 Good afternoon. This feels like a very cozy group here of friends and a few newcomers here this afternoon as well. My name is Christian Dupont and I'm the Burns Librarian and Associate University Librarian for a special collections here at Boston College. We're joined actually by our University Librarian, Tom Wall, and another of my colleagues, Kimberly Cole, who is the Associate Director for our Digital Services Initiatives. And this has been a big day for us actually in the library. Maybe that's where a few of our regulars came to a luncheon that we had, actually with members of the Burns family who have been benefactors in so many ways of our library. And we were celebrating an acquisition related to our Jesuitica collections for that event here. It was just tremendous. In fact, we just finished getting the tables turned and everything for our reception downstairs about 15 minutes ago, so it's been a great thing. So this is a series, for those of you who are a bit newer, in terms of having an endowed lectureship in Irish studies, the Burns visiting scholar. In a few minutes, we'll get a fuller introduction of our scholar tonight, Laura Narrington. But just to say that this has been a really enriching program. It's brought many scholars from Ireland here to Boston College and from there, many of them are going to spring board across the United States. And in principle, this is a really dynamic exchange. And it's really enriching for our students who are an audience here tonight to also have the benefits that I was studying with our Burns scholars and classes they present. So again, with that, I'll introduce Professor James H. Murphy, who is the director for our Center for Irish Programs. And we'll take it from here. So thanks, James. Thank you very much, Christian. Well, I think we'll have a treat in store for us this evening, as we welcome Lauren Arrington, who has been our Burns scholar this semester. Lauren comes to us from working in Britain. And Irish Studies is blessed in Britain with some very key institutions and chairs. There's the what's not called the Foster Chair of Irish History in Oxford. And the Institute for Irish Studies at the University of Liverpool is a very flourishing and dynamic and prestigious place. And it's founded by Marianne Elias, and it has wonderful faculty, not the least of whom is of herself who has been there for a number of years, but has produced a huge range of scholarship during that time. She's talked in a number of places before her doctorate is from Oxford. And she's thus far produced two to the monographs. One is entitled Revolutionary Lives, Constance and Kazemir Markiewicz, published in 2016. And then a few years before in 2010, WV8, the Amidtheater, Censorship and the Irish State adding the heap and stilett, hence. And in addition to that sort of primary scholarly work, she also is an important editor, and she's indeed the founding general editor of the International Eats Journal. Currently, she is working on WV8 as a repound for the late modernism, and I think we're going to hear of that this evening. We were delighted that she agreed to organise a conference recently on modernism and ex-patriotism, which turned out to be an absolutely tremendous success. It was Irish elements, but broader elements, comparative elements as well. And the standard of the papers from the speakers that Lauren drew to us was just extraordinary, and we hope that perhaps a publication may result from that, which will, as it were, carry forward the fruits of that conference. And this evening, without further ado, I'd like to hand you over to her, and she's speaking to us on the topic of shell-shocked Walt Whitman's WV8s and the war clothes that were patted, so we look forward very much to your words, Lauren. Thank you very much. Thank you, James, and the Centre for Irish Programs. And thank you, Christian, and also Kathy Williams for your support during this fellowship. I can say with full commitment that the book that I'm writing would not be possible without the research that I'm able to do this semester. So thank you. I'm writing a book, as James said, called Rappello, WV8s as repound in late modernism in Mussonini's Italy. And what I'm doing in this book is looking at the way a variety of figures, centred on Yates and Pound, come in and out of this little tiny town that's about 20 miles east of Genoa, and in the late 1920s and early 1930s. And I'm thinking about the processes of literary exchange and also the way that political pressure from the Italian regime and also, in the case of Yates, political change in Ireland are combining to affect a change on their style, late modernist poetics. The image that you see here is taken from a pamphlet that's advertising a concert series that Ezra Pound and Olga Rudge organized in 1934 to 1935. You can see Yates's fantastic, fantastically progressive, kind of art deco image, and this is an example of the way that Italian fascism's trying to market itself. It's kind of an international phenomenon to make even provincial towns like Rappello a site for international tourism and therefore to disseminate fascist ideas. So this is from 34 to 35. Tonight I'm going to be talking about some exchanges that occurred a few years earlier, focused principally on Richard Aldington and Thomas McGreevy, who are both veterans of the First World War and who both come to Rappello to see Yates and Pound. So on a particularly cold night in January 1929, WB Yates arrived for a dinner party at a Rappello hotel wearing wool socks pulled up over his glowed cans as a prophylactic against the frigid air. He was