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A Half Century of the High Poetic Art of William Butler Yeats

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SOURCE: "A Half Century of the High Poetic Art of William Butler Yeats," in The New York Herald Tribune Book Review, Vol. 27, No. 38, May 6, 1951, p. 3.

[In the following review, Stauffer praises The Collected Poems and briefly summarizes Yeats's poetic career, observing that in his poems, Yeats champions the integrity of the individual against society's pressure to reform.]

For the first time in an American edition, all of the lyrics William Butler Yeats cared to own, and some of his narrative-dramatic poems, are available in one volume. In prose or poetry, probably no single volume can compete with this one if a reader seeks to understand Western literature of the last century. Or for that matter, literature today or tomorrow.

Chronologically arranged, the Collected Poems can be read indirectly as a history. The dates which Yeats has assigned somewhat cavalierly to pieces he tinkered with during a long lifetime range from 1889 to 1939, the year of his death. Here is half a hundred years of continuous awareness and continuous development. Here are the Nineties, when the sickness of the century took on odd pastel tones in a precious worship of art. Here are the folk and the race and the nation, the seeking in epic and saga and religion and history for greatness that will transcend time. Here are the dreams of ancient and noble ancestors and of supernatural beauty.

But in dreams begins responsibility as Yeats knew. So here, too, is action, after the "old songs or courtly shows," after the symbols that search for meanings—"those stilted boys, Lion and woman and the Lord knows what." Ireland must be given a theater, a museum, a literature of its own. Yeats himself becomes a one-man Renaissance. In the years before the First World War, this singer of roses upon the rood of time is changed, changed utterly, into a satirist, economical as Swift, immediate, cutting, who writes occasional poems to university students, or at the Abbey Theater or on the land agitation, or about the Dublin Municipal Gallery.

The period between the wars witnessed Yeats's most magnificent efforts at discovery and consolidation. He formalizes his thought in an imaginative philosophical system of his own which whether the reader understands it or not, gives death and relationships to his poems. He remains a part of his times, if one is going to demand the superficial gestures: thinking of the death of airmen, meditating on the Irish civil wars, walking among school children as a Senator of the Irish Free State, aware of the bomb that can knock the town flat. More important are his thoughts relating aristocracy and democracy, the individual and the monolithic state, tradition and immediacy, art and life, age and youth, mathematical order and murderous passion.

Such oppositions of words mean little in a review. The point is that Yeats makes them mean much in his poems. In "The Second Coming" he has written the best apocalyptic poem of the century, with lines that will echo in quotation at least until the second coming (the poem appeared in a 1921 volume):

The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

And for poems of as many levels as the Empire State Building, who in this or any other period has surpassed "Byzantium" and "Sailing to Byzantium?"

As is true for all great long poems, but perhaps for the first time consistently in the short lyric form, his lyrics are inexhaustible. They are "reflective" poems in a literal sense: One poem reflects facets from another, like a wilderness of mirrors. Every reading adds a new pleasure or a new thought. The shallowest piece in appearance, if the others are borne in mind, cannot be drained dry. In his last poems, Yeats achieved what so many poets have aimed at: Complete surface simplicity coupled with reverberations in depth, rhythmical control balanced perfectly with rhythmical freedom. The surface can be imitated—and is. But to achieve the genuine product one first must be Yeats and second must work fifty years.

The casual boldness and directness are breathtaking. Here is a complete poem called "The Lover's Song":

Bird sighs for the air,
Thought for I know not where,
For the womb the seed sighs.
Now sinks the same rest
On mind on nest
On straining thighs.

The elements could not be simpler: a two-beat tall-rime stanza with slight variations; diction so stripped that one two-syllable word satisfies the whole poem; three paralel thoughts grouped to a conclusion; the idea of search or desire cast in a natural, an intellectual, and a sensual form; implicit oppositions that might be diagramed or reduced to syllogisms; and at the end the Nirvana or the blessing of fulfilment, home, consummation, death, age, sleep, night, peace rest.

Yeats's great battle, every day harder to fight, was to preserve the significance of the individual against the giant modern conformities in thought and society. His tactics were as slippery and changing as a jiujitsu bout acted by a Proteus. To the unsympathetic. Yeats may appear a poseur, an impractical Quixote, a gullible attender at seances, a dabbler in the occult, a hierophant of a religion he has himself constructed. One hardly knows where to take him, even in the varying portraits and photographs. The publishers did well to retain as frontispiece Augustus John's portrait done in 1907 when Yeats was forty-two, just at the turning point between his two styles—with the sensuous mouth, the wild disarray, the broad platform of the upper nose, the fey quality, the bold eagle glance from the wide-set eyes, fortunately without the horn-rims which he was later to adopt and which seemed so incongruous to his particular powers of seeing.

It will become increasingly apparent, if it is not already well enough known, that Yeats saw more, and more clearly, than most of his contemporaries. Eliot's tribute is just: "He was one of those few whose history is the history of their own time, who are a part of the consciousness of an age which cannot be understood without them." His great gift—greater even than his superb and classical art—was the carving of a figure of a man, the ideal figure of Yeats as he would have liked to be, of the Irishman, of any one who cares to read. The figure is not sentimental. It is full of lust and rage; it turns into a beggarman, a fool, a Crazy Jane as well as into Cuchulain fighting the ungovernable sea, or an Irish airman foreseeing his death, or a fisherman climbing at dawn, to cast his flies. The powerful religious sense is as inverted as Blake's: "Homer is my example, and his unchristened heart." Yet there is invincible vitality in Yeats's figure: Courage, gaiety and "Tragedy wrought to its uttermost." Yeats cannot be read through without a sense of wonder at the transformations he achieved: he changes his own avowed timidity into images of courage, unfulfillment in his own love affair into the most galvanized amatory verse since John Donne, local history and his own daily experience into the image of man.

Yeats could well have said of his poems as he said of the odd constructs in his philosophical system: "They helped me to hold in a single thought reality and justice." And at their high points, which come with astonishing frequency, the reader may believe with Yeats that:

It seemed, so great my happiness,
That I was blessed and could bless.

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