"All studies are, at bottom, the study of aging."
— Many Moon System Proverb

Tampering

"[I]n practice we tend to get in literature immature intellect tampering with imagination and in criticism immature imagination tampering with the intellect. Tampering, I think, is a very deep instinct; we see it in monkeys and in kittens, and in all the young parts of ourselves and also in all the senile parts of ourselves. You have a chance at an intervening maturity where you wouldn't go quite so far as tampering, but it doesn't turn up much."

— R.P. Blackmur, New Criticism in the United States, 26

Dignified and Old (Notes on Twee #6)

I suspect that an issue of prime importance in any analysis of twee would be the little matter of how it ages. (Cf. Luna, Calvin Johnson, The Wedding Present.)

Takes one to know one

Philip Larkin on Thomas Hardy and the codger question:

"Without doubt Hardy, like others of his century, was forever on the look-out for some sign that humanity was improving, and his failure to perceive one produced many occasional bitter utterances ('After two thousand years of mass / We've got as far as poison gas'), and it is curious to note that both he and Shaw see time as a necessary ingredient of man's spiritual and moral advance. Shaw's view is that we must live longer: Hardy's is rather that we must get old quicker or, like the little boy 'Father Time,' be born old. Both, in their different ways, are asking man to grow up." (Required Writing, 171-172)

Sick and tired

I want to throw a passage by Raymond Williams, somewhat haphazardly, at the question of Modernism's Old Man Fetish that we were kicking around way back. This is from "Individuals and Societies," an excerpt from his 1961 book The Long Revolution given in The Raymond Williams Reader, and it clarifies his theoretical distinction between "subjects" and "servants":

"The subject, at whatever violence to himself, has to accept the way of life of his society, and his own indicated place in it, because there is no other way in which he can maintain himself at all … It is not his way of life, in any sense that matters, but he must conform to it to survive. In the case of the servant, the pressure is less severe, though still, to him, irresistible. The subject has no choice; the servant is given the illusion of a choice, and is invited to identify himself with the way of life in which his place is defined. It is an illusion of choice, because again, like the subject, he has no obvious way of maintaining his life if he refuses. Yet the illusion is important, for it allows him to pretend to have an identification with the society, as if the choice had been real. The subject will have few illusions about the relationship which is determining him; he will know that the way of life is not his but must be obeyed. The servant, on the other hand, may come to identify himself with the other way of life that is determining him; he may even, consciously, think of himself as a member … Yet at many levels of his life, and particularly in certain situations such as solitude and age, the discrepancy between the role the individual is playing and his actual sense of himself will become manifest, either consciously or in terms of some physical or emotional disturbance. Given the right conditions, he can play the role as if it were really his, or in situations evoking his deepest personal feelings, the identification breaks down." (77-78)

I'm thinking here in particular of Yeats, in such a poem as "Among School Children," where the "role" of poet as public "servant" (in his own phrase, a "smiling public man") is unexpectedly decimated under the pressure of lyric "disturbance." Is this what Yeats (and maybe Eliot) are trying to embody in their personae — the kind of lack of faith in society experienceable not by rebellious youth (Joyce's/Stephen Dedalus' "Non serviam") but only by old men who've spent themselves in trying to serve?

Grumpy Old Modernism

Further conjectures about the premature senescence of Yeats, Eliot, Frost et al:

1. Thomas Hardy's age in 1898, the year his first volume of poetry (Wessex Poems) is published: 58. This unusual late debut makes him to a certain extent the Modernists' contemporary. His subject matter, moreover, is an old man's through and through: poems about friends and lovers dying, not being able to change things about yourself, rain on graves, etc. But in the figure of Hardy, age is not associated with a failing of powers (as it would have been in Tennyson or Swinburne) or even with a development or consolidation of old achievements (as with somebody like maybe Browning), but with a new aesthetic and a fresh start: Hardy, having experienced enormous disappointment and pain, is now finally ready to write and publish poetry. (Slight problem with this theory: Eliot didn't really like Hardy's work, and Yeats started publishing before him, so his example might not have meant much to them. Who did like him? Marianne Moore? But she's got to be one of the sprightliest of the Modernist bunch.)

2. The poets of the 1890s (especially Ernest Dowson and Lionel Johnson) were seen as dissolute, drunken messes who wasted their talent and died unnecessarily early deaths — i.e., as cautionary tales about what the post-romantic/aesthetic embrace of youth could lead to. Cf. Yeats' "The Tragic Generation," and Eliot's remarks on these people in the back of Inventions of the March Hare (quotes t/k?).

old folks, home

Evan, hopefully you’re not worrying Paris with the later Yeats; but if the vacation has found café-front time for further reading, you’ve no doubt found that the “king of the cats”* follows that obsession with age for his entire long lifetime. The verses he deliberately set at the end of his collected poems, “The Circus Animals’ Desertion” and “Politics,” are both self-elegizing and a cyclical cosmic way of calling “do-over.” Take a look also at the many later poems that reflect on the accomplishments of Yeats and the Republic’s youth, in particular “Under Ben Bulben,” with its enjoinder,

Irish poets learn your trade

Sing whatever is well made,

Scorn the sort now growing up

All out of shape from toe to top,

Their unremembering hearts and heads

Base-born products of base beds.

Which, for poets writing in Yeats’s wake (esp. Irish poets), can either sound like a job description by the boss or like an old man shaking his fist at the kids playing on the damn lawn. And “Politics” never quite settles for me into being entirely saccharine or entirely poignant:

And maybe what they say is true

Of war and war’s alarms,

But O that I were young again

And held her in my arms.

(I’d be interested to hear if/how you think the place of sentimentality shifts throughout his career.)

