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Overview
Originally published in 1983.
The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780691613604 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Princeton University Press |
| Publication date: | 07/14/2014 |
| Series: | Princeton Legacy Library , #994 |
| Pages: | 284 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.90(w) x 9.20(h) x 0.70(d) |
Read an Excerpt
Yeats & American Poetry
The Tradition of the Self
By Terence Diggory
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 1983 Princeton University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-06558-8
CHAPTER 1
Introduction: "The Tradition of Myself"
Not long ago, any study concerned with the concept of tradition in twentieth-century poetry would inevitably have revolved around T. S. Eliot. His most famous essay, "Tradition and the Individual Talent," is still the standard classroom introduction to the modernist preoccupation with tradition. Recent scholarship and poetry have helped to redefine that preoccupation, however. Contrary to the view that in other essays Eliot implicitly adopts toward himself, as a restorer of a tradition that had lain dormant for more than two hundred years, numerous scholars have argued that Eliot's work is in fact a continuation of the romantic tradition that has flourished since the late eighteenth century. Meanwhile, the "postmodernist" poets of the last two decades have shifted the question entirely, from "Which is the relevant tradition?" to "Is there a relevant tradition?" Robert Lowell's attitude to "Those Before Us" (1964) is that "We have stopped watching them. They have stopped watching" (UD 17).
Whichever perspective we adopt, that of the scholars or that of the poets, the modernist in whom the problem of tradition now finds its focus is not Eliot but William Butler Yeats. Measuring himself against Eliot, Yeats could assert, in his edition of the Oxford Book of Modern Verse (1936), that "I too have tried to be modern" (OBMV xxxvi). Yet he saw no contradiction in his claim, in "Coole Park and Ballylee, 1931" (1932), to be also one of "the last romantics." Identifying himself as an Irishman, Yeats tried at first to revive the ancient Irish tradition, but he soon realized that his real task was to create a tradition where none seemed to exist.
Yeats's commitment to creating a tradition for Ireland in particular helps to explain why his relevance to the question of tradition in a broader sense has not been fully perceived. To do so requires a recognition of the complex resemblance between Yeats's situation in Ireland and the situation of poets in America, for since World War I the American absence of tradition has increasingly come to be acknowledged as the situation of modern art generally. Long before World War I, Yeats acknowledged that poems analogous to Whitman's "Song of Myself" were being written in response to the failure of tradition in Europe, but he specifically excluded Ireland from the analogy. In 1906 an Irish newspaper reported Yeats's belief that "although, so far as cultivated Europe was concerned, the days of symbols and myths had gone, something had been gained as well as lost. Individuality stood out in stronger relief, and painters as well as poets had all learned to sing the song of themselves — the song of their own souls, more gladly, more confidently than ever before" (UP II, 344-45). Though he later emphasized their bitterness rather than their gaiety, the poets whom Yeats has in mind here are those of the eighteen-nineties, men like Lionel Johnson and Ernest Dowson, "who more and more must make all out of the privacy of their thought" (1922; Au 314). In 1906 Yeats still thought he might be spared the bitterness of his friends because he was from Ireland, where "this great tradition that they called a nation" (UP II, 345) might rescue the artist from his privacy.
Nationhood, rather than selfhood, was the issue in which Yeats first perceived the relevance to his own situation of Whitman and the other nineteenth-century American writers whom the Irishman admired. The Americans had succeeded in declaring aesthetic independence from England. Yeats wanted the Irish to follow the American lead — officially because English rationalism denied the authority of tradition; unofficially, perhaps, because English poetry embodied a tradition that threatened to overwhelm a young poet who had a strong attraction to romanticism. Once the Americans had determined not to make use of English tradition, they found themselves without any tradition, because America had no past of its own. Yeats hoped that the past embodied in Ireland's ancient legends and persisting folk beliefs would supply the tradition that gives poetry its essential resonance, but his attempt to found a national theater during the first decade of this century led him to abandon that hope. The sort of tradition he envisioned required the consent of a community, but the Irish community exhibited only dissension. In effect, then, Yeats found himself without a tradition as much as the Americans, and Whitman's "Song of Myself" became immediately relevant to him as well as to his English friends. American poets like Emerson and Whitman had discovered in the self an alternative to tradition that was at the same time a new source of tradition. This is the tradition Yeats had in mind when he resolved in his journal for 1909: "To oppose the new ill-breeding of Ireland, ... I can only set up a secondary or interior personality created out of the tradition of myself."
The view that personality is created distinguishes the tradition of the self from its origin in the romantic theory of artistic self-expression. Both doctrines lead logically to poems in which the speaker is identified through autobiographical detail with the poet himself, as in Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey" or Yeats's "The Tower." These two poems symbolize an important difference, however. Whereas Wordsworth views himself in terms of past stages of his life — the child sensualist and adolescent pantheist — Yeats views himself in terms of past creations — the fictional Hanrahan and even the restored tower itself. For Wordsworth, the self was given or, at most, discovered; for Yeats, the self was created. In the process of being created, the self becomes distanced or externalized. It is literally ex-pressed, but not as in romantic expression, because Yeats's externalized self differs from the internal self where it originated. Once externalized, the self is viewed not as the poet's content but rather as a form to be entered into; it is the mask or antiself that must be pursued throughout life.
