Afloat on the Ocean of Words

     Every artist in every medium is in effect shouting out “Look at me! Turn to me from all other phenomena!” And consumers of art collaborate with the considerable ego implied by this cry. Certainly in literature, whatever the theme, the author is always the hero. The critics, indeed, all readers, acknowledge sufficient value in the writer’s moves to follow every decision recorded on the page with careful attention. The creative artist’s abilities are fetishized, often considered mystically resistant to analysis and attributed to talent or inspiration. Yet at times the figure of the author can seem suddenly a specter, an insubstantial illusion shimmering even as it threatens to vanish altogether.
     If the proposition sounds incredible, that is because one if the most persistent of our Romantic received values is the celebration of individual Genius. Though that word is not attested in the sense of exalted intellectual power until the late eighteenth century this use seems now only natural. The nascent Romantic Edward Young celebrates the “man of genius” for his originality, comparing him to the less impressive imitator. According to Young only such an innovator “raises his structure by means invisible.” For him and for many today the genius “partakes of something divine” since “genius is the god within.” [1] In his best-seller titled Genius Harold Bloom refers with approval to Emerson’s description of genius using the very same phrase “the god within.” Bloom begins his book with the “unique” “supreme” genius of Shakespeare which he defines as evident from the poet’s “universality,” “the pervasive illusion (is it illusion?) that he has peopled a world, remarkably like what we take to be our own, with men, women, and children preternaturally natural.” The concluding oxymoron epitomizes the broader paradox that the individual most marked off from the rest of us has somehow earned that singularity by his ability to represent the lives of all.
     Yet prior to the Romantic era the successful artist was more often regarded as the best trained, likely the one who had spent an apprenticeship emulating the work if a master and the models of earlier eras. Thus according to Winckelmann “the only way for us to become great, and indeed, inimitable – if this is possible – is by imitating the ancients.” [2] Here again the neat confidence of the formulation is offset by the self-contradiction. Only by imitation do we get free of imitation, that is, become inimitable. Little wonder that the great art historian felt moved to include the qualification “if this is possible.”
     In more recent decades advanced thinkers have questioned the concept of the autonomous god-like creative author. A couple of generations ago Barthes declared “The Death of the Author” [3], citing Mallarmé as a predecessor and claiming that every "text is a tissue [or fabric] of quotations," that every work is "eternally written here and now," and that the “meaning of a work depends on the impressions of the reader,” and not the writer at all. At about the same time, Foucault asked “What is an Author?,” [4] noting, as though it were an established fact, that “criticism and philosophy took note of the disappearance –or death - of the author some time ago” and concluding with the question “what difference does it make who is speaking?” The case against what might be called the authority of the author by these two and their fellow travelers is weakened by the fact that they mean to displace the artist as the creative fountainhead only to step into the same role themselves as enlightened post-modern critics, juggling conundrums for the amusement of their less celebrated peers or cracking the whip and exasperating their more commonsensical critics into growls and roars. Few readers are likely to be willing to trade Shakespeare for Derrida.
     Long before the rise of deconstruction and allied theories, though, the artist’s status had been discounted or questioned. Most early poets and sculptors were anonymous. Homer does not emerge as an individual. Only after a certain date do we begin to see ancient Greek ceramic artists sign their work. We have no clue as to exactly which caryatids of the Erechtheum were crafted by Socrates’ father. Even in the Middle Ages anonymity is the rule in early lyrics and stained glass. In traditional societies the local carver is rarely celebrated as a “genius,” but rather is regarded as a craftsman like a carpenter or a potter. Folk songs and fairy tales are generally not attributed as original work by the person from whom they are collected. After all, according to the Grimm brothers’ dictum, the people as a whole compose (“das Volk dichtet”).
     Indeed, who can name the author of the myth of Oedipus? Sophocles certainly, though Aeschylus and Euripedes both wrote lost plays on the same theme. But Oedipus appears as well in the Iliad and the Odyssey, and Homer and as the tragedians had doubtless learned the story orally in childhood. It was the common possession of the Greek people. Though the view that authorship of folk works was in some mysterious way “collective” was championed by Francis Gummere among others, it had steadily lost favor and was finally supplanted by the careful and innovative work of Milman Parry and his student Albert Lord. [5]
     What Parry and Lord found was that the singers of epics in the Balkans in the 1930s were able to improvise oral poetry by using a set inventory of phrases, formulae, and lines, most of which were common to many “authors,” but that their performances varied widely in quality and content, even between successive recitations of the same piece by the same singer. The poet might say, and might in fact think that he is exactly reproducing his own version or the version of his mentor, but the texts invariably showed pervasive and significant differences. Though working in a genre in a way collective, some performers were talented and others pedestrian. The audience and the occasion always influenced the poem.
    The insights of Parry and Lord allowed for the first time an understanding of previously obscure characteristics of Homer as well as proving useful in the study of Beowulf, Pentecostal preachers, blues, and other oral forms. These works are demonstrably shaped by an entire community and a tradition though any individual work is also the product of the skill and vision of an individual. Just as art regularly both questions and affirms received ideas, it can only arise from a social consensus but through a single subjectivity.
