The Genius of Yeats

...states firmly a major theme in all his work: "the horror of old age that brings wisdom only at the price of bodily decrepitude and death," a subject that still obsessed him when he wrote the Byzantium poems and "Why Should Not Old Men Be Mad...

...Yes, they can stand by themselves, for Yeats, a good deal more frequently than some commentators would have us think, followed his belief that a poem should seem "but a moment's thought...

...like all good criticism, a help to those with the will to read, not a substitute for the creative process in which reader and poet must cooperate to discover significance...

...and there are few of his poems that cannot be appreciated on some level even at a first reading...

...For, to Yeats, the individual is important both for himself and for what he discovers and reveals about the total course of the history of the universe, which, understood, persuades him and us to rejoice...

...His method is to suggest so winningly what may be found in each poem that the good reader wants to find out a lot more on his own...

...It is...

...Unterecker, as NEW LEADER readers know, is a very knowledgeable, unpretentious critic...

...Leda and the Swan' makes a very different kind of sense if one sees it as a poem that examines the beginning of the cycle that preceded ours...

...Hardy had almost no capacity for joy...

...makes us see what we didn't on our own...

...he persuades us to rejoice in spite of everything as no ether modern poet who has faced up to contemporary reality has done...

...Yet how much Unterecker, who has absorbed everything Yeats wrote as well as what has been written about him...

...not in terms of this poem or that but rather as if his entire output constituted (as it almost doesi a single work of art...

...Reviewed by Harvey Curtis Webster Professor of Literature, Louisville University...

...But there is no modern poet apart from Yeats who has gotten into his poems so much of the complex feelings and thoughts aroused by being a sensitive man in our century, or so much of what it must feel like to be a sensitive man in any time, at any place...

...on the contrary, he hoped to extract "from dying faces and dying statements insights into universal patterns...

...Seen in this light it becomes a neat companion piece to 'The Second Coming,' which examines the genesis of the cycle that will follow ours...

...Unterecker writes...

...There is no better way to test my dangerous generalization than to read John Unterecker's excellent A Reader's Guide to William Butler Yeats along with the poems themselves...

...Only by being torn can it ultimately be made 'sole.' " So Yeats antithetically swings from soul to body to soul, from foul to fair, from the personal to the impersonal, from the individual to the society he conditions and is conditioned by...

...But Eliot has always slighted the body, Auden has been too much occupied with diagnosis and cure according to rather narrow formulae...

...This discussion prepares us to appreciate Unterecker's detailed examination of the poems themselves and enables us to find further and more profound levels of meaning than we thought were there...

...Unterecker follows Donald A. Stauffer's thesis "that some poets, Yeats included, either consciously or unconsciously organize the imagery of their lyrics in such coherent patterns that the total effect of the lyrics has an epic quality...

...Yeats delighted in the body as well as the soul: what there is of diagnosis and prescription in his poems is based upon an orientation broader and deeper than Auden's...

...by reading Yeats' poems and Unterecker's A Reader's Guide to William Butler Yeats side by side...

...My truncated account gives, I hope, some notion of what can be gained in wisdom and happiness (and are they not perhaps the same thing...

...Yeats is best approached...

...So it is that Yeats' earliest long poem, "The Wanderings of Oisin...

...He shows us that there is not an early Yeats, a middle Yeats, and a late Yeats, but a developing Yeats who realized as early as his 21st year that "talent perceives differences, genius unity," who set as his aim a little later the union of "stoicism, asceticism and ecstasy," and who fully and vividly embodied his aims...

...This work of art more durable than the life it was based upon must not slight either body or soul: "Only in experiencing everything, fair and foul, can the soul be made whole...

...that Unterecker exhausts the meaning of each poem...

...still developing, thank God, not far behind...

...He makes no grandiose claims: "Though almost everything Yeats wrote after 1922 and a good deal that he wrote before that date is linked to A Vision, one can read the poems without knowing the system...

...Author, "On a Darkling Plain" COMPARISONS ARE DANGEROUS and blanket statements odious: nevertheless, the more modern poetry I read, the more convinced I become that William Butler Yeats is the one truly great poet of the 20th century...

...He hoped to find in his own life, and in the lives of others that touched him closely, an insight into ultimate reality that would enable him "to be the work of art itself," although, "limited by flesh," he could "only construct that which is . . . greater and more durable than himself...

...Eliot, I suppose, and Hardy come close to greatness, with Auden...

...His book does not "solve" the poems so that it is unnecessary to read them, nor does it pretend to be a substitute for the process of alert reading...

...More fully than any other critic, Unterecker makes this point in his book...

...His preoccupation with old age and death was not morbid...

...This does not mean, I hasten to add...

...He is not the sort of critic who spends 20 pages on six lines of poetry...

...for his last volumes...

...His admirably clear discussion of Yeats' cyclical view of history, of his use of the mask, of his transfusion of his life into poetry, of the way Yeats builds a poem out of metaphor, image and symbol, is unequalled in its lucidity and concision...

...In his preface he acknowledges the help of his students who taught him "what to look for...

...But both it and 'The Second Coming' can stand by themselves...

...In poem after poem and volume after volume he displays truths that can be known only momentarily as one lives and writes, that only the completed work illuminates fully...

...Even further, the antithetical swings of the poems symbolize the cyclical process that lies under individual lives, history and the universe itself...

...There are very many good modern poets and a good many excellent ones...