ABSTRACT
In the early years of the twentieth century, young writers like Willa Cather, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, and D.H. Lawrence were already shifting the image of Persephone away from its associations with pessimism and toward a vision of regeneration. While Edith Wharton was still reworking the tensions articulated in the Victorian age, by 1914, much of the distress and angst evoked in literature from Swinburne to Wharton seemed to be fading. Then the First World War lent a powerful impetus to the renewal of angst. In the aftermath of the war, particularly in T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, the feverish post-war buzz of the 1920s seemed like the thin chatter of shades in Hades; accidie and despair were once again serious challenges to the ambitions and aspirations of serious poets. The image of the underworld, in Eliot’s poetry, became an image of the modern predicament. Pound, Williams, and Lawrence had to deal with this image, and by assimilating and moving beyond it, they enriched, complicated, and deepened their concepts of regeneration.
