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Something We Have That They Don't BRITISH AND AMERICAN POETIC RELATIONS SINCE 1925
University of Iowa Press Copyright © 2004 University of Iowa Press
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ISBN: 978-0-87745-881-4



Chapter One "Why Should Men's Heads Ache?" Yeats and American Modernism

EDNA LONGLEY

In this essay I visit the prehistory of postwar poetry to argue that certain dynamics and dialectics, which pivot on the self-remaking of W. B. Yeats, have been obscured by the "modernist" paradigms of Anglo-American criticism. I will discuss Yeats's reception by some younger poets during the 1930s, his provocative Oxford Book of Modern Verse (1936), his fitful rivalry with T. S. Eliot, and his long argument with Ezra Pound. That argument-about form-is surely central to twentieth-century poetics. But first I want to suggest why Yeats's poetry might elude readings predicated on the theory and practice of his American juniors. To apply his own critique of the Cantos, not "all the wine" gets "into the bowl." In fact, the modernist bowls seem mixed in shape and size, not to say leaky. As Astradur Eysteinsson notes, "while modernism is often accused of being a cult of form, it is also ... attacked for formlessness"; and "the theory of aesthetic autonomy frequently appears to co-exist with that of cultural subversion." Thus modernist paradigms themselves conflict over the relation between form and history. Further, some of the contradictions highlighted by Eysteinsson peculiarly suggest a failure to adjust the focus for Yeats. And since "postmodernism" might be seen as "modernism" by (roughly) the same means, whether these categories refer to poetic structure or to critical constructions, readings of contemporary poetry are also at stake.

It is difficult to insert "Irish" into "Anglo-American": Anglo-Irish leans in one cultural and political direction, Irish-American in another. Yet more correct ethno-national labels (like "Hiberno-British-American") seem equally beside the aesthetic point. All of which posits a doubly disruptive role for Irish poets. The Ashbery quotation, "something / We have that they don't," may assume that an American "we" and English "they" are the key players: its pronouns happen to echo Robert Frost's sly remark that T. S. Eliot has "left us and you know he's never really found them." However, as Christopher Hitchens has shown, the politics of them and us, including "cultural cross-fertilisations," can be unexamined, collusive, metropolitan, and imperial. Hence the appeal of each country to the other's dissidents. Hitchens traces an "emotional diagram" whereby "conservative Anglophile Americans [like T. S. Eliot] and transplanted liberal and radical Englishmen [like W. H. Auden]" change places. This helps modernist aesthetics to have it both ways: the power of an institution, the glamour of perpetual revolution.

To speak of "American modernism" conflicts with the global claims of "international modernism." Yet the components of that term, as it affects literature, have come to appear mutually and separately unstable. Peter Nicholls prudently called his 1995 "Literary Guide" Modernisms, yet the plural, also used by other critics, may still miss the aesthetic point if "international"-which sometimes signals no more than Anglo-American-is not also broken down. Within and outside of the Anglo-American sphere we find the national shading into the nationalist. If English resistance to modernism can have such nuances, as with Philip Larkin, so can American insistence, as when Hugh Kenner dubbed literary modernity The Pound Era, or when Frank Lentricchia takes America circa 1900 to be the crucial "site of emerging modernist poetic idioms." As Gail McDonald argues, Pound's and Eliot's "modern" aesthetic was conditioned by their national and academic origins. Hence the hegemonic force of its return full-circle.

Besides disguising or advancing American interests, "international" models of modern literature may give (selected) foreign writers modernist visas on American terms. The process has been documented in Joseph Kelly's "reputation-history" of Joyce, which argues that his championing by Pound and Eliot and later by the American "Joyce industry" involves a "de-Irishing" of his writing, and the recasting of his audience in avant-garde "elitist" terms. Pound, true to the fin-de-siècle a-historicity that formed him, envisaged "culturally superior" readers; Eliot, a "small number of people ... sensitive to good literature."

My own stress is neither on any national poetry nor on "our" Yeats-not that every Irish reader would own him. It is on cross-cultural dialogues that shaped the aesthetics of modern poetry in English, and which require critics to attempt a balance between underplaying and overplaying local/national specifics. Here the active force of "inter" in "international" should be stressed. Mutual stimulus sharpens difference as well as affinity or possibility. If these dialogues have often been homogenized into "cosmopolitanism," latter-day ethnocentrism also obstructs their visibility and continuance.

