Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

Reading Yeats we find a poet intensely and often painfully preoccupied with the irreconcilable claims of Soul and Body: ‘body and soul/Estranged amid the strangeness of themselves’. Intensely and painfully, because being a poet he was driven toward images of ‘wholeness’, unity, and ‘perfection’. There seemed no possibility of realizing ‘Unity of Being’; the poetic metaphor was frustrate at every point. In ‘King and No King’ he had written:

And I that have not your faith, how shall I know
That in the blinding light beyond the grave,
We’ll find so good a thing as that we have lost?
The hourly kindness, the day’s common speech,
The habitual content of each with each
When neither soul nor body has been crossed.

There were many moments in which Yeats thought — or hoped against hope — that everything would be fulfilled in the accords of a distinguished human body; that the body, in splendid animation, would certify an undissociated unity of being, like the transfiguration which Ribh conjured at the tomb of Baile and Aillinn. But again he would find the body a dissociated and dying animal.

     This is Yeats as patient. As agent he sought to heal himself: first, by lamenting the lost harmony, invoking a great-rooted chestnut tree that suffered from none of man’s dissociations. And again: with a dramatist’s instinct he broke down the crux into its two great conflicting parts; thereafter interpreting experience, as his ‘condition’ prodded, now in terms of Soul (or Spirit), now in terms of Body (or Nature). The crux was a complex and unmanageable simultaneity: Yeats replaced it, imperatively, by a more tolerable scheme of successiveness. He resolved a contradictory ‘yes-no’ situation by setting up a plot that developed from ‘yes’ to ‘no’ and vice versa. (1)

     In The Wanderings of Oisin, Crossways, The Rose and The Wind among the Reeds, Yeats located the Spirit in a realm of picturesque sorrow with ‘numberless islands’, ‘many a Danaan shore’, and a ‘woven world-forgotten isle’. In those books whatever mode of existence is identified with the Spirit is protected, in tenderness, from the critique of Body or Nature. Those early poems are a long and intermittently beautiful ‘yes’ to the Spirit; but the Spirit is abused, maimed, because torn from the Body. In later years and with different materials Yeats often said ‘yes’ to the Spirit; under the guise of Mind, for instance, as in ‘All Souls’ Night’:

Such thought — such thought have I that hold it tight
Till meditation master all its parts,
Nothing can stay my glance
Until that glance run in the world’s despite
To where the damned have howled away their hearts,
And where the blessed dance:
Such thought, that in it bound
I need no other thing,
Wound in mind’s wandering
As mummies in the mummy-cloth are wound.

In this poem Yeats praises those adepts who, like Florence Emery, meditate upon unknown thought and repudiate the Body:

                                  What matter who it be,
So that his elements have grown so fine
The fume of muscatel
Can give his sharpened palate ecstasy
No living man can drink from the whole wine.

Ours are ‘gross palates’.

     This is one situation, one act in the plot. Its counterpart is the Crazy Jane series in Words for Music Perhaps.

     The year is 1929. Yeats is recovering from an attack of Maltese fever. Behind him, or so he fancies, are the world of politics, the Irish Senate, and ‘a sixty-year-old smiling public man’. He writes to Olivia Shakespear from Rapallo: ‘No more opinions, no more politics, no more practical tasks.’ Joyful riddance: it is a prosperous moment. Sixty-four years old, Yeats feels new strength and sexual energy returning to his body. He is impelled to have recourse to that ‘nature’ (in bodily terms) from which he had withdrawn, estranged, to a more gracious world of pure Mind. Now he withdraws again, provisionally, not only from pure Mind but from a ‘practical’ scene of disillusion. Ridding himself of a ‘practical’ world he reduces his scene accordingly: he identifies his will, provisionally, with the urges of the body in revolt, giving it — for protection and definition — the name ‘Crazy Jane’.

     It is a simplification on Yeats’s part, and therefore an evasion. Indeed, each of Yeats’s books of poems is a strategic simplification, a trial account of his universe devoted not to the entire complex truth but to a particular bias which is dominant for the time being. Some are phoenix books; others turtle books; what one longs for is the mutual flame:

Hearts remote, yet not asunder;
Distance, and no space was seen.

