The Battersea Review and the Failure of Yeats!

Hot soup, people—the  much-anticipated new issue of the Battersea Review is finally here!

Marjorie Perloff on John Cage!

Adam Kirsch on superfluity and anxiety!

William Logan!

Charles Bernstein!

William Logan and Charles Bernstein together!

Translations of Rilke’s Russian poems!

Saskia Hamilton!

Unearthed poetry by J. Robert Oppenheimer!

Robert Archambeau! Me! On W.B. Yeats and poetry as minority culture!

More! Much more!

My own contribution begins this way:

It was June in the year 1311 when the people of Siena walked in a great procession bearing Duccio's Maestà—his altarpiece depicting the Virgin Mary in the glorious golden Italo-Byzantine style—to the cathedral that would become its home. It was a momentous occasion for the entire city: Duccio's painting was to replace the fabled "Madonna of the Large Eyes," to which the Sienese had appealed a half-century earlier, when the fate of their soldiers hung in the balance in the war with Siena's bitter rivals, the Florentines. The Madonna, it was said, had worked miracles that assured the Sienese victory, and it was the intercession of Mary on behalf of Siena in that battle that led the Sienese to make her their patron saint. Now they wished to commemorate her in a suitably grand sacred image. The event involved the entire city, from the highest grandees to the lowest beggars. One contemporary describes the procession of the Maestà this way:

And on that day when it was brought into the cathedral, all workshops remained closed, and the bishop commanded a great host of devoted priests and monks to file past in solemn procession. This was accompanied by all the high officers of the Commune and by all the people; all honorable citizens of Siena surrounded said panel with candles held in their hands, and women and children followed humbly behind. They accompanied the panel amidst the glorious pealing of bells after a solemn procession on the Piazza del Campo into the very cathedral; and all this out of reverence for the costly panel… The poor received many alms, and we prayed to the Holy Mother of God, our patron saint, that she might in her infinite mercy preserve this our city of Siena from every misfortune, traitor or enemy. 

The occasion of the installation of the Maestà was an aesthetic event, of course, but it was a religious event too. It was also a civic event, connected to the city's military past and to its prestige in the future. And, as the distribution of alms indicates, it was also an economic event, an opportunity to redistribute wealth so as to maintain the social fabric, legitimate the civic rulers, and perform the religious duty of charity. We could not be further from the way artworks are unveiled in our own time, in the pristine white cube of the gallery space, where artists and art-lovers have gathered for an event far more specialized, and far narrower in appeal and intention, than the Sienese procession of the Maestà.

William Butler Yeats, that most vacillating and self-reinventive of poets, imagined many different roles for art in society—but if there is one dream he dreams most passionately, it is one along the lines of the installation of Duccio's Maestà. That is, he yearned for a world where art was integrated into the culture at large, and where all social institutions were woven into each other, in the manner of medieval Sienese society. But why would he have this dream? The short answer is that he had seen the limits of aesthetic autonomy—of art for its own sake—and felt pinched by the boundaries of the self-exiled minority culture in which so many poets of the fin de siècle lived. Having helped found that bastion of the aesthetes, the Rhymer's Club, he grew disillusioned with the small scope of interests expressed in the group's meetings at the Cheshire Cheese pub, and even more disillusioned at the limited public impact of the group.

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All honor to U.S. Dhuga, Ben Mazer, and the Battersea crew for putting together a 300-pound per square inch pressurized tank of literary splendor!

Sharp (Poetic) Turns

Mike Theune and his band of merry pranksters at Voltage Poetry have been publishing a sharp series of short essays, for the most part on individual poems and how they use the traditional poetic volta or turn, since last October.  The essays include Don Share on Yeats' "Politics," Erica Bernheim on Dean Young's "Vacationland," Jason Bredle on John Ashbery's "My Philosophy of Life," Megan Volpert on John Yao's "830 Fireplace Road," and many, many more—including, most recently, my essay "Sharp Turns in Any Direction: John Matthias' 'Friendship.'"  Check it out!

Blood, Guts, and the Eternal Ideal: Notes on Yeats and Blake

[This is a draft of a section of the Yeats chapter of a book I've been working on that has the working title Power and Poetics: A Social History of Aesthetic Autonomy and Poetry.  And by draft I mean draft: I haven't even gone over it for typos yet.]

