Pome of the day. W.B. Yeats. ‘Silly Willy’, as Maude Gonne, Yeats’ great unrequited love, called him. He was born in 1865 and died in 1939. He started off as a Pre-Raphaelite Nationalist and finished as an apocolyptic visionary nationalist. The difference between the two positions lies in his relationship to poetic form and the idea of mastery. Yeats is often referred to as a Master. He often referred to certain other artists as Masters. And the idea of Mastery is one that crops up frequently in his middle to late poetry. The notion is one that Yeats adopted and developed in reaction to Romantic ideals of poetic inspiration prevalent in the 19th Century. Wordsworth, for example, but no less Shelley and Coleridge, had a model of inspired dictation where the poem arrived gift-like from an outer or inner darkness. The trick was to cultivate a special kind of inward audition and anticipatory attentiveness, ready to transcribe what was heard. Now, that makes the Romantics sound awfully passive, and I’m sure there was much more practical artisanship and lapidary struggle with language and form than the ideal recognises. But Yeats consciously reacted against the ideal: especially as he aged, he refused to give ground or to lose vigour (infamously, he underwent a monkey-gland transplant procedure in an attempt to ward off the effects of ageing). He held up the notion of Mastery in direct opposition to the Romantic model. In most of Yeats’ poems there is a sense of deliberation that (usually) transcends awkwardness. There is always the sense that a struggle has been undergone and that the eventual poem has been hammered out, as on an anvil. He admired architects and sculptors, the way they overcame the stubborn, innate intractability of their material and achieved a form that dominated the environment. When he pulls it off, his poetry has a corresponding authority. The voice is not particularly nuanced, nor does it register psychological subtlety: his goal was impersonal formal presence and the assertion of symbols with radiant power. He is wonderfully irrational at times, in the sense that he refuses to be measured or belittled by the constraints of reason. Like Dostoyevsky, he refused to be stopped by a wall simply because it is a wall. He dismisses the fact, contemptuosly. You can, of course, easily argue against this position, but when you read the poetry such an objection seems to miss the point, and is a symptom of your own lack of imagination and shaping power. I don’t agree with his politics, and some go so far as to detect an incipient fascism in his stance, but his poetry refuses, magnificently, to back down. Even death withers under his gaze. Sometimes. An interesting question is whether poetry of this order is still possible, or does Yeats represent the last fling of the Western imagination confident in it’s transcendant sources of authority? Modern American poetry, for example, rarely indulges in the formal confidence of the Yeatsian stanza. Instead, it is characterised by ‘open’ forms that are incomplete. The greatest 20th Century American admirer of Yeats was John Berryman, who said he wanted to be Yeats. He wasn’t, he was a brilliant alcoholic genius who took one of Yeats’ favourite stanza forms, the six lined unit, and ‘subjectivised’ it by introducing enjambment and sub-clausal constructions and revisions. He was haunted by contingency and a lack of certitude, and reflected that in his famous Dream Songs. He makes a fascinating contrast to Yeats. I’ve chosen Sailing to Byzantium. It is dense and deliberate, but pitched slightly lower than his most unconditional assertions. It’s noteworthy that despite the artifice, he remains trapped within the dimension of time.

[Sailing to Byzantium]