In the Crazy Jane poems Yeats for the time being places as much trust in the bodily (a turtle, surely) as Racine in the greatly passionate, or Wordsworth in the greatly sensitive. The bodily imperative is the ‘myth’ of the Crazy Jane poems, corresponding to the anthropological myth of ‘The Waste Land’.

     Words for Music Perhaps: the words are for music, not because they are to be sung, but because their burden, like that of the ballad, belongs to the folk. The context of the book is that quantity of folk-experience which has ‘the body’s potencies’ — Lawrence’s phrase — as its prime motive.

     The connotations are important. It is ‘that foul body’ in ‘Those Dancing Days are Gone’, but this does not mean — as a recent critic maintains — that Yeats ‘identifies the physical, corporeal aspects of love with that which is foul’, or that in his later poems, going one better, he ‘regards the sexual act as mostly beastly’. Quite the opposite. There is a curious tonality in those Crazy Jane poems:

Come, let me sing into your ear;
Those dancing days are gone,
All that silk and satin gear;
Crouch upon a stone,
Wrapping that foul body up
In as foul a rag:

The body is not foul. What is foul — here — is its decay, its loss of power, mainly sexual (‘the vigour of its blood’). Six days before writing this poem Yeats had rendered that bodily power in ‘Crazy Jane Grown Old Looks at the Dancers’:

God be with the times when I
Cared not a thraneen for what chanced
So that I had the limbs to try
Such a dance as there was danced —
Love is like the lion’s tooth.

Again in ‘Mad as the Mist and Snow’ the winds are foul because they testify to decay. In ‘All Souls’ Night’ the years are foul because they wear away Florence Emery’s beauty. Indeed, Yeats uses the word when he has in mind sheer mutability. The trickiest case is ‘Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop’:

I met the Bishop on the road
And much said he and I.
    ‘Those breasts are flat and fallen now,
    Those veins must soon be dry;
    Live in a heavenly mansion,
    Not in some foul stye.’

The choice is offered as if it were unanswerable; the Bishop, as rhetorician, has no time for the Gidean problematic. Here, of course, ‘foul’ is censorial, and we expect the Bishop to be whipped for his cliché. Crazy Jane accepts the word and its challenge:

‘Fair and foul are near of kin,
And fair needs foul,’ I cried.

There is also, she claims, the God of Love; and He has rights, a trim decorum, and His own special mansion. And the term He proffers — since two can play the rhetorical game — have a sanction prior to that of the Bishop’s God, because they are certified by the axioms of the body and by ‘the heart’s pride’:

A woman can be proud and stiff
When on love intent;
But Love has pitched his mansion in
The place of excrement;
For nothing can be sole or whole
That has not been rent.

A devotee of Blake, she has the last word.

     She has the first word in ‘Crazy Jane on the Day of Judgement’, and here her interpretation of love has a wider circumference than usual. Indeed the Crazy Jane of this poem encompasses the three great dramatic roles through which, as Richard Ellmann has observed, Yeats voiced his conceptions. First, she is the Seer:

‘Love is all
Unsatisfied
That cannot take the whole
Body and soul’;

The Victim:

‘Naked I lay,
The grass my bed;
Naked and hidden away,
That black day’;

Finally, the Assessor:

‘What can be shown?
What true love be?
All could be known or shown
If Time were but gone.’

The poem is intensely moving because it is willing to test the possibilities of growth and extension in a conception of love based on the bodily imperative. Crazy Jane’s speculations do not go very far, and anything like an Incarnational view of the body is as far removed from her as from Yeats himself at any point; but in this poem there is an urge to face radical questions which are often evaded in Words for Music Perhaps. This book is devoted to a partial view of things: Crazy Jane has a deeper idea of love than Jack the Journeyman, but she is less urgently engaged in refining this idea than In knocking down Aunt Sally’s like the Bishop. In the later ‘Supernatural Songs’ Ribh plays a similar rôle; not so much enacting the whole as insisting upon the part which, he asserts, the Christian view discards; ‘the phallic consciousness’, again Lawrence’s phrase:

Natural and supernatural with the sell-same ring are wed.
As man, as beast, as an ephemeral fly begets, Godhead begets Godhead,
For things below are copies, the Great Smaragdine Tablet said.