                       

In February of 1891, when “The Man Who Dreamed of Faeryland” appeared in the National Observer, Yeats had been involved for some two years in the three-volume edition of Blake that he and Edwin Ellis would complete in 1893.  By the time the poem was republished in The Book of the Rhymers’ Club in 1892, the club itself had expelled the anti-aesthete John Davidson and his allies and fellow Scots, becoming overwhelmingly an aesthete’s concern.  Both facts are relevant to an understanding of the poem.  The context of the battle between Davidson, with his “blood and guts” ethos, and the Oxford aesthetes matters because the poem stages a debate between the life of ordinary desires and satisfactions, on the one hand, and a kind of neoplatonic, otherworldly removal from such things, on the other.  The context of Yeats’ ongoing work on Blake matters because “The Man Who Dreamed of Faeryland” bears such strong structural similarities to Blake’s Book of Thel that it begs to be read in the context of the earlier poem, and when read in such a context emerges as a stronger critique of the eschewal of the everyday than it would otherwise.  While Yeats sided with the aesthetes against Davidson, his poem is less sanguine about matters.

            The first three lines of the poem’s first stanza give us a man in a specifically Irish setting seeking to satisfy his yearnings for an ordinary, this-worldly love, and finding some modest satisfaction in the quest.  But a sudden supernatural encounter marks an abrupt volta in the poem, snatching away the man’s satisfaction:

He stood among a crowd at Drumahair;

His heart hung all upon a silken dress,

And he had known at last some tenderness,

Before earth took him to her stony care;

But when a man poured fish into a pile,

It seemed they raised their little silver heads,

And sang what gold morning or evening sheds

Upon a woven world-forgotten isle

Where people love beside the ravelled seas;

That Time can never mar a lover's vows

Under that woven changeless roof of boughs:

The singing shook him out of his new ease.

The conflict, here, is between the ordinary love of a man of flesh and blood and the vision of a remote ideal of timeless, eternal love.  That the fish are silver and sing of a “gold morning” is significant: Yeats had long been reading in the alchemical tradition, and knew that gold was associated with the masculine principle, silver with the feminine principle, and the two together were a form of perfection, analogous to the perfection of the soul in eternity.[1]  Knowledge of this realm of eternal love brings sorrow to the man, making him unable to enjoy the ordinary love he had finally found in this world.  The poem is by no means a simple allegory of Yeats’ cultural position.  Nevertheless, the fact that the man is associated with Ireland, combined with the fact that the poems’ ideal world is reminiscent of the neo-Platonic inclinations of Symbolist poetics, links the poem to Yeats’ concerns about the relative value of commitments to specific, worldly Irish affairs, on the one hand, and the world of the aesthetes, on the other.

            The second stanza is structured on the same principles as the first, with a three line description of the man’s quest for worldly satisfaction in a specifically Irish context, followed by a volta in which his vision of an ideal world makes him dissatisfied with his modest achievements:

He wandered by the sands of Lissadell;

His mind ran all on money cares and fears,

And he had known at last some prudent years

Before they heaped his grave under the hill;

But while he passed before a plashy place,

A lug-worm with its grey and muddy mouth

Sang that somewhere to north or west or south

There dwelt a gay, exulting, gentle race

Under the golden or the silver skies;

That if a dancer stayed his hungry foot

It seemed the sun and moon were in the fruit:

And at that singing he was no more wise.

Here gold and silver have both literal and symbolic, alchemical properties, and the doleful effects of the encounter with the ideal world are even more severe than they were in the first stanza.  Rather than simply losing his “new ease,” the man becomes financially improvident, and we can assume that his worldly circumstances actually deteriorate after the encounter with the ideal.

            The third stanza presents a slight variation on the pattern set up by the first two stanzas:

He mused beside the well of Scanavin,

He mused upon his mockers: without fail

His sudden vengeance were a country tale,

When earthy night had drunk his body in;

But one small knot-grass growing by the pool

Sang where - unnecessary cruel voice –

Old silence bids its chosen race rejoice,

Whatever ravelled waters rise and fall

Or stormy silver fret the gold of day,

And midnight there enfold them like a fleece

And lover there by lover be at peace.

The tale drove his fine angry mood away.