aloof for much of the evening, turning to Bridget Patmore and Richard Aldington on one occasion to ask the impossible question, how do you account for Ezra? Our memoir, My Friends When Young, she recounts Yates's response to his own riddle. Here we have in him one of the finest poets of our time, some erudition and a high intelligence and yet he sometimes Yates says with his socks on. So amazingly clumsy, so tactless and does what one might call the most outrageous things. In those little books of poetry by new writers he shows me, he slanted his head back and said firmly, they are just shell-shocked Walt Whitman's. Then down sank the noble head, but we are all just pebbles on the beach in the backwash of a drunken. Across the table, George Yates queried under her bed, Willie talking poppycock. Patmore probably hopes so, since it was at Pound's urging that she and Aldington had gone to Rappello. Pound had reserved rooms for them at a hotel on the left of the bay, probably the Albergue Rappello, and on their arrival immediately took them to tea at the English tennis club, which was funny, Patmore remembered, since we'd come to Italy to be with him away from England, both climate and people. Aldington arrived shortly before WB and George Yates landed for their second season, and Pound advised that after WB had rested for a few days, they would have permission to see him. Somewhat under her thorough breath, Patmore wondered how long Yates would allow Ezra to arrange his life. She was speaking from experience. Her fraught love affair with Richard Aldington was entangled with her history with Ezra Pound. In fact, she had introduced Aldington and Pound over tea in London in 1911. At that time, Patmore was married to the Philandering grandson of Coventry Patmore, himself the author of the long poem, The Angel of the House, about the Victorian ideal marriage. She used the Patmore reputation and the Patmore wealth to establish herself as an important literary hostess, entering the scene through a friendship with Violet Hutt, who was a client in Bridget Hutt's insurance business, and who herself had cultivated a circle of London's avant-garde writers and artists. After Pound left the U.S. for London in 1908, he was engaged with marriage to Hilda Doolittle, whom he'd met while he was a student at the University of Pennsylvania. In London, he fell in love with Dorothy Shakespeare, to whom he pried at the proposed marriage on his return to England in 1911. His proposal to Dorothy was issued fewer than two weeks after HD arrived in London on a European tour. Pound tried to delay the awkward consequences of his double engagement for as long as possible. He introduced HD to Patmore in the hopes of keeping HD at bay, and Patmore, in turn, introduced HD to Aldington. HD first brought Aldington to Italy. Aldington followed her to Genoa in December 1912. She was on holiday with her parents and he trailed along, ostensibly writing a series of articles for the magazine The New Age. Also in Italy, but traveling separately, were Dorothy Shakespeare and George Hyde Lees, who were shot grown by Dorothy's mother, Olivia. Pound was there too, but because he was at that time considered to be an ineligible suitor, a rendezvous with Dorothy never occurred. Instead, he caught up with Aldington, HD, and HD's mother in Florence, and spent a may evening on the canals with HD and Aldington in one gondola, and Mr. Pound and Mrs. Doolittle in another. And HD were married later that year after their unofficial honeymoon in Italy. Over the next decade and a half, his friendship with Patmore persisted while his marriage to HD did not. A baby girl was still born near the beginning of the First World War, an event that HD depicts as concurred with the war in her novels and memoirs, and a string of infidelities followed. By 1928, Patmore had left her husband, published her first novel, This Impassioned Onlooker, and rekindled her relationship with Aldington, accelerating his breakup with Dorothy York. Patmore, though clearly in love with Aldington, expressed reluctance about leaving London. Aldington enlisted Pound in his campaign. He wrote, Help me, Uncle Ez, I'm kind of going crazy over it. Can't you send her a letter and tell her to cut free? And so she did, for one reason or another. A further directive from Pound sent Patmore and Aldington to Rappello on the 9th of January, 1929. Patmore's willingness to endure Yates' offhanded insults over dinner, and her fellow feeling in terms of Pound's domineering desire to coordinate the affairs of others meant that she and Yates struck up a friendship. In turn, Yates inadvertently had a hand and one of the most acerbic critiques to come out of the First World War. Richard Aldington's novel, The Death of a Hero, was a matter of fourth time lucky. Aldington had begun and abandoned the novel on three previous occasions, largely on the advice of D.H. Lawrence, who had told him to destroy what he'd written if he wished to preserve what little reputation he had. Away from Lawrence's overbearing instruction and with the encouragement of Patmore and Frida Lawrence, Aldington began the novel again in Paris in the autumn of 1928. In the new year, he took it with him to Rappello, where he and Patmore worked in the mornings before meeting the Pounds to socialize over coffee or cocktails in the afternoons. By the time they returned to Paris in late February, 1929, Aldington had written about 30,000 words, enough to secure his contract with a publisher. Aldington was keenly aware that the book broke ranks with the genre of the war novel, as well as the conventions