Though it has roots in Blake's The Four Zoas and Shelley's Alastor, Yeats's postulation of a dual or even multiple self marks another signal divergence from romantic self-expression, since that theory demands an identity between what is expressed and what is contained in the poet's true self. The romantic desires harmony between subjective and objective experience, a harmony that Yeats could preserve only by expanding the definition of the self to include what appeared to him as quite disparate modes of experience. Subjectively, Yeats felt himself to be the creator of the world, but, objectively, he felt himself the helpless victim of the world's intransigence. By granting a measure of truth to both selves, Yeats could adopt a heroic stance in his poetry without diminishing the obstacles he faced. Further, Yeats was able to retain a sense of inspiration as coming from outside — a sense demanded by the feeling of helplessness before the world — and yet to know also that his inspiration came from himself, since there was also a self that was outside. To enjoy the sanction of external authority and yet to recognize that authority as the self is the definitive experience of the tradition of the self.
Experience does not demand the distinction between inside and outside, subject and object, that intellect attempts to impose upon it. At least, this is the assumption of poets in the tradition of the self who, following their romantic predecessors, regard experience as a sense of wholeness that includes intellect but that is destroyed when that faculty functions exclusively. Robert Langbaum has stressed the continuity of modern poetry and romanticism by showing how "the poetry of experience" is designed to create experience for the readers However, a discontinuity emerges between romanticism and modernism, particularly Yeats's brand of modernism, if the same poetry is considered from the perspective of the writer. Because a poet in the tradition of the self creates a self when he writes, the act of writing extends his experience as well as that of the reader, whereas the romantic poet, in expressing a self that already exists, merely records preexisting experience. Thus, another intellective distinction, that between art and life, is obliterated when we arrive at the tradition of the self, and such modifications of theory are bound to affect the reader's experience of the poetry that results. For instance, the reader must adjust to an enlargement of the romantic's claim for the poet's heroic role, since in the tradition of the self the poet is not merely a seer but a man of action whose deeds are his poems.
This conviction of the power of language is one of the points of agreement between the tradition of the self as developed by Yeats and the second principal source of that tradition: the American poetry that regards the poet as another Adam who names the world anew. Contrasting scientists and artists in a 1908 lecture, Yeats described artists as "Adams of a different Eden" who "must name and number the passions and motives of men" (UP II, 369-70). But English romanticism checked Yeats's American Adamic impulse, freeing him to conceive a poetry distinct from either of its sources. The tradition of the self grows less distinctively American as Yeats shapes it to accommodate the communal concerns that he shared with the English romantics. The American Adam, as the first man, stands apart from society. Yeats felt that he had gone beyond the Adamic Whitman by asserting the public responsibility of the artist. At the same time, the public that interested Yeats was different from that to which the English romantics responded. Like the self, Yeats's public world was created by the artist, not given to him.
In the beginning, then, the self for Yeats stands alone, and if poetry is to be produced from that situation, the self is the poet's only available subject. Since that generating postulate of the tradition of the self derives immediately from American poetry, the next chapter of this study will be devoted to a fuller examination of Yeats's ties to nineteenth-century American writers. In the twentieth century many American writers came in touch with the tradition through Yeats. What they found, however, was not necessarily the core of the tradition but one of four corollaries derived from the generating postulate. The man most responsible for transmitting Yeats's influence to America, Ezra Pound, eventually embraced the tradition in its entirety, as I show in Chapter III, but for other poets, one of the corollaries usually remained of primary importance. If the poem's subject was to be an actual man, the poet himself, then the speech of the poem must convincingly convey that actuality (Chapter IV). But even though he spoke a natural speech, the self that entered the poem was in fact artificial, a created being, as Yeats would argue against the English romantics (Chapter V). Moreover, Yeats maintained against his American forebears that the dimensions of the self in the poem were not merely individual but also communal (Chapter VI). So that the self did not lose its individuality, however, it was located amid the special circumstances of the poet's private existence (Chapter VII). Understandably, given the conflicting demands embodied in this set of principles, few poets could embrace the entire system, but, taken as a whole, the system reflects the notion of the duality of the self that was fundamental to Yeats's thought.
