Ezra Pound Poetry

Pound, one of the most outstanding modern poets, has endeavored his entire artistic gifts for poetry's swift development. He has strived hardly to evolve a number of different methods or techniques for the expansion of modern poetry; evidently, he was ultimately open, the most public, the least repetitive. Moreover, his poetic experiments were ultimately various approximating extreme objectivity as supported by a courageous classical detachment. In addition to that, he as a subtle character, intended an extraordinary nineteenth century notion of grandeur of the romantic scale together with a 20th century notion of precision and economy.

It is worth noting that Pound adopted the 'organic form' whose idea already existed in romantic critical theory, but it is hardly achieved or achieved with any degree of completeness until the twentieth century. In fact, he strongly dismissed the predetermined shapes and forms arguing that it is the poetic experience as well as the poetic instinct that determines both syntax and form. Thus, Pound considered that the packing into a container doesn't sufficiently acknowledge the kind of reciprocity, interchange and mutual modification that can occur between a traditional form and its content. He also believed in the absolute simplicity and directness of utterance, for poetry according to him must be as well written as good prose. Its language must be a fine language, departing in no way from speech saved by a heightened emotional as well as musical intensity. Accordingly, unnecessary epithets and redundant adjectives are elements of aesthetic degradation, for they are one of the things that we couldn't in our daily life, in the stress of some emotion, actually say. Therefore, Pound did bring the language of his poetry nearer to daily speech where even the dullest and most turgid parts of his poems are ultimately pure, direct and extremely clear.

Pound, in his attempt to capture the dominating aesthetic principles of modern poetry, has evolved a magnificent, stylistic technique known under the name of Cantos. In fact, Pound never tried a moment to explain such technique, for he strongly believed that 'beauty should be presented, never explained'. Consequently, he presented infront of the reader four different cantos in which the complete absence of a rhyme scheme pattern and a standard meter is so obvious. As a matter of fact, in offering passages, to put words into a text from the first canto; images from the second; and an interpolation from the third, Pound succeeded to demonstrate to himself as well as to his colleagues how units from a single conception could stand juxtaposed without explanation and without linking, and standout more sharply and clearly as a result. Thus, an impersonal collage of mosaic was the essence of such method in which the items, large or small, invented or quoted, taken from life or recalled from art, were to stand in hard-edge relation, one to another, without explanatory or connective matter. 

Once again, it is worth noting that Pound was not by any means a symbolist. Instead, he was an eccentric imagist calling for total objectivity and denouncing slavish subjectivity. Furthermore, in Pound's poetry, the emphasis fell greatly on visual imagery where the visual elements, predominated over aural, and so the mind was turned outward towards the world. In addition, Pound images have a variable significance especially when added one to another, without the imposition of a structure and without logical or narrative continuity. Pound in such method defeated our rigid education that taught us so remorselessly to intellectualize and to ask what things mean. It is difficult for us to believe that an experience has any value until it has been interpreted, which is to say abstracted, linked to other experiences, placed in a category and had its concrete character beaten out of it. Nevertheless, Pound had the chance to prove that all poems which are truly poetry and not simply versified statement must be in some degree open to the differing interpretations where our various needs and personalities with circumstances imposed upon them.

Pound, as it is well known, proved to the whole world that poetry is not a form but a quality that is one sense of such quality does not depend upon understanding in the way, or to the degree, that one's sense of the value of a piece of prose is. Hence, Pound succeeds to show clearly that a poem should be sensed in its particularity, without necessarily seeing, or feeling any anxiety about its connection with what precedes and follows.

T.S.Eliot Poetry

Eliot, who was an extraordinary poet, has successfully grabbed the very spirit of modernism so early and more or less complete simply because he became a modernist poet even before modernism had been invented. As a matter of fact, Eliot was able to put himself into a picturesque category along with other modernist figures, like Picasso, especially when he enraged journalists who approached him about the meaning of one or another of his poems or plays by replying:"it means what you want it to mean". Thus, he proved that all poems that are truly poetry and not simply versified statements must be in some degree open to the differing interpretations according to our various needs, personalities and circumstances imposed upon them.

It is worth noting that Eliot's poetry approximates symbolist rather Imagist movement for the sensuous emphasis in his poetry fell more upon the ear than the eye, a music which cast the feeling inward declaring an instantaneous verbal rather semi-musical event. In other words, Eliot's poems delivered a succession of deeply interwoven sounds that has the ultimate ability to provoke the reader's imagination, and therefore allowing at the same time an overflowing of passionate feelings. In fact, his poetry parallels closely the developments of non-representational techniques in painting and of a tonality in music. Moreover, what characterizes such poetry is that the diction moves more closely to that of prose; it uses no special poetic terms, no decorative inversions, and it sheds some of the abstract burden which prose carries. Furthermore, such poetry, for the first time, seems to declare emphatically that it exists in its own right and for its own sake; besides, its simple diction and its apparently orthodox syntax mime meaningful speech so perfectly, offering, in their sedative music, such a sense of case and comfort.