of the novel more generally. In his preface addressed to his friend, the playwright, novelist, and war veteran Halcock Glover, he describes the book as not a novel at all, or perhaps a jazz novel. He said, to me, the excuse for the novel is that one can do anything one damn well pleases. In Thomas McGreebe's book, Richard Aldington, an Englishman, he proclaims death of a hero as the book that broke the silence and opened the floodgates for truthful accounts of the travesty of the great war. What marks the hero's difference is its wholesale refusal of the heroic. Aldington's narrator declares, the death of a hero, what mockery, what bloody cant, what sickening, putrid cant. Aldington soldiers are not lionized martyrs or hapless victims of trenchfoot. They're hospitalized for venereal disease as frequently asked for war wounds. His protagonist, George Winterborn, whose story is told through an unnamed narrator, dies soon after dawn on the 4th of November, 1918, at a place called Mais en Lange. But George's death is not heroic. The whole of his company were lying down, waiting for the flying trench mortar squad to deal with the German machine gun. When for some unexplained reason, George stood up and a dozen bullets had gone through him. Silly ass was the colonel's comment. At the funeral that follows, Winterborn's grave is surrounded by a mourning party of Tommy's and NCOs from his company on one side and facing them, the officers of his battalion. The narrator observes, I was on the extreme left of the line. This positioning signals the perspective of the entire novel, most of which is not about the events of the First World War, but about the corrupt society that produced it and will produce the next war and the next. In Talon Winterborn's story, Aldington's narrator blurs the line between the home front and the battle front, demystifying the landscape of the war by transposing it onto London's Sabbath in New Eye. His stroll along Turnstreet on a Sunday is a sally through that dismal communication trench which links the support line of Kensington High Street with the front line of Notting Hillgate. In one of the novel's jazz riffs, the narrator interrupts George's story to muse, we live in trenches with flat revetments of house fronts as parapet emperados. The warfare goes on behind the house fronts, wives with husbands, children with parents, employers with employed, tradesmen with tradesmen, banker with lawyer, and the triumphal doctor rooting out life's casualties. Desperate warfare, for what? Money as the symbol of power, power as the symbol of affirmation of existence, throbbing warfare of many cities. When the war finally arrives for Winterborn, Aldington delivers it with an unrelentingly fast pace that alternates between horror and anxiety. The war is, he repeats, a timeless confusion. Just as the geography of the war extends beyond the battle lines of continental Europe, so do the war's after effects. Winterborn looked unaltered. He behaved in exactly the same way, but in fact, he was a little mad. We talk of shell shock, but who wasn't shell shocked more or less? The change manifests itself in an anxiety complex and in a profound and cynical discouragement, a shrinking horror of the human race. Throughout Death of a Hero, classical learning and scholarship are scorned as grossly irrelevant. In the novel's preface, Aldington takes a clear swipe at hand and mediates too, when he says that he disbelieves in funk and despotism, even in a dictatorship of the intelligentsia. Neither Aldington, Winterborn, nor the unnamed narrator identify any redeeming qualities in contemporary society or in the idea of civilization. Near the end of the hero, shortly before Winterborn's suicide, he stands alone in the white curling mist, drifting slowly past like race of the slain and contemplates the last achievements of civilized men. In the novel's epigraph, civilization comes back, just briefly. Aldington returns to classical tropes in a poem that evokes the sun-drenched terraces where the repeller poets took their leisure. 11 years after the fall of Troy, we, the old men, some of us nearly 40, met and talked on the sunny rampart over our wine while the lizard scuttled in dusty grass in the cricket's church. Throughout his post-war work, Aldington's classical scholarship provided firm footing for feeling and enabled him to write most personally about his experience of the war. In his memoir, Life for Life's Sake, he recalled, just after the war, in the confusion and reaction against everything pre-war and war, there was an almost unanimous belief among artists and writers of the vanguard that all art of the past was so much dead stuff to be scrapped. They were woefully trying to make themselves barbarians. I felt unhappy about this, for my instinct was to do just the opposite. At the long hiatus of the war, I thought we should, for a time, at least steep ourselves in the work of the masters, but nobody would agree with me. Nobody but T.S. Eliot, he argues. Before he concedes, Eliot wasn't the only one. Pound is the unacknowledged other here, consigned to the shadows because of Aldington's unwillingness to admit how much he owed to a proponent of one of the regimes over which the next war would be fought. Instead of owning up to Pound's directive that he impact more go to Rappello, in life for life's sake, Aldington suggests that he went to Italy on the basis of a vague rumor that the weather would be good. It wasn't. Pound and Gates just happened to be in town at the same time. Gates, Aldington remarks sardonicly, when was given to understand, had been drawn