YEATS AS AN EXAMPLE
By W. H. Auden
ONE
drawback, and not the least, of practising any art is that it becomes very
difficult to enjoy the works of one’s fellow artists, living or dead, simply
for their own sakes.
When
a poet, for instance, reads a poem written by another, he is apt to be less
concerned with what the latter actually accomplished by his poem than with the
suggestions it throws out upon how he, the reader, may solve the poetic
problems which confront him now. His judgments of poetry, therefore, are rarely
purely aesthetic; he will often prefer an inferior poem from which he can learn
something at the moment to a better poem from which he can learn nothing. This
gap between his evaluations and those of the pure critic is all the wider in
the case of his immediate predecessors. All generations overlap, and the young
poet naturally looks for and finds the greatest help in the work of those whose
poetic problems are similar to his because they have experiences in common. He
begins, therefore, with an excessive admiration for one or more of the mature
poets of his time. But as he grows older, he becomes more and more conscious of
belonging to a different generation faced with problems that his heroes cannot
help him to solve, and his former hero-worship, as in other spheres of life, is
all too apt to turn into an equally excessive hostility and contempt. Those of
us who, live myself, have learned, as we think, all we can, and that is a good
deal, from Yeats, are tempted, to be more conscious and more critical of those
elements in his poems with which we are not in sympathy than we ought to be.
Our criticisms may sometimes be objectively correct, but the subjective
resentment with which we make them is always unjust. Further, as long as we
harbor such a resentment, it will be a dangerous hindrance to our own poetic
development, for, in poetry as in life, to lead one’s own life means to relive
the lives of one’s parents and, through them, of all one’s ancestors; the duty
of the present is neither to copy nor to deny the past but to resurrect it.
I
shall not attempt, therefore, in this paper, to answer such questions as, “How
good a Poet is Yeats? Which are his best poems and why”?–that is the job of
better critics than I and of posterity–but rather to consider him as a
predecessor whose importance no one will or can deny, to raise, that is to say,
such questions as, “What were the problems which faced Yeats as a poet as
compared with ours? How far do they overlap? How far are they different? In so
far as they are different, what can we learn from the way in which Yeats dealt
with his world, about how to deal with our own?”
Let
me begin with the element in his work which seems most foreign to us, his
cosmology, his concern with the occult. Here, I think, is a curious fact. In
most cases, when a major writer influences a beginner, that influence extends
to his matter, to his opinions as well as to his manner–think of Hardy, or
Eliot, or D. H. Lawrence; yet, though there is scarcely a lyric written to-day
in which the influence of his style and rhythm is not detectable, one
whole side of Yeats, the side summed up in the Vision, has left
virtually no trace.
However
diverse our fundamental beliefs may be, the reaction of most of us to all that
occult is, I fancy, the same: How on earth, we wonder, could a man of Yeats’s
gifts take such nonsense seriously? I have a further bewilderment, which may be
due to my English upbringing, one of snobbery. How would Yeats, with his
great aesthetic appreciation of aristocracy, ancestral houses, ceremonious
tradition, take up something so essentially lower-middle class–or should I say
Southern Californian–so ineluctably associated with suburban villas and clearly
unattractive faces? A. E. Housman’s pessimistic stoicism seems to me nonsense
too, but at least it is a kind of nonsense that can be believed by a
gentleman–but mediums, spells, the Mysterious Orient–how embarrassing. In fact,
of course, it is to Yeats’s credit, and an example to me, that he ignored such
considerations, nor, granted that his Weltans-chauung was false, can we
claim credit for rejecting what we have no temptation to accept, nor deny that
the poetry he wrote involving it is very good? What we should consider, then,
is firstly, why Celtic mythology in his earlier phases, and occult symbolism in
his latter, should have attracted Yeats when they fail to attract us; secondly,
what are the comparable kinds of beliefs to which we are drawn and why;
thirdly, what is the relation between myth, belief, and poetry?
Yeats’s
generation grew up in a world where the great conflict was between the Religion
of Reason and the Religion of Imagination, objective truth and subjective
truth, the Universal and the Individual.
