Late W. B. Yeats

Sean Pryor

I

Is this modernism?

What shall I do with this absurdity—

O heart, O troubled heart—this caricature,

Decrepit age that has been tied to me

As to a dog’s tail?1

The first lines of “The Tower” (1927) incorporate a past poetic like a foreign body. The

apostrophic “O,” the troubling, and the heart lie somewhere between pastiche and quotation,

and the impassioned repetition figures the fact that Yeats had been repeating these tropes for

a long time. In the 1890s Yeats could begin a poem with “If this importunate heart trouble

your peace,” and five lines later propose that the troubled beloved should cry “O Hearts of

wind-blown flame!” (162). In 1902 another poem reached its climax with “O heart O heart”

(200), and as late as 1911 the young Ezra Pound, still finding his modernist feet, had written

of his “troubled heart” in “Canzon: The Spear” (1910).2 It would be a curious irony were the

last Romantic to figure his anachronism with an allusion to an early poem by the younger

modernist whose recent work, full of pastiche and quotation, had juxtaposed past and present

poetics so successfully: Yeats drafted “The Tower” in 1925, the same year Pound published

A Draft of XVI. Cantos. The year in which Pound’s Canzoni (1911) appeared also saw a new

edition of unpublished poems by James VI and I, one of which begins: “Since thought is

thrall to thy ill will, / O troubled heart, great is thy pain!”—but it seems unlikely that Yeats or

Pound ever read that.3 They are much more likely to have encountered “troubled heart” in

The Earthly Paradise (1868–1870) or The Song of Hiawatha (1855), and maybe Yeats was

also thinking of the Whitman who cried “O throat! O throbbing heart!”4 But beyond any

direct allusion, Yeats’s exclamation seems to gather an entire tradition of poetry in English in

order to dismiss it as absurdity and caricature. Bracketed off from the main business of the

sentence, the phrase is inadequate both to Yeats’s old age and to modernity.

The first lines of “The Tower” frame the anachronism formally, setting the long slow

vowels, even stresses, and monosyllables of “O heart, O troubled heart” against the quick

short vowels, uneven stresses, and polysyllables surrounding it. The rhythmic contrast is

unmistakable, and the prosodic animus that ends the first two lines with secondary stresses,

that then imbues “me” with a sense of outrage by giving it instead a stronger stress (and

thereby, with the enjambment, putting the rhyme off-kilter), and that ends the sentence

contemptuously on the contiguous stresses of “dog’s tail” and in the middle of a line—all this

is masterly. But is it modernist? Maybe this form of framing, precisely because it employs the

expressive effects of rhymed iambic pentameters, however masterful, is itself inadequate to

modernity. “The Tower” may incorporate the past like a foreign body, but its own body or

form had seemed to some an anachronism since Pound and Mina Loy and even Walt

Whitman had made the “first heave” and broken the pentameter.5 After all, the ardent

repetition of “heart” is not so different from the bitter apposition of “this absurdity [ . . . ] this

caricature.” Yet maybe the anachronistic poem’s rejection of anachronism is knowing and

ironic, and maybe in that way “The Tower” actively opposes the poetics of the young and of

novelty, rather than merely falling short. Maybe that irony is itself a form of modernism.6

Lawrence Rainey includes not just “The Tower” but the whole volume, The Tower (1928), in

his modernist anthology.7 Some label The Tower “a paradigmatic modernist text.”8 On the

other hand, maybe it is wrong from the start to align an old man’s disgust at his obsolete

poetics with modernism’s attack on poetic traditions: these may involve two quite distinct

kinds of anachronism and two quite distinct notions of the present, of its exigencies and its

possibilities. The figure of the dog, for instance, alludes to a line from an earlier poem, which

haughtily compares Yeats and his imitators to a dog and its fleas (162), so that here the late

Yeats humbles his younger self. (Pound had singled out that line for special praise.)9 But the

trouble with the dog and “O troubled heart” may have little or nothing to do with modernity.

Even as a figure for the age-old plight of old age, the metaphor of a can or kettle tied to a

dog’s tail hardly makes it very new. “The Tower” first appeared in the June 1927 issue of T.

S. Eliot’s Criterion, some five months after Eliot’s own “Fragment of an Agon,” but whereas

the modernism of that poem involves appropriating the rhythms and rhymes of popular song,

Yeats’s lines surely have nothing to do with that popular 1922 tune, recorded by both Edward

Meeker and The Columbians, “Who Tied the Can on the Old Dog’s Tail?” It seems a long

way from the derisive clatter of Yeats’s “battered kettle” to vaudeville or jazz.

II

In 1895 and having recently turned thirty, Yeats remarked of Aubrey de Vere, then over

eighty years old: “Only the accident of his long life makes him a contemporary.”10 Someone

like Louis Zukofsky might have said the same thing about the “sixty-year-old smiling public

man” (443) who wrote The Tower, and perhaps The Tower is no more a genuinely modernist

text than that other major volume of 1928, Thomas Hardy’s Winter Words in Various Moods

and Metres.11 Critics have long argued about Yeats’s relation to modernism.12 Maybe he

belongs with Hardy or Walter de la Mare, rather than Pound and Eliot.13 Yet it was Eliot who

recalled that, whereas Yeats had previously seemed “a minor survivor of the ’90s,” the first

performance of At the Hawk’s Well in 1917 had transformed his standing: “thereafter one saw

Yeats rather as a more eminent contemporary than as an elder from whom one could learn.”14

Only three years later Pound complained to William Carlos Williams that Yeats had

“faded.”15 In hindsight that looks a premature judgment, since most readers have preferred

The Tower and The Winding Stair and Other Poems (1933) to any of the volumes Yeats had

published by 1920. Indeed, Pound included “Sailing to Byzantium” and “Blood and the

Moon” in the spring 1928 issue of his own little magazine, The Exile, and they appeared there

alongside an excerpt from Canto XXIII and Zukofsky’s “Poem beginning ‘The.’” That seems

sufficiently unambiguous company. But perhaps the placing of Yeats’s splendid ottava rima

beside a poem that critiques not just traditional poetics but also The Waste Land (1922), that

high-modernist critique of traditional poetics, is misleading. Perhaps the association of

Yeats’s Byzantine lords and ladies with an early instance of late or second-generation

modernism is only another chronological accident.16

The trouble is partly to do with value. If Yeats’s work is deemed to develop and to

improve as it moves from The Wanderings of Oisin (1889) to The Tower, and if the same

period saw the emergence of what some now call high modernism, then maybe Yeats was

modernist too. The career of Constantine Cavafy, two years older than Yeats, presents a

comparable trajectory, though Cavafy led a much quieter, more isolated life. Perhaps Richard

Strauss, one year older, is a better comparison: the innovative late Romantic who in middle

age confronts and rejects a younger generation’s radical experimentation—though Yeats’s

early and middle years probably produced nothing so advanced as Also sprach Zarathustra

(1896) or Elektra (1909). On the other hand, his final years probably produced nothing so

advanced as the late cutouts of Matisse, who was four years younger. Yeats nevertheless

seems an indispensable part of the story of modernist poetry in English, whether he is

positioned as modernist, proto-modernist, or anti-modernist. The triumvirate of Yeats, Eliot,

and Pound has long been a common critical model. Michael North’s The Political Aesthetic

of Yeats, Eliot, and Pound is a classic example,17 and more recently Michael Whitworth

ranked Yeats alongside Pound, Eliot, Williams, H. D., and T. E. Hulme in his roll call of

exemplary modernist poets.18 Sometimes this approach risks reducing “modernism” to the

merely “modern,” as if, in the age of modernism, any major work is modernist. (De la Mare,

on the other hand, is presumably just a minor poet.) Conversely, one might argue with

Fredric Jameson that “any theory of modernism capacious enough to include Joyce along

with Yeats”—and the same could certainly be said for Yeats and Gertrude Stein—“is bound

to be so vague and vacuous as to be intellectually inconsequential.”19 We need something

more than mere contemporaneity.

