Rex Murphy discusses Yeats and suggests his poetry is, in some sense, more present for our times than that of, say, Pound or Eliot. I am not sure that's really true -- the Cantos seem admirably suited to our time.
And in fairness, our time shades back to the past in curious ways; who would have imagined boys from Canada fighting to civilize Afghanistan in 2008? (Yes, I know I support the war but it does startle to realize how the past is the present)(also, my language 'boys' and 'civilize' is for effect -- I know there are lots of brave women in Afghanistan (three died last week) and I know Afghanistan has an old and established civilization -- Alexander went there).
Anyway, I drift from the subject -- Murphy has done a fine job and the article is worth reading, and when the article is done, its wise to reread the texts the article is based on.
The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats
Rex Murphy
A shudder in the loins engenders there
The broken wall, the burning roof and tower
And Agamemnon dead.
There you have in three lines, two and a half more precisely, a commanding summary of the myth and history of the Trojan war.
Both the myth and the history are the originating fountain of all Western literature. As the scale is to music, so the story of Troy is to all poetry.
Only a master poet can, in a handful of words, re-summon some of the original energy of that great fable, re-instate it as a living presence in a world centuries beyond its primal poetic exposition (in Homer) as William Butler Yeats did with Leda and the Swan.
What a bridging, what a connection (echoing E.M. Foster's famous injunction) he achieves between the (mythical) copulation of Zeus and Leda and the consequent razing of Troy and the fatal uxoricide of the great captain Agamemnon. So much in so little.
There is in these lines also the grandeur of the epic, the highest poetry according to the ancients. Very much of Yeats has the true epic energy (though he eschewed, or the age he lived in was upropitious to, the epic form). No other modern poet — from Wordsworth onward — has such frequent access to the sublime.
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned
-- From The Second Coming
There is, further, the element of the premonitory "that warning voice" (Milton) in Yeats.
From The Second Coming, or Meditations in a Time or Civil War, or a dozen others, we hear the accents of prophecy, of violence to be "loosed" upon the world.
There sounds in many of Yeats's poems a terrifying apprehension ("the nightmare Rides upon sleep") of the world and history in shock, a precognition of the worst that mankind can (and has) done.
We read Yeats in the Holocaust, in Rwanda, Darfur, 9/11 — he is "alert" as only the rarest poets are.
Troy and Agamemnon are present. History is never done.
Yeats is very much the poet as seer. He is in this sense a throwback, or a last avatar, of (again) an originating idea of the poet and poetry: a daemon or god-inhabited vessel who "speaks" with a truth beyond the merely or purely mortal.
Which cues to another aspect of Yeats's pre-eminence. Northrop Frye wrote once that listening to Mozart was like listening to the voice of Music itself. So with Yeats, there are times when reading him it is as if you are hearing Poetry's own voice.
He shares this property with so few others — Shakespeare in many lines, Milton in some, a gathering of a perfect lyrics by lucky lesser poets, the authors of so many great lines and passages of the King James Bible.
With Yeats at his best, then, and he is at his best profusely — not a costive poet like Eliot, or a cranky/spotty one like Pound — we encounter the very essence of what we mean by poetry, by art and the aesthetic sense.
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1 comment:
love Rex Murphy (and Yeats, too)!
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