A SPRINT THRU SUBTLETIES

YEATS, ELIOT, AND MODERNISM

CHARACTERISTIC ATTITUDES & CONCERNS OF MODERNISM

• Alienation from belief structures, social structures• Resentment at Victorian mind-set• Fragmentation & Loss• Cynicism• Sterility• Rejection of genres, literary traditions• Imagist narrative instead of dramatic

monologue

ART AND FUSION

• Poetry must be ‘impersonal,’ that is, greater than and outside of the personality of the poet.

• “It is not the ‘greatness,’ the intensity of the emotions, the components but the intensity of the artistic process, the pressure…under which the fusion takes place, that counts.” –T.S. Eliot, Tradition and the Individual Talent, 1219.

WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS1865-1939

“There is now overwhelming evidence that man stands between eternities, that of his family and that of his soul. I apply those beliefs to literature and politics and show the change they must make. . . . My belief must go into what I write, even if I estrange friends; some when they see my meaning set out in plain print will hate me for poems which they have thought meant nothing.”

T.S. ELIOT1888-1965

“Language, especially the language of poetry, is a different matter. Poetry, it might seem, separates peoples instead of uniting them.

But on the other hand we must remember, that while language constitutes a barrier, poetry itself gives us a reason for trying to overcome the barrier.”

TWO CRUCIALLY IMPORTANT WORKS

• The Second Coming: Most significant statement of early Modernism

• The Waste Land: Most significant statement of post-war Modernism, and one of the most influential literary works of the last century

MODERNIST VIEWS OF POETRY

• Eliot, Tradition and the Individual Talent:• “Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion but an

escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality.” (1221)• “The emotion of art is impersonal. And the poet

cannot reach this impersonality…unless he lives in what is not merely the present, but the present moment of the past, unless he is conscious, not of what is dead, but of what is already living.” (1221)

WHAT ARE THEIR SOURCES OF ANXIETY?

• For Yeats, constant tension of Irish history and tradition vs. modernism; the Irish Rebellion of 1916: “All changed, changed utterly: A terrible beauty is born….enough to know they dreamed and are dead.”

• For Eliot, WWI and the 20th century: the search for some kind of Grail, the displaced Countess, the reduction of love to something the typist does after dinner, etc.

WHERE DO WE SEE FRAGMENTATION AND LOSS?

• The Second Coming: “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.”• Sailing to Byzantium: “Whatever is

begotten, born, and dies.”• The Wasteland: The husband and wife who

can no longer communicate, Lil and her man, Tiresias the blind prophet: “I can connect Nothing with nothing.”

IN WHAT WAYS DO YEATS AND ELIOT DISCUSS ALIENATION?

• No Second Troy: “Why should I blame her…. Why, what could she have done, being what she is?” (Contrast with In Memoriam—she is also a type.)• Eliot: Typist’s inability to make human

connections, blind Tiresias, the dry desert of section V; “We think of the key, each in his prison / Thinking of the key, each confirms a prison”

HOW DO THEY “MAKE IT NEW”?

• Yeats: unrhymed iambic pentameter that is not blank verse, sonnets that are not sonnets (Leda and the Swan), Irish perspective

• Eliot: Vers libre (“free verse”), allusions to anthropology, cultural mythologies, stream of conscious, deconstructing experience down to fragments of images (“The Fire Sermon” section of The Waste Land, for instance, or the last 10 lines of the poem)

HOW DO THEY “MAKE IT DIFFERENT”?

• Yeats: “ Verse as an exacting instrument of introspection and national inquiry” (p. 113).• Weaving mythology, history, mysticism, and

politics into an intensely personal poetic.

• Eliot: Monologues and soliloquies by characters previously unimagined in British literature; writing as outsider against British tradition yet within it (see Tradition and the Individual Talent); the “anxiety of influence”

HOW DO THEY “MAKE IT HARD”?

• Yeats: Deliberate ambiguity, mythohistorical system of gyres, imagist poetry• Eliot: Deliberate ambiguity, deconstructed

and fragmented narrative, language changes, shifting points of view, stream of consciousness, pastiche of voices, images, cultural referents . Provides his own footnotes. • Both argue that difficulty is important—

these questions don’t have easy answers.

SENSE OF LOSS AND MOURNING

• Yeats, Easter 1916: “Too long a sacrifice can make a stone of the heart. O when may it suffice…Was it needless death after all?”

• Eliot: “These fragments I have shored against my ruins…”; the Countess; Lil’s dialogue in the pub; Mr. Eugenides’ proposition

EPITAPH FOR THE MODERN PERIOD