The trouble with constellating Yeats and his contemporaries is that at least two

competing dimensions of value are involved. We may try to measure late Yeats against early

Yeats, or Yeats against Stein, on some purely aesthetic scale, and we may try to measure the

modernism of Yeats on a scale extending from, say, Stein to Rudyard Kipling. Neither is a

simple process, and the one continually interferes with or informs the other. Sometimes a

critic will praise Yeats’s tireless experimentation with traditional forms as a kind of

modernism, a way to make it new.20 But in that case there seems little to separate modernist

poets from their Victorian forebears, and some have argued instead that reinventions of

traditional forms in the early twentieth century represent a valid alternative to modernism.21

(Yeats could then be judged a more interesting or successful poet than de la Mare, of his time

without needing to be modernist.) Perhaps we need something more specific from the

category. For some critics that something would be free verse, and especially free verse that

works neither with nor against traditional forms (Williams rather than Eliot, to employ a

crude shorthand). Whitworth helpfully abstracts the problem by suggesting that properly

modernist “experimentation must serve some purpose in enabling the poet to engage with or

cope with modernity.”22 That probably is true of Yeats, though his relation to modernity and

to the poetics of his younger contemporaries was so often hostile, and indeed David Ayers

proposes that we “might well regard as modernist any poetry which refuses to accept its place

in history.”23 A genuine contemporary “can despise his time, while knowing that he

nevertheless irrevocably belongs to it,” writes Giorgio Agamben, and so the genuine

contemporary can grasp the truth of his time, better perhaps than those who feel at home

there, “precisely through this disconnection and this anachronism.”24 Maybe the ragged

rhymed trimeters of the first part of “Blood and the Moon,” sung “In mockery of a time / Half

dead at the top” (480), are as modernist as the free-verse reverie of Canto XXIII, blending

Stesichorus, Homer, the Italian Renaissance, Provençal troubadours, Bion, and the fifth

Homeric Hymn.25 But Pound’s formal experiments—his free verse, his incorporation of prose

texts, the jagged juxtapositions of his ideogrammic method—give even his antique materials

an avant-garde cast. The Cantos greet the modern world with the past in order to transform

the future. And in order to do that they upset the whole apple cart, risking and reinventing the

concept of poetry itself. For Peter Nicholls, “the exemplary modernist poem deliberately

invites the question ‘Is it poetry?’”26 That seems rarely if ever true of Yeats.

There are many other ways in which to separate Yeats from modernism. We might

decide that his work remains within a conservative poetics of the lyric.27 We might decide

that he leads to the anti-modernism of The Movement rather than, say, to various schools of

avant-garde verse later in the century.28 (This despite the fact that the Movement poets were

themselves deeply ambivalent, and sometimes actively hostile, to Yeats.) Meanwhile, much

of the most important recent work on Yeats has focused on him singly and has been only

incidentally concerned with the problem of modernism, if at all: the Cornell edition of

Yeats’s manuscripts in facsimile, John Kelly’s edition of The Collected Letters, Roy Foster’s

biography.29 But many critics do bring Yeats into modernism’s orbit, and often they do so by

reading him in relation to some key modernist technique or theme. As early as 1923, Eliot

credited Yeats with having been “the first contemporary” to employ the famous “mythical

method.”30 Describing Yeats as “at once Modernist and great forerunner of the Modernists,”

Daniel Albright groups him with Pound and Eliot and examines their responses to

contemporary science.31 Ethics, violence, anthropology, post-colonialism, the occult, cyclic

theories of history, and the materiality of the text have all been put to work in this fashion.32

Yeats’s increasingly conservative politics, and in particular his interest during the 1930s in

eugenics and in fascism, might also tie him to major modernist currents.33 The trouble with

such arguments, and especially insofar as they deal with the 1930s, is that Yeats’s late poetry

can seem so unlike the most accomplished and stimulating works of the time. Setting value

aside, it is not always easy to discern an aesthetics common to Parnell’s Funeral and Other

Poems (1935) and The Man with the Blue Guitar (1937), or Last Poems and Two Plays

(1939) and The Fifth Decad of Cantos (1937)—let alone the contemporary works of a

Williams or Muriel Rukeyser. (And yet, a year before Burnt Norton first appeared, Eliot

declared Yeats “the greatest poet of his time”: “At no time was he less out-of-date than today,

among men twenty and forty years his juniors.”)34

So it sometimes seems more reasonable to turn from broad intellectual and historical

contexts to biography and to seek a modernist Yeats in the life and contacts of an earlier

period. That is the approach James Longenbach takes in his study of the winters Yeats spent

with Pound at Stone Cottage during the Great War.35 One might also look to the gatherings of

writers, artists, and intellectuals Yeats held on Monday nights at Woburn Buildings, a center

of London’s literary life before the war.36 If we turn to At the Hawk’s Well and the other Noh

plays, to Responsibilities (1914), or further back to The Green Helmet and Other Poems

(1910), we find a Yeats stripping his verse of fin-de-siècle glamour and developing a much

more vigorous syntax and flexible rhythms. This is an earlier episode in the story of

modernist poetry: The Waste Land and Anglo-Mongrels and the Rose (1923, 1925) are still

safely some years off. “I tried to make the language of poetry coincide with that of

passionate, normal speech,” Yeats explained late in life, and that meant an “escape from

artificial diction.”37 In many respects Yeats does approach the arc of Anglophone modernism

most closely at just this time. In self-consciously rejecting aestheticism or decadence the

middle Yeats might be compared to Ford Madox Ford, whom Pound celebrated for

championing “the prose tradition in verse”—but then Ford’s best work is in irregularly

rhymed free verse.38 In this way the biographical approach has returned us to questions of

form—prosody, syntax, diction—and it leaves the question of the late Yeats unanswered.

This remains “the most problematic and disconcerting of all” of Yeats’s phases.39 When,

writing to a young poet from Stone Cottage in 1913, Yeats recommends that he use “the

natural words in the natural order,” that seems at least a modern virtue.40 When he repeats the

same formula twenty-five years later, it seems a bid for the “ancient & deathless” against

wilful novelty, and that has both aesthetic and political implications.41 It seems an attempt to

stem the modernist tide.

III

There are many other ways in which to think about Yeats and about modernism, and some of

them appear in the rest of this article. A fuller consideration would also engage with Yeats’s

plays and with his prose, perhaps especially with A Vision (1926, 1937), whose system Yeats

likened “to the cubes in the drawing of Wyndham Lewis and to the ovoids in the sculpture of

Brancusi.”42 For the moment I want to suspend the concept of modernism and to set the late

Yeats alongside his more accidental contemporaries—not Pound and Eliot, and not even W.

H. Auden and Louis MacNeice.43 And I want to focus not on “The Second Coming” (1920)

or “Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen” (1921) but on the works that come after The Tower—

works that tend to feature neither in our thinking about modernism nor in surveys of the

poetry of the 1930s. My gambit is to imagine how this very late Yeats looks in unfamiliar

company and to consider what he and these other poets are able to make of a high modernism

whose moment has passed: the directions in which they are able to take it.

