Professor Langdon
Hammer: For Wednesday--This is my--our first Yeats lecture.
We're going to have three of
them. For the next class I'd like you
to, well, I'd like you to do a few things.
I know that your teaching fellows will have handed out a
meter exercise for you. I'd like you to work on
something else. You don't have to do this for
Wednesday but let's say for next Monday, and that is:
I'd like you to memorize a short poem by Yeats or by Frost,
either one. And this poem could be the
basis of a first paper, a topic for one.
It doesn't have to be but it might be.
And on Wednesday I'll also hand out a topic for paper number
one. In class I'll talk about
"Easter 1916," "The Magi," "The Second Coming," "Leda and the
Swan," and I'd like you to pay special
attention to these special Yeatsian words:
"tumult," "turbulence," "bestial."
Think about also that phrase
"terrible beauty" in "Easter 1916."
And finally, in your RIS packet you'll see a
timeline that charts significant dates in modern poetry that
tells you something about when the different poets we're
reading were working, and helps you perhaps keep
track of them; because confusingly,
although the course has a kind of rough chronological order,
we do move back and forth in time.
And in fact today, right now, we're going to move
back the furthest we go, all the way into the nineteenth
century to talk about the early Yeats.
Yeats's career is maybe the most famous one in modern
poetry; that is, a career that has been
seen as a kind of representative story about modern poetry as a
whole. What's that story?
Well, Yeats begins as a
Romantic visionary and a late nineteenth-century aesthete,
and under the pressure of political and social crisis he
breaks with the artificial rhetoric of his early poems and
becomes a kind of heroic realist.
Now, there's something to this story but it is also a kind of
cliché, and I'll try to introduce,
I think, a more true and also more interesting way of
understanding Yeats's development today,
starting with this picture.
This is an unlikely picture.
The face there,
if you have seen him before, you will recognize as Yeats's.
This is Yeats as King Goll.
This is Yeats in costume,
costumed as a figure from Irish myth, as an ancient bard,
mad King Goll, which is the furthest thing
from a modern poet. It's a late Victorian image of
an archaic singer rendered in the melodramatic manner of
Pre-Raphaelite art and thoroughly removed from the
aesthetic values of modernism, such as naturalism,
formal clarity, emotional restraint and so on.
It's an image that was created
by Yeats's father, the painter John Yeats.
You could also say that it was
created by the late nineteenth-century culture that
Yeats's father, John, represented and
introduced to his son. It's an image of Yeats that
modern poetry eventually forgot, Yeats as an un-modern,
nineteenth-century poet hamming it up.
But this poet is, in fact, important to the one
that Yeats became. In a way, Yeats is always in
costume. His poetic identity is forged
through identification with the heroic characters of his poems,
characters who are sometimes surrogates for the poet,
such as King Goll, the warrior Cuchulain or the
mysterious Michael Robartes – all characters you'll meet.
Or who are sometimes simply
versions of the poet himself; that is, the poet rendering
himself for us in stylized roles;
that is, Yeats the public man, Yeats the lover,
Yeats the mad old man. Yeats is always creating
himself in his poems and creating himself as a kind of
version of a type. And he does the same thing,
in fact, to those around him, famously to his lover,
Maude Gonne, who becomes Helen of Troy in
"No Second Troy" and in other poems.
The martyrs in the Easter Rebellion of 1916 become ancient
Irish warriors, and we'll talk about that next
time. There are many other instances
of this myth-making imagination that Yeats is always working
with. Yeats takes on self-consciously
staged identities, requiring costumes,
and he sees other people in similarly theatrical and mythic
terms. His poetry is,
in fact, deeply autobiographical,
but it doesn't necessarily help to know that because his life is
not a reliable key for reading the poems,
exactly because he treated his life as art, raising the
particulars of his experience into general symbols,
working the narrative of his life into myth.
This is a way of conceiving his activity as a poet but it's
also, as we'll see, a way of conceiving,
in fact, culture and human history in general.
