Sunday Night Journal — November 14, 2004
Sunday Night Journal — November 28, 2004

Sunday Night Journal — November 21, 2004

Yeats vs. Eliot

A couple of recent biographies of Yeats have, not surprisingly, provoked in some reviewers that potent urge to rank the modern poets as if they were so many sprinters or show dogs. This is an odd compulsion, and seems no less so to me for the fact that I find it in myself and thus have a case study close at hand. It seems to affect the aficionados of any art; it certainly does those of my main interests, which are literature and music. I have a co-worker who is as much a pop music fan as I am, and who has attempted to draw me into playing one of the most futile of these ranking games: that of picking the All-Time Top Ten Greatest Albums. I’ve never gotten very far with that one; only a few minutes thought suffice for me to come up with dozens of works that deserve to be in the top ten, and so that’s where I leave it.

The game of Greatest Modern Poet is much more appealing. I suppose that’s because there are not a great many candidates for the position. For me it comes down to a choice between Yeats and Eliot. I favor Eliot, and my reasons for doing so involve an important aesthetic question: to what extent does truth matter in literature?

An art of which language is the raw material inevitably has a discursive element, and touches on truth and falsehood in a way that music, for instance, does not. The mundane facts of the work may be entirely imaginative, but they must be true to what we know about the world, and the higher the work rises from the mundane the more important it is that it be true. Inevitably ideas present themselves, and we will either agree or disagree with them. In the latter case we may choose to ignore the disagreement, depending on how serious it is and on how important the ideas are to the work. We may even make an effort to enter imaginatively into the state of mind of one who believes the ideas, as a sympathetic and appreciative atheist might do with Dante, if the work seems to warrant the effort. Still, we naturally and inevitably prefer the work which does not require that effort. It is not only that such an embrace is easier, but that the experience of it is more whole. The work itself may be lesser, yet our enjoyment of it greater, because we are not forced to withhold our admiration for important aspects of it.

I think Yeats has a much greater poetic gift than Eliot, and he certainly produced more poetry of a higher quality than Eliot did, and yet I value Eliot’s work more, because Eliot is a Christian, and so am I, while Yeats is not. It was not for nothing that Christ promised us not peace but a sword; the division between those who believe in him and those who do not is profound and cannot be ignored or wished away. Christian faith is among other things a set of propositions about the essential nature of things, and a work of literature which is not based on Christian faith is, for the believer, fundamentally inaccurate. To repeat myself, as a defense against misunderstanding, this does not mean that the believer cannot admire and enjoy and love a work which arises from a non-Christian view of things, but it does mean that he is always left with a sense of something missing or awry in it.

Much of Yeats’ work is spoiled by bad philosophy, and by that I don’t mean only that it is non-Christian but also that it is eccentric and esoteric and doesn’t seem to be of much use or interest to anyone except those who want to understand his poetry better. A Christian recognizes in it the old enemy Gnosticism, and it shares with other forms of that ancient sensibility a penchant for obscure and complex symbolism. He wrote it all down in a book called A Vision, which I actually read when I was young and of which I now recall nothing. His best poems are understandable without the paraphernalia, but there are too many which were no doubt the product of great labor and now seem only to take up unnecessary space in his Collected Works.

I took down that book for the first time in many years while I was considering what I would say here, and I have to say that I think Yeats’ reputation no less well deserved now than I did when I was an enthusiast in my twenties. There truly is not another poetic voice in the modern period—that is to say, between the late 19th century and the present—which ranks with it in sheer genius, the sheer ability to put together potent and unforgettable sequences of words. I’m tempted, in fact, to retract what I have just spent several paragraphs saying. Yet in comparison with Eliot I still would have to say that if I had to do without one of them I would take Eliot. I might even take only the Four Quartets. To play another of those silly ranking games, the one that asks what you would take with you to a desert island, Eliot would still be my desert island choice. If I had to choose, which I’m glad I don’t.

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