File spoon-archives/bhaskar.archive/bhaskar_2002/bhaskar.0202, message 163


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 ---



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