Eliot, unlike Yeats dismissed any kind of predetermined forms, for he rejected the enslavement to the hindering restraints that prevented any poetic experience to be projected in its full aesthetic features. Thus, Eliot has the further freedom of "vers libre" and the "open form"; therefore, he adopted a wide range of musical and metrical possibilities that could always appeal to his instinct. In fact, Eliot always began with the music-that arouses a feeling, a rhythm, a cluster of images, something just coming into focus and works toward crystallizing it. As a result, his poem finds its form as it goes where the sense of the lines may be patterned by the music, rather than the music by the sense. In addition, his poetry forces us to recognize that a poem is essentially a verbal machine far more complex in its operations than any meaning, it may accidentally said to have, or express, or contain.

It's worth noting that despite Eliot's great artistic gifts, he was open to attacks of the surrounding circumstances. Accordingly, as he became more deliberate, more responsible, more answerable to the world, he denies himself a liberty, a freedom of imagination, which in turn robs his poetic language of some of its life, and this is done in the name of something external and at the same time abstract to the poem, such as a political faith, or a religious doctrine. In fact, Eliot, in his submission to religious as well as political influences, favored his ordinary self over the poetic one depriving it from its quality of completeness; nevertheless, he was already aware of the pressure the world exerted upon the preserve of the poetic imagination, and the temptation to give into it. Consequently, Eliot's continuing allegiance to 'Action Francaise' and his unequalled support to the 'Fascist Movement' made him blindly driven to examining the elements in the situation, mainly the situation of the poetic experience which frustrated his labor as an artist.

As a matter of fact, Eliot, despite any deficiencies that always threatened his reputation as a modern poet, presented magnificent poems which are very near to the techniques of modern painter. He were developing at the same time, in which colors and forms were worked into relationship, not in order to "represent" in any direct and obvious sense, but to create an artistic unity, where 'artistic' means neither objective realism nor pure subjective design but an enactment of their meaning.

Wallace Stevens Poetry

Wallace Stevens, an outstanding and a remarkable poet, has succeeded to make his poetry increasingly received, due recognition, as one of the great achievements of our time running through endless transformations of setting and mood, in which the life of the mind, caught in its double fate of self and world, is the constant theme of the drama. Moreover, Stevens' poetry is a poetry of the most lavish variety and the most profound unity, of the most baffling obscurity and the most immediate power. In fact, his poetry is an outer projection rather an outcome of the moral and theoretic unity of his beliefs which proves that Stevens was a master of a remarkably precise and clear sighted doctrine whose main issue sheds the light on the major aspects of actual poetry. 

As a matter of fact, Stevens' poetry ranges between two dominating rather powerful and contending temperamental strains. For instance, on the one hand, his poetry reveals an absolutely skeptical spirit for who denounces as well as dismiss religion in its rigid concepts and in its eccentric inflexibility, believing that the god is a supreme poetic idea rather an ultimate illusion, to which we must come when we have achieved disillusion with respect to all false ideals. On the other hand, Stevens restless and contemptuous poetry that approximates the vulgar esthetics, is at the same time balanced by soft poetry that tries to grab a possible basis for affirmation and acceptance driven by an irresistible tendency towards peace of mind and comfort of soul. As a result, the poetry of Wallace Stevens is the record of a lifelong attempt to discover what must be rejected and what can be affirmed in the translation of a pure poetic experience. 

It is worth noting that Stevens sought in his poetry the transcendental truth that lies behind the sensed world where the search of a single truth in an impossible and a fruitless task. As a result, Stevens rejects Christianity as much on moral and emotional as on intellectual grounds, for although the grand design posited by religion no longer commands acceptance, the mind's desire for order and meaningfulness in its world remains and must be satisfied. Consequently, a new order must be discovered and affirmed where a valid order has its sources in man himself and the reality of his experience. On the other hand, Stevens' poetry presents in front of us a violent refusal to the impotent consolations of wishful thinking and sentimentalist; therefore, declaring a pattern of steps towards a state of a spiritual exactest poverty in which all the false wealth of the spirit has been castaway for being the godfather of the misleading abstractness and the eluding fancies. 

The unbounded effectiveness of Stevens' poetry lies in his incredible ability to create an image of whatever sort the occasion requires. Accordingly, when Stevens is able to appeal unconditionally to his magnificent poetic experience, he delivers a true poetry which ceases to be dominated by negative emotions and moves toward satisfaction, affirming a limited but valid relationship among certain parts of the transcendental world. Hence, he succeeded in such creations to attain a level of imaginative capability that is accompanied by a calm and lucid strength as distinguished from visionary fervor or exaltation where the language of the poems appears to be extremely and correspondingly simple rather purely clear. 

It is worth noting, here at the end, that the poetry of Stevens records from day to day the life of a changing consciousness in a changing world. Because it is a human record, it presents contradictions which cannot be resolved in logical terms, for it can only find reconciliation in such revolting poetry. Its inconsistency reflects those fluctuations of inner strength whereby the adversities that depress us at one time exhilarate us at another. But more importantly, it reflects the fact that while the goal of the mind remains as a side issue, our progress towards it takes different forms according to our state or the conditions of the external world.      

