Readers of Walter Benjamin will recognize a polemical assertion in the title of this book. Benjamin defines fascism as the aestheticization of politics, and it is now quite common to suggest that Yeats, Eliot, and Pound are fascists in this general sense even if they were not all cardcarrying members of a fascist party. If the aestheticization of politics is the attempt to resolve in art contradictions that are really economic or political, then the charge against these three is a just one. But it is my contention that the very attempt to resolve economic or political contradictions, instead of just leaving them out of art altogether, inevitably politicizes the aesthetic. That is to say, the smooth workings of art are disrupted by what it cannot resolve. This is the case, I think, with Yeats, Eliot, and Pound, who, precisely because of their failure, are more faithful to the real conflicts of our century than many writers whose politics we now find easier to accept.

I am interested, therefore, in what these three poets have to say about political issues, but I am even more interested in the presence of politics as a disruptive force in the formal organization of their works. I think it is necessary to be quite specific about the particular political allegiances of the three, which were actually quite different from one another, but it is not my purpose to offer extended biographical accounts. Rather, I want to concentrate on the way specific political choices, such as Yeats's allegiance to the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy or Pound's to Mussolini, entail difficult poetic choices as well.