For instance, it’s instructively strange to think of the old poet who could rail so

scornfully at the common crowd reading the young poet who went on to cofound Mass

Observation. In the introduction to his Oxford Book of Modern Verse (1936), Yeats groups

Charles Madge with MacNeice, “the anti-communist,” and with Cecil Day Lewis, “the

communist,” and remarks: “often I cannot tell whether the poet is communist or anti-

communist. On what side is Madge?”44 By this time Eliot and Pound had taken to taking

sides—British citizenship, Anglo-Catholicism, Social Credit, Mussolini—and Pound in

particular wrestled to reconcile competing allegiances. Yeats could certainly take sides too.

“We are the people of Burke and of Swift, of Grattan, of Emmet, of Parnell,” he proclaimed

in 1925: the Anglo-Irish Ascendency.45 But when it came to the poetics of taking sides—

whatever the particular sides may be—on what side was Yeats?

In the same year that the Oxford Book appeared, Madge published a sequence of four

poems in New Verse with the title “Delusions.” “Where are the dancing girls?”, the first of

these poems begins, and then it continues:

We have no home. Our bourgeois home is wrecked.

We seek instead the shadowy consolation

Of glimmering alcohol, and still expect

The unexpected of our own creation.

For we create—proud tyrants of a moment—

Bright visions, born between despair and fear,

And, in possessing them, survive our torment.

Where are the dancing girls? They are not here.46

Yeats was right to wonder whether and how poetry like this takes sides. The poem

presumes to speak for an unspecified we and then aligns that collective both with the

bourgeoisie and with drunkards and artists, with their visionary or creative capacities. (Blake

envisions the dead, arisen at the Last Judgment, “Bathing their limbs in the bright visions of

Eternity.”)47 That creativity is also figured as tyranny—classical tyranny? absolute

monarchy? Fascist dictatorship?—but it is only the tyranny of the lone individual over her

own momentary fantasies, which are themselves only momentary tyrants over life in time,

over reality. If every bourgeois and every bright vision is a tyrant, none are really tyrants at

all. The poem’s indicative present seems to tyrannize an inebriate collective: we have no

choice but to create bright visions. Yet at the same time we are something more than

bourgeoisie, for we somehow survive the wreck of the bourgeois home we had: capitalism’s

present tense is only a transient, historical condition. So we are neither properly bourgeoisie

nor proletariat, neither genuine artists nor revolutionaries. And that is why those dancing girls

have disappeared or never yet arrived and why, unlike Eliot’s departed nymphs, the dancing

girls are homeless too. While Eliot’s nymphs rightly belong in Spenser’s “Prothalamion” and,

figuratively, in Tudor London, Madge’s dancing girls are aptly vague figures both for

impossible archaic or exotic fantasy and for impossible modern and urban fantasy: from the

dancing girls who, with dwarfs, eunuchs, and a poet, entertain Don Juan on an Aegean isle to

the Ziegfeld Girls.48 Madge’s dancing girls leave unsatisfied the conflicting desires of a

conflicted identity, which is to say we desire some other identity: here and now, there is no

side to take.

Yeats also knew how to manipulate multiple identities by speaking for collectives—

“We had fed the heart on fantasies” (425)—and by shuttling within the same poem or

sequence between we and I, or between we and an unattributed, impersonal voice.49 Madge’s

homeless we might be usefully compared with the we of Yeats’s very last poem, “The Black

Tower” (1939), in which an oath-bound band of old soldiers unwaveringly resists every

competing allegiance, party, or side (including that of their readers, for the soldiers explicitly

address us). Typically, Yeats’s anachronistic setting is related to his contemporary situation,

so that the “banners [which] come to bribe or threaten” (635) figure the political rhetoric of

the late 1930s. Yet by this stage in Yeats’s career even the symbol of the tower had become

rather old, and Yeats’s anachronistic soldiers have little to defend but their resistance to

change; their opposition to modernity seems empty. “Why do you dread us so?” they ask, and

the assumption that they inspire dread threatens to betray their irrelevance. In refusing every

consoling bright vision—from the promises of their enemies’ emissaries to the cook’s

conviction that he has heard their dead king’s horn, that revelation is nigh—the men of the

old black tower may well be deluded too.50

But rather than “The Black Tower,” whose soldiers are so distinctly characterized and

which offers an oblique perspective on contemporary politics, let’s take a shorter, more

direct, and mostly unremarked work from Parnell’s Funeral and Other Poems, “Church and

State.” As it happens, the poem employs neither we nor I, but like that passage from

“Delusions I,” “Church and State” is troubled by political antagonisms and troublingly

entangled in them:

Here is fresh matter, poet,

Matter for old age meet;

Might of the Church and the State,

Their mobs put under their feet.

O but heart’s wine shall run pure,

Mind’s bread grow sweet. (553–554)

When “Church and State” appeared in the December 1934 issue of Poetry, Yeats

explained that he had written it after severing “loose associations” with an unnamed “political

party.”51 (Madge, on the other hand, was a member of the Communist Party.) Yet the poem

does seem to take a stand, if not with a specific party then with a general elitism and

authoritarianism. That looks modernist enough, though here it is crudely performed. The term

“mobs” allows no sympathy and “Might” admits no other right. Conversely, “poet” separates

the lines that deploy those terms from both the powerless and the powerful. Brute domination

is merely material for art, though the art of this poem hardly appears sophisticated. Like

much of Yeats’s late verse, the vocabulary seems basic and the rhetoric declarative. In this

vein, the final couplet anticipates the transubstantiation of politics into art, as though the poet

might yet be a priest performing an aestheticist Eucharist. The lines appropriate religious

tropes to celebrate the political antagonisms perpetuated by both church and state. But against

the brusque manner of the first four lines that final couplet introduces the anachronism of

“The Tower,” with its apostrophic “O” and romantic “heart,” and Yeats’s “but” allows a

logical contrast in which the purity and sweetness are indifferent or even opposed to politics.

(That would explain the semicolon in the second line, where we might have expected a colon:

the might of church and state are not the fresh matter but an accompanying circumstance. In

that case, presumably, the heart’s wine and mind’s bread are the fresh matter.) Purity and

sweetness are but the bright visions of the alienated artist, who can expect nothing real of his

miracle. Again Yeats juxtaposes an old poet’s belatedness with the larger problem of poetry’s

relation to its historical moment. In 1934, in Ireland and across Europe, the violent

antagonisms sustained by political power were urgent concerns, but the artless repetition of

“matter” and a syntactic inversion for rhyme were as stale as Byron’s dancing girls.52 The

anachronism of “Matter for old age meet” betrays the first couplet as an old man’s bluff, and

between that bluff and the hoax Eucharist the violence of the middle couplet is exposed and

vulnerable. It has no logical home. Both the bright visions and the dark hostilities are

compromised, and even culpable. If the mobs are “Their” mobs only, they are people made

mob by and for their masters and so are not really mob at all. If the poet must name himself

“poet” he is not only a poet: there is also some other self to assume that identity, its posture

of haughty alienation. (Or perhaps instead this speaker calls on some other poet, or on an

archetypal poet? And is he young or old?)53 Here, too, there is no side left to take, nothing to

celebrate: neither commitment to authority or to art nor indifference to authority or to art’s

complicity with it. The first stanza of “Church and State” eats itself.