Crazy Jane and Ribh are propagandists, speaking hall-truths by vocation. They may be more humanely ‘right’ than the Bishop, but they are just as severely dissociated as he, and the poetic metaphor is just as far beyond their grasp. If the speaker in ‘All Souls’ Night’ is a Paleface, Crazy Jane and Ribh are Redskins — to use Philip Rahv’s famous terms; countering the ‘sensibility’ of The Tower with their own ‘experience’. But the experience is raw, and therefore equally vulnerable to irony.

     Yeats wanted his ‘Poems for Music’ to be ‘all emotion and all impersonal’. On March 2, 1929 — the day on which he wrote ‘Crazy Jane and the Bishop’ and ‘Crazy Jane Grown Old Looks at the Dancers’ — he referred to the poems: ‘They are the opposite of my recent work and all praise of joyous life, though in the best of them it is a dry bone on the shore that sings the praise.’ Joyous life in this book is life in which the prime commitment is to the body. Everything else may change or be dissolved, but not that.

     Until now we have been discussing the book as Yeats’s ‘self-expression. But it is necessary to add another context, involving the persuasive relation between the poet and his audience.

     Reading Yeats we find a poet who ‘believed in’ none of the public, institutional faiths. But he needed their authority, their momentum, or at least authority and momentum from similar sources. And he was a spectacular opportunist. So he used each of the public faiths whenever he felt that one of its patterns of insight was specially relevant to the feeling in hand. He may have been drawn to these local ‘allegiances’ by sensing a purely formal congruity between the pattern in the ‘public’ structure and the pattern implicit in the private feeling. This would account for the Way of the Cross in ‘The Travail of Passion’, to certify feeling akin to its own; or the figure of the Guardian Angel in ‘A Prayer for My Son’. Similarly in the Crazy Jane poems the bodily imperative is a ‘public’ pattern of experience, with the force of public authority, complete with dogmas, rites, mysteries—and these by universal assent. The great advantage of the bodily imperative as a source of verbal communication is that it is prior to all conflicts of thought or belief; it undercuts the contentious levels of experience. In lofty moments Yeats would invoke the Great Memory as the source and means of communication, and he would speak beautifully under its sign, but there would always be something problematic in its operation. The human body was more reliable; indeed, the body was the only universal church to which Yeats would belong.

     We have described a strategic simplification and called it — harshly — evasion. And we would suggest that a great mind which has recourse to such a strategy must harbour severe misgivings, knowing that it omits so much, condones so much distortion. That is why one has the feeling, reading through the later books, that very often Yeats is adopting certain roles not to protect himsell from tourists but because he rather fancies himself in the parts; like the ‘character part’ of the lusty old man. A new and distressing kind of picturesque, this leads to a certain hardening of the arteries in such a poem as ‘News for the Delphic Oracle’. Here is part of the first stanza:

Man-picker Niamh leant and sighed
By Oisin on the grass;
There sighed amid his choir of love
Tall Pythagoras.

Porphyry’s Elysian Fields are very like Yeats’s Islands of Forgetfulness, and Yeats — sly old virtuoso — can now jeer at both. With the same virtuosity he can laugh at the equestrian Innocents:

Straddling each a dolphin’s back
And steadied by a fin,
Those Innocents re-live their death,
Their wounds open again.

The last word is Yeats’s: he offers it, surely, as critique:

Foul goat-head, brutal arm appear,
Belly, shoulder, bum,
Flash fishlike, nymphs and satyrs
Copulate in the foam.

Touché. Yes, but isn’t it, itself, in a weak position, despite the bodily imperative and the sophisticated accent? The poem has ended, but one could envisage a fourth stanza (by Dante) in which the Old-Yeatsian heaven of the third would be shown for the vulnerable thing it is. The critique is valid enough as far as it goes, but not valid enough to justify the tone, the shrill exhibitionist mockery. The Yeats of the Last Poems did not often laugh in the tragic joy of Lear and Hamlet; his laughter is too shrill for that. (The great humane exception to this rule is of course ‘The Circus Animals’ Desertion’.)

