Sherry Chandler

Digital Yeats

Yeats has been digitized at the National Library of Ireland, and reading about it yesterday in the NYTimes lent a certain irony to my opening my volume of Seamus Heaney’s Redress of Poetry (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995) to his lecture on Yeats and Philip Larkin, “Joy or Night: Last Things in the Poetry of W. B. Yeats and Philip Larkin.”

The irony, a very mild one to be sure, is that Heaney presents Yeats as a poet over against science in the sense intended by Czelaw Milosz:

As Czeslaw Milosz has observed, no intelligent contemporary is spared the presssure exerted in our world by the void, the absurd, the anti-meaning, all of which are part of the intellectual atmosphere we subsist in; and yet Milosz notices this negative pressure only to protest against a whole strain of modern literature which has conceded victory to it. Poetry, Milosz pleads, must not make this concession but maintain instead its centuries-old hostility to reason, science and a science-inspired philosophy. [Heaney, p. 153]

Heaney contrasts Larkin’s “Aubade” with Yeats’s “Cold Heaven,” both poems confronting the inevitability of death, and gives the laurels to Yeats.

The ghost upon the road, the soul’s destiny in the afterlife, the consequences in eternity of the individual’s actions in time — traditional concerns like these are profoundly relevant to “Cold Heaven” and they are also, of course, typical of the things which preoccupied Yeats for the whole of his life. Whether it was fairy lore in Sligo or Buddhism with the Dublin Hermetic Society or spiritualist séances or Noh dramas which imagined the adventures of Cuchulain’s shade in the Land of the Dead, Yeats was always passionately beating on the wall of the physical world in order to provoke an answer from the other side. His studies were arcane, his cosmology was fantastic and yet his intellect remained undeluded. [pp 149-150]

Well, perhaps after all it is appropriate that Yeats should become virtual. It is sort of the nerd’s version of resurrection.

I myself have been wrestling with a poem lately, on a much lower plane than either Yeats or Larkin of course, that confronts death and whether one will be able to carry through to the end with some dignity and courage. I am not quite ready to say, with Larkin:

…Courage is no good:
It means not scaring others. Being brave
Lets no one off the grave.
Death is no different whined at than withstood.

There’s something to be said for “not scaring others” if you love them, but let that go.

Neither am I comfortable, after years of having religious fundamentalism oppose science to our great peril, with the notion that poetry must be hostile to reason and science. A poet like Linda Bierds finds much poetry in science itself, and while I don’t find myself at home in her work, I can recognize its worth. As Gregor Mendel could be both monk and scientist, so perhaps can a poet be both poet and rationalist (without going over to the dark side like Larkin).

I think I understand why a poet like Milosz would feel that way he does. I have read his essays in Witness of Poetry (Harvard University Press, 1983) and I think I understand that he was reacting to the nihilism that struck Europe in the period between the two world wars and in the post WWII period. But the pendulum has swung too far the other way and now we can see that “belief” can be as absurd and anti-meaning as “reason.”

But let Heaney continue:

Rational objections were often rationally allowed by [Yeats], if only to be imaginatively and rhetorically overwhelmed. Yeats’s embrace of the supernatural, in other words, was not at all naïve; he was as alive as Larkin to the demeaning realities of bodily decrepitude and the obliterating force of death, but he deliberately resisted the dominance of the material over the spiritual.
…
Yet it is because of Yeats’s fidelity to both perceptions and his refusal to foreclose on either that we recognize in him a poet of the highest attainment. [pp. 150, 151]

It’s a middle way we see Heaney praise here, not one that rejects reason but one that refuses to be cowed by it. Because

…I have repeatedly tried to establish through several different readings and remarks in the course of these lectures…that the goal of life on earth, and of poetry as a vital factor in the achievement of that goal, is what Yeats called in “Under Ben Bulben” the “profane perfection of mankind.”

In order to achieve that goal, therefore, and in order that human beings bring about the most radiant conditions for themselves to inhabit, it is essential that the vision of reality which poetry offers should be transformative, more than just a print-out of the given circumstances of its time and place. The poet who would be most the poet has to attempt an act of writing that outstrips the conditions even as it observes them. …The world is different after it has been read by a Shakespeare or an Emily Dickinson or a Samuel Beckett because it has been augmented by their reading of it. …We go to poetry, we go to literature in general, to be forwarded within ourselves. [pp. 158-160]

I am not utterly convinced that humankind is the crown of creation but most of this reasoning makes sense to me.

You can visit the virtual exhibition at this link (broadband and flash required).

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