into the orbit of the greater genius. Now, on one of Pat Moore's visits to W.B. in George's Rappello apartment, she browsed their bookshelves, and despite Gates's genial protest that she'd never returned it, she borrowed the first volume of Peter Cunningham's edition of Horace Walpole's letters. Walpole, a Whick politician, was the author of the Gothic novel of the Castle of Toronto, which purported to be a translation of 16th century Neapolitan text. The Gates has owned all nine volumes of the letters, and it isn't clear whether in the winter of 1929 it was Walpole's novel with the Italian connection, his constitutional monarchical politics which would appeal increasingly to Gates over the next few years, or the berb of the letter themselves as the principal draw. And in the case, the books were there, the Gates acquiesced to the loan, and Pat Moore found the perfect epigraph for Aldington's hero. See how we trifle, but one can't pass one's use too amusingly, for one must grow old and not in England. Two most serious circumstances, either of which makes people gray in the twinkling of a bedstaff and proof to that. For you know, there is not a country upon Earth where there are so many old fools and so few young ones. Walpole's observation may have spoken to Aldington's sensibility as a writer of the so-called Last Generation. The image of the fool probably also struck a chord, since it evoked the title of Aldington's long poem, A Fool in the Forest, which had been published in 1925, and which Thomas McGregy described in a backhanded compliment as ambitious, rarely a good phrase in the Irish context, and a statement in ideal terms of the theme of post-war disillusionment that was treated more realistically and elaborately in Death of a Hero. Now, even if Willie was talking poppycock at the dinner party, could he have been talking about Aldington's fool? The mock epic takes its title from one of Jacques Lyons' and As You Like It, A Fool, A Fool, A Meta-Fool in the Forest. Shakespeare's Cynical Outsider serves as a reference point for Aldington's poems, Triforcated Self, that I, that Aldington intends to be typical of a man of our time. The unmitigated display of the self is what Yates found so objectionable in Walt Whitman. The problem was not merely the focus on the self, I celebrate myself, I sing myself, but the egotistical looseness of form that came along with it, undisciplined and individualist in the worst sense, cut off from the tradition that sustains the highest art. This is Yates' aesthetic. In Fool, Aldington's severance from tradition is memetic. O break the silver trumpet and the lyre, sully the marble, cut the crisp bronze, fire in a state. While Aldington maintains a tenuous connection to tradition with his references to Homer, Virgil, and indeed, Byron, his form is chaotic, justified perhaps by his subtitle, A Momentized Magoria. For example, the Fool's 10th movement is described as the vision of hell, but Aldington pays no homage to the inferno. So if that made you think of hell, it was like a crematorium, or rather, a cadaver factory where every day millions of persons were consumed to smoke out of 10,000 towering chimneys, gush black greasy smoke that whiten to a cloud of blank notes. By the thrones to policemen, victors bearing fascis made of golf clubs, all the angels drove to work in tanks. In the next movement, Aldington's eye clamors back from hell, but the return of the self is not accompanied by the recovery of form. I saw that hell is the consequence of the hellish mind and that anyone who will risk his life can escape from hell. It is useless to announce the hellish mind and no one yet has quite explained it. Moreover, hell is sometimes useful if only to reveal its opposite. If hell disappeared, we might disappear with it. Perhaps hell is the only reality and we are its parasites. These lines are typical of what McGreevy identified as the quality that was to mark Aldington's verse more and more during the years that followed the war. Absolutely direct statement devoid of every kind of poetic trimming. McGreevy says, it was furious voice, verse, at times becoming too personal, at times not personal enough. McGreevy's judgment is a gentler version of T.S. Eliot's admonition in his introduction to the pound selected poems from 1928. One cannot write poetry all the time and when one cannot write poetry, it is better to write what one knows as verse and make it good verse than to write bad verse and persuade oneself that it's poetry. Eliot goes on to say, Whitman was a great prose writer. But Whitman's originality by which Eliot means development within a tradition was spurious and so far as Whitman wrote in a way that asserted that his great prose was a new form of verse. In the same essay, Eliot identifies contemporary free verse as developing from three points of origin. He says, my own type of verse, that of pound and that of the disciples of Whitman. He dismisses Whitman for many of the same reasons that Gates does, writing, I did not read Whitman until much later in life and had to conquer an aversion to his form as well as to much of his mamma in order to do so. He's equally certain it is indeed obvious that pound owes nothing to Whitman. It was probably a version of this essay that T. Stretchmore heard and mentioned in a letter he sent to Yates, Rappello, on the 1st of March, 1929, shortly after Aldington had left town. He said, I heard T.S. Eliot compare Tennyson to Whitman this afternoon. Very cute and quite sound as far as he went, but he evidently doesn't appreciate good Tennyson more than that. Did pound show Yates, Aldington's school? Aldington that survives in the Yates library is a presentation copy of Images, 1910 to 1915, inscribed simply to W.B. Yates from R.A. The title of course proclaims the author's role in the images movement, which he had initiated along with pound, H.D. and F.S. Flint, urging poets to escape the confines of meter and to base their compositions on musical phrasing. This natural rhythm was deemed to be superior to codified metering. Images developed from the symbolism then, which was important to Yates' development, but Images is antithetical to Yates' poetic. So one of the best examples of this is the poem Sailing to Byzantium, which has a close tie to a pillow because Yates publishes Sailing to Byzantium in Pound's magazine, The Exile, in the spring of 1928. There you'll remember the poet anticipates taking his place in the Artifice of Eternity. Once out of nature, I shall never take my bodily form from any natural thing, but such a form as Grecian goldsmith's make of hammered gold and gold anomaly. The regularity of the Iambic pentameter stumbles briefly at the word bodily if you're reading it. One syllable has to be shed in order to keep the meter perfect, and this imitates the casting off physical body with which the poem is concerned, enacting the rejection of the natural. Aldrington's rebellion against lyrical form is only partially related to his involvement with images. During the First World War, questions of poetic form were politicized. Discipline and form was perceived to be reflective of physical and mental discipline. So Rupert Brooks, the soldier, a Shakespearean sonnet in Iambic pentameter, epitomized patriotic verse, while free verse was the territory of either's deserters or potential traders. So breaking form also made breaking rank in wartime Britain. He pound the problem with Whitman, wasn't his free verse, but his static self-obsession. In the spirit of romance from 1910, Pound praised the work of late medievalist poet Francois Ville as superior to the kind of modern poetry epitomized by Whitman. He said, Villean never forgets his fascinating revolting self. If, however, he sings the song of himself, he is, thank God, free from that horrible air of rectitude with which Whitman rejoices in being Whitman. Villean's song is selfish through self-absorption. He does not, as Whitman, pretend to be conferring a philanthropic benefit on the race by recording his own self-complacency. Pound follows this assertion with a parody of Song of Myself in which Whitman's democratizing atom is replaced by the stereotypically American and, in Pound's hands, racist symbol of the watermelon. Lo behold, I eat watermelons. When I eat watermelons, the world eats watermelons through me. When the world eats watermelons, I partake of the world's watermelons, et cetera. Just two decades later, Pound was still sharpening his wit against Whitman. Riding from Rappello in 1928, he queried Luis Kosky's conjugation of frero in porn beginning V, suggesting that Kosky might have meant Parmano Fratello Frate. I forget the portugues of it, or perhaps Whitmanian, like Camarado. Kosky, probably remembering the spirit of romance, replied, ferro, but manian, I'm afraid. But he nevertheless changed ferro, which translates as the informal bro, to frate, brother, when the poem was published in the third issue of the Exile in spring 1928, and that's the same issue in which sailing to Byzantium appears. So, Kosky is eager to appease Pound, and he's apologetic. All things more Pound's equal is unrepentant. He later wrote that Whitman's specimen days in America, which is the collage of diary entries and essays focusing on the Civil War, made an unforgettable impression on him as a university student. And when he later reread the poems in Jumptops, he had a totally different viewpoint. He says, up till then, the killings, the manings, the sufferings, and misery of war had been as unreal and conventional to me as the murders in a detective story. Whitman made me see the reality, and I believe he has the honor of being the only poet of the 19th century to tell the truth about the war. For life's sake, Aldington's memoir, he meditates on his mentality during and after the First World War. The memoir was published in 1941, so in the middle of the Second War, by which time he wrote, the Great War no longer haunts me against my will as it did for years. Certain smell, sounds, and sights are the battering arounds, which suddenly demolished the wall and let the memories escape. Immediately following the armistice, he had slept badly, was subject to meaningless but unpleasant moods of depression, and was in a frenzy of impatience to get out of the arm. He thought his mind had deteriorated since he struggled to concentrate on mental work. It was a state he imagined that was not uncommon with men who'd been in the war a long time. The experience of war and the incomunicability of it was the making of the lifelong friendship between Richard Aldington and Thomas McGreevy, a man whom Aldington describes as 500% Irish and who, as an officer in the British Expeditionary Force in France, was well disposed towards my little efforts at reviving common memories. Although they moved in similar orbits in London and Paris, Aldington and McGreevy had never met. They buried in this to each other again in Rappello in the winter of 1928 to 29. Even so, it was Rappello that finally brought them together. McGreevy visited the AIDS family at Christmas 1928, and he stayed with them in their apartment until the new year when W.B. and George traveled to Rome for a short holiday. McGreevy