 Today, in World Literature, we examine European poetry. Bert Kimmelman, author of the Poetics of Authorship in the Later Middle Ages, The Emergence of the Modern Literary Persona, concentrates on Great Britain's W. H. Auden and Ireland's William Butler Yates and Seamus Haney. Professor Kimmelman asks us to look at the ways these poets merge the political and the personal point of view. While W. H. Auden's poems The Unknown Citizen and Musee de Beau Arts certainly function as aesthetic icons, they also were reflections of a writer who had lived during the Great Depression and the rise of fascism. Marianne Moore called Auden's poetry circumspectly audacious. He seeks out the universal in a particular, as we will see. While the many poems in our anthology of literature, composed by Europeans, exhibit a variety of style, tone and specific subject matter, almost all of them at least distantly reflect the great turmoil of the 20th century, the paroxysms of war, international, civil or both, and frequent genocidal activities that have formed some of the more important waystations of modern European history. Thus, many of these poems inevitably have a political agenda. The poetry of the British Isles is no exception. It reflects concerns about nationalism, politics, civil war, and strife. Towering over the English language poetry of all modern countries, the United States included, is the work of William Butler Yates. We will examine his poem, Easter, 1916, and note in it the ways in which he blends the public and political with the private and the personal. We will then discuss two other poems from our anthology, both by poets who were deeply influenced by Yates, W. H. Auden and Seamus Heaney. In the case of Heaney, we note that Auden was also an important precursor. The three together, representing successive generations, disclose a development in the poetry of the British Isles in which the political aspect of life becomes ever more merged with the personal point of view. Let us first begin with Yates' poem about the aftermath of the famous Irish rebellion against the English in 1916. Easter, 1916, I have met them at close of day, coming with vivid faces from counter or desk among gray eighteenth-century houses. I have passed with a knot of the head, or polite meaningless words, or have lingered awhile and said polite meaningless words, and thought before I had done of a mocking tale or a jib to please a companion around the fire at the club, being certain that they and I, but lived where motley is worn, all changed utterly, a terrible beauty is born. That woman's days were spent in ignorant goodwill, her knights in argument, until her voice grew shrill. His voice more sweet than hers when young and beautiful she rode to Harrier's. This man had kept the school and rode our winged horse. This other, his helper and friend, was coming into his force. He might have one fame in the end, so sensitive his nature seemed, so daring and sweet his thought. This other man I had dreamed a drunken, vain glorious lout. He had done most bitter wrong to some who are near my heart. Yet I number him in the song. He too has resigned his part in the casual comedy. He too has been changed in his turn, transformed utterly, a terrible beauty is born. Hearts with one purpose alone through summer and winter seem enchanted to a stone to trouble the living stream. The horse that comes from the road, the rider, the birds that range from cloud to tumbling cloud, minute by minute they change. A shadow of cloud on the stream changes minute by minute. A horse hoof slides on the brim and a horse plashes within it. The long legs more hence dive and hence to more cocks call. And by minute they live the stones in the midst of all. Too long a sacrifice can make a stone of the heart. Oh, when may it suffice? That is heaven's part, our part, to murmur name upon name, as a mother names her child when sleep at last has come on limbs that had run wild. What is it but nightfall? No, no, not night, but death. Is it needless death after all? For England may keep faith for all that is done and said, we know their dream. Enough to know they dreamed and are dead. And what if excess of love bewildered them till they died? I write it out in verse Macdonough and McBride and Connolly and Paris, now and in time to be wherever green is worn or changed, changed utterly, a terrible beauty is born. Here the sacred is a magical element of hope, but in relation to Ireland's renewal alone, the poem's refrain, A Terrible Beauty is Born, names the fusion of the appalling and the moving, shared by tragedy, the sublime and the sacred. Something has entered and transformed Irish nationalism, something with a self-perpetuating life, the terrible beauty is born, not was born. And out of a sacrifice has come new life and a new intimacy and continuity, Irish to Irish. After 1916 is the earliest of a group of Yeats' poems commenting on the change in Ireland swept by revolution. The poem sets up a careful antithesis between the polite meaningless words which constitute the casual comedy of pre-revolutionary Ireland, the Ireland where Motley had been born, had been worn, I'm sorry, and the tragic, terrible beauty that is born of the Easter rising. The Yeats has the historical personages he catalogues in the second stanza, resign their parts in the casual comedy, reject the roles called for by their, as it were, script, and become independent, beautiful figures, terrible and violent in their freedom. The narrator's task in Easter 1916 is straightforward. He wants to come to terms intellectually with the deaths by execution of leaders of the Irish volunteers of the Irish Republican Brotherhood. And to do so he apparently must satisfy himself that the executions have lasting, perhaps transcendent significance. He does this by supplanting the vocabulary of purposeless mortal catastrophe with oracular rhetoric. He must grapple