Here, rather than pursuing love of fortune, the man seeks something less universally regarded as positive: vengeance.  And the post-volta encounter with the ideal world (still symbolized by gold and silver) is not a matter of encountering an idealized version of the thing he’d sought in the quotidian world.  Rather, it is an ideal of the opposite of vengeance and hatred: an ideal of peace.  That this vision of eternal peace is unnecessarily cruel isn’t just a clever paradox: it shows how different the value systems of the ordinary and the neoplatonic realms are.  It is a conflict between the world of blood and guts and a world of complacency that turns its back on earthly feuds and conflicts—in short, it is a rough parallel both to the conflict between Davidson and the aesthetes, and to the conflict between Yeats the Irish political man and Yeats the aesthete.  

            The poem’s final stanza maintains elements of the pattern we’ve seen develop, but also brings us intimations of the man’s eventual union with the eternal:

He slept under the hill of Lugnagall;

And might have known at last unhaunted sleep

Under that cold and vapour-turbaned steep,

Now that the earth had taken man and all:

Did not the worms that spired about his bones

Proclaim with that unwearied, reedy cry

That God has laid His fingers on the sky,

That from those fingers glittering summer runs

Upon the dancer by the dreamless wave.

Why should those lovers that no lovers miss

Dream, until God burn Nature with a kiss?

The man has found no comfort in the grave.

The modest hope for an “unhaunted” sleep in the grave is denied by visions of holy grandeur.  Here, though, the man isn’t simply discomforted by the vision of eternity: he is given a hope of a final dream achieved, at the end of time, when God burns fallen nature away with his love.  While gold and silver do not appear in this stanza, the fire is a continuation of the alchemical imagery—indeed, it represents the purifying force that burns away dross and fuses higher elements into perfection (see Schuler 45-46).

            A criticism of idealizing turn from ordinary satisfactions (and, implicitly, a criticism of the aesthetic tendency in the Rhymers’ Club and the Symbolist and Decadent movement more broadly conceived) is clearly a strong element in the poem: the ideal torments the man and renders him incapable of satisfactions in ordinary love, ordinary pursuit of wealth, and in victory over his foes.  This criticism of the pursuit of the ideal is re-enforced when we consider the way the poem’s structure and cast of characters echo Blake’s Book of Thel, with which Yeats was intimately familiar, especially at this point in his career.  The parallels between the poems are strong.  Both poems offer us a protagonist on a quest whose encounters with interlocutors introduce them to the nature of the relation between the time-bound and the eternal, and whose speech frustrates them profoundly.  Both poems offer repetitions, with variations, of the same kind of encounter.  Moreover, both poems show the protagonist listening to humble speakers who can only be speakers in a fantastic environment: in Blake’s poem, Thel is addressed by a cloud, a lily of the valley, a worm, and a clod of clay; while in Yeats’ poem the man is addressed in turn by fish, by a lug-worm, by a knott of grass, and by coffin worms.  There is one significant difference between the poems.  While Yeats’ man lives in a very real set of Irish places, and is informed by his interlocutors about the existence of eternity and the ideal, Thel lives in Blake’s Vale of Har, a kind of Garden of Eden (Har, in Blake’s personal mythology, is a kind of Adam).  She has heretofore been sheltered from any concept of time or change, and her interlocutors try to inform her about mortality, and about how we are all subject to time and change.  While Yeats’ man is haunted by thoughts of the timeless and the eternal, Thel is haunted by the specter of time and mortality.  But this does not mean that the poems are not both critical of those who eschew the quotidian world of time and change: Yeats’ man would have been able to revel in ordinary satisfactions were it not for the intrusion of the ideal, and we see Blake’s Thel as a failure for her refusal to embrace the message of her interlocutors.  The poems, then, take alternate routes to a similar critique of the ideal and defense of the time-bound.  In a sense, Yeats’ “The Man Who Dreamed of Faeryland” is the masculine counterpart to the feminine figure in Blake’s Book of Thel.  This notion is re-enforced when we turn, again, to alchemical symbolism: for the alchemically-informed Yeats the melding of gold and silver represented a fusion of the masculine and the feminine leading to a perfection of beauty, wisdom, and love; and Blake’s poem begins with a motto for Thel that invokes both metals: “Can Wisdom be put in a silver rod,/Or Love in a golden bowl?”  Yeats might almost have taken it for an invitation for his own poem.

