 Wednesday. This is our first Yates lecture. We're going to have three of them. For the next class, I'd like you to do a few things. I know that your teaching fellows will have handed out a meter exercise for you. I'd like you to work on something else. You don't have to do this for Wednesday, but let's say for next Monday. That is, I'd like you to memorize a short poem by Yates or by Frost, either one. This poem could be the basis of a first paper, a topic for one. It doesn't have to be, but it might be. On Wednesday, I'll also hand out a topic for paper one. In class, I'll talk about Easter 1916, the Magi, the Second Coming, Leida and the Swan. I'd like you to pay special attention to these special Yatesian words, tumult, turbulence, bestial. Think about also that phrase, Terrible Beauty in Easter 1916. Finally, in your RIS packet, you'll see a timeline that charts significant dates in modern poetry that tells you something about when the different poets we're reading were working and helps you perhaps keep track of them, because confusingly, although the course has a kind of rough chronological order, we do move back and forth in time. And in fact, today, right now, we're going to move back the furthest we go all the way into the nineteenth century to talk about the early Yates. Yates's career is maybe the most famous one in modern poetry, that is a career that has been seen as a kind of representative story about modern poetry as a whole. What's that story? Well, Yates begins as a romantic visionary and a kind of late nineteenth century seat. And under the pressure of political and social crisis, he breaks with the artificial rhetoric of his early poems and becomes a kind of heroic realist. Now, there's something to this story, but it is also a kind of cliché, and I'll try to introduce, I think, a more true and also a more interesting way of understanding Yates's development today. Starting with this picture. This is an unlikely picture. The face there, if you have seen him before, you will recognize as Yates's. This is Yates as King Gaul. This is Yates in costume, costumed as a figure from Irish myth, as an ancient bard, Mad King Gaul, which is the furthest thing from a modern poet. It's a late Victorian image of an archaic singer rendered in the melodramatic manner of pre-Raphaelite art and thoroughly removed from the aesthetic values of modernism, such as naturalism, formal clarity, emotional restraint, and so on. It's an image that was created by Yates's father, the painter John Yates. You could also say that it was created by the late 19th century culture that Yates's father, John, represented and introduced to his son. It's an image of Yates that modern poetry eventually forgot. Yates as an unmodern 19th century poet, hamming it up. But this poet is, in fact, important to the one that Yates became. In a way, Yates is always in costume. His poetic identity is forged through identification with the heroic characters of his poems, characters who are sometimes surrogates for the poet, such as King Gaul, the warrior Cahulin, or the mysterious Michael Rabartes, all characters you will meet, or who are sometimes simply versions of the poet himself. That is, the poet rendering himself for us in stylized roles, that is, Yates the public man, Yates the lover, and Yates the mad old man. Yates is always creating himself in his poems and creating himself as a kind of a version of a type. And he does the same thing, in fact, to those around him, famously to his lover, Maud Gunn, who becomes Helen of Troy in no second Troy and in the martyrs in the Easter Rebellion of 1916 become ancient Irish warriors. We'll talk about that next time. There are many other instances of this kind of mythmaking imagination that Yates is always working with. Yates takes on self-consciously staged identities, requiring costumes, and he sees other people in similarly theatrical and mythic terms. His poetry is in fact deeply autobiographical, but it doesn't necessarily help to know that, because his life is not a reliable key for reading the poems, exactly because he treated his life as art, raising the particulars of his experience into, well, general symbols, working the narrative of his life into myth. This is a way of conceiving his activity as a poet, but it's also, as we'll see, a way of conceiving, in fact, culture and human history in general. In Yates people are always particulars who are fitted to types, which are new versions of old identities that travel across time. In a certain sense, Yates, I think, really felt that he was King Gaul. Now, the story of King Gaul is interesting. It's a longish poem, not in your anthology, but you can find it in the complete Yates, and I've given you on this handout page just a couple stanzas from it, so you have a sense of it. King Gaul is a mythical Irish ruler who goes mad in the heat of battle. He becomes distracted by an inward fire that draws him into the woods where he wanders and sings, full of unfulfilled desire. Finally, he destroys his harp in the scene represented by Yates' father's portrait. This story is a certain version of Yates' own early ambition to become a particular kind of figure, not an Irish king but an Irish poet, which would mean consolidating in himself a sense of