Much of the war poetry was pacificist, revolutionary; it was easier to look at
suffering if you had somebody to blame for it, or some remedy in mind.... the
men who created the communism of the masses had Stendhal's mirror for a
contemporary, believed that religion, art, philosophy, expressed economic
change, that the shell secreted the fish. Perhaps all that the masses accept
is obsolete -- the Orangeman beats his drum every Twelfth of July -- perhaps
fringes, wigs, furbelows, hoops, patches, stocks, Wellington boots, start up
as armed men; but were a poet sensitive to the best thought of his time to
accept that belief, when time is restoring the soul's autonomy, it would be as
though he had swallowed a stone and kept it in his bowels. None of these men
have accepted it, communism is their Deus ex Machina, their Santa Clause,
their happy ending, but speaking as a poet I prefer tragedy to tragi-comedy.
No matter how great a reformer's energy a still greater is required to face,
all activities expended, the unreformed.
W. B. Yeats, introduction to
The Oxford Book of Modern Verse, 1936
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Jon Corelis [log in to unmask]
www.geocities.com/joncpoetics
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