Richard Ellmann on Power

“I’m often marked for being a pessimist. Yet I cannot help but embrace three inescapable truths:

1.    I will run out of time.

2.    The odds of the world righting itself while I breathe are long.

3.    I doubt I’ll atone, acquit or redeem my own self in that span, either.”

From John Gorman’s I Suppose It Beats Knowing the End - On optimism.

Some twenty-five years ago, I read Richard Ellmann’s Yeats: The Man and the Masks . I was in a phase of reading and studying Yeats the man and his poetry, gleaning wisdom on the sly–that’s what reading had become for me. I think it was Ellmann’s book title referring to Yeats’s masks that caught my attention. Late in life Yeats was introduced to Japanese Noh theater–with the actors in beautiful painted masks–I suspect he fell right in—symbolism and acting in a single art form.

But the core memory I’ve retained was Ellmann’s considered opinion that Yeats was a writer of power.  

The NY Times book review by James Johnson Sweeney–written in 1948 shortly after Ellmann’s book was published–puts it that Yeats the poet used a number of devices and strategies, ‘masks,’ while he was in truth writing about himself—against Wordsworth’s dictum that the poet should never be seen in the work. In the modern era, that’s largely ignored, but it was a thing back in the day.

Mind, if all you write about is your very precious day, then it’s nappy time, however, if you’re not writing in some fashion about humans, how they think, perceive their world, it severely limits the subject matter. Some writers write about their dogs, when they run out of subjects.

The Day Dream by Dante Gabriel Rossetti 1880—image by Google Art Project.jpg

Yeats, in his poetry, was a slippery writer, arguing with Shelley, disguising himself first in the perfumes of the late Romanticism, Rossetti and the Pre-Raphaelites, then turning to mysticism and automatic writing in his later years.

In 1990 when D, Sean, Ryan and I circled the lake looking at Innisfree, letdown was the word that came to mind. Hardly even an islet and Lough Gill appeared to be half gone to wetlands. He wrote The Lake Isle of Innisfree when he was 23—proof poets develop their chops before their philosophy.

William Butler Yeats    Bain News Service, publisher - This image is available from the United States Library of Congress's Prints and Photographs division under the digital ID ggbain.00731

Ellmann thought Yeats’s literary adornments had something to do with insecurities. Perhaps. But through the years of his published poetry, he also moved away from Innisfree’s gauzy dream state to the power of The Second Coming. I’d like to think he grew up over that time. He’d been a formidable lyricist since a young man, but as he grew older, he also grew more sober–more modern and less pining. Whether one’s related to the other depends on your view–and probably your age.

The Second Coming by William Butler Yeats

“Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

“Surely some revelation is at hand;

Surely the Second Coming is at hand.

The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out

When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi

Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,

A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,

Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it

Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.

The darkness drops again; but now I know

That twenty centuries of stony sleep

Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?” 

first published in Dial magazine in 1919

That’s the entire poem. And what gives it its power is the monstrous nightmare worthy of H. P. Lovecraft used in service of the dread plague of murder Yeats saw descending on Europe and particularly on Ireland. Yeats had learned to wield his mythology like a weapon.

“A shape with lion body and the head of a man, / A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, / Is moving its slow thighs…”

“In April 1936, three years before his death, WB Yeats received a letter from the writer and activist Ethel Mannin. The 70-year-old Yeats was a Nobel prize-winning poet of immense stature and influence, not to mention Mannin’s former lover, and she asked him to join a campaign to free a German pacifist incarcerated by the Nazis. Yeats responded instead with a reading recommendation: “If you have my poems by you, look up a poem called ‘The Second Coming’,” he wrote. “It was written some sixteen or seventeen years ago & foretold what is happening. I have written of the same thing again & again since. This will seem little to you with your strong practical sense for it takes fifty years for a poet’s weapons to influence the issue.”

From The Guardian article, 'Things fall apart': the apocalyptic appeal of WB Yeats's The Second Coming by Dorian Lynskey

Yeats the man was on the delicate side, not bulging with testosterone in his manner, judging from his portraits. Yet his writing had the power to stir modern men (with apologies–let’s pretend the noun has naught to do with dangling participles). For someone who pined for the same woman unrequitedly over decades, Yeats was yet keenly aware of the world he lived in. Sensitive, one could say; I’m happy with keenly aware.

It’s common enough to believe the times one lives in are the most significant, most terrible in recorded history. It’s a journalist’s cliché. Yeats had World War I then the Irish Troubles, followed by the Irish Civil War as a background. In that regard, he had rich soil in which to plant his flowers. And he lived in an equally interesting literary period with early modern emerging. His secretary for a brief while was the American poet, Ezra Pound of later Cantos fame.