national identity and explaining that identity, representing it, embodying it in all senses, representing and embodying Irishness for an English-speaking readership in Ireland, but also in England and elsewhere. The nationality of that identity is important, that is Yates' Irishness, and so is Yates' audience. His ambition is to become the first major Irish poet writing in English. Significantly, this picture of Yates as King Gaul was used as an illustration for his first appearance in an English periodical, a magazine of art and ideas called The Leisure Hour. Yates bridges Irish and English cultures, and he is importantly Protestant with social and family ties to English life. The ambition that I'm describing is the first and political one. But paradoxically, perhaps for the young Yates, this ambition drew him away from the social and political world into the charmed landscapes of Irish myth, maybe in the same way as King Gaul is drawn away from, lured away from, battle to wander in the world. All of Yates' early poetry takes place in a symbolic, mythic domain. King Gaul's madness and the destruction of his instruments are perhaps warnings about the dangers of a poetry that would be confined to a symbolic world, as if to fully enter a mythical world, to write a kind of pure poetry that was archaic in its aims and its sources. This would be to go mad, to give sway to dangerously inward passions that can't be satisfied, to be cut off from the world. Being cut off from the world in some kind of higher or separate reality is a lure and threat opened up for Yates by the particular ambition that he had to write a mythic poetry on Irish themes. Now, something else is worth highlighting about King Gaul as a way to understand who Yates was. King Gaul is a singer. Yates identifies poetry with song, in particular with songs of passion, in which songs in which sound takes over is ravishing and chanting. Yates' early poetry has those aspects of song as its aim. They suggest verbal and oral equivalents for the poetry's cognitive concern with symbols. That is, in sound, just as in theme, Yates' poetry is idealized, purified, centrally rich, and yet also abstract. Contrast Frost. Yates' poetry dominated the poetry world in which Frost began writing and publishing. Yates publishes King Gaul in The Leisure Hour, and Frost mocks the ideal of poetry as the dream of the gift of idle hours. He mocks the idea of poetry as easy gold at the hand of fey or elf in mowing, characters that come right out of early Yates. Frost's realism, his roughness which is part of his sensibility, it's part of the sound of his poetry. Well, it contrasts quite directly with the smoothness sought by Yates and the kind of simulation of ease. You could go to Yates' poem, Adam's Curse, poet talking about this aesthetic ideal. Yates, there in Adam's Curse, which is in your anthology, calls specifically for a kind of simulation of ease in poetry, which is a traditionally aristocratic ideal, one which hides one's labor in order to make accomplishment seem natural. Yates, in Adam's Curse, regrets that the beautiful is something to be labored for, and he wants to conceal that labor. The contrast with Frost is powerful. Yates once said that he wanted the natural words in the natural order, but he had a very highly cultured sense of what is poetry, and his poetry is full of verbal archaism. It's characterized by a kind of high formal bearing. It has a careful decorum, a kind of high sheen, especially this early poetry. Metrically, Yates' attitudes result in a kind of superb regularity. In the early Yates you find smooth, unbroken lines, addiction that's elegant and seemingly easy, without ever daining to seem merely colloquial. The sound of Yates was and was meant to be seductive. The poems are in fact very often about kinds of seduction, a child, a king, the poet. These figures are drawn away from society or from family towards secret, sacred places, magical places of love that are frequently imaged in these poems as an island or the center of a wood. In short, this is a privacy that shut the world out and that stand for Yates' ideal of poetic autonomy, his desire to create and inhabit self-sufficient imaginative worlds. The Lake Isle of Innisfree, who goes with Fergus, the hosting of The Shee. These are all poems from your anthology that exemplify this idea, and there are many, many more. These poems come from a phase in Yates' career, the climax of which is this book published in 1899 that I showed you the cover of in the first class, The Wind Among the Reeds, with its gorgeous Celtic aestheticism. Here's the title page reminding us again that this gorgeous Celtic aestheticism is published and put up for sale in London, which is important again. Here is the table of contents, which you can't read, that has on it, well, the first poem, the hosting of The Shee, the song of Wandering Angus, and other famous poems from Yates' early career. I'd like to look with you at the song of Wandering Angus as a kind of model of the kind of poem I'm talking about, and its aesthetics. It's on 98. Yates says, I went out to the Hazelwood, Yates says, that is to say Angus says, it's a dramatic monologue for Angus. I went out to the Hazelwood because a fire was in my head and cut and