W. B. Yeats and WWI

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Elsa Franker

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Dec 3, 2012, 3:44:05 AM12/3/12
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Dear all,

My Oxford online course this Michaelmas term his Modern Irish Literature, and one of the authors we study is W. B. Yeats (1865 - 1939). His literary output is daunting and he also wrote some WWI poetry. But what has surprised me very much is his attitude towards WWI poetry and WWI poets. We have the short poems "On Being Asked for a War Poem" (1915), and "An Irish Airman Foresees his Death" (1919), but what has surprised me very much is his exclusion of all WWI poets when editing The Oxford Book of Modern Verse (1936).

W. B. Yeats is a giant on the literary firmament, and he wrote in several genres: fiction, poetry, drama, plus political statements. Can anyone explain his attitude towards the WWI and the WWI poets? I find it surprising that he could be that dismissive against the suffering and the atrocities of the warfare, and the way those who were there in the trenches of the Flanders Fields described it in their own words.

I have copied the texts below.

Best wishes

Elsa

"On Being Asked For a War Poem’ (1915)

I think it better that in times like these
A poet’s mouth be silent, for in truth
We have no gift to set a statesman right;
He has had enough of meddling who can please
A young girl in the indolence of her youth,
Or an old man upon a winter’s night." 

In the The Wild Swans at Coole, 1919, we find the poem: "An Irish Airman Foresees his Death".

"I know that I shall meet my fate
Somewhere among the clouds above;
Those that I fight I do not hate
Those that I guard I do not love;
My country is Kiltartan Cross,
My countrymen Kiltartan's poor,
No likely end could bring them loss
Or leave them happier than before.
Nor law, nor duty bade me fight,
Nor public man, nor cheering crowds,
A lonely impulse of delight
Drove to this tumult in the clouds;
I balanced all, brought all to mind,
The years to come seemed waste of breath,
A waste of breath the years behind
In balance with this life, this death."

From Yeats´s Preface of the The Oxford Book of Modern Verse (1936):

http://www.wwnorton.com/college/english/nael/20century/topic_1_05/wbyeats_oxford.htm, 2012-12-03

"Yeats made the controversial choice of excluding all of the World War I combatant poets, even though he had set himself the goal of including “all good poets who have lived or died from three years before the death of Tennyson [1889] to the present moment.” The following is his explanation.
 
XV
I have a distaste for certain poems written in the midst of the great war; they are in all the anthologies, but I have substituted Herbert Read’s End of a War written long after. The writers of these poems were invariably officers of exceptional courage and capacity, one a man constantly selected for dangerous work, all, I think, had the Military Cross; their letters are vivid and humorous, they were not without joy—for all skill is joyful—but felt bound, in the words of the best known, to plead the suffering of their men. In poems that had for a time considerable fame, written in the first person, they made that suffering their own. I have rejected these poems for the same reason that made Arnold withdraw his Empedocles on Etna from circulation; passive suffering is not a theme for poetry. In all the great tragedies, tragedy is a joy to the man who dies; in Greece the tragic chorus danced. When man has withdrawn into the quicksilver at the back of the mirror no great event becomes luminous in his mind; it is no longer possible to write The Persians, Agincourt, Chevy Chase: some blunderer has driven his car on to the wrong side of the road—that is all.

If the war is necessary, or necessary in our time and place, it is best to forget its suffering as we do the discomfort of fever, remembering our comfort at midnight when our temperature fell, or as we forget the worst moments of more painful disease. Florence Farr returning third class from Ireland found herself among Connaught Rangers just returned from the Boer War who described an incident over and over, and always with loud laughter: an unpopular sergeant struck by a shell turned round and round like a dancer wound in his own entrails. That too may be a right way of seeing war, if war is necessary; the way of the Cockney slums, of Patrick Street, of the Kilmainham Minut, of Johnny I hardly knew ye, of the medieval Dance of Death."





Stuart Lee

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Dec 3, 2012, 4:03:07 AM12/3/12
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Elsa,

It is well documented, of course, and the general feeling is that Yeats simply got it wrong, and started to dig a hole which he couldn't get out of. What is more interesting is why.

There is a reasonably well known article on this from 1959 (JEGP LVIII 4, October) by J. Cohen – but it is written about extensively.

Stuart

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From: Elsa Franker <elsaf...@yahoo.co.uk>
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