Top Ten 20th Century Poets in English
nik...@husc3.harvard.edu
gree...@gold.tc.umn.edu (Joseph M Green) writes:
> There is no reason whatsoever to believe that Yeats stumbled about until
> he met Pound. A slight acquaintance with biography, a listen to the
natterin> g that goes on provides this impression.
I wonder though if Yeats's late fascistic leanings were not in point
of fact inspired by Pound. I wonder also if it is not altogether
trivial to insist that Yeats wrote oodles of 'memorable verse'. Memory
is a daffy whore, easy prey to the wrong charms. Does not Yeats's
fascination with fascism bespeak a horrible wrongness that pervaded
from the start his entire murky mediumistic mumbo-jumbo-laden
mentality? Is this not relevant to his poetry? Or should one swallow
the moth-eaten lie that poetic genius, whatever that may be,
justifieth everything?
> The fact that the fellows about you screwed up their faces at the
> mention of Yeats should also give pause. As a fellow dweller
> in this forlorn state -- haunting similar scenes one suspects --
> I might caution you that the natives -- and those who come to dwell here, it
> seems, have the literary sensibilities of moose.
Should not the occult sensibilities of Morning Dawn wallahs also
bloody well give pause?
Philip Nikolayev
nik...@husc.harvard.edu
----------------------------------------------------------------------
'Likewise in respect of truth, I said, we shall regard as maimed in
precisely the same way the soul that hates the voluntary lie and is
troubled by it in its own self and greatly angered by it in others,
but cheerfully accepts the involuntary falsehood and is not distressed
when convicted of lack of knowledge, but wallows in the mud of
ignorance as insensitively as a pig.'
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Vance Maverick
> Does not Yeats's
> fascination with fascism bespeak a horrible wrongness that pervaded
> from the start his entire murky mediumistic mumbo-jumbo-laden
> mentality?
Uh, it seems like this can only be established by looking at the
poetry. Got some early examples in mind? How about "Down by the
Salley Gardens"?
> Or should one swallow
> the moth-eaten lie that poetic genius, whatever that may be,
> justifieth everything?
Or the moth-eaten...prejudice that any biographical fact or claim is
part of the poetry -- that, once established, it is part of the
reading of any aspect of all the works?
Vance
Louise Van Hine
: In article <gree0072.776040596@gold>
Ahem: if I may, the reference to "Morning dawn" occult group. Yeats was
involved with a mystical society known as the "Order of the Golden Dawn",
a Rosicrucian-like mystical society which flourished and died in a brief
period of time in Britain. If you're going to condemn Yeats as a mystic,
make sure you lump in Herman Melville (Rosicrucian) Benjamin Franklin
(Rosicrucian and Mason) Erik Satie (Rosicrucian and composer for the
Grand Master of France), Robbie Burns (Scottish Rite Mason and
Rosicrucian) to name a few notables.
Joseph M Green
mud of ignorance? Are we to celebrate this? What I said
about the dangers of some slight acquaintance with biography and
the absorption of this and that opinion that is "in the air" applies.
When you dismiss Yeat's mysticism you dismiss, oh, neoplatonism,
Mallarme, Blake and on and on. Not easy to do one would hope.
You need to read the life and letters before nattering about Yeats
as fascist. Yours is an opinion that requires a willed ignorance.
Of course, you may just be embarrassed by Madame Blavatsky.
Simon Hardy Butler
thought him so. Actually, for all of Blake's "prophetic"
writings (Urizen, etc.), his sensibilities seem to be quite
terrestrially inclined. :-)
- Simon
daniel newell
<nik...@husc3.harvard.edu> wrote:
>I wonder though if Yeats's late fascistic leanings were not in point
>of fact inspired by Pound.
I'm new to this thread, so forgive me if the evidence has already
been pointed to or laid out, but I have been reading Yeats for a very long
time and have never conjectured "fascistic leanings" were present in his
poetry. Could you please make the argument for me? What do you account
as fascism?
I do know that Yeats wrote in the introduction to *A Vision*
(which I have been re-reading as of late) this:
"Ezra Pound, whose are is the opposite mine, whose criticism
commends what I most condemn, a man with whom I should quarrel more that
with anyone else if we were not united by afection, has for years lived in
rooms opening on to a flat roof by the sea."
> Does not Yeats's
>fascination with fascism bespeak a horrible wrongness that pervaded
>from the start his entire murky mediumistic mumbo-jumbo-laden
>mentality? Is this not relevant to his poetry?
Well, would you say the same thing about James Merrill's
mediumistic claims? What textual evidence is there that it *is* relevant
to his poetry? Got a particular poem in mind? Or has someone just scared
you of the modernists in general? (Sorry, I don't mean to be so
confrontational.) Stanely Fish has a essay that I myself am not too
familiar with, that many people say is the last word on the relationship
between ideology, politics, and aesthetics. He argues that there ain't
necessarily any relationship at all.
--daniel.
MICHAEL WISE
>of fact inspired by Pound.
Yeats's background as a member of the Irish Literary Revival and the
Abbey Theatre would seem to suggest that fascistic tendencies came along
fairly early. At first, the connection would seem strained, but the
Literary movement, like early fascism in Germany and Italy, was concerned
with the revival of Irish nationalism. For that to be possible, it was
necessary to piece together a sense of Irish history, a past that the
Irish could consider their own. The revival of Gaelic (all but supplanted
by English by the time of Yeats), of ancient fables in new retellings
(Kathleen ni Houlihan, Deirdre of the Sorrows, dozen of Cuchulain
retellings), of mysticism (which many would poo-poo as a strange quirk of
Yeats's; mysticism would be integral to the reforming of a nation which
had been under the yoke of a foreign power, political or religious, and,
in the case of Ireland, under the yoke of both, for hundreds of years),
all contributed to the fanatical nationalism that led to the Easter 1916
uprising and to the declaration of the Irish Republic in 1921.
Nationalism is not fascism per se, even though we've seen in recent years
how fanatical nationalism can result in disturbing echoes of nazism
(ethnic cleansing in Bosnia; has this thread gone on long enough for
Godwin's law to come into play?); other elements must come into play as
well. For the Irish, the outsiders, the scapegoats, were the English and
Anglo-Irish Protestants, even though they as individuals did much to push
the Irish revival. People like Yeats and Lady Gregory were members of the
Anglo-Irish ascendency, not peasants, yet they held up the Irish peasant
as a mystical paragon. Those who challenged this notion were roundly
shouted down, even when they were members of the clique. J. M. Synge's
_Playboy of the Western World_ was booed off the stage; since Synge was a
charter member of the Abbey and a gifted playwright, Yeats and Gregory
felt compelled to defend him and the play, though both did so with
distaste. The realism of Playboy challenged the mystique growing around
the peasant at the time. Yeats was dead center in the middle of all this.
How does all this ring of fascism? It is first essential to distinguish
what it is called and what it actually is. Fascist is a perjorative that
is applied with great effect to those who are politically conservative
and who make statements that can be construed as preferring a nation,
class, race, etc. over all others. The Nazi stain of blood indelibly
marks the word: one might just as effectively state that a person would
as soon murder five millions men, women and children for the crime of
being born as call them a fascist. This is as it should be: some words
need to carry their stigma with them. Communism should not be separated
from the deaths under Stalin; fascism should never be divorced from the
Holocaust.
Stating that, and in no way seeking absolution, Yeats's nation-building
proceeded in a fascistic way, by emphasizing a heroic past, by excluding
certain classes of people who were more or less assimilated into the
society, by silencing voices of dissent, by emphasizing militant action
over reasoned discussion (Sinn Fein and the IRA were both born at this time).
Yeats was certainly well on his way to being a fascist long before he met
Pound.
___________________________________________________________________________
Michael Wise (wwhi...@nevada.edu) UNLV English
"Now I want you to tell me just one thing more. Why do you hate the South?"
"I dont hate it," Quentin said quickly, at once, immediately; "I dont
hate it," he said. I dont hate it he thought, panting in the cold air,
the iron New England dark: I dont. I dont. I dont hate it! I dont hate it!
--William Faulkner, Absalom! Absalom!
Zack T. Smith
>In article <1994Aug6.1...@husc3.harvard.edu>,
> <nik...@husc3.harvard.edu> wrote:
>
>>I wonder though if Yeats's late fascistic leanings were not in point
>>of fact inspired by Pound.
>
> I'm new to this thread, so forgive me if the evidence has already
>been pointed to or laid out, but I have been reading Yeats for a very long
>time and have never conjectured "fascistic leanings" were present in his
>poetry. Could you please make the argument for me? What do you account
>as fascism?
I recently attempted to find something -- anything -- in Yeats' poetry
that even remotely resembled a love poem. Couldn't find a one; of course
I was applying the standard that a love poem cannot and should not include
morbid references to death or decay... Ahhhh, poor WB, he had no glee.
Hearing that Yeats had fascistic leanings (if indeed that's true, who knows,
perhaps he was really going bonkers in his old age) does not surprise me TOO
greatly, for the reason that his emotional outlook seemed to be so negative in
general, and that all his rambling about Druid this-and-that did seem to me
to be a somewhat juvenile flavor of negativistic mysticism.
Plus we all know that jolly old Hitler's reliance of pseudo Christian, pseudo
Nordic negativistic mysticism was juvenile indeed. I would assert that fascism
of any flavor is a result of little more (1) hard upbringing (2) a stalling of
socioemotional development at the early teenage level, and (3) reliance on
negativistic mysticism to explain reality and deliver a moral code.
My two cents, discuss amongst yourselves.
Zack Smith
Millie Niss
Nationalism was quite informative, but to be fair, Yeats seems to have
regretted stirring up violence, and was disgusted with some results of
Nationalism. For example (is this the first time someone has posted
poetry in this thread?), in "The Circus Animals' Desertion," Yeats
reflects on all the mistakes in his career. One stanza is about _The
Countess Cathleen_, a nationalist play which helped to create the myth
of Ireland which the previous poster so well explained:
And then a counter-truth filled out its play
The _Countess Cathleen_ was the name I gave it;
She pity-crazed had given her soul away
But masterful heaven had intervened to save it.
I thought my dear must her own soul destroy,
So did fanatacism and hate enslave it,
And this brought forth a dream and soon enough
The dream itself had all my thought and love.
The last four stanzas refer to Maud Gonne, whom Yeats loved and who
was obsessed with Irish Nationalism, and inspired Yeats to join that
cause. This is certainly not Yeats at his poetic best. The other
stanzas (which do not deal with politics) are better IMO.
Another example (from Meditations in Times of Civil War, part VI)
We are closed in, and the key is turned
On our uncertainty; somewhere
A man is killed, or a house burned,
Yet no clear fact to be discerned:
Come build in the empty house of the stare.
A barricade of stone or of wood;
Some fourteen day of civil war;
Last night they trundled down the road
That dead young soldier in his blood:
Come build in the empty house of the stare.
We had fed the heart on fantasies,
The heart's grown brutal from the fare;
More substance in our enmities
Than in our love; O Honey-Bees,
Come build the empty house of the stare
Many of his best poems, while not specifically about Irish politics are
nonetheless strong condemnations of fanatacism. "The Second Coming"
is perhaps the best example:
[lns 3-8]
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intesity
I think these passages show that Yeats was very suspicious of
extremism of any kind, and was therefore no "fascist." If he was
guilty of inspiring it, it is because his particular gift was poetry
which is "full of passionate intensity" and he was able to make things
seem much more important than they really are.
Millie
Millie Niss
>I recently attempted to find something -- anything -- in Yeats' poetry
>that even remotely resembled a love poem. Couldn't find a one; of course
>I was applying the standard that a love poem cannot and should not include
>morbid references to death or decay... Ahhhh, poor WB, he had no glee.
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRGHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
May I suggest you rent a Care Bears video? You will find many
touching songs about love with no morbid reference to death and decay,
accompanied by cheering songs without any of those subversive rythms
which lead the youth to take drugs or become perverts....
>Plus we all know that jolly old Hitler's reliance of pseudo Christian, pseudo
>Nordic negativistic mysticism was juvenile indeed. I would assert that fascism>of any flavor is a result of little more (1) hard upbringing (2) a stalling of
>socioemotional development at the early teenage level, and (3) reliance on
>negativistic mysticism to explain reality and deliver a moral code.
This is not only wrong, it is extremely dangerous! Hitler did not
commeit his crimes because of Nietzsche or Wagner or a trauma during
toilet training. He committed them because of a general level of
anti-Semitism in Germany and resentment of the terms of the Versailles
treaty. If you blame it on personal psychology, you ignir everything
which could cause it to happen again.
>My two cents, discuss amongst yourselves.
I'm afraid your opinions don't merit rational discussion...
>Zack Smith
Millie, who is engaging in her first real flame in quite a while...
Francis Muir
FM
Mark Taranto
> I recently attempted to find something -- anything -- in Yeats' poetry
> that even remotely resembled a love poem. Couldn't find a one; of course
> I was applying the standard that a love poem cannot and should not include
> morbid references to death or decay... Ahhhh, poor WB, he had no glee.
Of course, if you rid yourself of your foolish standards, you would
find lots of them. How can you deny that anything with:
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you
And loved the sorrows of your changing face.
is from anything *but* a love poem.
Some might consider "A Deep Sworn Vow" a love poem. I certainly do.
If you want glee, try Hallmark. I'll stick with Yeats.
Mark
daniel newell
Francis Muir <fra...@oas.Stanford.EDU> wrote:
>Yeats never rhymed with Keats.
Yes, Thank you. That is improtant to note.
Keats rhymes with fates.
and Yeats rhymes with streets.
Actually, and visiting Indian professor here had his EE and
his AAy mixed up in just that way.
It was incredibly funny. But, how was he to know?
Thought he was doin' pretty good knowing that they
were to be pronounced differently at all. (!).
--daniel.
Tim Sullivan
First, Yeats' alleged pro-fascism is rooted in the hysterical
interpretation of some pro-German statements he made (statements
quite common for Irish nationalists). Comparing his politicalism
to Pound's is a mistake. Besides, we all ignore a poet's politics
when he leans toward Communist totalitarianism; why make a fuss
over the mirror-image?
To sum up Yeats as a "pseudo-Christian", glee-less, Druidic, rambler,
is to cheat yourself of the genius of perhaps the greatest artist
of the twentieth-century. I really could not believe the previous
post: "he had no glee." Yeats perfected the transformation of reality
into poetical experience. His joy is subtle, but overwhelming;
he possesses the happiness of the saints (or at least of Blake).
He is probably the single greatest influence on writing and writers,
whether they realize it or not, in our time.
Anyone who dismisses him because of some ill-founded rumor, or
because of a bad experience in some Lit. survey course, is doing
himself a tremendous dis-service.
Tim
US Naval Postgraduate School
Monterey, CA
John McCarthy
>Plus we all know that jolly old Hitler's reliance of pseudo Christian, pseudo
>Nordic negativistic mysticism was juvenile indeed. I would assert that fascism>of any flavor is a result of little more (1) hard upbringing (2) a stalling of
>socioemotional development at the early teenage level, and (3) reliance on
>negativistic mysticism to explain reality and deliver a moral code.
This is not only wrong, it is extremely dangerous! Hitler did not
commeit his crimes because of Nietzsche or Wagner or a trauma during
toilet training. He committed them because of a general level of
anti-Semitism in Germany and resentment of the terms of the Versailles
treaty. If you blame it on personal psychology, you ignir everything
which could cause it to happen again.
>My two cents, discuss amongst yourselves.
I'm afraid your opinions don't merit rational discussion...
>Zack Smith
Millie, who is engaging in her first real flame in quite a while...
Very likely what Hitler was kooky about except anti-semitism wasn't
very relevant to his success in getting power and in motivating the
crimes he committed.
Consider, however, Zhirinovsky. His specific form of kookiness is
quite relevant to the danger he represents to Russia and its
neighbors.