     This shrillness in Yeats’s late work issues, I think, from those misgivings which I have mentioned. In Words for Music Perhaps, A Full Moon in March, and many of the Last Poems Yeats’s strategic simplifications placed him in a false position; hence the strident tone.

     He soon got tired of Crazy Jane, though, perhaps acknowledging the limited range of her insight. He used her once again, innocuously, cursing puny times and a world bereft of Cuchulains.

     Words for Music Perhaps — a final comment before we look at other human images in Yeats — is a valuable book because it enables us to re-enact a movement of feeling downward into the limited, finite thing. The movement is touching in itself, in its compulsions and embarrassments; only the most sullen reader could fail to be moved and disturbed by this partial image of the human condition. The pathos of the book is that when Yeats had reached down into the finite Body there was little he could do with it; he saw no means of penetrating the finite without transcending it and thereby destroying it, as Roderick destroyed Madeline, in a rage for essence. The trouble was that he could not value the human body in itself; only when it agreed to wear a bright halo of animation.

     It is a painful dialectic. The poet for whom plenitude of being is everything finds himself kicking several of man’s faculties out of the way in his rage for essence. The devotee of ‘perfection’ bows before fragments. In his most perceptive moments he knows that it is a desperate expedient, that even his Byzantine eternity is artifice.

It seems that I must bid the Muse go pack,
Choose Plato and Plotinus for a friend
Until imagination, ear and eye,
Can be content with argument and deal
In abstract things; or be derided by
A sort of battered kettle at the heel.

If you reduce a human being to his consciousness, and then provide a diet of unknown thought, argument, and abstraction, you must face the risks involved; attrition, emaciation, a desert of mummies. Time and again in The Tower Yeats prays for a kinder unity: ‘O may the moon and sunlight seem/One inextricable beam/For if I triumph I must make men mad.’ But that book is a little too engrossed with its own exposure to allow much consideration for other people; apart from a few chosen friends, the rest are given as hot-faced bargainers and money-changers. And what can we say of the monstrous crudity, the sheer vulgarity, of ‘Mrs French,/Gifted with so fine an ear’? Grant that Yeats’s position was difficult, perhaps impossible. ‘All Souls’ Night’ was written under the sign of body-wearied Plotinus; as in the fourth Ennead, the dying animal of ‘Sailing to Byzantium’ is here dead, a mummy, and the ‘soul’ moves from its prison of diminished being. But in Yeats it has nowhere to go; the poet could not make anything of Plotinus’s belief in the later stages of emanation toward the One. Hence the desperate stratagem, six years later, of Byzantium.

     ‘All Souls’ Night’ is almost a test case for the hazard of the human image. It is a thrilling poem; we are at once thrilled and shocked to find Yeats driving himself into such a terrifying corner. The position itself — we feel at once — is untenable. It is unnecessarily dissociative. Mind — as the gentle philosopher Philip Wheelwright puts it — ‘does not stand alone: it exists intentively in relation to objects and it exists dialogically in relation to other selves’. (2) So the intensity of ‘All Souls’ Night’ amounts to this; a stern mind denying the most serviceable relations in a humane life, and holding this denial ‘to the end of the line.

     Does this matter? Or is it the fury in the words that matters, and not the words?

     The received opinion among readers of Yeats is that the classic poems are in The Tower and The Winding Stair. And yet by comparison with The Wild Swans at Coole the human image in those spectacular books is curiously incomplete; remarkably intense, but marginal; a little off-centre. Does this matter? Yes, it does; intensity is not enough. It matters greatly that The Wild Swans at Coole is at the very heart of the human predicament, groping for values through which man may define himself without frenzy or servility.

