When W. B. Yeats revised A Vision—almost making it a new work—he chose to begin the occult book with “A Packet for Ezra Pound.” This cluster of essays had first seen light in a book of the same name, published by the Cuala Press in 1929. A sort of rumination on his new home and community in Rapallo, Italy, these essays were intimately linked to A Vision from their earliest draft states. On the first page of this new version of A Vision, then, as printed by Macmillan in 1937, Yeats writes:

As a part of his rumination on Rapallo, such a comment makes perfect sense, but a reader of A Vision wonders what the firebrand American poet has to do with the system revealed by the Yeatses’ spirit guides and with the book that Yeats made of those revelations. This essay off ers an answer. Despite diff erences between the two poets on matters of politics, poetics, and even the relationships between this world and the next, their work was mutually influential. And in the context of Yeats's A Vision, Pound remains an important presence— a figure needing description, resistance, incorporation, collaboration. This essay traces the two poets’ literary relationship, Pound's influences on A Vision, the ways that A Vision grappled with the young American poet, and off ers a sense of the interrelationships between A Vision and Pound's lifework, The Cantos.

By the summer of 1908, twenty-two-year-old American Ezra Pound had had enough of Venice. He had arrived there in May, looking to escape American academic life and become a poet, but after a fairly short stay, and having had A Lume Spento, his first book of poetry, printed by a Venetian publisher, he determined thathe needed to be in London, where he could meet some “real people”—“Wm B. Yeats more espeialy especialy [sic].”