Further,
Reason, Science, the general, seemed to be winning and Imagination, Art, and
the individual on the defensive. Now in all conflicts it is the side which
takes the offensive that defines the issues which their opponents have to
defend, so that when scientists said, “Science is knowledge of reality, Art is
a fairyland,” the artists were driven to reply, “Very well, but fairies are
fun, science is dull.” When the former said, “Art has no relation to life,” the
latter retorted, “Thank God.” To the assertion that “every mind can recognize
the absolute truth of science, but the values of art are purely relative, an
arbitrary affair of individual taste,” came back the counterclaim, “Only the
exceptional individual matters.”
Thus,
if we find Yeats adopting a cosmology apparently on purely asthetic grounds, i.e.,
not because it is true but because it is interesting; or Joyce attempting to
convert the whole of existence into words; or even a dialectician like Shaw,
after the most brilliant and devastating criticism of the pretensions of
scientists, spoiling his case by being a and espousing Damarckism, we must see
their reactions, I think if we are to understand them, in terms of a polemical
situation in which they accepted they probably could do nothing else–the
antithesis between reason and imagination which the natural sciences of their
time forced upon them, only reversing, with the excessive violence of men
defending a narrow place against superior numbers, the value signs of each
side.
Our
situation is somewhat different. The true natural sciences like physics and
chemistry no longer claim to explain the meaning of life (that presumption has
passed to the so-called Social Sciences nor–at least since the Atom Bomb–would
any one believe them if they did. The division of which we are aware is not
between Reason and Imagination but between the good and evil Will, not between
objectivity and subjectivity but between the integration of thought and feeling
and their dissociation, not between the individual and the masses but between
the social person and the impersonal state.
Consequently
the dangers that beset us are different, we are unlikely to believe something
because it would be fun to believe it; but we are very likely to do one of two
things, either to say that everything is relative, that there is no absolute
truth, or that those who do not hold what we believe to be absolute reject it
out of malice.
When
two people today engage in an argument, each tends to spend half of his time
and energy not in producing evidence to support his point of view but in looking
for the hidden motives which are causing his opponent to hold his. If they lose
their tempers, instead of saying, “You are a fool,” they say, “You are a wicked
man.”
No
one now asserts that art ought not to describe immoral persons or acts; but
many assert that it must show those on the right side as pefectly moral and
those on the wrong as completely immoral An artist today is less likely than
his predecessors to claim that his profession is supremely important but he is
much more likely to sacrifice his artistic integrity for economic or political
reward.
To
return from life to poetry: any poet today, even if he deny importance of dogma
to life, can see how useful myths are to poetry–how much, for instance, they
helped Yeats to make his private experiences public and his vision of public
events personal. He knows, too, that in poetry all dogmas become myths; that
the aesthetic value of the poem is the same whether the poet and or the reader
actively believe what it says or not. He is apt then to look around for some
myth–any myth, he thinks, will do–to serve the same purpose for himself. What
he overlooks is that the only kind of myth which will do for him must have one
thing in common with believed dogma, namely, that the relation of the former to
the poet, as of the latter to the soul, must be a personal one. The Celtic
legends Yeats used were woven into his childhood–he really went to seances, he
seriously studied all those absurd books. You cannot use a Weltanschauung like
Psychoanalysis or Marxism or Christianity as a poetic myth unless it involves
your emotions profoundly, and, if you have not inherited it, your emotions will
never become involved unless you take it more seriously than as a mere myth.
Yeats,
like us, was faced with the modern problem, ie., of living in a society in
which men are no longer supported by tradition without being aware
of it, and in which, therefore, every individual who wishes to bring order and
coherence into the stream of sensations, emotions, and ideas entering his
consciousness, from without and within, is forced to do deliberately for
himself what in previous ages had been done for him by family, custom, church,
and state, namely the choice of the principles and presuppositions in terms of
which he can make sense of his experience. There are, of course, always
authorities in each field, but which expert he is to consult and which he is to
believe are matters on which he is obliged to exercise his own free choice.
This is very annoying for the artist as it takes up much time which he would
greatly prefer to spend on his proper work, where he is a professional and not
an amateur.
Because Yeats accepted the fact that we have lost the old nonchalance of the hand, being critics who but half create,
Timid,
entangled, empty and abashed
Lacking
the countenance of our friends,
accepted it as a
working condition and faced its consequences, he is an example to all who come
after him. That is one reason why he may be called a major poet. There are
others.
