CIRCULATING ANTISEMITISM: THE “MEN OF 1914” DOMINIC WILLIAMS The link between the modernism of the Pound circle and the anti- Jewish prejudices held by most of its individual members is a topic that has provoked a great deal of discussion. Individual studies have been written about Pound, Eliot and Wyndham Lewis, exploring their individual antisemitisms (Ayers, Casillo, Julius). Bryan Cheyette has also explored the general “semitic discourse” which was part of a discourse of Englishness and empire, and in which these modernists played a role. But no-one has asked the question of how “semitic discourse” operated in this group as a whole. Some sides of modernist collaboration have been widely explored, but little attention has been given to the effect of collaboration on the antisemitism of modernist works. 1 Eliot’s quatrain poems were part of a joint reaction with Pound against free verse, and all of them passed through Pound’s hands before their publication. Pound and Lewis jointly contributed a series of “Imaginary Letters” to The Little Review which contained a number of pejorative references to Jews. In neither case has the question been asked of what impact collaboration had on their antisemitic content. Yet it is an extremely important question, not simply because it brings in a level of social description between that of the individual and that of society as a whole, but also because it relates particular literary forms to particular social formations. Collaboration shaped both the writings, and the groupings of people who composed, circulated and even, it might be argued, read them – these were texts that originally appeared in very limited editions. Their interactions took place both within literary writings, and within their private correspondence (although the boundary between these two was, as I will show, somewhat permeable), and included consideration of which other writers, including Jewish writers, were worthy of their support. What this essay will argue is that the antisemitism, or the way that antisemitism works, within the writings of Pound, Eliot and Lewis is important because it had certain social effects. Not just by reproducing