In Yeats, people are always
particulars who are fitted to types, which are new versions of
old identities that travel across time.
In a certain sense, Yeats, I think,
really felt that he was King Goll.
Now, the story of King Goll is interesting.
It's a longish poem, not in your anthology,
but you can find it in The Complete Yeats,
and I've given you on this handout page just a couple
stanzas from it, so you have a sense of it.
King Goll is a mythical Irish
ruler who goes mad in the heat of battle.
He becomes distracted by an inward fire that draws him into
the woods where he wanders and sings, full of unfulfilled
desire. Finally, he destroys his harp,
in the scene represented by Yeats's father's portrait.
This story is a certain version
of Yeats's own early ambition to become a particular kind of
figure--not an Irish king but an Irish poet,
which would mean consolidating in himself a sense of national
identity and explaining that identity,
representing it, embodying it in all senses;
representing and embodying Irishness, for an English
speaking readership in Ireland, but also in England and
elsewhere. The nationality of that
identity is important; that is, Yeats's Irishness,
and so is Yeats's audience. His ambition is to become the
first major Irish poet writing in English.
Significantly, this picture of Yeats as King
Goll was used as an illustration for his first appearance in an
English periodical, a magazine of art and ideas
called The Leisure Hour. Yeats bridges Irish and English
cultures, and he is importantly Protestant with social and
family ties to English life. The ambition that I'm
describing is a public and political one.
But paradoxically, perhaps, for the young Yeats
this ambition drew him away from the social and political world
into the charmed landscapes of Irish myth,
maybe in the same way as King Goll is drawn away from,
lured away from battle, to wander in the Irish wood.
All of Yeats's early poetry
takes place in a symbolic, mythic domain.
King Goll's madness and the destruction of his instruments
are perhaps warnings about the dangers of a poetry that would
be confined to a symbolic world, as if to fully enter it,
to fully enter a mythical world, to write a kind of pure
poetry that was archaic in its aims and its sources – this
would be to go mad, to give sway to dangerously
inward passions that can't be satisfied, to be cut off from
the world. Being cut off from the world in
some kind of higher or separate reality is a lure and threat,
opened up for Yeats by the particular ambition that he had
to write a mythic poetry on Irish themes.
Now, something else is worth highlighting about King Goll as
a way to understand who Yeats was.
King Goll is a singer. Identifying with him,
Yeats identifies poetry with song;
in particular, with songs of passion in
which--songs in which sound takes over, is ravishing,
enchanting. Yeats's early poetry has those
aspects of song as its aim. They suggest verbal and oral
equivalents for the poetry's cognitive concern with symbols.
That is, in sound,
just as in theme, Yeats's poetry is idealized,
purified, sensually rich, and yet also abstract.
Contrast Frost.
Yeats's poetry dominated the poetry world in which Frost
began writing and publishing. Yeats publishes "King Goll" in
The Leisure Hour, and Frost mocks the ideal of
poetry as the "dream of the gift of idle hours";
he mocks the idea of poetry as "easy gold at the hand of fay or
elf" in "Mowing" –characters that come right out of early
Yeats. Frost's realism,
his roughness, which is part of his
sensibility – it's part of the sound of his poetry – well,
it contrasts quite directly with the smoothness sought by
Yeats and the kind of simulation of ease.
You could go to Yeats's poem "Adam's Curse" to see the poet
talking about this aesthetic ideal.
Yeats there in "Adam's Curse," which is in your anthology,
calls specifically for a kind of simulation of ease in poetry,
which is a traditionally aristocratic ideal,
one which hides one's labor in order to make accomplishments
seem natural. Yeats, in "Adam's Curse,"
regrets that the beautiful is something to be labored for and
he wants to conceal that labor. The contrast with Frost is
powerful. Yeats once said that he wanted
the natural words in the natural order, but he had a very highly
cultured sense of what is natural,
and his poetry is full of verbal archaism.
It's characterized by a kind of high, formal bearing.
It has a careful decorum,
a kind of high sheen, especially this early poetry.