For all this, though, to say with M.L. Rosenthal that “The Man Who Dreamed of Faeryland” evokes “the malign seductiveness of romantic dreaming” (9) is to misunderstand the nature of the poem’s ending, which mitigates the critique of idealizing tendencies considerably.  True, the poem’s protagonist has consistently suffered through his encounters with those who point to an ideal world beyond this one.  However, the purifying fire at the end of the poem (and, in theological terms, at the end of time) promises an eventual union with the eternal and divine, a gathering of the man to the neo-platonically Christian deity.  This is not a poem that simply asserts that we should take pleasures in the quotidian and shy away from any fish or knot of grass we find speaking of an ideal world beyond our own.  The poem’s criticism of the ideal is very much in evidence, and dominates everywhere but in the penultimate line.  That line does not so much negate the rest of the poem as it exists in counterpoint to it.  Yeats’ attitude to the turn from the world to the ideal, then, could best be described as “critical but ambivalent.”  A look at the other poems of this period in Yeats’ career (if not, in most cases, of his prose) career confirms that this is his attitude toward those who turn away from worldly concerns to the realm of the visionary.

Works Cited

Rosenthal, M.L.  Running to Paradise: Yeats’ Poetic Art.  Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994.

Schuler, Robert M.  “Yeats: Artist or Alchemist.”  The Review of English Studies, vol. 22 no. 85 (February 1971): 37-53.

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[1] For a long, but by no means exhaustive, list of Yeats’ reading in alchemical texts, see Schuler  37n.5.

W.B. Yeats, Madame Blavatsky, and the Mesmeric Force of Beards

"Yes," wrote the 24 year old William Butler Yeats in 1889, "my beard is off!"

The declaration comes in a letter to Katharine Tynan, an Irish poet and novelist some four years his senior. Those of you familiar with Yeats' constant vacillations over all things won't be surprised at his primary emotion on the momentous occasion: ambivalence.  "...my beard is off," he says, "and whether for good or ill I do not know."

Yeats' secondary emotion upon the loss of his beard won't be a surprise either, at least not to those familiar with his spiritualism, his Theosophy, and his susceptibility to anyone with a Ouija board tucked under her arm.  Invoking the name of London's most notorious spiritualist, Yeats continues his letter: "Madame Blavatsky promised me a bad illness of three months through the loss of the mesmeric force that collects in a beard."

I cannot speak to the mesmeric force of beards, though I do confess to an instinctive distrust of clean-shaven men.  But was the loss of Yeats' beard "for good or ill" at the aesthetic (as opposed to the mesmeric) level?  You be the judge.  The photo above depicts Yeats not long before the loss of his beard.  The photo below comes from the 1890s, when (if I may editorialize) the transformation from Dashing Young Rake to Canned Ham with Hair was complete.

Going to Innisfree

Are we autonomous individuals, or inextricably bound to our communities?  Is art created in freedom, for its own sake, or does it come into being to support a cause larger than itself?  I've been having a look at these questions lately in relation to the poetry of W.B. Yeats, as part of the research for a Yeats & Eliot chapter of a book that now has the unfortunate working title Power and Poetics: A Social History of Aesthetic Autonomy and Poetry.  The questions certainly haunted Yeats: as any study of his work will tell you, he came of age as a poet divided between the l'art pour l'art symbolism of the Rhymer's Club of the 1890s and the anti-colonial nationalism of the Irish Literary Revival.


The question of autonomy and community goes deeper than this, though: in fact, Yeats grew up in a household where the question was actively debated, and his father, the painter John Butler Yeats, was deeply interested in the question.


Reading JBY's letters, one frequently runs across statements that embrace the notion of the artist as a proudly isolated figure, disdaining the demands of the audience: "the artist must always be an aristocrat and disdain the street," he writes, or—echoing his favorite poet Keats, in Keats' rebuke of Shelley for putting politics, community, and philosophy before aesthetics—"if the lark were to bother itself about the 'Collective Soul'... it would not sing at all.  Elsewhere he argues that "the chief thing to know and never forget is that art is dreamland and that the moment a poet meddles with ethics and moral uplift he leaves dreamland, loses his music, and ceases to be a poet."


