What I read in April
Poetry, Plays, and Philosophy
Yeats’s Poetry, Drama, and Prose (Norton Critical Edition)
Author: William Butler Yeats. Date of Publication: March 19, 2000. Pages: 518. Genre: Poetry, Plays
In The Choice Yeats presents the dichotomy of life as art and art as life:
The intellect of man is forced to choose
perfection of the life, or of the work,
And if it take the second must refuse
A heavenly mansion, raging in the dark.
When all that story’s finished, what’s the news?
In luck or out the toil has left its mark:
That old perplexity an empty purse,
Or the day’s vanity, the night’s remorse.
Ironically, he himself provides perhaps the best refutation of this argument. Yeats’s personal life, his place in broader history, and his body of writing have all been the subject of intense study. He had a kaleidoscopic range of interests and influences ranging from traditional folklore to the occult to the cause of Irish nationalism. His personal relationships also figured prominently in his art from Lady Gregory’s patronage to his decades-long infatuation with actress and activist Maud Gonne. And Yeats was not one to stay stagnant with his output evolving through the years and old works going through multiple revisions. The Norton Critical Edition provides a thorough account of this evolution from more traditional pieces evoking the sentimental countryside:
The Meditation of the Old Fisherman
You waves, though you dance by my feet like children at play,
Though you glow and you glance, though you purr and you dart;
In the Junes that were warmer than these are, the waves were more gay,
When I was a boy with never a crack in my heart.The herring are not in the tides as they were of old;
My sorrow! for many a creak gave the creel in the cart
That carried the take to Sligo town to be sold,
When I was a boy with never a crack in my heart.And ah, you proud maiden, you are not so fair when his oar
Is heard on the water, as they were, the proud and apart,
Who paced in the eve by the nets on the pebbly shore,
When I was a boy with never a crack in my heart.
To rousing political theater:
OLD WOMAN. It is a hard service they take that help me. Many that are red-cheeked now will be pale-cheeked ; many that have been free to walk the hills and the bogs and the rushes, will be sent to walk hard streets in far countries ; many a good plan will be broken ; many that have gathered money will not stay to spend it ; many a child will be born and there will be no father at its christening to give it a name. They that have red cheeks will have pale cheeks for my sake, and for all that, they will think they are well paid.
[From Cathleen ni Houlihan]
To sparser poems that engage his thoughts on theology and history:
The Four Ages of Man
He with body waged a fight,
But body won; it walks upright.Then he struggled with the heart;
Innocence and peace depart.Then he struggled with the mind;
His proud heart he left behind.Now his wars on God begin;
At stroke of midnight God shall win.
There is something impersonal and a little biblical about most of Yeats’s work, almost as if he is looking past the reader at some intended audience off in the distance. In his critical essays he showed himself to be an idealist with the aim of forging a new Irish literary movement from the tales and histories of the past. I suppose Yeats wrote for the reading public he hoped to inspire and in doing so, he succeeded.
Other Thoughts
- As someone who likes the genre this hurt my feelings a little bit but I can’t say that it’s totally off the mark:
Of all the artistic forms that have had a large share of the world’s attention, the worst is the play about modern educated people. Except where it is superficial or deliberately argumentative it fills one’s soul with a sense of commonness as with dust…Educated and well-bred people do not wear their hearts upon their sleeves, and they have no artistic and charming language except light persiflage and no powerful language at all, and when they are deeply moved they look silently into the fireplace.
[From The Play of Modern Manners]
The Ethics of Ambiguity
Author: Simone de Beauvoir (translated by Bernard Frechtman). Date of Publication: 1947. Pages: 192. Genre: Philosophy
When I was little I thought trees were immortal and they only died when people cut them down or they were struck by lightning. The only trees I had seen at that point were the lonely manicured ones on lawns or forests indistinctly from the road. Then I went hiking and for the first time I saw worn trees dying of old age and disease. I realized that what seemed like a constant was really a succession, the vibrancy maintained year after year by trees falling and others taking their places.
Simone de Beauvoir’s Ethics of Ambiguity seeks to answer the “meaning” problem of existentialism in a similar fashion. She starts with the assertion that there is no inherent good or evil in our existence and makes the argument that in this void what should emerge to provoke action is the preservation of freedom, for the individual and thus for society. To some extent the reasoning feels like grafting older arguments, be they humanism or Marxism, onto newer theories but as a whole the book is cogent and compelling. Beauvoir’s focuses are obviously shaped by her context in post-war France. From explanations of how support for charismatic demagogues emerges:
He is thereby led to take refuge in the ready-made values of the serious world. He will proclaim certain opinions; he will take shelter behind a label; and to hide his indifference he will readily abandon himself to verbal outbursts or even physical violence. One day, a monarchist, the next day, an anarchist, he is more readily anti-semitic, anti-clerical, or anti-republican.
[Pg. 47]
To this oft-ignored nuance on what constitutes an acceptable freedom:
When a party promises the directing classes that it will defend their freedom, it means quite plainly that it demands they have the freedom of exploiting the working class…A freedom which is interested only in denying freedom must be denied. And it is not true that the recognition of the freedom of others limits my own freedom: to be free is not to have the power to do anything you like; it is to be able to surpass the given toward an open future; the existence of others as a freedom defines my situation and is even the condition of my own freedom. I am oppressed if I am thrown into prison, but not if I am kept from throwing my neighbor into prison.
[Pg. 97]
Some of which hit a little too close to home today, when it seems we are once again coming up on the inflection point of the hockey stick of disorder and global instability.