Yeats had the advantage of being the son of an artist, and the brother of another painter along with two sisters whose hand-printed books at Cuala Press were part of the Celtic Revival movement if thoroughly Arts and Craft. The book cover for Yeats’s The Tower shows that influence somewhere between Arts and Crafts and Art Nouveaux.

The Tower—Scribner facsimile reproduction cover

Which brings me back to why Yeats came to mind–John Gorman’s piece in Medium, I Suppose It Beats Knowing the End - On optimism. If you have four minutes, read it, and perhaps you’ll get what I’m reaching for, mainly an appreciation for when a writer succeeds in writing with no flabby spots, no tangents, no tertiary effects. In most of his writing, Gorman makes clear he’s no cock-eyed optimist–as the song goes. The article sounds in part like he’s trying it out for fit.

“The belief that we can live joyfully, rightly, and dutifully is the essence of optimism. Succinctly put: optimism is a healthy sense of our own agency within the vast expanse of cosmic and cultural determinism. It is our confidence within ourselves that we can further shift the state of play toward something less brutal, less joyless, and less inequitable.

“We cannot eliminate suffering, but we can ameliorate it. We cannot carpet-bomb injustice, but we can poke holes in it. We cannot redeem pasts, but we can reimagine our futures.”

from John Gorman’s “I Suppose It Beats Knowing the End - On optimism”

Gorman is a forceful writer–if not always a powerful one, the distinction being his voice is forceful if not always driving toward a goal worth the effort. I greatly sympathize. This particular piece by Gorman in Medium is one I’d be happy to claim because it has that power Ellmann found in Yeats’s best works.

Yeats preferred to disguise any uneasiness about the philosophical or theoretical argument–a discomfort at not summitting his mountain–behind a multitude of masks. Yet in his best works, I’m drawn to the core of the man, and overlook the trappings.

Yeats is recognized as an early modern poet–it’s his claim to fame. Yet his pursuit of the myth comes from the core of the Romantic Era, and once he’d grown bored employing the traditional mythology, he spent years creating his own–Spritus Mundi is referenced from his work, A Vision. First he creates his personal mythology then applies it as an authority, like an old time preacher uses the Bible. Now that takes brass ones.

Gorman doesn’t plead with his audience to like him or agree with him. At least half of his writing disparages or at least questions his own character and motivations. The other half insists he’s a challenging badass. But either way, his voice in the writing is direct, blunt. Very modern.

Our culture in the present day is the antithesis of allusion and referential subtleties; mythology doesn’t get too much airplay. Gorman by comparison to Yeats is impatiently kicking aside the ethereal and the abstract like so much unusable baggage so to get at what he believes is fundamental. One reason to appreciate his work.

When I first began writing poetry as a very immature teen, I’d scribble a verse or two at most and get stuck–no way to move on from there, and when I tried, the lyric would lose any semblance of the original spurt. Because, with no real anchor in my life other than vague longing, they were just pretty words that fell out on the page. If it’s true you write from your own life, you first have to have lived a bit of one, and at thirteen I knew for certain I didn’t know diddly about squat. And I sure didn’t know from power.

A poem I wrote maybe at fourteen or fifteen, Iced Silvery Tree, was one of the few I completed in those years. Growing up in South Carolina, we received little in the way of snowfall, we got mainly ice storms leaving the bare trees in a halo of silver ice. The poem is an attempt at descriptive language translating an image that had beamed in from somewhere. I was quite happy with the poem–and my English teacher complimented it. It may have been published in the high school lit magazine, but I’m not sure.

I wrote poetry in fits an starts through college and into adulthood, along with the longest running fantasy novel ever not published, the majority of pages lost to an apartment fire. The world was saved a major infliction by the conflagration.

If I sat long enough waiting for lightning, my butt would be sore and the page would be mostly empty, or worse, filled with dribble because I couldn’t figure out what it was I was trying to say–an itch without a salve. The most remarkable thing about that sole poem, Iced Silvery Tree, was that I had actually completed it. It wasn’t until I hit my late thirties I began to focus on writing poetry and stumbled across an amazing concept– amazing to me anyway–that writing required editing. So when I began drifting off, I’d pass over a piece of writing planning to come back to it later.

My sculpture prof at Clemson, Robert Young, his description of how he painted, making a first stroke and spending the rest of the time correcting it–that’s about as close to the truth as it’s been told.

When I was still working fulltime as an architect, I remember being envious of Yeats, reading how he spent time on Lady Gregory’s estate at Coole, writing three hours a day, taking it up as he chose, walking the shore of another small lake and thinking of the swans he’d watch lifting off. The Wild Swans at Coole was one of my favorite poems–even before I visited that haunt of his.

Coole Lake with tourists photo by Dahlia Awad, © 1990

The Wild Swans at Coole

The trees are in their autumn beauty,

The woodland paths are dry,

Under the October twilight the water

Mirrors a still sky;

Upon the brimming water among the stones

Are nine-and-fifty swans.