The Gyres: Yeats's Themes and Motifs

Many of the ideas of A Vision can distract from the poetry. They may even actually confuse the reading of a poem which is accessible without them. We do not, for example, need to know that the 'wandering gyre' of the falcon's flight in 'The Second Coming' connects with his vision of history, and it could be argued that the connection actually diminishes the power and universality of the poem, making it a smaller, more thesis-ridden work than it is without this knowledge. Likewise, in 'Sailing to Byzantium' the phrase 'perne in a gyre' is perhaps the only major flaw in the poem, bringing in an extraneous and unnecessary complication to a poem, bringing in an extraneous and unnecessary complication to a poem otherwise transparent. (A 'perne' can be both a bobbin and a peregrine falcon; here, to complicate interpretation further, it could be either noun or verb.)

It is only in its large sweep that Yeats's philosophy is necessary to understand the poetry. In the poem, 'The Gyres', for example, we need to know only its barest outlines. The title invokes his most notorious concept (usually pronounced with a hard 'g'). The poem can be very simply paraphrased: an old man, facing death, takes a kind of heady consolation from the fact that all things pass and come around again, and delights in charting the details of the modern disintegration. Even though itself, we are told, gets worn out. Beauty and worth outlive themselves; 'ancient lineaments' (the lines of a face, with the hint perhaps of a family lineage preserved by family features) suffer extinction. 

The present age (the late 1930s), the poem suggests, is a time of such extinction on a large scale. The blood-dimmed tide of 'The Second Coming' has been released on the earth. By a kind of transference, the ancient Greek philosopher Empedocles (who believed all things are a mingling of the four elements, held together by love or separated by strife, perpetually entering into new configurations) is held responsible for the present disorderliness in things. Another Troy is about to burn, like all those old civilizations put to the sword in 'Lapis Lazuli'. But 'what does it matter?' Yeats asks. All that we need to do is ' "Rejoice!" ' This poem is a powerful expression of Yeats's delight in an apocalyptic view of things.

'Old Rocky Face' in the 'The Gyres' represents that supernatural world beyond history, from which, Yeats's mysticism, all true meaning derive. In 'The Man and the Echo' it becomes 'Rocky Voice'. This poem however implies that the supernatural voice of the oracle is only the echo of human explanations, projected onto the abyss and coming back to us as divine wisdom. Yet significantly, though the Voice reiterates the man's words with the instructions 'Lie down and die' and 'Into the night', it does not echo as a command the last word of his argumentative and unanswered question: 'Shall we in that great night rejoice?' 

By contrast, 'The Gyres' suggests that the only attitude to take towards all this tumult is to 'laugh in tragic joy', accept and rejoice in whatever is coming, and stand above it. This is the posture taken by the Hamlet and Lear of 'Lapis Lazuli', who embrace 'Tragedy wrought to its uttermost' with a 'Gaiety transfiguring all that dread'. For, as Yeats says there: 

All things fall are built again,

and those that build them again are gay. 

The recurrence of all things links these poems with the poem Yeats chose to make the vehicle of his own epitaph, 'Under Ben Bulben'. Here again he tells us, speaking of the eternal return, that 'Gyres run on'. In 'The Gyres' recurrence is enacted by the way in which the word 'gyres' returns at the end, having been exclaimed twice at the very beginning of the poem, confirming stylistically what it claims as a truth, that 'all things [will] run/On that unfashionable gyre again'. But what are these 'gyres'?

In A Vision Yeats conceived of history as composed of two cones, rotating in opposite directions, the apex of each at the centre of the other's widest arc.Every moment in time moves through these opposing spirals. Any one moment thus contains two antithetical, interpenetrating movements, for one cone is widening as the other, whirling in the opposite direction, narrows. These spiraling motions are the gyres. The times of maximum historical turbulence are those where the gyres reverse their motions. These great historical reversals occur every cycle of two thousand years (the 'Great Year'), at those moments where previously expanding cone begins to contract and the previously contracting cone to expand.   

Throughout history, the interpretation of the gyres means that one dominant historical principle, the primary phase, is always shadowed by its antithesis, the objective by the subjective, and vice versa. The rape of Leda by a god in the shape of a swan is thus reversed in the annunciation of the dove to Mary. Christ, as the male god of love, reverses the female bringer of strife, Helen. In turn, these phases of the Great Year are reproduced in the twenty-eight 'Phases of the Moon', set out in Yeats's poem of that name, and explained at length in A Vision. 

Before the full moon of history, the subjective principle holds sway, and men seek fulfillment in themselves, in mastery of thought and action. After the full, men turn outwards, towards the objective world, before which they shrink in servitude, as in our own era. But the complete darkness without any moon of the twenty-eight phase, that of complete objectivity, brings a reversal, a movement back to subjectivity. It is in the movement between these antithetical gyres that human history and personal life are shaped.

