for 2/11.

Read the assigned poems and "Yeats: Myth and Philosophy" on Blackboard. Post on the poems, but your post should be the first step towards your paper and may encompass other poems as well. Your paper is a critical study, and therefore, you should do the following things:

1. Establish the necessity for your essay - why are you presuming on the reader's time with this commentary on Yeats
2. Comment on other, similar studies... this will require a little research. How is yours adding something. This isn't as hard as it seems... it's something of a ritual or formality.
3. Pursue your analysis of the poems, connecting your particular approach to a broader view of Yeats's poetics and modernism in general. You don't have to agree with the view I've put forth in this blog or in class, but you should show how a certain aspect of the poet's work may change the way we see him. In this lies the value of a critical study.
4. You don't necessarily have to "prove" some heavy-handed point. Instead, your piece can be an exploration of an aspect of this poet, perhaps seen through the lens of another thinker. You should stick with the subject, but your conclusion may contain questions as well as answers.
5. Avoid obvious, general topics, such as Yeats and the church. Instead, look for an approach that gives you a task, a way of reading Yeats afresh: "Yeats' metaphors for the body"; "'Common' Irish Women versus Heroic Female Figures in Yeats"; "Artificiality and Naturalness in the 'Byzantium' poems"; "Contemporary figures Yeats refers to by name - and those he alludes to obliquely"... Find your own - whatever intrigues you: this is just to give you a sense of the possibilities.

This will require some outside research, and I strongly suggest you work on it this weekend, since it is due Wed. of next week. I also suggest that you e-mail me with your plan - I will e-mail you back with suggestions and comments. If you like, include several ideas. Several people have already done this. I suggest Harold Bloom's book Yeats or Helen Vendler's studies... You may want to use the databases (accessible from my.newschool.edu) to find articles. Again, the criticism is not so much a source of ideas as a background to your own ideas. You should not quote too heavily from the poems... focus on specific lines: indent and single-space quotes. Include a "works cited" page in MLA format. E-mail me with any questions or concerns!

For 2/6

We will have class on 2/19. I didn't realize that this Tuesday has the M/W schedule. I'll give you a revised schedule soon.

Read the assigned poems and the essay. Obviously reflect on Yeats's progress, both as a stylist and as a thinker, and its relationship to his life, the influences Ellmann write of, his advancing age, etc. By now you should be working on a theme in Yeats's poetry which, in your paper, will be connected to his philosophical and aesthetic evolution. You should post with that theme in mind (or several themes, if you're not ready to commit yet).

Paleo-modernism and Oppositions

If Eliot's ideas seem confusing, it's because they are. Eliot, following F.H. Bradley, was a monist. This is one of the most slippery ideas in philosophy. Monists, the original being Spinoza, believed that reality is only composed of a single substance. Distinctions between substances are essentially an illusion. For Spinoza, God was everything, which strangely led contemporaries to call him an atheist.

Nietzsche said that all of Western history had been formed by a single illusion, started by Plato - that of the difference between mind and body. In "Among School Children" Yeats mentions the Platonic idea that we all began as whole but were condemned to division. From the original wholeness, there was division. What divisions?

mind body
Dionysus Apollo
soul body
universal particular
reality imagination
science religion

and many, many more. Nietzsche thought that, history being circular, these divisions would at length be rejoined. And the paleo-modernists made this their project, whether they knew it or not.

Henry James and W.B. Yeats both dealt in these opposites, but had opposite life stories, in a way. James began as a writer of realist fiction and turned into a symbolist writer. His late books, his best work, are also maddeningly obscure. Yeats began as a symbolist poet, then migrated in a realist direction, then transformed himself again.

Realism? Shaw, Flaubert, Frank Norris, Zola... Realism and symbolism, as oppositions, became so absolute that you could divide this paper (if this were a piece of paper) into two columns and list the resulting binaries:

content form
objectivity subjectivity
conscious unconscious
time eternal
immanence transcendence
empirical science epistemology
prose poetry
encyclopedic symbolic
description myth
fact invention
life art
laboratory labyrinth (a classic illustrative pedagogical device)

Get the idea? There is little room for compromise between these divisions, but compromise is not what paleo-modernism is about.

Yeats's early works are romantic: "The Wanderings of Oisin" are sheer myth, journey, Romanticism. But he got involved with the French poet Mallarme in the 1890s. Earlier he had written Romantic poems that delighted the novelist Robert Louis Stevenson. Then he became a symbolist poet in the 1890s. Yeats's heroes, like "The Man Who Dreamed of Fairyland" and Red Hanrahan, deserted the real world for the world of imagination. But even then, he considered the imagination a mixed blessing. He knew, unlike the European Romantics, that the life of the imagination might mean he would cease to be human, never live at all, become addicted to escapism. The imagination was incompatible with normality and responsibility.

Yeats then became a more realist poet, around 1912. His verse became more definite and hard-edged. He wrote about political themes, used images of rocks and thorns. But at the same time he wrote of Shaw, the leading realist of the Anglo-Irish stage, that he had appeared to him in a dream as a sewing machine that clicked and smiled perpetually. Just as he became a realist, adopting plainness and clarity, he condemned realist optimism in his prose.

Yeats never came to terms with the opposition between the real world and the imagination. He turned to "science": astrology, necromancy, alchemy, theosophy... These were obsolete poetic sciences. He turned to a study of trance states and dream states as Carl Jung did at the same time. These experiments led him to "A Vision," a book written out of dictation that his wife took from spirits.

More about this, Yeats's strangest work, soon.

