With the outbreak of the Great War and the consequent suspension of the third Home Rule bill, the ideological conflict in Ireland which had threatened to turn into armed confrontation was in part transposed to the battlefields of northern France. That ideological conflict can conveniently be broken down into three separate lines of thought: Unionism, Home Rule, and separatism. None of this was new: Irish political history from Grattan's Parliament onwards is the story of the evolution of those forces which were to come to a climax in the years following the introduction of the 1912 Home Rule bill. The quasi-autonomy of 1782, the Act of Union and the subsequent agitation for Repeal, the emergence of a Catholic democracy, the growing pressure for Home Rule in the final quarter of the nineteenth century, and the evolution of Southern Unionism and Ulster Unionism ~ all of this was contained within hish political thought in the opening decades of the twentieth century.

This thesis examines the relationship between the English Jewish writer and publisher John Rodker and the modernism of the Pound circle. Previous considerations of the antisemitism of Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot have either ignored or cited in their defence their Jewish friends and acquaintances. This thesis shows that the modernist interest in the figure of `the Jew' took effect not only in their poetry and social commentary but also in the social grouping which they formed in order to produce and circulate this writing. Rodker was both a necessary figure to Pound's theory and practice of modernism, but one who had to be kept on the margins. This resulted in his being able to articulate certain aspects of his experience as an assimilated Jew-loss, disconnection, feeling out of place place-while excluding any other possible aspects, including naming himself as Jewish. Chapter 1 shows that Pound and Eliot's antisemitic statements and poetry functioned as part of the formation of the `men of 1914', and as a means of shocking their audience through a poetry of ugliness. Chapter 2 considers a printing error in Rodker's Ovid Press edition of Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1920), and reads it as a sign of Pound's failure to carry out his social and poetic project, a failure which he blamed on Jews, but, because this failure was inevitable, part of the task for carrying the project out was assigned to Jews. Chapter 3 reads Rodker's volume of poetry Hymns (1920), and traces how his marginal position within modernism resulted in a poetry which did not directly address Jewish issues, but was affected by his Jewish social position. Chapter 4 considers Rodker and two other Jewish writers, Carl Rakosi and Louis Zukofsky, who Pound published in The Exile (1927- 28), showing that Pound's interest in these writers was combined with an unease with them that played out in editorial decisions and means of framing their work. Chapter 5 examines Rodker's Memoirs of Other Fronts (1932). His selfdescriptions of himself as a foreigner are shown to be still influenced by the Pound circle's ideas of Jews, but also reworked through his increasing interest in psychoanalysis.

Research through practice into the actual process of composing, such as William James on automatic writing and thought processes, or Sigmund Freud on creative writing and the unconscious, is rare, and needs extension and updating. This study builds a new theoretical framework for critical and practical work on imaginative composition by investigation of Edward Thomas's composing processes and complementary analysis of the processes of writing my own poetry collection. Thomas's emphasis on fragmentation of thought, hesitancy and silence in the content and form of his poetry, positioning him on the borders of Modernism, reflects essential aspects of his composing processes, as documented in his notes, letters, prose and poetry. The creating and revisiting of my own works-in-progress and final collection, in the light of the study of Thomas and in dialogue with readers, reveals further insights into poetic composition. Chapter One examines the point at which poems emerge and the influence of external writing conditions. Chapters Two and Three look at absence in the composing process in ellipses, aporia, gaps and unfinishedness, and in the art of submission as it is used in composing. Chapter Four investigates distraction, non-logical connections and physical and temporal disturbances in composing. Chapter Five shows the importance when composing of sustaining a flexible and exact attention to immediate perceptions and thoughts. The thesis concludes with an original poetry collection resulting from the documentation of my composing processes during the research period. These poems reflect and refract many points made in previous chapters, offering practical evidence of them. The principles of poetic composition established in this thesis are also more generally applicable to the composing of poetry. Similarities observed in composition processes in other art forms and in the writing of this thesis indicate that these principles also apply to other creative and academic disciplines, providing areas for further research.