was eager not to impose, but George assured that she'd arranged daily help, and as long as he was content to eat eggs first around Christmas afternoon, when the helps will be likely to be off duty, he would be most welcome. Much to Yates' disparagement, while McGreevy was visiting Rappello, he made great friends with Isra. Yates grumbled in a letter to Lady Gregory. I thought him, McGreevy, much solider and richer in all his thought. Soon after McGreevy's return to Paris, he reflected on the impact that meeting pound had made. McGreevy wrote to George Yates, I've had lots to think about as a result of my visit to you. It was terribly worthwhile to me and needless to say enjoyable as well. Needless to say I'm upset as a result of it too. I want to be nothing so much as a starving poet and in making all sorts of secret plans with a view to achieving that ambition. There was no one at the moment, only Isra, my latest hair. But if I had done nothing at Rappello, but get hold of your copies of the cantos, it would have been worth the voyage. He concludes, cordial remembrances and respects to the pounds are right to Isra when I've seen his friends. These friends almost certainly were Aldington and Patmore who were due to visit Rappello in a few weeks and who were living in Paris, as was McGreevy. In an essay, Richard Aldington as friend, Thomas McGreevy writes that it was probably 1928 that they met. But 1929 seems to be a more correct dating since his correspondence with Aldington begins with conversations about the sale of Death of a Hero and the progress of Aldington's mix novel, The Colonel's Daughter. In McGreevy and Aldington's recollections, they give different settings for their first encounter. Aldington puts it in a freezing cafe. While McGreevy lends their friendship an even stronger modernist genealogy, citing its beginning in the hospitable surrounds of James Joyce's apartment. McGreevy's probable infelicity is more than a simple matter of establishing literary credentials. It gestures to his sense that Joyce and Aldington were the novelists he aspired to be. Under Aldington's tutelage, he worked on at least one semi-albut autobiographical novel, the drafts of which bear a strong resemblance both Death of a Hero and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. A novel was never published or even finished for that matter, despite no shortage of words. Aldington reported to Pat Moore that McGreevy was doing 3,000 words a day. I keep warning him not to be literary. And yesterday, he casually remarked that he refers to Chateaubriand on the first page. Query, can a professor leave his vomit? The professor could, given the right medium, but fiction wasn't it. McGreevy planned a novel in two parts. The first, dealing with the return of the hero to Ireland and his home after war. And the second, from Dublin up to the Armistice through the Civil War, church domination, and ending with departure. Successively written passages strongly evoke Aldington's hero. For example, there's a compelling preface in which the narrator gives his appraisal of the hero, here Jack Madden, explains Jack's various romantic entanglements in terms nearly identical to Aldington's, and blings Jack's failure on state and social structures that are alienated from the people they intend to serve. He says Ireland broke him in the end as England broke him in the beginning, official Ireland and official England, that is. Seven drafts of what was probably intended to be a different novel, show McGreevy fighting his tendencies as an essayist, philosopher, and poet. Failing to bring the idea of the novel and its affect together in a way that's necessary for good fiction. Where McGreevy excels, this is writing about the war directly, though he can only sustain this for short bursts. Most of the short story, Torrena, which was originally titled Trench Warfare, deals with the soldier as seemingly interminable waiting on the front, and the awful machinations regarding who's going to be detailed to the dreaded trench mortars. The dialogue is stilted, but one scene is exceptionally vivid. The drone went on, steadily overhead. The searchlights paid beautifully through the night, and anti-aircraft guns went off with a swanky, vindictive crack, and occasionally one saw a burst of shrapnel amidst searchlights. The bomb after bomb came crashing down. McGreevy's difficulty constructing a convincing prose narrative of the war seems less the problem of mastering the mechanics than of psychological repression. In order to assimilate into Irish life, especially Catholic Irish society, soldiers had to suppress their service in the British Army. McGreevy's problem wasn't just that he joined up. There was also the problem of his voluntary enlistment, compounded by his feeling that the war was necessary, desirable, and even imaginatively productive. In one fragment of a draft, McGreevy's narrative reflects on his military service, and he says, "'Now you wouldn't, if you could, "'be without those very occasional hours "'of agonized suspense, "'which had come his way "'when one was imaginatively at least good as killed, "'dead, dead, killed.'" His vacillation over the killed, active, and dead, passive registers is unresolved, or perhaps it's lived as an inversion of the vernacular emphatic killed dead, was essential for McGreevy to the idea of knowing, although he writes it was hard to say knowing what. His narrative is certain, however, that being of the generation that one was, one could not afford to be ignorant of its major experiences. In an essay on McGreevy's war writing, Gerald Dobbs observes, it