--
John McCarthy, Computer Science Department, Stanford, CA 94305
*
He who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense.
baumler alan t
>
>First, Yeats' alleged pro-fascism is rooted in the hysterical
>interpretation of some pro-German statements he made (statements
>quite common for Irish nationalists). Comparing his politicalism
>to Pound's is a mistake. Besides, we all ignore a poet's politics
>when he leans toward Communist totalitarianism; why make a fuss
>over the mirror-image?
his politics were a bit too wierd to fit any of the standard 20th century
slots, but he clearly had affinities with Fascism. He praised O'duffy, the
irish fascist leader, and was convinced that ordinary people were quite
incapable of running their own affairs and needed some vaugely Nicheian
supermen to do it for them. Orwell wrote a good essay on this which is in
"Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters.
Alan Baumler
Al...@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu
ge?
Abigail Ann Young
>of fact inspired by Pound. I wonder also if it is not altogether
>trivial to insist that Yeats wrote oodles of 'memorable verse'. Memory
>is a daffy whore, easy prey to the wrong charms. Does not Yeats's
>fascination with fascism bespeak a horrible wrongness that pervaded
>from the start his entire murky mediumistic mumbo-jumbo-laden
>mentality? Is this not relevant to his poetry? Or should one swallow
>the moth-eaten lie that poetic genius, whatever that may be,
>justifieth everything?
>
>
>Philip Nikolayev
>nik...@husc.harvard.edu
[.sig also munched]
I'm not sure about moth-eaten lies, but it does seem to me that Bad
Men have written Good Poems just as Good Men have written Bad Poems
(or novels, or what you will). Perhaps Auden should have the last word
on Yeats:
Earth, receive an honoured guest
William Yeats is laid to rest.
Let the Irish vessel lie,
Emptied of its poesy.
Time that with this strange excuse
Pardoned Kipling and his views,
And will pardon Paul Claudel,
Pardons him for writing well.
A.
--
Dr Abigail Ann Young, Records of Early English Drama| young@epas.|
Victoria College, University of Toronto | utoronto.ca|
daniel newell
Abigail Ann Young <yo...@epas.utoronto.ca> wrote:
> Perhaps Auden should have the last word on Yeats:
Oh, Please. No. Let Bloom at least
(and he isn't so praising himself of WBY
but at least he is true to his spirit
and allows him to Sail To Byzantium and
be gathered. Auden would rather have
him scattered for some reason.) --Ah,
hell, I've done it again...discovered
(no...constructed, that's better) the
secret strength of a poem that I don't
like (!). Damn! :(
>Earth, receive an honoured guest
>William Yeats is laid to rest.
>Let the Irish vessel lie,
>Emptied of its poesy.
I think its "Emptied of it poetry."
That's line that I have always hated. And I suppose that it was
because his dream in Byzantium was to still be singing. I think that
Auden meant to praise, and well...I just don't think that he does it very
well. He does a violence to him that I can't sympathize. Most of the
lines seem like they were written for somebody else beforehand. Compare
these stanzas with "Sailing To Byzantium" (I'm just supposing you have
that one in your memory--Yeats did write many memorable poems you know...
(smile).)
Auden:
Now he is scattered among a hundred cities
And wholly given over to unfamiliar afections,
To find his happiness in another kind of wook
And be punished under a foreign code of conscience.
The words of a dead man
Are modified in the guts of the living.
If only Auden would have said the words of a dead man are wrenched in the
guts of the living. I think even that would make the poem more palatable
for me. It would at least give a hint that he knew what he was doing, and
thereby be truly "In Memory of." (It would make that last line a "better"
too, don't ya think?) But the stanza is topical to the discussion. The
fellow from New Mexico (long and excellent post) was in deed even after
what was looking like an apology, willing to punish him. (I hope my
memory is true to me on that one--if not...apologies. It was someone else
that posted shortly thereafter.
--daniel.
Joseph M Green
see that I am too late -- the natterers are already at large
and now we have the assertion that Yeats never wrote a "love
poem" along with the assertion that Yeats was a Fascist and
was, perhaps, a fascist all along -- something terribly wrong
from the start.
I don't wonder at this. The fellow who can't find a love poem
also writes that he ain't suprised to find out (from reading
a post here) that Yeats was a Fascist. This is usually all the
research these kinds of fellows do. Nattering is the mot juste.
Here are the facts about Yeats and Fascism -- available from
any biography.
Hell, I'll even copy a passage from Ellmann's bio:
"During these years [1933-1935] he [Yeats] arrived at his first
conclusions about politics. He began badly in 1933 by involving
himself slightly with a group of Irish fascists who wore blue
shirts and at one time seemed likey to threaten the De Valera
government. Their leader was General O'Duffey, whom Yeats met
not many times as has been said, but only once. Yeats recognized
from the first, as his letters prove, that O'Duffey was a
demagogic, fictile man, but hoped that he might develop
leaderlike qualities which he never did. Eventually O'Duffey
went off with an Irish brigade to fight for Franco in the Spanish
civil war. Yeats, like most of his fellow countrymen, was by
thistime thoroughly disaffected, and hoped O'Duffey would not
return from Spain a hero. The general happily did not prove a
very helpful acquisition to the Falange. [In fact, the Irish
brigade returned with more men than left]
Although Yeats was seen in a blue shirt at this time, he had been
wearing blue shirts since 1925 or 1926, and the reason was not
political but esthetic. If he learned the habit from anyone, it
was from William Morris. His brief encounter with O'Duffy must
have shown that they were more at odds than in accord. What
Yeats wanted was a political party which would espouse Unity of
Being" and turn it into a "discipline, a way of life," even a
"sacred drama." In February 1934, still toying with the
unofficial army, he wrote some marching songs for O'Duffey's men
which included such lines as: "What's equality?-Muck in the
yard:/ Historic nations grow/ From above to below.
But by August of the same year he had realized his error and
rewrote the poems so that nobody could sing them; and ,in
addition, to show that his earlier utterances had been
transitory, he made another poem to embody his growing
disaffection with politics: "What if the Church and the State/
Are the mob that howls at the door!"
In 1935 Yeats still urged in conversation the despotic rule of
the educated classes, but as the terror of Fascism and Nazism
increased he ceased to speak in favor of any existing government.
His friend Ethel Mannin, the novelist, tried on one occasion to
persuade him to take a definite position against totalitarianism.
They asked him to recommend Ossietsky, whom the Nazis had
imprisoned, for the Nobel Peace Prize. Yeats refused, and in
letters defending himself indicated his disaffection with every
known governmental system:
"Do not try to make a politician of me, even in Ireland I shall
never I think be that again -- as my sense of reality deepens,
and I think it does with age, my horror at the cruelty of
governments grows greater, and if I did what you want I would
seem to hold one form of government more responsible than any
other and that would betray my convictions. Communist, Fascist,
nationalist, clerical, anti-clerical are all responsible
according to the number of their victims. I have not been
silent, I have used the only vehicle I possess -- verse. If
youhave my poems by you, look up a poem called "The Second
Coming." It was written some sixteen or seventeen years ago and
fortold what is happening. I have written of the same thing again
and again since... I am not callous, every nerve trembles with
horror at what is happening in Europe "the ceremony of innocence
is drowned.""
....
Joseph M Green
> - Simon
Certainly Blake was a mystic -- even if of this type -- unless you
have some special definition of mystic (or mysticism -- or esoteric
beleifs --) that we should know about.
Joseph M Green
of stuff as Michael Wise in an article written in 1964. "Yeats'
adherence (in art, politics and human relationships) to
aristocratic and traditional values was indeed resented as an affront
to the rising lower classes then first becoming articulate and powerful.
To question the values of the new era was, at that time, to invite the
accusation of "Fascism."
Of course calling Yeats a fascist and then finding that he was one
all along is a game that has been played for some time. Yeats
caught on to what, in fact, Europen Fascism meant a lot more
quickly then all those (and these were legion) poets, artists etc
who took years to catch on to what Stalinism meant. Took the Hitler/
Stalin pact for them to feel betrayed.
One wonders how long it will take those who dabble in the construction
of theories based on nothing but vague feelings and a complete lack
of scholarship to realize the clownishness of their opinions.
Joseph M Green
One should also mention -- before we hear more about the influence
of Pound on Yeats in political ways -- that Yeats called Pound
"a revolutionary simpleton."
Just thought I'd introduce a fact.
Joseph M Green
then I di at first. I see that Michael is a grad student in English.
This explains the absolute lack of scholarship and logic in the article.
Michael is indulging in the latest half-assed theory -- the theory
of nation-building -- a theory devided by the same fellows who
bring you all the other dreary, self-serving theories designed
to give them something to write about -- they certainly
cannot write about literature. Examine his last two paragraphs.
Notice that the nation built by a number of political parties
with a number of views -- towards revolutionary violence among
other things -- becomes Yeats building of the nation. Historians
should be alerted that Yeats was so all-powerful. Wise lists
fanaticism as an instance of Yeatsian nation building. He does this blithely.
Would a fanatic describe Ireland as a place of "great hatred, little room?"
Yeats does -- and again and again he refuses to participate in political
action of the fanatic sort, expresses his contempt for fanatics, and
even tries to examine his character to see if this is part of it. Yeats
didn't make any revolution -- amazed at the 1916 rising. His program
based on what he thought O'Leary's program was -- and it included
specifically a contempt for the fanatic. Has Wise ever read any
of Yeats' poetry?
All Yeats sees as a result of violent revolution is the beggar on
horseback lashing the beggar on foot.
Yet -- Yeats is a fascist. What a perversion! How typical.
Yeats' poetry recalls a heroic past --- ooooohhhhh -- he must have
been someone like Wagner. The Fiddler of Dooney with a Nazi armband.
Yeats wanted to create a national identity -- so that politics with
all its brutality could be surpassed. This was naive, one supposes --
but it is nothing like what Wise accuses Yeats of doing. And --
Yeats worried that by doing this -- by providing myth -- everything
would be perverted by politicians. He did worry that the mythof
Cuchulain would have the effect it did -- that certain words of
his might have sent the fellows who participated in the Easter
risong out to be shot.
Has Wise ever read any of Yeats poems on Maud Gonne? Yeats
thought that she -- like so may including Eva Gore Booth and Con
Markievicz -- was ruined by revolutionary fanaticism. There
was nothing he abhorred more.
Was Yeats a fascist becasue he helped form a national theatre?
This is what Wise insists, it seems. In the current theory
that Wise adopts (uncritically -- he will be employed for sure)
any attempt to instill national identity is fascist.
In this model there is nothing more wicked than heroic myths --
after all this is where all violence begins. Yeats swans, towers,
mysic trees, red roses upon the rood of time etc. etc. are all
instances of this primitive fascist instinct.
And his post is so innocent of history! And the result is that
Lady Gregory -- operating from the same folkloric impulse that
brings us Darby O'Gill and the Little People -- might as
well have been the she-beast of Dachau.
There is no awareness of the complexity (of any complexity) in the
post, it perverts history, it is written in the smarmy tone of
the professional academic informing us in his priestlike way
that here at last are the pure waters of ablution, it is
fatuous -- I'd say it's ready to be published.
Doug Quarnstrom
: One wonders how long it will take those who dabble in the construction
: of theories based on nothing but vague feelings and a complete lack
: of scholarship to realize the clownishness of their opinions.
Forever, I would imagine. I still cannot resist the urge...
doug
Joseph M Green
This is from Hone's biography:
Yeat's had been preparing for some time for a clash with the little
clubs and with Arthur Griffith, their Sinn Fein mentor. Synge
gave him difficult ground to fight on for distaste of The Playboy
was not confined to Griffith's party; Lady Gregory herself had no great
love for it, and a politician of note, John Dillon, who constantly
went to the theatre, urged Yeats not to risk all for so unpopular a
talent....
....
NOTE: You, I hope, can see that Yeats did NOT feel distaste for the
play.
....
"The whole Nationalist press was hostile. Yet only few have been
stupid enough to think that Synge wanted to hold up the West of Ireland
people -- among whom, as he expressed it, he had escaped from the
nullity of the rich and the squalor of the poor -- to ridicule and
contempt for some propogandist Unionist purpose.... Yeats wrote to
Quinn that "the objection to Synge is not mainly that he makes the
country people unpleasant and immoral, but that he has got a standar
a sordid lot...but they shrink from Synge's HARSH, HEROICAL, CLEAN,
WIND-SWEPT VIEW OF THINGS."
...
So you see that you are dead wrong. In fact, Yeats praised
Synge so much that he received letters saying that his prefaces
to Synge's work -- in which he proclaimed the genius of Synge --
were creating the impression that Synge was the master
spirit of the Irish movement. You might also note that it was
Yeats (almost alone) who ensured that the play got to London.
So you see-- somewhere you heard that Yeats disdained the play
for some of the reasons Lady Gregory disdained it and --
since to ake your thesis work you cannot have Yeats standing
up to nationalists or taking the folk myth, folk people stuff
with anything less than deadly seriousness -- you let
everyone know that Yeats actually disdained the play and was
heartbroken that folk myth was made light of even tho he defended
the play. And then your theory can take off -- all contradiction
reconciled by poor scholarship.
of morals and intellect. They never minded Boyle, whose people are a
Liz Farrell
In article 776374403@gold, gree...@gold.tc.umn.edu (Joseph M Green) writes:
< stuff deleted >
> One wonders how long it will take those who dabble in the construction
> of theories based on nothing but vague feelings and a complete lack
> of scholarship to realize the clownishness of their opinions.
Um. Yeah. One wonders.
Not heavy into hueristics, are we, mon?
Was this page intentionally left blank? Like- does it take a clown to
not recognize a fascist and verse-vice? Or are you to smart for us
turnip-truck types?
Liz
Joseph M Green
he detects fascistic leanings in the early Yeats and muddles fascism
until a reverence for ceremony, for myth, for an heroic past, for
tradition, for certain kinds of innocence becomes jigging with
Hitler. Yeats defended Synge against nationalists who were offended
by Synge's making fun of a certain version of Ireland's heroic past.
He didn't defend Synge "with distaste." In fact one observer, Mary Colum,
wrote (of Yeats standing before Sunge's accusers at the Abbey Theatre)
"I never witnessed a human being fight as Yeats fought that night, nor
knew another with so many weapons in his armoury."
Yeats did feel a distaste for the howling, half-educated mob, but
this is a feeling one can acquire from many sources -- it is even possible
to acquire it from reading in here -- and has no specific roots
in Fascism.
Zack T. Smith
>Zack T. Smith <za...@netcom.com> writes:
>
>> I recently attempted to find something -- anything -- in Yeats' poetry
>> that even remotely resembled a love poem. Couldn't find a one; of course
>> I was applying the standard that a love poem cannot and should not include
>> morbid references to death or decay... Ahhhh, poor WB, he had no glee.
>
>Of course, if you rid yourself of your foolish standards, you would
>find lots of them.
I'll take that as being tounge and cheek, as we all know there's a
different between love-RELATED poetry and the thing called a "love poem".
>If you want glee, try Hallmark. I'll stick with Yeats.
Ah, if only modern man knew that happiness is not to be found
On a card,
Made by unionists
Made of trees and pesticides and toxic ink
Ah, but if.
>Mark
--
Zack T. Smith
Creator of MacShell(tm)
Email me if you'd like a demo copy.
Mark Thomas
: Yeats did feel a distaste for the howling, half-educated mob, but
: this is a feeling one can acquire from many sources -- it is even possible
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
: to acquire it from reading in here -- and has no specific roots
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Man, you can say that again..
Zack T. Smith
>
>>I recently attempted to find something -- anything -- in Yeats' poetry
>>that even remotely resembled a love poem. Couldn't find a one; of course
>>I was applying the standard that a love poem cannot and should not include
>>morbid references to death or decay... Ahhhh, poor WB, he had no glee.
>
>AAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRGHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Come away from the mirror, lassie.
