How Words Make Things Happen by Bromwich David;

Author:Bromwich, David; [Bromwich, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press, Incorporated
Published: 2019-02-08T00:00:00+00:00

4

Persuasion and Responsibility

Yeats, Auden, Orwell

W. B. Yeats chose as an epigraph to Responsibilities an aphorism—“In dreams begins responsibility”—which he pretended to have borrowed from an “old play.” Suppose we think of persuasion as a kind of dreaming aloud, which the dreamer asks other people to listen to and be somehow affected by. This lecture will discuss the relationship between two poets who did some of their dreaming aloud; and it will consider their respective views of the poet’s responsibility for the effects such dreams may engender. I begin by marking at once a significant contrast and a continuity between the careers of Yeats and W. H. Auden.

The early Yeats exemplified an aestheticism that shunned in principle the rhetorical aim of changing the minds of readers or affecting their practical lives in any way. By the last two decades of his life, however, he was writing poems that came close to propaganda for aristocratic society, and he showed a relentless hostility toward enemies whom he was not shy of naming. Auden, in his last decades, claimed an exemplary civic function for art, a function that deliberately excluded any notion of pragmatic effect—a stance far closer to pure aestheticism than he was willing to acknowledge. And yet Auden had come to be known, through his early volumes of the 1930s, as the self-conscious leader of a poetic movement dedicated to political reform and possibly to revolution. Though they seem to have moved in opposite directions, therefore, I will look at these two poets together at a moment in the late 1930s and early 1940s when George Orwell wrote discerning commentaries on both. Orwell at this time had come to believe (as he says the experience of the Spanish Civil War convinced him) that serious literature could not escape having a political motive. Nor could it inoculate itself against having a persuasive effect.

* * *

In “Coole Park and Ballylee, 1931,” Yeats has been contemplating emblems of nature and desire such as the swan: “That stormy white / But seems a concentration of the sky”—the image overwhelms him for a moment—“But in the morning’s gone, no man knows why.” Yeats is arrested by such images and bewildered when he searches for their significance. What is the peculiar quality of the soul? Can it be captured in an image? The poem does not answer those questions, but we hardly notice the fact. What holds our attention, in this poem and in others of his final decade, is the splendor of Yeats’s description of the aristocratic culture he loves and the place of beauty it has made for itself:

A spot whereon the founders lived and died

Seemed once more dear than life; ancestral trees

Or gardens rich in memory glorified

Marriages, alliances and families,

And every bride’s ambition satisfied.

Where fashion or mere fantasy decrees

We shift about—all that great glory spent—

Like some poor Arab tribesman and his tent.1

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