The Lateness of W. B. Yeats in A Vision (1937) and Last Poems
Date Issued
2012
Date
2012
Author(s)
Chang, Chia-lin
Abstract
Style is a static, retrospective description of the formal properties of an artist’s works that involve the artist’s connections to a particular period of time. It is a critical construction out of strategic necessity or discursive convenience, so it is essentially a fiction in a Kermodian sense. This study proposes an alternative theory of late style—the concept of “lateness” as an extreme occasion of subjectivity in crisis expressed in the stylistic arrangements of the work. A period of caesura or coda is created, full of reflexive meditation on the existential state of “I” and its relationship with the material world, with the part of “I’ that must leave, and with the part of “I” that is left behind. The meditating artist (re)presents such extreme moments of lateness in the work stylistically, rather than thematically, because for the artist, lateness means that the alliance between his subjectivity and his craftsmanship is being challenged. The “lateness” takes its shape on the basis of the theories of Frank Kermode, Theodor Adorno, and Edward W. Said.
With the notion of lateness as an extreme occasion of the crisis of subjectivity in reflection, this study attempts to explore the lateness of W. B. Yeats in his prose work A Vision (1937) and some of his last poems. In the first chapter, Frank Kermode’s idea of the sense of an ending as a critical part of a fiction and E. W. Said’s compensating notion of the beginnings are introduced to demonstrate that any theorization has a significant structuralist format and scale, while under the inevitable systemization are the essential fiction and authorial intention, without which no humanistic survey is impossible. Gordon McMullan’s book on the idea of late writing, taking Shakespeare as an example, criticizes and deconstructs the trans-historical, trans-cultural, and trans-contextual idea of “late style.” Adorno’s and Said’s theories of late style are then introduced to define the idea of lateness as an extreme occasion that will be the theoretical basis of this study on Yeats’s lateness. In the second chapter, Yeats’s life and health in his old age are surveyed. His “private philosophy” in A Vision and its making are introduced, especially the system of the phases of the moon, by which Yeats categorizes personality and explains the cyclical progress of human life. The second part of the chapter shows how A Vision has been maltreated either as a guidebook to the symbolism of his poetry or as an embarrassing proof of his esoteric interests. It is not until recently that A Vision is appreciated as an independent work of art. Following this new trend, the Bakhtinian idea of dialogism is compared with Yeats’s preference of the antithetical over its opposite—the primary. In this A Vision is read as a fiction, or more precisely a meta-fiction with Modernist features. In Chapter Three, A Vision (1937) is analyzed in detail to show how lateness is stylisticaly expressed in the arrangements of multiple personalities of W. B. Yeats, multiple plots of the source of the esoteric wisdom, dialogical interaction between subjects, and the progress of plots between genres. The last chapter analyzes a couple of poems from Yeats’s Last Poems—the tentative collection of his last poems—and demonstrates how lateness is revealed in the formal choices of poems with particular thematic interests. The order of poems is also significant of lateness: Yeats is making a final address towards the ending of human life in general. His own dark, pessimistic feelings in the very last poems are hidden or lessen through the re-arranged order of poems. That is, the intellectual wisdom or understanding of how human life sails towards its ending is deliberately displayed in contrast to the actual sensual trajectory of Yeats in his last days.
Subjects
W. B. Yeats
Lateness
Late Style
A Vision
SDGs
Type
thesis
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