In some of the later poems, a knowledge of the philosophy certainly helps to elucidate what is otherwise obscure in poems which get a great deal of their power from the esoteric doctrine they propound. But most of Yeats's poetry can be approached without worrying too much about this doctrine. For those who are interested in the philosophy, however, the clearest exposition and analysis is probably that of Northrop Frye, in An Honoured Guest. In this book, he explains: "The human soul is always moving outward into the objective world or inward into itself; and this movement is double because the human soul would not be conscious were it not suspended between contraries, the greater the contrast the more intense the consciousness. The man, in whom the movement inward is stronger than the movement outward, the man who sees all reflected within himself, the subjective man, reaches the narrow end of a gyre at death, for death is always, they contend, even when it seems the result of accident, preceded by an intensification of the subjective life; and has a monument of revelation immediately after death, a revelation which they describe as his being carried into the presence of all his dead kindred, a moment whose objectivity is exactly equal to the subjectivity of death. The objective man on the other hand, whose gyre moves outward, receives at this moment the revelation, not of himself seen from within, for that is impossible to objective man, but of himself as if he were somebody else. This view is true also of history, for the end of an age, which always receives the revelation of the character of the next age, is represented by the coming of one gyre to its place of greatest expansion and of the other to that of its greatest contraction. At the present moment the life gyre is sweeping outward, unlike that before the birth of Christ which was narrowing, and has almost reached its greatest expansion. The revelation which approaches will however take its character from the contrary movement of the interior gyre. All our scientific, democratic, fact-accumulating heterogeneous civilization belongs to the outward gyre and prepares not the continuance of itself but the revelation as in a lightning flash, though in a flash that will not strike only in one place, and will for a time be constantly repeated, of the civilization that must slowly take its place. This is too simple a statement, for much detail is possible. 

The Tower by W.B.Yeats: An Analytical & Critical View

The Tower

W. B. Yeats, 1865 - 1939

 I

What shall I do with this absurdity—

O heart, O troubled heart—this caricature,

Decrepit age that has been tied to me

As to a dog’s tail? 
Never had I more

Excited, passionate, fanatical

Imagination, nor an ear and eye

That more expected the impossible—

No, not in boyhood when with rod and fly,

Or the humbler worm, I climbed Ben Bulben’s back

And had the livelong summer day to spend.

It seems that I must bid the Muse go pack,

Choose Plato and Plotinus for a friend

Until imagination, ear and eye,

Can be content with argument and deal

In abstract things; or be derided by

A sort of battered kettle at the heel.

  II

I pace upon the battlements and stare

On the foundations of a house, or where

Tree, like a sooty finger, starts from earth;

And send imagination forth

Under the day’s declining beam, and call

Images and memories

From ruin or from ancient trees,

For I would ask a question of them all.

Beyond that ridge lived Mrs. French, and once

When every silver candlestick or sconce

Lit up the dark mahogany and the wine,

A serving-man, that could divine

That most respected lady’s every wish,

Ran and with the garden shears

Clipped an insolent farmer’s ears

And brought them in a little covered dish.

Some few remembered still when I was young

A peasant girl commended by a song,

Who’d lived somewhere upon that rocky place,

And praised the color of her face, 

And had the greater joy in praising her,

Remembering that, if walked she there,

Farmers jostled at the fair

So great a glory did the song confer.

And certain men, being maddened by those rhymes,

Or else by toasting her a score of times,

Rose from the table and declared it right

To test their fancy by their sight;

But they mistook the brightness of the moon

For the prosaic light of day—

Music had driven their wits astray—

And one was drowned in the great bog of Clone.

Strange, but the man who made the song was blind;

Yet, now I have considered it, I find

That nothing strange; the tragedy began

With Homer that was a blind man,

And Helen has all living hearts betrayed.

O may the moon and sunlight seem

One inextricable beam,

For if I triumph I must make men mad.

And I myself created Hanrahan

And drove him drunk or sober through the dawn

From somewhere in the neighboring cottages.

Caught by an old man’s juggleries

He stumbled, tumbled, fumbled to and fro

And had but broken knees for hire

And horrible splendor of desire;

I thought it all out twenty years ago:

Good fellows shuffled cards in an old bawn;

And when that ancient ruffian’s turn was on

He so bewitched the cards under his thumb

That all but the one card became

A pack of hounds and not a pack of cards,

And that he changed into a hare.

Hanrahan rose in frenzy there

And followed up those baying creatures towards—

O towards I have forgotten what—enough!

I must recall a man that neither love

Nor music nor an enemy’s clipped ear

Could, he was so harried, cheer;

A figure that has grown so fabulous

There’s not a neighbour left to say

When he finished his dog’s day:

An ancient bankrupt master of this house.

Before that ruin came, for centuries, 

Rough men-at-arms, cross-gartered to the knees

Or shod in iron, climbed the narrow stairs, 

And certain men-at-arms there were

Whose images, in the Great Memory stored,

Come with loud cry and panting breast

To break upon a sleeper’s rest

While their great wooden dice beat on the board.

