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Yeats and Modernism
| Article
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14427 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
6 / 1988 |
4,475 Words |
| Author
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Denis Donoghue
Denis Donoghue is professor of English at the University of
Dublin and visiting professor of English at New York
University. He is the author of The Ordinary Universe, and
Reading America: Essays on American Literature |
"I too have tried to be modern" W.B. Yeats confessed, or claimed in his introduction to The Oxford Book of Modern Verse, 1892-1935 (1936). What he meant no one has ever divined. Recourse to Yeats' context doesn't help. He has merely been saying that such contemporary poets as Cecil Day Lewis, Charles Madge, and Louis MacNeice "are modern through the character of their intellectual passion." In the next sentence he says that "we have been gradually approaching this art through that cult of sincerity, that refusal to multiply personality which is characteristic of our time." The allusion to Oscar Wilde's epigram--"What people call insincerity is simply a method by which we can multiply our personalities"--is clear enough: It means that the poets of the thirties, Auden's generation, have decided that they must speak directly, sincerely, each in his own voice; they have given up the device, in high repute from Browning, Wilde, and Nietzsche to Yeats and T.S. Eliot, of speaking through a mask. Still referring to Auden's generation, Yeats says: "I can seldom find more than half a dozen lyrics that I like, yet in this moment of sympathy I prefer them to Eliot, to myself--I too have tried to be modern." Can he mean: "I too, much as I love the doctrine of the mask and much as I have managed to say by resorting to it, now feel inclined to speak directly in my own voice?" If so, it suggests that Yeats was at any moment willing to be modern, but that he was not sure what being so would entail.
Yeats and Symbolism
At the beginning of his career, he let Arthur Symons convince him that modernity was French. From the autumn of 1895 to the following spring, Yeats shared a flat with Symons at 2 Fountain Court in London, and received from that hospitable source the good news from Paris. The new method was Symbolism, the procedures of Baudelaire and Rimbaud culminating in Mallarmé. Symbolism produced "a literature in which the visible world is no longer a reality, and the unseen world no longer a dream." The aim of such literature was not to denote things but to suggest essences. Words would be used to prohibit a quick translation into meanings; instead, the words would imply a divination, a tone escaping from the things that ostensibly provoked it. A certain rhythm would be sustained among words summoned mainly to sustain that rhythm. If readers were to accept the idea "that poetry moves us because of its symbolism," Yeats said, "we would seek out those wavering, meditative, organic rhythms, which are the embodiment of the imagination that neither desires nor hates, because it has done with time and only wishes to gaze upon some reality, some beauty." Being modern, in that sense, meant turning away from realism--mere mimicry of
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