     That dialectic is evident though less marked in non-oral work as well. Every writer shapes work in part with audience in mind. Each uses phrases, images, and conventions (sometimes twisting or altering them) learned from earlier texts. The concepts that populate a particular vision of reality are based on those borrowed from others. Even opposing sides of issues in a given era are generally founded on the same basic vocabulary and assumptions. The assumptions of one’s own era are virtually invisible, while those of earlier periods are more easily discerned. [6]
     The notion of genius is fostered by the supposed opposition of tradition and innovation in literary production. In all periods art is produced by crafting altered versions of the inherited templates. While during many earlier eras past masterpieces provided the model the artist could aspire to equal, for two hundred years novelty has been privileged. The radical has been admired. Yet in fact the author who defies, opposes, or omits a recognizable convention makes use of it just as much as the one who repeats it. Each use of convention – in any of these ways -- allows for the more efficient expression of information. A writer who rebels against an established trope or other device by defying it is governed by the same code as the writer who employs it. No inherent value accompanies either use of conventions or defiance of them.
     The themes in literature and the language people use to express them evolve over the centuries with their own dynamic, finding expression through the agency of people active in each era. Thus one might say that Doctor Johnson, rather than being the author of his poetry, is himself written by the eighteenth century English Zeitgeist while James Joyce is an inevitable product of the altered intellectual atmosphere over a hundred and fifty years later. Just as the leopard’s fur appears in a spotted pattern without conscious planning and the clouds assume a particular aspect in every moment of the day, people’s writing is generated by the entire population of thinking humans in a grand polyphonic symphony continuing now for thousands of years. [7]
     Of course, the secondary symbolic elaboration of literature only intensifies the opposition inherent in all language. One can only make use of words and phrases which a listener or reader can understand. Every utterance is based on earlier listening experiences, yet each combines the pre-existing elements in a new way. A wholly original composition could only be meaningless gibberish. On the other hand a work that exactly repeats an earlier one like Borges’ Pierre Menard whose “translation” of Don Quixote exactly reproduces the original might seem equally otiose, but Borges insists to his readers that Menard’s Quixote is “almost infinitely richer” as it includes the new author’s own experiences. Surely he was only saying in a whimsical way that meaning accumulates, that a Horatian ode today is more meaningful than when it was written, though its increase in significance has nothing to do with Horace.
    Borges’ playful fancy resembles T. S. Eliot’s celebrated insight about the whole of literary history changing with every new work. To Eliot “what happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it . . .the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered; and so the relations, proportions, values of each work of art toward the whole are readjusted.” After complaining about the modern tendency to privilege “those aspects of [the poet’s] work in which he least resembles anyone else,” he insists on the contrary that “no poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone,” but rather that “his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists.” [8]
     Finally, and perhaps most destructive to the myth of the semi-divine author, literature cannot be said to occur until the text is received by a listener or reader. Barthes was quite right in locating the consumer’s interaction with the text as the moment when significance arises. Thus the reader may well be said to be the actual composer of the work. Though some texts are comparatively rich in possibilities or may arrive already well-plowed with a history of past readings, the mere words are barren until they are read. In a sense they provide only potential arenas for constructing meaning; they cannot deliver it ready-made.
     The problematics of authorship are then rather complex. The causes of literary works must be shared it seems by the writer (who might be called the “efficient cause”) with the uses of language that the writer has heard or read, the assumptions of the era of its composition, and the literary tradition preceding (and, later, following) its date. Add to these the interpretations, reactions, and allusions of others, all dynamically evolving from the work’s first appearance onwards, inevitably compounded by misunderstandings, the imprecision inherent in all language, and the data lost to noise in every transmission. Where then can the author be located?
     Perhaps the choice between the multiple authors responsible for the text is a problem better transcended than solved. The identity in Buddhism between viewing the world as reality and as illusion or in Hinduism between the individual and the Whole may provide a model for that between the writer and the entire corpus of human words. [9] This link may provide the base for the scent of the divine which underlay the intuition of Young and Bloom when they imagine “the god within.” Hovering above the alternatives, the reader may embrace both or neither or may select the one with the greatest heuristic value in a given analysis.
     As readers we float atop the ocean of words, each text a whitecap, briefly rising and then sinking into the vast body of language beneath, leaving it ever so slightly changed. From the perspective of an individual the whole is never in sight and one cannot even take exhaustive account of the waters in which one paddles, yet in every human society people engage artful language in a vigorous and ever-new interchange which by dint of constant effort keeps us for a time buoyant. Our babble goes on, though we know in the end that we and our words with us will fail and fall into the general ferment not to vanish but to suffer a sea change and later return reshuffled and refreshed.




