Thanks for posting this site. It got me thinking.
Yeats was right about Sitwell and the inability of civilization
to still or stay the savage violence beating through the hearts of
people who can't or won't grow up. The masks are failing us, in
other words.
Sitwell's writing style reflects this. She uses very sophisticated
figures and provides great insight into both her reflective and
external world, the Age of Innocence gone decadent and savage;
but the childish form and rhyme scheme make the poem very
difficult to read with meaning. It takes great effort on the part
of the reader not to fall into the sing-songy meter of the nursery
rhyme or greeting card. You can read it in a natural way, but it
takes thought and effort. I keep wishing she would have used the
natural iambic pentameter enjambs of Milton or even the more
natural wordflow of Yeats himself.
Yeats' speaking style can also be rather annoying. He had this idea
that poetry should not sound like natural language, and he affected
a kind of aristocratic preciousness in his speaking tone and inflection.
My speaking and listening preference is more laid back bohemian, so
I have to work at listening to Yeats too. However, unlike Sitwell, he
reads well in my own voice, or any voice for that matter.
What's nice about both Yeats and Sitwell is that their poetry is not
self-indulgent. It is finely crafted and tuned as great art. Yes, there
is a personal aspect to it, but it reaches out universally to a higher
plane that pleases the human and divine mind in all of us.
I have a hard time with some of the more self-indulgent poetry of the
generation after Yeats, starting with Ginsberg and the Beats. I read
them early on and then just let them go as though putting them on my
ignore list. But then I watched the recent film Howl and came to a
better appreciation of Ginsberg and his post-asylum banshee street
style. It made some sense after what he had been through in life.
Also, there is a way that the fifties post-world war II artists wished
to find a more free and authentic life in the midst of a society bent
on a kind of uniform, mechanistic conformity. They acted as kinds
of surgeons cutting through the paperdoll bodies and exposing the
blood and guts with the language of the gutter and the underbelly
of tramps and vagabonds on the road of life. Considering the way
the Hoover-led FBI, and the McCarthy-led witchhunters went after
these artists and those who couldn't keep up the facade, I have to
appreciate the courage of both the artists and the courts for at
least upholding some ideal of free and uncensored speech in art and
society.
There is still some freedom in song-writing, but the hiphop and rap
stuff can be very disturbing in its self-indulgence and its violent
sexism and wish to get on the classist topside through pimping,
drug dealing, and murder. Maybe we need to look at this side of
art in order to examine our own roles in a very oppressive society;
but in the end, it is not pleasing art. A lot of kids like it. It has a
certain spirit and rebelliousness to it; it pierces through all kinds
of masks and exposes the anti-puritan underbelly behind the desire
to get rich and flashy.
But these are just symptoms and results, not causes. Maybe a
poet like Robinson can speak better to the causes. Even Simon
and Garfunkel retold Richard Cory; and both they and Bob Dylan
might be better voices for that. I wonder if Yeats would have
appreciated Dylan the way my counter-culture heart does. I
hope so.
= new reply since forum marked as read
