W.B. Yeats and World Literature

The Subject of Poetry

Barry Sheils

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317000785
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Critique littéraire pour la littérature comparée

Arguing for a reconsideration of William Butler Yeats's work in the light of contemporary studies of world literature, Barry Sheils shows how reading Yeats enables a fuller understanding of the relationship between the extensive map of world literary production and the intensities of poetic practice. Yeats's appropriation of Japanese Noh theatre, his promotion of translations of Rabindranath Tagore and Shri Purohit Swãmi, and his repeated ventures into American culture signalled his commitment to moving beyond Europe for his literary reference points. Sheils suggests that a reexamination of the transnational character of Yeats's work provides an opportunity to reflect critically on the cosmopolitan assumptions of world literature, as well as on the politics of modernist translation. Through a series of close and contextual readings, the book demonstrates how continuing global debates around the crises of economic liberalism and democracy, fanaticism, asymmetric violence, and bioethics were reflected in the poet's formal and linguistic concerns. Challenging orthodox readings of Yeats as a late-romantic nationalist, W.B. Yeats and World Literature: The Subject of Poetry makes a compelling case for reading Yeats's work in the context of its global modernity.

Chapter 1
Yeatsian Transmissions: Between Kiltartan and the Sky

I know that I shall meet my fate,

Somewhere among the clouds above;

Those that I fight I do not hate,

Those that I guard I do not love;

My country is Kiltartan Cross,

My countrymen Kiltartan’s poor,

No likely end could bring them loss

Or leave them happier than before.

Nor law, nor duty bade me fight,

Nor public men, nor cheering crowds,

A lonely impulse of delight

Drove to this tumult in the clouds;

I balanced all, brought all to mind,

The years to come seemed waste of breath,

A waste of breath the years behind

In balance with this life, this death.

(‘An Irish Airman Foresees His Death’)

An ‘Irish’ Airman

Although its title suggests a poem about the fortitude of any Irish airman, the extensive critical heritage informs us that ‘An Irish Airman Foresees His Death’ (1918) is also about the fortitude of one Irish airman in particular, namely Major Robert Gregory, the son of Yeats’s patron and long-time artistic collaborator Lady Gregory. We know that Yeats wrote four elegies for Gregory, who was shot down over Italy in January 1918 while flying scouting missions for the Royal British Flying Corps, and that this poem is the only one of these four composed as if from Gregory’s perspective – the only self-elegy, in other words.¹ By comparing the sentiment of the other three poems – ‘Shepherd and Goatherd’ (1919), ‘In Memory of Major Robert Gregory’ (1918) and ‘Reprisals’ (pub. 1948) – critics have long noticed how the passing of Gregory, the lonely Irish Airman, came to represent for Yeats a more general cultural loss. There were certain of Gregory’s personal characteristics, including his art and his martial skill, which through the course of these poems became transfigured into impersonal and immemorial virtues. In ‘Reprisals’, Gregory’s military honour is juxtaposed to ‘the half-drunk or whole mad soldiery’ running amok in Ireland in the wake of the First World War. In ‘Shepherd and Goatherd’, he is remembered playing his pipes among the hills such that when he played them ‘it was their loneliness, / The exultation of their stone, that cried / Under his fingers’. And when mentioned as the final of those friends who cannot sup with Yeats and his wife at Thoor Ballylee in ‘In Memory of Major Robert Gregory’, the dead man is invoked as ‘Soldier, scholar, horseman, he, / As ‘twere all life’s epitome’ (VP 791, 339, 327). Significantly, in ‘An Irish Airman Foresees His Death’ the dead, lamented man is still alive, which is important because it allows us to see Gregory in his most generalised form as a Nietzschean hero confronting death with equanimity. Having ‘balanced all’ from such a height, and at such a heightened moment, that of his impending death, the Airman is shown to combine the artistic ideal of a full life lived – cast retrospectively – and life as it is being lived. Thus we have a prospective elegy.

So far, so familiar, perhaps, since this only confirms Yeats’s reputation for high artistic latitudes and for looking askance at the chaos below. Does it matter, in this context, that Major Robert Gregory was flying a Sopwith Camel, a single-seat fighter plane equipped with twin machine guns; or that the pilot’s ‘lonely impulse of delight’, reminiscent of the Paterian flame of fin de siècle aestheticism, may have been lit just as he was about to strafe those he consolingly does not hate? Conventional critical wisdom tells us that it does not matter: Yeats was always looking for the symbol inside the thing rather than the thing itself, we are told, so the technical features of the aircraft pale to insignificance beside the poetic deed of being airborne and about to die.² This may be so, but it is hardly pedantic to point out that this scene of aesthetic bliss takes place aboard a modern, military machine, and that its range of transcendence relies upon the real technology of flight. If, indeed, this is the war poem Yeats said he would never write, it is neither rutting à terre together with Wilfred Owen’s or Isaac Rosenberg’s infantry rats, nor sounding with Filippo Tommaso Marinetti the fanfare for destruction and the sublimity of the machine.³ Whilst Yeats’s airman exemplifies tragic joy over and above the ‘passive suffering’ of those who laboured in the trenches, the vehicle of his deportment still lacks the bombast of ‘The Future’.⁴ Yeats’s plane is less a machine than a poetic principle.

