The politics of Yeats, Eliot, and Pound have long been an embarrassment and a scandal. Yeats's authoritarianism, Eliot's prejudices, and Pound's fascist anti-Semitism have presented sympathetic critics with insuperable problems of explanation. The poetry is often saved from contamination by being placed in quarantine, while the growing number of critics hostile to the poetry can easily condemn it by association. Arguments about whether Yeats and Eliot were or were not fascists – about Pound there is little room for doubt – continue as if under a similar obligation to the either-or, simply because the question seems too serious to permit any vacillation. The hope behind this book is that both the politics of these three poets and the relationship of politics to their poetry can be understood better if the either-or can be avoided, not just where fascism is concerned, but also where aesthetic modernism touches modern politics in general.

Faith in a coherent and unified modernity – one in which enlightenment brings material progress, political freedom, and cultural renaissance – is now so quaint as to seem pre-modern. The most that is now claimed for modernity, even by its strongest remaining supporters, is that it is “an incomplete project.” Even the ironic hopefulness of Schiller and Hegel is outmoded, as is the dialectical faith of Marx that the evils of modernity would call up their own solution. The only real quarrel is over where to lay the blame for the failure of modernity: on technology, on liberal democracy, on cultural modernism, or on enlightenment itself.