1. Conjectures on Original Composition (1759).

2. Thoughts on the Imitation of the Painting and the Sculpture of the Greeks (1755).

3. Originally published as “La mort de l'auteur” (punning on Le Morte d'Arthur) in Aspen 5-6, 1967, reprinted in Image-Music-Text in 1977.

4. A talk originally given in 1969, the essay appears in Michel Foucault, "What is an Author?" Trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon. In Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, ed. Donald F. Bouchard, Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1977. pp. 124-127.

5. See Milman Parry, "The Making of Homeric Verse." The Collected Papers of Milman Parry, ed. Adam Parry, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971 and Albert B. Lord, The Singer of Tales, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960.

6. The forgeries of Han van Meegeren, for instance, which fooled many connoisseurs and experts when they were new now can be seen to have obvious affinities with the styles of the nineteen-thirties.

7. A clear parallel exists with certain technological developments, such as the invention of automobiles, motion pictures, or nuclear weapons in which a number of researchers all but simultaneously develop what is fundamentally the same idea. The invention of the electric light need be attributed neither to the inexorable processes of impersonal history nor to Edison’s singular genius.

8. The concept of a sort of super-organism of literature resembles the Gaia hypothesis advanced during the 1970s. See James Lovelock’s popularization Gaia: A new look at life on Earth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 3rd edition, 2005) and Lynn Margulis’ The Symbiotic Planet (New York: Basic Books, 1999).

9. Perhaps the best initial texts for these views are Nagarjuna for Buddhism and Gaudapada for Hinduism.

The Skeptico-Semiotico-Mystic: Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus

My copy of Sartor Resartus is a compact but handsome 1891 Frederick A. Stokes publication with an amusing engraving on the title page. As most readers will use a different edition I have adopted the ugly expedient of identifying quotations by not only page number but also with chapter (the part indicated by Roman numerals in capitals and chapter numbers in lower-case).



