Yeats and Modernism

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Albright, Daniel. 2006. Yeats and Modernism. In The Cambridge

Companion to W.B. Yeats, ed. Marjorie Howes and John Kelly,
59-76. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press.

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doi:10.1017/CCOL0521650895.004

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Published in The Cambridge Companion to W. B. Yeats, eds. Marjorie Howes and John Kelly,
2006.
Daniel Albright
Yeats and Modernism
When Yeats died in January 1939, he quickly became the ghost that haunted Modernism.
First to register the shades presence was W. H. Auden, who wrote his famous elegy In Memory
of W. B. Yeats in February 1939:
Now he is scattered among a hundred cities
And wholly given over to unfamiliar affections [. . .]
The words of a dead man
Are modified in the guts of the living. [. . .]
For Auden, Yeats is a distasteful Orpheus, whose corpse dismembers into the scattered leaves of
his volumes of poetry, undergoing a queasy process of digestion in the guts of his readers.
Auden gives the distinct impression that Yeats might have been a much more satisfactory meal:
You were silly like us [. . .]
[Time] Worships language and forgives
Everyone by whom it lives;
Pardons cowardice, conceit,
Lays its honours at their feet.
Time that with this strange excuse
Pardoned Kipling and his views,
And will pardon Paul Claudel,
Pardons them for writing well.1
He does not directly call Yeats a timid, vain, blustering fascist, but by treating Kipling, Claudel,
and unspecified cowardly and conceited poets as parallel cases, he leaves such characterizations
open as a possibility.
In an essay in Partisan Review (Spring 1939), The Public v. the Late Mr. William Butler
Yeats, Auden, wearing the mask of the Public Prosecutor, goes further: he says that Yeats did
nothing to create a juster social order, he felt nothing but the hatred which is born of fear:
Of all the modes of self-evasion open to the well-to-do, Nationalism is the easiest and the
most dishonest. [. . .] Still, it has often inspired men and women to acts of heroism and
self-sacrifice. For the sake of a free Ireland the poet Pearse and the countess Markiewicz
gave their all. But if the deceased did give himself to this movement, he did so with a

singular moderation. [. . .] What are we to say of man whose earliest writings attempted
to revive a belief in fairies and whose favourite themes were legends of barbaric heroes
with unpronounceable names, work which has been aptly and wittily descried as Chaff
about Bran?2
The defense attorney in Audens imaginary debate tries a few mild rebuttals of these points, but
with less verve and conviction. In 1939 Auden saw Yeatss ghost as a fussy and inept spectre,
and yet (as the elegy suggests in a slightly noncommittal fashion) a figure of astonishing force, a
river, a fountain in the hearts desert, a whole modality of event; even the bland glance at the
thermometer at the opening (O all the instruments agree / The day of his death was a dark cold
day) can be interpreted either as the sign of a preference for objective fact over mythy nonsense,
or as the symptom of desolation of the landscape from the masters death, as if Yeats were the
Grail King from Eliots The Waste Land. It is impossible to get a clear fix on Audens attitude
toward Yeats; one may feel that Auden scribbles mustaches on Yeatss face to defend himself
from Yeatss overwhelming cultural authority. The whole elegy works at once to manifest
Yeatss ghost and to exorcise it: even Audens adoption, in the last part of the poem, of Yeatss
almost-patented form of catalectic trochaic tetrameter suggests the power of the ghost to usurp
the soul of his elegist. Auden ridicules Yeatss spooks, but seems determined to become a spiritmedium in spite of himself. Because Under Ben Bulben, Yeatss tetrameter elegy to himself,
was not published until February 1939, and then only in three Irish newspapers, the literary
historian may feel a certain shiver that the ghost was trying to show itself forth simultaneously
through the Irish Times and through Audens empathic intelligence.
The ghosts next important apparition occurred around August 1942, when T. S. Eliot
was writing drafts for the so-far unsatisfactory second part of Little Gidding:
Then, changing face and accent, he
declared with another voice:
These events draw me back to the
streets of the speech I learned early
in life. I also was engaged in the
battle of language. My alien people
with an unknown tongue claimed
me. I saved them by my efforts
you by my example: yet while I
fought the darkness I also fought the
light, striving against those who
with the false condemned the true.