peeled a hazel wand and hooked a berry to a thread. If you're having problems with an iambic pentameter, this should – well, it's not quite pentameter, but if you want to get an iambic rhythm in your head, this will do it, and cut and peeled a hazel wand and hooked a berry to a thread. And when white moths were on the wing and moth-like stars were flickering out, I dropped the berry in a stream and caught a little silver trout. When I had laid it on the floor, I went to blow the fire of flame, but something rustled on the floor and someone called me by my name. It had become a glimmering girl with apple blossom in her hair, who called me by my name and ran and faded through the brightening air. Though I am old with the moon, through hollow lands and hilly lands, I will find out where she is gone and kiss her lips and take her hands and walk among long dappled grass and pluck till time and times are done the silver apples of the moon, the golden apples of the sun. This rhymed iambic tetrameter four beats per line with some variations. It is a popular song form in English. It's the way Puck and other folk characters speak in Shakespeare. Its smoothness and its simplicity is associated with folk forms, perhaps with the condition of enchantment or trance into which the speaker Angus falls. The poem is a fairy tale. It's the story of Angus's longing and quest for union with a fairy girl whom he desires. Yates spoke of the poem as a mad song. It's maybe not a kind of mad song. It's not what we would think of as a mad song necessarily. The poem imagines, through a dramatic character, Yates' own coming to poetry, which he represents here both as the undertaking of a specifically erotic quest and as a sort of fury in the mind. A fire was in my head. Angus begins. Yates wants us to share in, as we attend to the sound of his poem, a certain state of enchantment and longing, which includes a feeling of monotony as we listen to those repeated phrases and images and syntactic structures that always seem on the verge of redundance in this poem. Think about how generalized, how abstract, how unnatural nature is in this poem. But then it's exactly a poem about nature transformed. The fish, who turns into the glimmering girl, who, like any really marvelous catch, gets away. The transformation here, importantly, interrupts the eating of the fruit. Consummation of desire is deferred. Appetite gets sublimated, and at the same time deferred, the glimmering girl then calls Angus by name. She names him, she in a sense makes him Angus. Angus is the Celtic name, the Celtic master of love, a certain kind of Irish version of Apollo. He's also a mortal who ages. The poem describes a vocational moment when the poet is called to his calling, called to his calling in a way that amounts to a kind of seduction that lures him out into the woods, wandering as he follows this fishwoman and fairy girl, who is a kind of muse or mother too. The quest is without end. It's even without direction. It has a goal, however, that's described in that last stanza. Contrast Yeats's old age and the freshness of his desire in this poem. He holds in dream the possibility of satisfied desire, possession of the beloved, meaning specifically physical possession of her, which would be an apocalyptic moment of time and times. Yeats represents that moment of consummation as the plucking of the silver and the gold apples. Yeats was trained in the occult disciplines of theosophy and gnosticism. Those traditions merge in his early work with European symbolism and also with cultural nationalism. Here, the gold and silver apples are specifically alchemical symbols of body and soul and a kind of mystical image of earthly paradise. That's a nice touch. But don't worry about these symbols or don't worry about them too much. Here, as elsewhere in Yeats's poetry, it's not essential for you to be able to pursue his occult learning and decode his symbols in order to read his poetry. Johann Ramazani, who is the editor of the Norton and a great Yeatsian, himself has decided that all this is too much to explain and you don't really need it, and fair enough. The point is simply to recognize that the apples are occult symbols, which is to say they're not apples. They are rather images, symbols, artifacts. And isn't that clear already from their colors, the material that they're made of, gold and silver? These colors mark them as fashioned precious objects that are unorganic, and in all these ways, beyond time and nature, growth or decay. When Angus or Yeats pursue their desires, the object of desire that is, when they pursue a kind of hope for unity of being that the merging with the beloved would constitute, this carries them out of the natural world into a realm of high art of symbols. The realization of desire for this young Yeats is something only possible in art. In many ways, Yeats retained this aesthetic bias. This is Yeats rather later still dressed, however, in his study as an esthete and dandy. That's a wonderful coat and silk bow tie. He began and ended his career as a decadent, I suppose, a reader of Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde. Nonetheless, Oscar Wilde, a friend of Yeats. Nonetheless, Yeats' poetry does undergo an important and notable stylistic