Philippe Lacoue Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy have suggested that every romantic and post-romantic lyric contains the theory of its own origin.⁵ The modern lyric understands itself as a fragment, in other words, as a part dissociated from its whole. Giorgio Agamben reminds us that ‘all modern poems after Mallarmé are fragments, in that they allude to something (the absolute poem) that can never be evoked in its integrity, but only rendered present through its negation’.⁶ This seems particularly apt with respect to ‘An Irish Airman’ whose single-cell autonomy doubles as a theatre of deprivation signalling, in the negative, a world of heteronomous attachments and experiences: ‘I do not hate’, ‘I do not love’, ‘No likely end could bring them loss / Or leave them happier than before’ (VP 328). Its manner of poetic address – the speaker’s prospective elegy to himself – underlines this negative reflection since its heroic projection – it will have been thus – is always in danger of foreclosing the unpredictability of present-tense experience. How closely matched are sublime heroism and suicidal depression in this case? Whilst the pilot’s ‘wasted breath’ indicates the heroic acte gratuite forever unrecognised in an un-heroic world, its stated repetition surely slides towards self-abjection. This is where the vehicle of the poem becomes more conspicuous than perhaps Yeats intended it to be, as the plane is not only a convenient metaphor for aesthetic disinterest soaring above the muddle of the world, but also a closed chamber designed to isolate the vulnerable subject from inhospitable ‘tumult in the clouds’. The paradox of aesthetic expression and formal compression finds its technological imperative in the feat of air travel.

According to Peter Sloterdijk, it is definitive of ‘our’ modernity, which found its ‘primal scene’ in the First World War, that the habitable world’s ‘primary givens’ are thematised and manipulated in a process he terms environmental ‘explication’.⁷ The gas attacks at Ypres and the establishment of flying squadrons and bombing raids, for example, ex-plicated the human relation to air. No longer invisible and benign, a condition of natural being (and breathing) in the world, air, after the War, became conspicuous as a problem, always potentially poisonous, and the carrier of untold technologies of destruction. No longer did men fight men, suggests Sloterdijk, men fought to control their environment; and it was mastery of the environment which guaranteed victory in war. That Yeats places Gregory, his breath-conscious exemplar of chivalric valour, in a machine which could only render such valour obsolete is an historical irony, certainly; but it is further detectable as a poetic irony insofar as our soldier and elegist lacks both a visible antagonist and a receptive audience. The poem’s internal symmetry is countered by the fundamental asymmetry of its reception. We, the readers, have not been addressed directly by this Irish Airman; rather, owing only to happenstance it seems, we have managed to tune ourselves in to his wave length as he is in the midst of addressing himself. Here Yeats extends the Victorian convention of the dramatic monologue practiced most influentially by Robert Browning and theorised by John Stuart Mill in his essay ‘What is poetry?’.⁸ Significantly, the lyric understood in this way as an overheard soliloquy isolated from the context of a whole play, places an editorial demand upon the reader. Self-consciously exiled from the whole drama, which would allow direct correspondence between addressor and addressee, the ‘lonely’ lyric voice requires from the reader explication of its own absent conditions.

Jahan Ramazani points the way here by reminding us how unusual it is for a military poem of any stripe to lack an afterlife image: there is no implied redemption in Yeats’s poem; and unlike Tennyson’s famous Victorian elegy for the Duke of Wellington, which celebrates the dead man as a soldier who fought nobly for an official cause, the Irish Airman is left only with the existential thrill of his own finitude. This is because, says Ramazani, ‘the Fenian Yeats could hardly look to the continued life of the British Empire as a source for the dead airman’s redemption’. Formally speaking, the elegy ‘is made to transcend politics, ironically, for a political reason – the logjam in which Irish nationalism found itself during World War I’.⁹ Two things are significant in this explication. The first is that Gregory’s aesthetic disinterest is allied to his Irishness: his supreme ‘balance’ and dedication to form is attributable to his being at one remove from the immediate patriotic attachments of the War. The second is that Gregory’s ‘inbetweenness’, suspended in transmission, is indicative of Ireland’s political situation at the time: the suspended Home Rule Bill of 1912, the political crisis precipitated by the 1916 Dublin Rising and incipient War of Independence at the time of Yeats’s writing in 1918. This was a volatile time during which there was no sovereign Irish nation to address, certainly no unitary Irish audience willing to recognise the sacrifice of those men who fought for Britain in the War. The Airman’s declared allegiance to his ‘country’ Kiltartan Cross is especially significant in this context: why else does the sub-national locale take precedence except to emphasise not only the spatial, but also temporal disjunction between the finitude of place and the abstraction of the air in which he finds himself? Ireland – the pilot’s Irishness – can only be understood in the movement between these two co-ordinates, the sub-national and the supranational: at one level Ireland is essentially local, immanent, minoritarian in ethos and always falling short of full national sovereignty; at the other level it is a movement of transnational flight and essentially diasporic in nature. Ireland’s is a state of misrecognition, conceived as either local or exilic and failing forever to settle on a single temporality. In this respect it was appropriate enough that when the ‘Irish’ Airman Robert Gregory was shot down over Italy on 23 January 1918 it was because his own side misrecognised him as the enemy.