Those who have known purgatory

here know it hereafterso shall you
learn when enveloped by the coils
of the fiery wind, in which you
must learn to swim.3
The ghost goes on to say that his spirit parted from the southern shoreYeats died in the south
of Franceand to add other details that tend to identify him with Yeats, though Yeatss name
never appears. As air-raid warden Eliot moves through the dismantled streets of London, he
seems to inhabit a purgatory that contains one and only one shade, as if Tradition had fined itself
down to a sole Individual Talent, that of Yeats. Like Auden, Eliot seems eager to deface the
mighty ghost: Eliot makes him confess that he fought the light as well as the darkness, as if his
anarchic strength were so great that nothing whatever, good or bad, could stand before him. In
The Waste Land Eliot imagined a Thunder Word, DA, an utterance of such force that it might
restore vitality to a slack exhausted culture; in Little Gidding Eliot imagines a Thunder
Speaker, a furious wraith who seems to energize and to destroy; to prophesy and to lacerate; to
sustain, even if that sustenance has the bitter taste of shadow fruit. The ghost seems an abstract
of the whole culture of the English language, in all its triumph and failure.
In both Audens poem and Eliots, the ghost is so intimate with the elegist that every
excoriation of the ghost seems a form of self-excoriation. As Auden wrote many years later,
Yeats has become for me a symbol of my own devil of inauthenticity [. . . his poems] make me
whore after lies.4 This almost repeats Eliots complaint that Yeatss supernatural world was
the wrong supernatural world. It was not a world of spiritual significance, not a world of real
Good and Evil, of holiness or sin, but a highly sophisticated lower mythology summoned, like a
physician, to supply the fading pulse of poetry with some transient stimulant so that the dying
patient may utter his last words.5 For Auden and Eliot, Yeats was false: he wrote potent,
unforgettable poetry without caring whether the content were good or evil, truth or error. In the
elegy Auden calls him A way of happening, a mouth, a line that may insinuate that Yeats was
all mouth and no brain, a blank megaphone, the decadents posie pure incarnate. Still, he
looms.
What Harold Bloom calls the anxiety of influence usually leads to a more elegant and
subtle subversion of the great father-poet than this hectoring of Yeats. Auden and Eliot seem to
see themselves as walking in Yeatss footsteps, just as Chaucer, at the end of Troilus and
Criseyde (1382-86), asks his litel book to kis the steppes where as thow seest pace / Virgile,

Ovide, Omer, Lucan, and Stace. But Auden and Eliot seem to find themselves confronted with
a path that leads straight to purgatory, if not to hell. Has poetry itself, in a dying culture, simply
become a form of lying?the extraordinary prosiness of Audens and Eliots later works might
suggest that with Yeats the art of poetry has reached its end.
But perhaps Yeats could stimulate his successors precisely because his rhetorical
vehemence seemed disconnected from any discipline except the discipline of poetic form. If he
struck Auden and Eliot as amoral, evasive, indifferent to truth, he nevertheless reminded them
that poetry is incantation, spell, charman art dedicated not to correctness but to power. Auden
and Eliot were suspicious of the poets archaic and magical aspectAuden once wrote thst the
purpose of poetry is by telling the truth, to disenchant and disintoxicate.6 But it is impossible
to disenchant without some prior enchantment, and it may be that Yeats and his drabber Mugglesuccessors form a single whole. The long tradition of British poets, from the savage bards who
could make trees walk by casting spells, to the refined sorcery of Yeats, may find its complement
and antidote in the later Modernism of Eliot and Auden. But perhaps disillusionment is itself a
flattering illusion, and the poet who whores after lies may not always go in the wrong direction.
According to my records, the third visitation of Yeatss ghost occurred in 1945, in a
detention camp in Pisa:
I recalled the noise in the chimney
as it were the wind in the chimney
but was in reality Uncle William
downstairs composing
that had made a great Peeeeacock
in the proide ov his oiye
had made a great peeeeeeecock in the...
made a great peacock
in the proide of his oyyee
proide ov his oy-ee
as indeed he had, and perdurable
a great peacock aere perennius7
In this passage from Ezra Pounds Canto LXXXIII, memories of Yeats seem to intensify into a
sort of clairaudience. Pound recalls a moment from the winter of 1913-14, when he and Yeats
lived in a cottage in Sussex learning craft from one another: Yeats was bawling his poem The

Peacock out loud, to test its cadences as he invented it. Now, in 1945, the finished poem
disarticulates itself into wind, pneuma, sheer inspiration. Yeatss organ seems to fill vast spaces
with sound, as if he, so intimate with transcendence, had become after death the voice of
imagination itself.
For Yeatss successors, then, Yeats was both god and idol, the ark of the covenant and
the golden calf.
If Yeats became a ghost that haunted Modernism, Modernism was also a ghost that
haunted Yeats. Yeats often casts himself as the enemy of Modernism: if Eliot condemns
Romanticism as fragmentary [. . .] immature [. . .] chaotic,8 Yeats asserts We were the last
romantics9; and again and again Yeats flogs the Modernist poets for their sloppiness of
construction (All out of shape from toe to top10) and flatness of diction. He never pretends to
understand the concept of free verse; the best that he can say of an ametrical poem that he finds
reasonably attractive, Pounds The Return, was that it seems like a brilliant improvisation that
has not got all the wine into the bowl.11 When, in the Introduction to The Oxford Book of
Modern Verse (1936), the elderly Yeats sums up his response to contemporary poetry, he finds a
writhe, a seethe, a degenerate mess: Nature, steel-bound or stone-built in the nineteenth century,
became a flux where man drowned or swam; the moment had come for some poet to cry the
flux is in my own mind.12 Most of all Yeats despises the absence of metaphor, the dead plod, in
advanced recent poetry: he even offers a little caricature of a Modernist poem, It has sometimes
seemed of late years [. . .] as if the poet could at any moment write a poem by recording the
fortuitous scene or thought, perhaps it might be enough to put into some fashionable rhythmI
am sitting in a chair, there are three dead flies on a corner of the ceiling.13 As Yeats says
elsewhere, this rejection of imagination reminds him of the sedate bewigged poetry of the
Augustan age: Technically we are in a state corresponding to the time of Dryden [. . .] We are
developing a poetry of statement as against the old metaphor. The poetry of to-morrow will be
finely articulated fact. T. S. Eliot fascinates us all because he is further on towards this
consummation than any other writer.14 It seems that Modernist poetry paradoxically combines
all the worst aspects of triviality and incomprehensibility.
And yet, one might venture to argue that there is not a single feature that Yeats ascribes
to Modernist poetry that cannot be found in Yeatss own poetry. Vulgar diction starts to intrude

