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 --- from list bhaskar-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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