>As his later poems include the odd sequence
>of Irish Fascist marching songs, my position
>on the later poetry of W.B. Yeats
>is that while there are things to admire like
>"The Circus Animals Desertion" and "Crazy Jane",
>I've never been a "Long-Legged Fly" man.
Do you mean Long Legged Fly is an Irish Fascist Marching Song? Confused.
Yeats seems a little complex to be boxed into slogans.
>It's not supposed politics, but the politics I find
>in them. Have you read Jamieson? Because,
>it's also the silences that seem damning in later
>Yeats.
No I haven't read Jamieson (Fredric Jamieson?) I don't know what you
mean by "the silences"; but it seems a little easy to condemn poets for
what they don't write, rather than examining what they _do_.
If anything's damned in later Yeats, it seems to me to be Yeats the Poet
by Yeats himself. There's one who raged against the dying of the light,
and who violently returned to his mortal body, tearing at the vanity of
his poetic. "Lust and rage" indeed. No, not nice, not pleasant.
I hasten to say here that I don't admire everything Yeats wrote. But the
later work includes poems of such astonishing power it seems strange to
dismiss them. There is much in that work which is like Prospero in the
Tempest, the abjuration of the fancies of illusion: My ending is despair
/ Unless I be relieved by prayer / which pierces so that it assaults /
mercy itself and frees all faults."
Yeats assaults mercy itself. And in that I find those poems movingly
human: the "foul rag and bone shop of the heart" lifts itself above no
humanity, but places itself "where the ladders begin". Isn't that also
liberating?
>The world the poems construct, isn't
>constructive, isn't fair, isn't likeable. Is that what
>you mean by praise for them as 'tough'.
The world around me seems unfair, unlikeable, destructive. But full,
nonetheless, of that "terrible beauty".
I really don't think it's the work of a poet to moralise. (It's like the
demand that art be "uplifting", meaning: feelgood, lulling, "nice".) To
be moral, yes, but that's a different question, and much harder, because
it pulls you into questions about truth.
Peter Brook puts it quite well, talking about Shakespeare: to be
optimistic (about life/politics) is stupid. To be pessimistic is
indulgent. All that's left is to try to see the astonishing beauty and
the terror, both _at once_. (He does say it better than I do.)
best
Alison
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