The second stanza is if anything more strident still, and we may decide that its

convictions are also compromised formally and logically. But is that modernist? “Church and

State” seems, like many of Yeats’s late poems, a minor affair. It has none of the ambition or

rich symbolism of “Meditations in Time of Civil War” (1923) or “Byzantium” (1932);

deploying established symbols and abstractions, it looks an example of Yeats’s habitual

rhetoric, rather than a singular performance. Throughout his final volumes Yeats frequently

pitches his work at this more modest level, from epigrammatic quatrains like “The Spur”

(1938) or “The Great Day” (1938)—Yeats called them his “Aphoristic” poems54—to ballads

like “The Three Bushes” (1937) or “Three Songs to the One Burden” (1939). Because this is

poetry of broad rhetorical statement, and of calculated disregard for canons of social

propriety and poetic polish, it can seem to lack the compression or resonance of, say, the best

Imagist verse and even the best of Madge’s work. Yet there is a sense in which this

represents a genuine freedom, a relief from modernist strictures. (Use “absolutely no word

that does not contribute to the presentation,” Pound urged.55 But though a word like Yeats’s

“put” appears merely functional, a weak figure for violence, what word would have served

better? No other word would allude ironically to God’s dominion by recalling 1 Corinthians

15.27: “For he hath put all things under his feet.”)56

So to the extent that “Church and State” is a minor poem, hardly extraordinary in

form or content, perhaps I have worked too hard to find the internal complexity characteristic

of some more familiar modernist masterpiece. Though it is the first in a substantial sequence

of poems, “Delusions I” also feels deliberately modest or restrained. There is a sense of dull

and inevitable disappointment when Madge’s “They are not here” completes its line, its

rhyme, and its quatrain, while the final line of each of Yeats’s trimeter stanzas contracts

expressively to a dimeter: “Wine shall run thick to the end, / Bread taste sour” (554)57—

nothing to hope for or expect, perhaps not even from poetry that says so. (“Church and State”

was originally titled “A Vain Hope.”) Madge’s pentameter quatrains do not blend satire and

pastiche like the tetrameter quatrains of Eliot’s “The Hippopotamus” (1917) or “Mr. Eliot’s

Sunday Morning Service” (1918); they do not attack. Working within the protocols of

traditional versification to probe their own impotence, Madge and Yeats respond to the

problem of taking sides by taking the sides apart, especially the side of poetry. Perhaps that

represents a development of modernist impersonality, though it is not the impersonality of

Tender Buttons (1914) or “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” (1917). Only when

Yeats takes to howling at the mob, their masters, and their songsters do friend and foe prove

shifting categories. And in a decade when taking sides in politics and in art was an acute

dilemma, that response makes sense only in relation to a high modernism that has passed,

whether Eliot’s or Yeats’s own.58

“Delusions I” takes on new significance when read within its longer sequence, and in

similar fashion what looks like a minor poem will sometimes invite closer scrutiny because it

appears in one of Yeats’s late lyric sequences: A Man Young and Old (1928), A Woman

Young and Old (1929), Words for Music Perhaps (1932), or Supernatural Songs (1935). It

would be illuminating to compare these collections—which gather pieces ranging from the

slightest of songs to dramatic monologues in blank verse and which develop larger narratives

by moving through series of dialectical oppositions—to the minutely turned observations and

abstractions in free verse of George Oppen’s Discrete Series (1934). One might also compare

Yeats’s determination to revive the ballad, culminating in the broadsides he produced with

Dorothy Wellesley in 1937, with Basil Bunting’s “Gin the Goodwife Stint” (1930) and “The

Complaint of the Morpethshire Farmer” (1930), or with the blues and jazz poems of the

Harlem Renaissance. In turning to song both Yeats and Langston Hughes put to new uses

various techniques associated with oral verse: nonsense, refrains, stock metaphors, archetypal

speakers, commonplace sentiments, a simple vocabulary, and the wholesale repetition of

phrases and syntactical structures. Though such poems do not meet the “great variety and

complexity” of modernity with baffling allusion, indirection, dislocation, and other familiar

forms of difficulty,59 and though they never settle into the satire of Sweeney Agonistes (1932)

or Auden’s late 1930s ballads, the results can be complex and subtle. Those techniques do

much more than simply signify orality or music. So perhaps Yeats is not quite as remote from

African American modernism as he looks. (Speaking in March 1914 at a banquet held in

Chicago by Poetry magazine, Yeats praised Vachel Lindsay in particular, and Lindsay in turn

praised Hughes’s work when they met in 1925.)60 Moreover, for both Hughes and Yeats the

turn to song means the voice of collective experience: “every word and turn of phrase from

the common speech,” as Yeats put it.61 But Yeats’s notion of “common speech” seems

sometimes an attempt to resurrect the traditions of the rural Irish peasant, sometimes an

attempt to seize a deathless tradition beyond any nation or class: “ours is the main road, the

road of naturalness & swiftness and we have thirty centuries upon our side.”62 Yeats’s songs

never attend to local Irish idioms as do Synge’s or Lady Gregory’s plays (nor do they

embrace the speech of Dublin’s emerging middle classes).63 The common speech of

Hughes’s songs, on the other hand, is historically and politically specific. Yeats’s

collectivities are shifting and imagined.64

Let’s turn finally to a poem that takes the high road, filling four stanzas of stately

ottava rima and pitched at the level of the rise and fall of civilizations, “The Statues.” Here,

too, Yeats happily hurls judgments and generalizations. “We Irish,” the poem declares, have

been “thrown upon this filthy modern tide / And by its formless spawning fury wrecked”

(611). The lines themselves take up the fight against that tide: the intricate play of consonant

and vowel; the falling rhythms and final stressed monosyllable of “filthy modern tide”

repeated and extended by “formless spawning fury wrecked”; the gradual construction of the

stanza as a bulwark, a monument of unageing intellect. And maybe the strength of poetic

form buttresses the judgment and the generalization, as if a poem could justifiably generate

its enemies. But to buttress its own formal choices, “The Statues” traces a history of

civilizations through a history of their forms—mathematical, philosophical, religious,

aesthetic—and its history is preposterous: from Ancient Greece, through mediaeval

Buddhism, to modern Ireland. Even as a logical argument (since there is no suggestion of

comprehensive historical survey), the selection of materials seems willful. Why two stanzas

for Greece? Who ever thought to contrast Buddha with Hamlet? If ottava rima is relevant to

Buddhist statues, it is only at the most abstract level, as an example of “calculation, number,

measurement.” The argument about historical forms thus implies an ahistorical contest of

form and chaos. Sculpture and verse are only examples. From the perspective of eternity, the

filthy modern tide may be no worse than the “many-headed foam at Salamis” (610), scattered

with the bodies of dead sailors. Seemingly improvised and actually planned with care, the

whole poem thus circles from the “plummet-measured face” (610) of classical art to the

“plummet-measured face” (611) the Irish imagine today—or might yet do. But in measuring

the history of forms, Yeats’s measurements break down. That very line—“What calculation,

number, measurement, replied?” (611)—is a hexameter stalking through a stately pentameter

mansion, and it is by no means the poem’s only calculated mismeasurement. One might then

argue that such prosodic liberties or deformations reflect “the historical migrations,

transformations, and revolutionary upheavals in which art participates.”65 Paradoxically, the

bulwark is strengthened by the buffets of the spawning fury; form incorporates and masters

the formless. But at this level of abstraction any form would do. Insofar as it allegorizes form

as such, the choice of ottava rima is arbitrary.

