Modernist Writing and Reactionary Politics

Charles Ferrall argues that the politics of Yeats, Pound, Eliot, Lawrence, and Wyndham Lewis was a response to the separation of art from an increasingly industrialized society. Fascism became attractive to these writers because it promised to reintegrate art into society while simultaneously guaranteeing its autonomy. Yet with the exception of Pound and Yeats, these writers all finally rejected fascism, preferring instead to see the aesthetic as a sphere in permanent opposition to liberal democracy, rather than the basis for a new social order.