in vain with the recalcitrant facts of these mass executions and futile effort as he tries to formulate a conciliatory sense of history. And so he seeks to accomplish a compensatory, perhaps even redemptive, orientation toward public slaughter and futility of collective effort. The heart in the last stanza no longer enchanted has been sacrificed. Death is both metaphor and fact. The men are not sleeping. This is not night but death. And in what is the stuff of tragedy, it is a death which, though perhaps needless, is certainly brought on by a heroic dream, a dream founded on excess love like all the greatest tragic motives. Changed by not changing, dying uselessly, bewildered by love, Ireland's unexpected heroes create the ironic, terrible beauty of tragedy in an otherwise meaningless time. What we find in Yeats' poem is a historical account but also a mythologizing of events in order to elevate them, to show their importance, and to memorialize them. In accomplishing these ends, Yeats is able to blend didactic political concerns and purely aesthetic concerns. This effort to blend the two poles of language and thought is furthered by Auden. Here is his poem, Musée des Beaux-Arts, about suffering they were never wrong, the old masters. But while they understood its human position, how it takes place while someone else's eating or opening a window or just walking dully along, how, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting for the miraculous birth, there always must be children who did not specially want it to happen, skating on a pond at the edge of the wood. They never forgot that even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot where the dogs go on with their doggie life and the torturer's horse scratches his innocent behind on a tree. In Bruegel's Icarus, for instance, how everything turns away quite leisurely from the disaster, the plowmen may have heard the splash, the forsaken cry, but for him it was not an important failure. The sun shone as it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green water. And the expensive delicate ship that must have seen something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky, had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on. Musée des Beaux-Arts was published in the spring of 1939. In the poem, Auden uses a flag colloquial style to make social comment. The poem's plot parallels the willful ignorance of German hostility and aggression on the part of English and American citizenry in the years leading up to World War II. Others endure pain or misery, but suffering is a personal condition. It can be refused or disguised, but not falsified, since the self-deception would then become part of the suffering. Bruegel's painting, The Fall of Icarus, like the other paintings alluded to in the poem, The Numbering at Bethlehem and the Massacre of the Innocence, quietly points out that events of the greatest pathos and importance occur in settings that seem to be out at the edge of history, ordinary places where we pursue our normal, unobservant lives. The language is deliberately unpoetic on the whole, and the tone varies between deadpan irony and simply expressed awareness. Musée des Beaux-Arts is a reflection upon the unspectacular way in which human suffering occurs in, so to speak, a corner of the picture, while the rest of life continues, oblivious of it. One mirrors the effect of life, disinterestedly and trivially pursuing its random course in the trailing line while someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along. He says that the old master has painted the miraculous birth or the dreadful martyrdom fully aware that nearby, quote, the torturer's horse scratches its innocent behind on a tree, end quote. In the second half of the poem, Auden describes Bruegel's Icarus in which the large solid peasant plowman fills most of the picture and a tiny figure in the distance is the falling Icarus. One critic has interpreted this painting as Bruegel's manifesto of Northern realism's superiority to classical mythologizing, but Auden's point is that ordinary life, plowing, the sailing ship on the sunlit sea into which Icarus is falling to his death. Ordinary life ignores the disaster, the important failure, the something amazing. As well we might observe that to Auden, the poetic imagination that seeks out grandeur and sublimity could scarcely be bothered with those insignificant figures lost in the background or in the crowd. Yet Auden sees them, yet Auden sees in them an example of Christianity's great and enduring transformation of classical rhetoric, its inversion principle that the most important subjects require the highest style. One might say that Auden's philosophical comment about life is not itself startlingly original or profound and the relaxed conversational tone, for example, where the dogs go on with their doggie life, that this tone is casual to the point of being blasé as though the observer is merely a tired journalist doing a routine job. However, this effect is deliberate and it is calculated to shock. The poem's informal irregular lines make none of the demands for action and attention that marked Auden's earlier poems, his harangues on the urgency of the times. Yet beneath the apparent surface disorder, a deeper pattern of connectedness gradually makes it so felt. The unassertive rhymes easily overlooked on a first reading hold the poem together. They affirm with Bruegel that suffering is no less crucial because it happens somewhere else or when we are too busy to notice. Whether or not we are aware of it, our connection with other's suffering is inescapably real. The normal expectation of a lyric poem, such as a sonnet for instance, is that its first portion in the sonnet it would be the octave, is that its first portion will usually present a particular scene or event rendered with a pleasing vividness and accuracy. And this would be