The Birth of Modernism: Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, W.B. Yeats, and the Occult.

Publication: The Journal of English and Germanic Philology

Publication Date: 01-JUL-94

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COPYRIGHT 1994 University of Illinois Press

Leon Surette knows he is swimming against prevailing currents. Modernism has been under attack for some time as elitist, politically reactionary, and excessively male. It has also been seen as a momentary congealing of cultural energies that assumed more vital and interesting forms in the aestheticism that preceded it and the postmodernism that followed. Some have even refused to grant the existence of modernism, seeing instead a loose agglomeration of disparate movements (imagism, vorticism, expressionism, futurism, and so on) or a pallid last gasp of something better understood as Romanticism. Refreshingly unashamed of finding value in modernist writers, Surette also acknowledges (as well he should) the value of the term "modernism"; but he also claims that the key to the entire literary movement and to the New Critical principles it promulgated lies in the writings of the occult.

This is essentially a source study run out of control. "Occultism," Surette observes, "needs a hermeneutic that will explain the general ignorance of an occult revelation contained in various well-known texts" (p. 27), and what's true of occultism is true of The Birth of Modernism. Surette has slogged through a great deal of admittedly bad writing by Madame Blavatsky, G. R. S. Mead, Allen Upward (could Joyce have given him a better name?), and Alfred Orage....

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