Yeats and the GyreHUM 2213: British and American

Literature IISpring 2015Dr. Perdigao

January 30, 2015

Epicness

Indeterminancy• Charles Darwin, Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, Albert Einstein, Max Planck, Werner

Heisenberg

• Darwin:

challenge to Biblical literalism, idea of authority

• Marx:

people’s actions controlled by economic system, altered ideas about human nature

• Freud:

psychological determinism, discovery/invention of unconscious

• Einstein:

space and time as great absolutes are relative

Indeterminancy• Planck:

atom, wave particle theory; light has both properties, complementary and contradictory

• Heisenberg:

indeterminacy theory

• Challenges to nature, what constitutes knowledge

• 1891—first motion camera patented

• 1897—first subway opened

• 1900—US Census, 75 million people: 1950, 150 million; population doubles

• Technology growth, population expansion, transportation developments: changing individuals’ sense of and relationship to the community, to the world

Framing Yeats• Responses to change

• Sense of loss, liberation traceable in culture, literature

• High modernists—mythic poets, lamenting loss

• Liberation—as counter-modernism, not mythic but Adamic (begins anew, renames)

• Style and Themes

• Loss—intellectually difficult, obscure

• Liberation—transparent, easy to understand

• Impersonal vs. personal

• Use of tradition—experiments within traditions versus ex nihilo creation—recognition of relationship to the past vs. radical break from the past, new forms and means of creation

• Reactions to fragmentation in twentieth century: ironic resistance (puts fragments together to make whole) or immersed acceptance

William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)• Born to Anglo-Irish family in Dublin, spent most of childhood in Ireland, moved to

London in 1874 and returned to Dublin in 1880

• Father—painter, religious skeptic but believed in the “religion of art” (Greenblatt 2019)

• Yeats, unable to believe in Christian Orthodoxy, “sought all his life to compensate for his lost religion,” turning to mysticism: folklore, theosophy, spiritualism, neoplatonism (Greenblatt 2019)

• Spent time between Dublin, London, and Sligo

• In London in 1890s, founded the Irish Literary Society, acquired the late-Romantic, Pre-Raphaelite ideas of poetry; in the early stages of his career, thought of language as dreamy, evocative, ethereal (Greenblatt 2020)

• Early style as writing about nature, Irish folklore, heroic age of Irish history, Gaelic poetry; shift from Romanticism with Ezra Pound’s influence, stripped-down style, modernist

Politics and poetics• Hybridization of Irish and English traditions (Greenblatt 2020)

• 1889 met actor and Irish nationalist Maud Gonne, inspiration for “No Second Troy”

• With help of Lady Gregory, Anglo-Irish writer, promoter of Irish literature, founded Abbey Theatre 1904, work in drama

• Dichotomies—late-Romantic visionary and modern skeptic, Irish patriot and irreverent antinationalist, man of action and esoteric dreamer (Greenblatt 2021)

• Married Georgie Hyde Lees in 1917; automatic writing—gyres, symbolic system

• Irish poet whose language is English, colonial oppressor

• Politics within poetry—return to Ireland he had left for England, returns after Easter Rising of 1916

• “Easter, 1916”—Irish rebels taking over Dublin post office, hanging; ideas about Irish nationalism; Yeats named senator of new Irish Free State; Yeats’ role as senator from 1922-28, promoting arts and politics

Politics and poetics• Rising of Irish consciousness

• Yeats’ life—language taken away by oppressors, reinstating Gaelic in schools

• Yeats’ interest in the occult; culture filled with Celtic tales about fairies

• Tension between faith and skepticism

• 2000 year cycles of history, mathematical equations

Those gyres• Yeats’ attitude toward change as modern phenomenon

• Continuity between past and present

• “Sailing to Byzantium”

• Old man dreaming of songs

• Surpassing limits of physical world

• Byzantium as “the purest embodiment of the union and subsequent transfiguration through art of the fleshly condition and the ideal of holiness” (Rosenthal xxxix).

• Universal system of “interpenetrating opposites . . . rotating gyres forever whirling into one another’s centers, merging, and then separating” (Rosenthal xxxix)

• Metapoem

• Yeats age 62 when writing the poem

• Wins Nobel Prize for literature in 1923

Answers• “The Second Coming”

• Apocalyptic

• Christ’s return, Book of Revelations

• Christianity about to die, replaced by “rough beast,” horrible/natural

• Confusion at moment of cultural crisis, awareness of his confusion and loss

• As prophecy

• “Sailing to Byzantium”—Yeats’ fear of loss of sexual potency in personal terms; in a larger sense, modernist consideration, find alternative to collapse

• If religion no longer works, and philosophy is insufficient, what can we replace it with?

• Answer is art to become what religion once was

Forms• Artist becomes the historian

• Idea of becoming a monument, contained

• But tension because no beauty like living in the present

• Request in “Byzantium” to be gathered in artifice of eternity, made a thing

• Poet of containment, holding fragments in tension but reveals artifice of language

• Critiques of Yeats—interest in aristocratic authority, plays with Fascist attempts at order, application of power of few on many

• “Second Coming”—something is ending but something new is to be born from it, critique of political systems—grim prophecy of what was to come (Greenblatt 2022)

Endings… or beginnings? That gyre thing again.