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.