Yeats (The Collected Poems/ Cullingford on Yeat's Love Poetry)

I will try to blog here in a way that separates Yeats' work into three rough periods (early, middle, and late). I will attempt to describe each period, provide examples of poems from each period, and explain some of the thematic and stylistic variation from period to period.


NOTES FROM COLLECTED POEMS
Yeats' early work...


* Song of the Happy Shepherd

Seems like an example of a london influenced somewhat self-consciously romantic poem. This is from Yeats early period. 

* The Stolen Child (the theme of escape)

Interesting repetition of italicized verse. This is also an early work, and makes use of Irish Mythological content (the Faeries)

* The Lake Isle of Innisfree

Also, romantic, but a romanticism of solitutde and nature-- where poet may find peace. Yeats shows his love for County Sligo. A refreshing image that may be carried back into the grey of urban Dublin.

* When you are old

Beautiful poem written to a beautiful woman (Maude Gonne) who the speaker loved, more for who she was then simply for her physical beauty...

* Who Goes With Fergus

Joyce used this at quite a few points in Ulysses... "Who will follow King Fergus to know the wisdom of nature and have the cares of the world (possibly exhorting his generation to leave off with Ireland's political struggles and look to a deeper mythical past... There is a deeper mystical meaning, a unity, within the natural world...

* The Man Who Dreamed of Faeryland

Inspired image from his time in Sligo/ Yeats as in (Fergus) encouraged young Irish to return to nature... druids felt all natural things control the divine...

* The Lamentation of the Old Pensioner

Nice poem of old age/ how women don' look at him anymore, but he has the women from his past stored in memory... he 'spits in the face of time'... Perhaps having these memories is worse, or perhaps not... maybe it really does comfort him...

* To Ireland in the Coming Times

Yeats defends his poems as patriotic, in the sense that they benefit Ireland... he implores us to remember to reflect  on eternal things.

* Aedh Thinks of Those Who Have Spoken Ill and Aedh Wished for the Clothes of Heaven

Aedh is one of Yeats' three archetypal/ mythological characters. Aedh is the most romantic of the three.

* No Second Troy

A poem comparing Maude Gonne to Helen of Troy... she in her nature has spurned the speaker... may lead men and be responsible for revolution...

* September 1913

Yeats criticizes employers who locked out workers in general strike... also criticizes rampant mercenary materialism. Also celebrates Irish heroes such as John O'Leary...

* AN Irish Airman Forsees His Death

Seems the story of a poor Irish soldier dying for the British Empire... probably based on Yeats' friend's death (Major Robert Gregory)-- the only child of Yeat's patron Lady Augusta Gregory (co-founder of Abbey Theatre)...

* Easer 1916

About Yeats confused feelings about Easter 1916 uprising, in which many IRA members were executed for treason..."A terrible beauty is born"/ beauty of martyrdom?

* The Second Coming

Yeat's uses Christian imagery of the apocalypse to describe conditions in post World War I Europe... I often have an image of Hitler/ Mussolini/ and fascism emerging out of world war I... something slouching toward Bethlehem... 

* A Prayer for My Daughter

During a storm the speaker imagines his infant daughter's life/ and wishes for peace and happiness for her...

* Mohini Chatterjee
 Seems to be a poem in which the Brahmin tries to calm someone and worries about life with talk of reincarnation and the endless circle of samsara...

NOTES ON GENDER AND HISTORY IN YEATS'S LOVE POETRY

Opening quote from Virginia Woolf sets tone of book:

"All human relations have shifter-- those between masters and servants, husbands and wives, parents and children. And when human relations change there is at the same time a change in religion, conduct, politics, and literature. Let us agree to place one of those changes abut the year 1910." (from Mr. and Mrs. Bennett)

Chapter one: (pgs. 11-24) discusses ho Yeat's deviates from stereotypical/ canonical male love poet.

Chapter two: (pgs. 25-42)

Chapter three (pgs. 43-54) deals with the concept of 'liebstod' which conflates sex with death...

