Inside Stone Cottage

ELT: Volume 33:2, 1990 350 lines of prose, mostly it would seem '"taking out the Thous.'" However, in March 1912 Yeats makes the last mention of the project until he resurrects it in 1926. The first production was Rex 3 on 7 December 1926. From all accounts (at least Yeats's own) it was a great success. Rex 4 is the result of cutting and pruning, in collaboration with Lady Gregory, January-February 1927, though no one seems to have taken note of the differences in versions. Rex 5 represents further refinements and stands for the printed edition 27 March 1928. (The King Oedipus was published together with Oedipus at Colonus.) It has become a cliché to speak of "definitive" works, especially editions; but in this case it is easy to use that word without fear of exaggeration: it is difficult to imagine what might have been added. Surely new materials about the composition and the versions of the Rex might surface (though I doubt it), but this edition is by every standard of the profession complete—and definitive. Edward Engelberg Brandeis University Inside Stone Cottage James Longenbach. Stone Cottage: Pound, Yeats and Modernism. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. xviii + 329 pp. $21.95 STONE COTTAGE IS THE NAME of the six-room house in a Sussex village at which William Butler Yeats and Ezra Pound lived and worked together during the three successive winters between 1913 and 1916. Yeats, at the time the two met in 1908, possessed a considerable reputation. Pound, a much younger man recently arrived from America, had not only no reputation to speak of, he had not yet done much upon which to establish a reputation. Nonetheless, conventional wisdom has held that the relationship between Pound and Yeats is best characterized by the influence exerted by the younger poet upon the older. James Longenbach, however, utterly undermines this notion by arguing not only that Yeats had already begun to remake himself as a lyric poet before he met Pound, but that it was primarily he who influenced Pound. Longenbach says that his "story is told more from Pound's point of view than Yeats's." It is certainly true that, having read Stone Cottage, one's view of Yeats remains essentially unaltered. It is Pound that the book is chiefly about, and it is about Pound in the sense that one is made aware of the degree to which Yeats's influence 214 Book Reviews both before and after the two actually met formed the young Pound's poetic. In telling that story, Longenbach usefully reminds us of both the continuities between modernism and an earlier generation of poets, as well as the nature of that continuity. Longenbach's book begins with a brief historical survey of the geographical area in which Stone Cottage is located. We are then given some local history, a thumbnail sketch of the family history of Yeats's and Pound's landlord. This beginning, taken with the fact that the book is divided into three sections corresponding to each of the three winters the two poets spent in Sussex, and the inclusion of a selection of photographs, suggests that Stone Cottage is intended to be a biographically oriented account of the two poets during the years in question. Such is not, however, the case. We discover, in fact, very little of the day-to-day lives of Pound and Yeats in the cottage. Nor do the personalities of the poets come to life: Yeats's certainly does not, and insofar as Pound's does, he comes across chiefly as an unpleasant, one-man self-promotion industry. But Yeats's purpose in spending his winters in Sussex was to establish a writing routine. Pound's motives were partly economic, partly literary, and partly promotional. Pound was poor, and to spend several months acting as Yeats's secretary eased that burden. Then, too, Pound was keen to be seen to have an exclusively intimate relationship with Yeats, whether because he wished to learn from the older poet or merely to gain prestige by associating with greatness is not altogether clear. The former is a possibility, the latter, a virtual certainty...