johnlyon
The political and ethical controversies surrounding Auden’s relation to the
conflictsoftheThirtiesandtotheSecondWorldWarare,then,asnothing compared
to the contentions regarding Yeats and the Great War. The full complexities of this
latter relation have been fully elaborated by critics, most recently in the brilliant
accounts by Peter McDonald and Fran Brearton.^32 The less ambitious and more
particular focus of this essay is on the illogicalities, contradictions, tricks, voiced
silences, loquacious reticences, and sleights of hand which the extremities of human
violence can cause poetry to enact. It is impossible—and indeed insulting—to
separate the Irish Troubles from the First World War, and it is true that, whatever
Yeats’s own claims to the contrary, Yeats did write a number of poems which
addressed the First World War, ‘An Irish Airman Foresees his Death’ being an
obvious, if problematic, example. Yet the poem which most directly addresses
the issue is a masterpiece of illogicality, its very existence contradicting its own
argument:
On being asked for a War Poem
I think it better that in times like these
A poet’s mouth be silent, for in truth
We have no gift to set a statesman right;
He has had enough of meddling who can please
A young girl in the indolence of her youth,
Or an old man upon a winter’s night.^33Yeats’s alternatives—pleasing young girls and cheering old men—are trundled
out too often and too automatically in his verse to be anything other than camp
sentimentalities. Was the silent mouth of Yeats’s poem in Auden’s mind when he
reduced poetry in his elegy to a mouth? The self-unwriting of Yeats’s poem had
begun earlier in a previously published version (that version had the more demotic
‘We poets keep our mouths shut’ in place of ‘A poet’s mouth be silent’) with its
then title ‘A Reason for Keeping Silent’,^34 and ‘silent’ is something of a signature in
poems that are profoundly unhappy with their own existence and uncomfortable
with the matter they are seeking—or not seeking—to address. For all his dislike
of Wilfred Owen, Yeats had something in common with Owen in the way they
both tied themselves in logical and linguistic knots in trying to describe the relation
between poetry and war:
(^32) See Peter McDonald,Serious Poetry: Form and Authority from Yeats to Hill(Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 2002), esp. ‘Yeats and Remorse’, 17–50; and Fran Brearton,The Great War in Irish Poetry:
W. B. Yeats to Michael Longley 33 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), esp. 43–82.
Yeats, ‘On being asked for a War Poem’, inPoems, 205.
(^34) This version of the poem appeared in Edith Wharton (ed.),The Book of the Homeless(New York:
Charles Scribner’s, 1916), 45.