Yeats worked on “The Statues” in Dublin over the summer of 1938, completing it on

or soon after 23 September.66 (Over the same summer the crisis over the Sudetenland steadily

worsened until, on 30 September, Chamberlain, Hitler, Mussolini, and Daladier signed the

Munich Agreement. Modernity’s fury seemed to have been held at bay.)67 On 9 August in

New York, Zukofsky began drafting the ninth section of his long poem, “A.”68 Zukofsky’s

choice looks if anything more arbitrary even than Yeats’s, for what can Cavalcanti’s canzone,

“Donna mi prega,” have to do with Marx’s theory of value? (The connection is thematic in

the second half of “A”-9, which Zukofsky wrote ten years later, for both Cavalcanti and

Spinoza deal with love.) Zukofsky relates Cavalcanti to Marx specifically at the level of form

and in particular by relating the exchange value of commodities as an abstract form of

equivalence to the form of equivalence called rhyme. But whereas the commodity form

reduces particulars to a universal, Zukofsky’s play of conventional rhyme, identical rhyme,

and other alliterative, assonantal, and typographical patterns reveals the particular in the

universal. In the first stanza, for instance, the sounds of “equated” and “related” are equated

as materials with which to meet the requirements of Cavalcanti’s verse-form.69 Abstractly,

their common sound resembles an exchange value. But of course at the same time that

prosodic form of equivalence, unlike the commodity form, reveals other and contradictory

values: relation is quite unlike equation. Similarly, the phonemic and semantic values of the

“-semblance” in “resemblance” are not the same as the values of “semblance,” though the

words rhyme, nor is verbal “use” the same as nominal “use,” though they serve as rhymes

here too. (Both examples turn on s as /s/ and /z/.) Exchange value represents the mere

quantity of socially necessary labor time, while Zukofsky’s poetic labor uses the exchange of

common sounds, historical products of the collective language, to think through modernity’s

opposed forms of value. And whereas under capital the “measure all use is time congealed

labor,” and though Zukofsky’s measurements (numbers, calculations) are conspicuously the

products of labor, the value of “A”-9 cannot be exchanged or redeemed for an equivalent. In

other words, the poem’s use value involves the moment of autonomy essential to Objectivism

and, more broadly, to modernist aesthetics. It helps that “Donna mi prega” has an especially

intricate scheme of internal and end rhymes, and it helps that the canzone offsets capitalism

by recalling an earlier mode of production, but other verse-forms could have performed the

same service. The arbitrariness of Zukofsky’s choice remains, and it is vital. When this

abstracted form meets this theory of abstraction, a particular poem emerges, neither just

another canzone nor another treatise.

“A”-9 makes new a form abstracted from an old poem, and it makes new the way that

form abstracts verbal material, by making abstraction a contemporary particular: through its

arbitrariness, the canzone acquires a significant relation to the political economy of

modernity. Is this or something like this true of the forms in and the form of “The Statues”?

The theories offered by Yeats’s poem are slippery, for the poem is by turns solemn and

dismissive, colloquial and august, and so too are its evaluations. Within two lines we shift

from the earnest philosophizing of “knowledge increases unreality” to the offhand

informality of “all the show” (610). At first the poem celebrates classical sculpture for

successfully yoking Pythagoras’ cold, lifeless “numbers” to hot-blooded “passion”: only the

amorous gaze of lovelorn adolescents could bring those forms to life. But in the second

stanza aesthetic success comes to life as history, in particular when classical sculpture

supplants the victory at Salamis as the birth and triumph of European civilization. The third

stanza’s account of Buddhist sculpture makes form’s abstraction lifeless and ahistorical

again: the “emptiness” (611) of “Empty eyeballs” (610), which is also an emptiness for

empty eyeballs. And finally, when the fourth stanza brings us to Patrick Pearse in the General

Post Office, a bloody historical event seems to have supplanted sculpture altogether, for there

are no actual statues here. (Oliver Sheppard’s statue of Cuchulain, placed in the Post Office

to commemorate the Easter Rising, is conspicuously absent.) It is as if Pearse were Phidias’

legitimate heir. But because Yeats has Pearse summoning the spirit of Cuchulain, the form

Pearse represents is anachronistic, quite unlike Phidias’ or Pythagoras’ forms. The

contemporary political values of the Rising’s “calculation, number, measurement”—military

strategy, dead bodies, public opinion—are an irruption of the ancient in the modern world.

Since the stanza then moves from that specific event to an historical condition, to the Irish

wrecked on the filthy modern tide, the form of this poem presumably represents a similar

irruption. Form as such is of the past and formlessness of the present. While “A”-9 recalls

two specific precursors separated by more than six centuries—Cavalcanti and Pound, who

twice translated “Donna mi prega”—ottava rima summons a tradition of poetry in Italian and

in English nearly six centuries long, as well as Yeats’s own previous uses of the form.70

Yeats’s poetic choice thus looks rather less arbitrary. Yeats and Zukofsky are only accidental

contemporaries after all.

Yet from where does that opposition of past form and present formlessness come, if

not Yeats’s own historical moment, as a condition of modernity? Yeats’s Greek and Buddhist

sculptors work with no such opposition. Modernity is no more a filthy tide than a neon sign.71

Modernity is the contest of “filthy modern tide” (611), a kind of furious, vague, illogical

curse in a strict pentameter, with “these / Calculations that look but casual flesh, put down”

(610), the wondering celebration of miraculous precision in lines that look but loose

pentameters.72 The bravura with which Yeats selects and arranges his materials, from logical

antitheses to passing shifts in tone, from Pythagoras to ottava rima, means that history and

form are both refracted through the poem’s own moment. And that moment is not 1916 but

1938; the poem ends significantly on a note of anticipation, or better still, the anticipation of

anticipation: “that we may trace / The lineaments of a plummet-measured face” (611). It

looks as though, through the resounding resolution of the couplet that closes every ottava

rima stanza, these lines and their verse-form simply repeat or represent those classical

lineaments, but “trace” suggests both a secondary copy and a preparatory sketch, while

“may” makes that sketch not achieved but possible. The value of ottava rima here is precisely

that it coincides with neither the past’s nor the future’s forms. The arbitrariness of Yeats’s

choice is vital too. The value of “The Statues” lies partly in the autonomy of verse that is not

sculpture, so that relation is not reduced to equation. The value of “The Statues” lies partly in,

having labored with its materials, anticipating the further labors of a collective, rather as the

poem had celebrated the anonymous “men” who modeled those calculations. Yeats’s we is

vague but open. It cannot be reduced to “Poet and sculptor” (638), “the peasantry,” or “Hard-

riding country gentlemen” (639). The space the poem opens between copy and sketch, and

the difference that copy and sketch together open as a future, is a poetics we sometimes call

modernist.

IV

Perhaps I have again worked too hard to find a modernism in Yeats’s late poetry. “The

Statues” may seem quite distant from “the natural words in the natural order,” but the lexical

and syntactic freedoms of a Zukofsky or E. E. Cummings are a world apart. It is difficult to

imagine Yeats understanding or approving of the documentary aesthetic of Rukeyser’s The

Book of the Dead (1938). Some of Yeats’s greatest and last poems, “News for the Delphic

Oracle” (1939) or “Cuchulain Comforted” (1939), are rapt with the anticipation of new

metamorphoses and new songs, but at the same time they locate that promise in mythological

or otherworldly realms. Such poems can seem a long way from the banners of Moscow and

Rome or the violence of church and state. Might modernity appear in a terza rima poem

thrilling to the collective birdsong of shades in the afterlife? “Lapis Lazuli” (1938) deals

much more explicitly with the general sense of crisis that characterized the 1930s, but it turns

from the possibility of aerial bombardment, of a specifically modern catastrophe, to the rise

and fall of civilizations, to an unchanging cycle of change: “All things fall and are built

again, / And those that build them again are gay” (566). It would certainly be wrong to reduce

the poem’s sense of possibility and value to those lines, but Yeats rarely if ever exhibits the

utopian impulse of Madge’s “Instructions” (1933) or Hughes’s “Let America be America

Again” (1936).73 Is “The Municipal Gallery Re-visited” (1937) or “A Bronze Head” (1939)

merely retrospective? Though it resolves to start all over again, even “The Circus Animals’

Desertion” (1939) turns repeatedly to that outworn old trope, “the heart” (630). But because

he often did test himself against his contemporaries, for many of whom “the heart” could

mean only sentimentality or evasion, the late Yeats may prove a surprisingly effective figure

with whom to test and even to trouble our concepts of modernism.