     This book is concerned with the behaviour of man in the cold light of age and approaching death. The ideal stance involves passion, self-conquest, courtesy, and moral responsibility. Yeats pays the tribute of wild tears to many personages and to the moral beauty which they embody; the entire book is rammed with moral life. Most of the poems were written between 1915 and 1919, and it is significant that those were the years in which Yeats was perfecting his dance-drama; because the dancer was the culmination of the efforts which Yeats made in The Wild Swans at Coole to represent the fullness of being as a dynamic action. In ‘The Double Vision of Michael Robartes’ the girl who dances between the Sphinx and the Buddha dreams of dancing and has outdanced thought; which I take to mean that in her Action is not distinct from Vision but is Vision itself formulated. The moral equivalent of this is a certain nonchalance or recklessness, Castiglione’s sprezzatura, a certain high daring; mastery, rather than singularity, to cite Valéry’s distinction. As we gloss we may quote a few sentences from Buber’s meditations upon Nijinsky:

     ‘The decisive power in the development of the dance was neither play nor expression, but what bound them both and gave them law: magic. That is the response to the chaotic and furiously inrushing happening through the bound, lawful movement, through movement as form. The bound binds.’ (3)

     Above all, it must be dynamic, this ideal behaviour; it must not be complacently picturesque. In T. S. Eliot’s later poems this ideal condition appears a little static; the poet may say, ‘at the still point, there the dance is’, but there is very little energy in that dance, and we have to exert some goodwill before we can register it at all. In some of Wallace Stevens’s poems the ideal condition is given as a still life — a blue woman, in August, registering grape leaves and clouds — someone sitting in a park watching the archaic form of a woman with a cloud on her shoulder. These are handsome moments, and we are free to relish them. But Yeats knew that they are at best provisional, at worst evasive; in his greatest poems static effects denote a failure of being.

     The Wild Swans at Coole is committed to action; not to thought or concept or feeling, except that these are essential to the full definition of action. We are to register action as the most scrupulous notation of human existence, far more accurate, more ‘creatural’, than thought or concept — which are simplifications; far more comprehensive, too. Action is silent articulation of experience. Yeats’s dancer has outdanced thought, summarized thought in a pattern of gestures. Her dance is an act of desire toward the God-state, or God-term; the dancer strives toward an ‘essential’ human image, an image of dynamic perfection freely formulated — fulfilled — at the end of the body-line. This is probably what Yeats meant in that great letter which he wrote a few weeks before his death; in which he said, ‘It seems to me that I have found what I wanted. When I try to put all into a phrase, I say, “Man can embody truth but he cannot know it.”’ Truth is embodied in the figure of action, the dancer for whom meaning is embodied in gesture and gesture the only expression there is. Thought is not enough; even the ‘thinking of the body’: the most accurate annotation is that act which outdances thought and sums up human potentiality in gesture.

     In The Wild Swans at Coole the dance which engrosses Yeats is the dance of the sell and the anti-self. In ‘Ego Dominus Tuus’ the Yeatsian speaker says:

I call to the mysterious one who yet
Shall walk the wet sands by the edge of the stream
And look most like me, being indeed my double,
And prove of all imaginable things
The most unlike, being my anti-self,
And, standing by these characters, disclose
All that I seek . . .

The appropriate gloss is from ‘Anima Hominis’: ‘Unlike the rhetoricians, who get a confident voice from remembering the crowd they have won or may win, we sing amid our uncertainty; and, smitten even in the presence of the most high beauty by the knowledge of our solitude, our rhythm shudders.’ Add to this that Art is a vision of reality: in the artist this vision is animated by his own passion, and in the passion his rhythm shudders.

     It is also dialogue, the fruitful grappling of self and anti-self. Hence the number of poems in The Wild Swans at Coole in which the structure is ‘dialogical’ and the animation is the rhythm of speech. One of the finest examples is ‘The People’:

‘What have I earned for all that work,’ I said
‘For all that I have done at my own charge?
The daily spite of this unmannerly town,
Where who has served the most is most defamed,
The reputation of his lifetime lost
Between the night and morning. I might have lived,
And you know well how great the longing has been,
Where every day my footfall should have lit
In the green shadow of Ferrara wall;