Chapter four (pgs. 55-72) primarily offers Yeat's view of Ireland as represented in the image of the beloved/ woman and country are symbolically linked.

Chapter five (pgs. 73-101) discusses suffrage movement during Yeats' time and his association with Maude Gonne and the love poems about her...

Chapter six (pgs. 102-120) provides much discussion of Yeats's sex life-- particularly his wife George's disappointment with Yeats...

Chapter seven (pgs. 121-139) This chapter brings together images of love and patriotism-- especially in Easter 1916...

Chapter eight (pgs. 140-164) Much focus in this chapter on Leda and the Swan, and sexuality in Ireland being repressed by previously agrarian culture and the clergy...

Chapter nine (pgs. 165-184) A very interesting portrayal of the Crazy Jane poems as "attempt to construct the erotic as a site of popular resistance", which culminated in "Crazy Jane's defiance of the Irish Episcopate..."

Chapter fourteen (pgs. 261-287) Yeats become randy in his final years...

Eliot (More from BC Southam & The Cambridge Companion)

I am purely a product of a postmodern age, and so at times when I try to think of either classical rhetoric (Aristotle, Plato, Quintillian, Cicero), or even the more recent Modernist writers (in this case Eliot), my mind dredges up unlikely, useless (or so it seem to me) references. Every time I pick up my Cambridge Companion to T.S. Eliot, I keep hearing that little wrinkly ant-like creature, saying "Eliot...Eliot...". No good can come, I fear, from connecting an 80s movie to a 20s poet. Except for the fact that these connections simply help me remember.

So where were we? Ah yes, T.S. Eliot. He was famous, in fact for his own borrowings; his own stealings; his own quotations drawn from so many varied sources, throughout literary history. A quick look at Eliot's Annotated Wasteland reveals the following references in the first 60 of 430 lines: Grail Legend: From Ritual to Romance, The Golden Bough, Ezekiel, Ecclesiastes, Tristan and Isolde, The Fisher King, and Baudelaire.  So my own mind ranging over its catalog of mediocre films, bad television, strip malls, bible school, and comic books comes up with a reference to E.T. This is what, at base, I had bestowed upon me in my youth. The important thing to remember from my own little mnemonic story is that Eliot, as modernists often do, borrows from the sacred western tradition-- not to slight or destroy it. His borrowing and allusions are not of the iconoclastic variety, but are, in the words of Ezra Pound, attempting to "make it new." I don't see Eliot as hoping to do anything but bring a renewed vigor to, in his estimation, a worn and outdated literary tradition.

FROM A CAMBRIDGE COMPANION TO T.S. ELIOT
An interesting part of the Cambridge Companion to Eliot is the connection drawn between Eliot and Yeats:

(P. 5-- para 2) "So very present was yeats to Eliot...we find echoes...of such late Yeats poems as "A Prayer for Old Age," "An Acre of Grass," and "What Then..."

(P.8-- para 1) "The shift from the plural "emotions" of life to the singular "emotion in the writing" is altogether relevant, implying the transformation of multiple disordered emotions into the ordered and significant emotion of the poem."

(P. 10-- para 2) "Shakespeare too was occupied with the struggle which alone constitutes life for a poet-- to transmute personal and private agonies into something rich, and strange, something universal and impersonal."

(P. 11-- para 1) "What Eliot implies with the commencement of the Waste Land is that as Chaucer was the first great individual talent in the English tradition, so, as of 1922, the poet of this poem is the last, the most recent individual talent in the same line."

(P. 19-- para 3) ""Eliot's earliest poems quietly register the American tendency to associate culture with what is foreign..."

(P. 20-- para 2) "... nearly every poet and writer of his generation left for Europe, in search of living art..."

(P. 20-21) "... St. Louis Heritage connected Eliot's work to the then current popular phenomenon-- ragtime music..."

((P. 26-- para 2) "Rev. Eliot's last book [was an abolitionist book] The Story of Archer Alexander From Slavery to Freedom..." (this author was Eliot's grandfather).

