One thing that Marxist criticism has not succeeded in doing is to trace
the connection between “tendency” and literary style. The subject-matter
and imagery of a book can be explained in sociological terms, but its
texture seemingly cannot. Yet some such connection there must be. One
knows, for instance, that a Socialist would not write like Chesterton or
a Tory imperialist like Bernard Shaw, though HOW one knows it is not
easy to say. In the case of Yeats, there must be some kind of connection
between his wayward, even tortured style of writing and his rather
sinister vision of life. Mr Menon is chiefly concerned with the
esoteric philosophy underlying Yeats’s work, but the quotations which
are scattered all through his interesting book serve to remind one how
artificial Yeats’s manner of writing was. As a rule, this artificiality
is accepted as Irishism, or Yeats is even credited with simplicity
because he uses short words, but in fact one seldom comes on six
consecutive lines of his verse in which there is not an archaism or an
affected turn of speech. To take the nearest example:
Grant me an old man’s Frenzy,
My self must I remake
Till I am Timon and Lear
Or that William Blake
Who beat upon the wall
Till Truth obeyed his call.
The unnecessary “that” imports a feeling of affectation, and the same
tendency is present in all but Yeats’s best passages. One is seldom long
away from a suspicion of “quaintness”, something that links up not only
with the ‘nineties, the Ivory Tower and the “calf covers of pissed-on
green”, but also with Rackham’s drawings, Liberty art-fabrics and the
PETER PAN never-never land, of which, after all, “The Happy Townland” is
merely a more appetising example. This does not matter, because, on the
whole, Yeats gets away with it, and if his straining after effect is
often irritating, it can also produce phrases (“the chill, footless
years”, “the mackerel-crowded seas”) which suddenly overwhelm one like a
girl’s face seen across a room. He is an exception to the rule that poets
do not use poetical language:
How many centuries spent
The sedentary soul
In toils of measurement
Beyond eagle or mole,
Beyond hearing or seeing,
Or Archimedes’ guess,
To raise into being
That loveliness?
Here he does not flinch from a squashy vulgar word like “loveliness” and
after all it does not seriously spoil this wonderful passage. But the
same tendencies, together with a sort of raggedness which is no doubt
intentional, weaken his epigrams and polemical poems. For instance (I am
quoting from memory) the epigram against the critics who damned THE
PLAYBOY OF THE WESTERN WORLD:
Once when midnight smote the air
Eunuchs ran through Hell and met
On every crowded street to stare
Upon great Juan riding by;
Even like these to rail and sweat,
Staring upon his sinewy thigh.
The power which Yeats has within himself gives him the analogy ready
made and produces the tremendous scorn of the last line, but even in
this short poem there are six or seven unnecessary words. It would
probably have been deadlier if it had been neater. more…