This is the mutual flame. A poet, in weariness and sell-pity, claims the reward of the rhetorician; quarrelling with others, he makes a sullen rhetoric. He is in the condition of earth, ‘the place of heterogeneous things’, and he is admonished by his phoenix, the spirit of fire ‘that makes all simple’. The common ground between them is the human world, Castiglione’s aristocrats and ‘the people’. The poet prolongs the dispute by setting up a rivalry between the purity of a natural force and the definitions of the analytic mind; but the dispute is helpless. The real dialogue, the dance, is under the words, in the meeting of selves, the leaping of his heart at her phoenix-words, the sinking of his head abashed. This is the poet’s quarrel with himself. If we feel that the only appropriate response to this poem is intimacy and assent, this is — I believe — because it commits itself to the human situation, to the specific occasion of dialogue; it commits itself to time, place, and circumstance, to history, to beginning, middle, and end, to authentic syntax, to action; and — as the animation of all these — to the behaviour of speech, certified idiom. Wallace Stevens in his great essay ‘The Noble Rider and the Sounds of Words’ persuades us to acknowledge the genial interdependence of reality and the imagination, that when Horatio says, ‘Now cracks a noble heart. Good night, sweet prince,/ And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest!’ — here reality and the imagination are equal and inseparable. In Yeats’s poem reality — the violence without, the pressure of external events upon the poet’s consciousness — is answered, at once caught, sustained, and ‘formed’, by his great imagination, the violence within.

     Yeats’s spokesman in ‘Ego Dominus Tuus’ justifies his tracing characters upon the sands instead of imitating the great masters: ‘Because I seek an image, not a book’. Thought is not enough, though the poet will sometimes fancy otherwise in The Tower. The image he seeks is described by Robartes in ‘The Phases of the Moon’; at the fourteenth phase ‘the soul begins to tremble into stillness, to die into the labyrinth of itself’:

All thought becomes an image and the soul
Becomes a body.

The body and the image, I assume, are the dancer and the dance, dynamic, indistinguishable, the final gesture in the dialogue of sell and anti-self.

     My argument, to bring these matters to a conclusion, is that in The Wild Swans at Coole the balloon of speculation is brought into the shed of common experience: in this book more radically than elsewhere Yeats takes ‘the living world for text’. We have to realize this before we can register the impassioned gravity of its later pages.

     Perhaps this explains why the poems in The Wild Swans at Coole seem peculiarly ‘central’ to our experience. The burden of meaning has been placed firmly where it belongs, in action, and in the Value embodied in action. The book is an anthology of represented lives in which private vision becomes incarnate in public action; Lionel Johnson, John Synge, George Pollexfen, Robert Gregory, Solomon and Sheba, Iseult Gonne, the anonymous and classic fisherman — and many more. The poems speak to us directly, to our sense of the human predicament; and in the last reckoning this is a more reliable mode of communication than the Great Memory or even the Body.

     The human image in this book is at once sweet and serviceable; it hides behind no platitudes that it can see; it does not feel called upon to take possession of the world or to set up as God. It acknowledges human limitation and tries to live as well as possible under that shadow. This image chimes with our own sense of the ‘creatural’ situation; it is continuous with our own unspectacular experience in its assent to common occasion. Here is one such occasion, in the poem ‘Her Praise’:

She is foremost of those that I would hear praised,
I have gone about the house, gone up and down
As a man does who has published a new book,
Or a young girl dressed out in her new gown,
And though I have turned the talk by hook or crook
Until her praise should be the uppermost theme,
A woman spoke of some new tale she had read,
A man confusedly in a half dream
As though some other name ran in his head.
She is foremost of those that I would hear praised.
I will talk no more of books or the long war
But walk by the dry thorn until I have found
Some beggar sheltering from the wind, and there
Manage the talk until her name come round.
If there be rags enough he will know her name
And be well pleased remembering it, for in the old days,
Though she had young men’s praise and old men’s blame,
Among the poor both old and young gave her praise.

Yeats wrote that poem in 1915, the year in which T. S. Eliot wrote Prufrock’s more famous love song. Mr Eliot’s poem is very rich, but perhaps a little insecure, like the newly rich in any age; it is aware of its affluence, and wears it a little ostentatiously. Yeats’s poem seems more comfortable in its older weeds.