change. When I said that there's a story about Yeats' career that makes him out to be an exemplary modern poet, I had in mind how, over the course of this long career, he leaves behind him that idealized world of late nineteenth-century art for a more fully human, realist poetry, one that rhetorically strips away Yeats' own poeticisms and locates his subjects in contemporary politics and history. This is the kind of generalized story of Yeats' career. Pound, Ezra Pound, is Yeats' younger friend. Pound, you'll see, keeps turning up in all these stories. He had a role in pushing Yeats in the direction in which he went. He had also a big role in publicizing Yeats' developments. Here's a copy of a letter to Pound by Yeats when they were both living in London. This is at the Beinecke among Pound's papers. This is Yeats' letter. He's living at this point at Woburn Place. Yeats is in London, where one of the bombs went off in London two summers ago right outside Yeats' house. My dear Pound, here is the poem. Many thanks for taking so much trouble with it. Yours, W.B. Yeats. Pound goes to work on Yeats, goes to work on his poetry and helps modernize him, although I think in lots of ways the influence went just as much the other way. The period of Pound's influence coincides with Yeats' significantly titled book representations, Responsibilities Rather. This is published in 1914, which is the same year as Frost's North of Boston. These two books are coming out at the same moment in London. Some of the poems in this book dramatize and describe the stylistic changes I'm talking about. For instance, the short poem A Coat. Here it is. It's in your anthology as well. I made my song a coat covered with embroideries out of old mythologies, from heel to throat. But the fools caught it, wore it in the world's eye as though they'd wrought it. Song, let them take it, for there's more enterprise in walking naked. This is Yeats' throwing off his early work as if throwing off a kind of costume, all that King Gall crap that he was on. He's tossing it off. The embroidery and decoration, all that now seems inauthentic. Something that, in fact, Yeats' audience had failed to value properly, he's complaining here in this poem. In this short poem he's referring to the vexed efforts by himself and his collaborators, J.M. Singh and Lady Augusta Gregory, to create an Irish national theater. Yeats sought a popular audience for his poetry, in part through his work in the theater, but he became disenchanted with the theater going public, with imitators and detractors too, all of whom, as he puts it here, caught at his coat. This is a poem that declares nakedness as a poetic value. It's a kind of semi-official announcement that Yeats is giving up his early manner precisely because it seems like a manner and a disguise. In doing so, Yeats might have seemed to be moving closer to the Irish people in a move something like Frost's foreswering of the poetry of dream and elves and fairies in favor of a poetry of fact. Let's keep in mind Frost's own wish to create a poetry that would reach ordinary people and would reach all kinds and sorts. Again, it might seem that Yeats is interested in something like this too, and again the same moment that Frost is publishing his work in England. But there's a difference in Yeats. He adopts this ideal of poetry precisely as a repudiation of a popular audience. It's a kind of dare, demonstrating not just his indifference to the crowd but in fact his scorn for it. I'm going to walk naked. I'm not going to dress for you. Yeats's early poetry is elite because it is high, aristocratic, ideal in character. The middle poetry, the poetry that begins with volume responsibilities, remains elite. Only now its elitism will be expressed differently. It will be expressed in a rhetoric of nakedness or what Yeats will also call coldness. The Fisherman. The Fisherman is another poem from this volume that both comments on and exemplifies the transformation that I'm describing, the transformation of Yeats's style and values. It suggests both the difference between the earlier Yeats and the middle Yeats but also importantly the kinds of continuity between them, the ways in which Yeats remained very much the same poet. Let me read it for you. Although I can see him still, the freckled man who goes to a gray place on a hill in gray Kanamara clothes at dawn to cast his flies. It's long since I began to call up to the eyes this time. All day I'd looked in the face what I had hoped to be to write for my own race and the reality, the living men that I hate, the dead man that I loved, the craven man in his seat, the insolent, unreproved, and no-nave brought to me who has won the drunken cheer, the witty man in his joke aimed at the commonest ear, the clever man who cries, the catch cries of the clown, the beating down of the wise, and great art beaten down. Well, Yeats begins in scorn of an audience that's unable to recognize true wisdom and great art. In scorn of that audience he imagines another audience, another audience to write for and to emulate an audience represented by the fisherman. What is the fisherman like? What does he represent? What values does he embody? What is the grayness? Grayness that suggests the color of a land and