     Like my title, the form of Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus is peculiar indeed. One might say of it as it itself says of Teufelsdröckh’s manuscript that it is an “enormous, amorphous Plum-pudding, more like a Scottish Haggis.” (256, III, xii) Its elaborate periodic sentences, lengthened further in caricature might seem to some reader well-characterized by the English editor’s comment on his German original “Of his sentences perhaps not more than nine-tenths stand straight on their legs; the remainder are in quite angular attitudes.” (26, I, iv). To make matters worse, the material appears with “an almost total want of arrangement.” (29, I, iv) The book shares its predilection for self-reflective passages with Sterne’s Tristram Shandy and with The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft the pretense of presenting someone else’s manuscript to the reader. Carlyle’s novel, however, is extraordinary in the multiple layers that distance its text from any sort of lived experience distance. Further, the details it presents are themselves hedged about with levels of irony that render authorial intention further problematic. It might seem that his assumptions and the practices that proceed from them would lead to a rag-bag hardly more systematic than the parcels of ephemera and notes that represent Teufelsdröckh’s literary remains, yet Carlyle manages to snatch from his “Centre of Indifference” a grand and illuminated finale, well-put enough to carry a very modern sort of conviction in the end, bringing resolution to the quest of the learned professor, his English editor, the author who recorded their words, and the reader, perhaps, as well in some cases.
     Carlyle presents the reader with an account of the opinions and some incidents from the life of the professor of all knowledge, often prefacing his direct quotations with cautionary qualifications of the material to follow and urging the reader to come to his own original conclusions. The unnamed English editor of Teufelsdröckh’s papers often complains about the quality and condition of the papers left him and poses the question of whether they contain sense or nonsense. The issue is complex for the reader as well because, while the work is clearly a humorous burlesque, it is also, and indeed through use of the very same devices, a serious and even heart-felt philosophical document. An entire theory of signification, an epistemology that can appeal to the most dubious modern, and a final attitude of enlightened joy are offered in the guise of hare-brained ideas redacted by a somewhat exasperated intermediary.
     Teufelsdröckh is himself elusive to the point of nearly vanishing. He is not only deceased and distant, he is a foundling, mysteriously delivered by a “Stranger of reverend aspect” who then vanishes mysteriously. (72, II, i) His history is irrecoverable; he is as slippery as Melville’s Confidence Man. “Hopeless is the obscurity, unspeakable the confusion. He glides from country to country, from condition to condition, vanishing and re-appearing, no man can calculate how or where.” (136, II, vi) His is said to possess an occult “Hindoo” character, seeming “a man without Activity of any kind, a No-man; for the deep-sighted again, a man with Activity almost superabundant.” (88, II, iii) He is several times identified with the Wandering Jew (14, I, iii and with Cain as well 139, II, vi). His life is “”an inexplicable Phantasmagoria” marked “emblematically” by “dim multifarious tokens” while he himself is “spiritualized, vaporized.” (137, II, vi)