was as if the writing of poetry became in McGreevy's self associated with war, that the two experiences were interdependent. Winter, McGreevy's poem dedicated to Richard Aldington, evokes, yet since the wild swans had cooled, the titular poem was 1919 volume. Here, the swans on the leaden colored water look like hostile ghosts of kings who resent our presence. With those lines, Winter sets up a deliberate contrast with Yeats's autumn scene, where upon the brimming water among the stones are nine and 50 swans. Yeats's poem is a melancholy meditation on the passage of time and posits dead in the penultimate line as an awakening. McGreevy's poem rejects this kind of aestheticizing tendency and asks boldly, are they not right? How should we be, whose hearts are with the dead, come here and not die? The contrast of the two poems brings into relief the difference between Yeats's high modernism in 1919 and McGreevy's late modernist poetics. Moreover, Winter illustrates what Yeats articulated as the problem with war poetry in his introduction to the 1936 Oxford Book of Wanderverse. Yeats compiled a selection for the book near the end of his seasons at Rapello, and as in the case of a vision published in the same year, Pound remains a prevailing concern. Yeats admits that he doesn't know what to think of the cantos and will withhold judgment in the long poem's completion, but he identifies a lack of discipline in Pound's work, which he believed also dominated the work of the war poets. He said, this loss of self-control among uneducated revolutionists is rare, among men of Ezra Pound's culture and erudition. Style in its opposite can alternate, but form must be full, sphere-like, single. For Yeats, total form can't be reactive. It can't have edges that bind it to a temporality. He wrote, if war is necessary, or necessary in our time and place, it's best to forget its suffering as we do the discomfort of a fever, remembering our comfort at midnight when our temperature fell, or as we forget the worst moments of a painful disease. 10 years after the war, certain poets combined the modern vocabulary, the accurate record of the relevant facts learned from Elliot, with the sense of suffering of the war poets. That sense of suffering no longer passive, no longer an obsession of the nerves. Philosophy had made it part of all the mind. In a reminiscence, published a quarter of a century after Yeats' death, McGreeley recalled a knight and Marian Square when George Russell rambled on for a while in praise of Walt Whitman. Yeats remained silent and then suddenly cut in with a regular finality. No Russell, no, he said firmly. Whitman is one of the errors of our youth. Yeats' disparagement of the younger generation of poets as shell-shocked Walt Whitman's anticipates his exclusion of poetry written during the First World War from the Oxford Book of Modern Verse. Aldington, it's important to note, is entirely left out of the Oxford Book despite Yeats and Aldington's close relationship before the First World War. Now Yeats did include in the Oxford Book writers generally thought of as war poets, but the poem said each other's didn't reflect the work for which these poets are best known. So there's one poem by Rupert Brooke, for example, it's called Clouds. And remarkably, four poems by Siegfried Sassoon, who's a substantial presence in the volume, probably owing to Sassoon's visit to Rappello. Sassoon and his lover David Tennant went to see W.B. and George Yeats and Rappello in the autumn of 1929. After the visit, George wrote a gossipy letter to Linux Robinson. Damn all the rich young men prancing around the world beautifully existing remote from a gross world by money, money, and money. Tennant had left a lingering impression. So very tall, incredibly slim, with that pale, delicate, 90-ish complexion. Large, sad, hazy eyes surrounded by the long, dark, upturned eyelashes that so admirably matched blondes and gray hair with a deep wave of color in it from brow to nape of neck. Long and small-boned hands ending in marvellously polished, pointed nails issued from three inches of beige silk cuffs. No turn back, one large individual button, which in their turn emerged from brown suiting. But I didn't care for its taste and scent. He'd just been a week in Paris and had, I'm afraid, been misled by one of those new Parisian perfumes, which disdain association with any flower. Le sang, relive de mon pour troublée, and how it troubled the flat. She wrote more charitably about Sassoon, the same as ever, as nice as always, full of very incoherent conversation and nerves. Just over a year earlier, in July 1928, Sassoon had published The Heart's Journey. But it seems probable that W.B. and George Yates didn't acquire a copy until 1935 in preparation for the Oxford book. On the inside cover, which you see here, Yates made notes on possible poems for inclusion in the Oxford edition, eventually settling on When I'm Alone, Grand River Ghosts, The Power and the Glory, and remarkably on Passing the New Men in Gate, about the memorial to Commonwealth soldiers killed at Yates. Who will remember, passing through this gate, the unheroic dead who fed the guns? Who shall absolve the foulness of their fate, those doomed, conscripted, unvictorious ones? Well, might the dead who struggled in the slime rise into ride, the sepulcher of crime? Yates's avowed distaste for certain poems written in the midst of the Great War did not extend to an emotional response to the war's memorial, written by Sassoon, who had been hospitalized for actual shell shock. Yates's choice of Sassoon seems to be justified