Yeats and the Gyre
HUM 3285: British and American Literature
Spring 2011
Dr. Perdigao
January 19, 2011
Epicness
Indeterminancy
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Darwin, Marx, Freud, Einstein, Planck, Heisenberg
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Darwin—challenge to Biblical literalism, idea of authority
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Marx—people’s actions controlled by economic system, altered ideas about human
nature
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Freud—psychological determinism, discovery/invention of unconscious
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Einstein—space and time as great absolutes are relative
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Planck—atom, wave particle theory; light has both properties, complementary and
contradictory
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Heisenberg—indeterminacy theory
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Challenges to nature, what constitutes knowledge
Framing Yeats
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1891—first motion camera patented
1897—first subway opened
1900—US Census, 75 million people—150 million in 1950, population doubles
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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
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Reactions to fragmentation in twentieth century: ironic resistance (puts fragments
together to make whole); immersed acceptance
William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)
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London/Dublin
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Father—painter, skeptic, “religion of art”
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Poetic forms—late-Romantic, Pre-Raphaelite; language as dreamy, evocative,
ethereal (2020)
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Shift from Romanticism with Ezra Pound’s influence, stripped-down style,
modernist
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1889 met Actor and Irish nationalist Maud Gonne— “No Second Troy”
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With help of Lady Gregory, Anglo-Irish writer, promoter of Irish literature,
founded Abbey Theatre 1904, work in drama
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Dichotomies—late-Romantic visionary and modern skeptic, Irish patriot and
irreverent antinationalist, man of action and esoteric dreamer (2021)
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Married Georgie Hyde Lees in 1917; automatic writing—gyres, symbolic system
Politics and poetics
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Irish poet whose language is English, colonial oppressor
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Politics within poetry
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“Easter, 1916”—Irish rebels taking over Dublin post office, hanging; Irish Free
State; Yeats’ role as senator from 1922-28
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Rising of Irish consciousness
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Yeats’ life—language taken away by oppressors, reinstating Gaelic in schools
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Yeats’ interest in the occult; culture filled with Celtic tales about fairies
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Tension between faith and skepticism
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2000 year cycles of history, mathematical equations
Those gyres
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Yeats’ attitude toward change as modern phenomenon
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Continuity between past and present
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“Sailing to Byzantium”
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Old man dreaming of songs
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Surpassing limits of physical world
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Byzantium as “the purest embodiment of the union and subsequent transfiguration
through art of the fleshly condition and the ideal of holiness” (Rosenthal xxxix).
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Universal system of “interpenetrating opposites . . . rotating gyres forever whirling
into one another’s centers, merging, and then separating” (Rosenthal xxxix)
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Metapoem
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Yeats age 62 when writing the poem
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Wins Nobel Prize for literature in 1923
Answers
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“The Second Coming”
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Apocalyptic
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Christ’s return, Book of Revelations
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Christianity about to die, replaced by “rough beast,” horrible/natural
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Confusion at moment of cultural crisis, awareness of his confusion and loss
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As prophecy
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“Sailing to Byzantium”—Yeats’ fear of loss of sexual potency in personal terms; in
a larger sense, modernist consideration, find alternative to collapse
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If religion no longer works, and philosophy is insufficient, what can we replace it
with?
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Answer is art to become what religion once was
Forms
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Artist becomes the historian
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Idea of becoming a monument, contained
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But tension because no beauty like living in the present
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Request in “Byzantium” to be gathered in artifice of eternity, made a thing
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Poet of containment, holding fragments in tension but reveals artifice of language
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Critiques of Yeats—interest in aristocratic authority, plays with Fascist attempts at
order, application of power of few on many
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“Second Coming”—something is ending but something new is to be born from it
Endings… or beginnings? That gyre thing again.