YEATS, ELIOT, AND
MODERNISM
A SPRINT THRU SUBTLETIES
CHARACTERISTIC ATTITUDES &
CONCERNS OF MODERNISM
• Alienation from belief structures, social
structures
• Resentment at Victorian mind-set
• Fragmentation & Loss
• Cynicism
• Sterility
• Rejection of genres, literary traditions
• Imagist narrative instead of dramatic
monologue
ART AND FUSION
• Poetry must be ‘impersonal,’ that is, greater
than and outside of the personality of the
poet.
• “It is not the ‘greatness,’ the intensity of the
emotions, the components but the intensity
of the artistic process, the pressure…under
which the fusion takes place, that counts.” –
T.S. Eliot, Tradition and the Individual Talent,
1219.
WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
1865-1939
“There is now overwhelming
evidence that man stands
between eternities, that of his
family and that of his soul. I
apply those beliefs to
literature and politics and
show the change they must
make. . . . My belief must go
into what I write, even if I
estrange friends; some when
they see my meaning set out
in plain print will hate me for
poems which they have
thought meant nothing.”
T.S. ELIOT
1888-1965
“Language, especially the
language of poetry, is a
different matter. Poetry, it
might seem, separates
peoples instead of uniting
them.
But on the other hand we
must remember, that while
language constitutes a
barrier, poetry itself gives us a
reason for trying to overcome
the barrier.”
TWO CRUCIALLY IMPORTANT WORKS
• The Second Coming:
Most significant
statement of early
Modernism
• The Waste Land: Most
significant statement
of post-war
Modernism, and one
of the most influential
literary works of the
last century
MODERNIST VIEWS OF POETRY
• Eliot, Tradition and the Individual Talent:
• “Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion but an
escape from emotion; it is not the expression of
personality, but an escape from personality.”
(1221)
• “The emotion of art is impersonal. And the poet
cannot reach this impersonality…unless he lives in
what is not merely the present, but the present
moment of the past, unless he is conscious, not of
what is dead, but of what is already living.” (1221)
WHAT ARE THEIR SOURCES OF
ANXIETY?
• For Yeats, constant tension of Irish history
and tradition vs. modernism; the Irish
Rebellion of 1916: “All changed, changed
utterly: A terrible beauty is born….enough to
know they dreamed and are dead.”
• For Eliot, WWI and the 20th century: the
search for some kind of Grail, the displaced
Countess, the reduction of love to
something the typist does after dinner, etc.
WHERE DO WE SEE
FRAGMENTATION AND LOSS?
• The Second Coming: “Things fall apart; the
centre cannot hold; mere anarchy is loosed
upon the world.”
• Sailing to Byzantium: “Whatever is begotten,
born, and dies.”
• The Wasteland: The husband and wife who
can no longer communicate, Lil and her
man, Tiresias the blind prophet: “I can
connect Nothing with nothing.”
IN WHAT WAYS DO YEATS AND ELIOT
DISCUSS ALIENATION?
• No Second Troy: “Why should I blame her….
Why, what could she have done, being
what she is?” (Contrast with In Memoriam—
she is also a type.)
• Eliot: Typist’s inability to make human
connections, blind Tiresias, the dry desert of
section V; “We think of the key, each in his
prison / Thinking of the key, each confirms a
prison”
HOW DO THEY “MAKE IT NEW”?
• Yeats: unrhymed iambic pentameter that is
not blank verse, sonnets that are not sonnets
(Leda and the Swan), Irish perspective
• Eliot: Vers libre (“free verse”), allusions to
anthropology, cultural mythologies, stream
of conscious, deconstructing experience
down to fragments of images (“The Fire
Sermon” section of The Waste Land, for
instance, or the last 10 lines of the poem)
HOW DO THEY “MAKE IT DIFFERENT”?
• Yeats: “ Verse as an exacting instrument of
introspection and national inquiry” (p. 113).
• Weaving mythology, history, mysticism, and
politics into an intensely personal poetic.
• Eliot: Monologues and soliloquies by
characters previously unimagined in British
literature; writing as outsider against British
tradition yet within it (see Tradition and the
Individual Talent); the “anxiety of influence”
HOW DO THEY “MAKE IT HARD”?
• Yeats: Deliberate ambiguity, mythohistorical
system of gyres, imagist poetry
• Eliot: Deliberate ambiguity, deconstructed
and fragmented narrative, language
changes, shifting points of view, stream of
consciousness, pastiche of voices, images,
cultural referents . Provides his own
footnotes.
• Both argue that difficulty is important—these
questions don’t have easy answers.
SENSE OF LOSS AND MOURNING
• Yeats, Easter 1916: “Too long a sacrifice can
make a stone of the heart. O when may it
suffice…Was it needless death after all?”
• Eliot: “These fragments I have shored against
my ruins…”; the Countess; Lil’s dialogue in
the pub; Mr. Eugenides’ proposition
EPITAPH FOR THE MODERN PERIOD