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?

"I will hammer my thoughts into unity"

Yeats was always Yeats. He was always worried about the tragedy of aging, and wrote his first poem about this at the age of 21. He always struggled with the identity of Ireland and his own Irishness, and searched for a foundation for his country. But was it his country? He was Protestant, from the North, and moved in elite British circles for much of his life. Maybe that's why some of his most embattled poems are about violent events in the Irish struggle for independence and self-determination. At bottom, he searched for a basis on a more fundamental level, and this is what makes him a great poet, really. He looked for a mythology that would give structure to life, not just to the politics of day. Like Blake or Shelley, he decided to assemble his own mythology.

And his pet concerns - with beauty, with the godliness of men and women and their frailty, with the pain of unrequited love, the tragedy of lost things - run through his entire history. As a young poet, he set himself the task: "I will hammer my thoughts into unity." He had a vision, even as young man, of his own destiny, and it had something to do with unity. That meant the mystic goal, which he would later pursue with the Theosophists, of unifying the various parts and faculties of the mind and therefore evolving as a human being, it also meant finding a unifying principle for the world. I can't help but admire this ability to set a goal for himself of the highest order - and pursue it relentlessly. This single-mindedness is the mark of many extraordinary achievers.

Unity: Yeats set out to unify or ground Ireland, and then himself, and then the world. He began as a traditional, nationalist poet, then as a Romantic who sought to find the God in himself, and then as a modernist - but an optimistic one - who sought to reconstruct a fractured world. This quest took him to some strange places, and, over the course of looking at his life and influences, we'll have to ask whether he became a visionary - or whether he slipped off the deep end.

How to Set Up Your Blog

1. Register for an account at Blogger.com. If you have a google account, you can use the same password.
2. Please name the URL of your blog as follows: [your first name & last initial].crackedlookingglass.blogspot.com. The only reason for this is so it will be easy for me to link your blog to the this (central) class blog. And, it will be easy for your classmates to find and read your blog.
3. Choose a template. I picked a dignified one 'cause this is all literary and stuff.
4. Do an initial post, or your blog won't be stored.
5. Then post your first assignment, which should be an answer to the question above. Feel free to drift away from the question to other aspects of the text that interst you. Keep it specific (refer to the texts and criticism). Feel free to put in links, html, whatever. And PLEASE look at other people's blogs.
6. End every assigned post with a couple questions about the reading. Skeptical, probing, specific. Talk back to the author. Or express your confusion.

Okay, that's all.

Assignment for 1/28

When you see this - you guessed it - I'm giving a you an assignment for your post response. The first readings were about Ireland, the Irish background to literature... and a couple early poems by the quintessential Irish Bard, William Butler Yeats. How, in these early poems, do you see Yeats trying to stake out his identity as an Irish poet... and just as a poet? Is there something in his work that reflects the stormy history of Ireland. Review and summarize the readings in your post. Also, bring your blog URL to class for me so I can add a link over to the right.