Axel's CastlePublished in 1931, Axel's Castle was Edmund Wilson's first book of literary criticism a landmark book that explores the evolution of the French Symbolist movement and considers its influence on six major twentieth century writers: William Butler Yeats, Paul Val ry, T. S. Eliot, Marcel Proust, James Joyce, and Gertrude Stein. As Alfred Kazin later wrote, Wilson was an original, an extraordinary literary artist . . . He could turn any literary subject