     In placing these two poems together we move toward a question which can hardly be evaded: was Symbolism necessary?; or was it perhaps an aberration, a retreat? In this case it is impossible to be wise after the event, because the event is still with us: ‘modern poetry’ still means, for most people, symbolist or post-symbolist poetry, poems like ‘The Waste Land’ and ‘Mauberly’. But in the light of Yeats’s great central poems Symbolism seems at best a strategic retreat. Unable to compete with the new, virile sciences, poets conceded to the scientists not only the materials of speech and idea, but — alas! — many of the resources of commonsense. Poetry did not become nonsense, but sense so ‘special’ and uncommon that it could no longer accommodate the roughage or the rationale of daily experience. Poetry took refuge in an inscrutable ‘manner’, in an air of large-scale profundity without the restrictions of local meaning; it absolved itself from the rhetoric of argument and proof. This partly accounts for the tendency to assimilate poems to solid objects in space; since statues or apples or urns cannot be required to yield any ‘meaning’ other than their being. Hence — to cite one example — Mallarmé’s poems offer themselves as, in the first instance, visual events, sophisticated and inscrutable arrangements of black marks on a white page. Poetry became sculpture; speech became music.

     This is gross oversimplification but justifiable. Perhaps the most incorrigible defect of symbolist poetry is that it is arbitrary; not safely referable to the common life of feeling or to a human situation acknowledged as real. This is where Yeats’s solid commonsense imposes itself. He was as ‘modern’ as any of his contemporaries: he took even greater risks of fancy and magic; but his roots were in common experience, he spoke a common idiom, harboured a tenacious commonsense. He knew that he was human.

     There are three letters which must be mentioned even in a brisk account of the question. Yeats wrote them in 1937. To Mrs Moya Davies he said: . . . ‘like Balzac I know no one who shares the premises from which I work. What can I do but cry out, lately in simple peasant songs that hide me from the curious’. Then to Dorothy Wellesley: ‘I am reading Roger Fry’s translation of Mallarmé. He gives the originals and a commentary by a French critic. I find it exciting, as it shows me the road I and others of my time went for certain furlongs. It is not the way I go now, but one of the legitimate roads. He escapes from history; you and I are in history, the history of the mind. Your “Fire” has a date or dates, so has my “Wild Old Wicked Man”.’ And finally to Edmund Dulac: ‘All my life I have tried to get rid of modern subjectivity by insisting on construction and contemporary words and syntax.’ (4)

     It was ‘Prufrock’, though, which brought in the new age and defined the new tone. In recent years many of the younger poets have been labouring to avoid the melody which Mr Eliot and his colleagues established; often picking up snatches of an older tune and rehearsing them again. John Crowe Ransom some time ago discussed the magnificent confusion which obtained in the years after ‘Prufrock’, and he remarked that present signs suggest that there is still going to be a continuity between the old poetry and the poetry of the ‘sixties. I think he hopes that the new poetry will be written under the sign of that sturdy old eagle Thomas Hardy. My own guess is that it will be under the sign of Yeats. Hardy would serve many an occasion, but his human image is a little too long-suffering, hardly strenuous enough, to serve our new needs. The Yeats of The Wild Swans at Coole and the Stevens of The Rock; these rather than Mr Eliot or Mr Pound would point the new poet toward a properly ‘public’ poetry, a poetry which would uphold man’s intelligence, his reverence for life, and his assent to the common life of feeling.

     Those who know about such matters tell us that the young poet writing today wants above all to evade the Symbolist cul-de-sac, that of the poet admiring the image in his own mirror. The new direction is outward; and this is healthy, provided we do not rush to the naturalistic extreme and drown the individual in the destructive element. Yeats would sponsor this new direction, if we think of him now as the poet of The Wild Swans at Coole; many of the noblest poems in that book charted it, convinced that human life is substantial, that a moral lexicon should include Alfred Pollexfen if it includes Tamburlane, that a great — literally, great — part of life consists of other people and the values they help us to realize in action. Action may often seem merely the struggle of the fly in marmalade, but the speaker who so describes it in ‘Ego Dominus Tuus’ also says: ‘I seek an image . . . ,’ and the seeking is itself action, discipline, and vision. The Wild Swans at Coole is a human-sized book, a book of acts, hence of morals. A grammatical analysis would disclose its commitment to ‘will’ and ‘shall’ and ‘ought’, the ground of our own beseeching.