Metrically, Yeats's attitudes
result in a kind of superb regularity.
In the early Yeats you find smooth, unbroken lines,
a diction that's elegant and seemingly easy,
without ever deigning to seem merely colloquial.
The sound of Yeats was,
and was meant to be, seductive.
The poems are, in fact, very often about kinds
of seduction – a child, a king,
the poet, these figures are drawn away from society or from
family towards secret, sacred places,
magical places of love that are frequently imaged in these poems
as an island or the center of a wood;
in short, places of privacy that shut the world out and that
stand for Yeats's ideal of poetic autonomy,
his desire to create and inhabit self-sufficient,
imaginative worlds. "The Lake Isle of Innisfree,"
"Who Goes with Fergus?" "The Hosting of the Sidhe":
these are all poems from your anthology that exemplify this
idea, and there are many, many more.
These poems come from a phase in Yeats's career,
the climax of which is this book published in 1899 that I
showed you the cover of in the first class,
The Wind Among the Reeds, with its gorgeous
Celtic aestheticism. Here's the title page,
reminding us, again, that this gorgeous
Celtic aestheticism is published and put up for sale in London,
which is important again. And here's the table of
contents, which you can't read, that has on it,
well, the first poem,
"The Hosting of the Sidhe," "The Song of the Wandering
Aengus," and other famous poems from
Yeats's early career. I'd like to look with you at
"The Song of the Wandering Aengus" as a kind of model of
the kind of poem I'm talking about and its aesthetics.
It's on page 98.
Yeats says:
I went out to the hazel wood [Yeats says--that is to
say, Aengus says; it's a dramatic monologue for
Aengus], Because a fire was in my head,
And cut and peeled a hazel wand, And hooked a berry to a thread
[If you're having problems identifying
iambic pentameter this should--well,
it's not quite pentameter, but if you
want to get an iambic rhythm in your head, this'll do it];
And when white moths were on the wing,
And moth-like stars were flickering out,
I dropped the berry in a stream And caught a little silver
trout. When I had laid it on the floor
I went to blow the fire a-flame, But something rustled on the
floor, And someone called me by my
name: It had become a glimmering girl
With apple blossom in her hair Who called me by my name and ran
And faded through the brightening air.
Though I am old with wandering Through hollow lands and hilly
lands, I will find out where she is
gone, And kiss her lips and take her
hands; And walk among long dappled
grass, And pluck till time and times
are done, The silver apples of the moon,
The golden apples of the sun.
It's rhymed iambic tetrameter,
four beats per line, with some variations.
It is a popular song form in
English. It's the way Puck and other
folk characters speak in Shakespeare.
Its smoothness and its simplicity are associated with
folk forms, perhaps with the condition of enchantment or
trance, into which the speaker,
Aengus, falls. The poem is a fairy tale.
It's the story of Aengus'
longing and quest for union with a fairy girl whom he desires.
Yeats spoke of the poem as a
mad song, maybe not a kind of mad song we would--it's not what
we would think of as a mad song, necessarily.
The poem imagines, through a dramatic character,
Yeats's own coming to poetry, which he represents here both
as the undertaking of a specifically erotic quest and as
a sort of fury in the mind: "a fire was in my head,"
Aengus begins. Yeats wants us to share in,
as we attend to the sound of his poem, a certain state of
enchantment and longing, which includes a feeling of
monotony, as we listen to those repeated phrases and images and
syntactic structures that always seem on the verge of redundance
in this poem. Think about how generalized,
how abstract, how unnatural nature is in this
poem. But then, it's exactly a poem
about nature transformed: the fish who turns into the
glimmering girl, who, like any really marvelous
catch, gets away. The transformation here,
importantly, interrupts the eating of the
fruit; consummation of desire is
deferred. Appetite gets sublimated and at
the same time deferred, held in suspension.
The glimmering girl then calls
Aengus by name. She names him.
She, in a sense, makes him Aengus.
