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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