in the late 1930s: His rod and its butting head / Limp as a worm; Belly, shoulder, bum, / Flash
fishlike.15 Much earlier, at the time of his winters in Sussex with Pound, there come
experiments with something like free verse. Compare Pounds The Return with a passage
from Yeatss play At the Hawks Well:
See, they return, one, and by one,
With fear, as half-awakened;
As if the snow should hesitate
And murmur in the wind,
and half turn back;16
Her heavy eyes
Know nothing, or but look upon stone.
The wind that blows out to sea
Turns over the heaped-up leaves at her side;
They rustle and diminish.17
It is difficult to find any technical reason for declaring one passage freer than the other: each has
irregular line lengths, and an iambic pulse unsteadied by extra syllables in odd positions; if
anything, more wine spills out of Yeatss bowl than Pounds. As for Modernist fortuitousness,
dependency on casual observation, we can even find a Yeats poem not far removed from I am
sitting in a chair, there are three dead flies on a corner of the ceiling:
The bees build in the crevices
Of loosening masonry, and there
The mother birds bring grubs and flies.
My wall is loosening;18
This is a somewhat unfair example, since Yeats instantly proceeds to take the scenery as a
metaphor for his spiritual state, and the stanza concludes with a prayer:
honey-bees,
Come build in the empty house of the stare.
On the other hand, might not the imaginary Modernist poet have meant the three dead flies as an
emblem of despondency, torpor? Does not Yeats himself mean to say something about the inner
life of Modernism by referring to the three dead flies?
One aspect of bold artistic ambition is the desire to be complete; and Yeats may have felt,
consciously or unconsciously, that he had to incorporate the methods and themes of Modernism
in order to comprehend in himself the whole round of art. Similarly Igor Stravinsky, in old age,

fitfully abandoned his tonal style and adopted an idiosyncratic version of Arnold Schoenbergs
twelve-tone methods. Stravinsky waited until Schoenbergs death in 1951 before attempting
something that might be read as capitulation; Yeats, however, did not have the luxury of trying to
outlive Pound, Eliot, and Auden, and so had to fight them and to accommodate them at the same
time.
Many of those whom we call the High Modernists were born in the 1880s: Ludwig
Kirchner, Pablo Picasso, Stravinsky, Bla Bartk, Virginia Woolf, Anton Webern, James Joyce,
D. H. Lawrence, Pound, Alban Berg, and Eliot, for example. Yeats was born in 1865, during a
decade far less richly productive of English writers; but if we look beyond the confines of
English literature, we find in the 1860s the birthyears of a number of important Modernists, or
precursors to Modernism, such as Claude Debussy, Gustav Klimt, Richard Strauss, Vassily
Kandinsky, and Henri Matisse. All of them were profoundly influenced by the aesthetic of
Symbolism, the artistic movement that leads most directly into Modernism.
Accounts of the origin of Modernism often begin with Charles Baudelaire, partly because
Baudelaires The Painter of Modern Life (1864) gave such prestige to the term modern:
this solitary mortal endowed with an active imagination, always roaming the great desert
of men [. . .] is looking for that indefinable something we may be allowed to call
modernity, for want of a better term to express the idea in question. The aim for him is
to extract from fashion the poetry that resides in its historical envelope, to distil the
eternal from the transitory. [. . .] Modernity is the transient, the fleeting, the contingent; it
is one half of art, the other being the eternal and the immovable. [. . .] You have no right
to despise this transitory fleeting element, the metamorphoses of which are so frequent,
nor to dispense with it. If you do, you inevitably fall into the emptiness of an abstract and
indefinable beauty19
Of course, if Modernism is defined as the art of fugitive urban junkposters for last weeks
cabaret singers ungluing in the rain, orange peels flushing into the sewersYeats is the least
Modernist of poets. Many Modernists were at home in cities; one rarely encounters a major
character in a novel by Joyce or Woolf who would feel comfortable milking a cow. But Yeatss
attitude toward the pavements grey, despite the fact that he lived in Dublin or London for most of
his life, was contempt: When I stand upon OConnell bridge in the half-light and notice that
discordant architecture, all those electric signs, where modern heterogeneity has taken physical
form, a vague hatred comes come up out of my own dark.20
On the other hand, Baudelaire was also the poet of Correspondences, which defines