(P. 27-- para 20 "His poems borrowed a measure of the humor, rhythm, and musical expression of Afro-American culture, while also acknowledging its peculiar burden of morality and history-- distinct from, yet related to, Eliot's own."

(P. 31-- para 2) "Eliot pursued philosophical questions throughout his career..."

(Pgs. 37-39) Eliot was deeply influenced by his friendship with Bertrand Russell-- particularly Eliot's ideas of literary criticism as objective/ impersonal logical analysis... without emotion or relationship to the author...

(Pgs. 41-43) Eliot mirrors in his criticism much of Wittgenstein (i.e. language's dependence on social use... valid interpretations of texts may thus change over time...

(P. 44-- para 2) "Eliot's later philosophy thus abandoned the objectivist scientism of his early critical theory for a hermeneutic historicism which emphasized the contextual limits and pragmatic functions of world human knowledge (as distinguished from the absolutes of faith).

(P. 44-- para 3) "The kind of pragmatism Eliot most wanted to revive for modern life was not the philosophy of Peirce, James, and Dewey but the classical idea of practical wisdom... elaborated by Aristotle-- phronesis..."

(P. 46-- para 1) "It is practical wisdom which involves the development of character and the education and discipline of the emotions. Eliot thought...such emotional discipline..."only attainable through dogmatic religion"... which offers a time-tested version of the good life, and a solid, reinforcing community and social practice for its pursuit..."

(Pgs. 48-59) Eliot's critical program created an unrivaled influence in his generation (other than Pound).

(P. 58-- para 2) "When T.S. Eliot was an experimental poet, rebelling against literary convention, his respect for tradition generated a creative dialectic in his work."

(Pgs. 60-75) The social critic in Eliot created some troublesome or "problematic" social criticism.

(P. 61-- para 2) "In Eliot as in Yeats and Pound, we see the cultural alienation definitive of modernism, which drove all three poets to emigre obsession with the cultural defectiveness of their homelands."

(P. 63-- para 3) "Analytical psychology... can do little except produce monsters; for it is attempting to produce unified individuals in a world without unity; the social, political, and economic sciences can do little, for they are attempting to produce the great society with an aggregation of human being who are not units but merely bundles of incoherent impulses and beliefs."

(P 81-- para 2) "The highest goal of the civilized being... to unite the profoundest scepticism with the deepest faith..."

(P. 96-- para 2) "What I want to suggest is this: that Eliot's development as a writer from the Wasteland on is governed by his changing relationship to England..."

(P. 122-- para 3) "This contradiction, along with the poem's lack of thematic clarity and its careful refusal of connections between images, scenes, and voices, makes the Wasteland particularly open to different interpretations."

(P.123-- para 2) "While the poem provides an emotional and often visceral critique of the state of human life, it equally provides a critique of the desire to transcend and escape that life, and it offers no alternatives beyond that life of the persistence of that desire."

(P. 131-- para 2) "The Passionate and paradoxical desire to end desire leads only to the continuation of life in all its variousness, confusions, tragedies, and improper desires."

(P. 229-231) An interesting parallel is drawn between modern and postmodern architecture and writing.

(P. 230-- para 3) "What such 'difficulty' writing as that of Eliot, Joyce, and Pound potentially offered was justification for claiming the status of a discipline for English..."


BC SOUTHAM/ ON THE WASTELAND

(P. 126-- para 2) "THe wasteland is not, however, that of war's devastation... but the emotional and spiritual sterility of western man, the 'waste' of our civilization (para 3) The theme of the poem is the salvation of the wasteland... of emotional, spiritual, and intellectual vitality to be regained."

(P. 128-- para 3) "The common source of all these myths lay in the fundamental rhythm of nature... and their varying symbolism was an effort to explain the origin of life-- their symbolism was basically sexual."

(P. 135-- para 4) "A personal wasteland closes book II of the confessions of St. Agustine... I became to myself a wasteland."

(P. 137 para: 1) "Pound's cutting was largely responsible for the cinematic effects of the poem in its sudden disjunctions and shifts of scene."