Admittedly, Yeats's efforts to make a national literature were fired by competition with Scotland and emulation of America. He wrote in 1892: "America, with no past to speak of, a mere parvenu among the nations, is creating a national literature which in its most characteristic products differs almost as much from English literature as does the literature of France. Walt Whitman, Thoreau, Bret Harte ... are very American, and yet America was once an English colony." In 1893 he praised "Emerson's admirable saying-'To thine orchard's edge belong / All the brass and plume of song'" as an antidote to "cosmopolitan water-gruel." George Russell (AE) was also keen that the Revival should do "what Emerson did for the New Englanders." There is good warrant, then, for assumptions of American-Irish revolutionary solidarity. But we might note Pound's progressive annexing of Ireland as he crows over the English in "How to Read": "the language is now in the keeping of the Irish (Yeats and Joyce); apart from Yeats, since the death of Hardy, poetry is being written by Americans. All the developments in English verse since 1910 are due almost wholly to Americans." Now you see Yeats, now you don't.

There are two main ways in which I see Yeats as misrepresented or unrepresented by modernist constructions of modern poetry. First, he figures as a precursor rather than a player, and a largely obsolescent one, whenever Imagism is held to succeed Symbolism on a progressive model rather than as a dialectical alternative in a complex aesthetic field. Second, although named in modernist cast-lists, he is rarely quoted for purposes of definition. Hence he may be co-opted for generalizations at odds with his aesthetic, and read through the lenses of Eliot and/or Pound.

When Pound regrets that the Yeats of Responsibilities remains a symboliste rather than an imagiste, he is less writing an epitaph than conceding a defeat. Pound reviewed (in Poetry) both Responsibilities: Poems and a Play (1914) and Responsibilities and Other Poems (1916). In his first review, Pound describes the "manifestly new note in [Yeats's] later work" in language familiar from his own Imagist manifestoes: "he has driven out the inversion and written with prose directness"; "his work [is] becoming gaunter, seeking greater hardness of outline"; "this quality of hard light is precisely what one finds in the beginning of ... 'The Magi.'" Yet Pound calls that effect "a passage of imagisme [such as] may occur in a poem not otherwise imagiste"; accepts that "there is no need for [Yeats] to recast his style to suit our winds of doctrine"; and mentions that what Yeats criticizes in les Imagistes is "what he calls 'their devil's metres.'" The conclusion of Pound's second review (he had now read The Wild Swans at Coole) is more precise about where the poets' aesthetic compatibility ends, and more inclined to see Yeats as obstructing a clear run for his own agenda: "Mr. Yeats is a romanticist, symbolist, occultist, for better or worse, now and for always. That does not matter. What does matter is that he is the only one left who has sufficient intensity to turn these modes into art."

C. K. Stead concludes, however, that the relation between Poundian and Yeatsian aesthetics can be construed as developmental:

It is the difference between the marmoreal and the Mallarméan, between the stillness and finality of the musée and the action and inconclusiveness of the atelier. This is why I think Pound especially appeals to poets . . . It is that atmosphere of the studio which suggests further excitement, possibility, life still to be lived and work still to be done. But it is probable too that this air of incompleteness, of energy, of possibility, appeals to something in the modern temperament.

In fact, two Pounds are invoked to make the Yeatsian aesthetic appear passé: the Imagist Pound and the Pound of the Cantos. The Imagist Pound has his own "marmoreal" tendencies, and his doctrine of brevity secretes "finality" even if his doctrine of "the musical phrase" refuses a stanzaic means to that end. What puzzles the formal theory of both Pounds (always in implied argument with Yeats) is the conundrum of whether there exists a point - between taking everything out and putting everything in - where a poem realizes its shape. Yeats's most enduring insistence - his most significant fidelity to symbolism - was on the possibility of formal unity, which need neither imply nor impose other kinds of coherence (eventually delegated to the conveniently elastic back-up system of the gyres). A poem's parts may cohere to say "the center cannot hold." Later, I will argue that the negative fetishizing of "closure" (a product of the view that Symbolism collapsed rather than evolved) is a simplistic way in which to think about tradition, form, and audience. And Stead's language of openness and energy is, at bottom, mimetic. It evokes a poetic New World.