nature as a temple where living pillars utter confusing wordsman passes through a forest of
symbols that stare at him with an intimate gaze. This is the sonnet that gave an important push to
the Symbolist movement. In fact, the tension in Baudelaires aesthetic between the transitory
fleeting element and abstract and indefinable beautybetween the citys detritus and
transsensuous sanctityhelped to generate Modernism itself. In his occult book A Vision (1925)
Yeats expresses this tension as an eternal competition between objective (factual, ugly) and
subjective (symbolic, beautiful), continually boring into one another in the peculiar arrangement
he called a double gyrea set of intersecting cones. Yeats feels that the Modernist artists were to
some extent failures, in that their work shows a grotesque floundering between realistic and
mythic / hallucinatory elements:
Mr Ezra Pound, Mr Eliot, Mr Joyce, Signor Pirandello [. . .] either eliminate from
metaphor the poets phantasy [. . .] or [. . .] break up the logical processes of thought by
flooding them with associated ideas or words that seem to drift into the mind by chance;
or [. . .] set side by side as in Henry IV, The Waste Land, Ulysses, the physical
primarya lunatic among his keepers, a man fishing behind a gas works, the vulgarity of
a single Dublin day prolonged through 700 pagesand the spiritual primary, delirium, the
Fisher King, Ulysses wandering. It is as though myth and fact [. . .] have now fallen so
far apart21
This is not a bad reading of Modernism: a heap of urban garbage weirdly juxtaposed with
antique glamour. Professors like to teach Ulysses by stressing the points of connection between
Homers Odyssey and Joyces novel; but much of the pleasure lies in the bitonal clash, the
discord between the two texts.
From a Symbolist point of viewfrom Yeatss point of viewthe objective or realistic
elements exist only as a sort of colorful wrapping paper that half-disguises, half-reveals, the
bright ineffabilities within. As Thomas Carlyle put it in 1836, mans Life is properly the
bodying forth of the Invisible, and In a Symbol there is concealment and yet revelation22; as
Jean Moras put it in the Symbolist manifesto of 1886,
Symbolic poetry, the enemy of instruction, declamation, false sensibility, and
objective description, seeks to clothe the Idea in a tangible form which will not be that
poetrys object but which, while serving to express the Idea, will remain subordinate.
Nor must the Idea itself be seen stripped of the sumptuous robes of external analogy; for
the essential characteristic of symbolic art is never to go so far as the conception of the
Idea in itself. Thus, in this art, neither scenes from nature nor human actions nor any
other physical phenomena can be present in themselves: what we have instead are
perceptible appearances designed to represent their esoteric affinities with primordial
Ideas.23

Symbolist art, then, is an aesthetic of strip-tease, an unveiling of something (intense, devastating)

that can never be shown quite naked, lest the spectator, like Semele, perish from overapprehension. This explains why the Symbolists keep reviving again and again the story of
Salome (who never had a dance of the seven veils until Oscar Wilde provided her with one in his
1893 play): Richard Strauss in his 1905 opera; Yeats in the story The Binding of the Hair
(1896) and the plays The King of the Great Clock Tower (1934) and A Full Moon in March
(1935); and Klimt in his 1901 Judith (presumably the severed head belongs to Holofernes, not
John the Baptist, but the womans eyes-half-shut, head-thrown-back, lips-faintly-parted look of
sexual languor tends to make the spectator think first of Salome). The art work becomes the
garment of shimmering gold, the erogenous zone beneath which some bulge of meaning makes
itself felt.
Yeats is always happier with symbols drawn from the traditional stock of conventions
than with symbols drawn from modern life. For Yeats, such fact-scenes as a man fishing behind
the gas works could never align themselves properly with a myth, a meaningso The Waste Land
looks to him like a bunch of industrial photographs arbitrarily pasted onto the story of Parsifal or
Adonis, like a tin can tied to a dogs tail. It took a later generation of Modernists to savor the
dissonance between fact and myth with full appreciation of the aesthetic possibilities.
Nevertheless Yeatss works, like those of all the Symbolists, are full of the most up-to-date
references, though the contemporaneity is sometimes occluded. The Viennese public that first
saw Klimts Judith regarded it as a disturbing portrait of a contemporary upper-class Jewish
woman, and Klimts exceedingly volumeless, intricate style reflects the most recent artistic
trends; Strausss music characterizes Salome as a creature of pure chromatic glitz, sometimes
slithering out of tonality altogether; and Yeats furnishes his play The King of the Great Clock
Tower with the movable abstract sets that the visionary director Gordon Craig had devised for a
famous early-twentieth-century production of Dido and Aeneas: an inner curtain [. . .] may
have a stenciled pattern of dancers . [. . .] one sees to left the King and Queen upon two thrones,
which may be two cubes. There should be two cubes upon the opposite side to balance them. [. .
.] The background may be a curtain hung in [. . .] a semi-circle of one foot Craig screens, so
painted that the blue is darker below than above.24 Yeats aspires to a sort of timelessness, but
the conventions of his eternity are those determined by the Cubism of Picasso and the

dramaturgy of the Noh play as revealed by a Japanese dancer who had studied with the
Denishawn modern dance company in New York. Another sign of Yeatss engrossment with
Modernist abstraction can be found in his last play, The Death of Cuchulain, in which
Cuchulains severed head is represented by a black parallelogram, the size of a mans head.
There are six other parallelograms near the backcloth.25 The more fervently Yeats tries to
disencumber himself of the modern world, the more deeply the modern world imprints itself
upon his work.
The first aesthetic movement fully to rejoice in the technological presentand in that
sense the first Modernist movementthrust itself on Europe in 1909, when Filippo Tommaso
Marinetti published his Futurist manifesto in Le Figaro. For Baudelaire, the city was a zone of
detachment, where a distinguished, nearly extinguished observer could gaze into shop windows,
or contemplate a spectral throng of passing strangers; for Marinetti, the city was a zone of power,
the buzzsaw of motors on the street, the silent buzz of electric wires above, an outspew of
signifiers. For Marinetti, an art work should aspire to the brute certainty of the laws of physics:
To substitute for human psychology, now exhausted, the lyric obsession with matter. [. . .] The
warmth of a piece of iron or wood is in our opinion more impassioned than the smile or tears of a
woman.26 Furthermore, art should attune itself to the radiation that permeates the universeas
he wrote, collaborating with some Futurist painters, in the Technical Manifesto of Futurist
Painting: All things move, all things run, all things are rapidly changing. [. . .] moving objects
constantly multiply themselves: their form changes, like rapid vibrations, in their mad career.
Thus a running horse has not four legs but twenty [. . .] Who can still believe in the opacity of
bodies, since our sharpened and multiplied sensitivity has already penetrated the obscure
manifestations of the medium? Why should we forget in our creations the doubled power of our
sight, capable of giving results analogous to those of X-rays?27
Yeats, of course, detests most of the things that Marinetti loved. He purges his poetic
vocabulary of technological words; as he explains to Virginia Woolf, such words as steamroller
were altogether dead to his ear: He said that the spade had been embalmed by 30 centuries of
association; not so the steam roller. The great age of poetry, Shakespeare's age, was subjective;
ours is objective; civilisations end when they become objectified. Poets can only write when
they have symbols. And steam rollers are not covered in symbolismperhaps they may be after

