Date: Thu, 28 Feb 2002 10:09:20 +0000 From: Mervyn Hartwig <mh-AT-jaspere.demon.co.uk> Subject: Re: BHA: Re: Aesthetics and ethics Dear Carrol, Thanks for this. You (and Gary) have certainly made out a good case that Yeats needs excusing. Well, let's not excuse him then except insofar as his poetry can be 'appropriated' for non-vile ends. Mervyn Carrol Cox <cbcox-AT-ilstu.edu> writes >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 --- --- from list bhaskar-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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