Yeats and the Gyre HUM 3285 British and

Yeats and the Gyre HUM 3285: British and American Literature Spring 2011 Dr. Perdigao January 19, 2011

Epicness

Indeterminancy • Darwin, Marx, Freud, Einstein, Planck, Heisenberg • Darwin—challenge to Biblical literalism, idea of authority • Marx—people’s actions controlled by economic system, altered ideas about human nature • Freud—psychological determinism, discovery/invention of unconscious • Einstein—space and time as great absolutes are relative • Planck—atom, wave particle theory; light has both properties, complementary and contradictory • Heisenberg—indeterminacy theory • Challenges to nature, what constitutes knowledge

Framing Yeats • • • 1891—first motion camera patented 1897—first subway opened 1900—US Census, 75 million people— 150 million in 1950, population doubles • • • Sense of loss, liberation High modernists—mythic poets, lamenting loss (cooked vs. raw) Liberation—as counter-modernism, not mythic but Adamic (begins anew, renames) Loss—intellectually difficult, obscure; liberation—transparent, easy to understand Impersonal vs. personal Use of tradition—experiments within traditions versus ex nihilo creation • Reactions to fragmentation in twentieth century: ironic resistance (puts fragments together to make whole); immersed acceptance

William Butler Yeats (1865 -1939) • London/Dublin • Father—painter, skeptic, “religion of art” • Poetic forms—late-Romantic, Pre-Raphaelite; language as dreamy, evocative, ethereal (2020) • Shift from Romanticism with Ezra Pound’s influence, stripped-down style, modernist • 1889 met Actor and Irish nationalist Maud Gonne— “No Second Troy” • With help of Lady Gregory, Anglo-Irish writer, promoter of Irish literature, founded Abbey Theatre 1904, work in drama • Dichotomies—late-Romantic visionary and modern skeptic, Irish patriot and irreverent antinationalist, man of action and esoteric dreamer (2021) • Married Georgie Hyde Lees in 1917; automatic writing—gyres, symbolic system

Politics and poetics • Irish poet whose language is English, colonial oppressor • Politics within poetry • “Easter, 1916”—Irish rebels taking over Dublin post office, hanging; Irish Free State; Yeats’ role as senator from 1922 -28 • Rising of Irish consciousness • Yeats’ life—language taken away by oppressors, reinstating Gaelic in schools • Yeats’ interest in the occult; culture filled with Celtic tales about fairies • Tension between faith and skepticism • 2000 year cycles of history, mathematical equations

Those gyres • Yeats’ attitude toward change as modern phenomenon • Continuity between past and present • “Sailing to Byzantium” • Old man dreaming of songs • Surpassing limits of physical world • Byzantium as “the purest embodiment of the union and subsequent transfiguration through art of the fleshly condition and the ideal of holiness” (Rosenthal xxxix). • Universal system of “interpenetrating opposites. . . rotating gyres forever whirling into one another’s centers, merging, and then separating” (Rosenthal xxxix) • Metapoem • Yeats age 62 when writing the poem • Wins Nobel Prize for literature in 1923

Answers • “The Second Coming” • Apocalyptic • Christ’s return, Book of Revelations • Christianity about to die, replaced by “rough beast, ” horrible/natural • Confusion at moment of cultural crisis, awareness of his confusion and loss • As prophecy • “Sailing to Byzantium”—Yeats’ fear of loss of sexual potency in personal terms; in a larger sense, modernist consideration, find alternative to collapse • If religion no longer works, and philosophy is insufficient, what can we replace it with? • Answer is art to become what religion once was

Forms • Artist becomes the historian • Idea of becoming a monument, contained • But tension because no beauty like living in the present • Request in “Byzantium” to be gathered in artifice of eternity, made a thing • Poet of containment, holding fragments in tension but reveals artifice of language • Critiques of Yeats—interest in aristocratic authority, plays with Fascist attempts at order, application of power of few on many • “Second Coming”—something is ending but something new is to be born from it

Endings… or beginnings? That gyre thing again.