30 generations.28 For Marinetti, the shock, the crush, imparts to the steamroller the most potent
symbolic value, while the spade has long since sunk into the realm of the boring; for Yeats,
symbolic value can be imparted only by age and long useno word is fit for poetry unless your
great-grandfather uttered it.
And yet, Yeats is fascinated by what he loathes, and technology, obliquely or directly,
makes a strong appearance in his writing. Aerial warfare especially haunts him, from the
symbolical brazen hawks whose innumerable clanging wings that have put out the moon to
the quite explicit evocation, Aeroplane and Zeppelin will come out, / Pitch like King Billy
bomb-balls in.29 A canceled passage from Under Ben Bulben, also on the theme of aerial
bombardment, shows Yeatss closest approach to Futurism:
So whats the odds if war must come
From Moscow, from Berlin, or Rome.
Let children should an aeroplane
Some neighbouring city pavement stain,
Or Should the deafening cannon sound
Clasp their hands & dance in a round.
The passing moment makes it sweet
When male & female organ meet 30
The poem cuts from exploding bombs to dancing children to orgasm. Marinetti wrote odes to his
femme fatale the machine gun; Yeats here toys with a similar confusion of the erotic and
technological. Yeatss great-grandfather surely never used the word aeroplane; and yet a device
that can provoke such powerful glee may indeed be fit for use in a poem.
Even the robot, that science-fiction gadget familiar from Karel apeks R.U.R. (1921) and
Fritz Langs film Metropolis (1927), has a role to play in Yeatss imagination. Ezra Pound, in
his more demonic aspect, could appear to Yeats as a big doll or robot: Mr. Pound, not
transfigured but transfixed contemplat[ing] the race [. . .] until hatred turns the flesh to wood and
the nerves to wire.31 And when Yeats considers the future society of A.D. 2000the end of our
modern thing-driven, fact-ridden civilization, according to his historical systemhe has a vision
of gigantic puppets chomping or manipulating small human figures:
with the last gyre must come a desire to be ruled or rather, seeing that desire is all but
dead, an adoration of force spiritual or physical, and society as mechanical force be
complete at last.

Constrained, arraigned, baffled, bent and unbent

By those wire-jointed jaws and limbs of wood
Themselves obedient,
Knowing not evil and good.
A decadence will descend [. . .] what awaits us, being democratic and primary, may
suggest bubbles in a frozen pondmathematical Babylonian starlight.32
Technology may be Moloch, a general smashing or petrifying of things, but it does not lack
poetic interest.
The machine is exceedingly sinister in Yeatss work, as his version of a mock mechanical
Creation suggests:
Locke sank into a swoon;
The Garden died;
God took the spinning-jenny
Out of his side.33
Yeats discovers the gynoid not only in the spinning-jenny but also in The Waste Lands typist,
whose verse-movement seems to him as mechanical as the gramophone she plays with
automatic hand: in The Waste Land there is much monotony of accent.34 But if Yeats hates
machines, he likes electromagnetic radiation just as much as the Futurists did. Giacomo Balla
painted objects that decompose into fields of force (Street Lamp 1909); Luigi Russolo painted
objects generated from the vibration-patterns of sound (Music, 1912). If Yeats, following Blake,
rejects the Newtonian model of the clockwork cosmos in which dead objects swing inexorably
around other dead objects, Yeats hopes that post-Newtonian physics may be far more congenial
may even find experimental proof for the existence of the phenomena he witnesses during
spiritualist sances:
I once heard Sir William Crookes tell half a dozen people that he had seen a
flower carried in broad daylight slowly across the room by what seemed an invisible
hand. His chemical research led to the discovery of radiant matter, but the science that
shapes opinion has ignored his other research that seems to those who study it the slow
preparation for the greatest, perhaps the most dangerous, revolution in thought Europe
has seen since the Renaissance, a revolution that may, perhaps, establish the scientific
complement of certain philosophies that in all ancient countries sustained heroic art.35
Crookes was the physicist who developed the cathode ray tube, by sending an electric current
through rarefied air; the radiant matter mentioned by Yeats has nothing to do with
radioactivity, but instead refers to a fourth state of matter, beyond solid, liquid, or gas, that
Crookes (incorrectly) described. Crookes noticed that cathode rays caused certain substances to

phosphoresce; and it seemed to Yeats that Crookes scientific and psychic researches were
convergingthat ectoplasm was receiving a sort of public confirmation. Marinetti looked
forward to an art of pure radiation: The reception amplification and transfiguration of vibrations
emitted by matter

