By DENIS DONOGHUE [Hudson Review] – Yeats and Eliot were not familiars; they met occasionally and agreeably from as early as 1915—at least once at a meeting of the Omega Club, and again when they lunched at the Savile. Eliot published him in The Criterion. Yeats and Eliot were also active together in their support of Rupert Doone’s Group Theatre. Eliot’s Sweeney Agonistes, published on December 1, 1932, was performed by the Group in their Rooms in London on November 11, 1934, the text as we have it being eked out with music by William Alwyn, masks by Robert Medley, and presumably a good deal of stage business. That was its first English performance: it had already been done by Hallie Flanagan’s Vassar College Experimental Theatre during Eliot’s months in the U.S. in 1933. Yeats attended another performance of it by the Group Theatre in London on December 16, 1934. Eliot and Yeats also tried to found a Poets’ Theatre in London in 1935, with no success. So they were associates from time to time but not companions. Yeats and Pound make a different relation: they were friends and remained friends, especially after the three winters they spent in Stone Cottage, Coleman’s Hatch, Sussex. The friendship continued over the years and found fulfillment in a shared Rapallo. One of the many differences between Eliot and Pound, in their relations to Yeats, was that Pound did not change his opinion. From the first years in London, he sought out the writers he regarded as important, but he did not haggle over their attributes. When he had decided on their quality, he rarely changed his mind. On December 10, 1912, three years after meeting Yeats, he wrote a letter to Poetry, Harriet Monroe’s new magazine:

The state of things here in London is, as I see it, as follows:

I find Mr. Yeats the only poet worthy of serious study. Mr. Yeats’ work is already a recognized classic and is part of the required reading in the Sorbonne. There is no need of proclaiming him to the American public . . . I would rather talk about poetry with Ford Madox Hueffer [not yet Ford Madox Ford] than with any man in London. Mr. Hueffer’s beliefs about the art may be best explained by saying that they are in diametric opposition to those of Mr. Yeats.

Continued at the Hudson Review | More Chronicle & Notices.