Aengus is the Celtic name,
the Celtic master of love, a certain kind of Irish version
of Apollo. He's also a mortal who ages.
The poem describes a vocational
moment when the poet is called to his calling,
called to his calling in a way that amounts to a kind of
seduction, that lures him out into the woods,
wandering as he follows this fish-woman and fairy girl,
who is a kind of muse, or mother, too.
The quest is without end, it's even without direction.
It has a goal,
however, that's described in that last stanza.
Contrast Yeats's old age and
the freshness of his desire in this poem.
He holds in dream the possibility of satisfied desire,
possession of the beloved; meaning specifically physical
possession of her, which would be an apocalyptic
event, the end of time and times.
Yeats represents that moment of consummation as the plucking of
the silver and the gold apples. Yeats was trained in the occult
disciplines of Theosophy and Gnosticism.
Those traditions merge in his early work with European
symbolism, and also with Irish cultural nationalism.
Here, the gold and silver
apples are specifically alchemical symbols of body and
soul, and a kind of mystical image of earthly paradise.
That's a nice touch.
But don't worry about these
symbols; don't worry about them too much.
Here, as elsewhere in Yeats'
poetry, it's not essential for you to be able to pursue his
occult learning and decode his symbols in order to read his
poetry. Jahan Ramazani,
who is the editor of The Norton and a great Yeatsian,
he himself has decided that all this is too much to explain and
you don't really need it. And fair enough.
The point is simply to recognize that the apples are
occult symbols, which is to say they're not
apples. They are rather images,
symbols, artifacts. And isn't that clear already
from their colors, the material that they're made
of? Gold and silver,
these colors marked them as fashioned, precious objects,
inorganic, and in all these ways beyond time and nature,
growth or decay. When Aengus or Yeats pursue
their desires, the object of desire – that
is, when they pursue a kind of
hoped for unity of being that the merging with the beloved
would constitute – this carries them out of the natural
world into a realm of high art, of symbols.
The realization of desire for this young Yeats is something
only possible in art. In many ways Yeats retained
this aesthetic bias. This is Yeats rather later,
still dressed, however, in his study as an
aesthete and dandy. You can see that wonderful coat
and silk bowtie. He began and ended his career
as a decadent, I suppose;
a reader of Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde.
Nonetheless – Oscar Wilde, a friend of Yeats –
nonetheless, Yeats's poetry does undergo an important and notable
stylistic change. When I said that there's a
story about Yeats's career that makes him out to be an exemplary
modern poet, I had in mind how over the
course of this long career he leaves behind him that idealized
world of late nineteenth-century art for a more fully human,
realist poetry, one that, rhetorically,
strips away Yeats's own poeticisms and locates his
subjects in contemporary politics and history.
This was the kind of
generalized story of Yeats's career.
Pound – Ezra Pound – is Yeats's younger friend.
Pound, you'll see,
keeps turning up in all of these stories.
He had a role in pushing Yeats in the direction in which he
went. He had also a big role in
publicizing Yeats's development. Here's a copy of a letter to
Pound by Yeats when they were both living in London.
This is at the Beinecke among
Pound's papers. Oh, and here's the--This is
Yeats's letter. He's living,
at this point, at Woburn Place,
Yeats is, in London, where one of the bombs went off
in London two summers ago, right outside Yeats's house.
"My Dear Pound,
here is the poem. Many thanks for taking so much
trouble with it. Yours, W.B. Yeats."
Pound goes to work on Yeats,
goes to work on his poetry and helps modernize him,
although I think in lots of ways the influence went just as
much the other way. The period of Pound's influence
coincides with Yeats's significantly titled book
Responsibilities. This is published in 1914,
which is the same year as Frost's North of Boston.
These two books are coming out
at the same moment in London. Some of the poems in this book
dramatize, dramatize and describe the stylistic changes
I'm talking about. For instance,
the short poem, "A Coat."