>May I suggest you rent a Care Bears video? You will find many
>touching songs about love with no morbid reference to death and decay,
>accompanied by cheering songs without any of those subversive rythms
>which lead the youth to take drugs or become perverts....
A typical American response. Desecrate all that requires maturity to comprehend
(such as love without excessive negativity) while promoting a brazenly
juvenile fascination with death, pain, pettiness, and the destruction of
those ideals which appeal to more than the urge for immediate gratification.
>>Plus we all know that jolly old Hitler's reliance of pseudo Christian, pseudo
>>Nordic negativistic mysticism was juvenile indeed. I would assert that fascism
>>of any flavor is a result of little more (1) hard upbringing (2) a stalling of
>>socioemotional development at the early teenage level, and (3) reliance on
>>negativistic mysticism to explain reality and deliver a moral code.
>
>This is not only wrong, it is extremely dangerous! Hitler did not
>commeit his crimes because of Nietzsche or Wagner or a trauma during
>toilet training.
Fine, prove it. Prove to everyone reading this that fascism has no
psychological basis, that fascists aren't neurotic, sick losers
who lack emotional maturity and who desperately cling to bogus religions
in order to gain security, justify their hatred, and make some sort of
twisted sense out of their confused, miserable lower class existences --
existences which they themselves, due to their neuroses and lack of
intelligence, have utterly failed to comprehend individually beyond simple
us/them ape-logic.
>He committed them because of a general level of
>anti-Semitism in Germany and resentment of the terms of the Versailles
>treaty.
Oh? And why can't a person do something for more than one reason?
Haven't you considered that not everyone is as single-minded as you are?
>If you blame it on personal psychology, you ignir everything
>which could cause it to happen again.
No one is ignoring the other factors, so quit with the neurotic fixation,
will you? You shouldn't be so narrow minded, it's bad for your reputation.
>Millie, who is engaging in her first real flame in quite a while...
Yes, very tough of you. And just think, when you start developing your
breasts next year or so, you'll be like REAL WOMAN -- no need to act.
Zack Smith
Vance Maverick
[among much childish insult]
> A typical American response. Desecrate all that requires maturity to
> comprehend (such as love without excessive negativity) while promoting
> a brazenly juvenile fascination with death, pain, pettiness, and the
> destruction of those ideals which appeal to more than the urge for
> immediate gratification.
"Nyah nyah nyaah, my fixations are more mature and cosmopolitan than
yours, nyah nyah nyaah!"
Ahh, USENET....
Vance
David E. Latane
>There is no awareness of the complexity (of any complexity) in the
>post, it perverts history, it is written in the smarmy tone of
>the professional academic informing us in his priestlike way
>that here at last are the pure waters of ablution, it is
>fatuous -- I'd say it's ready to be published.
Naw--just read as a paper at a grad-student conference.
But really, be charitable:
"If want provok'd, or madness made them print,
I wag'd no war with Bedlam or the Mint."
After, even A Pope knows that.
D. Latane'
spideir
>Yeats never rhymed with Keats.
>
> FM
>
Though Coleridge, I've read, sometimes rhymed with Wordsworth.
*===*===*===*===*===*===*===*===*===*===*===*===*===*===*===*===*===*===*
| Thomas C. Gannon | tga...@charlie.usd.edu | U of SoDak (Vermillion) |
* ------------------------------- _-^-_ ------------------------------- *
| "--If I decide to practice a / o )=\ slight movement from right |
* to left . . . or from left { /===} to right . . . it's *
| nobody's business but my \ (=o=/ own." (_A_Day_for_Eeyore_) |
*===*===*===*===*===*===*===*===* ^-_=^ *===*===*===*===*===*===*===*===*
Allan Burns
says:
>
>Let's have a few facts about Yeats and Synge and the "Playboy..."
>
>This is from Hone's biography:
>
>WIND-SWEPT VIEW OF THINGS."
>
There's also that little epigram. You know, sinewy, sweat,
thigh, Juan. Can't remember the exact wording.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
--Allan Burns
Douglas Clark
Cant ZAck Smith read? Yeats adaptation of Ronsard's sonnet for
Olivia Shakespeare is one of the great love poems in the language.
`When you are old and grey and full of sleep...'
--
Douglas Clark Voice : +44 225 427104
69 Hillcrest Drive, Email : D.G.D...@bath.ac.uk
Bath, Avon, BA2 1HD Books : http://www.bath.ac.uk/~exxdgdc/poetry.html
Robert C. Spirko
Thanks for the fact. :) I'd like to introduce a perspective: One
should remember that Yeats was writing in a country which had been engaged in
low-level rebellion for, oh, three centuries at least, and was split in Yeats's
later life by recurrent civil wars. I think very few of us live in a similar
situation.
One should also note that Yeats died in January 1939, before the
results of fascism were really known. It's all well and good for us to
tote our high-and-mightly late-century morality over the authoritarian
leanings of Yeats, Pound, and Eliot, but let's remember who it was who
pointed out that "an intellectual hatred is the worst."
Joseph M Green
>-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Well, it is obvious that Yeats is showing his fascist sensibility
here. Harsh and heroic? Wind-swept? And then "clean."
We know that fascists are obsessed with being clean -- didn't
Yeats also write "death begins in the colon?" It's obvious to
me that underneath it all is a horror of landscape, the body --
finally of the other. What Yeats wants is nothing/Nothing/Nothung.
I can't tell whether he was always that way or became that way
under the influence of Lady Gregory -- She Beast of Coole.
In any case, it is obvious that here once again what Yeats
really want is visionary dreariness -- a depeopling of the landscape
--and imagines that it can be accomplished by the poetic afflatus --
the wind blown from those masculine spaces between the stars --
from the vacuum -- from the nothing that he wants. He wants Synge dead,
of course. His advice to go to the West of Ireland is transparent --
even, by God, trans-spicuous. The West is Death -- Go to
Das Abendland, Synge. Go! Go!
No -- we must stand up to Yeats. Take your nasty little Nazi
leprechauns with you when you go -- your great-bladdered she-gods --
your pigs without bristles -- your goddamn tower. And
don't forget your nine and fifty swans. Your slow-thighed
great bladdered bitches will have to go too.
After all isn't it obvious that Yeats intended to make NaziFascist
myth from goddesses peeing in the snow, heroes turning into
pregnant lassies, gods of love wandering about with four birds
circling their heads, kings that are reincarnated as donkeys
and all the other blindpoetwormpeniseddeathdeathdeath stuff
in Celtic mythology -- a mythology that so obviously
lends itself to this kind of thing. Look for a fairy ring --
and there will be a fascist King.
Perhaps we could all dig him up and pee on him? Grrrr. Grrrr.
(there's Robert Browning, Andrew).
For the erudite -- ah, dear God -- Yeats use of wind-swept
is meant to invoke the Slaugh Gaoith -- the host of the air --
who hate the human race with utmost malignancy -- they steal
brides --drown ababies while humming the Horst Wessel in Old
Irish. Yeats has been seen (his wraith, pale spirit) with
them in Bosnia -- oh, save the children!
David E. Latane
>Cant ZAck Smith read? Yeats adaptation of Ronsard's sonnet for
>Olivia Shakespeare is one of the great love poems in the language.
>`When you are old and grey and full of sleep...'
>--
Actually, according to the criteria established by Smith, the reference to
people getting old and grey would immediately disqualify this poem. Let's
face it, Yeats thought man is in love, and loves what vanishes, what more
is there to say. Smith won't allow a love poem to say that much.
So, no--he can't.
D. Latane'
Judith Eubank
>>Zack T. Smith <za...@netcom.com> writes:
>>
>>> I recently attempted to find something -- anything -- in Yeats' poetry
>>> that even remotely resembled a love poem. Couldn't find a one; of course
>>> I was applying the standard that a love poem cannot and should not include
>>> morbid references to death or decay... Ahhhh, poor WB, he had no glee.
>>
>>Of course, if you rid yourself of your foolish standards, you would
>>find lots of them.
>
whole category of carpe diem poems. And perhaps the most famous love poem
in English, Marvell's To His Coy Mistress.
Thanks but you can keep your rule, and I'll keep the poems.
Judith
Douglas Clark
Philip, in poetry the end justifies the means.
Villon tried murder!
--
Douglas Clark Voice : +44 1225 427104
Douglas Clark
Ulick O'Connor in `The Yeats Companion' says that `When you are old and grey..'
is Maud Gonne's poem. I always understood it to be Olivia Shakespear's
whom Yeay [Yeats] called `Diana Vernon'. Anyone know? I will have to
dig Ellman out.
--
Douglas Clark Voice : +44 1225 427104
Douglas Clark
>
>Ulick O'Connor in `The Yeats Companion' says that `When you are old and grey..'
>is Maud Gonne's poem. I always understood it to be Olivia Shakespear's
>whom Yeay [Yeats] called `Diana Vernon'. Anyone know? I will have to
>dig Ellman out.
>--
A.Norman Jeffares has sorted me out. `When you are old' was written
by Yeats for Maud Gonne on 21 October 1891.
F2F...@vm.biu.ac.il
says:
>
>Yeats' poetry recalls a heroic past --- ooooohhhhh -- he must have
>been someone like Wagner. The Fiddler of Dooney with a Nazi armband.
>Yeats wanted to create a national identity -- so that politics with
>all its brutality could be surpassed. This was naive, one supposes --
>but it is nothing like what Wise accuses Yeats of doing. And --
>Yeats worried that by doing this -- by providing myth -- everything
>would be perverted by politicians. He did worry that the mythof
>Cuchulain would have the effect it did -- that certain words of
>his might have sent the fellows who participated in the Easter
>risong out to be shot.
Sorry sir knight but this objections put him along with a few of
the current hebrew artists/politians/etc in my fascist blacklist.
(in increasing percentages back there). If you do not like my
objection pray read the most praise worthy works of William Gibson
8-p ooops replace that with errr errr what's his name hmmmm double
dass it -- Henry Lawson the late great Australian national poet. Sure
Auzzie land was not under Brutish rule (hehehe or perhap I am
mistaken you see the cases are not altogether dissimilar) Now this
great word smith did no less than one would expect from a national
poet (yep the man had a hand for prose if not for playwritting)
but so as not to arouse your warth I let his works speak for themselvs
One could point out the Hebrew national poet Haim Nachman Bialik
though perchance his works are less accessible as another example of
a poet that could lie back and feel guilt free of his country's
rampant fascist policies.
>
>Has Wise ever read any of Yeats poems on Maud Gonne? Yeats
>thought that she -- like so may including Eva Gore Booth and Con
>Markievicz -- was ruined by revolutionary fanaticism. There
>was nothing he abhorred more.
>
>Was Yeats a fascist becasue he helped form a national theatre?
>This is what Wise insists, it seems. In the current theory
>that Wise adopts (uncritically -- he will be employed for sure)
>any attempt to instill national identity is fascist.
Sure those are awesome plays but like you fail to admit these
works (ok perhaps not all) are guilty as sin in setting the
ground for rampant fascism, the very morose abstraction does
more than half the trick -- If you cannot see this I suggest
your time and reread them a second time.
>
>In this model there is nothing more wicked than heroic myths --
>after all this is where all violence begins. Yeats swans, towers,
>mysic trees, red roses upon the rood of time etc. etc. are all
>instances of this primitive fascist instinct.
>
So, are you saying that because other artist worse in these repect
we should remove this instance from the list?? I feel that this
particular artist was more important and that when his book is
placed on the proverbial ballance the blood by far outways the
innocent albaster feathers of the swan....
-------
_/_/_/ _/_/_/ _/_/_/_/ _/ _/
_/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/_/ _/ f2f...@vm.biu.ac.il
_/ _/ _/_/_/_/ _/_/_/_/ _/ _/ _/
_/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/ Cyber Punk At Large
_/_/_/ _/ _/ _/_/_/_/ _/ _/
Various Disclaimers May Not Apply
Joseph M Green
back into the heavenly city. A remarkable feat -- for every thousand that
leave to wing it about in the Vast Inane (whilom Chaos and Old Night)
only one returns. If we had a fatted calf we would kill it. However,
things are grim here -- the best we can do is offer some small beer
and a chance to flop down and listen to sad stories.
MICHAEL WISE
trying to resolve why an intelligence like Pound's would be so fascinated
with the mob mentality of fascism--as Joe indicates, Yeats was not into
mob scenes.
More to the point, I chose to omit (since it went against my argument)
that Yeats's defense of Synge came out of a deeply-held belief in the
freedom of the theatre, a principle both Yeats and Lady Gregory stuck to.
Distaste came in the play itself, which was well off what the Abbey
usually produced--milky productions of Celtic heroes (George Morris's
Deirdre comes to mind as a example). Synge was following a different
drummer, that of Ibsen, Chekov, Strindberg--the ugly hero, the common
characters, the botched marriages, loves, ideals, lives; in other words,
realism. Dublin theater crowds weren't really ready for that, the
national theatre portraying Irish peasants as drunks and parricides.
Seems Yeats wasn't ready for it either; when the little man died, he
sought, successfully, to patch up any disagreeableness that might have
gone on.
___________________________________________________________________________
Michael Wise (wwhi...@nevada.edu) UNLV English
"Now I want you to tell me just one thing more. Why do you hate the South?"
"I dont hate it," Quentin said quickly, at once, immediately; "I dont
hate it," he said. I dont hate it he thought, panting in the cold air,
the iron New England dark: I dont. I dont. I dont hate it! I dont hate it!
--William Faulkner, Absalom! Absalom!
Gabrielle Hodson
>The long article explaining Yeats' role in the rise of Irish
>Nationalism was quite informative, but to be fair, Yeats seems to have
>regretted stirring up violence, and was disgusted with some results of
>Nationalism. For example (is this the first time someone has posted
>Are full of passionate intesity
passages deleted
>I think these passages show that Yeats was very suspicious of
>extremism of any kind, and was therefore no "fascist." If he was
>guilty of inspiring it, it is because his particular gift was poetry
>which is "full of passionate intensity" and he was able to make things
>seem much more important than they really are.
I agree. I also feel that to set up the Irish hatred of the British as
an example of fascistic racism (as I think the previous poster did) requires
a somewhat creative use of language given the history between those
countries.
--
Gabrielle g...@muffin.apana.org.au
*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*
MICHAEL WISE
tenuous argument (which I buttressed for my own pleasure), and, for my
part, I am glad. I am very fond of Yeats as a poet, less fond of him as a
mover and shaker (which, I believe, he rather candidly admits to all
around). Maud Gonne is said to have upbraided him for not participating
in a Dublin riot, and pushed him, unwillingly, into politics. But this
was Ireland of the teens and twenties, on the brink of revolution.
I don't think Yeats had strong feelings about politics; he had strong
feelings for art. His feeling for art perhaps pushed him into sordid
situations, the Abbey Theatre being one, Irish Free State politics for
another. Being involved in the art often meant, as it has always meant
and will always mean, taking a political stand. This is particularly true
of Yeats, who lived in interesting times, times not suited to scholars
and poets. Perhaps this made him a better writer; would Yeats be Yeats
without "Easter 1916"? I would like to think the times were difficult,
that he would have enjoyed the leisure of a Tennyson or Browning.
A friend once told me that even though she liked Wallace Stevens poetry,
she probably would not have liked the man himself. That does not change
her opinions of the poems, though. People who don't like Yeats's poetry
should say so, rather than dig up some excuse to banish him from his
pre-eminent status in modern poetry. To banish Yeats on a vague
allegation of fascism is to throw away a lifetime of contribution to art
and the development of civilised life. Will our future judge us as
harshly as we have our past? Will our great grandchildren revile us
because we once ate meat? Told a funny story about a drunk? Since only
the standards of the present are the correct ones, by which we are
entitled to judge all other generations, aren't we setting ourselves up
for rather a summary judgement of our own generation?
Joseph M Green
mob mentality of fascism?" You must mean that he was --anent your assertion
that this goes way back -- fascinated in a particularly revolting way.
