Alison wrote:
> My quibble is that Yeats' "political practice", in the poems or in the
> "real world", is no basis for evaluating the worth of the poems. Poetry
> itself seems a witness for more complex ideas of consciousness, more
> complex ways of being: human beings are complex creatures, after all.
Surely human beings' "political practice" would then be itself accordingly
"complex"? I'm still concerned about what I take to be a deprecation of
politics as somehow less "conscious" than poetry, as being that inert matter
upon which literary consciousness reflects (and to which it should not,
therefore, be "reduced").
I don't have a "yes" or a "no" for Yeats, or Pound, but I do have a number
of "don't be so stupid"s for the former - there's a culpable naivety, or low
shrewdness, about some of his politics - by which I also mean some of the
politics of his poetry. He gets some of the same sorts of things wrong in
both cases - a tendency to succumb to utopian projections, which include the
notion that there is somewhere where "the ladders start" where one can go to
be pure - in the midst of primal human muck - of the elaborations and
complications of public politics (higher up the rungs, or the "greasy
pole"). Isn't "there's more enterprise in walking naked" a kind of bid for
innocence?
- Dom
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