Politics (poem)
"Politics" is a
Background
The epigraph at the top of the poem is taken from
O Western wind when wilt thou blow
That small rain down can rain:--
Christ, that my love were in my arms
And I in my bed again[4]
MacLeish, in the article, compliments Yeats for his "public" language, but the poem's response to that compliment appears, to Yeats historian Brenda Maddox, to be tempered by Yeats' refusal to believe that war would actually break out. In
Themes
In the poem, there are many opposites that appear to challenge each other: age and youth, intellect and emotion, and male and female. The implication that the young are in each other's arms, to Nicholas Meihuizen, highlights the poet's age and its adverse relationship to the youth of the poem's lovers. As the poet speaks of turning his inability to turn his "attention" from "that girl standing there" to "politics", the poet presents the battle of intellect and emotion, a battle which emotion wins in the poem. Likewise, Meihuizen argues that the poem presents sexual longing in the final line as the poem ends with the combination of the male and female in sexual union.[5]
The conflict between the girl and the political surroundings mentioned in the text is, according to critic Charles Ferrall, an extension of a correspondence Yeats had with Olivia Shakespeare in which Yeats suggests that there is a relationship between Fascism and aesthetics. While Yeats never embraces Fascism the way that Ezra Pound did, the theme of the relationship between art and politics appears to focus heavily on that particular form of government as it was the prevailing political force in two of the three countries mentioned in the poem.[6] However, Yeats was consistently elusive on political matters throughout his literary career and carefully avoids taking a position in "Politics". Michael Bell, in his essay "W.B. Yeats:'In Dreams Begin Responsibilities'" suggests that in "Politics", Yeats "treads a dubious line between honesty to mood and a would-be seductive fecklessness".[7] The image of young people in each other's arms calls back to Yeats's 1928 poem "Sailing to Byzantium" ("That is no country for old men. The young / In one another's arms, birds in the trees").[8]
The retreat from the political world suggested by the poem's title and carried out throughout the text of the poem also implies that the poet is inclined to create what Glenn Willmott calls a "narcissistic paradise". According to Willmott, Yeats's poems often move from the world of social interaction to a place where the individual finds seclusion, as is also the case in the pastoral Yeats's earlier poems "The Lake Isle of Innisfree, "The Song of the Happy Shepherd", and "The Sad Shepherd". All of the poems create a "utopia" in which the poet finds relief from public life by withdrawing from social spheres and entering into a mythical setting, yet "Politics" is unique in that it lacks the pastoral qualities of the earlier works and finds solitude in a different time rather than a different place.[9]
Critical response
To Lewis McAdams, the presentation of "Politics" was Yeats's attempt to counter Mann's argument that meaning are presented in political terms. McAdams argues that "Politics" suggests that the pull of "nostalgia and love" appears to Yeats to be stronger than the call of "war and war's alarms" presented in line 10.
Philip L. Marcus, in Yeats and Aesthetic Power argues that "Politics" clearly represents a different view on art that many of Yeats's earlier works in that the politics are no longer limited to Ireland and the
References
- ^ a b c Robinson, Peter. Poetry, Poets, Readers. Oxford University Press (2002), p. 72-74
- ^ a b Maddox, Brenda. Yeats's Ghosts: The Secret Life of W.B. Yeats HarperCollins (2000)
- ^ Finneran, Richard.Yeats: An Annual of Critical and Textual Studies 1995. University of Michigan Press (1998) p. 202
- ^ MacLeish, Archibald. "Public Speech and Private Speech in Poetry".The Yale Review.27.(1937-8)545-6 540.
- ^ Meihuizen, Nicholas. Yeats and the Drama of Sacred Space. Rodopi (1998) p. 158
- ^ Ferrall, Charles. Modernist Writing and Reactionary Politics. Cambridge University Press 2001 pp.36–39
- ^ Bell, Michael. "W.B. Yeats: In Dreams Begin Responsibilities". Literature, Modernism and Myth: Belief and Responsibility in the Twentieth Century. Cambridge University Press 1997 pp.41–42
- ^ Hofstadter, Albert. "The Poem Is Not a Symbol". Philosophy East and West 19:3. University of Hawaii Press 1969 p. 231.
- ^ Willmott, Glenn. Modernist goods: Primitivism, the Market and the GiftUniversity of Toronto Press 2008 pp.49–51
- ^ McAdams, Lewis. "Poetry and Politics" in Talking poetics From Naropa Institute. Taylor & Francis (1979) p. 354
- ^ Genet, Jacqueline. La poétique de W. B. Yeats. Univ. Septentrion (1989) p. 220-220 (Fr.)
- ^ Marcus, Philip L. "W.B.Yeats: Cultural Nationalism" The Political Aesthetic of Yeats, Eliot, and Pound. pp.51–53,71–75