That is -- you must mean that he was -- for a long time -- caught up in
it rather than viewing it analytically. It would also help if
you defined what specifically the mob mentality of fascism was -- and
how it differs from the mob mentality of -- say -- the mob in
St. Petersburg or a mob of raging Catholic nationalists.
I'd say that you don't know Yeats if you can believe that he was
fascinated (in the way you seem to mean) with any mob mentality.
But -- we await specific evidence.
Joseph M Green
"On Those that hated "The Playboy of the Western World," 1907"
Once, when midnight smote the air,
Eunuchs ran through Hell and met
On every crowded street to stare
Upon great Juan riding by:
Even like these to rail and sweat
Staring upon his sinewy thigh.
MICHAEL WISE
says, pulling at his long white beard, fumbling with the gold and silver
keys as he peers into a large, leather-bound volume, I can't seem to find
it. How do you spell that again?
Wise, W-I-S-E.
I'll take the beer, though, as long as it's cold. I like warm beer only
when it's cold outside.
David E. Latane
>And don't underestimate toilet training: I believe there are numerous
>psychological studies on toilet training in German families and the
>effect on personality. I also recall a survey a few years ago purporting
>that 75% of all Germans peed in swimming pools...
Considerably less than the USA I'll wager.
>Perhaps Joe Green can plumb the biographies for some dirt on the toilet
>habits of Yeats, Pound and Eliot.
Yeats, I just read in Bold's biography of MacDiarmid, took a
pee in the middle of a Dublin Street in 1928; the younger poet, as
per usual, peed too.
As for Hitler, let's hear Auden:
Accurate scholarship can
Unearth the whole offence
From Luther until now
That has driven a culture mad,
Find what occurred at Linz,
What huge imago made
A psychopathic god:
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.
"September 1, 1939"
D. Latane'
Tom Listmann
mil...@shire.math.columbia.edu (Millie Niss) wrote:
> >Plus we all know that jolly old Hitler's reliance of pseudo Christian,
pseudo
> >Nordic negativistic mysticism was juvenile indeed. I would assert that
fascism>of any flavor is a result of little more (1) hard upbringing (2) a
stalling of
> >socioemotional development at the early teenage level, and (3) reliance on
> >negativistic mysticism to explain reality and deliver a moral code.
>
> This is not only wrong, it is extremely dangerous! Hitler did not
> commeit his crimes because of Nietzsche or Wagner or a trauma during
> toilet training. He committed them because of a general level of
> anti-Semitism in Germany and resentment of the terms of the Versailles
> treaty. If you blame it on personal psychology, you ignir everything
> which could cause it to happen again.
Hitler didn't commit his crimes because of Nietzsche, Wagner or toilet
training, but because of a 'general level' and 'resentment?' I submit
that Hitler's crimes resulted from HATE. His crimes were directed at
more than Semites, and anti-semitism, the Versailles treaty, Nietzsche,
Wagner, etc were all tools he used to commit those crimes. And he used
Nordic negativistic mysticism to explain reality and deliver a moral
code that justified his crimes to his supporters.
And don't underestimate toilet training: I believe there are numerous
psychological studies on toilet training in German families and the
effect on personality. I also recall a survey a few years ago purporting
that 75% of all Germans peed in swimming pools...
Perhaps Joe Green can plumb the biographies for some dirt on the toilet
habits of Yeats, Pound and Eliot.
Tom
Joseph M Green
Tom Listmann wants to know about the toilet training of Yeats, Pound,
and Eliot. I thought that this was common knowledge. It has been
two yearsrs since I founded post-colonic studies and we have
done what we can to spread our knowledge.
Yeats -- an affection for tar water. What Irish bishop shared this?
Why?
Eliot -- we await his letters.
Pound -- generally loose bowels and a loving relationship
with his colon.
Much more, of course. But I have to go.
Millie Niss
>Douglas Clark <exx...@midge.bath.ac.uk> writes:
>
>> `When you are old and grey and full of sleep...'
>
>
>
Mark is usually right about nit picky points like this, but I am
afraid he is wrong this time. Ronsard's poem is upon which Yeats'
"When yoiu are old and grey" is based is number XLIII in the sonnet
series "Sonnets Pour Helene." You are quite right that Ronsard's
poem is not in iambic pentameter the way English sonnets are
supposed to be, but a French sonnet is written in Alexandrians, which
are 12 syllable lines (French verse is syllabic, not based on
stresses; the stress in French depends on the placement of a word
within the phrase, not on the individual words alone).
by the way, Yeats' poem is not all that close to the original (Ronsard
has four stanzas where Yeats has only three) and I much prefer the
Yeats version. Yeats follows the original fairly closely in the 1st
stanza, but the best lines in Yeats's poem have no counterpart in
Ronsard. "But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you" is pure Yeats.
Ronsard's poem is much more commonplace and seems more like a "pure
love poem" according to the bad definition given by that guy who
insulted me... Ronsard seems to be saying that she _should_ be
honored to be priased by one so wonderful as himself, while Yeats
makes us really feel that she _will_ regret him. It is typical of
Yeats' poetry that it speaks with such authority that it seems to be
objectively true, even when it is about something as entirely
subjective as love. Maybe that is why (to address the topic of
another thread) Yeats stirred up so much nationalism with his plays
even though Yeats himself had mixed feelings about nationalism and
politics in general.
Millie
Joseph M Green
D. Latane recalls Yeats and MacD peeing together....
This is why I have my doubts about MacD. He should have micturated
on Yeats.
Readers will remember that I once micturated on N. Frye. It
was at the Joseph Warren Beach lecture here three years ago.
A wonderful talk. I saw him enter the men's room at the same
time as two associate professors. Had to knock them down --
was worried N. would be finished but he was an old fellow by
then and was (as far as I could tell) simply sighing and hoping
as I took my place at the urinal next. I was rather out-of-sorts
(as you might guess) and, in my enthusiasm, whirled about in mid-stream
with the rather (to N.) unfortunate result. I'm afraid that I didn't
help things any by forgetting to ... "Put thathorse back in the
barn!," he roared. (This is as severe a reprimand as one should
expects from an ordained minister). He also knocked me down.
I ignored the looks of envy from the two professors as I left.
Ialso stole his umbrella -- which I will place on public view
when my museum is opened.
nik...@husc3.harvard.edu
> Phillip -- doesn't your sig. say something about wallowing in the
> mud of ignorance? Are we to celebrate this? What I said
> about the dangers of some slight acquaintance with biography and
> the absorption of this and that opinion that is "in the air" applies.
For dog's sake, Joseph, spare me your patronising tone until you
yourself produce a better standard of scholarship.
> When you dismiss Yeat's mysticism you dismiss, oh, neoplatonism,
> Mallarme, Blake and on and on. Not easy to do one would hope.
What nonsense. Dismissing Yeat's mysticism does not commit me to
dismissing anything else whatsoever.
> You need to read the life and letters before nattering about Yeats
> as fascist. Yours is an opinion that requires a willed ignorance.
I have read just enough of 'the life and letters' to know what I am
talking about. With all due respect, before I accept your charge of
nattering, let's see if your own desire to whitewash Yeat's politics
deserves any credibility. Here's what you wrote in another article:
> I
> see that I am too late -- the natterers are already at large
> and now we have the assertion that Yeats never wrote a "love
> poem" along with the assertion that Yeats was a Fascist and
> was, perhaps, a fascist all along -- something terribly wrong
> >from the start.
>
> I don't wonder at this. The fellow who can't find a love poem
> also writes that he ain't suprised to find out (from reading
> a post here) that Yeats was a Fascist. This is usually all the
> research these kinds of fellows do. Nattering is the mot juste.
>
> Here are the facts about Yeats and Fascism -- available from
> any biography.
>
> Hell, I'll even copy a passage from Ellmann's bio:
Ellmann-shmellmann. You call this 'doing research'? Henn and Ellmann
are so antiquated as to be quite useless with respect to establishing
Yeats's political beliefs. The problem of Yeats's fascism has been
studied by people who care about the issue; please feel free to ask
for references.
> "During these years [1933-1935] he [Yeats] arrived at his first
> conclusions about politics.
Unless you are mistaken about the years that Ellmann has in mind, I am
frankly surprised that you'd cite something as self-evidently stupid
as that. It is even worse than the popular myth that Yeats had been
dragged into politics by Maud Gonne. Yeats had entertained strong
political (nationalist) opinions and had been politically active since
the 1880s. Besides, I am curious to what extent you are prepared to
trust a biographer who consistently misspells O'Duffy's surname?
> He began badly in 1933 by involving
> himself slightly with a group of Irish fascists who wore blue
> shirts and at one time seemed likey to threaten the De Valera
> government. Their leader was General O'Duffey, whom Yeats met
> not many times as has been said, but only once. Yeats recognized
> >from the first, as his letters prove, that O'Duffey was a
> demagogic, fictile man, but hoped that he might develop
> leaderlike qualities which he never did.
This is somewhat misleading. Himself no small demagogue, Yeats never
had any luck identifying other demagogues, not even such a prominent
one as Mussolini. The only problem that Yeats had with O'Duffy was
that the latter seemed too 'plastic'. Here is what Yeats wrote about
him in a letter: 'O'Duffy himself is autocratic, directing the
movement [i.e. the Irish Fascists] from above down as if it were an
army. [Note that this is said with approval.] I did not think him a
great man though a pleasant one, but one never knows, his face and
mind may harden or clarify.' Somewhat later, O'Duffy failed to
understand a word of an abstruse political disquisition that Yeats
inflicted upon him, whereupon Yeats called him an 'uneducated
lunatic'.
> Eventually O'Duffey
> went off with an Irish brigade to fight for Franco in the Spanish
> civil war. Yeats, like most of his fellow countrymen, was by
> thistime thoroughly disaffected, and hoped O'Duffey would not
> return from Spain a hero. The general happily did not prove a
> very helpful acquisition to the Falange. [In fact, the Irish
> brigade returned with more men than left]
>
> Although Yeats was seen in a blue shirt at this time, he had been
> wearing blue shirts since 1925 or 1926, and the reason was not
> political but esthetic. If he learned the habit from anyone, it
> was from William Morris. His brief encounter with O'Duffy must
> have shown that they were more at odds than in accord. What
> Yeats wanted was a political party which would espouse Unity of
> Being" and turn it into a "discipline, a way of life," even a
> "sacred drama." In February 1934, still toying with the
> unofficial army, he wrote some marching songs for O'Duffey's men
> which included such lines as: "What's equality?-Muck in the
> yard:/ Historic nations grow/ From above to below.
> But by August of the same year he had realized his error and
> rewrote the poems so that nobody could sing them; and ,in
> addition, to show that his earlier utterances had been
> transitory, he made another poem to embody his growing
> disaffection with politics: "What if the Church and the State/
> Are the mob that howls at the door!"
>
> In 1935 Yeats still urged in conversation the despotic rule of
> the educated classes, but as the terror of Fascism and Nazism
> increased he ceased to speak in favor of any existing government.
> His friend Ethel Mannin, the novelist, tried on one occasion to
> persuade him to take a definite position against totalitarianism.
> They asked him to recommend Ossietsky, whom the Nazis had
> imprisoned, for the Nobel Peace Prize. Yeats refused, and in
> letters defending himself indicated his disaffection with every
> known governmental system:
>
> "Do not try to make a politician of me, even in Ireland I shall
> never I think be that again -- as my sense of reality deepens,
> and I think it does with age, my horror at the cruelty of
> governments grows greater, and if I did what you want I would
> seem to hold one form of government more responsible than any
> other and that would betray my convictions. Communist, Fascist,
> nationalist, clerical, anti-clerical are all responsible
> according to the number of their victims. I have not been
> silent, I have used the only vehicle I possess -- verse. If
> youhave my poems by you, look up a poem called "The Second
> Coming." It was written some sixteen or seventeen years ago and
> fortold what is happening. I have written of the same thing again
> and again since... I am not callous, every nerve trembles with
> horror at what is happening in Europe "the ceremony of innocence
> is drowned.""
This quote is particularly interesting since it reflects Yeats's habit
of lying retrospectively about his political activities and beliefs,
and presenting himself as a starry-eyed poet with his head in the
clouds - a habit which he indulged more frequently towards the end of
his life. Here is a famous example, in doggerel, from 1938:
I never bade you go
To Moscow or to Rome.
Renounce the drudgery,
And call the Muses home.
If you take these snippets of self-justification at face value, it may
indeed appear that Yeats's interest in fascism was brief and 'slight'.
Alas, it was lasting and profound, is well documented, and goes back
all the way to 1922 (also, incidentally, the year that Yeats became
Senator). 'The Ireland that reacts from the present disorder is
turning its eyes towards individualist Italy.' I wonder how this could
have escaped someone who urged me to read Yeats's letters in an
attempt to disabuse me of my misconceptions about Yeats. From 1922 to
1935, Yeats was full of consistent admiration for _il Duce_, although
it is said that at first he was prone, in his perpetual confusion, to
call him 'that very great man, Missolonghi'. He also admired Kevin
O'Higgins, Ireland's very own resident ' Mussolini'. Yeats hung out in
Italy with Pound and lavished praise on the regime in 1925, then again
in 1928-9 and in 1934. It is a myth that Yeats was idealistic about
fascism and entirely opposed to violence: he explicitly advocated the
use of violence on occasion. At home, his involvement with the
Blueshirts was brief, but far more vibrant than Ellmann suggests, and
he never dissociated himself from them until it became perfectly clear
that they had no chance of winning; talk about his 'disillusionment'
with fascism is just another myth. For the rest of his life he still
spoke with approval of fascist regimes when it served some
anti-English purpose of his.
In mentioning all this I am not at all bent on denouncing Yeats into
the ground. After all, he wasn't a fanatical creep a la Pound, but
merely a discombobulated political nerd in a state of perpetual
muddle. I do want to point out, however, that his fascism was
consistent with his larger worldview, and that his worldview accounts
for the conspicuous cheesiness that plagues much of his verse (much
even of his best and most famous verse) - a cheesiness that only a
highly selective reading can conceal. He was frequently blind to evil,
and not terribly insightful generally. I am mildly amused by the
facile little compromise that you have so quickly reached with Michael
Wise, that Yeats, though he happened to be a bad chap, was
nevertheless a great poet. Duh. It is ironic that you should mention
Blake in connection with Yeats, and insist that if I trash Yeats's
mysticism I must throw out Blake's also. Do you realise how different
their temperaments are? In Blake, despite all appearance to the
contrary, there is no room for the occult in the stuffy Yeatsian
sense; he is full of pure Platonic mania, of true insight. He had no
urge to romanticise himself. Yeats, on the other hand, was of a
different sort of kidney - not at all the 'passionate foolish man'
that he'd like us to believe he was. He was hardly very passionate at
all, and moderately clever, though all his life he fancied himself as
a sort of Brahmin and pretended that he saw transcendent shimmerings
and otherworldly 'visions', being in this respect but a banal
translucent epigone of Blake. A lot of his poems would not stand out
much in our glorious benighted rec.arts.poems. Please pause to think
about this before you smugly accuse me again of 'willed ignorance.'
Unfortunately, Yeats lacked both a genuine madness and a discipline of
mind capable of ridding him of his indelible cheesiness and making him
truly great. I don't want to deny his significance. But this thread
originated as a discussion of a canon of modern English poetry, and
you will excuse me if I say that I can't help being annoyed by certain
features of the Anglo-Saxon canon. Yeats was certainly extremely
gifted; he has a number of wonderful poems, but there are quite a few
others who have wonderful poems but who don't make the alleged top
ten. Poetry can be wonderful in a superficial sort of way, and there
is nothing wrong with that. On the other hand, there is the eternal
business of the king's new clothes. Far be it from me to wish to
contribute to the canonisation or decanonisation of anyone. Yet, even
though I may be slightly overreacting, I would like to know if there
is still anyone out there who realises that Eliot's best book is
'Practical Cats', that the actual merits of 'Wasteland' are scanty,
that his 'Four Quartets' are worthless, and that his general
importance is blown out of all proportion? That Dylan Thomas is a far
better poet than both Eliot and Yeats multiplied by Pound? That
reading that bearded false-prophetic mother, Walt Whitman, is a sheer
waste of time, and damaging to literary taste if taken seriously? That
there is an unfortunate organic consistency between the alleged canon
and the sorry plight of modern American poetry? Does anyone read
William Empson any more?
