By Stewart Cole a Thesis Submitted in Conformity with the Requirements For
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
SHADOWS OF FUTURITY: YEATS, AUDEN, AND THE POETICS OF UTOPIA by Stewart Cole A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Graduate Department of English University of Toronto Copyright by Stewart Cole, 2012 SHADOWS OF FUTURITY: YEATS, AUDEN, AND THE POETICS OF UTOPIA Stewart Cole Doctor of Philosophy Department of English University of Toronto 2012 ABSTRACT This dissertation works to illuminate modern poetry’s ambivalent stance toward the concept of utopia through the work of two of its most politically engaged practitioners. One of the most quoted literary maxims of the twentieth century is W.H. Auden’s assertion, in his 1939 elegy “In Memory of W.B. Yeats,” that “poetry makes nothing happen.” For Yeats, poets serve as harbingers of new worlds, imaging more ideal societal orders while working to actualize these private speculations in the public realm – a viewpoint which Auden, always concerned to define poetry’s social niche, finds both ludicrous and naggingly attractive. This dissertation examines this ambivalence, tracing the two poets’ modulating views on poetry’s world-building capacities, and their shifting stances toward the Shelleyan analogy between poetic forms and social formations. Spanning a period from the 1880s of early Yeats to Auden’s death in 1973, and devoting two chapters to each poet, I take up the following questions: Why is their work so often concerned with the future? What images of better worlds does it present? And more expansively, how can lyric poetry – so often predicated upon solitude – work to embody social aspirations? ii Given the sheer prevalence of an affirmative future-orientation in the two poets’ work, I see them as embodying (albeit in various ways at different stages in their careers) a poetics of utopia, whereby both poetry itself and the vocation of writing it stand as crucial manifestations of the impulse to strive after better ways of life in more ideal futures. Engaging with theorists of utopia from Lewis Mumford and his contemporary Ernst Bloch to, more recently, Fredric Jameson and Ruth Levitas, I work to mediate among the various senses of “utopia” with which the two poets engage in their work. Writing in dialogue with recent efforts to recuperate the drive for social change at the root of the utopian impulse, I highlight the centrality of this impulse not just to the work of Yeats and Auden, but to twentieth-century poetry more generally, as it strives to underscore its indispensability to our search for better futures. iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Thanks are due to my supervisor, Professor Malcolm Woodland, and my supervisory committee, Professors Andrew DuBois and Michael Cobb, for their encouragement and critical insight throughout the writing of this dissertation. I am grateful to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) for a Canada Graduate Scholarship which sustained me during the initial stages of the writing process. And finally, thanks to Pascale McCullough Manning for her constant support. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION 1 CHAPTER ONE “Ever new and ever ancient”: The Pastoral Utopias of Early Yeats 18 CHAPTER TWO “History is very simple”: Desire and the Meanings of Utopia in Later Yeats 66 CHAPTER THREE “The Good Place has not been”: The Pursuit of Unity in Early Auden 115 CHAPTER FOUR “The ungarnished offended gap”: Utopia and Negative Poetics in Later Auden 165 AFTERWORD 211 WORKS CITED 213 VITA 220 v INTRODUCTION Probably the most famous poetic aphorism of the 20th century is W.H. Auden’s claim that “poetry makes nothing happen.” Formulated in 1939 on the eve of World War II, it finds the poet facing the reality that his art can have no impact on the monstrous course of global affairs, that in times of military crisis poetry can amount to little more than (as he put it in another context) “fiddling while Rome burns” (EA 329). Furthermore, Auden makes his claim for poetry’s causal impotence in an elegy for W.B. Yeats, and so it must be read not only in its historical context, but in its poetic one, as one line amid a 65-line tribute not only to Yeats as an ambivalently influential predecessor, but as the great poet of Auden’s age most likely to disagree with it. For Yeats himself – as my first chapter will elaborate – often made extraordinary claims for poetry (and art in general) as exerting a patterning influence upon the course of history, repeating in many forms the assertion that “the laws of art […] are the hidden laws of the world” (EE 120). In the context of Yeats’s work, such an assertion implies not just that the extra-perceptive artist builds her work from what she gleans from a deep communion with the world, but that her work in fact helps determine world events. As he wrote in his 1900 essay “The Symbolism of Poetry”: “I am certainly never certain, when I hear of some war, or of some religious excitement or of some new manufacture, or of anything else that fills the ear of the world, that it has not all happened because of something that a boy piped in Thessaly” (Early 116). This is art – and throughout Yeats’s early writings, all art refers itself to poetry – unequivocally making something happen, and it is precisely against such assertions of art’s causal force that Auden formulates his famous aphorism. 