(P. 138-139) discussion of opening of poem "April is the cruelest month" may refer to Egypt waiting for flooding of the Nile for land to be fertile, of to Chaucer's Canterbury Tales..."

(P 141-- para 1) "Image... from Whitman's when lilacs last in the dooryard bloomed/ Elligaic poem to Lincoln... in some ways both post war mournful poems..."

(P. 144-- para 6) "A handful of dust... found in many places such as John Donne's meditation IV/ in Tennyson's Moud.../ In Conrad's Youth.../ also biblical-- dust is the symbolic reminder to man of his bodily mortality..."

(P. 145-146) Hyacinths... a symbol for the resurrected god of fertility rites...

(P. 147) Madame Sostoris borrowed from "Chrome Yellow" a novel by Aldous Huxley... a posing fortune teller...

(P. 151 para 5) "Such a long stream of people: refers to Dante's inferno and the reaction upon seeing so many unhappy spirits-- those who in life knew neither good nor evil, who never learned to care for anyone but themselves..."

(P. 163 para 3) ""Hayward makes it clear that Eliot thinking of the post war ragtime world, the jazz world of the 1920s, restless, aimless, hectic, fearful, futile, enurotic."

(P. 165 para 1) "THe fire sermon was preached by the Buddha against the fires of lust, anger, envy, and other passions that consume men."

(P. 172 Para 2/ 3) about Tiresias character from Ovid's Metamorphoses a character who has been both man and woman...

(P. 181 para 3) "In the Buddhist tradition the image of fire carries both the pain of worldly experience and the processes of purification."

(P. 190 para 2) "Bertrand Russell recalls that he told Eliot of a nightmare in which he had a vision of London as an unreal city-- its inhabitants like hallucinations..."

(P. 188 para 6) "Sanskrit word so repeated signifying peace which passeth understanding"

Family Ties (Raisin, Foxes, Journey, Juno)

I set this blog up for summer, but now, well into fall, I find that blogging about my reading helps me think out loud (which I need in order to process information). So, I'll continue to try to tie things together here from reading. Comps are now less than four months away.



I read Lorraine Hansberry's Raisin in the Sun. After Dr. Power suggested parallels between this work and Sean O'Casey's Juno and the Paycock. Reading it through that lens, I have to say there did seem to be some very obvious comparisons. First, surface similarities such as an unwanted pregnancy (Mary and ...). Then, of course social class similarities, and the money motive inspiring and driving everything. On a deeper level, there is the family dynamic in both plays, which seems to be breaking apart. The major difference is that in the American play (Raisin) the family seems to come together finally, in opposition-- dare we say solidarity-- to oppose the exclusionary practices of the all white neighborhood association. In the Irish play (Juno) the family breaks in to splinters, with the death of one, and the mother and daughter leaving at the end to live to raise the coming child with two mothers and no father.



I also read the Little Foxes by Lilian Hellman last week, and that particular play immediately made me think of Eugen O'Neil's Long Day's Journey into Night. Both plays are realistic depictions of American families, and these families are dysfunctional. In fact you could describe both plays as a painful protracted glance at dysfunction-- dysfunction on display. An interesting contrast to the Irish plays, which do not allow this intimate glance into family life (at least in O'Casey's case), and though you are in the home of the family, you are not in the head of the characters so deeply. Both O'Neil and Hellman seem to write from within the family secret they have been party to.



One of the most helpful, and fun, things I've been doing in conjunction with my reading and meeting with Dr. Power has been finding films version of the plays and novels I've been reading. There is an old version of Juno directed by Alfred Hitchcock, a film version of Raisin in the Sun with Sidney Poitier, a film of Long Day's Journey with Katherine Hepburn and Jason Robards, and a Bette Davis version of Raisin in the Sun. All of these are worth watching and the O'Neil, the Hansberry, and the Hellman stay very close to their original sources.
The Little Foxes

He Didn't Quit His Day Job

My father worked in the Insurance industry for thirty years, first as a salesman, and later as a sales manager. There was a moment just after finishing my BA in 1990, when I thought, maybe I should go to work for Dad. At that time, I thought I'll teach High School, and finish my PhD in the evenings, on weekends, and over summers. Also, I'll find time to write. Fast-forward twenty years. I've been teaching since 1991, and now doing admin work, and am still trying to finish my education.