Philip Nikolayev
nik...@husc.harvard.edu
---------------------------------------------------------------------
'We shall affirm, then, that those who view many beautiful things but
do not see the beautiful itself and are unable to follow another's
guidance to it, and many just things, but not justice itself, and so
on in all cases - we shall say that such men have opinions about all
things, but know nothing of the things they opine.'
----------------------------------------------------------------------
nik...@husc3.harvard.edu
> Philip, in poetry the end justifies the means.
> Villon tried murder!
When I make up my mind to do something so very rad for poetry's sake,
I'll begin by gently shooting every harmless fluffy good-natured
primitivist poet in Bath.
> --
> Douglas Clark Voice : +44 1225 427104
> 69 Hillcrest Drive, Email : D.G.D...@bath.ac.uk
> Bath, Avon, BA2 1HD Books : http://www.bath.ac.uk/~exxdgdc/poetry.html
Philip Nikolayev
nik...@husc.harvard.edu
----------------------------------------------------------------------
'Likewise in respect of truth, I said, we shall regard as maimed in
precisely the same way the soul that hates the voluntary lie and is
troubled by it in its own self and greatly angered by it in others,
but cheerfully accepts the involuntary falsehood and is not distressed
when convicted of lack of knowledge, but wallows in the mud of
ignorance as insensitively as a pig.'
----------------------------------------------------------------------
nik...@husc3.harvard.edu
fascism.
PN
> > Does not Yeats's
> > fascination with fascism bespeak a horrible wrongness that pervaded
> > from the start his entire murky mediumistic mumbo-jumbo-laden
> > mentality?
VM
> Uh, it seems like this can only be established by looking at the
> poetry. Got some early examples in mind? How about "Down by the
> Salley Gardens"?
Oh, I'm prepared to take back the phrase 'from the start'. After all,
we were talking about 'memorable verse'. Who cares about Yeats's
eminently forgettable early stuff anyway?
PN
> > Or should one swallow
> > the moth-eaten lie that poetic genius, whatever that may be,
> > justifieth everything?
VM
> Or the moth-eaten...prejudice that any biographical fact or claim is
> part of the poetry -- that, once established, it is part of the
> reading of any aspect of all the works?
I am sorry that you fail to distinguish between 'any' accidents of
biography and the self-determined and fundamental dynamics of a
worldview. With the appropriate correction, the 'prejudice' that you
describe is of course Yeats's own even more than it is mine. Pick it
up from there if you want to interpret his verse correctly. Should I
remind you about the business of 'hammering one's thoughts into
unity'? And why do you think he was so fond of autobiography?
Incidentally, everyone is entitled to a favourite prejudice. Feel free
to pick one too. May I suggest Pushkin's famous prejudice that genius
and evil are incompatible?
> Vance
Tim Sullivan
(a great deal of snide scholaring which I didn't really read)
Yeats uber alles.
Tim
BAUER, THOMAS D.
I am amazed you were able to determine Nikolay's article as snide
despite the fact that you claim not to have read it...
>
>
>Yeats uber alles.
While I enjoy the debate among the erudite immensely I have long come
to the conclusion that the most important writers of the first half
of the twentieth century, the most important poets especially, did
not write in English. I am always stunned whenever I read ANY claim
that a writer or poet in English is the most important writer or
poet of the 20th C. I myself think Joyce is proably the most important
writer of fiction in English of the first half of the century. As for poet,
it would seem no English poet is as important as Paul Celan, who wrote in
German. Without Joyce, and probably Beckett, there would be no one in English
to compare with Kafka, Broch, Schultz and any number of other important
writers. As far as poets go Eliot, Pound and yes, Yeats, will probably
begin to be seen as somewhat less interesting than Celan, Zukofsky, or even
Williams. These last two, btw, being American.
Certainly "Yeats uber alles" is wishful thinking at best, unless it
is meant solely as a declaration of personal taste, a matter of course
over which no arguments can rightfully be made.
Tom
>
>
>Tim
Douglas Clark
Regarding Paul Celan, having no German if Celan's tortured language can
be called that, I feel that in Michael Hamburger's translation it is
difficult to make a case for him as a great poet. I cannot help but feel
that George Steiner's advocacy and his own personal tragedy have helped
elevate him to an unwarranted height. All poetry is personal taste but
that is mine. I have only been able to steal a few phrases from him.
But it has been pointed out to me before he is more effective read
in German.
David E. Latane
Cheddar, Stilton, Cheshire, Brie
Fascist foes of liberty!
old style:
The brawling of a sparrow in the eaves,
The brilliant moon and all the milky sky,
And all that famous harmony of leaves,
Had blotted out manÕs image and his cry.
New style:
There's a noisy bird out there, I guess I could write a poem
about it that would give pleasure and insight to millions of people
for the next 100 years, but someone at Harvard might consider it
'cheesy' so instead I'll shut the window and go to bed.
Old style:
You say, as I have often given tongue
In praise of what another's said and sung,
'Twere politic to do the like by these;
But was there ever dog that praised his fleas?
New style:
A friend wants me to praise some bad poets who imitate my style;
I guess I better do it because otherwise I might be seen
as an elitist fascist.
Old style:
I write it out in a verse--
MacDonagh and MacBride
And Connolly and Pearse
Now and in time to be,
Wherever green is worn,
Are changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.
New style:
Some proto-fascist nationalists have done something or other,
but since I'm an ineffectual nerd I couldn't possibly write anything
about it, because all nationalism is really fascism and in another
twenty years Hitler will be in power in Germany.
Old style:
But is there any comfort to be found?
Man is in love and loves what vanishes,
What more is there to say? That country round
None dared admit, if such a thought were his,
Incendiary or bigot could be found
To burn that stump on the Acropolis,
Or break in bits the famous ivories
Or traffic in the grasshoppers or bees.
New style:
Being without any insight I won't comment on the political chaos
in which I'm living; but I am no small demogogue, so I'm probably
fully in favor of rounding up incendiaries to trash the
countryside--I just wish I had rec.art.poems to post to, where
assuredly my cheesy verse wouldn't stand out.
Old style:
How can I, that girl standing there,
My attention fix
On Roman or on Russian
Or on Spanish politics?
New style:
I'm a cheesy, sexist nerd--old too--and now that the results of my
fascism are apparent to everyone I better pretend I'm just a poet, even
if exceptionally clever chaps at Harvard will spot this ploy and expose
me to the Internet.
D. Latane'
Ellyn Winslow
nik...@husc3.harvard.edu writes:
<snipped Phillips huge-o (enjoyable even at 3 in the morning) defense of
his op of Yeats>
> I would like to know if there
> is still anyone out there who realises that Eliot's best book is
> 'Practical Cats', that the actual merits of 'Wasteland' are scanty,
> that his 'Four Quartets' are worthless, and that his general
> importance is blown out of all proportion?
Not so fond actually of "Practical Cats", and I'm still quite in love (ok,
maybe only enamoured, for sentimental reasons doubtlessly) with "Love
Song", but I agree about "Quartets", ugh. (When I first read "Love Song" I
ran out and bought the only book that- sorry to admit it-Crown books had
which was the Quartets, what a disappointment!)
<That Dylan Thomas is a far better poet than both Eliot and Yeats
>multiplied by Pound?
Thank you, thank you! And less of an ass, too. Sorry to those who'd like
to see the work seperated from the bio, but attitudes/ideologies don't
exist in a vacuum and there's nothing worse than reading the tone of a
self absorbed and arrogant Artiste. (in my _humble_ opinion!) (ok, so
maybe I'm slashing a bit hard, but I get my hackles up... :-)
>That there is an unfortunate organic consistency between the alleged
>canon and the sorry plight of modern American poetry? Does anyone read
> William Empson any more?
Who? BTW, he who wants to write and reads only the 'Canon' deserves what
he gets. Meanwhile there are some good people who got (get) published
anyway, though I'm not really sure we should thank the lovely morons that
act as poetry editors in this country, but that sounds like another
thread...
Living people I, for one, would like to see more widely read: Amy
Gerstler, WS Merwin, Thomas Lux, Stanley Plumly, Allen Grossman.
-ellyn
Robert Schechter
: While I enjoy the debate among the erudite immensely I have long come
: to the conclusion that the most important writers of the first half
: of the twentieth century, the most important poets especially, did
: not write in English. I am always stunned whenever I read ANY claim
: that a writer or poet in English is the most important writer or
: poet of the 20th C. I myself think Joyce is proably the most important
: writer of fiction in English of the first half of the century. As for poet,
: it would seem no English poet is as important as Paul Celan, who wrote in
: German.
The subject of this thread is "Top Ten 20th Century Poets in
English," so start another thread if you would like to receive responses
to your provocative thesis that those who wrote in English in this
century cannot hold a candle to those who didn't.
My more general problem with most of the postings to this thread
is that not a single one of you give any indication of having any sort of
affection for poetry in the slightest.
Many of you excel, instead, in striking an intellectual tone that
preemps any honest disagreement and attempts to make others appear
foolish for holding opinions you do not share.
Perhaps a thread which invites people to rate and rank poets will
inevitably bring out the worst in people. But is it really a sign of
ignorance, and should it really provoke rancor or sarcasm, if one of us
prefers Williams and the other prefers Eliot?
Let's discuss what we like, appeal to the best in each other as
serious readers of poetry, and teach rather than browbeat or posture.
Or am I missing the point of literature in academia?
--
--Bob r...@panix.com
MICHAEL WISE
>is that not a single one of you give any indication of having any sort of
>affection for poetry in the slightest.
That is a fair statement of modernism; it's kind of a perverse,
intellectual fascination for those who get the jokes.
> Many of you excel, instead, in striking an intellectual tone that
>preemps any honest disagreement and attempts to make others appear
>foolish for holding opinions you do not share.
> Perhaps a thread which invites people to rate and rank poets will
>inevitably bring out the worst in people. But is it really a sign of
>ignorance, and should it really provoke rancor or sarcasm, if one of us
>prefers Williams and the other prefers Eliot?
> Let's discuss what we like, appeal to the best in each other as
>serious readers of poetry, and teach rather than browbeat or posture.
> Or am I missing the point of literature in academia?
Yeah, you're missing it. The only professor I ever had who had the balls
to really trash Eliot had a professorship and several books, including a
Hemingway biography, under his belt. Now it's becoming a passing fancy to
trash them all: Yeats, Eliot, Pound. Perhaps not a passing fancy; a
professional compulsion. Since it is now wrong to be a fascist, or even a
dead white male (who, as any Marxist will tell you, were all fascists
anyway) careers in the Ivory Tower center on branding fascists, and on
giving the canon a good thrashing. Now I'm all for a scrap over whose up
to what and when in the early twentieth century. But I like a fair fight,
one where when it becomes apparent that the combatants will never come to
a meaningful resolution, that they put up the gloves.
It's more that way here than in academe, I'm afraid. I'm rather fond of
modernist poetry: the emotion throbs out of the words the poet leaves
unspoken. The sound of plaintive voices in The Wasteland ("My nerves are
bad tonight") always sends chills up my spine, makes my eyes well up.
But now it's getting too much like religion, you know: too damn much
dogma, too much "to hell with you if you don't agree with me." I enjoy
the poetry, and given an appropriate setting I'd like to teach it and to
discuss it intelligently. I am finding, more and more, that this is the
only place where voicing unpopular opinions won't kill your chances for
tenure. I enjoy that about this forum; one shouldn't suggest that we
should all play nice and try to get along. The truth is, I like it when
things get a little raucous around here. It means we're not all fossils
hanging out in bookshops.
Bill Duke
In article <CuIow...@bath.ac.uk:, Douglas Clark (exx...@bath.ac.uk) writes:
:
:Regarding Paul Celan, having no German if Celan's tortured language can
:be called that, I feel that in Michael Hamburger's translation it is
:difficult to make a case for him as a great poet.
==================
Yes, exx...@bath.ac.uk, Celan's preferred language can indeed be
thought of as German. But considering the subtleties and intracacies
of both poetic verse and German syntax, I can see how a tyro might
consider it "tortured language." (All those peculiar foreign words
and all.)
:I cannot help but feel that George Steiner's advocacy and his own
:personal tragedy have helped elevate him to an unwarranted height.
:All poetry is personal taste but that is mine.
Steiner is hardly his only advocate, and personal tragedy is hardly
uncommon among poets. (Sometimes it seems like the rule.) I don't
know to what heights he's been elevated, but they're probably
warranted. (Just personal taste.)
:I have only been able to steal a few phrases from him. But it has
:been pointed out to me before he is more effective read in German.
Any poetry is better read in the original, but Hamburger's
translations seem pretty dependable to me, if a little flat-footed
at times. Browse the bilingual editions. That way you can hear the
metre, rhyme scheme and other formal devices. Of course, if the
poetry itself is of no interest to you, neither would this
suggestion be.
Joseph M Green
D. Latane has provided an effective criticism of Phillip's post.
A willed inability to distinguish between fascism and nationalism,
between Yeat's sort of myths and fascist myth etc. etc.
But __ harvard has come through -- this doesn't often happen and
Phillip -- it seems -- has read Yeats' letters, knows a bit
about the politics, can criticize Ellmann (who also calls I.
Gonne Maud's "beautiful niece" and doesn't provide the details we
require about Yeats' liason with the Bards namesake).
The fact remains, however, that Yeats' actual involvement with
actual Fascists was slight. It is possible to confuse certain
longings for a certain kind of heroism with fascism -- but a
person who wishes to demonstrate this has a long way to go.
It should again be pointed out that Yeats actual involvement with
fascism is much less deep than the actual involvement of many of
the poets of the thirties with movements (from the other side, shall we say)
that led to mass slaughter.
I don't think that Phillip understands what Yeats does with mysticism
and the supernatural, automatic writing and visions. It is easy
to laugh at persons sitting on one anothers astral bodies, Yeats pounding his
head against a medium's table, mediums whose spirit guide resides
in their duodenum and feels (they say) somewhat like a wet chicken.
The last egg of old Leda in a certain Spartan temple -- the Great Herne.
Michael Robartes and a certain group pf Arabs etc. etc. etc.
Good fun. But Yeats does something with all this that is rather
amazing -- and, of course, one must keep metaphor in mind,
attempt at unity, pervasive irony, Yeats' own skepticism -- Yeats
makes it impossible to read "A Vision" in the way Phillip seems
to want to read it. All sorts of deliberate complications.
It feels to me that Phillip dislikes Yeats for reasons that seem
valid to him. Any taint of fascism might be enough to send Yeats
to hell (and again Yeats is much less involved with the various
systems of evil then extant than a myriad) and a declaration
from Pushkin might seem in order. But then we might ask (becasue we
are so clear-eyed and moral) whether Pushkin -- a great great poet but
a fellow who we might say (applying Phillip's criteria) was involved/
associated with/ around certain kinds of political evil (being
exiled to one's estate is not enough) and who certainly indulged in
sexual connexions with exploited persons can achieve the moral
grandeur to make declarations about poetry and evil. That is, if
one wants to simply conflate fascism with a longing for a certain
kind of aristocracy (even if "spiritual) one can happily condemn
a myriad and Pushkin among them.
But -- this would be wrong. No special pleading is involved.
Joseph M Green
Bob writes:
> My more general problem with most of the postings to this thread
>is that not a single one of you give any indication of having any sort of
>affection for poetry in the slightest.