Just as today we listen to the song of the forest and the sea so tomorrow

shall we be seduced by the vibrations of a diamond or a flower.36 It is of course a long way

from Madame Blavatsky to Marconi, and yet both Yeats and Marinetti hope for a poetry in
which potent vibrations far beyond the visible spectrum would enter into the field of knowing.
During and just after the Great War, starting in the cabarets of Zurich and Berlin, the
Modernist movement stared directly at its limits. How far could art go toward a radical attack on
the assumptions that governed its own operation and reception? How far could art go toward a
disengagment of itself from history, from canons of beauty, from the human mind itself? Here,
in the world of Dada, artists performed experiments in dismembering art: Tristan Tzara, for
example, generated poems by cutting up newsprint into individual words, mixing them in a hat,
and pulling them out one by one. Here is the art that Yeats sets himself against, All out of
shape from toe to topindeed it had no purpose except to investigate the aesthetics of out-ofshape. And yet, from a certain point of view, the Dadaists were behaving like magicians, who
have always looked for inspiration to random designs, the pattern of dregs in the bottom of
teacups, the flight of birds, the twist of intestines, a word chosen by chance from Virgil or the
Bible. Yeatss magic was purposive and consequential, unlike the magic of the Dadaists, but
they were alike hoping for revelation from disordered fields or from the null set.
According to the mythology of Yeatss A Vision, personality types close to the full moon,
Phase 15, are lost in imaginative reverie, while personality types close to the new moon, Phase 1,
are lost in contemplation of objective truth. Therefore, those personality types that fit into the
last few days of the lunar month, Phases 26, 27, and 28, lead useful lives only insofar as they try
to cure themselves of desire, try to accept the physical world exactly as it is. For most of the
phases, Yeats lists human exemplars, such as Keats in Phase 14, and Blake (and Maud Gonne) in
Phase 16, since Romantic poets and beautiful women manifest the maximum degree of
imagination; but for the extremely objective phases, Yeats mentions no specific people, except
for Socrates and Pascal in Phase 27, the phase of the Saintmost of those born in these phases
have too little personality to leave any trace in the historical record. Abandoned to the sheer

factuality of things, they cannot register any Gestalten of themselves against the immitigable
background of hard objects and hard ideas. And yet, Yeats likes to correlate his phases of human
personality with artistic movements; and if I read his descriptions of Phases 26 and 28 correctly,
Yeats is thinking of people who might be called Dadaists.
Phase 26 is called the Hunchback, or the Multiple Man:
All the old abstraction, whether of morality or of belief, has now been exhausted
[. . .] there is an attempt to substitute a new abstraction, a simulation of self-expression. [.
. .] He is all emphasis, and the greater that emphasis the more does he show himself
incapable of emotion, the more does he display his sterility. If he live amid a
theologically minded people, his greatest temptation may be to defy God, to become a
Judas who betrays, not for thirty pieces of silver, but that he may call himself creator. [. .
.] The Hunchback is his own Body of Fate.37
Body of Fate is Yeatss technical term for the objective world as it manifests itself to a particular
person. Therefore, the Hunchback has in effect turned into a thing: incapable of having a finite
personality, he is simply a deformation, a lump of clay not yet shaped into a man. If Yeatss
Hunchback, utterly incoherent and unimaginative, were to become an artist, he could do little
more than to exhibit his own falseness by means of spasms of nihilistic defiance. This is one
interpretation of what the Dadaists in fact did. In Yeatss play about Judas, Calvary (1920), the
Roman soldiers perform a dance of the dice-throwers for Christs cloak, and, in a note to the
play, Yeats tells a story about an old Arab who has spent his life worshiping Gods Chance: If I
should throw from the dice-box there would be but six possible sides on each of the dice, but
when God throws He uses dice that have all numbers and sides.38 I know no better description
of the God of Dada, the random number generator from whom the universe streams. As Tzara
said, Everything is incoherent [. . .] There is no logic. [. . .] The acts of life have no beginning
and no end. Everything happens in a completely idiotic way.39 If the Hunchback points the way
toward identification of the human subject with exterior chaos, Yeatss Fool, at Phase 28, has
fully achieved it: He is but straw blown by the wind, with no mind but the wind and no act but a
nameless drifting and turning.40 It is as if he were cut up and put inside Tzaras hat.
Of all the radical aspects of Modernism, Surrealism came closest to touching Yeats. By
the early 1920s the disintegrating force of Dada had reached such a pitch that it managed to
disintegrate itself; and from its orts and scraps Andr Breton cobbled together a movement which
he called, borrowing a term that Apollinaire had coined in 1917, Surrealism. Surrealism can be