Eysteinsson faults Anglo-American criticism for an obsession with canon-formation that stresses "iconic individuals," "superwriters," rather than movements. 18 This obsession produces iconic listings of strange bedfellows, where Yeats typically illustrates rather than creates trends. The main problem arises where definitions of poetic modernism narrow to particular criteria regarding form and language, as when Richard Sheppard states: "A similar sense of pessimism about the possibility of revivifying language, a similar sense that all that remains are a few isolated and arbitrary symbols, runs through the writings of Eliot, Yeats and Rilke." Yeats could make himself believe that his symbols came from anima mundi, and he saw Irish literature as belated in a different sense: Ireland was neither gripped by the crisis of modernity, nor a "half-savage country, out of date," but an originary mythopoeic source. While this may still correspond to Perry Meisel's sense of modernism as "a structure of compensation," it yet makes Ireland a metaphor for creative resilience rather than for cognitive pessimism or semantic collapse.

In part, the current academic map reproduces Yeats's two distinct points of entry into America: first through Irish America; later, through Pound, Harriet Monroe, and Poetry. If John Quinn, the Irish-American lawyer and patron of modern art, connects these two constituencies, he also marks their differences. Yeats saw the success of his pioneering 1903-04 lecture tour in terms of playing off Irish, English, and American audiences. He was of course speaking as promoter of the Irish Literary Revival, if obliquely as self-promoter, when he said, "I find I annoy English people exceedingly by my praises of America"; and noted, "If the intellectual movement makes ... a large public for itself here, that will help us greatly in Ireland. It is impossible to discount American opinion the way English opinion can be discounted."

Today, however, academic Irish-America is a mixed blessing to Yeats. The contexts it supplies place him outside the Anglo-American mainstream. This also casts light on Helen Vendler's anxious presentation of Seamus Heaney as not merely an Irish poet: "the history of his consciousness is as germane to our lives as that of any other poet." Meanwhile, in Ireland Yeats's relation to American modernism has been construed in ways that question not only his modernism but his Irishness. This tendency has long roots. After the Irish Free State seceded from the United Kingdom, some poets wanted to declare their independence of aesthetics associated with the Literary Revival and its perceived "Anglo-Irish" or Protestant origins. The "revolt" of American modernism against "English" traditional forms seemed an apt role model, although the Irish "neo-modernists," their imitators, and their critical champions often recall the reflexly counter-canonical uses of transatlantic models in England (with the added complication that Irish canons are more unstable). Most contributors to Patricia Coughlan and Alex Davis's 1995 collection, Modernism and Ireland, for example, fail to test such oppositions as "fidelity" and "fragmentation," and thereby question the canonical building-blocks of poetic modernism itself.

This is my hypothesis with respect to Yeats's contradictory surfacings in Hiberno-Anglo-American cross-currents then and now: the uncertainties of his cultural-political locus, uncertainties that include the disappearance of his "Anglo-Irish" context in all its hyphenated meanings, have combined with his distance from the making of academic paradigms to produce partial views of his aesthetic and its influence.

One possible remedy is to trace Yeats's presence in transatlantic relations during the 1930s. I have written elsewhere about Louis MacNeice's role in the Yeatsian succession with respect to both "modern" and "Irish" poetry, and to his internal dialectic between the precedents of Yeats and Eliot. But Yeats, Eliot, and Pound were also being absorbed and debated in America. For instance, Terence Diggory discusses the response to Yeats by the southern Agrarian poets who sought regional tradition and "traditional sanctity," and for whom "Yeats and Ireland vis-à-vis England" paralleled the situation of writers in the American South. In Diggory's view, John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, and Robert Penn Warren understood Yeats's access to Irish "tradition" rather literally. It took them time to see that his myth could not "assume public assent" and that he had "made the failure of such assent one of his themes." Nonetheless, a need for aesthetic and religious reassurance determined the transcendental tilt in New Critical readings of Yeats, their greater resort to A Vision than to Irish culture and politics. In effect, the mid-century American poet-critics de-historicized Yeats's poetry by folding Yeatsian history into vague "world history." This is Yeats as Wallace Stevens. It also brings Yeats closer to Eliot without regard to the formal differences between their respective poetries.

(Continues...)

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