JBY was the furthest thing from a systematic thinker, though, and like a true negative capabilty-having lover of Keats, he often presented contradictory opinions without any irritable reaching after some final resolution.  "Art for art's sake," he writes at one point, "is for those who hate life... the great artist is also a man like ourselves."  Moreover, he argues on behalf of "democratic art" in a letter to his son, saying that WBY should aim at art "that unites a whole audience" because the art for art's sake crowd is just "a coterie of discontented artists" lacking worldly experience and relevance and amounting to nothing more than "a tea-party of old maids discussing marriage and large families."


Sometimes JBY pulls off a kind of having-it-both ways move, in which the moral and political problems of Ireland are best served by artists who do not aim at addressing those problems, but at a totally autonomous art. This is a move one sees from time to time in the late nineteenth century, and it becomes an important principle of some avant-garde movements in the twentieth century: in fact, it's a major principle of Surrealist thought.  Here's an example of JBY making the autonomous artist politically engaged despite himself: "Ireland is to be rescued neither by Belfast nor by England, neither by priest nor by parson, but by its artists," because they, with their independence and apparent unconcern for the orthodoxies of political faction or ideological battle, provide what no one else can, "freedom of thought and the intoxication of truth... an unshackled intellect."  It's all very Matthew Arnold, isn't it? So very like Arnold's hope that a disinterested group of intellectuals, with their "free and fresh play" of ideas, will save the world from bitter partisan struggle. JBY was 30 when Arnold's Culture and Anarchy appeared, and it seems to have had an influence on his thought.


Anyway.  If we want to see how these issues play out in Yeats' poetry, we can look in any number of places.  But "The Lake Isle of Innisfree" is a particularly good poem with which to start, since here the question of autonomy vs. community is linked to filial loyalty, to both father and fatherland, in ways often overlooked.


Here's the poem:


I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made:
Nine bean-rows will I have there, and a hive for the honey-bee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.


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.


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.


At first glance, it's just a nice bit of pastoralism, a yearning for a rural retreat from the busy modern world.  It is that, certainly.  And Yeats' statement about the poem's genesis re-enforces this pastoralism: he famously wrote that the idea came to him when he saw an artificial fountain in a London shop window, and remembered the peaceful waters of Sligo.  But what to make of the specific kind of pastoral retreat the poem proposes?


It's worth considering the phrasing of the first line, "I will arise and go now."  It's an allusion to the King James Bible, to Luke 15:18, and the story of the prodigal son.  "I will arise and go to my father" are the words of the prodigal son, just as he resolves to return to his father and confess his sins.  So this isn't just a retreat to a quiet place: it is a son's return to the things from which he has guiltily strayed.  The place to which he the speaker resolves to return is overtly Irish (the place name alone establishes that), and the world of gray pavements is most likely London (it was where Yeats had lived, it was the place where the inspiration for the poem struck him, and it is the great metropolis most readily identified with "pavements grey").  So the poem presents us not just with pastoral retreat, but with a kind of re-affiliation of the poet and his nation, and with the implication that his removal from that nation was as wrong as the prodigal son's straying away from his family duties.


But if the poem contains a kind of nationalism, and an implicit statement that the poet's place and duty lie back among his own people, it's a funny kind of nationalism.  The plan for life at Innisfree, after all, is a plan of isolation — or more than that: of an almost Robinson Crusoe-like self-sufficiency, with the poet building his own dwelling and raising his own food in autonomous isolation.  Is this nationalism or individualism?  Political commitment or individual withdrawal?


The issue is further complicated when we consider another allusion, one so buried that it was probably not intended to be found, but that is mentioned in Yeats' autobiographical writings.  As the critic Michael North has pointed out in The Political Aesthetic of Yeats, Eliot, and Pound, the bean rows of the first stanza of Yeats' poem come from the "Bean Field" chapter of Henry David Thoreau's Walden.  And not only that: they come from Yeats' father reading passages of Walden aloud to the poet.  As Yeats says in Reveries Over Childhood and Youth, "my father had read to me some passage out of Walden, and I planned to live some day in a cottage on a little island called Innisfree... I thought that having conquered bodily desire and the inclination of my mind toward women and love, I should live, as Thoreau lived, seeking wisdom."


