Eminent Domain: Yeats among Wilde Joyce Pound Eliot and Auden by: Richard Ellmann
Hardcover. NY, Oxford University Press, 1st, 1967, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover in a lightly worn and sunned dust jacket, 159 pages. Creative talent is rapacious, and to speak of writers as influencing each other is to make tender what is often harshly acquisitive. Writers do not flow into each other like waves, but expropriate, by the force of youth, or of age, what they require. They do not borrow, they override, exercising the right of eminent domain. Like rival sovereignties, Yeats and the five writers here balanced with him - Wilde, Joyce, Pound, Eliot, Auden - take each other into account. Name on front fly leaf, otherwise clean.