> Many of you excel, instead, in striking an intellectual tone that
>preemps any honest disagreement and attempts to make others appear
>foolish for holding opinions you do not share.
> Perhaps a thread which invites people to rate and rank poets will
>inevitably bring out the worst in people. But is it really a sign of
>ignorance, and should it really provoke rancor or sarcasm, if one of us
>prefers Williams and the other prefers Eliot?
> Let's discuss what we like, appeal to the best in each other as
>serious readers of poetry, and teach rather than browbeat or posture.
> Or am I missing the point of literature in academia?
>
>--
greater evil. Phillip probably is. I wouldn't trust Michael Wild
(living in Vegas) not to be more capable in a bad way. Douglas
Clark is a saint and has not indulged in the acts you reprehend.
Vance is also saintly and Alan Burns is very reasonable and liberal
in his views.
The point of litrature in academia -- you will be stunned to hear --
is never mentioned in most precincts. Literature is a bad word.
Cultural studies are performed. Almost all the poets
discussed here are thorougly condemned -- the exceptions are
those who meet current lifestyle criteria.
In this thread the pre-emption of honest disagreements has been rare.
Condemnation of Yeats as a fascist without (in fact) knowing a damn
thing about his life, the history etc has been ridiculed. No "resist
not evil" here. We care too much about poetry. A more erudite
(but flawed) condemnation from Phillip has been met. Here we are gently
leading Phillip to purer waters -- as he deserves because (at least)
he has read some letters even if he hmmmmm lacks context.
>
We have also briefly discussed criteria for judgment, matters of
influence etc etc.
What you seem to require as evidence that poetry is liked is
an exclamation something like "Isn't it nice that we can ride
our bicycles to the library?"
Vance Maverick
> eminently forgettable early stuff anyway?
Nobody, of course, but some of us like the memorable early stuff
pretty well.
> > > Or should one swallow
> > > the moth-eaten lie that poetic genius, whatever that may be,
> > > justifieth everything?
> > Or the moth-eaten...prejudice that any biographical fact or claim is
> > part of the poetry -- that, once established, it is part of the
> > reading of any aspect of all the works?
>
> I am sorry that you fail to distinguish between 'any' accidents of
> biography and the self-determined and fundamental dynamics of a
> worldview. With the appropriate correction, the 'prejudice' that you
> describe is of course Yeats's own even more than it is mine.
Oh?
The intellect of man is forced to choose
Perfection of the life, or of the work,
And if it take the second, must refuse
A heavenly mansion, raging in the dark.
> Incidentally, everyone is entitled to a favourite prejudice. Feel free
> to pick one too. May I suggest Pushkin's famous prejudice that genius
> and evil are incompatible?
That's a fine prejudice, but not one of mine. In Wagner, for example,
I see a genuine evil genius -- no question (for me) of his lacking
either quality.
Vance
Douglas Clark
Let me jn [p [just] say that Bill Duke's article on He [Celan]
never reached here. I only have the clip Vance extracted from it.
I have been reading Celan in translation for over twenty years and
feel that I have never penetrated to him. By comparison Rilke is
an open book. I am suspicious of others with no German who say they
understand him. Although Roger of rec.music.classical who is a
German speaker made the point to me that Deathfugue is very effective
Vance Maverick
> Yes, exx...@bath.ac.uk, Celan's preferred language can indeed be
> thought of as German. But considering the subtleties and intracacies
> of both poetic verse and German syntax, I can see how a tyro might
> consider it "tortured language." (All those peculiar foreign words
> and all.)
This is needlessly snide. Foreign words (unless you're being even
snider than I think) are not the stumbling block: Celan pushes farther
than anyone I've read the German language's capacity for neologism,
using this micro-syntax to yoke symbolically loaded words violently
together. These are not the barriers thrown up by garden-variety
"poetic verse and German syntax"; reading the later Celan is just not
like reading, say, Heine.
> Browse the bilingual editions. That way you can hear the
> metre, rhyme scheme and other formal devices. Of course, if the
> poetry itself is of no interest to you, neither would this
> suggestion be.
Again, why be snide? Douglas is saying he finds "the poetry itself"
inaccessible to him even through such homework; and as a reader whose
German is just good enough to like the poems and sense what lies
beyond my grasp, I sympathize.
Vance
Joseph M Green
also demands it.
First of all, I do not require references and don't, of course,
only rely on Ellmann. Here at this rag and bone shop it is necessary
to know these kinds of things because poets and other writers who
do not meet current lifestyle critera are automatically denounced
as fascists etc based on what someone has heard. I still think that
Ellmann gives a good brief account -- very coherent. But I fear
that you Phillip have got hold of the awful and extensively refuted
O'Brien article (or one of several based on his shoddy work). Reads
as if you have. I recommend Cullingford's "Yeats, Ireland, and Fascism"
the best scholarly work on the subject (a book!). Everyone of your points
are refuted therein. But to your article...
Rather incoherent at times. You say, for example, that the only
problem Yeats had with the fascist O'Duffy was that he was "Plastic."
You then note that Yeats also said that he was an "uneducated lunatic."
Seems that you refute yourself.
You attack Ellmann for saying that in the last six years of his life Yeats
reached conclusions about politics. You then heap scorn on the fellow for (
you say) not noticing that Yeats was always involved in politics.
Really, if Ellmann hadn't noticed this, he must have been an idiot.
You misunderstand Ellmann. He means (and this should be clear) that
Yeats finally decides on the worth of politics. His conclusion
is that things are so bad with good old Western Civ (and he
believes Fascism is an example of how bad things are) that politics
is useless -- won't work, worthless. I hope that this insight helps.
You smear Yeats by associating him with Kevin O'Higgins. O'Higgins, you
say, was a fascist. Like O'Brien you probably get this from ther fact
that he was called the "Irish Mussolini." Cullingford straightens
you out: " Although O'Higgins was popularly known as the Irish
Mussolini, the main resemblance lay in his energy and determination,
since he was a convinced democrat." Perhaps you should consider
whether Yeats accorded the admiration that he did to Mussolini
because he thought he was like O'Higgins. And perhaps you should
provide details of this admiration (why, how qualified) and then
place it into the political context (lots of folks admired M. early
on as a reaction to communism and in Ireland as a reaction to the
dreaded imposition of rule by clerical bigots) and then into a wider
historical context. At any rate, Yeats denounces M. In fact, as
a Senator he even went against O'Higgins -- on many issues.
You also need to show how resistance to a censorship bill shows a
fascist temper and how refusing to subordinate children to the state
by declaring that "the child itself must be the end in education...
In the modern world the tendency is to think of the nation; that
is more important than the child. In Japan, I understand, the
child issacrificed to patriotism...We are bound to go through the
same passion ourselves. There is a tendency to subordinate the
child to the idea of the nation....we should always see that the
child is the object and not any of our special purposes." shows
the good old fascist instinct.
Nah -- you got hold of some bad information.
Another Willie quote:
"Why should I trouble about communism, fascism, liberalism,
radicalism, when all, though some bow first and some stern first
but all at the same pace, all are going down stream with the
artificial unity that ends every civilization? Only dead sticks
can be tied into bundles..."
Only dead sticks! And notice how Willie abhors artificial unity.
You are the victim of a canard, I think.
So -- let's look back on your article.
1. You misunderstand Ellmann (on purpose). Ell mann states
that in the last six years of his life Yeats arrives at conclusions
about politics -- he could never state that Willie had never
been involved.
2. You contradict yourself on O'Duffy.
3. You are wrong on who O'Higgins was and what he represented.
You are wrong when you imply that Yeats was a follower, in any case.
4. Citations, quotations as shown above cast doubt (an understatement)
on Yeats having the fascist temper. Specifically denouncing
them is telling, wouldn't you say.
Points not covered.
Yeats does not attempt to re-write his political history. Yeats never
had any sympathy for Russian or German totalitarianism. The record
is clear.
You conflate nationalism, fascism, traditionalism. You must make
an effort to separate these.
Yeats repudiated anti-semitism, State-worship, censorship,
interference with individual liberty, and the cruelty of all
totalitarian regimes. By doing this he was doing much much better
than many.
Read "Among School Children" -- the first stanza prompted by a visit
to a Montessori school -- and then "labor is blossoming or dancing
where/The body is not bruised to pleasure soul..." (the first lines
of the last stanza -- and then those great last lines and
really ask yourself (with all the other evidence I've given you)
whether you really want to insist that this guy was a "Fascist."
If you still do -- why you may be mad.
Dave Palmer
my vote goes to dr. seuss.
"did you ever fly a kite in bed?
have you ever walked with ten cats on your head?
have you ever milked this kind of cow?
well, we can do it. we know how!
if you never did, you should.
these things are fun and fun is good." --one fish two fish red fish
blue fish
--dave
--
"Once I had a little game
I liked to crawl back into my brain
I think you know the game I mean
I mean the game called 'go insane'" Jim Morrison
Joseph M Green
will, doubtless, require and extensive discussion of Yeats' early
admiration for Mussolini. Ill get ready by providing some
background -- by quoting a passage from Cullingford.
"The word "fascism".... is commonly used as a synonym for "Nazism," and
carries implications of brutal totalitarianism, genocidal racism, and
desire for world conquest, which it never possessed during the twenties.
Paradoxically, the word has also been weakened into a term of
indiscriminate abuse, usually aimed at one even marginally right of
centre. This linguistic imprecision has been fatal to Yeats'
reputation. The cry of "fascist," an essential part of leftist
vocabulary, has been taken by serious scholars to mean that Yeats condoned
Nazi atrocities.
In the twenties the word "fascism" had different implications. Admiration
for Mussolini was widespread among European conservatives, who regarded
him as Italy's deliverer from the menace of Bolshevism. Repressive
measures were condoned as initially inevitable, and its admirers thought
that fascism would "settle down." Many distinguished politicians,
including Chamberlain and Churchill, voiced their support for the new
regime. Il Duce was also popular with many Italians. Despite the
brutality of the fascist squads, Mussolini was less ruthless, as well
as less efficient, than Hitler. Antisemetism was originally
unknown, Church and monarchy survived as independent entities, and
censorship was relatively lax. Although Mussoloni invented the word
totalitatianism, it was left to Hitler to embody it.
Not only did Mussolini genuinely have less to hide; he had an
efficient propaganda machine with which to hide it. The British
press reproduced the confusions and inaacuracies of the Italian.
The information available to Yeats, who read the Irish Times, was
similar to that available to readers of The Times, which
considered Mussolini a potential heir of Garibaldi, praised him
constantly as the restorer of Italian order, and noted his
"wonderful judgment" and "sense of humor." The violence of the
fascist squads was more or less ignored.
Between 1922 and 1933, therefore, the connotations of the word fascism stood
for resolute opposition to Bolshevism, and devotion to order, hierarchy,
and discipline. Outside observers took rather less interest in the other
side of the fascist equation: the glorification of energy, activism, and
force..."
Ah, the rain, the weary, dreary rain. We will, I am sure,
discover/discuss what Yeats understood/meant by hierarchy, order,
and discipline and will take into account what Yeats knew of
Fascism -- what he thought it was. Just to anticipate --
Yeats always identified discipline as self-discipline. But --
we await these refinements and explorations.
Phillip will detail Yeats' admiration for Mussolini (one hopes)
and I will reply. No more generalizations! We will find that
Yeats was seriously misinformed (early on) about Il Duce, place the
admiration within the context of bloody Irish politics and
discover (along with much else) that this was what Yeats thought
about the politics of Ezra Pound
"He is an economist, poet, politician, raging at malignants with
inexplicable characters and motives, grotesque figures out of a
child's book of beasts. This loss of self-control, common
among uneducated revolutionists, is rare -- Shelley had it in
some degree -- among men of Ezra Pound's culture and erudition."
and discover that Yeats says this of the kind of nationalism that
fascist states build on:
"I am no Nationalist, except in Ireland for passing reasons; State
and Nation are the work of intellect, and when you consider what comes
before and after them are, as Victor Hugo said of something or other, not
worth the blade of grass God gives for the nest of a linnet."
Work of intellect. Don't depend on blood! Not organic! A strange
fascist this fellow Yeats...
Oh, and let's discuss Yeats as Senator. There is so much there to
refute the fascist slander.
Or -- let's discuss Yeats' irrationalism -- to see if it is of
the Fascist sort or, even, just to discover what he means.
Or let's discuss "The Second Coming" and "A Vision."
BAUER, THOMAS D.
>
>Let me jn [p [just] say that Bill Duke's article on He [Celan]
>never reached here. I only have the clip Vance extracted from it.
>
>I have been reading Celan in translation for over twenty years and
>feel that I have never penetrated to him. By comparison Rilke is
>an open book. I am suspicious of others with no German who say they
>understand him. Although Roger of rec.music.classical who is a
>German speaker made the point to me that Deathfugue is very effective
>in German.
Well, since I brought up Celan in the first place, I'll just jump
in here and say I make no claim to understand him, I just think he's
great and important. I've only read the Hamburger translation. The
first few times I read the poems from 'Die Niemandsrose' I drew a
blank. Took a long time and lots of readings to begin. But the Deathfugue
and the other poems I have read have a life in me now. I do, of course,
have an understanding of some of the poems. What I understand of Celan,
what I understand of his contribution to language, leads me to think
he is important. This is why I made the previous statements, all of
which are meaningless anyway. I think I have lived so long with the
poetry of Eliot on down, the canonized moderns, that other voices
are more interesting at this stage.
I hate it when I call some writer important. I always think of
myself as shutting off the brain and letting bilge pour. So, since
I seem unable to stop opening my mouth, I have tried to understand what
I mean when I open it. I think an idea of subject is in there. The poetic
subject matter of various poets seems to vary in importance in some
way. So many of the poets in the various manifestations of the more
or less discernible canon of English lit seem to me to spend way
too much time whining about their lot. Some of them became and become
very very good at whining about their lot. Others become very very
good at saying 'Look at me, I am clever!' The gist of many poems
can be summed in a sentence. Some say simply: Gosh! Others say
other things. Some, in rare cases, communicate the incommunicable, or
seem to. I see not being able to understand a poet as good thing, sometimes,
and I guess with Celan I just feel overwhelmed by that which, though
I may not be able to understand, I can feel. Explication is the
foundation of the study of literature in the Academy. I tend to
prefer the inexplicable, or the thing that is open to many partial
explications. What would you rather have if you were stranded on
a desert island? Rilke, the open book, or Celan the impenetrable?
Tom
Philip Nikolayev
r...@panix.com (Robert Schechter) writes:
> Let's discuss what we like, appeal to
> the best in each other as serious readers of poetry, and teach
> rather than browbeat or posture.
I don't know if this should necessarily be so, but my own Net
experience suggests that around these parts well-nigh every routine,
thoroughly bland, moderately self-righteous admonition to be nice to
each other, to 'teach rather than browbeat and posture', &c., is in
fact a concealed appeal to ignore something, often uttered precisely
when the resources for flatly denying that something have been
exhausted. How important the something is in this instance I honestly
don't know. Perhaps Yeats's fascistic flirtations are altogether a
piddling matter. Still, I am mildly annoyed by the fact that some of
you here are so much cleverer than I am that its piddling nature is so
perfectly self-evident to you, but not to me. I wish I could share in
the certainty and comfort.
Since I first posted on the subject, I have spent two nights rereading
with visceral abandon my copy of Yeats's collected poems. Lots of
delightful, what you call 'memorable', stuff: I didn't need any
staunch guardians of the glossy portrait to draw my attention to it.
It's a good idea when reading him to try and forget as much as
possible about Yeats himself. But that's precisely the trouble with
his poetry, since the meaning of any poem is, alas, just what the poet
meant to say. Hence a curious paradox. By and large, the less you
understand Yeats, the more you are likely to admire him. For example,
it certainly helps you delight in the moving imagery and resonant
diction of 'Among School Children' if you don't know it to be made up
of rhymed plagiarisms of the thoughts of a certain fascist philosopher
on education.
