Poetry

William Butler Yeats

In William Blake and the
Imagination, Yeats calls his great
mentor a man crying out for a
mythology, and trying to make one
because he could not find one to his
hand. (David A. Ross, William Butler
Yeats. A Literary Reference to His Life
and Work, vii)
Yeats, too, was a man crying out for a
mythology and in the end went
remarkably far in erecting against the
mechanism of the modern universe a
system of meaning that would free the
soul from the drudgery of space and time,
or that would, in his later conception,
plunge the soul into the foul ditch of
experience, there to find redemption in
the ecstasy of its own defiance. (vii)
His body of thought is not a
descriptive account but a symbolic
act. It exemplifies the quest for
meaning; exemplifies also the faith
that there is meaning to be found. In
all of this endeavor, Yeats reminds us
what it means to be human and to be
vast in ones humanity. (vii)
 Byzantium
In the waning days of Byzantium, then,
Yeats found the image of his own era and
a context in which to play out his own
metaphysics. (62)
The scene opens upon Byzantium. Night
has fallen, but there is no sense of rest or
resolution. The images of day recede,
but they remain unpurged; the night
cannot, as in the normal order of things,
release the tension of the day. (62)
The second and third stanzas
respectively represent the two means
the esoteric and the artistic by
which passion delivers humanity from
the antitheses of mortality.
In the second stanza, a figure neither
man nor shade, neither living nor
dead, but superhuman, presents
itself to the visionary eye. (63)
The third stanza is counterpart to the
second. As the second envisions
neither man nor shade, but the
image of the superhuman, so the
third envisions neither bird nor
golden handiwork, but a miracle
that belongs neither to life nor to art,
though produced by the artist. (63)
 Leda and the Swan
Yeatss poems of apocalyptic annunciation
can be arranged in historical sequence:
Leda and the Swan announces the birth of
the classical era that replaced the
Babylonian mathematical starlight; Two
Songs from a Play and Wisdom announce
the birth of the Christian era that replaced
the classical era; The Second Coming
announces the birth of the antithetical era
that will replace the Christian era. (140)
The poem itself is one of Yeatss
signal achievements. It roils with the
vast spiraling of the gyres of history,
and yet the moment of violence is
rendered in all its tactile immediacy
and fluid sexuality: the concurrence
of the eternal and the particular is
flawless. (141)
 Sailing to Byzantium
Yeatss two arch-canonical poems on
the capital city of the Byzantine
Empire, Sailing to Byzantium and
Byzantium, are the exquisite
crystallization of his persistent
longing for spiritual redemption
through the timelessness of art.
(214)
I think that in early Byzantium,
maybe never before or since in
recorded history, religious, aesthetic
and practical life were one, that
architect and artificersthough not, it
may be, poets, for language had been
the instrument of controversy and
must have grown abstractspoke to
the multitude and the few alike.
The painter, the mosaic worker, the worker in
gold and silver, the illuminator of sacred books,
were almost impersonal, almost perhaps without
the consciousness of individual design, absorbed
in their subject-matter and that the vision of a
whole people. They could copy out of old Gospel
books those pictures that seemed as sacred as
the text, and yet weave all into a vast design, the
work of many that seemed the work of one, that
made building, picture, pattern, metalwork of rail
and lamp, seem but a single image [. . .] (215)
 Yeats recognizes [] that all journeys are
metaphors of self-transformation or
preparations for self-transformation. There is
nothing to discover or embrace beyond the
selfs readiness, its welled intensity, its
ability to imagine the terms of its new
beginning. Byzantium, then, is less a place
than a condition of triumph into which the
imagination enters when it has finally thrown
off all sense of its own limitation. (215)
 The Second Coming
One of the most famous poems in
the English language, The Second
Coming is the definitive vision of the
Yeatsian apocalypse. (219)
The underlying mathematical figure of
The Second Coming, as Yeats states in
a lengthy note to the poem, is the cone
or gyre interlocked with its opposite, the
vertex of the one centered upon the base
of the other. This figure defines the
relation not only between subjective and
objective impulses within the individual,
but also within the pattern of history.
(219)
Discussing the work of one of his
contemporaries, Yeats stressed the
symbiosis between the life and the
art of the poet: A poet is by the very
nature of things a man who lives with
entire sincerity, or rather, the better
his poetry the more sincere his life.
His life is an experiment in living and
those that come after have the right
to know it.
Above all it is necessary that the lyric
poets life should be known, that we
should understand that his poetry is
no rootless flower but the speech of
a man, that it is not a little thing to
achieve anything in any art, to stand
alone perhaps for many years, to go
a path no other man has gone, to
accept ones own thought when the
thought of others has the authority of
to give ones life as well as ones
words which are so much nearer to
ones soul to the criticism of the
world. Why should we honour those
that die upon the field of battle, a
man may show as reckless a courage
in entering into the abyss of himself.
 Ezra Pound
Literature, not politics, was his
calling. As poet, translator, editor,
critic, librettist, and dramatist,
drawing on medieval, Italian,
American, English, Chinese, French,
and contemporary traditions, Pound
created works that were as complex
as they were absorbing. (Ira B. Nadel,
CCEP, i)
Before and during that effort [of creating
The Cantos, he produced a series of
innovative lyric and dramatic poems that
were alternately identified as Imagist or
Vorticist but were undeniably modern.
Yet he knew what he was seeking which
a 1946 letter to his American publisher,
James Laughlin, makes clear:
God Damn & buggar the punctuation
The important thing is
for the 1st time
to
emphasize
the articulation
of the thought. (i)
In "A Few Don'ts by an Imagist" (1913), Pound
outlined the new aesthetic: an image was the
presentation of "an intellectual and emotional
complex in an instant of time" treated according to
certain rules:
1. Direct treatment of the "thing," whether
subjective or objective.
2. To use absolutely no word that does not
contribute to the presentation.
3. As regarding rhythm: to compose in sequence of
the musical phrase, not in sequence of a
metronome. (L, 3,4)
In the ABC of Reading (1934), he outlined the
essential properties of this method which
relied on the direct examination of the object
and the invention of a means to render it
more concisely (ABCR, 20). To this end, the
Chinese ideogram, to become integral for The
Cantos, provided Pound with a direct example
of the new objective method. The ideogram,
he explained, "means the thing or the action
or situation, or quality germane to the several
things that it pictures" (ABCR, 21).
The Cantos seeks to undo the hard
categories of drama, satire,
documentary, diaries, hymns, elegies,
epigrams, essay, catalogues and
sermons, to cite only a few of its other
genres. The overlaying of so many
genres has the effect of eliding their
differences, fulfilling Pound's dictum that
literary forms often subvert the
distinction between them.
The poem, an intellectual
autobiography simultaneously
manifesting a history of literature
and culture, also incorporates myth
which mediates the personal into
something unusual. Consequently,
The Cantos is polyphonic in theme
and serial in form, with recurrence
rather than linearity its thrust. (6)
In a Station of the Metro

The apparition of these faces in the

crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.
 LArt, 1910

Green arsenic smeared on an egg-

white cloth,
Crushed strawberries! Come, let us
feast our
eyes.