A History of English Literature

became a Senator in a Catholic-dominated Ireland, and henceforward cultivated his

Anglo-Irish ancestors and historical heroes.

From 1913 onwards his poetry had extended its range: of subjects, to politics; of

diction, to the colloquial; of moods, to realism and even bitterness. He began to address

others besides himself. Always he maintained his devotion to form, which for him

(unlike Pound) meant ‘a complete coincidence of sentence and stanza’. But now he had

more to say. In 1917 he stopped adoring Maud Gonne and married; he had children.

His poetry became more powerful and declarative, filled with his own voice, binding

and provoking a large audience. The Romantics and their heirs, with rare exceptions

such as Browning and Hardy, had declined with middle age. When Yeats was ‘close on

forty-nine’, he began to write his best poetry. He has thirty or forty outstanding poems,

more than other 20th-century poets: chiefly in The Tower (1928) and The Winding Stair

(1933). Eliot was astonished, Auden and Dylan Thomas awestruck. In the next gener-

ation, Philip Larkin (1922–1985) began by trying to write like Yeats.

In prose, some of Yeats’s opinions, spiritual and political, are strange indeed. In

the poems they are held as dramatized ideas, often in dialogue within a volume. In

style and form, his poems bring drama to the tradition of the Romantic ode. Some

of those set at Lady Gregory’s house at Coole, and ‘Among School Children’, are the

most splendid of 20th-century poems, comparable to Keats’s odes. In ‘Sailing to

Byzantium’, his fruitful obsession with the paradoxes of soul and body, of art and

life, found its classical expression in an old man’s meditation on the youth of Ireland,

a country in which

The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,

Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long

Whatever is begotten born, and dies.

Caught in that sensual music all neglect

Monuments of unageing intellect.

He was later to claim, of his friends in the Irish Literary Revival, that they were ‘the

last Romantics’ (‘Coole Park and Ballylee, 1931’). Some extreme later poems express,

often with epigrammatic force, his sense that his soul was growing younger as his

body aged: ‘Love has pitched his mansion in / The place of excrement’ (‘Crazy Jane

talks with the Bishop’).

The last poems are full of self-destruction and renewal, as in ‘The Circus Animals’

Desertion’. All the symbols of his life’s work desert him and he recognizes that it was

‘the dream itself ’ which had enchanted him: that the images which had mastered his

mind gre w out of the most undignified cravings:

Now that my ladder’s gone

I must lie down where all the ladders start

In the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart.

As filthy rags and bones are boiled down to make fine paper, and as the physical

assimilation of food feeds the mind, so the spirit is fed by gross appetites. Some crit-

ics find the rhetoric of the later poems strained. Others dwell on how modernist

poets were attracted to authoritarian attitudes, unlike most European modernists.

But Yeats, Pound and Eliot had well-founded doubts about the future of high art in

mass democracies dominated by market forces: a world in which, to quote Pound in

Hugh Selwyn Mauberley in poem II, ‘the age demanded / An image of its acceler-

ated grimace’, made ‘to sell, and sell quickly’.

356 13 · FROM POST-WAR TO POST-WAR: 1920–55