Lauren Arrington - The Poets of Rapallo: How Mussolinis Italy shaped British, Irish, and U.S. Writers

In the early years of the fascist regime, an unlikely assortment of poets from the United States, England, and Ireland gathered in a small town on the northwest coast of Italy. An array of quasi-friendships brought them together, in the orbit of the one poet who went to Italy for the politics: Ezra Pound, the fiery American who had already lit up London drawing rooms and Parisian cafes. Pound left his mark on literature in English for three reasons: his instigation of two important movements in the early twentieth century, Imagism and Vorticism that were both driven by his commitment to make it new, and his master-work The Cantos, most of which was written in Italy. In Rapallo, Pound hoped to make it new again. From 1928 to 1932, he undertook this work alongside the mature poet and elder Irish statesman, W.B. Yeats, with whom Pound had a long and complex set of poetic and personal relationships.

Pound and Yeatss presence in Rapallo oriented their literary networks from Paris, Dublin, and even New York onto a small town on the Italian Riviera. There, they were joined by two veterans of the First World War, Richard Aldington (an Englishman and associate of Pound and Yeats from London) and Thomas MacGreevy (an Irishman and close friend of George Yeats, married to W.B.). Pound and Yeats also drew to Rapallo an even younger generationthe self-identified Northumbrian poet Basil Bunting, and the cosmopolitan New Yorker Louis Zukofsky, son of immigrant Russian Jews. Bunting and Zukofsky, Aldington and MacGreevy forged friendships that lasted far beyond their time in Rapallo. As they became important twentieth-century poets in their own rights, they confided in one another while they tussled with the problem of how to account for Ezra Pound, andto a lesser degreefor W.B. Yeats, with whom they lived closely in Italy in a period that was marred by the rise of Mussolinis regime.

This book is about the poets relationships with one another, their collaborations as literary artists, and their intersections with Italian fascist politics, especially wider debates in Italy about what might constitute a fascist aesthetics. Most of the writers and artists who feature in this book did not support Mussolinis regime, and none was always in agreement with Ezra Pound. Yet even writers who were later explicitly anti-fascist were willing to overlookor at least to diminishthe severity of what was happening around them in Italy. The importance of some poets complicity in everyday fascist culturesuch as Basil Buntings role in the production of the literary supplement to the local newspaper Il Mareand his involvement in Rapallos concert series that was sponsored by the fascist statehas been elided by a critical focus on Pounds support of Mussolini as exceptional. This perception has been compounded by our tendency to read autobiographies and memoirs written by people in the Rapallo group as credible accounts of the poets proximity (or lack thereof) to Pound. How tempting it is to think that Thomas MacGreevy and Richard Aldington met in James Joyces apartment, or that Louis Zukofksys allegiance to Pound was due to poor self-confidence, or that Basil Buntings poetic style, as he describes his literary genealogy in interviews from the 1970s, developed concurrently tobut not in tandem withPounds poetic.