So just as the Biblical allusion to the story of the prodigal son signals that there is a communal or nationalist urge at work, this other allusion signals that there is a Thoreauvian individualist urge at work, re-enforcing the poem's Crusoe-like images of autonomy and self-reliance.  The nationalist story comes with the authority of fatherhood behind it (the poet away in the great metropolis is the nation's prodigal son), but so does the individualist story, since the poet is reminded of his father in the individualist mode JBY so often (but so inconsistently) struck.  Without Yeats' autobiographical writings this latter paternal-filial relation would remain invisible, but we have the autobiographical writings, and we aren't hung-up on sticking to the internal evidence of the text itself, are we?  I mean, my name's not W.K. Wimsatt, and yours isn't Monroe C. Beardsley.


What to make of the poem, then?  Clearly it isn't a simple pastoral, but neither is it simply a Celticist poem of national affiliation.  Nor is it simply a poem of individual autonomy.  Instead, it is a poem that tries to have things both ways, but offers no easy fusion of the competing urges, along the lines of what JBY had offered in his comment about autonomous writers saving the nation by virtue of their autonomy.  Despite the poem's apparently placid surface, the fusion is incomplete, or perhaps we should say dynamic, with the nationalist urge and the autonomous urge oscillating endlessly.  The poem, in the end, is a dog chasing its own tail, or an attempt to square the circle.  It attempts something not quite possible, which will, after all, be the ambition of Yeats throughout his career.

"The Return of the Prodigal Son," by Pompeo Batoni

T.S. Eliot on the Metra: Urban Alienation and the Urge for Community

Maybe it's appropriate that I've been doing all my thinking about T.S. Eliot on the train, from the windows of which I catch fleeting glimpses into other people's lives: a bent-over old man with a plastic shopping bag shouting angrily at a bent-over old woman; two kids in kelly green hoodies running down an alley, looking back over their shoulders; a laughing, shirtless, dreadlocked man seen through the open blind of his apartment window, a bottle of wine in his hand; other quick flashes of people living out their particular stories, in which I won't, in all probability, play even a walk-on role.  Eliot was, after all, a great poet of urban alienation, of the strange mix of intimacy and distance created by life in the modern metropolis.

Except for my commute on the Metra, where I've been poking around Eliot's Selected Poems on my Kindle, I haven't had much time to devote to Eliot lately, but I do want to start getting him into my mind, since the impossibly glorious summer, free of teaching and (I hope) free of administrative chickenshit, lies just a few weeks in the future, and I'm hoping to bang out two chapters of the big, boring book I've been writing (now called Power and Poetics: A Social History of Aesthetic Autonomy in Poetry): one chapter on the rejection of Tennyson by poets coming of age in the 1890s, and another on Yeats and Eliot. 

The interesting thing, for me, is how both Yeats and Eliot act out versions of Tennyson's old dilemma in radically different contexts.  Tennyson really does have two distinct careers: one as a writer of somewhat cryptic, symbolic, ambiguous poems — poems like "The Kraken" or "The Eagle" or even "The Lady of Shalott" — poems that resist being converted to moral messages; and another career as the writer of poems like Enoch Arden or "The Charge of the Light Brigade," which told the bourgeoise reader what he wanted to hear about decency, self-sacrifice, and the keeping stiff of the upper lip.  He had the dilemma because he inherited a tradition of aesthetic autonomy from one of the main strands of Romantic poetics (Keatsian negative capability, Coleridgean ideas of polysemous symbolism and organic form, etc.), but he wrote at a time when a certain kind of middle-class reader turned to poetry for a particular kind of self-affirming moral guidance.  By the 1880s and 1890s, though, the public that had sought moral guidance in poetry was finding it elsewhere, and publishers were less interested in poetry relative to other genres than they had been.  The public was rejecting poetry, and poets were rejecting the public right back, turning, with a new intensity, to aestheticism, to art for art's sake, and to an attitude that rejected poor old Tennyson as a stooge for the middlebrows.  When Harold Nicholson tried to revive Tennyson's reputation in the 1920s, he did it by disowning the "Charge of the Light Brigade" side of Tennyson's poetics, and embracing the Tennyson canon to which we still cling — the side of the work that shies away from overt moralism.  This was, of course, to truncate Tennyson in order to make him more amenable to our tastes, and in a way to kidnap him out of his own context and fit him to the Procrustean bed of our own time.  For me, this is a real loss, since we miss the struggle in Tennyson between two incompatible urges, the battle between the aesthete and the moralist, which was the real dilemma of the poet in his time.  It's a dilemma that Yeats and Eliot inherited differently.

