Yeats and Pound were the two central poets of the 20th century, dominating the modernist poetry in the first half and second half of the century. Pound began as Yeats's "student" reading the older poet's The Wind among the Reeds. When the apprenticeship with Yeats at Stone Cottage was over, Pound served as patron to almost all the major poets and writers, and some painters. Unlike the mythology of the last 50 years, in matters of poetic influence between them, Pound seems to have got more than he gave to Yeats. For instance, Pound could not find the value of the new poetic form emerging in Yeats's "Adam's Curse" which is alongside "Red Hanrahan's Song about Ireland." It is because he admired the early Yeats so much. It is not until Pound was bored by the shadows and dreams in his own poetry that he began to see "Adam's Curse," "No Second Troy," "Reconciliation." Before Pound did anything, Yeats had already undegone some transformation in his poetry. Then, why Pound had been so immersed in the early Yeats? Yeats had been a complex personality, capable of making use of what had seemed impossible as material for poetry: magic and mysticism, arts, folkore, Romantic poetics in his earlier career and politics, Noh drama, philosophy. At the last moment Yeats and Pound emerge as different poets; the older poet neither commits himself to his world nor alienates himself from it: he contemplates it as detached artist. Pound, on the other hand, chooses to be in utter solitude, with his memories of Stone Cottage sustaining him.

• Young Suck Rhee(Hanyang University)