To talk of postulates and corollaries is, of course, to employ a logical schematization available only to hindsight. A poet attracted to what I have called a corollary would have seen it rather as an aspect of Yeats's poetry that had value in itself or, more important, that might instill similar value in his own poetry. Because Yeats's poetry cohered as a system, however, a poet who explored one element of the system was likely at least to confront other elements, provided he devoted sufficient time and attention to his exploration. As an acknowledgment of the importance of time in this study, I have used an organization that is chronological as well as logical. Chapters IV through VII each represent a decade during which one of the corollaries of the tradition of the self received special attention. Though these chapters embrace the entire career of each relevant American poet, the decade divisions serve to define stages of Yeats's career as it was shaped by the poets who read him. In Yeats's case, the issues raised by his readers cluster around volumes that seem to announce decades: The Green Helmet volume in 1910, Four Plays for Dancers in 1921, and The Tower in 1928. Yeats's death in 1939 marks off another decade.
This book concludes with three poets who published their first volumes during the nineteen-forties, the sort of poets whom M. L. Rosenthal describes as "carrying on where Yeats left off when he proposed that the time had come to make the literal Self poetry's central redeeming symbol."? Rosenthal is speaking of confessional poetry, which indeed represents the culmination of the tradition of the self. To appreciate the scope of that tradition, we need to recognize that "confessional" poems have been written not only within the school so designated but also by poets as diverse as William Carlos Williams, Robinson Jeffers, and Archibald MacLeish. Although most of these poems were written from the forties through the sixties, the phenomenon is too widespread to be considered merely the leading fashion of a period. These poets shared a common experience, World War II and its aftermath, and a common tradition, derived from Yeats. Within the confessional school more strictly defined, especially in the work of Robert Lowell, there are signs that the tradition has come to an end.
What signs allow us to trace a tradition? The question is especially problematic when applied to the tradition of the self, because far more important than any of the characteristics I have designated as corollaries of the tradition is the central lesson: a poet is to be himself in his poems. Yet to say that a poem betrays the influence of Yeats especially at those moments when the author presents himself most persuasively sounds either like nonsense or like an extremely subtle paradox. Harold Bloom traces that paradox to its origin in American poetry when he attributes to Emerson "the only poetic influence that counsels against itself, and against the idea of influence." Though Emerson certainly opened the way to the tradition of the self, that fact provides further proof of the difficulty of tracing such a tradition. For as far as Yeats was concerned, Whitman, not Emerson, was the central figure in American poetry. Yeats's opinion would not matter to Bloom, because he is interested in the Emersonian tradition as a pure idea. Yeats's opinion matters greatly to me, however, because I wish to study the tradition of the self as a movement in literary history.
For that reason, the following chapters will trace the tradition of the self not solely through a succession of poems that fully embody the tradition, but also through the careers of poets who, continually struggling either to invest themselves in or to divest themselves of the tradition, meet only rarely with complete success. The opinion of Yeats and other poets, as expressed in their prose and implied in their poetry, will be attended to closely, because in a historical study it is just as important to know what poets thought they were doing as it is to analyze what they were actually writing. In a historical study of tradition, it is especially important to know whom poets were reading and what they thought of their reading, and to this end prose statements, biographical data, and even the much maligned verbal and structural echoes prove useful, so long as we bear in mind the advice of Wellek and Warren that echoes "establish, at the most, the mere fact of relationship." That is an important fact, from which we can proceed to fill in the larger patterns of influence that transmit the functional values of tradition. Thus, when a poet's letters discuss Yeats, when specific lines in certain poems echo Yeats, and when those poems reveal a concern for one of the corollaries of the tradition of the self — such superficial signs, if they agree with each other, indicate that Yeats may have penetrated deeper into the poems, to the level at which the poet creates his identity.
If Yeats plays no other part in such a poet's self-creation, he at least offers support to the self by providing access to tradition. To those for whom tradition is preserved through formal technique, Yeats shows how the trimeter line or the eight-line stanza can be made freshly contemporary. To those for whom tradition is a pattern of belief, Yeats shows how the modern world can be set parallel to myth. But to all the poets studied here, Yeats presents a possibility that can be vividly inspiring or fatally intimidating: the possibility that, when inheritance fails to provide tradition, tradition can be generated from the self.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Yeats & American Poetry by Terence Diggory. Copyright © 1983 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents
- FrontMatter, pg. i
- CONTENTS, pg. vii
- ACKNOWLEDGMENTS, pg. ix
- PERMISSIONS, pg. xi
- NOTE ON CITATIONS AND ABBREVIATIONS, pg. xv
- I. INTRODUCTION : “THE TRADITION OF MYSELF”, pg. 1
- II. AN AMERICAN TRADITION: EMERSON, POE, THOREAU, AND WHITMAN, pg. 11
- III. A LIVE TRADITION: EZRA POUND, pg. 31
- IV. NATURAL SPEECH: THE NINETEEN-TENS, pg. 59
- V. ARTIFICIAL LIVES: THE NINETEEN-TWENTIES, pg. 87
- VI. PUBLIC SPEECH: THE NINETEEN-THIRTIES, pg. 134
- VII. PRIVATE LIVES: THE NINETEEN-FORTIES, pg. 181
- VIII. CONCLUSION: THE END OF TRADITION, pg. 225
- NOTES, pg. 229
- INDEX, pg. 249