As I would question all, come all who can;

Come old, necessitous, half-mounted man;

And bring beauty’s blind rambling celebrant;

The red man the juggler sent

Through God-forsaken meadows; Mrs. French,

Gifted with so fine an ear;

The man drowned in a bog’s mire,

When mocking Muses chose the country wench.

Did all old men and women, rich and poor,

Who trod upon these rocks or passed this door,

Whether in public or in secret rage

As I do now against old age?

But I have found an answer in those eyes

That are impatient to be gone;

Go therefore; but leave Hanrahan,

For I need all his mighty memories.

Old lecher with a love on every wind,

Bring up out of that deep considering mind

All that you have discovered in the grave,

For it is certain that you have 

Reckoned up every unforeknown, unseeing

Plunge, lured by a softening eye,

Or by a touch or a sigh,

Into the labyrinth of another’s being;

Does the imagination dwell the most

Upon a woman won or a woman lost?

If on the lost, admit you turned aside

From a great labyrinth out of pride,

Cowardice, some silly over-subtle thought

Or anything called conscience once;

And that if memory recur, the sun’s

Under eclipse and the day blotted out.

  III

It is time that I wrote my will;

I choose upstanding men

That climb the streams until

The fountain leap, and at dawn

Drop their cast at the side

Of dripping stone; I declare

They shall inherit my pride,

The pride of people that were 

Bound neither to Cause nor to State, 

Neither to slaves that were spat on,

Nor to the tyrants that spat,

The people of Burke and of Grattan

That gave, though free to refuse—

Pride, like that of the morn, 

When the headlong light is loose,

Or that of the fabulous horn,

Or that of the sudden shower

When all streams are dry,

Or that of the hour

When the swan must fix his eye

Upon a fading gleam,

Float out upon a long

Last reach of glittering stream 

And there sing his last song.

And I declare my faith:

I mock Plotinus’ thought

And cry in Plato’s teeth,

Death and life were not

Till man made up the whole,

Made lock, stock and barrel

Out of his bitter soul, 

Aye, sun and moon and star, all, 

And further add to that

That, being dead, we rise, 

Dream and so create

Translunar Paradise.

I have prepared my peace

With learned Italian things

And the proud stones of Greece,

Poet’s imaginings

And memories of love,

Memories of the words of women,

All those things whereof

Man makes a superhuman

Mirror-resembling dream.

As at the loophole there

The daws chatter and scream,

And drop twigs layer upon layer.

When they have mounted up, 

The mother bird will rest

On their hollow top,

And so warm her wild nest.

I leave both faith and pride

To young upstanding men

Climbing the mountain-side,

That under bursting dawn

They may drop a fly;

Being of that metal made

Till it was broken by

This sedentary trade.

Now shall I make my soul, 

Compelling it to study 

In a learned school

Till the wreck of body, 

Slow decay of blood,

Testy delirium

Or dull decrepitude,

Or what worse evil come—

The death of friends, or death

Of every brilliant eye

That made a catch in the breath—

Seem but the clouds of the sky 

When the horizon fades, 

Or a bird’s sleepy cry 

Among the deepening shades.

Analytical View:
“The Tower” is one of the longest poems written by William Butler Yeats (1865-1939). It was written in 1926 and was the title poem of the collection that he published in 1928.

The tower in question is that of Thoor Ballylee in County Galway. It is a typical Irish square castle tower (built around 1500) that Yeats bought in 1916 and restored over several years. It was his summer home until 1929. It was also the first property that he had ever owned outright.

Yeats had turned 60 when he wrote “The Tower”. He was aware that he is getting older and that his health was beginning to fail. He was therefore moved to take stock of his life. The tower, with its long history and associations with past legends, symbolized the passing of time and gave rise to thoughts about how people in the past had dealt with the approach of old age.

The first section of the poem’s three sections comprises 17 lines. In them, Yeats considers the “absurdity” that is “decrepit age”. He feels that his mind is as active as ever (“Never had I more/Excited, passionate, fantastical/Imagination, nor an ear and eye/That more expected the impossible”), but his body is not as nimble as when he was a boy climbing the local mountain with “the livelong summer day to spend”. The reference to his “troubled heart” can be taken, for once, as a literal rather than a poetic one. The alternative, he feels, is that poetry must be abandoned (“I must bid the Muse go pack”) in favor of the consolations of philosophy (as represented by Plato and Plotinus). Imagination, ear and eye will have to be “content with argument”.

The second section is much longer, comprising thirteen eight-line stanzas with an AABBCDDC rhyme scheme (although a number of the rhymes are half-rhymes). As he walks on the battlements at the top of his tower, Yeats chooses to use imagination as a tool to seek out the past and “call/Images and memories/From ruin or from ancient trees”, because he wants to pose a question to some of the people who once lived in the neighborhood and whose spirits still seem to haunt the place. He takes time to tell a few of their stories before asking his question.