Perhaps if I'd have read Wallace Stevens seriously (more than the Emperor of Ice Cream in an anthology), I would have gone to work selling insurance because I would have seen it as a viable 'day job' for an aspiring academic.  To me though, teaching was the job of choice for those who wanted to pursue higher education, and business was for those who wanted only to pursue money. Two modernist luminaries, though, worked in the hurly burly of the business world, and produced some of the greatest writing of the twentieth century.

I had know something about TS Eliot and his work in banking, but I never equated his job with banality for the simple reason that he lived in London. 'Expatriate' banker somehow still seems revolutionary, non-conformist, and appropriate to a writer. But Wallace Stevens is unaccountable within my universe. He breaks stereotypes, and I enjoy the experience of having prejudices or biases questioned. It is not only that he is a poet and an Insurance Company Executive, but that he is an Insurance Company Executive, and writes amazing poetry.

I was not deeply interested in Stevens and thought I would just read a few of his poems from an anthology, but after my experience with Sunday Morning, I wanted to read everything he's written. So I bought a collection of his poems I found at Page One called The Palm at the End of the Mind

So far, several poems have made very strong impressions:

1) Sunday Morning. Apparently, when asked about this Poem Stevens replied it was a Pagan work, and I love that idea reading this. I can imagine a woman on a Sunday morning coping with the sudden rush of beauty from a moment, and then the let down of, "oh yes, but this is all temporary", and the diminished quality of comparing the earthly, physical world to the otherworldly, spiritual, divine. A dichotomy is set up dividing the material from the spiritual. Maybe there is a possible thematic connection to Frost's the Oven Bird. In fact, the idea of 'what to make of a diminished thing' may be a rhetorical question in Frost's work, but it is as if, in some way, Stevens answers the rhetorical question. And perhaps he answers it by saying, "this thing is only diminished if you are operating within a certain epistemological frame". How do we know that a beautiful. Sunday Morning isn't really the most important thing, and that a bird diving down in the present moment isn't just as real as an eternal form, beauty.

There is some suggestion that Matisse and Stevens are kindred spirits. I can really see the greens and the oranges in this painting by Matisse in much the same way that the poem's oranges an cockatoo are imaginable, though I think the kindred nature is more in the vision, the world view. Though, I don't know enough about Matisse to pretend to understand that.

2) Peter Quince at the Clavier is another very interesting poem, which draws on the biblical story of Susana, who was condemned to death, after she refused to succumb to some elders who had seen her bathing and pursued her. She is defended by Daniel who uses a series of puns to secure her safety and condemn the elders to death. The picture by Gentileschi is one of many paintings based on the Susana story.

I am struggling to comprehend the full weight of the possible inversion of Platonism which has been pointed to in this poem by critics. The idea that there is not ideal form of beauty, but only the transitory beauty existing in the mind. The challenge to Plato is in many ways a challenge to the foundations of modern Christianity in the same way that Sunday Morning challenges a world view dependent on the unseen, and somewhat suspicious of the seen, actual, material world, as corrupt, or at best devoid of truth.

3) The Idea of Order at Key West is a poem I am still coming to understand, and will look at it more closely during the fall term's independent study.

Again, I've just been struck by how much I love Steven's work, and again at the surprise at his position in the world seeming to be so out of step with my stereotype of 'the artist'. I like that about Stevens, and maybe my reading his work and my deep appreciation of it is that wonderful accident of finding a certain work or collection or artist at exactly the right time in life.

