Pages from Tales: Narrating Modernism's Aftermaths Edward Ragg Wallace Stevens Journal, Volume 42, Number 1, Spring 2018, pp. 1-5 (Article) Published by Johns Hopkins University Press DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/wsj.2018.0000 For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/687674 No institutional affiliation (27 Feb 2019 15:56 GMT)
Pages from Tales: Narrating Modernism s Aftermaths EDWARD RAGG MORE OR LESS a century ago, T. S. Eliot published Prufrock and Other Observations (1917), The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock having appeared in Harriet Monroe s Poetry in 1915. Although modernism in all its cultural manifestations traces its origins to prior to World War One, both Prufrock and The Waste Land (1922), to which Ezra Pound also notably contributed, have clearly come to represent seminal moments in the narration of literary modernism in English. Wallace Stevens s Harmonium (1923) was understandably overshadowed by Eliot s experimental 1922 poem published with targeted Transatlantic reach in The Dial and The Criterion (with Eliot the critic already in the making). W. B. Yeats, of a clearly different generation and significantly different cultural background from Stevens and Eliot, was already a more established figure than either. Yeats had recently published Michael Robartes and the Dancer (1921) and had been actively involved in the Irish National Theatre, first conceived as early as 1902, the year the young James Joyce met Yeats personally only to inform the elder poet he was too old to be of any help to younger writers (see Yeats xxiii). Yeats s Easter, 1916, collected in that volume, testifies to the Irish poet s measure of contemporary events as would Meditations in Time of Civil War, collected later in The Tower (1928). But the poet, playwright, and one-time Senator of the Irish Free State, for all the modernizing of his lyric diction, would never be accounted modernist, despite or maybe because of his contact with and differences from Joyce, Eliot, and Pound. Great poetry written in the English language was, of course, produced in the early twentieth century without recourse to modernist techniques or even overt modernist influence. Yeats s work up to his death in 1939 was massively influential, and not only in Irish literary circles, not least in the case of W. H. Auden. Auden was very much attuned to both Eliot s and Yeats s poetries, out of which he fashioned his own uniquely modern English idiom, having been published by Eliot at Faber in 1930 as well as producing In Memory of W. B. Yeats (1939), Auden s first work on arriving in the United States one that shows both Yeats s influence and Auden s transformation of the older poet s work. THE WALLACE STEVENS JOURNAL 42.1 (SPRING 2018): 1 5. 2018 JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY PRESS. 1
When we consider, therefore, both modernism and its aftermaths and the legacies of such different poets as Yeats, Eliot, and Stevens, especially together, some caution must be taken in terms of what the contemporary critic wants to achieve. With modernism now so much more thoroughly understood in what are seemingly ever-widening and more culturally nuanced investigations of a truly international phenomenon, there is the danger of losing sight of what made each of these poets not only very much of their times but both unique and even visionary. That said, it is precisely through the new modernist studies that a greater appreciation of the novelty of each of these poets works may be realized, especially if one considers Yeats s peripheral relationship with modernism and Stevens s development beyond the early modernist phase of Harmonium. This Special Issue stems from a panel entitled Yeats, Stevens, Eliot: Re-triangulating the Transatlantic Canon, assembled at the 2017 MLA Convention in Philadelphia. Several of that panel s contributors Margaret Mills Harper, Benjamin Madden, and Hannah Simpson subsequently transformed their presentations into the essays published here, now flanked by contributions from Marjorie Perloff, Lee Jenkins, Tony Sharpe, and Sarah Kennedy. Our aim has been to assemble a wide range of experienced and upcoming voices: Yeats scholar Harper, Eliot scholar Kennedy, and readers of Stevens with significant experience of modernism (as well as Yeats and Eliot) including Perloff, Jenkins, Sharpe, Madden, and new voice Simpson. This lineup has proved fittingly international. For, in Philadelphia, what began as a Transatlantic discussion quickly morphed into a more wide-ranging analysis of the fates of Yeats, Stevens, and Eliot globally. Madden, as he does in his invaluable essay here, illustrated the Australian reception of Stevens and Eliot, whereas Harper spoke of Yeats s afterlives in India, Korea, and Japan (phenomena also observed by Perloff in her fascinating interview, which opens the issue). It quickly became apparent, assisted by such luminaries of modernist studies in the Philadelphia audience as Vincent Sherry and Jahan Ramazani, that to consider the legacies of Yeats, Stevens, and Eliot today unsurprisingly required a more global perspective than the Transatlantic focus originally proposed. For those of us who have written about Stevens s work, but who are not based in the United States, there is, even in 2018, still perhaps the nagging sense that Stevens is not as well-known as he should be. Rightly or wrongly, Stevens, like Yeats, is still sometimes figured as a last romantic, more a distal figure to modernism and the avant-garde poetics of twentieth- and twenty-first-century literature than Eliot or Pound. It is especially refreshing, therefore, to hear Perloff s insightful and sometimes polemical responses to each of our three poets afterlives in US academic culture (and elsewhere). Stevens s star has undeniably risen; Yeats seems to have been relegated in some academic circles to Irish Studies ; and Stevens again appears to be more than holding his own with Eliot in the classroom, at 2 THE WALLACE STEVENS JOURNAL