1 W. B. Yeats, The Variorum Edition of the Poems of W. B. Yeats, ed. Peter Allt and Russell

K. Alspach, corrected 3rd printing (New York: Macmillan, 1966), p. 409. All

subsequent page references are to this edition.

2 Ezra Pound, Collected Early Poems of Ezra Pound, ed. Michael John King (New York:

New Directions, 1976), p. 135.

3 James VI and I, New Poems by James I. of England, from a hitherto unpublished

manuscript (Add. 24195) in the British Museum, ed. Allan F. Westcott (New York:

Columbia University Press, 1911), p. 62. Westcott doubts the authenticity of the poem

(p. 105).

4 William Morris, The Earthly Paradise, ed. Florence S. Boos, 2 vols (New York: Routledge,

2002), 1.513, 1.516, 1.663, 2.15, 2.57, 2.197; Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Poems

and Other Writings (New York: Library of America, 2000), p. 210; Walt Whitman,

Complete Poetry and Prose, ed. Justin Kaplan (New York: Library of America,

1982), p. 392.

5 Ezra Pound, The Cantos (New York: New Directions, 1996), 81/538.

6 See Helen Vendler’s reading of the ironic inversion of ballad metre in the fifth part of

“Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen” (1921), in Our Secret Discipline: Yeats and Lyric

Form (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007), p. 74.

7 Lawrence Rainey, ed., Modernism: An Anthology (Malden: Blackwell, 2005).

8 George Bornstein, Material Modernism: The Politics of the Page (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 2001), p. 81.

9 Ezra Pound, Literary Essays, ed. T. S. Eliot (New York: New Directions, 1968), p. 380.

Though his essay was published after Yeats’s poem, Pound actually quotes a draft

version, which Yeats must have shown him privately. See W. B. Yeats, In the Seven

Woods and The Green Helmet and Other Poems: Manuscript Materials, ed. David

Holdeman (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002), p. 181.

10 W. B. Yeats, letter to Katharine Tynan Hinkson, 31 July 1895, in The Collected Letters of

W. B. Yeats: Vol. I, 1865–1895, ed. John Kelly and Eric Domville (Oxford: Clarendon

Press, 1986), p. 470.

11 On 15 March 1935, Zukofsky told Pound that he had found little to like in Eleven New

Cantos: no one in the United States was interested in Mussolini, he added, and no one

“will be interested in the after-dinner wish fulfilment & table talk of an Irish senator.”

In Canto XLI Pound notes: “‘Sure they want war,’ said Bill Yeats, / ‘They want all

the young gals fer themselves.’” See Pound/Zukofsky: Selected Letters of Ezra Pound

and Louis Zukofsky, ed. Barry Ahearn (New York: New Directions, 1987), p. 164;

and Pound, The Cantos, 41/205.

12 The best summaries are to be found in Daniel Albright, “Yeats and Modernism,” in

Marjorie Howes and John Kelly, eds., The Cambridge Companion to W. B. Yeats

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 59–76; Anne Fogarty, “Yeats,

Ireland and Modernism,” in Alex Davis and Lee M. Jenkins, eds, The Cambridge

Companion to Modernist Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp.

126–146; and Edna Longley, Yeats and Modern Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 2014).

13 For an argument against aligning Yeats with a non-modernist tradition of British verse

(Thomas Hardy, de la Mare, Davies, Edward Thomas, and Wilfred Owen), see Peter

Howarth, British Poetry in the Age of Modernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press, 2005), pp. 8–10.

14 T. S. Eliot, “Ezra Pound,” Poetry 68 (1946): 326–329 (quote on p. 326).

15 Ezra Pound, letter to William Carlos Williams, 11 September 1920, in Pound/Williams:

Selected Letters of Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams, ed. Hugh Witemeyer

(New York: New Directions, 1996), p. 38.

16 Yeats makes only an incidental appearance in Tyrus Miller’s Late Modernism: Politics,

Fiction, and the Arts Between the World Wars (Berkeley: University of California

Press, 1999), but that book focuses primarily on prose fiction.

17 Michael North, The Political Aesthetic of Yeats, Eliot, and Pound (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 1991). See also M. L. Rosenthal, Sailing into the Unknown: Yeats,

Pound, and Eliot (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978); Cairns Craig, Yeats,

Eliot, Pound and the Politics of Poetry (London: Croom Helm, 1982); C. K. Stead,

Pound, Yeats, Eliot, and the Modernist Movement (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1986);

Leon Surette, The Birth of Modernism: Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, W. B. Yeats, and the

Occult (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1993); Stan Smith, The Origins

of Modernism: Eliot, Pound, Yeats and the Rhetorics of Renewal (Hemel Hempstead:

Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1994); Daniel Albright, Quantum Poetics: Yeats, Pound, Eliot,

and the Science of Modernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); and

Donald Davie, Modernist Essays: Yeats, Pound, Eliot, ed. Clive Wilmer (Manchester:

Carcanet, 2004).

18 Michael Whitworth, Reading Modernist Poetry (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), p. ix.

See also Peter Howarth, The Cambridge Introduction to Modernist Poetry

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), which gives whole chapters to

Yeats, Pound, and Eliot, while grouping Williams, Marianne Moore, and Wallace

Stevens as American modernists and Loy, Stein, and H. D. as avant-garde modernists.

19 Fredric Jameson, A Singular Modernity (London: Verso, 2002), p. 104

20 “Critics sometimes ask whether Yeats was the last of the Victorians or the first of the

Modernists,” writes Vendler. “In his sonnet practice, certainly, he left no aspect

unscrutinized in his modernizing of the genre. Like all the best Modernists, he

disturbed forms without entirely abandoning them” (Our Secret Discipline, p. 181).

For Vendler’s further thoughts on Yeats and modernism, see Helen Vendler, “The

Later Poetry,” in Howes and Kelly, eds, The Cambridge Companion to W. B. Yeats,

pp. 77–100.

21 Daniel Albright provocatively suggests that if “Modernism implies experimentation with

the limits of art, shocks and thrills beyond all previous bounds, then, in the matter of

poetic form, the Victorians were more Modernist than the Modernists themselves.”

Neil Corcoran argues that in Yeats or Thomas Hardy “traditional form may be so

originally wrought as to become something quite different from itself and, thereby, a

means for the articulation or realisation of things which Modernism itself could not

articulate or realise.” See Daniel Albright, “Modernist Poetic Form,” in Neil

Corcoran, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Twentieth-Century English Poetry

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 24–41 (quote on p. 24); and Neil

Corcoran, “Introduction,” in Corcoran, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Twentieth-

Century English Poetry, pp. 1–5 (quote on p. 3).