Here it is; it's in your anthology as well:
I made my song a coat Covered with embroideries
Out of old mythologies From heel to throat;
But the fools caught it, Wore it in the world's eye
As though they'd wrought it. Song, let them take it
For there's more enterprise In walking naked.
Yeats is throwing off his early work as if throwing off a kind
of costume. All that King Goll crap that he
had on, he's tossing it off. The embroidery and decoration,
all that now seems inauthentic, something that,
in fact, Yeats's audience had failed to value properly;
he's complaining here in this poem.
In this short poem, he is referring to the vexed
efforts by himself and his collaborators,
J.M. Synge and Lady Augusta Gregory,
to create an Irish national theater.
Yeats sought a popular audience for his poetry,
in part through his work in the theater, but he became
disenchanted with the theater-going public;
with imitators and detractors, too, all of whom,
as he puts it here, caught at his coat.
This is a poem that declares
nakedness as a poetic value. It's a kind of semi-official
announcement that Yeats is giving up his early manner,
precisely because it seems like a manner and a disguise.
In doing so,
Yeats might have seemed to be moving closer to the Irish
people, in a move something like
Frost's foreswearing of the poetry of dream and elves and
fairies, in favor of a poetry of fact.
And let's keep in mind Frost's
own wish to create a poetry that would reach ordinary people and
would reach all kinds and sorts. Again, it might seem that Yeats
is interested in something like this too and,
again, in this same moment that Frost is publishing his work in
England. But there's a difference in
Yeats. He adopts this ideal of
nakedness precisely as a repudiation of a popular
audience. It's a kind of dare,
demonstrating not just his indifference to the crowd but in
fact his scorn for it. "I'm going to walk naked.
I'm not going to dress for you."
Yeats's early poetry is elite
because it is high, aristocratic,
ideal in character. The middle poetry,
the poetry that begins with the volume Responsibilities,
remains elite; only now, its elitism will be
expressed differently. It will be expressed in a
rhetoric of nakedness, or what Yeats will also call
"coldness."
"The Fisherman":
"The Fisherman" is another poem from this volume that both
comments on and exemplifies the transformation that I'm
describing, the transformation of Yeats's
style and values. It suggests both the difference
between the earlier Yeats and the middle Yeats,
but also, importantly, the kinds of continuity between
them, the ways in which Yeats remained very much the same
poet. Let me read it for you.
Although I can see him
still The freckled man who goes
To a grey place on a hill In grey Connemara clothes
At dawn to cast his flies, It's long since I began
To call up to the eyes This wise and simple man.
All day I'd looked in the face
What I had hoped 'twould be To write for my own race
And the reality; The living men that I hate,
The dead man that I loved, The craven man in his seat,
The insolent unreproved And no knave brought to book
Who has won a drunken cheer, The witty man and his joke
Aimed at the commonest ear, The clever man who cries
The catch-cries of the clown, The beating down of the wise
And great Art beaten down. Well, Yeats begins in scorn of
an audience that's unable to recognize true wisdom and great
art. In scorn of that audience,
he imagines another audience, another audience to write for
and to emulate, an audience represented by the
fisherman. What is the fisherman like?
What does he represent?
What values does he embody?
Grayness – grayness that
suggests the color of a land and a culture, the color of stone,
of peasant clothes. He, the fisherman,
is a solitary figure in a landscape of stone,
stone that is dark, resistant, apparently
non-ideal; that is, real.
Contrast this place, this way of imagining Ireland,
what Ireland means, with the sensual landscape of
Aengus, with the unreality of the world
of that earlier poem. In a sense, the earlier poem,
"The Song of the Wandering Aengus," transformed the Irish
landscape into a place of myth, in the same way that the poem
is describing the transformation of the trout into the girl.
Yeats seems to be reversing
this trick in "The Fisherman," seems to be converting myth back
into reality, the ideal object of desire from
a glimmering girl back into a trout.
The poem represents a kind of – as does the short poem,
"A Coat" – represents a kind of ascetic move,
an active imaginative and rhetorical stripping-down.