     The starting point is a concept of “learned, indefatigable, deep-thinking Germany” (3, I, i) taking off from the groundwork on German idealism laid by Coleridge for English readers. Simultaneously evoking and teasing the country’s reputation for high-flown thought, his “Professor der Allerley-Wissenschaft” (the “Science of Things in General”) whose appointment is unfunded and “in name only” (15, I, iii) in fact earns his unlikely title. He delivers on his apparently fanciful promise: “Could I unfold the influence of Names, which are the most important of all Clothings, I were a second greater Trismegistus.” (51, I, ix) The reader rapidly realizes that Teufelsdröckh’s theory of clothes, far from being limited to fashion, is indeed a theory of everything. He notes that “this Science of Clothes Is a high one, and may with infinitely deeper study on thy part yield richer fruit.” (238, III, ix) This naturally follows from the notion that “all Symbols are properly Clothes . . .all Forms . . . are Clothes” as, indeed, are all customs (237, III, ix) and all convictions as well. All told, “there is much, nay almost all, in Names.” (76, II, i) “Terrestrial Life [is] but an Emblem.” (63, I, xi); indeed, “all visible things are emblems.” (62,I, xi) Language is the garment of thought, further, everything inn existence is mere clothing, “a suit of Raiment.” (64, I, xi) It is simply the guise of the prisoner that leads to his condemnation and execution (51, I, ix) Money is also symbolic (34, I, v), and, as if to seal the case, our Herr Professor himself wishes no more than to “go forth before this degenerate age ‘as a Sign.’” (51, I, ix) His desire is now realized by the book under consideration.
     Of course what we call this study today is semiotics (or semiology) though Carlyle predates Pierce and Saussure. “We inherit not Life only, but the garniture and form of Life” (216, III, vii), but we are unconscious of the separation of signifier and signified (as of clothes and self). (49, I, viii) The consequence of his semiotics parallels the decay of both subject and object in post-modernist thought. It implies no apparent possible result apart from the most radical skepticism. Since the observer views not things in themselves but rather the signs of things, or, more likely, the signs of the signs of things, the evidence will never go beyond the shimmering surface of appearance, what Hindus call Maya, or what might be identified in different terms as Derrida’s “always under erasure.” Thoughts (including the principles of science) are simply passed from one to another with no reference to an absolute or knowable truth. (See 216, III, vii) Thus “in the end one can only conclude that the Universe can only be described as ‘a mighty Sphinx-riddle.’” (112, II, iv) People habitually mistake “the Appearance of true ware” for the reality. (98, II, iii)
     Unable to locate a solid foundation for knowledge, some find no motive but the basest egotism and thus “to all spiritual intents become dead” while “the better sort” ends up in “sick, impotent Scepticism.” (99, II, iii) In his “shivered Universe” compounded of his philosophic cul-de-sac reinforced by a disappointed love explicitly connected to Goethe’s Werther (which Carlyle had translated), he sees no options but madness, Satanism, and suicide. He is wise enough to set out traveling in preference to any of these options. (131, II, vi)
     Teufelsdröckh’s vision has led to a vision of the absurdity of everyday life where nothing can even be expected to make sense. “We looked on Life, with its strange scaffolding, where all at once harlequins dance, and men are beheaded and quartered” (103, II, iii) He figures humanity and himself as a first instance as dog with a can on its tail. (90, II, iii) Surely there is little difference between the visions of naked humanity going about ordinary business defamiliarized by their lack of clothes (52-3, I, ix) and the image in Camus Myth of Sisyphus. A man is talking on the telephone behind a glass partition; you cannot hear him, but you see his incomprehensible dumb show: you wonder why he is alive. This discomfort in the face of man's own inhumanity, this incalculable tumble before the image of what we are, this "nausea," as a writer of today calls it, is also the absurd.” Teufelsdröckh is capable at times of “a certain horror at myself and mankind; almost as one feels at those Dutch Cows, which, during the wet season, you see grazing deliberately with jackets and petticoats of (striped sacking) in the meadows of Gouda.” (49, I, viii) Yet how spirited the image! How delightful the parentheses enclosing the material’s name and then the mention of Gouda whose cheese the author doubtless liked! Here I would infer a gleam of Teufelsdröckh’s mystic-aesthetic deliverance. As the commentator notes at the outset, “even a Russian steppe has tumuli and gold ornaments.” (4, I, i)