Yeats is, of course, drawn to esoteric wisdom, arcane and polyvalent symbolism, and to ideals of transcendent beauty (for which one of his most famous symbols is the rose).  But he's also drawn to a very specific kind of politically and culturally engaged poetry, a poetry at the service of national liberation.  The gymnastics he goes through trying to square that circle can be excruciating.  Here's the beginning of the poem "To Ireland in the Coming Times," where he tries to make the rose of esoteric, otherworldy beauty compatible with the politics of Irish liberation:

Know, that I would accounted be
True brother of a company
That sang, to sweeten Ireland's wrong,
Ballad and story, rann and song;
Nor be I any less of them,
Because of the red-rose-bordered hem
Of her, whose history began
Before God made the angelic clan...

You can feel the anxiety: he wants to devote himself to the rose of eternal, autonomous beauty, but he also wants to write ballads of Irish nationalism — a heteronomous poetry if ever there was one.  He ends up claiming that esoteric beauty and Irish nationalism are compatible by making up a kind of bullshit history, where Ireland's past was devoted to this rose, and where that past endures now in the "Druid land" of Ireland.  Yeats wants to have it both ways, but only by pretending that Irish nationalism is also aestheticism because of an ancient-yet-enduring commitment to esoteric beauty can he do it.  And that's just one stop on the long, strange trip he took trying to work out those incompatible urges.

Eliot faces a different situation, since the politics of national liberation aren't really an issue for him, and there isn't really a strong constituency urging him to write for the greater glory of his nation.  The Irish eventually made Yeats a senator, such being the esteem attached to poets during periods of national liberation, but that sort of situation hasn't really been available for poets from powerful nations like 20th century America: when Yeats wrote to Ezra Pound saying "don't let them make you a senator" (or words to that effect), he must have known that such an event was impossible.  And it was just as impossible for Pound's more respectable friend Eliot.  In fact, Eliot was so far from being an American nationalist that he became not only an ex-pat, but a nationalized British citizen.  Instead, his dilemma had to do with the conflict between a commitment to French symbolist poetics, with all their glamorous obscurity and aesthetic autonomy — Eliot was so drawn to this that he even wrote some poems of that kind in French — and a commitment to poetry at the service of a community of Christians, a yearned-for society of people committed to the same principles, the same tradition, the same past, and the same places — the grounded community of "the same people living in the same place" for generations, as he put it in After Strange Gods (a people for whom he wanted to perform "the role of a moralist").

What I've been thinking about, as I read Eliot's early poetry between glimpses out the train window, is just how Eliot's need for a coherent, rooted, traditional society grew out of his experiences of alienation as a young man in London [correction: in greater Boston, given the dates of composition for "Preludes"].  Consider the experience of urban space in the famous "Preludes" from Prufrock and Other Observations.  The dominant impression is of a strange combination of closeness and distance, of constantly seeing other people in their private moments without actually knowing those people.  If you've lived in a little apartment in a big city, you know what he's talking about.  Here's the second section of the poem:

The morning comes to consciousness

Of faint stale smells of beer

From the sawdust-trampeled street

With all its muddy feet that press

To early coffee-stands.

With the other masquerades

That time resumes,

One thinks of all the hands

That are raising dingy shades

In a thousand furnished rooms.

This is the poem of a man whose senses always take in the intimate traces of other people's lives: he smells what the people around him drank last night, and what they're drinking this morning, he sees their footprints in the street, he sees their hands, and the dinginess that is the trace of the repeated actions of their hands, on a thousand window shades.  The bodily presence of others is near, and palpable, and not really meant to be the acknowledged public face — the "masquerade" — they present to the world.  There's intimacy, and bodily proximity, but there's also total anonymity.  Eliot doesn't know the people raising their dingy shades, and seems to glimpse them only partially.  It's proximity without community, the world of the lonely crowd, the depersonalized modern world of gessellschaft.