in part by the 10 years that separated the end of the war and the poem's composition. But I think there's more to it than that, since the poem's path seems hardly less immediate than poetry written during the war. The structure of the New Men in Gate seems to be the key to understanding Yates's choice. Unveiled in July 1927, the monument mediates between the suffering that Sassoon experienced firsthand and the generalized suffering of war. So the materiality of the gate enables its universality, circumventing the passive suffering that Yates believed was not the thing for poetry. Decades later, Aldington arrived at a similar conclusion in Life for Life's sake. He thought that Death of a Hero, and by implication, other work published in the same period, was full of passion and indignation, feelings he had to work out of my system, purging stuff which had been poisoning me for a decade. He admitted that a novel or a poem could never fully communicate what war was like. During the First World War, he had written to D.H. Lawrence, there are two kinds of men, those who have been to the front and those who haven't. Reflecting on this, he surmises in his memoir, that was true then and after the war also, and there's seen no way at first of bridging the gap. The things I'm sure are looking at people taking those shirts yourself, please. Yeah. In fact, sorry about that. There you come to the mic before I open the mic. Why not? Very good. It's just like, what's that, besides the technical side of the story? Yeah, no, no. The age of women. Women. Yeah. Yates returns to Whitman a lot though. And he's in the Oxford book. He also talks about being a young boy with Whitman in his pocket. And I think he associates, in a way, Whitman of the previous generation and himself as a modern, I'm not a modernist. So he's keen to set up Whitman in opposition to himself. And a lot of it is that relationship to form that I'm talking about, the looseness in Whitman, the eye that never supersedes the eye for Yates. It doesn't have any kind of universalizing quality. It's never able to be something that stands apart and in and of itself. It's always attached to personality, which I can believe was true poetry. It was in the reflection of the personality. Poetry had to be mediated. Reform was a way of doing that, of creating kind of boundary between the self and the thought of art. Okay, Marjorie, everybody does that. So the most important thing to think of was that in the period of the early days, when he's happier about Whitman, when he says about it on his essays, is that when he does something to form the integrated views, so he kind of embraces Whitman moving on by pretending in some way. And then that made him wonder, did you have anything to say about the particular way that the early town seems to embrace Whitman? And so there's that following. Yeah, I think some of Yates' early interest in Whitman, or it's closer affinity with Whitman before the war, is Whitman's status as a national poet? Which is kind of the poet that speaks for people, which is what Yates is trying to establish himself as. And I think once he has that kind of security of esteem, then he can beset up an oppositional relationship. Yeah, just an afterthought about Whitman, and then I have a different question, but I'm always aware of how Whitman is in that, you find Whitman in unexpected places. I mean, there's a lot of Whitman and Eliot, for instance. You know that people don't really talk about that, but it's really there. The listing, it's a kind of anti-Whitmanian with many styles, but my question is about Aldington, and for those of us who are not specialists in British modernism, Aldington is a poet we know for a few images poems in the images' anthology. And I couldn't get a sense from your lecture, as I could about other writers, what you think of Aldington? I mean, should we all be reading Aldington, or is he a footnote? I mean, you know, it was clear with McGreeby where you stood, but I wondered if you could say, just that, should we be reading Aldington, for other reasons than simply historical interest? Yeah, to name my color to the mask, I think Death of a Hero was a great novel, and I teach it, and students really respond to it. And one of the reasons that I think it's a great novel is because while it is a war novel, it's not a war novel. It's about society, and corruption, and greed, and use, and lack of prospects for young people in a modern world, and the way that war is connected to, there's an industry of war, right? And the way that permeates society, creates this permanent war, right? Which is what we're dealing with, and are contemporary. And so I think that Death of a Hero was more than a novel that's important for its time. I wouldn't say that of all of Aldington's writing. The Colonel's daughter, I think, is not fantastic. He doesn't have that kind of gripping voice that Death of a Hero does. And I think part of that is the commercial pressure that Aldington is under towards the end of the 20s. So he manages to get Death of a Hero out just after the crash, and there's a big slump on sales. And there's a lot of correspondence between him and Negrivi about the Colonel's daughter and how Aldington's going to have to write it in order to keep sales up. And the bookseller, Heather H. Smiths, is canceling their orders because people aren't buying books like they were before the crash. And so I think that those material concerns impact on Aldington's productivity after Death of a Hero won the later 30s. But Death of a Hero, I think, really stands as a book that we should all be reading.