     Well before (and after, for time and space are, after all, mere symbols as well) the “Everlasting Yea” Teufelsdröckh had been dropping clues, like a trail of bread-bits through the forest. Words are indeed indicted, but words are not the only evidence. Though speech is said to often amount to “the art of concealing Thought,” of “quite stifling and suspending Thought,” our scholar admits that “symbols possess “concealment and yet revelation” as “Thought will not work except in Silence.” (192, III, iii) He hopes to have led the reader to a “Land of Dreams” “through a magical Pierre-Pertuis” into “the realm of the Wonderful.” (237, III, ix) Here everything is changed though nothing whatever seems any different. Out of the abyss of absolute skepticism arises “the Everlasting Yea,” a new apprehension of the same old world, now lit with a numinous glow. This novel conviction is born of direct experience, the one source that cannot be gainsaid by skeptic or nihilist. In fact the sensation of identity with the cosmos, is not with the void or the absolute Godhead but rather with nature itself sufficiently more glorious and mysterious. We realize then that people are “we know not what – light-sparkles floating in the ether of Deity.” (47, I, viii) The wise man a will be a “delirious Mystic” (60, I, xi) who can see the world as “Living Garment of God.” (165, II, ix as well as 47, I, viii) To the adept of such Descendentalism “The true Shekinah is Man.” (56, I, x) In the “meanest Tinker” he finds a “venerable Mystery” and in wonder the basis for worship. To such an opened eye the phenomenological world will seem a marvel illuminated everywhere by “natural supernaturalism.” (58, I, x) Whereas earlier the description of the world as “a boundless Phantasmagoria and Dream-grotto” (45, I, viii) had seemed to certify one’s irredeemable ignorance, it now appears that such phantoms and dreams can be the stuff of delight. The ego itself, the source of such grave error is now revealed as insubstantial, a ghost, a mere illusion. (232, III, viii) The bipolar oppositions to which we have become accustomed, for instance the divine and diabolical elements in our main character’s name, are exploded.
     Teufelsdröckh’s passage through semiotics and skepticism to a mystic affirmation duplicates though with greater enthusiasm the path of the ancient skeptics to ataraxia. His conclusions parallel as well elements of Buddhist thought – the comparison to the Dalai-Lama (22, I, iii) is well-founded though Carlyle could have had only a vague notion of Tibet. He must undergo the “Annihilation of Self” to “unseal” the “mind’s eyes” and “ungyve” his hands. (164, II, ix) While the “Cause-and-Effect” philosophers (30, I, I, v) and the too-practical utilitarians (204, III, v) can offer the soul little, love had led even Teufelsdröckh to the point that ego melted and “the poor claims of Me and Thee, [are] no longer parted by rigid fences.” (126, II, v) He learns then that Fantasy is “the true Heaven, gate, and Hell-gate of man: his sensuous life is but the small temporary stage (Zeitbühne) whereon thick-streaming influences from both these near yet far regions meet visibly.” (127, II, v) Surely the most potent form of fantasy is art, and Carlyle has fashioned a new sort of narrative that claims to trump philosophy and to establish a new sort of vision for his age, a vision that resolves his experience of “the strangest Dualism” (164, II, ix) the separation of heaven and hell, self and other, the material and the ideal to rise triumphant over these contradictions like his own figure of the phoenix.