a culture, the color of stone, of peasant clothes. He, the fisherman, is a solitary figure in a landscape of stone, a stone that is dark, resistant, apparently non-ideal, that is real. Contrast this place, this way of imagining Ireland, what Ireland means, with the sensual landscape of Angus, with the unreality of the world of that earlier poem. In a sense, the earlier poem, Long of Wandering Angus, transformed the Irish landscape into a place of myth, in the same way that the poem is describing the transformation of the trout into the girl. Yeats seems to be reversing this trick in the fisherman, seems to be converting myth back into reality, the ideal object of desire from a glimmering girl back into a trout. The poem represents a kind of, as does the short poem, a coat, represents a kind of ascetic move, an act of imaginative and rhetorical stripping down. The landscape itself, Yeats's poem, seems naked, barren, probably untillable, and the poetry that Yeats wants from this place will be, as it seems, as he goes on to describe cold and passionate. Let me finish the poem here. Maybe a twelve month sense suddenly I began in scorn of this audience that Yeats has been describing, this audience associated with the double and middle class and theater going public. In scorn of this audience, I began imagining a man in his sun-freckled face and gray Connemara cloth climbing up to a place where stone is dark under froth and the downturn of his wrist when the flies drop in the stream, a man who does not exist, a man who is but a dream, and cried, Before I am old I shall have written him one poem maybe as cold and passionate as the dawn. The poetry that Yeats wants from this place, the place that the fisherman takes him to, is it's going to be cold and passionate, as he describes it. You can see him in a sense, Yeats, cooling the fire in the head of Angus at this moment. The poem identifies also cold and passionate with dawn, the moment of awakening, which is also a moment of coming into reality from dream and sleep. The kind of rhetorical and stylistic transformation I'm describing identified with Yeats' modernness, his coming into modernity all has these qualities and is associated here powerfully with morning. Importantly, though, morning and dawn are also seen as moments of passion. If Angus is a figure of passion, so interestingly is the fisherman. It's only what it means to write a poetry of passion that Yeats is now beginning to rethink. Passion seems to lie in coldness rather than heat, lies exactly in the restraining and disciplining of passion. In this sense, the fisherman is not, after all, a poem that's very different from the song of Wandering Angus. In fact, Yeats is still writing a solitary fisherman. Just as in that earlier poem, the act of fishing is symbolically resonant. The fisherman is an image of man searching the depths of the world for the wisdom that hides beneath the surface of things. The fishing is seen here, as in the earlier poem, as an image of quest, an image of desire. For all these reasons, the fisherman is really a rewriting and even a kind of continuation rather than a description of the song of Wandering Angus and the poems from that period. In fact, as Yeats declares, the fisherman does not exist. It's a wonderful sentence, isn't it? A man who does not exist, a man who is but a dream. Yeats is still writing a theme. The man is not a real man, the man is a symbol, only this time a symbol of the real, a symbol of the actual and local, of the Irish race and the reality, and the poetry that he stands for, that the fisherman stands for, like all of Yeats's poetry, is a poetry, again, of symbols. The fisherman is also representative of the Irish peasantry to whom Yeats turns in scorn of the urban audience that he had tried to write for in the theater. This is, again, not a break with the aristocratic values of the early poetry, but an aligning of those values with an ideal image of the peasant classes with whom Yeats creates a kind of imaginative bond against the bourgeois people who seem to represent the new order of things, modernity and Dublin. Yeats's sense of modern history, of the crisis of his moment, this is something we can describe and explore next time in Eastern 1916. Before we finish today, let me just connect the fisherman and its images of cold passion to another poem, the, well, specifically, the elegy for Robert Gregory Yeats's friend, Augustus Gregory's son, who dies in the First World War in Airman. Yeats here evokes Gregory as a kind of representative of Irish culture and of aristocratic culture, in particular, in which art and eloquence and political and cultural life all coexist and all combine and form a passionate heart. Yeats evokes Gregory's death and sees it in relation to other friends and collaborators of Yeats's early life, including Lionel Johnson and Singh and others. This is, again, Gregory representing a kind of aristocratic elegance and culture that is juxtaposed to, will be juxtaposed to, the revolutionary violence that comes to shatter the Irish capital in 1916 and in many ways reshape Yeats's career as he encounters what he calls the terrible beauty of that explosive rebellion. Well, that's enough for today and we'll continue with Yeats on Wednesday.