First there is Mrs French, who sent her serving-man to cut off the ears of a farmer who had been insolent to her. The ears were presented to her in “a little covered dish”. Then there is the story of the men who, after a night of drinking and singing, resolved to “test their fancy” for a local peasant girl by going to find her but they fell into the local bog, where one of them was drowned.

This second story had come from a song written by Anthony Raftery (1784-1834) who, as a blind poet, was, to Yeats’s mind, Ireland’s equivalent of Homer, “that was a blind man”. Yeats is thus prompted to compare the peasant girl with Helen of Troy in her ability to drive men mad with desire and lead them to their doom. Although he does not make the link directly in the poem, Yeats is clearly thinking about the unrequited love of his own life, namely that for Maud Gonne, whom he had pursued for many years without success and who he had often compared with Helen of Troy (as in his earlier poem “No Second Troy”).

Yeats next recalls a character that he had invented himself in a series of short stories entitled “The Secret Rose” (1897). This is “Red Hanrahan”, a country poet, who was able to perform feats of magic. Yeats repeats one of his stories for two stanzas of “The Tower”, but then breaks off to bring in “A figure that has grown so fabulous …”, namely a former owner of Thoor Ballylee who went bankrupt. This then prompts Yeats to mention all the previous men-at-arms who had garrisoned the tower in past centuries.

After a stanza (the tenth of the second section) that summarizes all these characters, Yeats ask the question at which he had hinted earlier, which is whether they did: “… in public or in secret rage/As I do now against old age?” However, he then dismisses all the “real” characters and only asks that Hanrahan stays behind, he being the poet that only existed in Yeats’s own imagination.

Yeats has another question for Hanrahan, which is: “Does the imagination dwell the most/Upon a woman won or woman lost?” Clearly Yeats has Maud Gonne in mind as his “woman lost” and, by invoking the spirit of his own invented character, it is his own memories and imagination that he is calling upon to answer the question. His conclusion, at the end of this section of the poem, is that such a memory can only result in: “the sun/Under eclipse and the day blotted out”.

The third section has a very different character to the preceding section, in that it comprises four stanzas of different lengths (respectively 45, 7, 8 and 15 lines), the lines being short and half-rhymes being much more common than full ones. The pace therefore picks up as Yeats makes up his mind and declares his intentions unequivocally and boldly. This section is possibly one of the finest passages that Yeats wrote in his later poems. The words tumble out as Yeats makes it crystal clear that he will always place poetry above philosophy. He begins by stating that: “It is time that I wrote my will”, and the first thing he wishes to bequeath is his pride, which he had inherited from people who were bound: “Neither to slaves that were spat on, Nor to the tyrants who spat”. His inheritance is from people who were not afraid to speak their mind in the cause of freedom, and he mentions two Irish politicians from a previous age (Edmund Burke and Henry Grattan) whom he admires for that reason.

Yeats declares that his inheritors will be: “…upstanding men/That climb the streams until/The fountain leap …”. In other words, they will be another generation of people just like he was when young, as these lines echo those at the start of the poem about his explorations as a young boy on the mountain of Ben Bulben. Having previously wondered about devoting his last years to the study of Plato and Plotinus, Yeats now declares his faith: “I mock Plotinus’ thought/And cry in Plato’s teeth”. It is through constructing systems of thought that man has: “Made lock, stock and barrel/Out of his bitter soul”. Far better, says Yeats, for “Poet’s imaginings/And memories of love” to be the building blocks for “… a superhuman/Mirror-resembling dream”. He likens all the memories that the poet accumulates through life to the sticks laid by jackdaws as they build their nests outside the tower. Each is insignificant by itself, but together they form the cradle in which new life can be created.

However, Yeats is also clear that he is passing on this inheritance of faith and pride to a new generation. His own future may be limited to “study/In a learned school” due to “the wreck of body”. There is no need for rage, as hinted at earlier, because the “young upstanding men” will carry on where he is forced to leave off. He is content, as the poem’s last lines say, to let the process of aging take its course until he is no more than: “a bird’s sleepy cry/Among the deepening shades.”

As stated earlier, this is a long poem that has many facets to it. There is much to be gleaned from it over several readings and it has many memorable and well-crafted lines. It is a poem that entertains as well as posing questions and suggesting answers.

Critical View:

In this extract from "The Tower":

  II

I pace upon the battlements and stare

On the foundations of a house, or where

Tree, like a sooty finger, starts from earth;

And send imagination forth

Under the day’s declining beam, and call

Images and memories

From ruin or from ancient trees,

For I would ask a question of them all.

It is not easy to classify Yeats in poetry because he is a modern poet but not modernist, symbolist or imagist. The subject matter upon which all poets work is the same, and it is not different from our subject matter. We are living in the same world and dealing with the same materials. The difference between one poet and the other is the same difference that exists between all poets and ourselves. The difference is that one poet looks at subject matter as representation of a unified universe and others (Yeats) as being separated. In Yeats the existence is a dual existence. In his book "The Tower," which included such famous lyrics as "Sailing to Byzantium," "Leda and the Swan," the most representative emblem of fire is hell. 

