To crawl in her own blood, and gonscot-free;nThe night can sweat with terror as beforenWe pieced our thoughts intonphilosophy,nAnd planned to bring the world underna rule,nVf^o are but weasels fighting inahole.nThis is much less decorous than “ThenSecond Coming,” and much less likely tonappear in the Times as an authorizedncommentary on the human self. It isnmuch less likely to win the approval ofnthe mind of the late 20th century. Thenbarrier in his poetry is not symbolism ornspiritualism: it is opinion.nThe difference between Yeats and hisncurrent audience—between Pound andnEliot and Hemingway and Conrad andnthe modern audience—^is that all thesenwriters believe things self-evidentlynwhich are no longer generally believed.nThe bland rationalism typified by Shaw isnnow regnant, even though we quotenYeats from time to time.nIn one of the good books about Yeats,nRichard Ellmann (The Identity of Yeats)nsays that one of the great themes of hisnwork is the opposition of Asiatic tonEuropean civilization, the faceless andnformless against (literally) sculpturednforms of individual identity. Hence thenimportance in his work of the nonlivelynarts: architecture, painting, and sculpture.nThese things show what Yeats calls,nThe self-sown, self-begotten shapenthat givesnAthenian intellect its mastery.nIt is the “intellect” which is so large ansubject in his verse: theplay of mind overnexperience. Always in Yeats the exercisenof mind is toward consciousness, informednby discipline, and easy to anger.nThat is one of the reasons why he links itnto the vocabulary of ait. Throughout thenpoems we find words like “order” andn”shape” and “art” itself—the discipline ofnwhich goes against our grain. And hisnconception of public beliefis goes violentlynagainst the sentimentalism thatnnowpasses so widely for liberal thought:nA man in his own secret meditationnIs lost amid the labyrinth that he hasnmadenIn art or politics.nThis is not of much use in a campaign,nexcept, perhaps, for someone likenEugene McCarthy. When the Timesninvokes “The Second Coming,” with itsnbrute beast slouching towardsnBethlehem to be bom, it does so with thenunquestioned belief that something hasngone vsTong and ought to be set right. Itnis Shavian in its tropistic responses tonthings. But in that poem and in the 1919npoem Yeats was not saying that thingsnhave gone wrong—only that that wasnthe way things were. He may be the onlynmajor poet ever to have given so muchnthought to pontics, and politics for himnwas not the expression of universalisticnhope. It was the manifestation of a viewnof character that made even Freud’snseem optimistic.nThe political poetry of Yeats is dominatednby hatred and failure. It is not onlynthat Parnell dies and Maud Goime becomesnafenatic hag and Yeats himself declinesninto a 60-year-old smiling publicnman. He has a theory that, upon closernconsideration, the r/mes will never like.nHere is the note fl-om the new edition onnone of the most femiliar of the poems:nInfheMailnI wrote Leda and the Swan because theneditor of a political review asked menfor a poem. I thought, ‘After thenindividualist, demagogic movement,nfounded by Hobbes and populari2ednby the Encyclopaedists and thenFrench Revolution, we have a soil sonexhausted that it cannot grow thatncrop again for centuries.’ Then Inthought, ‘Nothing is now possible butnsome movement from above precedednby some violent annunciation.’n*Caveat lector. Yeats goes on to say: “Mynfancy began to play with Leda and thenSwan for metaphor, and I began thisnpoem; but as I wrote, bird and lady tooknsuch possession of the scene that allnpolitics went out of it, and my friend tellsnme that his conservative readers wouldnmisunderstand the poem.”nSo that there is again the thing thatnLionel Trilling, in one of his last books,ncalled the problem of looking into thenabyss. Taking the Modernists for creditnmay mean satisfying the eternal Americanndesire to have the world correspondnwith one’s self—^but it may alsonmean the recognition, late for all Americans,nnever for some, that our bestnmodem writers are out of tune. They arennot optimists or rationalists; they don’tnbelieve in psychiatry: Yeats was not thenMass Media Between tiie Wars: Perceptions of Cultural Tension, 1918-1941 edited bynCatherine L. Covert and John D. Stevens; Syracuse University Press; Syracuse, NY. Arguesnthat various social tensions arose as a result of the proliferation of mass media—movies, TV,nnewspapers, and books like this.nJoseph Conrad’s Bible by DwightH. Purdy; University of Oldahoma Press; Norman, OK.nAs part of the dust jacket information puts it, “The author reveals Conrad’s reliance on scripturalnmetaphors that escape the modernist reader who does not know the Bible.” Said reader would benbetter off with a primary, not a tertiary, text, we think.nIhe Winged Gospel: America’s Romance uMt Aviation, 1900-1950 by Joseph J. Com;nOxford University Press; New York. Once, not so many years ago, it was anticipated that thenadvent of aircraft would “usher in the millennium.” Reality set in. Now we have nothing morenexotic than flying buses.nFugitive Industry: The Economics and Politics ofDeindustrializaUon by Richard B.nMcKenzie; BalUnger; Cambri^e, MA. A sensible book about plant closings. Makes you thinknthat more people ought to be opening moving companies.nnnDecember 1984n