> --Bob r...@panix.com
Joseph M Green
of a certain fascist philosopher of education. He is referring
to Gentile -- many of us knew all along that Yeats was interested
in the fellow. But -- Gentile is not quite what Phillip says he is and
-- as I posted -- Yeats specifically rejects those elements in Gentile
that offend Phillip. Again -- read the book and let's lift this onto
a higher plane. Again and again I have answered Phillip's
general and indiscriminate charges with specific information. Phillip
responds by not responding specifically but by merely suggesting
that he knows something we don't. Perhaps at Harvard it is generally
true that Phillips antagonists are merly posing and it is possible
for Phillip to harry them with the smattering of facts he knows.
But -- it ain't true here.
And calling the poem above rhymed plagiarism is a bit thick. Harvard
has a rather large library. Cullingford is availale for perusal
I am sure. Info about what was known about Early Mussolini
is available -- as I said the sources Yeats used were such that
Yeats simply didn't know all. Churchill an early enthusiast
of Mussolini. Are we to condemn him as a fascist too?
Perhaps Phillip has his attention fixed on a beautiful lass
instead of Irish or Roman politics. Who knows?
Douglas Clark
he was a man of his times and not particularly a namby-pamby liberal.
The point was made quite strongly recently, probably in discussion
of the Gonne-Yeats letters, that if Yeats had known of the Easter
Uprising in advance he would probably have scurried to Dublin and
finished up inside the Post Office. After all the man was an Irish
Nationalist. We could afford to lose a McDonagh or a Pearse, but
not a Yeats. Perhaps that is why they didnt tell him, to his anger.
--
Douglas Clark Voice : +44 225 427104
Douglas Clark
Philip Nikolayev
> D. Latane has provided an effective criticism of Phillip's post.
> A willed inability to distinguish between fascism and nationalism,
> between Yeat's sort of myths and fascist myth etc. etc.
May I ask you to point out where exactly I have failed to distinguish
between fascism and nationalism (are you perchance thinking of Micheal
Wise?), or 'between Yeats's sort of myths and fascist myth'? I'm also
interested in the 'etc. etc.'
> But __ harvard has come through -- this doesn't often happen and
> Phillip -- it seems -- has read Yeats' letters, knows a bit
> about the politics, can criticize Ellmann (who also calls I.
> Gonne Maud's "beautiful niece" and doesn't provide the details we
> require about Yeats' liason with the Bards namesake).
>
> The fact remains, however, that Yeats' actual involvement with
> actual Fascists was slight. It is possible to confuse certain
> longings for a certain kind of heroism with fascism -- but a
> person who wishes to demonstrate this has a long way to go.
> It should again be pointed out that Yeats actual involvement with
> fascism is much less deep than the actual involvement of many of
> the poets of the thirties with movements (from the other side, shall we say)
> that led to mass slaughter.
Who said anything about 'actual involvement with actual fascism',
anyway? And who confuses 'longings for a certain kind of heroism with
fascism'?
> I don't think that Phillip understands what Yeats does with mysticism
> and the supernatural, automatic writing and visions. It is easy
> to laugh at persons sitting on one anothers astral bodies, Yeats pounding his
> head against a medium's table, mediums whose spirit guide resides
> in their duodenum and feels (they say) somewhat like a wet chicken.
> The last egg of old Leda in a certain Spartan temple -- the Great Herne.
> Michael Robartes and a certain group pf Arabs etc. etc. etc.
> Good fun. But Yeats does something with all this that is rather
> amazing -- and, of course, one must keep metaphor in mind,
> attempt at unity, pervasive irony, Yeats' own skepticism -- Yeats
> makes it impossible to read "A Vision" in the way Phillip seems
> to want to read it. All sorts of deliberate complications.
Oh yeah? Though I largely disagree with Cullingford (whom you yourself
praise) about Yeats's politics, I refer you to the best parts of her
book, which have to do precisely with _A Vision_, her sound conclusion
being that 'Yeats's interest in fascism was initially motivated by his
desire to corroborate the historical speculations formulated in _A
Vision_'. Are you willing to refute her argument, or will you confine
yourself to gainsaying?
> It feels to me that Phillip dislikes Yeats for reasons that seem
> valid to him.
I do not dislike Yeats.
> Any taint of fascism might be enough to send Yeats
> to hell (and again Yeats is much less involved with the various
> systems of evil then extant than a myriad) and a declaration
> from Pushkin might seem in order. But then we might ask (becasue we
> are so clear-eyed and moral) whether Pushkin -- a great great poet but
> a fellow who we might say (applying Phillip's criteria) was involved/
> associated with/ around certain kinds of political evil (being
> exiled to one's estate is not enough)
I don't understand what you have in mind here.
> and who certainly indulged in sexual connexions with exploited persons
So what? Most people I know are 'exploited persons'; should I refrain
from having sexual relations with them?
> can achieve the moral
> grandeur to make declarations about poetry and evil.
You mistake me for someone arguing by authority. I simply cited
another poet's insight (or a prejudice, if you prefer), which happens
to be either true or false quite regardless of its provenance. 'Moral
grandeur' has nawt to do with this: where morality (or any serious
thinking) is concerned, everyone proceeds at one's own risk, and one's
insights come on the strength of one's assumptions purely as a matter
of daring. Would you not agree that moral strife characterises the
best of literature?
> That is, if
> one wants to simply conflate fascism with a longing for a certain
> kind of aristocracy (even if "spiritual) one can happily condemn
> a myriad and Pushkin among them.
>
> But -- this would be wrong. No special pleading is involved.
You've lost me again. Who said anything about 'a longing for a certain
kind of aristocracy'?
Philip Nikolayev
> Phillip mentions "Among School Children" and calls it rhymed plagiarisms
> of a certain fascist philosopher of education. He is referring
> to Gentile -- many of us knew all along that Yeats was interested
> in the fellow. But -- Gentile is not quite what Phillip says he is
> and--as I posted -- Yeats specifically rejects those elements in Gentile
> that offend Phillip.
Correction: I referred to Gentile merely as 'a certain fascist
philosopher', which is exactly what he was, by his own as well as by
public lights. Although I have said nothing about elements in him
that offend me, Yeats indeed embraces a few of those.
> Again -- read the book and let's lift this onto
> a higher plane. Again and again I have answered Phillip's
> general and indiscriminate charges with specific information. Phillip
> responds by not responding specifically but by merely suggesting
> that he knows something we don't.
Sorry, but my little posting about Gentile was not in response to
anything that you had written: when I was writing it, your longer
postings about Yeats had not yet appeared at my site. The newsreader
here is a bit slow. Besides, my current exhausting full-time
interpreting job is preventing me from responding to your postings
promptly. Please bear with me.
> Perhaps at Harvard it is generally
> true that Phillips antagonists are merly posing and it is possible
> for Phillip to harry them with the smattering of facts he knows.
> But -- it ain't true here.
Duh. Should we imitate our venerable facile Murky the Lugwit in
swapping such inexpensive shots? I assure you that Harvard has
absolutely nothing to do with anything that I happen to know or think
about Yeats.
> And calling the poem above rhymed plagiarism is a bit thick. Harvard
> has a rather large library. Cullingford is availale for perusal
> I am sure.
Sorry, you are wrong. Cullingford is quite misguided on this score and
says nothing illuminating about 'Among School Children'. The poem's
overwhelming textual and imaginal indebtedness to the 1923 English
translation of Gentile's 'The Reformation of Education' is discussed
in Donald Torchiana's essay, '"Among School Children' and the
Education of the Irish Spirit'.
> Info about what was known about Early Mussolini
> is available -- as I said the sources Yeats used were such that
> Yeats simply didn't know all. Churchill an early enthusiast
> of Mussolini. Are we to condemn him as a fascist too?
Would you rather praise him for the enthusiasm?
More to the point, I did not 'condemn [Yeats] as a fascist': I have
all along spoken tactfully and consistently about his 'fascinations'
and 'flirtations' with fascism. You seem to be missing my point again
and again. Let me restate it for the sake of clarity. Yeats was an
obscurantist; obscurantism is compatible with any form of political
evil (and this is but one of many reasons why obscurantism sucks);
hence Yeats's obscurantism was compatible with political evil. This is
the weaker and more general claim. Somewhat more strongly, Yeats's
specific interest in fascism over a long period illustrates his
occasional blindness to actual political evil and therefore also a
wrongness about his larger worldview. I submit that the quality of his
poetry suffers too. Naturally, this involves a scale of values which
you may not be prepared to accept. But insisting that Yeats was a
'memorable' poet strikes me as belabouring the obvious; I find it more
interesting at the moment to discuss those aspects of his life and
work which should give pause.
Please note that my previous posting about 'Among School Children'
simply mentioned the fact that my own erstwhile admiration for the
poem was ruined by a deeper understanding of its meaning. However,
since obscurantism appeals to many, I rather expect that an awareness
of the poem's indebtedness to Gentile - a fairly radical key to its
meaning - will make slight difference to them.
Philip Nikolayev
> Or -- let's discuss Yeats' irrationalism -- to see if it is of
> the Fascist sort or, even, just to discover what he means.
May I humbly submit that any form of irrationalism, including Yeats's,
is consistent with any form of evil?
> Or let's discuss "The Second Coming" and "A Vision."
Let's discuss 'The Second coming'. I would like to insinuate that only
the first two lines of the poem have superficial literary merit by
virtue of containing what one calls a fresh image, while the rest of
the poem has no merit at all, being as it is nothing but a tedious,
tame, technically unremarkable description of one man's alleged
apocalyptic vision - one so vague that, save for a dismal historical
determinism that thickly informs it, hardly any intelligible meaning
can possibly be teased out of it without recourse to other, equally
tedious sources which inform one of Yeats's elaborate, insipid
mystical symbology and familiarity with which tends to sour one's
enjoyment even of the first two lines by virtue of introducing one to
the profuse occult rubbish that Yeats associated with the imagery of
'gyres'. Douglas Clark has been known to do far better on occasion. Amen.
Philip Nikolayev
> Phillip will require a more detailed reply. Decency (oddly enough)
> also demands it.
>
> First of all, I do not require references and don't, of course,
> only rely on Ellmann. Here at this rag and bone shop it is necessary
> to know these kinds of things because poets and other writers who
> do not meet current lifestyle critera are automatically denounced
> as fascists etc based on what someone has heard. I still think that
> Ellmann gives a good brief account -- very coherent. But I fear
> that you Phillip have got hold of the awful and extensively refuted
> O'Brien article (or one of several based on his shoddy work). Reads
> as if you have. I recommend Cullingford's "Yeats, Ireland, and Fascism"
> the best scholarly work on the subject (a book!). Everyone of your points
> are refuted therein.
Ironically, some of my points were in fact taken from Cullingford. I'm
afraid I disagree with you about both her and O'Brien. The latter has
indeed been criticised a good deal, and a number of his claims
(especially about Yeats's early political activity) have been refuted;
it is generally agreed that he somewhat overstates the case about
fascism also. Yet the pioneering nature of the essay is a sufficient
excuse for its shortcomings. As a matter of fact, I read Cullingford
first, and found the reference to O'Brien therein. Cullingford, being
an apologist, is rather full of shit and wishful thinking about
Yeats's politics, and has been rightly criticised too. She makes him
out to be a liberal - a claim which, to the best of my knowledge, no
serious scholar accepts today. I refer you to the criticism of her
book in Grattan Freyer, _W.B.Yeats and the Anti-Democratic Tradition_
(a book of greater scholarly worth than Cullingford's). Observe also
that you come across as an even greater partisan than Cullingford in
denying that the problem exists at all.
> But to your article...
>
> Rather incoherent at times. You say, for example, that the only
> problem Yeats had with the fascist O'Duffy was that he was "Plastic."
> You then note that Yeats also said that he was an "uneducated lunatic."
> Seems that you refute yourself.
Allow me to clarify. Ellmann's claim was that Yeats instantly
identified O'Duffy as a demagogue. As far as I can tell, this is
inaccurate: O'Duffy's 'plasticity' was the only fault that Yeats
*initially* found with him, while 'uneducated lunatic' is a later
accusation. If you know of a specific reference to O'Duffy's
demagoguery in Yeats, please cite it.
> You attack Ellmann for saying that in the last six years of his life Yeats
> reached conclusions about politics. You then heap scorn on the fellow for (
> you say) not noticing that Yeats was always involved in politics.
> Really, if Ellmann hadn't noticed this, he must have been an idiot.
> You misunderstand Ellmann. He means (and this should be clear) that
> Yeats finally decides on the worth of politics. His conclusion
> is that things are so bad with good old Western Civ (and he
> believes Fascism is an example of how bad things are) that politics
> is useless -- won't work, worthless. I hope that this insight helps.
Alas, your exegesis doesn't work: Ellmann explicitly talks about Yeats
having arrived at his *first* conclusions about politics. But I
understand now that it's all quite simple, really: the sentence is
Ellmann is an unacknowledged quotation from one of Yeats's letters (I
can't remember which one right now, but I'll look it up if necessary);
so also is another sentence in the passage that you cited - the one
about 'constantly urging the despotic rule of the educated classes'.
Yeats's statement is, of course, false; and these unacknowledged
citations illustrate just how Ellmann's effort is knocked together.
> You smear Yeats by associating him with Kevin O'Higgins. O'Higgins, you
> say, was a fascist.
He wasn't, and I didn't.
> Like O'Brien you probably get this from ther fact
> that he was called the "Irish Mussolini." Cullingford straightens
> you out: " Although O'Higgins was popularly known as the Irish
> Mussolini, the main resemblance lay in his energy and determination,
> since he was a convinced democrat." Perhaps you should consider
> whether Yeats accorded the admiration that he did to Mussolini
> because he thought he was like O'Higgins.
This is an old objection, and one adequately met by O'Brien himself:
'O'Higgins's biographer, Mr. Terence de Vere White, while noting that
it became the fashion to call him "the Irish Mussolini", maintains
that he was in fact "an intense believer in democracy". This may well
be so; as far as the subject of this essay is concerned, the important
point is that it was as "an Irish Mussolini" that Yeats rightly or
wrongly saw him, and that he admired him for that."
> And perhaps you should
> provide details of this admiration (why, how qualified) and then
> place it into the political context (lots of folks admired M. early
> on as a reaction to communism and in Ireland as a reaction to the
> dreaded imposition of rule by clerical bigots) and then into a wider
> historical context. At any rate, Yeats denounces M.
If you have references to Yeats's denouncing Mussolini before the
conquest of Ethiopia in 1935, please cite them.
Mussolini symbolised for Yeats Europe's supposedly inevitable and
certainly welcome exit from the 'widening' democratic 'gyre' of
history, full of the hated 'centrifugal' liberty sown initially by the
Enlightenment. The exact reasons for this admiration for Mussolini's
politics are seldom clearly and coherently articulated, but at any
rate it is obvious that Yeats draws an opposition between the Duce's
elitist 'individualism' and 'authoritarianism' on the one hand and the
rule of 'the mob' on the other. Here's a passage from Yeats's speech
at the opening of the Tailteann Games in 1924:
We do not believe that war is passing away, and we do not
believe that the world is growing better and better. We even
tell ourselves that the idea of progress is quite modern, that
it has been in the world but two hundred years; nor are we
quite as stalwart as we used to be in our democratic politics.
Psychologists and statisticians in Europe and America have all
challenged the foundations, and a great popular leader has
announced to an applauding multitude: 'We will trample on the
decomposing body of the goddess of liberty.' It is impossible
not to as ourselves to what great task of the nations we have
been called in this transformed world, where there is so much
that is obscure and terrible. The stream has turned backwards,
and the generations to come will have for their task, not the
widening of liberty, but recovery from its errors - the
building up of authority, the restoration of discipline, the
discovery of a life sufficiently heroic to live without the
opium dream.