22 Whitworth, Reading Modernist Poetry, p. 5.

23 David Ayers, “Modernist Poetry in History,” in Davis and Jenkins, eds, The Cambridge

Companion to Modernist Poetry, pp. 11–27 (quote on p. 26). Nevertheless, Yeats

makes no appearance in Ayers’s Modernism: A Short Introduction (Oxford:

Blackwell, 2004), which focuses instead on Eliot, Pound, Nancy Cunard, Loy, and

Stevens.

24 Giorgio Agamben, “What Is the Contemporary?”, in What is an Apparatus? and Other

Essays, trans. David Kishik and Stefan Pedatella (Stanford: Stanford University Press,

2009), pp. 39–54 (quote on pp. 40–41). Agamben develops this notion of the

contemporary’s anachronism, in terms that are helpful for reading Yeats, by

considering the relation between the present and the archaic: “the entry point to the

present necessarily takes the form of an archaeology; an archaeology that does not,

however, regress to a historical past, but returns to that part within the present that we

are absolutely incapable of living” (p. 51).

25 The first thirty-four lines of Canto XXIII, omitted when the poem was published in Exile,

add Michael Psellos, Gemistus Plethon, Malatesta Novello, and Pierre Curie to this

mix.

26 Peter Nicholls, “The Poetics of Modernism,” in Davis and Jenkins, eds, The Cambridge

Companion to Modernist Poetry, pp. 51–67 (quote on p. 52).

27 Drew Milne, “Politics and Modernist Poetics,” in Peter Middleton and Nicky Marsh, eds,

Teaching Modernist Poetry (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), pp. 25–44 (p.

29).

28 Redell Olsen, “Postmodern Poetry in Britain,” in Corcoran, ed., The Cambridge

Companion to Twentieth-Century English Poetry, pp. 42–55 (p. 46). On the other

hand, Yeats’s famous presentation of Pater’s passage on the Mona Lisa as a free-verse

poem at the beginning of his Oxford Book of Modern Verse makes a rather surprising

appearance in Craig Dworkin and Kenneth Goldsmith, eds, Against Expression: An

Anthology of Conceptual Writing (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2011).

29 More formalist studies that, examining Yeats alone, put aside the question of modernism,

include Vendler, Our Secret Discipline, and Nicholas Grene, Yeats’s Poetic Codes

(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).

30 T. S. Eliot, “Ulysses, Order, and Myth,” Dial 75.5 (1923): 480–483 (quote on p. 483).

31 Albright, Quantum Poetics, pp. 27–28.

32 Lee Oser, The Ethics of Modernism: Moral Ideas in Yeats, Eliot, Joyce, Woolf, and Beckett

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Sarah Cole, At the Violet Hour:

Modernism and Violence in England and Ireland (New York: Oxford University

Press, 2012); Gregory Castle, Modernism and the Celtic Revival (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 2001); Edward Said, “Yeats and Decolonization,” in

Terry Eagleton, Fredric Jameson, and Edward Said, Nationalism, Colonialism, and

Literature (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990), pp. 69–95; Surette,

The Birth of Modernism; Louise Blakeney Williams, Modernism and the Ideology of

History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); and Bornstein, Material

Modernism.

33 See especially North, The Political Aesthetic of Yeats, Eliot, and Pound; Donald J. Childs,

Modernism and Eugenics: Woolf, Eliot, Yeats, and the Culture of Degeneration

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); and W. J. McCormack, Blood

Kindred: W. B. Yeats: The Life, the Death, the Politics (London: Pimlico, 2005).

34 T. S. Eliot, “A Commentary,” Criterion 14.57 (1935): 610–613 (quote on pp. 612–613).

Thirty-nine years Yeats’s junior, Day Lewis urged that “almost everyone who has

written verse in English during the last twenty years has felt Yeats’s later work to be

the most admirable written in the period.” See C. Day Lewis and L. A. G. Strong, A

New Anthology of Modern Verse, 1920–1940 (London: Methuen, 1941), p. xiv.

35 James Longenbach, Stone Cottage: Pound, Yeats, and Modernism (New York: Oxford

University Press, 1988).

36 One good example is Ronald Schuchard’s detailed study of Yeats’s interest in the chanting

of verse and its relations to Imagism, though Schuchard concludes that Yeats was

never a genuine modernist. Dealing with similar materials, Michael Golston, in

contrast, aligns Yeats with Pound and Williams as major figures in the development

of modernist concepts of rhythm. Finally, Richard Greaves argues against reading the

middle Yeats as a modernist. See Ronald Schuchard, The Last Minstrels: Yeats and

the Revival of the Bardic Arts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008); Michael

Golston, Rhythm and Race in Modernist Poetry and Science (New York: Columbia

University Press, 2008); and Richard Greaves, Transition, Reception and Modernism

in W. B. Yeats (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002).

37 W. B. Yeats, Later Essays, ed. William H. O’Donnell, with assistance from Elizabeth

Bergmann Loizeaux, The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats, V (New York: Charles

Scribner’s Sons, 1994), p. 212; and W. B. Yeats, letter to Margot Collis, [early July

1935], The Collected Letters of W. B. Yeats, general ed. John Kelly (Oxford: Oxford

University Press [InteLex Electronic Edition], 2002), #6278. All subsequent

references to Yeats’s letters are to this edition, cited by accession number. I have not

corrected Yeats’s misspellings.

38 Ezra Pound, “Mr. Hueffer and the Prose Tradition in Verse,” Poetry 4.3 (1914): 111–120.

“I used to see Ford in the afternoons and Yeats at his Monday evening,” Pound later

recalled, “Yeats being what Ford called a ‘gargoyle, a great poet but a gargoyle.’” See

Ezra Pound, “This Hulme Business,” Townsman 2.5 (1939): 15.

39 Graham Hough, Selected Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), p. 167.

40 W. B. Yeats, letter to Peter McBrien, [? November–December 1913], #2315.

41 W. B. Yeats, letter to Dorothy Wellesley, 8 February [1937], #6804.

42 W. B. Yeats, A Vision (1937; repr. London: Macmillan, 1962), p. 25. For further

consideration of A Vision as a modernist text, see Fredric Jameson, “A Note on A

Vision,” in The Modernist Papers (London: Verso, 2007), pp. 269–277; and Marjorie

Perloff, “The Pursuit of Number: Yeats, Khlebnikov, and the Mathematics of

Modernism,” in Poetic License: Essays on Modernist Poetry and Postmodernist Lyric

(Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1990), pp. 71–98. Perloff’s essay is

unusual in placing Yeats beside an experimental European writer like Khlebnikov.

43 Jahan Ramazani recently suggested that, though Yeats and Loy seem to have so little in

common, the juxtaposition might be surprisingly productive: “Yeats’s violent

ambivalences toward his Irish and English inheritances, in a poem such as ‘Easter,

1916,’ can be compared with Loy’s fractured identifications; his cross-national and

cross-cultural interstitiality, with hers.” See Jahan Ramazani, A Transnational Poetics

(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), p. 32.

44 Yeats, Later Essays, p. 201.

45 W. B. Yeats, Later Articles and Reviews: Uncollected Articles, Reviews, and Radio

Broadcasts Written after 1900, ed. Colton Johnson, The Collected Works of W. B.

Yeats, X (New York: Scribner, 2000), p. 191.

46 Charles Madge, “Delusions,” New Verse 20 (1936): 2–5 (quote on p. 2). Madge later

published four more poems from the sequence when it appeared in The Disappearing

Castle (1937). See Charles Madge, Of Love, Time and Places: Selected Poems

(London: Anvil, 1994), pp. 47–59. Yeats included two poems by Madge in The

Oxford Book, “The Times” and “Solar Creation.”

