Louise Williams explores the cyclical nature of historical memory in the work of five major Modernists: Yeats, Pound, Eliot, Ford and Lawrence. These Modernists, Williams argues, started their careers with historical assumptions derived from the nineteenth century. But their views on the universal structure of history, the abandonment of progress and the adoption of a cyclical sense of the past, were the result of the important conflicts and changes within the Modernist period. This wide ranging and inter-disciplinary study will be essential reading for anyone interested in modernist writing.