Much of modern politics and aesthetics can be traced to the philosophical problem Hegel identified with modernity itself: “When the might of union vanishes from the life of men and the antitheses lose their living connection and reciprocity and gain independence, the need of philosophy arises.” From a desire like Hegel's to reconnect the antitheses without losing any of their newly won independence come the most radical movements of modern politics – fascism and communism – as well as a newly militant conservatism and even a chastened liberalism that has spurned laissez-faire. From the same sense of disconnection there arises an aesthetic tradition, the English version of which Raymond Williams has traced back through Ruskin and Morris to Pugin. Yeats, Eliot, and Pound are heirs of both traditions, and their work constantly illustrates the many connections between the two. Since Schiller, the political project of reconciling the antitheses has naturally had recourse to the aesthetic, and the aesthetic has in its turn always contained political implications.

The experience of Yeats, Eliot, and Pound also shows, however, that this relationship harbors certain paradoxes. The aesthetic can complete its assigned task and reconcile social and political contradictions only by remaining aloofly aesthetic; its political power rests in a way on its power to resist politics. The three poets make this claim for their own work in many different ways. Yeats's aristocrat, Eliot's man of letters, Pound's scholar of the luminous detail – all achieve political relevance by asserting and maintaining their difference from the mundanely political. Yet the three were so steeped in the politics of their time that they could hardly resist applying their solutions, which then shattered in their hands.