On January 18, 1914, Ezra Pound, helped by William Butler Yeats, and, behind the scenes, by Yeats’s patron and friend, Lady Gregory, held a luncheon for Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, a man whom Pound regarded as the “grandest of old men” and “the last of the great Victorians,” at Blunt’s manor house in West Sussex. The guest list should come as a reproach to anyone who overvalues his literary fame, since, aside from Yeats and Pound, the other figures—including Blunt, a celebrity in his day—are all but forgotten: Victor Plarr, Thomas Sturge Moore, Richard Aldington, F. S. Flint.

The key gimmick, dreamed up by Lady Gregory, was to roast and serve a peacock, arranged on a tray beside its full plumage, a touch that complemented the “iron-studded barricades,” “medieval relics,” and “Burne-Jones tapestry” in Blunt’s home, as Pound later explained in a letter to his mother. The elder poet was presented with a small stone casket full of poems written by the younger men, poems that struck him as “word problems”: incomprehensibly Modern**,** most of them in vers libre. After the meal, the party—Blunt plus the other six poets, including Pound and Yeats—posed in front of an ancient stone wall for what became a famous photograph. The papers were alerted, and news of the meal spread far and wide, from the London Times to the Boston Evening Transcript.

Pound was a great impresario, and this was among his first and shrewdest stunts. The modernism that he was then designing to be an affront to Victorian literary culture was also intended to be its heir; the Victorians, though reduced to a few surviving eminences, were, whatever their excesses of diction and sentiment, the nearest model for greatness. He had sought to join the “apostolic succession” of poets through Blunt, who, a generation or two earlier, had cunningly arranged his own ancestry, marrying the granddaughter of Lord Byron and becoming a Byronic coxcomb—dieting, coiffing his curls, and dressing himself in Turkish- and Albanian-inspired attire. Pound (who wore velvet jackets with buttons of pearl and was, according to Robert Frost, “a great intellect abloom in hair”) lived, during those years, in Yeats’s Stone Cottage and was employed as Yeats’s secretary, typing and proofing his poems.

These poets were all male, all photogenic, and all given to conspicuous behavior—as when, one evening, Pound ate the centerpiece (tulips, though some have said they were roses) at a pub called the Cheshire Cheese as Yeats expounded upon the fundamentals of verse. We are not far from the first silent film stars, whose own evenings were often choreographed for public consumption. The maneuverings of poets and literary people, jostling for fame behind the keyhole of glimpsed conviviality, is as old as Rome, older even; but Pound had a special gift for P.R.

The peacock dinner is affectionately reconstructed in Lucy McDiarmid’s “Poets & The Peacock Dinner: The Literary History of a Meal.” It is the second excellent book to appear in the past year about an illustrious dinner thrown for poets: Stanley Plumly’s “The Immortal Evening” described a night on which the eminent painter Benjamin Robert Haydon entertained Wordsworth, Keats, and Lamb, all of whom had posed for Haydon’s ambitious canvas “Christ’s Entry into Jerusalem.” The writers had good reason to believe that their appearance in Haydon’s painting would represent the pinnacle of their fame; as it happened, Haydon’s work is remembered mostly for his association with the poets, and especially with Keats, who wrote some of his most famous letters to “My Dear Haydon.” The reconstruction, in book form, of these distant nights stems from the same impulse that brought the original diners together: to seek a material scrap of prior genius. Pound admired Blunt but seemed to be operating under the transitive property of genius, thrilled by the “Victorians and Pre-Raphaelites and men of the nineties” Blunt had known, and by the aura of association with “old Browning” or “Shelley sliding down his front bannisters ‘with almost incredible rapidity.’ ”

The story of the peacock dinner is really about the forms literary professionalism took just before poets could learn their trade in schools, first from literature surveys and, much later, from writing workshops. Yeats was especially important for poets of a slightly younger generation, and stories about meeting Yeats (all of them by men, mind you) make up a distinguished genre all their own. (John Berryman, a much younger poet, said coming to call upon him was like asking “Is Ben Jonson here?”) And Pound, in his old age, living in Venice, received many young admirers of his own. Poets, perhaps more than any other group of creative artists, understand their art vertically, as a succession that one wants either to join or to disrupt. Pound felt both impulses, as did Yeats a little before him and, after them both, writers like Berryman and Robert Lowell. It’s the Burden of the Past, the Anxiety of Influence. Under optimal circumstances, these meetings enter literature, as in Berryman and Lowell’s many marvellous elegies for the poets who were dying out just as they were getting started.

Some people live in the past; poets often live in the future perfect, imagining their current actions from the point of view of future recollection. The peacock dinner is suggested twice in Pound’s Pisan Cantos, which he wrote, accompanied only by his memories, decades later while imprisoned for treason in a six-foot-by-six-foot cage:

But to have done instead of not doing this is not vanity To have, with decency, knocked That a Blunt should open To have gathered from the air a live tradition or from a fine old eye the unconquered flame This is not vanity. Here error is all in the not done, all in the diffidence that faltered . . .

You can hear in these lines Pound’s relitigation of the past, clearing himself of “vanity” and “error”: that rash young man who ate the tulips has taken his valiant older self as passionate defender. Everything in later Pound is animated by that search for a “live tradition,” which now includes his own early manhood. In Canto 83, he recalls overhearing Yeats as he composed “The Peacock” downstairs in Stone Cottage, all those years ago: