the great war and modernist poetry Think
Neitherfear nor courage saves us. Unnatural vices
Are fathered by our heroism. Virtues
Are forced upon us by our impudent crimes...
Think at last
We have not reached conclusion, when I
Stiffen in a rented house. Think at last
I have not made this show purposelessly...Verging compulsively on some deliberated significance—‘Think now’, ‘Think|
Neither’, ‘Think at last’, ‘Think at last’—the speaker proceeds to a ‘conclusion’,
however, which ‘We have not reached’. Thelogic is promissory at best, really only
hortative. Eliot seizes this conceit of meaning-seeming nonsense as a poetics, as
witnessed especially near the end of the main passage, where he turns the words of
progressive and logical proposition into a composite of contradictions. How is it,
after all, that an ‘Unnaturalvice’ can be biologically ‘fathered’, and a vile unreal thing
begotten from a natural good? Whose ‘impudentcrimes’ are capable of generating
‘Virtues’? These disparities seem unapparent to the speaker, who talks through them
with every pretence of reasonable and coherent meaning. The inverse ratio and
particular power of this verse show thus in its capacity to outsize its own rationalist
measures, reaching through the sense it feigns to the illogic it really means, where
the emotion that is released grows in ratio to its overwhelming of an older Reason.
This complex effect is the meaning that recent ‘History’ has revealed to the critical
imagination of the modernist, who, like Pound, distinguishes his art by the special
faculty he manifests for tapping this awareness and providing the extraordinary
moment of history the answering echo of a new imaginative language.
IV
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Yeats’s literary commitments and political engagements during the years of the
Great War suspended him, as it were, in the middle of the Irish Sea. While his centre
of operations shifted continually between London and Sussex, Dublin and Sligo,
he seemed nonetheless to centre his attention, wilfully perhaps but also rhetorically
and forcefully, far to the side of the English war. Absence or denial of this event
appears as the posture the poet wishes to strike. This dismissal represents an attempt
to keep his focus on the Irish front, as though he resented the English distraction.
But it is of course the global cataclysm and crisis that helped foment the Irish Rising
and compel subsequent developments. And so the poetry witnesses a sort of double
vision, or contrary insistence, at once resisting the signal event of this European
war and registering its effects in ways little and large.
His poetic disengagement with the war is conducted most memorably for most
readers with the poems he was driven to compose on the death of Major Robert