The essays collected in Emblems of Adversity: Essays on the Aesthetics of Politics in W. B. Yeats... more The essays collected in Emblems of Adversity: Essays on the Aesthetics of Politics in W. B. Yeats and Others hinge on the question of political articulation in Yeats's poetry. Politics and history are paramount to our understanding of the Yeatsian poetic text. They are inextricable from the poet's aesthetic philosophy. Yet politics manifests itself in a complex and complicated form in his work. It articulates itself both consciously and unconsciously. It is at once latent and manifest; appropriated and yet rejected; unambiguously announced in the title but immediately muffled in the corpus. Additionally, political articulation in Yeats's poetry is multifarious, insofar as the biographical, the national and the historical are not only politicized but most often envisioned-apocalyptically-as emblems of adversity. To put it differently, ageing, Irish politics and modernity are synonymous with a Time transmogrifying "ancestral houses" into "ruins"-a Time ...
W. B. Yeats: A Poetics of Ideology investigates the articulations of ideology in Yeats from the b... more W. B. Yeats: A Poetics of Ideology investigates the articulations of ideology in Yeats from the beginning of his poetic career. The book seeks to contextualize this ideology within what I call “the modernist predicament.” Yeats’s articulation of politics can be divided into three major phases. The first focuses on his juvenilia, where politics is articulated in the pastoral trope at the unconscious level of the text. The second is explicitly expressed in Yeats’s “imaginative nationalism.” Here Ireland is painted as a utopian land, an extension of his early pastoral world. In such an idyllic depiction of the nation traumatic events like the Great Hunger are glossed over. The third phase grounds Yeats in the modernist predicament. Here the poet’s consciousness of the discrepancy between aesthetics and praxis, poetry and modernity, is paramount to our understanding of the Yeatsian crisis. The crisis articulates itself in Yeats’s politicization of space and claustrophilia. The book aims...
In myth, Echo lives in hollow places. Gaston Bachelard advances the shell as one of those locatio... more In myth, Echo lives in hollow places. Gaston Bachelard advances the shell as one of those locations. W.B. Yeats and Paul Valéry, however, deploy it as a physical object and a poetic trope. For them, the shell is a figure of echo of both poetry and subjectivity. Yet where Yeats uses the figure in his poetry, namely his juvenilia, Valéry devotes a philosophical treatise to the mollusk. Both collude and collide in their examination and figuration of the shell. If Yeats associates it with his own poetic growth, that is, as a figure of selfappraisal through self-echoing, Valéry considers this "marvelous thing" a perfect occasion for the mind to engage in a philosophical inquiry into the origins of poetic and metaphysical genesis and destination. Here conchology rhymes with phenomenology. The shell, as an echoic trope, rectifies Yeats's aesthetic and even political trajectory. In Valéry, however, the observer's inquiry is left unresolved. Poetic genesis remains as enigmatic as the shell's and self 's inner formation.
the end of their lives. Wallace Stevens proposes the "rock" as an ultimate symbol in the face of ... more the end of their lives. Wallace Stevens proposes the "rock" as an ultimate symbol in the face of imminent physical and imaginative decay. Yeats clings to his much-celebrated "tower," Thoor Ballylee, both as a place of writing and a writing of place, virtually to the last minute of his life. Suspended between death and life he frenziedly worked on his deathbed "The Black Tower." Both the rock and the tower operate as symbols of solidity and permanence against approaching corporeal and imaginative disintegration. These symbols will survive not only the poets' biographical time but historical time as well. They are unbroken paradigms. They are points of stillness in the whirling flux of history and temporality. In the following lines, the old Stevens presents the rock as a paradigm of "certainty" and "repose":
The essays collected in Emblems of Adversity: Essays on the Aesthetics of Politics in W. B. Yeats... more The essays collected in Emblems of Adversity: Essays on the Aesthetics of Politics in W. B. Yeats and Others hinge on the question of political articulation in Yeats's poetry. Politics and history are paramount to our understanding of the Yeatsian poetic text. They are inextricable from the poet's aesthetic philosophy. Yet politics manifests itself in a complex and complicated form in his work. It articulates itself both consciously and unconsciously. It is at once latent and manifest; appropriated and yet rejected; unambiguously announced in the title but immediately muffled in the corpus. Additionally, political articulation in Yeats's poetry is multifarious, insofar as the biographical, the national and the historical are not only politicized but most often envisioned-apocalyptically-as emblems of adversity. To put it differently, ageing, Irish politics and modernity are synonymous with a Time transmogrifying "ancestral houses" into "ruins"-a Time ...
W. B. Yeats: A Poetics of Ideology investigates the articulations of ideology in Yeats from the b... more W. B. Yeats: A Poetics of Ideology investigates the articulations of ideology in Yeats from the beginning of his poetic career. The book seeks to contextualize this ideology within what I call “the modernist predicament.” Yeats’s articulation of politics can be divided into three major phases. The first focuses on his juvenilia, where politics is articulated in the pastoral trope at the unconscious level of the text. The second is explicitly expressed in Yeats’s “imaginative nationalism.” Here Ireland is painted as a utopian land, an extension of his early pastoral world. In such an idyllic depiction of the nation traumatic events like the Great Hunger are glossed over. The third phase grounds Yeats in the modernist predicament. Here the poet’s consciousness of the discrepancy between aesthetics and praxis, poetry and modernity, is paramount to our understanding of the Yeatsian crisis. The crisis articulates itself in Yeats’s politicization of space and claustrophilia. The book aims...
In myth, Echo lives in hollow places. Gaston Bachelard advances the shell as one of those locatio... more In myth, Echo lives in hollow places. Gaston Bachelard advances the shell as one of those locations. W.B. Yeats and Paul Valéry, however, deploy it as a physical object and a poetic trope. For them, the shell is a figure of echo of both poetry and subjectivity. Yet where Yeats uses the figure in his poetry, namely his juvenilia, Valéry devotes a philosophical treatise to the mollusk. Both collude and collide in their examination and figuration of the shell. If Yeats associates it with his own poetic growth, that is, as a figure of selfappraisal through self-echoing, Valéry considers this "marvelous thing" a perfect occasion for the mind to engage in a philosophical inquiry into the origins of poetic and metaphysical genesis and destination. Here conchology rhymes with phenomenology. The shell, as an echoic trope, rectifies Yeats's aesthetic and even political trajectory. In Valéry, however, the observer's inquiry is left unresolved. Poetic genesis remains as enigmatic as the shell's and self 's inner formation.
the end of their lives. Wallace Stevens proposes the "rock" as an ultimate symbol in the face of ... more the end of their lives. Wallace Stevens proposes the "rock" as an ultimate symbol in the face of imminent physical and imaginative decay. Yeats clings to his much-celebrated "tower," Thoor Ballylee, both as a place of writing and a writing of place, virtually to the last minute of his life. Suspended between death and life he frenziedly worked on his deathbed "The Black Tower." Both the rock and the tower operate as symbols of solidity and permanence against approaching corporeal and imaginative disintegration. These symbols will survive not only the poets' biographical time but historical time as well. They are unbroken paradigms. They are points of stillness in the whirling flux of history and temporality. In the following lines, the old Stevens presents the rock as a paradigm of "certainty" and "repose":
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