W.B.
YEATS
Of all the poets I read
and enjoyed as a youth, W.B. Yeats was the one whose work most intrigued me and
who, together with James Joyce, Oscar Wilde, Robert Graves, and Thomas Hardy,
acquired a special status in my hierarchy of poets by dint of the fact that I
was able to commit so many of his poems to memory. In fact, some of his poems seemed to commit
themselves to memory, which was, I supposed, a mark of their poetical
worth. I especially admired The Second Coming
and Byzantium, particularly the former, which, though
poetically inferior to the latter, was possessed of a politico-historical
dimension that made it all the more interesting, in light of my own burgeoning
politico-historical predilections such that were to lead me, in due course, to
Spengler, with whom Yeats was well acquainted.
Years later I was to find fault with the second stanza of this
tragic poem, because it seemed to do a grave disservice to the concept of the
Second Coming, likening it to a 'rough beast' with 'lion body and head of a
man' which 'slouches towards Bethlehem to be born' ... Yet, by then, I had
parted spiritual company with Yeats, whose poetry I no longer read and whose
philosophical views, including many of those expressed in that remarkable book
A
Vision, the product of what might be called a consummate 'lune', I would
have been only too ready to analyse in relation to his Protestant ancestry.
For, of course, Yeats was a Protestant Irishman, and hence
someone to distrust from a Catholic standpoint - or so I reasoned. One could admire his apparent attempt at
ingratiation with the majority population through assimilation of traditional
Irish culture, as expressed in various poems and plays, but, nevertheless, it
was still difficult to take all that Celtic mythologizing seriously,
particularly from the pen of someone who had little or no ancestral connections
with it and was questionably Celtic himself!
For me, the plays dealing with traditional Irish themes were the least
acceptable part of the Yeatsian corpus, partly for the above reason and also
partly because I had an inbuilt distrust of drama, which eventually matured
into a distaste for what I could only regard as an extremely antiquated, not to
say autocratic, medium of literary expression, even more antiquated than
narrative literature, whether novelistic or otherwise, with its inherently
liberal and bourgeois overtones.
Television plays were another thing, but theatrical plays I could not
abide, and never read any these days.
Indeed, it is primarily because Shaw was a playwright (horrible
term!) that I have little interest in the man; though I suppose the fact that
Shaw, too, was a Protestant and therefore less than truly or deeply Irish ...
is another factor which has to be taken into account, as also with his
fellow-dramatist and bon
viveur, Oscar Wilde, one of the greatest shallow-pates of all time. All these men - Yeats not excepted - were
Anglo-Irish and accordingly descended from or connected with the Ascendancy, a
British phase, as it were, of 'Irish' culture and civilization which the
Catholic Irish have no great love of and consequently no reason to
respect. Doubtless, the high literary
reputations of men like Wilde, Shaw, Beckett, and Yeats in England owes more
than a little to their Anglo-Irish origins, while Joyce's own not inconsiderable
reputation with the English in part derives from his anti-Irishness and
atheistic socialist bent, which could only have been out-of-place or, at any
rate, less than welcome in Ireland.
Hence his long exile on the Continent where, though nominally an Irish
Catholic writer, he functioned more as a European homme de lettres within
the Western tradition than strictly as an Irish expatriate. An Irish Social Transcendental Centre would
certainly take a less than indulgent view of Joyce's work, not to mention the
works of Wilde, Shaw, Beckett, and Yeats, who would also seem alien to
Ireland's true destiny on a properly idealistic level of people's evolution,
where all forms of bourgeois literature, together with all the other
traditional arts, would be officially beneath the ideological pale.
Returning to Yeats, it is interesting that, in A Vision (a
rare excursion into esoteric philosophy), the poet wrote of a distinction
between what he termed 'primary' and 'antithetical' men, the former given to a
cohesive and middle-of-the-road view of life, the latter to a dichotomous and
extremist view - a distinction roughly corresponding to British and Irish
alternatives. So much Yeats reasoned,
though it apparently didn't occur to him that the one is worldly, whereas the
other reflects a God/Devil dichotomy, in antithetical polarity, flanking and
distinct from a worldly view of life. If
we apply Yeats' classification to Christianity, we find that Catholicism
signifies the antithetical view while Protestantism, Yeats' own religious
tradition, signifies the primary one. In
the former case, a distinction between Satan and Christ, with Satan symbolic of
evil and Christ symbolizing good, being effectively Le Bon Dieu. In the latter case, no such dichotomy but a
cohesive Christ, abraxas-like in his dual integrity between good and evil, a
worldly figure who lacks true divinity by dint of his inherently human, or
atomic, integrity - a stage on the downhill road to the secular humanism of
communism, which denies bourgeois realism in the interests of proletarian
materialism, all idealism abandoned or scorned in the name of the Antichrist
(Marx).
So Protestant realism leads to communist materialism as surely
as the evening twilight to the darkness of night. God humanized becomes a stage on the road to
the secular deification of the proletariat through communist atheism. Protestant realism leads not up towards
Heaven, but down towards the hell of a godless materialism.
Yet what of the Catholic antithesis between Satan and Christ,
diabolic materialism and divine idealism?
Does this not project towards a Second Coming/Antichrist antithesis
between Social Transcendentalism on the one hand and Autocratic Socialism on
the other, with a wavicle/particle distinction on the evolutionary levels of
electron superidealism and proton submaterialism? Yes, I believe so, and he who, in his
transcendental extremism, corresponds to a Second Coming would recognize and be
recognized by the Catholic Irish people for his inherent idealism - no
dualistic worldly figure but one corresponding to Christ as the Catholics
conceive of Him: Le
Bon Dieu who wishes to establish His 'Kingdom of Heaven' here
on earth in order that joy may reign supreme, and all frictions and hatreds,
not to mention aggressors and haters, be consigned to the rubbish heap of
history.
Obviously a long, difficult, and at times arduous process, but
not impossible once the world, or worldly and anachronistic manifestations of
life, have been overcome and all those who do not recognize or relate to the
Second Coming have been cast out of the heavenly Kingdom ... of the Social
Transcendental Centre. Would Yeats have
recognized this transcendental Messiah, this man of the Holy Spirit, had he
appeared in the world during the poet's lifetime? No, not if the Antichristic image of The Second Coming is
anything by which to judge!
LONDON
1985 (Revised 2011)