The nineteenth autumn has come upon me

Since I first made my count;

I saw, before I had well finished,

All suddenly mount

And scatter wheeling in great broken rings

Upon their clamorous wings.

I have looked upon those brilliant creatures,

And now my heart is sore.

All's changed since I, hearing at twilight,

The first time on this shore,

The bell-beat of their wings above my head,

Trod with a lighter tread.

Unwearied still, lover by lover,

They paddle in the cold

Companionable streams or climb the air;

Their hearts have not grown old;

Passion or conquest, wander where they will,

Attend upon them still.

But now they drift on the still water,

Mysterious, beautiful;

Among what rushes will they build,

By what lake's edge or pool

Delight men's eyes when I awake some day

To find they have flown away?

Now I find, drawing near the age when Yeats finally lay down his pen, if I can get three solid hours and not feel the need to throw away two, it’s been a good day of writing.

All Yeats’s talent as a poet, the knowledge he’d acquired over a life of reading, his mind is now gone. It must have seemed his living that way could go on forever, yet he had to know it wouldn’t. Cherry-picking another of his powerful lines:

“That is no country for old men. The young

In one another's arms, birds in the trees,

—Those dying generations—at their song,

The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,

Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long

Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.

Caught in that sensual music all neglect

Monuments of unageing intellect.”

From “Sailing to Byzantium” by William Butler Yeats

Interesting that Gorman makes a similar acknowledgement in his piece–at a much younger age than Yeats when he wrote Sailing to Byzantium. Possibly Gorman got there faster.

“I am born cursed and born prisoner, continuing to build sandcastles from the eroded mass of those who built before me. I am taking the pieces offered and trying to rearrange them the best way I know available. This is often done poorly, naively and with less thought and care than I’d wish.”

From John Gorman’s “I Suppose It Beats Knowing the End - On optimism”

W.S. Auden wrote of Yeats in his panegyric, “The words of a dead man / Are modified in the guts of the living.” [1] Of course any writing is modified by whoever reads it–as I believe Auden intended–modified by each person’s interpretation–perpetuated in about the only way immortality works for us.

[1] from In Memory of W.B. Yeats by W. H. Auden

Everyone’s Entitle to an Opinion

Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s quote keeps ringing “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts." Evidently we’ve been at this disputation for a while, because Moynihan’s been in the ground since 2003.

Last week’s article in the Washington Post, They’re worried their mom is becoming a conspiracy theorist. She thinks they’re the ones living in a fantasy world, by Jose A. Del Real was about a family fractured by politics–and worse, by social media–and the four children who fear their loving 71 year old mother has been swallowed by far-right conspiracists like Alex Jones.  

Most of the article is about how agonized her children are over who she’s become, because they clearly idolize her despite of her views of late. Though, as the article makes clear, she’s articulate and still a sharp 71, if misguided in her reading of politics and the truth; e.g. she believes Trump won by a landslide and the attack on the Capital was instigated by leftists. And she’s not alone in that belief.

It’s a constant struggle not to fall into believing what one is pre-conditioned to believe. Instead of looking at what’s in front of us, we chose to do the opposite; we expect reality to marry tightly to our beliefs–else why would we believe them? Ipso facto and all that good Latin. Presently, skepticism isn’t a strong suit in the U.S., it doesn’t seem.

Occasional lapses, straying from reality will affect us always. One hopes to regain better footing before too long and that it leaves no lasting damage. What can be said for this current state of affairs? If it’s not due in part to the present epidemic quarantine, it is surely the disease of social media. I fear this modern fad in how it encourages hives of disfunction and unreality to flourish and grow. No doubt they have flourished throughout history, only we were better separated by distance back in the day.

I recall journalists commenting with amazement on the Arab Spring and how much it was fed by social media. That was Facebook’s shining hour. 2020 witnessed its greatest failure.

My loving mother-in-law was certain the Egyptian army’s 2013 coup, which overthrew the popularly elected Morsi government was necessary, that the resumption of the Egyptian dictatorship under el Sisi was necessary. There was no discussing this with her. She herself hadn’t lived in Egypt since the 1960s, so her working knowledge of the country was narrowed to what news she heard on TV and the few relatives she was still in touch with. Her people, the Copts, were a shrunken minority threatened by radical Muslims–against which the el Sisi dictatorship appeared to be the Copts’ only protection.

My mother-in-law knew her country better than I ever will. Yet the fast fade from the Arab Spring’s hope for democracy struck me as continuing a long standing Middle Eastern failure.

Before 2020, there seemed an insurmountable distance between cultures rooted in democracy and those of dictatorship, that democracy was moving the world into the future. So I despaired when the Arab Spring largely failed.

Now the distance between old world dictatorships and new world democracies seems not so wide, and that mad beast with “a gaze blank and pitiless as the sun” is roaming free again.