(By opium here he means science.) He hoped that Ireland might develop
on the Italian model. And you can see, Yeats's 1933 dribble about
liberty 'being muck in the yard' is more than a fleeting rhetorical
escapade.
> In fact, as a Senator he even went against O'Higgins -- on many
> issues.
Irrelevant.
> You also need to show how resistance to a censorship bill shows a
> fascist temper
I have no idea what a fascist temper is, nor need I show anything of
the sort. You misunderstand my point and keep setting up unfortunate
strawmen. I never claimed that Yeats was either doctrinaire or
visceral in his fascistic flirtations.
> and how refusing to subordinate children to the state
> by declaring that "the child itself must be the end in education...
> In the modern world the tendency is to think of the nation; that
> is more important than the child. In Japan, I understand, the
> child issacrificed to patriotism...We are bound to go through the
> same passion ourselves. There is a tendency to subordinate the
> child to the idea of the nation....we should always see that the
> child is the object and not any of our special purposes." shows
> the good old fascist instinct.
This is so vague as to be almost mysterious; the passage needs to be
interpreted, and the interpretation justified, especially vis a vis
the pronounced emphasis on nationality, 'race' and religion in
education which Yeats consistently foments elsewhere. I do not pretend
to understand what specifically he has in mind when he proposes to
liberate the child from the state (and this is not self-evident or
trivial!), and especially in the sentence which you left out of the
quote: 'I have seen education unified in America, so that the child is
sacrificed to that [patriotism?] of unified Americanism, and the human
mind is codified.' Whatever does it all mean? At any rate, he had
dubious ideas about what was best for the 'child itself': a lot of
Gaelic, and little science.
I wonder if there isn't a parallel between Yeats's liberation of 'the
child itself' and Mussolini's liberation of the 'individual'.
> Nah -- you got hold of some bad information.
>
> Another Willie quote:
>
> "Why should I trouble about communism, fascism, liberalism,
> radicalism, when all, though some bow first and some stern first
> but all at the same pace, all are going down stream with the
> artificial unity that ends every civilization? Only dead sticks
> can be tied into bundles..."
>
> Only dead sticks! And notice how Willie abhors artificial unity.
>
> You are the victim of a canard, I think.
While I think that you lend yourself too easily to the self-serving
illusion that Willie's own word suffices for resolving the matter. By
your logic, Mussolini can't have been a fascist because he proclaimed:
'We return to the individual. We oppose everything that opposes and
mortifies the individual', while every schoolboy knows that fascism,
on the contrary, subordinates the individual to the state.
> So -- let's look back on your article.
>
> 1. You misunderstand Ellmann (on purpose). Ell mann states
> that in the last six years of his life Yeats arrives at conclusions
> about politics -- he could never state that Willie had never
> been involved.
See above.
> 2. You contradict yourself on O'Duffy.
See above.
> 3. You are wrong on who O'Higgins was and what he represented.
> You are wrong when you imply that Yeats was a follower, in any case.
I said 'admirer' (undeniable!), and never said 'follower'. Please be
careful in your attributions.
> 4. Citations, quotations as shown above cast doubt (an understatement)
> on Yeats having the fascist temper. Specifically denouncing
> them is telling, wouldn't you say.
>
> Points not covered.
>
> Yeats does not attempt to re-write his political history. Yeats never
> had any sympathy for Russian or German totalitarianism. The record
> is clear.
Irrelevant.
> You conflate nationalism, fascism, traditionalism. You must make
> an effort to separate these.
You should first make an effort to show that I have indeed done so.
Direct citation would be best. Good luck with that.
> Yeats repudiated anti-semitism, State-worship, censorship,
> interference with individual liberty, and the cruelty of all
> totalitarian regimes. By doing this he was doing much much better
> than many.
Granted regarding anti-semitism and censorship. If you imply that he
showed any consistency with respect to the other three, your claim is
blatantly false. To cite just one omnibus counterexample, he voted for
the Flogging Bill, as you doubtless remember.
> Read "Among School Children" -- the first stanza prompted by a visit
> to a Montessori school -- and then "labor is blossoming or dancing
> where/The body is not bruised to pleasure soul..." (the first lines
> of the last stanza -- and then those great last lines and
> really ask yourself (with all the other evidence I've given you)
> whether you really want to insist that this guy was a "Fascist."
Please avoid arbitrary obfuscatory atomism. The final stanza can only
be understood correctly when examined along with the preceding lines.
It is quite absurd to insist that fascism and obscurantism are
incompatible with remarkable uses of language. The message of the poem
is decidedly obscurantist in that it explicitly dismisses the
rationalist tradition and the role of reason in education, while
celebrating an occult union of body and spirit, tended by mother and
nun. Plato, Aristotle and Pythagoras are described as pathetic
scarecrows (being, by implication, inferior to Gentile, of whose own
words most of the two concluding stanzas are contrived).
> If you still do -- why you may be mad.
Touche'! I gladly cede to you the prize for pompous self-righteousness
in this exchange.
nik...@husc3.harvard.edu
for a while. I'll forward my stuff about Yeats to him, so that he may
respond at his leisure. Meanwhile, let me point out a few things that
I forgot to mention yesterday. Contrary to the snide and inelegant
remarks of D. Latane and a few other disgruntled guardians of the
glossy portrait, an awareness of Yeats's fascistic escapades is not a
'new style' invented by some brainwashed dimwitted wise guys at
Harvard. It would be unfair for me to claim any original credit for my
dirty insinuations. I enthusiastically recommend to everyone George
Orwell's remarkable and compelling essay on Yeats, written in 1943 and
widely available today. Orwell says largely the same things as I; it
fact, it was his essay that first got me interested in the problem.
'Throughout most of his life, and long before Fascism was ever heard
of, [Yeats] had had the outlook of those who who reach the fascism by
the aristocratic route.' He explains how this relates to Yeats's
occultism and how it bears on the highly 'artificial' and 'affected'
style of 'all but Yeats's best passages'. A must for everyone who
cares to have an opinion on the subject.
O'Brien's essay is also a must. I have already mentioned Grattan
Freyer's _W.B.Yeats and the Anti-Democratic Tradition_ (1981). Those
with a particular interest in the subject should look also at John
Harrison's _The Reactionaries_ (1966; prefaced by William Empson) and
certainly at the most recent study - Paul Stanfiled's _Yeats and
Politics in the 1930s_ (1987). I'll supply references of secondary
importance on request.
Vance Maverick
> [Orwell] explains how [pseudoaristocratic protofascism] relates to
> Yeats's occultism and how it bears on the highly 'artificial' and
> 'affected' style of 'all but Yeats's best passages'.
This is a tangent -- Joe, Orwell, and (apparently) Philip all agree
that artificiality is bad. As far as I can tell, though, *all* of
Yeats is artificial, in varying degrees; even his relatively "natural"
or "unaffected" passages are a good deal more visibly contrived than,
say, Bukowski, and some of my favorite Yeats lines take the
affectation right over the top into exalted self-parody. (I can never
restrain an admiring laugh when I reach "That dolphin-torn, that
gong-tormented sea.")
Now perhaps my idea of naturalness is naive; but I certainly found
that I had to learn to understand certain kinds of artificiality
before I could even begin to enjoy such a poet as Yeats.
Vance
Douglas Clark
Quality of language. What Yeats is about in collecting his abstruse
elements together in a poem is a remarkable texture of language.
--
Douglas Clark Voice : +44 1225 427104
Joseph M Green
Louise Van Hine -- possibly because she shares a name with a noble
ancestor of mine -- quite sensibly brings up the intentional fallacy
and brings new critical insights to the discussion. But I am
afraid that we will have to pretend that the objection is irrelevant
to help Yeats out. Just a matter of strategy -- tho I hope Louise
continues objections along this line until it is realized that
that Cleanth Brooks was one of the few critics who had anything
remarkably sensible to say about the criticism of poetry in the
last 60myears or so. In fact, all the questions about the
possibility of standards and the difference between likings
and standards are , more or less, answered in "The Well Wrought Urn."
I was shattered (again, more or less) after my hasty reading
of Phillip's last post. I thought that Torchiana had, as so many
have, eaten of the forbidden fruit. But now I see that Phillip
is referring to his old essay on "Among School Children." In
this essay he merely points to Yeats' reading of Gentile,
influences Gentile's thought might have had etc. He never
makes the connections, accusations that I thought Phillip
was suggesting he had made. In fact, I can't see how Phillip's
assertion that the poem is a rhymed plagiarism of any one
thing could ever be justified. But we'll go through it -- verse by verse
to see if it is possible.
We also need to go into the Kevin O'Higgins business -- a democrat
who was called "The Mussolini of Ireland" and is, therefore judged
(in a remarkable tour-de-force) as a fascist. Rather like
asserting that since Babe Ruth was called "The Sultan of Swat,"
he was complicit in the machinations of the Grand Turk.
Even more remarkable -- since Phillip takes Yeats' frienship
with O'Higgins as another instance of his fascism - what is
really going on, it seems, is rather like declaring that
since the Babe was called the Sultan of Swat and is therefore
a follower of the ideology of the Ottoman Empire, any friend
of the Babe's is also someone with the same sympathies.
It will be objected that this is a false analogy because Yeats
was a fellow whom one may reasonably suspect of fascist sympathies
and that O'Higgins showed tendencies which are now deemed
fascist -- or maybe Phillip will dig up actual proof that O'Higgins
was a fascist and then show how Yeats' friendship with the fellow
implicates Yeats __ by, among other things, demostrating that
it was, precisely, O'Higgins' fascist point of view that Yeats
admired, by showing that Yeats' opposition to measures
introduced by O'Higgins demonstrates Yeats' fascist tendencies or
does not weaken the assertion that Yeats' association with
O'Higgins means that Yeats sympathized with O'Higgins' fascism.
All this awaits, of course, actual proof that O"Higgins was
a fascist.
But I am anticipating.
Joseph M Green
Oh, and one should question whether Orwell had the facts he needed.
A Man of the Left -- and what else did the men and women of the left do
with Yeats except abhor his politics and (with some exceptions)
throw the word "fascist" about with grim abandon. But -- a curious
fact -- the best of them (Louis MacNeice as an example) recognized
his literary merit. The "literary" was still a category back then.
What, in fact, did Orwell know about Yeats' activities? Not much one
suspects. How could he -- and then his own politics inevitably
led to certain assumptions. We'll see.
Louise Van Hine
: Oh, and one should question whether Orwell had the facts he needed.
: A Man of the Left -- and what else did the men and women of the left do
: with Yeats except abhor his politics and (with some exceptions)
: throw the word "fascist" about with grim abandon. But -- a curious
: fact -- the best of them (Louis MacNeice as an example) recognized
: his literary merit. The "literary" was still a category back then.
Orwell made no secrets of his political explorations, and in fact his
disenchantment following his involvement in the Spanish Civil War (ref.
"Homage to Catalonia"). Seriously injured in that war, which he joined
for idealistic reasons, he re-examined his entire political viewpoint in
book form, providing an intriguing personal history. At the very least,
it can be said that Orwell was out of Britain entirely during a critical
period in the development of what later became known as fascist ideology,
and could not be said to have been intimately involved in British
politics during the time he was fighting in Spain.
If Orwell's essay is the TRUE topic (rather than Nikolayev's commentary),
we should get hold of Orwell instead and discuss the merits of that
document. But that may be begging the question, too. To use the
interpretation of a poet's work as primary evidence of his political
position is derivative research at best, and at its worst, abuse of the
critical office, and beyond the scope of any critic to judge.
In my own reading of "Among School Children", and a glance at
interpretive commentary, I found nothing in there which would give rise
to any suspicions of Fascist political leanings. If you want to see
Fascism in poetry, there's enough in Pound to keep you going into the
next political revolution, not to mention anti-Semitism, ref.
"Usura", "Pisan Cantos", "Burbank with a Baedecker, Bleistein with a Cigar"
Pound's poetry has the unique feature of being backed up by his
voluminous rantings on Italian radio under the sponsorship of Italy's
Mussolini, Benito Mussolini, and his famous status as a war criminal
after the defeat of the Axis. In my research preparing for a monograph
on Fascism in the lives and poetry of Eliot and Pound, I have to admit,
Yeats never surfaced even tangentally.
Interpretive readings of "Among School Children" are that it is a
meditation upon being an old scarecrow-like senator among nubile females
and remembering what it was like to be handsome. I think Yeats was most
disappointed about losing his looks and failing to attract the younger
female eye. But that is purely a personal impression and not a critical
opinion.
--
lou...@netcom.com
Vance Maverick
> In my own reading of "Among School Children", and a glance at
> interpretive commentary, I found nothing in there which would give rise
> to any suspicions of Fascist political leanings.
The ugly-duckling material (stanza III) certainly touches on the
notion of a born aristocracy. But it's hard to be sure whether he
means the awkward schoolchildren are ducks or swans; and the fact that
he moves on so quickly suggests it doesn't matter too much. And when
in stanza VII he calls the images which people worship (including
religious icons) "self-born mockers of man's enterprise" -- it's hard
to read this as anything but anti-fascist in implication.
> "Burbank with a Baedecker, Bleistein with a Cigar"
This is Eliot, actually....
> Interpretive readings of "Among School Children" are that it is a
> meditation upon being an old scarecrow-like senator among nubile females
> and remembering what it was like to be handsome.
Wait, who's nubile? The old nun or the schoolkids? Yeats, pedophile!
Brooks points out that there's no warrant for assuming the woman with
"Ledaean body" is old now....
Vance
Alasdair Grant
>Louise Van Hine writes:
>> "Burbank with a Baedecker, Bleistein with a Cigar"
>This is Eliot, actually....
Could Louise be thinking of Brennbaum, the elegant Jewish figure
in _Mauberley_?
There is a stanza in it, something about the first world war dead
having died for "a dying civilisation, an old bitch gone in the
teeth"; I do not know how much this is a reference to society as
a whole (i.e. a need for a New Order) and how much it refers to the
British Empire, suggesting that even then, Pound was slightly
disappointed that Germany didn't win.
Vance Maverick
> There is a stanza in [_Mauberley_], something about the first world war dead
> having died for "a [botched] civilisation, an old bitch gone in the
> teeth"; I do not know how much this is a reference to society as
> a whole (i.e. a need for a New Order) and how much it refers to the
> British Empire
Well, since he names broken statues (as well as battered books) as
synecdoche for the civilization, I suspect it wasn't Britain he had in
mind so much as Western Civ (tm) writ large.
Vance
Andrew Dinn
: >Louise Van Hine writes:
: >> "Burbank with a Baedecker, Bleistein with a Cigar"
: Could Louise be thinking of Brennbaum, the elegant Jewish figure
: in _Mauberley_?
: There is a stanza in it, something about the first world war dead
: having died for "a dying civilisation, an old bitch gone in the
: teeth"; I do not know how much this is a reference to society as
: a whole (i.e. a need for a New Order) and how much it refers to the
: British Empire, suggesting that even then, Pound was slightly
: disappointed that Germany didn't win.
This is an utterly ludicrous suggestion. Go read the poem again.
There is no suggestion in the poem of support for Kaiser Bill or for
the Nazis who came in the wake of the defeat. It is a lament for the
gross futility of the war and, most important to Pound, artists like
Gaudier-Brzeska.
There died a myriad
And of the best amonsgt them
Pound's choice of Mussolini's Fascism as a societal cure-all was
determined by his study of and delusions regarding Italian and
Classical history (see e.g. the Cantos deealing with Malatesta ). The
idea that this belief could be transplanted to Germany/the Nazi party
is crass.
Andrew Dinn
-----------
there is no map / and a compass / wouldn't help at all
David E. Latane
With regard to Pound's Anglo-Phobia --
it was quite strong, and the lines in question in Mauberly all relate
directly to Britain and the Empire (that is, by implication), and
there are no direct (and perhaps expected) snipes at the Hun.
"Oh to be in England,
Now that Winny's gone"
and a' that.
D. Latane'