The literary consequences of the Peace: T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and the Treaty of Versailles

This dissertation tracks the literary consequences of the Peace in works by H. G. Wells, John Maynard Keynes, Wyndham Lewis, Virginia Woolf and, above all, T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. The primary claim advanced is that Eliot and Pound's post-War poetry responds not only to the Great War, as is commonly acknowledged, but to the expectations of what the Peace would bring, the spectacle of peacemaking, and the disappointments occasioned by the Treaty of Versailles. The first chapter explores the ways the Peace was imagined in the fiction and pamphlets of Wells, in the speeches of President Woodrow Wilson, and in Keynes's The Economic Consequences of the Peace. The second chapter presents evidence that Eliot was an expert on Versailles and its companion treaties, and reads "Gerontion", The Waste Land, "The Hollow Men" and some of Eliot's literary criticism in the light of this evidence. The third chapter is framed by Pound's conversion, under the stresses of the peacemaking period, to the economic theory of Social Credit. Pound's attempt to convert Keynes to this theory is also explored, and the place of the Peace in works such as "Homage to Sextus Propertius", "Hugh Selwyn Mauberley" and A Draft of XVI Cantos is elucidated. The Epilogue touches on Lewis's The Apes of God and Woolf's Between the Acts in exploring their expectations that Versailles would lead to another war.