James Dowthwaite

Ghosts, Patched with Histories: The Occult Image in Pound and Yeats

In this talk, I will discuss the ways in which Ezra Pound and William Butler Yeats both draw on the same poetics of the spiritual. Both, I argue, were committed to finding a poetic form inflected by a particularly paganist, spiritualist, and mystical philosophy. Perhaps because there is so much material that can be treated from either a literary-historical or a political angle, Pound’s interest in occult form has received little but scant attention. Some scholars, like Vincent Sherry, James Longenbach or Sean Pryor, have explored it, and its role in the development of his poetics, but otherwise it has been broadly marginalised in scholarship of his work. This is not the case with William Butler Yeats, for whom the hermetic, the occult, and the spiritually arcane were always at the forefront of his poetry and his essays, to the extent that to ignore it is to avoid dealing with a central aspect of his life.
In my talk, I will focus on the period in which Pound nominally worked for Yeats as his literary secretary (roughly 1913-1916), spending winters together Stone Cottage in Sussex. I will sketch the commonalities between their works, looking particularly at the ways in which the ‘image’ – the central poetic unit for both writers – can be used to embody or evoke the beyond, to give tangible imaginative form to the intangible. My main point of demonstration will be how the ghostly, or in Pound’s terminology the ‘apparition’, manifests this. Without this important spiritualist dimension, I argue, the form of the image cannot truly be understood.

James Dowthwaite is one of the convenors of MADS, having founded the network with Melissa Sarikaya in 2023. He is Junior Professor of English Literature and Culture at the Johannes Gutenberg University, Mainz. His books include Ezra Pound and 20^th Century Theories of Language (Routledge, 2019) and Aesthetic Criticism: An Introduction (2026), and he has edited and co-edited special issues on the period for ZAA, Volupté and Literary Matters. His first poetry collection, Babylonian Pieces: A Dream Vision is coming out with The Artel Press in 2026.

Feride Ertural

Conscious Nature: Esotericism and Liminality in Algernon Blackwood's "The Willows"

Algernon Blackwood, celebrated for his contributions to the development of the ‘weird tale,’ positions himself on the margins of literary tradition. His texts are known for their employment of occultist and esoteric themes, often used as a subversion to the standards of Western or Christian iconography. At its core, , esotericism refers to the idea that there are truths which are understood by a select group or inner circle. In his short story, “The Willows” (1907), Blackwood draws on this form of knowledge and instills himself in the canon of the Modern Gothic. Also often referred to as a story of botanical horror, the short story is full of dense descriptions of nature and space, as the two protagonists struggle in their fight to not become victims to unknown entities. The most telling example of such is the extensive description of the River Danube in the first four pages. However, throughout the story’s entirety, Blackwood uses esoteric concepts in this portrayal of nature as an entity, the sacrificial replacement of bodies, and influence of nature on the human rationale. This paper will draw on Antoine Faivre’s identification of the core characteristics of esotericism, more specifically, correspondences and living nature (as also explored by Kocku von Stuckrad). Blackwood’s use of these concepts builds an atmosphere of the liminal or transitional state between the known and unknown in order to create tension in the reader and achieve the desired effect of a ‘weird’ tale. The terror of the supernatural had been a subject of major interest since the rise of the Gothic in the 18th century; but using this method, Blackwood pointedly centered esoteric ideas which had since become marginalized in the literary tradition.

Bibliography

Blackwood, Algernon. “The Willows.” The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Willows, by Algernon Blackwood, 1 Mar. 2004, www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/11438/pg11438-images.html.

Stuckrad, Kocku von. Western Esotericism: A Brief History of Secret Knowledge. Routledge, 2017.
 

Feride Ertural is finishing her B.A. in English Literature and Culture and American Studies from the Johannes-Gutenberg University in Mainz, and is to begin pursuing her M.A. in English this spring. She is interested in various iterations of Gothic texts, the elegiac form, Occultism, prospect and spatiality, as well as the long 18th century.

Charlie Kleinschmidt

“No other sound anywhere”: “The Sin Eater” and Sensing Occult Decadence

Cultural identity, especially marginal identity, necessitates a sense of belonging – to a group, to a belief, or to a place. In Scottish literature of the fin-de-siècle, as writers were advocating for cultural revivalism and Home Rule, Fiona Macleod stands out through a decadent folk horror-approach, as in the 1895 tale “The Sin-Eater.” In it, a penny-less traveller named Neil Ross takes on the role of “sin-eater” in a seaside Scottish village. He does this through prayer and figurative incorporation, eating bread and drinking beer from a deceased man’s breast. Ross’s unresolved grudge against the man causes a fit of madness – and he attempts to cast the sins into the sea to free himself from them. Macleod, an alias of William Sharp, constructs a decadent soundscape, playing with the primal eerie tension between presence and absence to construct an image of Scottish culture. Where there should be no consciousness, in the water, there is agency through sound. And where there should be consciousness, there is death – and silence. Rather than mythologising a heroic past of rural Scotland, as we might expect from a cultural revivalist, I argue that Macleod chooses to embrace the imposed otherness of Catholic Scottish culture, and she/he does this by figuring a Scottish decadence through the acoustic sense. Water, through sound, becomes a presence of its own, and is contrasted by the silence of the dead; death being described in the story as going into the silence, no less. As the landscape becomes a grotesque agent of fate in the folk tale of Neil Ross, the Sin-Eater, identity is shaped through belonging – belonging to the “mournful waters” and “sodden bracken” of “that marshy place” in rural Scotland where the land itself is the noise embracing the silence of death, and where the ritualistic occult haunts the stranger.

Bibliography

Macleod, Fiona. “The Sin-Eater.” The Sin-Eater, and Other Tales by Fiona Macleod. Patrick Gedde & Colleagues, 1895. Archive: https://archive.org/details/sineaterothertal00sharuoft/page/n7/mode/2up. Accessed 06 Jan 2026.

Charlie Kleinschmidt holds a B.A. in English Literature and Culture and American Studies from JGU Mainz and is pursuing an M.A. in English, where they will write on melancholy spaces in eighteenth-century poetry. They are interested in themes of the Gothic, melancholia, spatiality and landscape, the occult, and aesthetic illusion. Charlie is also a poet, and their work has been published in Channel Mag and ANMLY, among others.