conceived as a pyschologizing of Dada, in that it displaced the locus of random from the exterior
universe to the human mind. As Breton defined it in the Surrealist Manifesto, SURREALISM,
n. Pure psychic automatism [. . .] Dictation of thought in the absence of all control exercised by
reason.41 Breton experimented with methods for hearing the inspired voice, the dictation of the
unconscious, by cultivating states of trance, waiting, at last transcribing the mysterious words
and images that appeared. Breton gave a famous example of words that knocked at the
window of his mind: 'There is a man cut in two by the window [. . .] it was accompanied by a
feeble visual representation of a walking man sliced halfway up by a window perpendicular to
this axis of his body.42
Bretons automatism had the cachet of Freud and the literary avant-garde. But Yeats was
pursuing a surprisingly similar automatism, under the far less reputable aegis of occult research.
Yeats records in his autobiography some of his sessions with Macgregor Mathers, a quixotic,
war-obsessed visionary: when Yeats closed his eyes and Mathers held a cardboard symbol to
Yeatss head, there arose before me mental images that I could not control: a desert and black
Titan raising himself up by his two hands from the middle of a heap of ancient ruins. Mathers
explained that I had seen a being of the order of Salamanders because he had shown me their
symbol.43 In this light, Yeatss poem The Second Coming (1920) looks like a transcript of an
automatic process of image-evocation: the poet empties his mind until it becomes a tabula rasa;
then in the blank desert there appear complicated intra-ocular effects (Reel shadows of the
indignant desert birds) and in the center a vision, more virtual than actual, of a sphinxAntichrist, slouching towards Bethlehem to be born.44 Breton sought what he called
convulsive beauty; and Yeatss poems often record both images of terrible beauty and the
processes of imaginative convulsion that bring them into being.
Yeats differs from Breton in that his rigid stanza forms, his extraordinary syntactical
control, impose a sort of discipline on the imaginative act. Yet sometimes that very discipline
could impose a sense of the automatic. Sailing to Byzantium (1927) begins with a leisurely,
somewhat loose stanza about Irelands salmon falls and mackerel-crowded sees, but ends with a
stanza in which the poet imagines himself transfigured after death into a golden birdwritten in
tick-tock iambs, this stanza gives the feel of a key winding the mechanical birds mainspring. It
is a powerful conclusion, this twitter of hammered gold and gold enameling; and yet it verges on
a whole world of Modernist toys, as in Stravinskys Hans Christian Andersen fable The

Nightingale (1914)the artificial nightingale is Stravinskys true heroine, not the real one
George Antheils Golden Bird (1921), and Paul Klees Twittering Machine (1921). One of the
sources of Surrealisms force is a certain shivery sense that the voice of the unconscious or
transconscious has little of human pertinence to saythat its dictate is something inanimate, vain,
a measured seizure, a rote chirp. It makes us uncomfortable to think that deepest oracle may
scarcely serve to keep a drowsy emperor awake.
In the last year of his life, when Yeats decrying the out-of-shape-from-toe-to-top as
loudly as he could, he was also experimenting more intently than ever before with seriously
shapeless ways of writing, as in High Talk (1938), a poem about a stilt-walker:
All metaphor, Malachi, stilts and all. A barnacle goose
Far up in the stretches of night; night splits and the dawn breaks loose;
I, through the terrible novelty of light, stalk on, stalk on;
Those great sea-horses bare their teeth and laugh at the dawn.45
Yeats does not quite indulge in the slosh of images that Andr Breton could produce, but he
comes close:
Ah, to take a bath, a bath of the Romans, a sand bath, an asss milk sand bath. [. . .] To
travel on the back of a jellyfish, on the surface of the water, then to sink into the depths to
get the appetite of blind fish, of blind fish that have the appetite of birds that howl at
life.46
This passage is from The Immaculate Conception (1930), a text in which Breton tries to find
prose equivalents for various mental diseases. As Yeatss speaker admits that he and his world
consist entirely of metaphor, he seems to lose any sense of what these tropes are metaphors for:
they seem to become free radicals, figures of speech incapable of terminating in meaning,
metaphors for nothing in particular, simply constituents of a landscape deliquescing into ecstasy.
This is an essentially Surrealist state of referencelessness: barnacles, geese, sea-horses, it is all a
pullulation of words, just as Bretons text continually deviates into inconsequence. The
recklessness of Yeatss last year can scarcely be exaggerated. Sometimes he casts a cold eye on
life and death; other times he undergoes strange seizures of giddiness and frivolity, as when, in
his play The Hernes Egg, a man enters leading a Donkey, a donkey on wheels like a childs toy,
but life-size.47 One explanation of the origin of the word dada is that it is a childs word for
hobby-horse; Yeats promotes the hobby-horse to a character in an apocalyptic farce.
It could be argued that Yeatss A Vision is the greatest of all Surrealist experiments.

Based on years and years of George Yeatss trances, in the form of both automatic writing and
transcriptions of voices she uttered while she slept, A Vision ever falters in its attempts to
rationalize the unrationalizable: the messages from the unconscious, or from beyond death, seem
all the eerier because they exercise such strong resistance against interpretation. Bretons texts,
by contrast, have a certain stressless feel, because Breton, a trusting man, rarely calls them into
question. I have previously quoted some of the passages from A Vision that describe the failure
of the human subject to constitute itself before the disorderliness, the defunction of things;
perhaps no Modernist text is more intimate with chaos.
The strenuous geometry of A Vision, with its diagrams of gyres and cones and midnight
things, does not lessen the feel of chaoss hand at work. Nothing is more formless than arbitrary
form: when the form imposed is the wrong form for the content, or when the content is such that
any form would be the wrong form, then form does not serve to articulate or illuminate. Yeats
deplores the arbitrary form he found in Cubist painting:
I feel in Wyndham Lewiss Cubist pictures an element corresponding to rhetoric arising
from his confusion of the abstract with the rhythmical. Rhythm implies a living body, a
breast to rise and fall, or limbs that dance, while the abstract is incompatible with life.48
And yet, he repeatedly describes A Vision as an essentially Cubist book:
the whole philosophy was so expounded in a series of fragments which only displayed
their meaning, like one of those child's pictures which are made up out of separate cubes,
when all were put together.49
This childishness is not something clumsy and immature, but the high childishness of High
Modernism itself:
now that my system stands out clearly in my imagination I regard [the gyres] as stylistic
arrangements of experience comparable to the cubes in the drawing of Wyndham Lewis
and to the ovoids in the sculpture of Brancusi.50
Yeats fights Modernism as hard as he could, only to find himself acknowledging that he was
Modernist to the marrow of his bones. But this paradox is itself typical, for the Modernist often
travels a road as far as it will go, only to wind up in some exactly opposite place.
Notes
1. W. H. Auden, The English Auden, ed. Edward Mendelson (New York: Random House, 1977),
pp. 242-43.