47 William Blake, The Four Zoas, p. 117, l. 19, in The Complete Poetry and Prose of William

Blake, ed. David V. Erdman, rev. edn. (New York: Anchor Books, 1988), p. 387.

48 Lord Byron, Don Juan, ed. T. G. Steffan, E. Steffan, and W. W. Pratt (London: Penguin,

2004), 3.78. See, also, Pound, The Cantos, 87/595: “Religion? with no dancing girls

at the altar?” Madge may not have meant “proud tyrants” to allude to Spenser, but see

The Faerie Queene, ed. Thomas P. Roche, Jr, with the assistance of C. Patrick

O’Donnell, Jr (London: Penguin, 1987), 5.12.24.

49 See Michael Wood, Yeats and Violence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 43–

44.

50 The soldiers’ intransigence seems to be set against the refrain’s prophecy of revelation,

their we against the refrain’s impersonality, but then the refrain might be the soldiers’

after all, and it actually describes nothing more certain than a storm. It is impossible

to say whether or to what extent the poem endorses the soldiers, even as it undercuts

them.

51 W. B. Yeats, “Three Songs to the Same Tune,” Poetry 45.3 (1934): 127–134 (quote on p.

134). See Variorum Poems, p. 837. For the background to this poem, and Yeats’s

relations with Eoin O’Duffy’s Blueshirts (the unnamed political party), see Elizabeth

Cullingford, Yeats, Ireland and Fascism (London: Macmillan, 1981), chapter 11,

“Blueshirts”; and R. F. Foster, W. B. Yeats: A Life, 2 vols (Oxford: Oxford University

Press, 1997–2003), 2.466–483.

52 The phrase “fresh matter” is itself nothing of the sort. In “The Journal of a Modern Lady”

Swift writes: “Enter the folks with silks and lace: / Fresh matter for a world of chat”

(l. 82). See Jonathan Swift, The Complete Poems, ed. Pat Rogers (Harmondsworth:

Penguin, 1983), p. 367.

53 Cf. “Under Ben Bulben,” l. 37: “Poet and sculptor, do the work” (638).

54 This was the title Yeats gave “The Spur,” “The Great Day,” “Parnell” (1938), and “What

Was Lost” (1938) in a draft table of contents for New Poems. See W. B. Yeats, New

Poems: Manuscript Materials, ed. J. C. C. Mays and Stephen Parrish (Ithaca: Cornell

University Press, 2000), p. 376. Yeats contributed an introduction to a new edition of

Shri Purohit Swami’s translation of the Aphorisms of Yoga (1937), which he first read

in 1933 (W. B. Yeats, letter to Shri Purohit Swami, 12 May [1933], #5873).

55 Ezra Pound, “A Few Don’ts by an Imagiste,” Poetry 1.6 (1913): 200–206 (quote on p.

200); Pound, Literary Essays, p. 3.

56 Cf. Psalms 47.3: “He shall subdue the people under us, and the nations under our feet.”

57 Alternatively, one might read “Mind’s bread grow sweet” and “Bread taste sour” as

trimeters, and in that case the significant shift would be not from trimeter to dimeter

but from stresses loosely arrayed in duple and triple rhythms to strong contiguous

stresses. For a discussion of Yeats’s trimeter quatrains, see Vendler, Our Secret

Discipline, pp. 182–204.

58 I do not mean to suggest that this reading of two quatrains would suffice for the whole

sequence or for Madge’s work in general. For further consideration of the political

aspects of Madge’s poetry, see Drew Milne, “Charles Madge: Political Perception and

the Persistence of Poetry,” New Formations 44 (2001): 63–75.

59 See T. S. Eliot, “The Metaphysical Poets,” Times Literary Supplement (20 October 1921):

669–670 (quote on p. 670).

60 Harriet Monroe, “Poetry’s Banquet,” Poetry 4.1 (1914): 25–29 (p. 25); Langston Hughes,

The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes, ed. Arnold Rampersad and David Roessel

(New York: Vintage Books, 1995), p. 9.

61 W. B. Yeats, letter to Dorothy Wellesley, 12 May [1937], #6927.

62 W. B. Yeats, letter to Dorothy Wellesley, [19 April 1936], #6538.

63 ”With you it is not a question of the speach of the common people—as with Synge & Lady

Gregory—but the common speach of the people,” Yeats wrote to Wellesley on 22

December [1935] (#6492).

64 One could extend the comparison to Poem XVII (“Shoot it Jimmy!”) from Williams’s

Spring and All (1923). Williams deploys jazz diction and rhythms as an expression of

modern America’s most vital energies, at the same time playing self-consciously with

the fact that he has borrowed them from African American musicians, that they are

alien to a white doctor from Rutherford. Yeats’s songs and ballads can be similarly

synthetic and self-conscious, though his appropriations tend to reach into the past or

the traditional.

65 Vendler, Our Secret Discipline, p. 272. For a similar argument about the making and

unmaking of Yeats’s stanzas, see Peter McDonald, Serious Poetry: Form and

Authority from Yeats to Hill (Oxford: Clarendon, 2002), pp. 51–69.

66 The manuscript history of “The Statues” is complicated and unclear. One late draft is

marked “Final version Sep 23,” but it seems likely that another surviving draft is a

later version. Yeats had mentioned “The Statues” in letters to Wellesley on 8 and 22

June, and the poem was dated 9 April 1938 in the posthumous Last Poems and Two

Plays. Over that summer he also spent time in Sussex and in London, where he could

conceivably have worked on the poem too. See W. B. Yeats, Last Poems: Manuscript

Materials, ed. James Pethica (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997), pp. xlvii–xlviii,

232–233; Collected Letters, #7252, #7259; and Variorum Poems, p. 610.

67 “Political News looks very evil but I still do not beleive in war,” Yeats wrote on or around

23 September, and on 2 October he wrote: “My own releif was immense, even I had

given up my beleif in peace last Monday” (Collected Letters, #7305, #7307).

68 Jeffrey Twitchell-Waas, “Chronology of LZ Compositions and Publications,”

http://www.z-site.net/biblio-research/Composition-Publication.php#Note, accessed 19

April 2013.

69 Louis Zukofsky, “A,” rev. edn (New York: New Directions, 2011), p. 106.

70 For Yeats’s uses of ottava rima, see Vendler, Our Secret Discipline, pp. 262–290.

71 “When I stand upon O’Connell Bridge in the half-light,” Yeats explained in 1937, “and

notice that discordant architecture, all those electric signs, where modern

heterogeneity has taken physical form, a vague hatred comes up out of my own dark”

(Later Essays, p. 215). “The Statues” takes that hatred and makes it a sign of

modernity.

72 These lines are especially deft. Before Yeats’s final revisions the word “these” clearly took

a metrical beat: “Who totted on a slate or moulded these.” When the line then became

“That with a mallet or a chisel modelled these” either the line became a hexameter or

“these” became the second of two unstressed syllables trailing after the beat. The

former reading places unusual emphasis on the deixis, allowing perhaps for other

calculations that only look casual, and perhaps even including the verses’ own

calculations. The latter reading is more likely to produce two strong stresses in

“Calculations,” making its line a calculatedly casual hexameter. See Last Poems:

Manuscript Materials, pp. 228–229.

73 Madge, Of Love, Time and Places, pp. 125–129; Hughes, The Collected Poems, pp. 189–

191.