war, politics, and disappearing poetry Above all I am not concerned with Poetry.
Mysubject is War, and the pity of War.
The Poetry is in the pity.^35Again, in this extract from Owen’s famous preface, we have the ostensible clarity
and absoluteness of aphorisms, their grandeur further emphasized by the capital
letters and by the gnomic utterances each being set apart in individual paragraphs.
But when these statements are taken together, ‘Poetry’ slips out and in—now you
see it, now you don’t—of the argument which Owen appears to be pursuing, and
we are left with something more like a riddle than a syllogism, a riddle in which the
meaning of ‘Poetry’ withdraws into figurative vagueness and all but disappears.
As Auden’s elegy with its meticulously recorded date reminds us, Yeats did
not live to see the Second World War, but, like so many others, he foresaw
it, not least in ‘Lapis Lazuli’, a poem written in 1936, the same year which
saw the publication of hisOxford Book of Modern Verse.And ‘Lapis Lazuli’ is
an extraordinary poem, thoroughly contrived, wilfully artificial, piling artistic
example upon artistic example, and—though it mangles logic and language to say
it—raising tendentiousness to a poetic principle. Because ‘Lapis Lazuli’ is a difficult
poem in the frequent and familiar sense that readers require notes, explanations,
and contextualization, critics have failed fully to register that it is undoubtedly
a virtuosity of trickery and—arguably—a poem of extraordinary offensiveness:
contrariwise, Yeats’s biographer, R. F. Foster, records Yeats’s own view that this
poem was ‘almost the best I have made of recent years’.^36 Like Auden’s elegy
for Yeats, ‘Lapis Lazuli’ is a poem divided into sections, so that the promise of
coherence it makes to its readers is acircumscribed one, something less than—or
other than—the sustained and consecutive coherence of a prose argument. Its
beginning has particular women in mind—Laura Riding, Margot Ruddock, and,
pre-eminently perhaps, the passionately political Ethel Mannin^37 —and Yeats is
writing at an earlier stage of the women’s movement when there was even less self-
consciousness about the offensiveness of misogyny than there is today. Nonetheless,
the poem’s opening is extraordinarily aggressive, intent on taking no prisoners, a
vehemently combative statement of a non-combatant position:
I have heard that hysterical women say
They are sick of the palette and fiddle-bow,(^35) Wilfred Owen, ‘Preface’, inThe Complete Poems and Fragments, ii:The Manuscripts and
Fragments, ed. Jon Stallworthy (London: Chatto & Windus, Hogarth Press, and Oxford University
Press, 1983), 535. 36
Yeats, quoted in R. F. Foster,W. B. Yeats: A Life, ii:The Arch-Poet 1915–1939(Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2003), 550.
(^37) Ibid.