The Yeats' were hardly ruling class, tho both Willie and father pretended
to be at times.
If your interest is as stated I'd love to see your analysis (of which so
far there's been precious little) of the relationship between his poetics
and politics applied to a specific case. I nominate "Among School
Children," one of my personal favorites. It may surprise you.
At 11:25 AM 9/19/2000 -0700, you wrote:
>
>
>In my own case I
>have to deal with the sometimes vicious sometimes
>merely polite
>antisemitism of many of the writers most important to
>me, some of whom were
>cheerleaders for the nazis. No fun, to say the least,
>but I'd hate to give
>up Celine, Pound, Williams, Spicer, or even, in
>Pound's case, specific
>cantos in which he spews forth hate. "
>
>
>I don't want anyone to give up anything, in the sense
>you mean: I want a true picture to be given of the
>relation between Yeats' politics and poetics. The
>point I guess is not to give up but to understand.
>Actually, I don't like Yeats much, so he wouldn't be
>too much to kick, were I to take the conssumer boycott
>methodology to literature! The only poem of his I like
>is 'Valley of the Black Pig', in fact.
>
>"And a query: as nominally a Protestant, and
>increasingly as an Anglo-Irish
>Protestant, did Yeats actually vote against the
>interests of the class with
>which he chose to identify?"
>
>The Protestants are certainly not all members of the
>ruling classs. My Ulster Protestant forebears, for
>example, were potato farmers!
>The issue really though is not that Yeats was or was
>not a hypocrite but that Yeats helped perpetuate a
>pretty crummy regime in Ireland. I don't know though
>about any links to the fascist Green Shirts, haven't
>been reading this thread right through.
>
>Cheers
>
>Scott
>
>
>=====
>"Why is it not possible for me to doubt that I have never been on the
moon? And how
>could I try to doubt it? First and foremost, the supposition that perhaps
I have
>been there would strike me as idle. Nothing would follow from it, nothing
be
>explained by it. It would not tie in with anything in my life...
Philosophical
>problems occur when language goes on holiday. We must not separate ideas
from life,
>we must not be misled by the appearances of sentences: we must investigate
the
>application of words in individual language-games" - Ludwig Wittgenstein
>
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>
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