12901
    Identification Number: 10.1080/07907184.2018.1454667
    Depositing User: Lauren Arrington
    Date Deposited: 18 May 2020 11:39
    Journal or Publication Title: Irish Political Studies
    Publisher: Taylor & Francis (Routledge)
    Refereed: Yes
    Related URLs:
    URI: https://mu.eprints-hosting.org/id/eprint/12901
    Use Licence: This item is available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial Share Alike Licence (CC BY-NC-SA). Details of this licence are available here

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