John, I share your admiration, as any person--sane, or, better, mad--must, for the later Yeats. But you must not casually join in the consensus judgment (propagated first of all, of course, by Yeats himself) against the early work. Bloom's Yeats makes the case fulsomely, as I'm sure you know, but you must also read de Man's long essay on him (which finds an apocalyptic continuity between early and late in their shared adherence to the world-destroying Symbol), but also Allen Grossman's Poetic Knowledge in the Early Yeats, a superbly severe study of the Wind Among the Reeds, which, as he shows, itself abundantly merits both descriptors.
You make me now hear this image as an anticipation of what has always struck me as the uncanniest moment in Larkin's (not a poet I favor, but one in regards to whom I ought to overcome my prejudice) "Aubade": "It stands plain as a wardrobe what we know." The sense is the same, but Yeats's image is somehow both more literal and more indirect.
I would love to hear your thoughts on the Grossman. He became a woollier figure as he aged. That early book seems as if it were dictated by Fergus, among the brazen cars.
John, I share your admiration, as any person--sane, or, better, mad--must, for the later Yeats. But you must not casually join in the consensus judgment (propagated first of all, of course, by Yeats himself) against the early work. Bloom's Yeats makes the case fulsomely, as I'm sure you know, but you must also read de Man's long essay on him (which finds an apocalyptic continuity between early and late in their shared adherence to the world-destroying Symbol), but also Allen Grossman's Poetic Knowledge in the Early Yeats, a superbly severe study of the Wind Among the Reeds, which, as he shows, itself abundantly merits both descriptors.
(Pardon me for again, as it my wont I suppose, playing the role of carping scholiast.)
No worries, Paul, I value your recommendations and had Bloom admonishing me in my head as I wrote those very words.
Throw a coat over that man -- he's walking naked!
Fifteen apparitions have I seen;
The worst a coat upon a coat-hanger.
Oh yes.
You make me now hear this image as an anticipation of what has always struck me as the uncanniest moment in Larkin's (not a poet I favor, but one in regards to whom I ought to overcome my prejudice) "Aubade": "It stands plain as a wardrobe what we know." The sense is the same, but Yeats's image is somehow both more literal and more indirect.
I would love to hear your thoughts on the Grossman. He became a woollier figure as he aged. That early book seems as if it were dictated by Fergus, among the brazen cars.