To deem the First World War a crisis of Irish national identity might appear an egregious distortion of perspective – the substitution of a major for a minor event – were it not that the crisis of sovereignty exemplified by Ireland as a suspended, not-yet-actualised, state would become the most general principle of Yeatsian historiography. Nineteen eighteen, the year of Gregory’s death, did not simply provide the material conditions for a specific crisis but also the discursive conditions which enabled the poet to reflect on it:

They [Yeats’s occult ‘communicators’] drew their first symbolic map of that history, and marked upon it the principal years of crisis in July 1918, some days before the publication of the first German edition of Spengler’s Decline of the West, which, though founded upon a different philosophy, gives the same years of crisis and draws the same general conclusions. (V 11)

This is from ‘An Introduction to A Vision’, appended to its primary text in 1928. As is well known, A Vision (1925, 1937) formalised Yeats’s vacillation ‘Between extremities’ (VP 499) – between Kiltartan and the sky – according to the phases of the moon. The occult correspondences have been productively explored elsewhere and will not detain us here except as a footnote to Yeats’s encyclopaedic modernism (more of which below); indeed, the symmetries of ‘The Great Wheel’ in A Vision and the way the Eurocentric history of literary personalities maps onto the Great Platonic Year of world history is less interesting in its detail than in the fact of its dynamism – its perning gyres turning between the full and the nought. What the equipoise of ‘An Irish Airman’ disguises, and what its prominent technological metaphor of the aeroplane implies, is rendered schematically explicit in A Vision, namely the dissonance between local and global scales. Yeats declares with Oswald Spengler in 1928 a consciousness, belonging to 1918, that there is no fixed state of sovereignty under the conditions of modernity.¹⁰

At the full, ‘under the frenzy of the fourteenth moon’, as Yeats’s persona Michael Robartes informs us in ‘The Phases of the Moon’ (1919), ‘The soul begins to tremble into stillness / To die into the labyrinth of itself’ (V 60). This is the plane of pure subjectivity which cannot, however, bear its own local intensities. Robartes again:

When the moon’s full those creatures of the full

Are met on the waste hills by countrymen

Who shudder and hurry by: body and soul

Estranged amid the strangeness of themselves. (V 62)

The inference is one of civil war: countrymen estranged from one another at the very moment of their greatest definition. Again, the material conditions play a part in this conception, and Yeats’s adverting to the fact that the first main section of A Vision, ‘The Great Wheel’, was finished at Thoor Ballylee in 1922 in ‘a time of Civil War’ (V 184) rings out as a note of emphatic corroboration: empirical events have borne out the book’s meta-historical form! As the subject, by force of will, becomes most itself, it splits in two: a fissure which propels personality and history back towards the plane of objectivity and the world. Here, at the other extremity, things have no will at all: ‘insipid as the dough before it is baked / They change their bodies at a word’ (V 63). This is the world of dead material abstracted beyond living use. What is finally missing from this hyperbolic vacillation between fissile intensity and blank extension is a mediating and containing state of stability – an official ‘national’ register of space and time. All is movement and transmission between the painfully compressed and the fatally estranged.

In his poem ‘Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen’ (1921) Yeats expresses the complexities of this economy with a memorable, and disillusioning, image: ‘We pieced our thoughts into philosophy, / And planned to bring the world under a rule, / Who are but weasels fighting in a hole’ (VP 429). All that was excluded about the First World War from an ‘An Irish Airman’ is included in this poem which recycles Yeats’s own aesthetic myths, revealing them in a new, less flattering light. So not only do the ‘weasels fighting in a hole’ provide a startling image of ignoble and subterranean skirmishing reminiscent of the trenches,...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 Yeatsian Transmissions: Between Kiltartan and the Sky
• 2 Folklore and the New World of Text
• 3 Put into English: The Monoglot Translator and World Literature
• 4 Woman and the Poetics of Destitution
• 5 Fanatic Subjectivity in the Modern State
• Bibliography
• Index