2. Ibid, pp. 390-91.

3. Helen Gardner, The Composition of Four Quartets (New York: Oxford University Press,
1978), p. 186.
4. Humphrey Carpenter, W. H. Auden: A Biography (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1981), p. 416.
5. T. S. Eliot, After Strange Gods: A Primer of Modern Heresy (New York: Harcourt, Brace,
1933), p . 51.
6. W. H. Auden, The Dyers Hand (New York: Random House, 1962), p. 27.
7. Ezra Pound, The Cantos of Ezra Pound (New York: New Directions, 1995), p. 553-54.
Horace (Odes 3.30) intended his poems to be aere perennius, more lasting than bronze.
8. T. S. Eliot, Selected Essays (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1960), p. 15.
9. W. B. Yeats, The Poems, ed. Daniel Albright (London: J. M. Dent, 1994), p. 294.
10. Ibid, p. 375.
11. W. B. Yeats, ed., The Oxford Book of Modern Verse, 1892-1935 (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1936), p. xxvi.
12. Ibid, p. xxviii.
13. Ibid, pp. xxvii-xxviii.
14. E. H. Mikhail, E. H. W. B. Yeats: Interviews and Recollections (New York: Barnes and
Noble Books, 1977), vol. II, p. 200.
15. Yeats, The Poems, pp. 348, 386.
16. Ezra Pound, Personae (New York: New Directions, 1926), p. 74.
17. W. B. Yeats, The Variorum Edition of the Plays of W. B. Yeats, ed. Russell K. Alspach (New
York: Macmillan, 1966), p. 401.
18. Yeats, The Poems, p. 250.
19. Modernism: An Anthology of Sources and Documents, ed. Vassiliki Kolocontroni et. al.,
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998, pp. 106-7. The translator here is P. E. Charvet.
20. W. B. Yeats, Essays and Introductions (New York: Macmillan, 1968), p. 526.
21. W. B. Yeats, A Critical Edition of Yeats's A Vision (1925), ed. G. M. Harper and W. K. Hood

(New York: Macmillan, 1978), pp. 211-12.

22. Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus (London: J. M. Dent, 1975), pp. 164-65.
23. Cited in Robert L. Delevoy, Symbolists and Symbolism (New York: Rizzoli, 1982), p . 71.
24. Yeats, Variorum Plays, pp. 990, 992.
25. Ibid, p. 1061.
26. Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Marinetti: Selected Writings, tr. R. W. Flint and Arthur A.
Coppotelli (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1972), p. 87.
27. Cited in Caroline Tisdall and Angelo Bozzolla, Futurism (New York: Thames and Hudson,
1989), pp. 33, 35.
28. Virginia Woolf, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Volume III, 1925-1930, ed. Anne Olivier Bell,
assisted by Andrew McNeillie (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980), p. 330
29. Yeats, The Poems, p. 252, 341.
30. Jon Stallworthy, Vision and Revision in Yeats's Last Poems (Oxford: The Clarendon Press,
1969), pp. 163-64.
31. George Mills Harper, The Making of Yeats's 'A Vision: A Study of the Automatic Script,
Volume II (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1987), p. 28.
32. Yeats, Critical Edition of Yeatss A Vision (1925), p. 213. Yeats here quotes a version of a
stanza of his poem The Double Vision of Michael Robartes.
33. Yeats, The Poems, p. 260.
34. Yeats, Oxford Book of Modern Verse, p. xxi.
35. Yeats, Variorum Plays, p. 569.
36. Filippo Tommaso Marinetti and Pino Masnata, La radia, tr. Stephen Sartarelli, in Wireless
Imagination, ed. Douglas Kahn and Gregory Whitehead (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992), p. 267.
37. W. B. Yeats, A Vision (New York: Macmillan, 1969), pp. 177-78.
38. Yeats, Variorum Plays, p. 790.
39. Robert Motherwell, ed., The Dada Painters and Poets: An Anthology (Cambridge: Belknap
Press, 1981), pp. 250-51.
40. Yeats, A Vision, p. 182.

41. Breton, Oeuvres compltes, dition tablie par Marguerite Bonnet (Paris: ditions Gallimard,
1988), vol. I, p. 328
42. Ibid, pp. 324-35.
43. W. B. Yeats, The Autobiography of W. B. Yeats (New York: Collier, 1965), p. 125.
44. Yeats, The Poems, p. 235.
45. Ibid, p. 391.
46. Andr Breton, What is Surrealism? Selected Writings, ed. Franklin Rosemont (New York:
Pathfinder, 1978), p. 50. This passage was translated by John Ashbery.
47. Yeats, Variorum Plays, p. 1014.
48. W. B. Yeats, The Letters of W. B. Yeats, ed. Allan Wade (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1954),
p. 608.
49. Yeats, A Critical Edition of Yeatss A Vision (1925), p. 11.
50. Yeats, A Vision, p. 25.