followed by a second portion in which what came before is meditated upon, regarded from a new or newly considered perspective. Yet Auden reverses this sequence in his poem. He begins with a generalization about a lot of varied paintings, none of them really up for inspection, quote, about suffering they were never wrong, the old masters. How well they understood its human position, how it takes place while someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along. In its brisk survey of quotidian life, the poem, in the midst of which astonishing events take place, such as the miraculous birth and the dreadful martyrdom, adopts in its opening section a calm and distant language that is meant to be slightly disruptive as it portrays the common human indifference to the reverent, passionate waiting of the agent to say nothing of the nativity itself and bestows bland attention on the innocent dogs and the horse that belongs to the torturer. The second part begins with the line in Bruegel's Icarus, for instance. That phrase, for instance, particularizes and exemplifies the generalities that began the poem and augments the already impromptu tone of voice. The most interesting equation is between ploughman, ship, and sun. The blank neutrality of nature, quote, the sun shone as it had to on the white legs. The blank neutrality of nature is offered as an exact equivalent to human indifference. The total effect is then not to challenge this world of separated goals and involvements, but rather to ratify it in a shrewdly anti-heroic wisdom as, quote, the way life is. History, like the suffering of Moussé de Beaux-Arts, is at once the most intense and most peripheral social fact, but this disjunction of the normal and extraordinary is not to be especially regretted. Auden became a spokesperson for English society, adopting in this culture a role in many ways similar to the function fulfilled by Yates in Ireland. Myth in Yates is not easily disengaged from history, and neither are easily separable from the present. Auden lived through the suffering of an epic and was applauded for many years as its representative voice. Yet the irony around which the first stanza of Moussé de Beaux-Arts revolves, the incongruous uneven relationship between major human catastrophe and the casual detail of routine life. This ironic contrast points to a difficulty in representativeness that is central to much of his social poetry. The suffering is intensely real, and so is his, quote, unquote, untidy spot which provides it with a context, yet the link between them can only be contingent and external, focusing on maladjustment rather than on connection. It is not difficult to trace the roots of this perception in the particular social condition out of which Auden wrote, the condition of a society undergoing a disturbance so profound that it required a real effort of attention and analysis to relate it at all significantly to the stubbornly persisting fabric of daily life. Auden was a great influence on Seamus Heaney, just as Yates, an Irishman, deeply inflected the English poetry of Auden's time. Yates' work also played a tremendous role in the development of Heaney, so that we see the flow of the English tradition bending back toward Ireland in our own era. Heaney's work is intensely political, but politics for him has become deeply embedded in dailiness, more so than in Auden, well below the surface of discourse as we see in the poem entitled Digging, where one of the things being unearthed is the Irish English fierce embrace. In Digging as well, Heaney will locate the poetic tradition metaphorically in the soil, and he aligns it with his own personal lineage. Here is his poem, Digging, between my finger and my thumb the squat pen rests snug as a gun. Under my window a clean rasping sound when the spade sinks into the gravelly ground. My father Digging. I looked down till his straining rump among the flower beds bends low, comes up twenty years away stooping in rhythm through potato drills where he was digging. The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft against the inside knee was levered firmly. He rooted out to all tops, buried the bright edge deep to scatter new potatoes that we picked, loving their cool hardness in our hands. By God, the old man could handle his spade, just like his old man. My grandfather cut more turf in a day than any other man on toner's bog. Once I carried him milk in a bottle, corked sloppily with paper. He straightened up to drink it, then fell to right away, nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods over his shoulder, going down and down for the good turf. Digging. The cold smell of potato mold, the squelch and slap of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge through living roots awaken in my head, but I have no spade to follow men like them. Between my finger and my thumb, the squat pen rests, I'll dig with it. What we may observe right off in this poem is its inescapably palpable material language and how its tangibility completes a progression begun in the eights and extended through Auden. Also worth noting at this juncture is that this poem has survived at the head of Heaney's volume of selected poems, just as it begins his first full-length collection titled Death of a Naturalist, published in 1966. The poem's privileged place argues for it being read as his ars poetica. Heaney is primarily an explorer. He charts his ground and excavates and re-inscribes tradition. Creating the speaker in the poem, a writer, creates an analogy between his own work with a pen and the work of his father and grandfather with a spade. The poem begins as a recollection of events from a moment of leisure. There are the speaker's thoughts of his father and grandfather as farmers, men of the soil. The frame of the poem is the speaker sitting at his desk, pen snuggles a gun in his hand. The second stands initiates a sequence