Every Reader's Yeats

This is the third of a series of essays meant to introduce (or re-introduce) readers to the work of important poets. In this series I limit my focus to the discussion of only three or four of each writer’s best-known works while providing a bit of context and biography, eschewing most byways and all footnotes.


     The earliest works of William Butler Yeats, whose family was part of the Protestant Ascendancy that dominated Ireland during the days of British rule, are dreamy, melodious, and romantic, a compound of Spenser, Shelley, and pre-Raphaelite medievalizing. He soon found rewarding materials closer to hand and became fascinated with his country’s indigenous culture. Yeats published Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry, a collection of traditional lore from earlier sources, and, five years later The Celtic Twilight, stories he had himself recorded from cottagers. The book concludes with his lyric “Into the Twilight” which clearly defines the fin de siècle appeal of what he, an “out-worn heart, in a time out-worn,” had found in “mother Eire,” which by contrast seemed “always young.” For him his informant Paddy Flynn possessed “the visionary melancholy of purely instinctive natures and of all animals” and “did not live in a shrunken world, but knew of no less ample circumstances than Homer himself.”
     The most popular poem of Yeats’ youth is surely “The Lake Isle of Innisfree.”

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made:
Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee;
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet’s wings.

I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
I hear it in the deep heart’s core.

     This vision of escape to an uninhabited island in Lough Gill is very much a pastoral dream. In spite of its Irish scene which he knew well in person, he said the poem was largely inspired by Thoreau’s Walden and by the fountain in a London shop window. It is an urbanite’s fantasy of the countryside, as unreal and as precious as Theocritus.
     Yeats was deeply involved in the late nineteenth century fashion of mysticism and the occult, studying Theosophy and joining the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. The fullest explanation of his esoteric system is laid out in A Vision. To some this quasi-philosophy is central to the poet, while to Orwell it underlies his fascist tendencies. Auden’s reaction was simpler: “How on earth, we wonder, could a man of Yeats’s gifts take such nonsense seriously?”
     In some poems, however, such as the Byzantium pieces and “The Second Coming,” the poet’s preoccupations bore substantial fruit.

The Second Coming

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?

     In all times, but especially in the modern era, many unfamiliar with Yeats’ theory of the two thousand year periods he called “gyres” have felt as though the world were coming apart. In the poet’s lifetime, age-old theories of society, of the nature of humanity and, in particular, the human mind had been shaken, if not destroyed, by Marx, Darwin, and Freud. Religious assumptions that had dominated European culture for over a thousand years were thrown into question by scholarly investigation of the Biblical texts and by the availability of Buddhist, Hindu, and Daoist writings in translation. Then World War I with its gas attacks, aerial bombardment, and prolonged trench warfare resulting in enormous casualties further disillusioned Europeans.
     The ancient trope that we live in decadent latter days of our species, familiar from around the world, gained new form and currency. In terms so memorable they have provided Chinua Achebe, Joan Didion, and Woody Allen with titles, the poem characterizes the apparent chaos of the contemporary world, implicitly contrasted with a more orderly past. In images chilling as any horror movie, Yeats imagines the governing deity of the time to come as “rough,” “pitiless,” and, perhaps most frightening of all, “blank” like the entropy or total randomness implied in the earlier phrase “mere anarchy.”
     Yeats’ later poems become increasingly spare and gnomic. One group describes Crazy Jane, a “wise fool” who, like the poet, is capable of maintaining self-contradictory propositions and speaking truth to power.

Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop

I met the Bishop on the road
And much said he and I.
`Those breasts are flat and fallen now
Those veins must soon be dry;
Live in a heavenly mansion,
Not in some foul sty.'

`Fair and foul are near of kin,
And fair needs foul,' I cried.
'My friends are gone, but that's a truth
Nor grave nor bed denied,
Learned in bodily lowliness
And in the heart's pride.

`A woman can be proud and stiff
When on love intent;
But Love has pitched his mansion in
The place of excrement;
For nothing can be sole or whole
That has not been rent.'


     The bishop, a representative of religious authority, cautions the madwoman to have care for her soul. Knowing as she must that she has not much longer to live, he tells her to prepare herself for admission to heaven rather than living “in some foul sty.” She responds by questioning the dualities by which the bishop has governed his life, suggesting that opposites are in fact not in contention but rather are “near of kin” and that this true of life and death as well as of “fair and foul” and “lowliness” and “pride.” The selfless idealism of romantic love, she reminds the prelate, is also messy and dirty. Her argument is sealed with an unanswerable anatomical point: “Love has pitched his mansion in/The place of excrement.” The poem ends in a grand crescendo of multiple meanings of soul/sole and whole/hole as Jane insists that what strikes us as the imperfection of reality is in fact its glory, the Fall that thickens the plot and sets history in motion, the suffering and passion that not only accompany sexual love and childbirth, but which in general make our lives meaningful and arduous and taxing and worth living.
     In his later years, the same Yeats whose righteous nationalist enthusiasm had contributed so greatly to the Irish Literary Revival was writing marching songs for the explicitly fascist Blueshirts (though, to be sure, he did end his affiliation with them). His poetry, however, had become far more artful, compressed, and subtle in theme. He had a master’s control of poetic sound effects, rare in his day and rarer still today. Over his lifetime he changed and excelled in a variety of styles producing in each memorable cadences and unforgettable images. Yeats for his craftsmanship stands as a sort of complement to our American Whitman of the loose flowing language. Whitman’s celebrative affirmation is answered by Yeats’ more secretive and ambiguous mythology, but their contradiction points a greater truth as both are probing, as though through the Very Large Telescope in Chile, the furthest reaches accessible to words.