The impression in the final section is much the same, at least initially:

His soul stretched tight across the skies

That fade behind a city block,

Or trampled by insistent feet

At four and five and six o'clock;

And short square fingers stuffing pipes,

And evening newspapers, and eyes

Assured of certain certainties

The conscience of a blackened street

Impatient to assume the world.

It's all in those stubby fingers, isn't it?  There's more of the intimate proximity of people in their private acts, but once again the people are seen only in parts — as fingers, as eyes — and don't belong to anyone known, to anyone with a proper name.  The poem ends with the speaker (let's call him young Eliot) feeling the pathos of this lonely crowd, perhaps yearning for some kind of connection to the people he only glimpses in brief vignettes of their private lives — until he breaks away with a brusqueness that seems like an attempt to place himself above his own yearnings:

I am moved by fancies that are curled

Around these images, and cling:

The notion of some infinitely gentle

Infinitely suffering thing.

Wipe your hand across your mouth, and laugh;

The worlds revolve like ancient women

Gathering fuel in vacant lots.

The imagination would provide some fanciful connection to the people around him, some emotional intimacy with those Eliot smells, hears, and briefly sees.  But then Eliot backs away, laughing at his pretense, and trying to be the tough-minded, cynical person the metropolitan way of life seems to demand.

"Rhapsody on a Windy Night" is even better (though here the setting seems more like Paris, and the critic B.C. Southern argues that the images are actually culled from Charles-Louis Phillipe's Bubu-de-Montparnasse, but that's neither here nor there, and only the most ink-stained of pedantic wretches would mention it in a parenthesis).  The imagery suggests a metropolis of the kind familiar to many of us, where the mentally ill wander, disconnected, through the uncaring streets, and where the illusion of intimacy presents itself in terms of base commerce:

Every street lamp that I pass

Beats like a fatalistic drumm

And through the spaces of the dark

Midnight shakes the memory

As a madman shakes a dead geranium.

Half-past one, 

The street-lamp sputtered,

The street-lamp muttered,

The street-lamp said, "Regard that woman

Who hesitates toward you in the light of the door

Which opens on her with a grin.

You see the border of her dress

Is torn and stained with sand,

And you see the corner of her eye

Twists like a crooked pin."

The intimately-observed sordidness, the seeing-past what is meant to be seen (that stain, that strangely twisted eye), recalls the anonymous proximity of "Preludes," and the odd hesitancy, as the prostitute eyes young Tom Eliot up, trying to gauge whether he's too jammed up for the awful daring of a moment's surrender, is powerful stuff: we feel a strange stand-off, which could result in cold distance or an act of sexual commerce that is much like the alienated intimacy of "Preludes," where we can see, smell, and almost touch the closeness of others without any real intimacy.

The poem moves on to a string of images less literally connected to the street setting.  My favorite is this:

I have seen eyes in the street

Trying to peer through lighted shutters,

And a crab one afternoon in a pool,

An old crab with barnacles on his back,

Gripped the end of a stick which I held him.

We return to those eyes looking out from behind shades, seen by other eyes: a curious kinship between the observer and the observed, a kinship in anonymity and alienation.  And the pairing of this with the image of the stick-grabbing crab is wonderful, because the man-stick-crab combination is an intimacy, but also a distance: it's play, but it's also struggle for the stick, and the man and the crab, while involved in the same action, are such utterly different forms of life, so terribly alien to each other.  Like "Preludes," it's all about distance-in-proximity, the alienating condition of life in the rootless modern metropolis.

It's the notion of humanity under these conditions  as "some infinitely gentle/Infinitely suffering thing" that drives Eliot to dream of a more rooted world, a world united by shared traditions, shared religion, and the kind of stability of trans-generational habitation of the same space that the industrial world destroys.  Seeing this makes me about as sympathetic to Eliot's reactionary politics as I'm ever likely to get.  Glimpsing the world from my train window, I feel much the same as he felt, looking at those eyes  behind the shutters.  The difference was that he arrived at a prescription for the condition, in After Strange Gods, The Idea of a Christian Society, and Notes Toward the Definition of Culture — a narrow, somewhat authoritarian, hierarchical, and ultimately a xenophobic prescription.  Me, all I've got is a sense of the problem.  That, and a deep skepticism about people with comprehensive plans for the renovation of civilization.