Yeats Papers

Generally, although my comments may seem critical, I was pleased with these ambitious papers. The choice of topics was very interesting - some very serious topics with scholarly potential.

The real challenge is framing the topic correctly. That is, setting out what you want to explore, finding a way that you can reasonably and thoroughly explore it, and - the payoff - emphasizing why this is an addition to the way we think of Yeats. There is a real danger of ending up saying things that most any Yeats reader would already agree with. So, most of your topics need some reframing.

Very few of you "justified" your topic in light of "what people usually say" about Yeats. This sounds hard, because it makes it seem like you have to know all Yeats scholarship, but actually it's nowhere near as hard as you would think. It's part of the literary critical form.

So, if your grade is lower than you expected, it's because I'm trying to motivate you to really learn the literary critical form. Maybe you'll never become a professional literary scholar, but the principle applies to almost any kind of writing you might do. You have to observe certain formalities.

Your revisions are due at the last day of school, May 12 (another discrepancy on the syllabus), so you'd be well advised to work on it in dribs... a little at a time, since you'll be very busy with Ulysses.

Note the revised dates for presentations due to my illness today.

Cheers, Robin.

WELCOME TO BLOOMSDAY, JUNE 4, 1904

I WILL NOT GIVE SPECIFIC PROMPTS FOR YOUR JOYCE BLOGS. I don't want to direct your reading that much, but you know what to do. Analyze, brainstorm, be specific, make connections, quote, free associate... GRAPPLE with the text as each of these three characters grapples with their internal contradictions.

What characters?

Leopold Bloom, half-Hungarian-Jewish, and no one will let him forget it. Deeply in love with a wife he has not touched in ten years. Scarcely orthodox in his habits. Sensual, enjoying the physical body, yet questioning and well-read.

Stephen Daedalus ("the mockery of your name - and ancient Greek!" Mulligan mocks). Aware, as Yeats was, of his destiny, but nowhere near as sure that he will get there. Struggling for freedom from the past, like the two sons he echoes: Telemachus and Icarus. Struggling between art and religion.

Molly Bloom, as sensual in her inner life as her husband. Seemingly so cruel that she wants her husband to see the evidences of her afternoon with her lover. Yet so tender that she thinks lovingly of the first time she made love with him. Craving sexual pleasure fiercely, her mind flits from thing to thing.

Joyce's book was roundly rejected by critics upon its obscure publication. Irish, established figures such as Yeats's friend George Moore implied that Joyce was a fellow of no breeding, who thought dirty words were a substitute for good literature. Ulysses, whose name mocks the author for his lack of knowledge of Greek, was rescued by admiring Americans: Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot. Eliot felt that Joyce had transformed the novel by grounding it in myth. Pound admired Joyce's learning, heaping scorn on anyone who did not see the unknown writer's genius. He helped Joyce publish the book, critics set to unraveling its many puzzles, and today it is the Citizen Kane of novels, regularly topping "best of" lists.

What's that above? It's the Martello Tower at Sandycove where Joyce stayed for a few nights with two friends, one of whom resembled the garrulouos Buck Mulligan, while the other was a well-fed Englishman. Art imitates life as closely as it can in this complex work, like the wine that Jesus turns back into water in Mulligan's humorous and blasphemous rhyme. But that's still to come...

Post with energy and imagination on each section of this masterwork.

Mr. Eliot's Sunday Morning Service (The Waste Land)

for 2/13

Remember to use the revised syllabus. Presentation assignments to the right (scroll down).

Read Eliot's "The Waste Land" in full. Please print it out and bring it to class. Yeats paper due. No additional posts are due today.

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.