The
difference between major and minor poetry has nothing to do with the difference
between better and worse poetry. Indeed it is frequently the case that a minor
poet produces more single poems which seem flawless than a major one, because
it is one of the distinguishing marks of a major poet that he continues to
develop, that the moment he has learnt how to write one kind of poem, he goes
on to attempt something else, new subjects, new ways of treatment or both, an
attempt in which he may quite possibly fail. He invariably feels, as Yeats puts
it, “the fascination of what’s difficult”; or, in another poem,
I
made my song a coat
Covered
with embroideries
Out
of old mythologies
From
heel to throat;
But
the fools caught it,
Wore
it in the world’s eyes
As
though they’d wrought it.
Song,
let them take it,
For
there’s more enterprise
In
walking naked.
Further
the major poet not only attempts to solve new problems, but the problem he
attacks are central to the tradition, and the lines along which he attacks
them, while they are his own, are not idiosyncratic, but produce results which
are available to his successors. Much as I admire his work, I consider Hopkins
a minor poet, and one of my reasons for thinking so is that his attempt to
develop a rhetoric to replace the Tennysonian rhetoric is too eccentric, the
proof of which is that he cannot influence later poets in any fruitful way;
they can only imitate him. Yeats on the other hand has effected changes which
are of use to every poet. His contributions are not, I think, to new subject
matter, nor to the ways in which poetic material can be organized–where Eliot
for instance has made it possible for English poetry to deal with all the
properties of modern city life, and to write poems in which the structure is
musical rather than logical. Yeats sticks to the conventional romantic
properties and the traditional step-by-step structure of stanzaic verse. His
main legacies to us are two. First, he transformed a certain kind of poem, the
occasional poem, from being either an official performance of impersonal
virtuosity or a trivial vers de societe into a serious reflective poem
of at once personal and public interest.
A
poem such as In Memory of Major Robert Gregory is something new and
important in the history of English poetry. It never loses the personal note of
a man speaking about his personal friends in a particular setting–in Adonais,
for instance both Shelley and Keats disappear as people–and at the same
time the occasion and the characters acquire a symbolic public significance.
Secondly,
Yeats realised regular stanzaic poetry, whether reflective or lyrical, from
iambic monotony; the Elizabethans did this originally for dramatic verse, but
not for lyric or elegiac. Thus:
What
youthful mother, a shape upon her lap
Honey
of generation had betrayed,
And
that must sleep, shriek, struggle to escape
As
recollection or the drug decide,
Would
think her son, did she but see that shape
With
sixty or more winters on its head,
A
compensation for the pang of his birth,
Or
the uncertainty of his setting forth?
Or take this:
Acquaintance;
companion;
One
dear brilliant woman;
The
best endowed, the elect
All
by their youth undone,
All,
all, by that inhuman
Bitter
glory wrecked.
But
I have straightened out
Ruin,
wreck and wrack;
I
toiled long years and at length
Came
to so deep a thought
I
can summon back
All
their wholesome strength.
What
images are these
That
turn dull-eyed away,
Or
shift Time’s filthy load,
Straighten
aged knees,
Hesitate
or stay?
What
heads shake or nod?
In spite of all the rhythmical variations and the half-rhymes which provide freedom for the most natural and lucid speech, the formal base, i.e., the prosodic rhythms of iambic pentameter in the first, and iambic trimeter in the second, and the rhyme patterns which supply coherent dignity and music, these remain audible.
The
magazine Vogue is preparing, 1 believe, to run two series of
photographs, one called Contemporary Great, the other Contemporary Influences,
a project which is calculated to cause considerable ill-feeling. Does a man
feel prouder of what he achieves himself or of the effect he has on the
achievements of posterity? Which epitaph upon a poet’s grave would please him
more: “I wrote some of the most beautiful poetry of my time or I rescued
English lyric from the dead hand of Campion and Tom Moore”? I suspect that more
poets would prefer the second than their readers would ever guess, particularly
when, like Yeats, they are comfortably aware that the first is also true. *
* Copyright. Originally
published in “The Kenyon Review”, Vol. X., No, 2, Spring,
1948, and reprinted by arrangement with UNESCO, Arts and Letters Division.