Dr.

Richard Clarke LITS3001 Notes Week 04

1

W. B. YEATS “THE SYMBOLISM OF POETRY” (1900)

Here, the Modernist poet and theorist Yeats continues very much in the vein of Coleridge, Shelley and
company by arguing that poetry calls “into outer life some portion of the divine life, or of the buried
reality” (31). The realist trend in literature – which is the product of what Yeats calls the “scientific
movement” (31) – encouraged, in his view, a form of literature “always tending to lose itself in
externalities of all kinds” and resulting in what he terms “picturesque writing, in word-painting” (31).
However, there is another tendency in literature, the propensity to “dwell upon the element of evocation,
of suggestion, upon what we call the symbolism in great writers” (31) which he perfected in his own
poetry.
Yeats explains symbols as follows:
All sounds, all colours, all forms, either because of their preordained energies or
because of long association, evoke indefinable and yet precise emotions, or, as I prefer
to think, call down among us certain disembodied powers, whose footsteps over our
hearts we call emotions. (33)
Poetry, like art, has its origin in these lofty emotions even as it has an emotional effect upon its reader:
poets, he writes, “are continually making and unmaking mankind” (33). Indeed, every concrete affair or
achievement has its origin also in emotion: “all those things that seem useful or strong, armies, moving
wheels, modes of architecture” (33), etc. are the product of “some mind long ago” (33) which “had . . .
given itself to some emotion . . . and shaped sounds or colours or forms, or all of these, into a musical
relation, that their emotion might live in other minds” (33). In short, emotion is not the effect of life, it is
the source of all life and achievement. Yeats doubts whether the “crude circumstance of the world,
which seems to create all our emotions, does more than reflect, as in multiplying mirrors, the emotions
that have come to solitary men in moments of poetical contemplation” (33-34). The reason for this is
that “unless we believe that outer things are the reality, we must believe that the gross is the shadow of
the subtle” (34).
This view of poetry leads Yeats to suggest that there is need for a corresponding “manner” (34)
of poetry, a
return to the way of our fathers, a casting out of descriptions of nature for the sake of
nature, of the moral law for the sake of the moral law, a casting out of all anecdotes and
of . . . brooding over scientific opinion . . . and of that vehemence that would make us do
or not do certain things. (34)
Yeats also advocates the casting out of “those energetic rhythms, as of a man running, which are the
invention of the will with its eyes always on something to be done or undone” (34) and their replacement
by “wavering, meditative, organic rhythms, which are the embodiment of the imagination, that neither
desires nor hates because it has done with time, and only wishes to gaze upon some reality, some
beauty” (34).
In short, a “change of style” (34) in this way is the result of a “change in substance” (34) and a
“return to imagination” (34), that is, to the “understanding that the laws of art, which are the hidden laws
of the world, can alone bind the imagination” (34). Acknowledging this would make it impossible for
anyone to “deny the importance of form . . . for although you can expound an opinion, or describe a
thing, when your words are not quite well chosen, you cannot give a body to something that moves
beyond the senses, unless your words are as subtle, as complex, as full of mysterious life, as the body of
a flower or of a woman” (34). Great poetry crafted in this way possesses “perfections that escape
analysis, . . . subtleties that have a new meaning every day” (35).