least on US campuses. But the particular value of this Special Issue from Perloff s interview to Jenkins s impressive analysis of all three poets writing in times of war is not only to reassess how these poets have fared in the academy, both in the US and internationally, but also and more importantly to focus less on their competing reputations and more on how the three poets may revealingly be read together. Any lover of poetry in the English language probably needs no reason to reflect on why it is still valuable to read Yeats, Stevens, and Eliot, however dated their poetic diction might sound, especially considering their earliest works (with Stevens, a century on from Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird, probably sounding the least outmoded, at least in his barer, abstract late lyrics). But the kind of comparative critical reassessment found in the pages that follow gives added value to what has been overlooked in each of these poets. That is, deft comparative analysis renders each poet in different lights. Stevens was seemingly more open to Yeats than to Eliot, certainly when one considers Page from a Tale and his ambivalent Homage to T. S. Eliot, the latter expertly reexamined by Sharpe. Stevens was not a poet given to self-conscious allusion and yet Page from a Tale specializes in just that: it evokes both Yeats s The Lake Isle of Innisfree and, as George Lensing has discussed (179), one of the pieces of Heine s Lyrisches Intermezzo (No. 31), Stevens quoting directly from Yeats s poem and echoing Heine with his so blau... so lind / Und so lau (CPP 363). Texts and contexts prove compelling, as Yeats was influenced both by Thoreau s Walden and by his being culturally displaced when he wrote his 1888 poem, walking down London s Fleet Street, dreaming of an idyllic life in Innisfree far from the metropolitan environment of pavements grey 1 : 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. (60) Stevens s narrative poem, itself (con)textually complex, seemingly internalizing the penchant for rhyme in both Yeats s poem and Heine s, then begins rhyming almost in Yeatsian fashion: These were not tepid stars of torpid places But bravest at midnight and in lonely spaces, They looked back at Hans look with savage faces. (CPP 363) Indeed, Page from a Tale is one of Stevens s most self-consciously sonorous poems, at least for this later period: The miff-maff-muff of water, PAGES FROM TALES: NARRATING MODERNISM S AFTERMATHS 3
the vocables / Of the wind, the glassily-sparkling particles / Of the mind (CPP 364 65). Where Stevens writes, As if whatever in water strove to speak / Broke dialect in a break of memory (CPP 364), he invokes not only Yeats s water lapping but, seemingly, the poet of memory writing of Maud Gonne in Broken Dreams (Yeats 202 03). Stevens is, though, narrating one of several different poetic tales, including the fate of the Irish-sounding ship Balayne that lay frozen in the sea (CPP 363). Where Hans and the stuck mariners look at the stars and where Stevens s poem considers Arcturus, the largest star visible in the northern hemisphere, Page from a Tale borrows from Yeats s poem, but borrowing in almost as remote a fashion as the context evoked. Stevens imagines the sun might melt Arcturus to ingots dropping drops, / Or spill night out in brilliant vanishings, / Whirlpools of darkness in whirlwinds of light... (CPP 364), which follows Yeats s own repetition of dropping : 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. (60) No doubt this passage appealed to Stevens sonorously and in terms of color, bearing in mind the poet of Of Hartford in a Purple Light. Yeats s purple also has a specific location, the poet relating in a radio broadcast that he had conceived heather reflected in water ( Innisfree meaning heather island ). 2 But the end of Stevens s poem registers an entirely different tone from The Lake Isle of Innisfree, following the long em-dash that links mind with They : Of the mind They would soon climb down the side of the ship. They would march single file, with electric lamps, alert For a tidal undulation underneath. (CPP 365) Stevens plays overtly on undulation and underneath, that tidal motion and the precarious sense of modernity in a remote place ( with electric lamps ) marrying with an implicit concern for safety They would march single file that suggests a more sinister context than the idyllic and perhaps idealized setting of The Lake Isle of Innisfree. 4 THE WALLACE STEVENS JOURNAL
Perhaps it was Thomas McGreevy who shaped Stevens s sense of both Yeats and Eliot, as Lee Jenkins reflects below. But whatever the narratives wound up in Page from a Tale and whatever Stevens s responses to Yeats and Eliot, this Special Issue marks a timely reassessment of three of the twentieth century s greatest English-language poets, whose legacies are, especially in Stevens s case, akin to those tidal undulations vibrating sonorously perhaps underneath the poetry of today. Notes Beijing People s Republic of China 1 In his edition, Daniel Albright illuminates the texts and places shaping Yeats s poem (436 38). 2 See Albright s note on 437. Works Cited Lensing, George S. Wallace Stevens and the Seasons. Louisiana State UP, 2001. Stevens, Wallace. Wallace Stevens: Collected Poetry and Prose. Edited by Frank Kermode and Joan Richardson, Library of America, 1997. Yeats, W. B. The Poems. Edited by Daniel Albright, J. M. Dent, 1990. PAGES FROM TALES: NARRATING MODERNISM S AFTERMATHS 5