Line 3: "Tree, like a sooty finger, starts from earth:" According to Yeats, art is a not a deliberate creation but it is a creation. It is not spontaneous, it is an art and not feelings. Art is not equal to feelings, it is creation. A poet can not say that he is going to write a poem, but he has to evoke feelings and this has to be created and worked for. It is not the automatic outcome of feelings though it is not deliberate. When he says not deliberate, he does not mean spontaneous. It is not the feeling but the creative model from which these feelings are made. So, poetry is a creation but not deliberate nor spontaneous as William Wordsworth believes (spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings). It is the creation of intense feelings, the target of poetry has to be emotional. Yeats says in a letter to a friend: "I have no speech, I have symbols". Speech is common but creative ability is not, it is characteristic of artists. A poet should have the ability to create intense feelings in his poem, so the emphasis or criterion is the model and not the feeling. Hence, when Yeats says "Sooty fingers," the implication is black. However, "Starts, call, and sends," are forceful verbs which are being used in a row. Sooty implies that the finger is coming from hell. "Sooty finger, starts from the earth:" he is creating a complete movement. Dual conception of the universe (hell & earth) and (day & declining beam). When he mentioned tree twice, he dropped the definite or indefinite articles (he didn't say a tree or the tree) as if the tree has become a noun, he adds a personal quality to the tree, he is giving it life.  

Line 4: "And send imagination forth:" This line is an elaboration of the previous one. He is saying that there is no subject which is poetical. Poets bring over subjects which they think are poetical and use them whenever they write poetry. William Wordsworth has touched on the issue when he spoke of poetic language. Poets borrowed the terms which were functional, but the time has changed; what was functional is no more functional nowadays. So, Yeats couldn't believe in inherently poetical things or else poetry would cease to be a creation. There is no inherently poetical things, a poet has to modify and create. 

The lines of  this poem have sound unity but the rhythm and sense overruns this unity. 

         Or where ------>  and call 

         Tree like ------>  Images and memories

The most distinctive feature of the poem in so far as the superficial surface structure of the poem is that we have couplet form. The couplet form here is modified because here we have a sound unity but not a sense unity. The form is inherited but modified. Here the regular Iambic pattern is not found. The form is the way a poet feels and thinks. Yeats is using the couplet form, but he thinks and feels in a different way than Dryden and Pope because the target of poetry changed from what it was before. 

A Vision by William Butler Yeats: Critical View

In her book the Unicorn Virginia Moore says: "To me all things are made of the conflict of two states of consciousness, being or persons which die each other's life, live each other's death, that is true of life and death themselves." She also says: "The acts and nature of spirit during anyone life are a section or abstraction of reality and are unhappy because incomplete. They are gyres or part of a gyre where as reality is a sphere." Another critical view on classifying poetry, in the book 'First Principle' written in 1904, states: "Art, in its highest moments, is not a deliberate creation, but the creation of intense feeling." In addition, Arthur Symons says: "The error of late periods like this is to believe that some things are inherently poetical, and pull them on to scene at every moment. It is just these seeming inherent poetical things that wear out."

There is no one track view in poetry. Regardless of the fact that critics classify poetry, there are only two classifications: good and bad. Yeats represents a case standing on its own. He wrote in the 20th century. He is modern but not a modernist; he is not a symbolist or imagist. Yeats is coming from a wide extensive background of poetry, and he represents a track for which there was no taste. He did not create the taste upon which he could be followed or judged. Yeats is appreciated and to understand his poetry, one has to exert an effort. So, he has his own philosophy and every poet is a philosopher and thinker, but he has to leave his philosophy outside his poetry. When you start writing, you are a poet. Therefore, Yeats is a very particular poet, a particular character as a poet indeed.

The requirements of poetry are very different, could Yeats fulfill these requirements being a particular poet?

If we speak of rhythm in good poetry, it is not enough to observe rhythm because anyone could write poetry with rhythm and not be a good poet. The criterion in good poetry is that the reader should be patterned by the music of the words. If the poet achieves this, then he would be a good poet. In reading a good poem you would be oriented, however being sustained by a bad poet you cannot be patterned by his rhythm. Pattern is a product of the movement of a verse. Music is an achievement in language. Yeats is complicated and in order to clear this complication you have to look into his philosophy and his particular thought. He invents words and concepts which are his own, so we have to have a particular knowledge in order to study him (Ex: Perne in gyre).  