that lends itself to contrasting interpretations. The speaker hears the sound of his father digging in the garden below, the son looking down upon his father. The father bends low to thrust his spade into the earth and, quote, comes up 20 years away, stooping in rhythm through potato drills, end quote. The father 20 years away could be the speaker remembering a past event that parallels or echoes the present, or the father could be digging in an archaeological sense to a time far away, each spadeful apparently bringing him closer to the past to his origins. Even so, the title of the poem is in the form of a non-finite verbal which has voice and tense inflection. The word digging appears three times in the poem. The first in the present, my father digging. The second in the past 20 years away recalled in a memory, he was digging. The third in reference to the grandfather, even further in the past, but in reference to a present moment, the single word sentence, digging. The fact that the father has some kind of rhythm implies the naturalness of his actions, although it could be the speaker's perception of the father being in harmony with nature, a trait the speaker feels he does not share. Similarly, the speaker's grandfather spent his days going down and down for the good turf, digging as if the depth of the soil holds a special secret. The second to last stands as significant because it could be either a moment of continuation or a moment of rupture in tradition. The cold smell of potato mold, the squelching slap of soggy peat, the current cuts of an edge through living roots awaken in my head. The smells and sounds of digging as well as the cuts of the spade in the turf awaken in the speaker's head. Memories are thereby awakened in the speaker's mind. Also, the act of digging turf is the act of excavating the speaker's personal heritage, even his mythic historical heritage. The words squelch and slap resonate not only experiences on the farm, but political and social repression. The words smell and cuts evoke not only images of cutting turf but of battles fought and lives lost through a history of violence. The act of digging bonds generations but severs those connections too, those living roots. Indeed, digging is a form of violence as the image of the gun implies. David Lloyd suggests that Heaney's search into the past is designed to retrieve a lost origin, a moment of isomorphism between individual and native soil, between past and present, between writer and source. But more than this, the act of digging into the turf, like excavating the peat bogs of Jutland and Ireland Heaney will write of in later poems, is not merely commemorated but performed in the poem. For the poem is itself a form of digging. Furthermore, digging is no mere analogy. Rather, it represents a process of writing that recurs throughout Heaney's poetry. The act of writing, like that of digging, is a consistently present moment. That, while inhabited by echoes of the past, truncates and re-inscribes those echoes. Tradition, like the self, is a collection of discursive surfaces, written by and in language, and open to its free play. The power of a poetic voice to ascribe mythic immortality upon those who at one time seem so ordinary is evident in the final lines of Yeats' poem, Easter 1916. Literature can seem to act as a means of transcendence and consequently can forge a cultural conscience steeped in a mythic heroism that is elevated above the divisiveness of political unrest. According to Richard Kearney, Thomas MacDonald, whom Yeats memorializes in his poem, described the recurring aspiration for national renewal as the supreme slong of victory on the dying lips of martyrs. MacDonald's words articulated the overall mythos of the 1916 rising, which gained common currency in the popular imagination. Yet, such mythic visions of sectarian and political violence can so dominate a culture that they assure the perpetuation of the violence that gave rise to mythic visions in the first place. In other words, the joint forces of politics and aesthetics may result in politics with the power of the poetic and a poetic whose aesthetic practices cannot escape a pre-determined political premise. Heaney, rather than elevating the attention he cannot resolve, to an extra worldly level, as Yeats did, burrows into a realm of adivisms. This practice was anticipated by Auden. The very best political poetry, as we see in Yeats, Auden and Heaney, strives to put forward the everyday flesh and blood world. Only through the images of such a world can the meaning of politics fully emerge. At the close of his lecture, Professor Kimelman reveals one of the many aspects of the significance of literature. He tells us that poets put forth the everyday flesh and blood world in the midst of political turmoil. Thus, we may infer, poets give us a version of history that we might not otherwise have. While we may know, for instance, the facts of the Easter Rebellion that British soldiers and Irish rebels battled in the streets of Dublin for nearly a week, beginning on April 24th, 1916, that the Irish were defeated and their leaders executed, that the British-backed government failed in 1918, and the British were forced to accept an Irish free state on December 6th, 1921, there is no historical account that captures the dramatic conflict of the struggle in Yeats' lines. A terrible beauty is born. Yeats held Ireland as the source of his poetic imagery, his imaginative life. A collection of his essays, The Skeletal Twilight, displayed in prose his passion for Irish nationalism. Two, Haney articulates his Irish nationalism, his palm digging expresses through allusion a national identity and response against English cultural imperialism between my finger and my thumb, the squat pen rests, I'll dig with it, he writes, suggesting that his role as a writer will allow him to solidify his role as an Irish citizen.