Poets and their visions 25 – Yeats

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A Prayer for my Daughter, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Lake Isle of Innisfree, Leda and the Swan, poems, Poetry, Robert Browning, Sailing to Byzantium, T S Eliot, W. B. Yeats, Wild Swans at Coole, Yeats

As with Tennyson and Browning, Eliot and Yeats were long considered a pair of poets who best represented their age. As with Browning, Yeats now is considered far less important than his more enduring contemporary. This judgment is largely true, but nevertheless Yeats like Browning was a considerable writer and well deserves to be read even now.

Though more orthodox than Eliot in style and subject matter, Yeats too had a wide range. Yet many of his best poems deal with the subject of age and transition. The beautiful Wild Swans at Coole exemplifies the manner in which he transits from scenic description to cognizance of the years passing.

The trees are in their autumn beauty,
The woodland paths are dry,
Under the October twilight the water
Mirrors a still sky;
Upon the brimming water among the stones
Are nine-and-fifty swans.

The nineteenth autumn has come upon me
Since I first made my count;
I saw, before I had well finished,
All suddenly mount
And scatter wheeling in great broken rings
Upon their clamorous wings.

I have looked upon those brilliant creatures,
And now my heart is sore.
All’s changed since I, hearing at twilight,
The first time on this shore,
The bell-beat of their wings above my head,
Trod with a lighter tread.

Unwearied still, lover by lover,
They paddle in the cold
Companionable streams or climb the air;
Their hearts have not grown old;
Passion or conquest, wander where they will,
Attend upon them still.

But now they drift on the still water,
Mysterious, beautiful;
Among what rushes will they build,
By what lake’s edge or pool
Delight men’s eyes when I awake some day
To find they have flown away?

Poets and their visions 24 – T S Eliot

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Book of Practical Cats, Harold Bloom, La Figlia che Piange, Murder in the Cathedral, poems, Poetry, T S Eliot, The Cocktail Party, The Four Quartets, The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock, The Waste Land

The other great example of American poetic genius, and indeed the most important and influential English language poet of the 20th century, was T S Eliot. Bloom is not quite as enthusiastic about him as I am, but he grants that this is also a personal judgment relating to what he sees as Eliot’s anti-Semitism. I am not so sure that it is fair to dismiss Eliot as anti-Semitic, since he seems rather to have reflected the prevalent view in Western society about Jews, before their undoubted economc power provided invaluable assistance to the Allies in the First World War, and they became respectable.

To ascribe moral inadequacy to those who were contemptuous of the Jews before that is as silly as it would be to find reprehensible those who were contemptuous during colonial times of people whose colour was darker than their own. One can certainly find admirable those who resisted the common prejudices of their times, but Jews tend to be ultra-sensitive, and can afford to be, in a manner that is not open to those who do not exercise similar economic and political power.

Asian and African critics cannot then ascribe racism to great writers reflecting the common perspectives of their times, and assert that this takes away from their genius. Fortunately, despite Bloom’s moral fervor, he does grant Eliot’s genius, and provides useful insights into some of his poetry.

Poets and their visions 23 – Robert Frost

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A Servant to Servants, Fire and Ice, Henry James, I have been acquainted in the night, Mending Wall, poems, Poetry, Robert Frost, Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening, T S Eliot, The Death of the Hired Man, Tree at my Window, White Landscape

Robert Frost is for me the most appealing of American writers, always excepting the two who got away, as it were, Henry James and T S Eliot. I should note though, in fairness to the Americans, or perhaps to avoid any charges of prejudice, that I find their modern dramatists, Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams, as good as any British playwrights of the same period.

Frost however stands out, for the range of his poetry, for a simplicity of language that conveys extremely subtle and complex ideas, for deep understanding of some key human relationships, and for a plethora of memorable phrases that expand our understanding of the world in which we live. ‘Good fences make good neighbours’ and ‘Home is where, when you have nowhere else to go, they have to take you in’ are a couple that will serve to introduce two very different but equally striking poems.

The first line is taken from Mending Wall, which describes a supposedly common New England habit, the rebuilding of fences between properties after the depradations caused by winter. But the narrator thinks there are other reasons for walls being broken down, perhaps because nature abhors barriers between people. His neighbor however comes out with the blunt aphorism I cited, and often this is taken to indicate that Frost himself subscribes to this orthodoxy.