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EZRA POUND 57
the Strand. In this bare room with sanded floors, Yeats and his
friends were wont to drink black coffee and smoke hashish until
dawn. The group included Ernest Rhys, Lionel Johnson, Thomas
Hardy, Ernest Dowson, Arthur Symons, Francis Thompson, and
the Poet Laureate, Robert Bridges.
Yeats was the grandson and namesake of the Reverend William
Butler Yeats, the late Rector of Tullylish, County Down. He was
the eldest of four children of the painter, John Butler Yeats. The
family was consecrated to the arts. Yeats was a poet, his brother
Jack was a painter, his sister Lily taught the country girls fine
handicrafts, such as embroidery, in the ancient Gaelic tradition,
and his youngest sister, Elizabeth, affectionately known as "Lolly",
enlisted the local maidens in the craft of book publishing.
They made their own paper from rags and pulp, set type, printed
and bound beautiful little books, which were issued under the imprint
of the Cuala Press. The editions, which were sold in series by
private subscription, appeared in lots of from one hundred to five
hundred copies. The Cuala Press brought out some of Yeats' best
work, such as his enchanting essay, A Packet for Ezra Pound
(1929). "Lolly" also published Pound's edition of the Selected
Letters of John Butler Yeats (1917).
Yeats had recently come through a harrowing experience with
the self-professed master of black magic, Alistair Crowley. The two
men, both interested in psychic phenomena, had founded a Society
for Psychical Research. They set up a "temple" in order to perform
their works, but Yeats soon discovered that he, a practitioner of
beneficial "white magic", had been lured into an association with a
practitioner of evil, or "black magic".
To counteract Crowley's baneful activities, Yeats moved into
"the Temple". A titanic struggle for the soul of one of the members
ended in a draw between the master of white magic and the lord of
black magic. Tiring of the contest, Crowley decided to move to the
Continent. He insisted on selling all of the furnishings of "the
Temple" before he left, with the proceeds to be divided between
the two founders. Yeats refused to let him enter "the Temple", and
Crowley, finding his black magic insufficient for the purpose, resorted
to the courts. The lawsuit was grist for Crowley's mill, but
Yeats found the court battle very upsetting.