Yeats says in a letter to a friend: I have no speech, I have symbols. Most of his symbolism is subjective symbolism because elsewhere symbolism to a great extent has to do with the objectivity. A symbol in Yeats' poetry is subjective. In his book "A Vision" there is terminology which we do not know, he invents words that stand for conceptions. He presents new terminology and conception. For example, a gyre would be a chain of circles, like a spiral spring. If we look down at them from above, we would see one circle. The circle represents the moon. In this book there is two moons and has  twenty eight phases standing for the inexorable cyclic movement of history that determines all that happens. Each phase represents a period in history, and it is dominated by a certain civilization and its own myths. Therefore, each phase stands for one complete civilization (rise and fall of it). To these phases there is a beginning and an end. The end is a new beginning and not an end. There is the new moon represents the beginning of phases and the full moon represents the end of phases. For example, according to Yeats, the present cycle of history has started with birth of Jesus Christ and it will last till the year 2000. This explain his conception of duality. His world is build on a dual conception (something and its opposite) this is the world of Yeats on which he built his poetry. Unless one has passed through the two phases he would not have lived his complete life. Death is another life it is not an enemy. The cycle is made of 2000 years. Death is not the end. By necessity, one's life is unhappy because it is incomplete. His philosophy is not standardized. The polarities of his poetry are subjectivity and objectivity. His attitude towards poetry should affect the structural level of his poetry. Yeats was for a pattern in world and in poetry, he was against the free verse medium where there is neither a pattern nor structural rhythm.

Therefore, Yeats had fulfilled one condition which is he is a philosopher, there is philosophy in his poetry and this is an obstacle to the reader. He created poetry, but he didn't create the taste. What comes with this philosophical movement, leads to another philosophical notion: The repeating notion of life and death moving in a parallel line with the cyclic movement. History moves in phases and cycles following the full moon and the moon. The axis of his poetry is set on this conception of duality and coexistence: existence of life, there is death; existence of body, there is spirit. Others have found a still point. However, the basic structure of his poetry is build on a dual structure of two opposites "death" and "life". 

William Butler Yeats Poetry

Yeats, who started his artistic era as a Pre-Raphaelite, gained an ultimate reputation when he succeeded. Thanks to Pound in developing rather than unleashing his poetic gifts and approximating the threshold of modernism. Yeats, who was viewed as a survivor of the romantic age, made his poems harsher and more outspoke, adopting an extraordinary directness and a subtle clarity, and striving hardly to represent a new kind of poetry that has the virtues of good prose. Thus, the vagueness as well as the eccentric mysteries of the past were dismissed to be replaced by the favorable concreteness of the new age.

It's worth noting that Yeats's poetry has the advantages as well as the features of symbolism simply because it sought to capture reality itself rather than an interpretation of it. In his poetry the sensuous emphasis fell more upon the ear than the eye, a music which casts the feeling inward declaring an instantaneous verbal rather semi-musical event. In other words, Yeats's poems delivered succession of deeply interwoven sounds that has the ultimate ability to provoke the readers imagination, and therefore allowing at the same time an overflowing of passionate feelings. Yeats's symbolist poems reflect too much glamour and too much beauty for beauty's sake where aesthetic features arises in its ultimate intensity declaring the presence of transcendental poetic gifts. Thus, symbols in Yeats's poetry existed to suggest, to evoke, to stimulate imagination and to arouse emotion, but not at all to stand as symbols in allegory that only denote something particular of abstract nature.

Evidently, "The new Yeats", as Pound preferred to call him, revolted to certain extent against the enormous hindering restraints that prevented the poet from projecting his poetic experiences without being deformed or mutilated by superficial rather artificial devices. He strived hardly to get rid of the old-fashioned rhetorical techniques which are the fertile soil of bombastic style and unnecessary euphemism. Yeats also dismissed the theory of poetic diction trying hard to strip away everything that was artificial, to get a style like daily speech, as simple as the simplest prose. In fact, Yeats whole endeavor was to prove in a way or another that the ordinary speech is the best medium that suits poetic purpose. Therefore, his poetry was no more sophisticated or complex than any simple conversation.

A very large past of Yeats's problem in making the change to his later rather modern style, was that he set himself almost impossible tests simply because they were conflicting and contradicting. He planned at the same time to rid his poetry of every poetic artificiality of syntax and diction, making the normal words and the word-order of accustomed spoken English the controlling measure of his style which it should always return. On the other hand, Yeats was not by any means ready for the usage of the open form, for he did not want an apparently low style of the kind found in many of Wordsworth's lyrical ballads. He was bound to the restrictions of meter and rhyme scheme patterns depriving himself from the open and free form, which was developing by Pound who had a wide range of musical and metrical possibilities, that would always appeal to his instinct. 

As a matter of fact, Yeats's poems were mostly viewed as the works of a master-craftsman, a thing of beauty. He was always obsessed by a necessary quality that functions as a distinction from the practice of prose. Therefore, the rhyme scheme pattern is, always, regular and the metric rhythm rarely strays from the iambic pentameter. Yeats was considered 'the greatest minor poet who ever lived', for he was able to evolve his own poetical gifts as well as style. His endless subjectivity and  all his attempts to be poetic in some manner or other defeat their own end. Yeats could be only considered as a mere practitioner in the field of modernism. His enslavement to fixed forms and moods make him imprisoned in an earlier time. Hence, he could not 'make it new', but most important of all he could not produce what the present age called for.