I was reading Yeats on the train (there's a
Snakes on a Plane pun here) yesterday – particularly the really late
New Poems: "The Statues", "A Bronze Head", "Lapis Lazuli", "The Gyres", etc. I hadn't read him for a while.
It helped (a lot) that the
Selected Poems has notes in the back, otherwise I'd have been totally stumped by much of it.
Anyway, I find reading his poems endlessly fascinating, though not
reliably pleasurable (and maybe that's why they're so fascinating). Particularly struck this time around by:
1) his (marooned Romantic) absurdity, which though often provocatively absurd, seems to me
too easy to mock – I feel that, having acknowledged he's being absurd, it's important to resist that urge and think about what taking him seriously as he took himself would mean. Auden called out his "ridiculous"ness – but also pointed out that he was only as ridiculous as everybody else is.
The other thing is, and maybe this is a feature of poetry (being more introverted) in general, is the sense of nothing existing outside of his mind. The
inhumanity of it. The humourlessness. Compare Joyce, who was a narcissistic show-off and so on, but who fills his stories and novels with people and jokes and liveliness.
2) his visceral disgust re: the "filthy tide" of Modernity – which, much like and part and parcel of his absurdity, enables him to channel forces closed off to the less hysterical, 'reasonable', post-modern mind – "What matter though numb nightmare ride on top, And blood and mire the sensitive body stain?") – I noticed that it's often when he's railing against the "sty" of modern life (and close to being a raving 'rivers of blood' Fascist) that his language is most powerful.
3) the compression of historical epochs, philosophies, personal symbols/resonances into stanzas and lines – this highly compacted depth/breadth of reference which makes these fairly short poems endlessly re-readable (and richer for having read the others).
I wondered if the jarring ugliness of some of his lines is deliberate, a tactic derived from Pound, to avoid things becoming too late-Romantically mellifluous. There's obvious Pound influence (I mean critical, since I've not read any Pound poetry) in stuff like " Aeroplane and Zeppelin will come out. / Pitch like King Billy bomb-balls in /Until the town lie beaten flat."