Backyard like Mississippi

Finished reading Absalom, Absalom this afternoon (actually listened to the last part of it on tape; actually on CD; actually on my I-pod) while cooking meals for the week (pork chops with mango and cilantro, and tuna salad for sandwiches)... after a nap and while typing up notes on Long Day's Journey into Night, and Juno and the Paycock, I heard a clatter out on the lawn... springing from my computer. No, springing is not exactly it-- it was vexatious, no not really vexatious, but a desire nonetheless, a desire, that's how it might be said in a Faulkner novel, or perhaps it would be an ardor, or a hunger or a thirst, or some other such thing as might be said of a will brought about by a thought, or maybe it is the other way around, and I can only say that I heard some imperviously vexing, lugubrious resonance and moved from my place at the computer, and there, high in the old apple tree, with its eyes on me like I was a demon straight out of Sutpen's hundred-- there, up in the billowing, bending, pliancy of those branches was a Raccoon-- a salacious, determined, nocturnal, little creature, and it was ingratiating itself of my apples and it's kin-- another black-faced, ring tailed mammalian, acrobat-- was just scuttling about up the tree, over the wall and onto the shed. 
That was my attempt at a Faulknerian sentence, and the pictures are here as well.

It did seem very Mississippi to have the "coons outch younder thayre". Weird! Raccoons in Nob Hill-- well I declare Miss Colfield, it's strange aint it....

Cambridge Companion to W.H. Auden

I read The Cambridge Companion to W.H. Auden earlier this month. Below are some key quotes from this text.

(P.3/ para 3) "The 'Auden effect' lay in that ability to catch the changing moods of the time in luminous images, magical phrases and breathtaking apercus, expressing sentiments that people were unaware they shared until they read him."

(P.7/ para 2) "For the younger Larkin Auden was of course the first "modern poet", not just in his ability to employ modern properties unselfconsciously but primarily in the 'dominant and ubiquitous unease' at the heart of his poetry. Auden's outlook was completely dislocated..."

(P.9/ para 3) "...his sleeping around with poetic forms and his plagiarism of other poet's voices, constitute a deliberate assault on the idea of autonomous authentic self, speaking with its own unique accents." "All art is ventriloquism."

(P.11/ para 3) "He denounced Stephen Dedalus' remark...as an impossible ambition, since it is precisely this attempt to escape being a historical creature that makes man's history a nightmare..."

(P.13/ para 3) "Art is born of humiliation."  "(Auden was) The first poet at home in the 20th century."

(P.17/ para 4) "...his language and anxieties in the early 1930s entranced the young intelligentsia...they heard...political injustice and human pain clarified and amplified in his words."

(P.19/ para 3) "Many of his young admirers felt betrayed by the departure...the belief that he had deserted Britain during a dangerous crisis..." (seems an interesting pop-parallel when Bob Dylan went electric in the mid-1960s, and many in the folk community criticized him for selling out. Martin Scorcher's documentary No Direction Home outlines this process of following one's art, and the resultant alienation of some followers).

Too brief, Edward Estlin, too brief

I have not consulted any critical sources for E.E. Cummings, so if this ends up as a part of my exams I will need to do more work with this poet. This is a brief note or two from the five poems I looked at.

1) All in green went my love riding-- Early poem/ may be allusion to the Knight's Tale by Chaucer or refers to or retells story of Diana or Artemis/ Actaeon observes Diana bathing, and because of this Diana turns him into a stag and he is eaten by his own dogs... the myth really takes a fearful attitude to the corrupting power of female beauty.

2) O Sweet spontaneous--describes the rape of the earth, but allows that spring returns anyway.

3) The Cambridge Ladies Who Live in Furnished Souls-- this is a form of the sonnet, not as experimental in form as other works by Cummings. Seems to suggest a dead sort of religion/ an interpretation that limits one's direct experience or the real, actual physical reality/ an anit-Tao...

4) I was Sitting in McSoreley's-- poem uses strange, experimental syntax and punctuation. Shows Cumming's "manunkind" concept, lack of harmony between the organic world and human society. Maybe written to simulate 'sloppy' way the brain processes language when intoxicated.

5) A Man Who Had Fallen Among Thieves-- There is an obvious comparison to the story of the Good Samaritan. May be a comparison to "manunkind" who ignores-- contrasted with speaker in the poem who picks up the 'puke covered wretch'....