File spoon-archives/bhaskar.archive/bhaskar_2002/bhaskar.0202, message 146


Date: Tue, 26 Feb 2002 12:04:33 -0600
From: Carrol Cox <cbcox-AT-ilstu.edu>
Subject: Re: BHA: Re: Aesthetics and ethics


I'm no expert on Yeats, and his poetry perhaps should be read as
establishing the ironic distancing (as in Browning?) of writer from the
character who speaks the poem. I can't quite see it.

	The Leaders of the Crowd

They must to keep their certainty accuse
All that are different of a base intent;
Pull down established honour; hawk for news
Whatever their loose fantasy invent
And murmur it with bated breath, as though
The abounding gutter had been Helicon
Or calumny a song. How can they know
Truth flourishes where the student's lamp has shone,
And there alone, that have no solitude?
So the crowd come they care not what may come,
They have loud music, hope every day renewed
And heartier loves; that lamp is from the tomb.
		(1921)

Tell that to the Haymarket hanged or to the former Czarist general,
threatened with hanging if he did not renounce the Revolution, who
proclaimed, "I die a bolshevik." Yeats _did_ write _books_, not
collections of disconnected poems, and this poem is the ninth in the
volume, _Michael Robartes and the Dancer_, preceded by (5) "Easter
1916," (6) "Sixteen Dead Men," (7) "The Rose Tree," and (8) "On a
Political Prisoner." It would seem to undercut, quite unironically, the
claim in the first of these five poems, that

		All changed, changed utterly:
		A terrible beauty is born,

And underline (now unqualified) the lines which follow immediately after
"beauty is born":

	That woman's days were spent
	In ignorant good-will,
	Her nights in argument
	Until her voice grew shrill.

This is essentially a repetition of the blindsiding of democratic
politics performed by Plato when he twists the argument of Thrasymachus
to apply to individuals rather than classes. Those who offer to give
voice to the "crowd" are shrill, not beautiful, except in death -- for,
afterall, "England may keep faith / For all that is done and said."

And this too reflects Yeats's own response to the claim made by Keats
(and affirmed by Mervyn), for "Sailing to Byzantium" is, among other
things, an answer to _Ode on a Nightingale_:

	Caught in that sensual music all neglect
	Monuments of unageing intellect.

And

	Consume my heart away; sick with desire
	And fastened to a dying animal
	It knows not what it is; and gather me
	Into the artifice of eternity.

And 

	Once out of nature I shall never take
	My bodily form from any natural thing . . . .

Truth and beauty only in here in frozen beauty ("artifice of eternity"
"golden bird") -- that is in death, in that "lonely impulse of delight"
which freezes the airman for all time in the work of art which he has
made of his life. That work of art happened, of course, to carry with it
the deaths of many others, others against whom he had nothing negative
to say, and who just perhaps (in fact probably) were dying not for that
lonely minute of delight but for the reasons Tobin inaccurately ascribed
to Yeats's airman -- i.e. for some reason (if only the cheers of the
crowd) external to their own inward turning focus.

I really feel that Yeats certainly needed an excuse. In fact Pound's
vicious politics were vicious only in their perverted focus, not in
their initial drive, which was for human happiness, not the artist's
lonely self-satisfaction. If one chooses to back off a bit from Pound's
immediate occasions (as Mervyn backs off from Yeats's immediate
occasion), then the vilest passages in _Rock-Drill_ or _Thrones_ point
back, not to the death camps but to Pound's earlier response to World
War I:

	Died some, pro patria,
			non "dulce" non "et decor" . . .
	walked eye-deep in hell
	believing in old men's lies, then unbelieving

And

			V
	There died a myriad,
	And of the best, among them,
	For an old bitch gone in the teeth,
	For a botched civilization,

	Charm, smiling at the good mouth,
	Quick eyes gone under earth's lid,

	For two gross of broken statues,
	For a few thousand battered books.
	  (Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (Life and Contacts)			

It is also worth noting that those "leaders of the crowd" at whom Yeats
sneers were among the few in Europe (outside of Rosa Luxemberg, William
Liebknect, and the bolsheviks) who opposed that slaughter.

Carrol


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