William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) is, in the opinion of many, the greatest poet of the English language. He is almost singlehandedly responsible for the Irish Literary Revival of the early 20th century. He received the Nobel Prize in 1923.
Yeats was a strong Irish nationalist and patriot, though with a strongly liberal sentiment. He deplored the bigotry and hatred which sometimes came from his own side. (See his poem, Easter 1916, for example.)
Matt Taibbi has a piece in the current Rolling Stone which deals with the political career of Rep. Michelle Bachmann, tea party leader (supposedly), and evangelical crusader.
The piece is worth reading in its own right, but this especially caught my eye: Some years ago, in Stillwater, MN, Bachmann joined up with one of those "purify our schools" outfits. This one was called EdWatch.
EdWatch...railed against various dystopian indoctrination plans, including the U.N.-inspired International Baccalaureate program, offered in some American high schools. Bachmannites despise IB because its "universal" curriculum refuses to recognize the superiority of Christianity to other religions. You and I might have thought William Butler Yeats, for example, was a great poet who died half a century before the Age of Aquarius, but EdWatch calls him a "New-Age Pantheism Guru" who was aggressively "undermining Christianity."
Yeats died in 1939, well before the "new age" movement of the 1970's. Yeats liked nature, so apparently that means he was a "pantheist." Witness the stultifying effects of ideology: Yeats is not a nature-loving mystic. He's a "new age pantheist guru."
What he was for sure is a prophet. Perhaps it is this quality which really confounds his evangelical critics. In "The Second Coming," Yeats spoke of social disintegration because of social divisions--"things fall apart / the center cannot hold"--which he attributed to ideological extremism:
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
He hopes for rescue--"Surely some revelation is at hand!" "The Second Coming!" he exclaims. But as soon as he does, he also sees the true "spirit of the world," which is dry and lifeless--"a waste of desert sand". The "rough beast" rises out of this "waste" to do battle with "the second coming."
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
You could call that "new age pantheistic guru-ism" which "undermines Christianity." Or, you could call it an incisive analysis of contemporary politics.
Image: Wiki
“His own side” is complicated in the matter of Yeats. He was a nationalist with some Fenian connections, but he was also very much a Southern Protestant and proud of it, like the fellow played by Graham Chapman in Monty Python’s “The Meaning of Life.” He did explore varieties of mysticism and if he was not a Fascist per se he was certainly playing footsie with the movement.
It should also be noted that in Ireland the religious bigotry business has been largely on one side. You don’t have any orders of Catholic laymen vowing never to set foot in Protestant churches.
Why the evangelicals are taking an interest in him, I can’t imagine. At least they’re reading, I guess.
Posted by: Hypatia | June 24, 2011 at 12:45 PM
It's hard for me to see Yeats as much of a right-winger. The Irish nationalist movement undoubtedly included a wide range of folks, some of them with a fascistic bent.
Posted by: John Petty | June 27, 2011 at 12:51 PM
Yeats' fascist tendencies and admiration for Mussolini had little to do with his nationalism. The pro-Fascist Irish who went to Spain to fight for Franco were anti-IRA and got into street fights with them and a number of IRA men went to Spain to fight for the Loyalists and died there. Yeats initially was an admirer of the Irish Blueshirts until it became apparent that their leader O’Duffy was a moron. It is true that the IRA played footsie with Germany during the war, but that was more along the lines of the-enemy-of-my-enemy-is-my-friend, not that that’s a proper excuse. And of course Frank Ryan wound up dying in Germany after Franco handed him over to the Nazis, but that’s a long story.
As to how seriously Yeats took fascism, that’s certainly a matter for argument. Some scholars downplay it.
Posted by: Hypatia | June 28, 2011 at 03:39 PM
Thanks for your comments, Hypatia. It has inspired me to read more on the subject.
By the way, did you notice the plug I gave your namesake a week or two ago?
Posted by: John Petty | June 29, 2011 at 03:11 PM