I’m fascinated by this question of age too, especially insofar as late nights spent reading for generals will slowly blind me and the approaching exam will pull out my increasingly wispy hair, such that y’all can expect the full emergence of “Old Greg,” slouching toward McCosh Hall, sometime around the first week of September. But while I’m still chipper and spry, I’ll say this:

Your wonderful phrase “voluntary senility,” though especially apt given Yeats’s occasional tone of patrician weariness and creaking joints, sounds to me too much like he’s giving in to age, rather than forcefully claiming it in the face of broader cultural infantilization. It may be of use here to think of the imperative Irish literary nationalists faced around the turn of the century to forge an indigenous and rooted tradition – that is, to imagine the nation and its folk as both new-born and old with Gaelic tradition. Within that cultural fund are important precursors to the modernist age fetish, such as the allegorical Kathleen ni Houlihan (as in Yeats and Lady Gregory’s 1902 play) who appears as an old woman begging sacrifice of young Irish men, and who turns young and beautiful when they vow their love and lives.

The bardic voice might be the Romantic counterpoint to the “youth-cult” you mention, since Blake is a particular grandpappy to keep in mind for Yeats. For Yeats, there’s a willingness and a desire to make of himself a relic while, as you say, asking his rhythm to test ideas and words til they become old in the way polished stones in creeks are old. (I’ll have more to say on this topic of rhythm, but will wait until I’ve re-read the poems again. The use of repetition to tune words comes into Geoffrey Hill’s definition of a poem’s “perfect pitch” and his ideas about poetry’s civic responsibility to/in language). That is all to say that there is a future tense to Yeats’s past tense -- which gets to the famous, occasionally derided repetition in the determined first line of “The Lake Isle of Innisfree”: “I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree.” Or the apocalyptic perfect rhyme at the center of “The Second Coming”: “Surely some revelation is at hand/ Surely the Second Coming is at hand.”

But if Eliot follows these geriatric gestures, do you think he does so in the same way? Has he internalized it in some way, 'psychologized' it (to be waaay too quick with that word)? And, since Adrienne mentioned The Public Burning, do y’all think old greybeard Uncle Sam is in any way comparable to Kathleen in the nation-as-beckoning-old-person figuration? Both somewhat menacing figures in their respective calls to arms.

Anyway, this is a very quick reply, and one that is not yet informed by Official Generals Reading, since I’m still finishing up some writing. My plan is to start with Thomas Hardy and, on my Irish list, with Douglas Hyde (to get at some of these issues of cultural nationalism and aging, in his Love Songs of Connacht, 1893, and his pamphlet “The Necessity for De-Anglicizing Ireland”).

*Evan already knows this: The night on which Yeats first heard of Swinburne’s death, he wrote in his journal, “Now I’m king of the cats.” Thanks to Jim Longenbach for that un.

****Perhaps not particularly surprising tidbit of the day: Ezra Pound was a bad dancer (according to H.D., in her memoir of Pound called “End to Torment”).****

The W.B.

I figured I would begin with Yeats, since there are reputedly worse places to start in order to understand this whole Modernism schmegegge. Plus, he has the added bonus of being a major, major writer whose work I don't really know, other than a few isolated greatest hits. (As a matter of fact, I think I've avoided reading him until I had the opportunity to do something like this. Do either of you ever do that — save up authors you know you'll like, or that you know are important, until you can really focus in and give them your full attention? Stanley Cavell supposedly did this with Heidegger, waiting to read him until he was in his forties or something.)

And what do you know: the kid's pretty good! So far I am up through "Responsibilities" (published 1914) which I take it is kind of the middle of the middle phase. One thing that's been interesting is the sort of "a-ha" effect of recognizing Yeats' influence retrospectively on poets whose oeuvres I know quite a bit better: not just the obvious ones, like Pound and Eliot and Auden, but even people like Marianne Moore and Kenneth Koch, whose late poems especially are, I now realize, very Yeatsian underneath the surface craziness and Francophilia.

Anyway, I'll just note a couple of general features that strike me as I read, one thematic and one formal, possibly to be elaborated on further later:

1. Yeats' obsession with age — starting from very early on; there are poems from the perspectives of old men written when he was still very young, a habit he clearly passed on to Eliot. This is kind of a stock affectation among the Modernists for a while — I guess as a way of counteracting the youth-cult of Romanticism? Or am I missing some more obvious literary precursor to the tradition of voluntary senility?

2. His increasing, very admirable lack of fear about repeating words in poems. One of my favorite examples so far is from "The Secret Rose":

"… A woman of so shining loveliness
That men threshed corn at midnight by a tress,
A little stolen tress."

This is sort of a ballad-like device, but here it's not used as a refrain, nor is it exactly conversational: it's more like WBY was so pleased with the word he just wanted to use it again, immediately. Even better, perhaps, is this from "The Hour Before Dawn":

" … And he
Had dipped the wooden ladle deep
Into the sleeper's tub of beer
Had not the sleeper started up.

'Before you have dipped it in the beer
I dragged from Groban's mountain-top
I'll have assurance that you are able
To value beer; no half-legged fool
Shall dip his nose into my ladle
Merely for stumbling on this hole
In the bad hour before the dawn.'

'Why, beer is only beer.' "

To me this has a kind of mock-epic, even mythological, effect: "the beer" gaining, through repetition, something of the force of a Homeric epithet. But it also gives the impression of an extreme carefulness, like he isn't taking any chances and is deliberately restricting the range of his diction in order to get the rhythm absolutely perfect, beautiful, lifelike and metrical all at once. Which he does.

These are, quite possibly, two of the most obvious and stupid qualities of Yeats' poetry, but you've got to start somewhere, right? I don't know. What poems should I look out for?