The four phases of Yeats's career were:
1. The Romantic or Preraphaelite
2. The Symbolist (1890s)
3. The Realist (1912-)
4. The paleo-modernist (1920s and 1930s)

Check out the audio track on Ben's blog

Song by Harry McClintock.

This song has a humorous likeness to some of the fantasy or folkloric elements in Yeats's early verse.

Assignment for Februrary 4th

As before, pick several poems for close reading and try to piece out Yeats's developing influences, whether Romantic, Preraphaelite, or an emerging modernism. When looking at The Seven Woods we saw a Yeats who is willing to allow antinomies to remain unresolved, showing the negative capability prized as much by modern critics as by the Romantics who coined the term. Does he display this faculty in these poems? Is the somewhat younger Yeats more effective in any way?

Eliot, Williams, Paleo-Modernism - and magic

Critics of today are fairly hard on classic or "high" modernism - Henry James, Faulkner, Eliot, Yeats. Why? Modernism has come under attack for being cold in its formal concerns (referred to as "inhumanism"), for being politically conservative (but Eliot said that conservatism as a political philosophy was an intellectual vacuum), and even for having associations with fascism. And you can see where this comes from. Eliot converted to Anglicanism late in life. Figures like Eliot and Yeats certainly come across as traditionalists, Pound eventually became nuttily enamoured with Mussolini, in whose defense he gave radio broadcasts in Rome, and the geometric lines of architectural modernism are reminiscent of a kind of rigid, positivistic cast of mind associated with fascism.

But the mark of fascism is a sort of "absolutism" philosophically, a belief in a single, fixed view of reality. This - I submit - is more characteristic of Williams-style neo-modernism than paleo-modernism. The paleo-modernists were relativists of the most extreme stripe.

Williams and the Williams point of view has won, in the long run. Williams' "objectivism" set the pace for contemporary poetry and set the scene for numerous "objectivist" styles - and then the "language"-oriented poets. To say nothing of the dominance of neo-modernism in the other arts.

Williams said: "Take the concepts embodied by T.S. Eliot. They are completely worthless." He associated Eliot with Hellenism or with the Renaissance, a time of slavish imitation of classical models. Eliot, for Williams, disliked new ideas, and refused to break the classic forms. He was backward, not politically, but morally. In the London Times, Eliot's work was referred to as "inhumanism."

But what Williams called "unbound thinking" may have derived from a philosophical absolutism. In an attack on modernist poetics, Williams said that one must draw a strict line between true and false values. He believed there are truths - absolute truths - which are independent of relations with other truths, connotations, interpretations. They're just truths - isolated. He dislikes similes because they make reality dependent on the relationships between things. "It approaches the impossible to arrive at an understanding of a thing." His vocabulary and beliefs are objectivist and absolutist philosophically: things exist objectively and independently. This is a throwback to Platonic realism, the very classicism that Williams scorned.

Eliot? He studied with William James - Henry James's brother. In his Ph.D. dissertation , he said:

• "culture is human nature; reality is its product" (i.e. reality does not pre-exist culture)
• "reality is a convention"
• "no idea can be wrong"

What do these extraordinary statements mean? Eliot believed that all reality depended on point of view; the point of view resulted in the reality. This is a form of idealism, meaning the idea that "mental things alone are real." Eliot thought the chief problem with philosophy was a problem with its language. "The typical explainer," Eliot said, "assumes that his explanation is independent of his point of view. But every explanation can be shown to be correct from some point of view. Even schizophrenia is a philosophical position, not a disease." There is no criteria to determine what is true and what is an error. While every theory is an illusion, every theory is also true. An explanation is inadequate but moves toward adequacy as it takes into account more perspectives and more of the relations with other explanations. Only in relation to other things can any proposed "thing" be said to exist. This, you'll note:

• is the opposite of Williams' position. Williams hated similes. Eliot liked them.

Eliot thought philosophers created problems by asking questions that do not arise. In other words, Plato's core metaphysical question, "What is there?", would have been answered by Eliot's teacher Quine, "What there is." Eliot said,

• "reality is a theory which has succeeded." This summarizes Eliot's philosophy, but still might be a bit confusing. Reality is the product of ideas, even though we're not aware of them.
  
• Eliot said of Henry James, "He had a mind so fine no idea could enter there." Ordinarily this would sound like an insult; but it was the highest compliment. Posing questions such as "What is there?" was an unnecessary use of ideas. James showed the complexity of many perspectives, free of ideation.
  
• post-philosophers like Richard Rorty agree: philosophers work is unnecessary. It is better, actually, to live in the world (even though we create this world through our beliefs).
  

What does this have to do with Yeats? Well, think of the power this gives language. Poets, unlike philosophers, know that they create reality with language. Therefore, for paleo-modernists, reality is perspectival - depends on your theories, your point of view, where you're coming from. They can dance around between various possible realities.

For Williams, reality is something we ought to try and approach, and we shouldn't let language get in the way.

Yeats spoke of a "counter-Renaissance" in Ireland. His modernism and perspectivism, along with Eliot's, was starkly opposed to the Platonism of the Renaissance. It didn't entail a belief in things, but rather, given the fact that nothing really exists until language creates it, allowed the poet to play around with this creative power. Much like the magician figure Yeats admired as a kid.

Assignment for 1/30

Respond in detail to the poems, picking several to read more closely. In class I will ask you to highlight those poems. Remark on Yeats's middle style as a resolution of the polarity discussed in Ellmann's account of the young poet. How did Yeats manage, through poetic style, to "hammer his thoughts into unity," and what sort of unity resulted? What is "modern" about this middle style?