1 But the picture set out in the preceding paragraph – of Yeats the late Romantic indulging in fantasies of poetry’s worldly power, with Auden the clear-eyed Modern arriving to straighten the record – is far from complete. When Auden claims, in his comic essay “The Public v. Mr. William Butler Yeats” (written just after the first draft of the elegy) that “if not a poem had been written, not a picture painted, not a bar of music composed, the history of man would be materially unchanged” (Prose II 7), any reader of his 1930s work must wonder if he really means it. For not only did he place this statement in the mouth of the Defence attorney in an essay whose dialogic form allows the Prosecution equal space to embody the opposite viewpoint, but he published the essay at the end of a decade during which he himself repeatedly expresses the hope that art might alter the moral landscape of the world, helping us distinguish between good and evil and thus leading us closer to social unity. His repudiation of such hopes comes only after his move to America – a move that precipitated his return to the Anglican communion and his subsequent shift in emphasis from social unity to personal union with the divine. Yeats actually follows a similar trajectory, with his work before the turn of the twentieth century embodying the hope that poetry might help to forge Ireland into unity while his later work reflects the abandonment of these cultural-nationalist aspirations in favour of a view of poetry as expressing the poet’s unique attunement to the cyclical forces of history – his status as harbinger “Of what is past, or passing, or to come.” Even in their later periods, however – though having largely repudiated their youthful hopes for poetry as a force for concrete sociopolitical change – both Yeats and Auden persist in depicting in their verse worlds and states of being more ideal than the societies in which they lived, versions of paradise that evince both poets’ enduring 2 conviction that poetry has a crucial role to play in the imaging of better futures. This dissertation is built upon the premise that despite their considerable formal and ideological differences, what crucially unites Yeats and Auden is their propensity, throughout their bodies of work, to adopt poses of what I call affirmative futurity: desiring, wishing, hoping, aspiring – modes of looking forward that emphasize the future as above all a space of potential social and personal improvement. Given the sheer prevalence of this affirmative future-orientation in the two poets’ work, I see them as embodying (albeit in various ways at different stages in their careers) a poetics of utopia, whereby both poetry itself and the vocation of writing it stand as crucial manifestations of the impulse to strive after better ways of life in more ideal futures. I have chosen to figure this striving through the term “utopia” for several reasons. First, its use in designating a literary genre allows it to encompass those texts – surprisingly frequent in the two poets’ oeuvres, like Yeats’s “Byzantium” and Auden’s “Atlantis” – which envision and describe the sorts of ideal “no places” (outopias) and “good places” (eutopias) to which the word punningly refers. Despite quite commonly depicting such places, modern poetry is not often acknowledged among the annals of utopian literature, and this dissertation aims to redress that omission. Second, the structural and organizational connotations that inhere to the word “utopia” – the idea of a society minutely planned down to the last detail – make it a useful way of figuring the similar rigour with which poems themselves are organized; and indeed the later Auden highlights this connection himself in his claim (which I examine in considerable detail in Chapter Four) that “every good poem is very nearly a utopia” (DH 71). In other words, a poem is like a little verbal society, which though it may present through its subject matter 3 any number of impressions from paradisal to hellish, nonetheless strives for internal coherence – for harmoniousness, however defined by any given aesthetic occasion. Thus the concept of utopia can shed light not only on poetry’s content, but on its foregrounding of form as well, offering a means by which we might conceive of an inherent connection between at least some acts of poetic composition and the drive for more ideal social formations.