The landscape itself in,
here in Yeats's poem, seems naked,
barren, probably un-tillable, and the poetry that Yeats wants
from this place will be, as it seems,
as he goes on to describe, cold and passionate.
Let me finish the poem here.
Maybe a twelvemonth since
Suddenly I began, In scorn of this audience [that
Yeats has been describing, this audience
associated with the Dublin middle class and theater-going
public] Imagining a man,
And his sun-freckled face, And grey Connemara cloth,
Climbing up to a place Where stone is dark under froth,
And the down turn of his wrist When the flies drop in the
stream; A man who does not exist,
A man who is but a dream; And cried, "Before I am old
I shall have written him one Poem maybe, as cold
And passionate as the dawn."
The poetry that Yeats wants from this place,
the place that the fisherman takes him to,
it's going to be cold and passionate, as he describes it.
You can see him,
in a sense – Yeats, cooling the fire in the head of
Aengus at this moment. The poem identifies also cold
and passion with dawn, the moment of awakening,
which is also a moment of coming into reality from dream
and sleep. Yeats--the kind of rhetorical
and stylistic transformation I'm describing identified with
Yeats's modernness, his coming into modernity,
has these qualities and is associated here powerfully with
morning. Importantly,
though, morning and dawn are also seen as moments of passion.
If Aengus is a figure of
passion, so, interestingly, is the fisherman.
It's only what it means to
write a poetry of passion that Yeats is now beginning to
rethink. Passion seems to lie in
coldness rather than heat, lies exactly in the restraining
and disciplining of passion. In this sense,
"The Fisherman" is not, after all, a poem that's very
different from "The Song of the Wandering Aengus."
In fact, Yeats is still writing
about a solitary fisherman. And just as in that earlier
poem, the act of fishing is symbolically resonant.
"The Fisherman" is an image of
man searching the depths of the world for the wisdom that hides
beneath the surface of things.
Fishing is seen here,
as in the earlier poem, as an image of quest and an
image of desire. For all these reasons,
"The Fisherman" is really a re-writing and even a kind of
continuation, rather than a repudiation,
of "The Song of the Wandering Aengus" and the poems from that
period. In fact, as Yeats declares,
the fisherman does not exist. It's a wonderful sentence,
isn't it? "A man who does not exist,
/ a man who is but a dream." Yeats is still writing dream.
The man is not a real man,
the man is a symbol; only this time,
a symbol of the real, a symbol of the actual and
local, of the Irish race and the reality.
And the poetry that he stands for – that the fisherman
stands for – like all of Yeats's poetry,
is a poetry again of symbols. The fisherman is also
representative of the Irish peasantry to whom Yeats turns in
scorn of the urban audience that he had tried to write for in the
theater. This is, again,
not a break with the aristocratic values of the early
poetry but an aligning of those values with an ideal image of
the peasant classes with whom Yeats creates a kind of
imaginative bond against the bourgeois people who seem to
represent the new order of things – modernity and Dublin.
Yeats's sense of modern
history, of the crisis of his moment – this is something we
can describe and explore next time, in "Easter 1916."
Before we finish today,
let me just connect "The Fisherman" and its images of
cold passion to another poem – the elegy for Robert Gregory,
Yeats's friend, Augustus Gregory's son,
who dies in the First World War, an airman.
Yeats here evokes Gregory as a kind of fallen representative of
Irish culture and of aristocratic culture,
in particular, in which art and eloquence and
political and cultural life all co-exist and all combine and
form a passionate heart. Yeats evokes Gregory's death
and sees it in relation to other friends and collaborators of
Yeats's early life, including Lionel Johnson and
Synge and others. This is, again,
Gregory representing a kind of aristocratic elegance and
culture that is juxtaposed to – will be juxtaposed to –
the revolutionary violence that comes to shatter the Irish
capitol in 1916 and in many ways reshapes Yeats's career as he
encounters what he calls the "terrible beauty" of that
explosive rebellion. Well, that's enough for today,
and we'll continue with Yeats on Wednesday.
