Yeats and Violence

Michael Wood, the widely admired critic of twentieth-century film and fiction—particularly that of Latin America—and a regular reviewer on a wide variety of topics for both the London Review of Books and the New York Review of Books, here turns his attention to what is for him an unusual topic—lyric poetry—specifically W. B. Yeats's great and difficult six-part sequence "Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen" (1921). More accurately, Yeats's long poem becomes a point de repère for Wood's own reflections on the meanings of violence in our time. "Yeats," as Wood puts it, "is a poet almost everyone associates with violence," and yet the word itself appears only four times in the entire Collected Poems, two of these instances occurring in the first line of Part VI of "Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen," "Violence upon the roads: violence of horses."

In its original form, Yeats and Violence was a set of Clarendon Lectures Wood delivered at Oxford in 2008. For this audience, many of them probably unfamiliar with the particulars of Yeats's poetry or career, Wood clearly wanted to make "Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen" part of a larger discussion, and so he pays lip service to the Big Theorists, even when their paradigms are less than relevant. The book begins by citing Barthes on Balzac's Sarrasine: "This is not an 'explication de texte.'" Barthes, Wood reminds us, distinguished between the novel's "plan"—its overt plot—and its structure or inner motive—what Barthes calls a "system of exchanges." Wood evidently wants to do the same for "Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen" but he mistakes "plan" (pages 3ff) for what is simply a prose paraphrase of what the poem says: e.g., "Many ingenious lovely things are gone, like the art objects of ancient Greece," and so on. Surely the "plan" is larger than such paraphrase: it encompasses the poem's move from the existential present in which "we" witness the horrors of actual violence of war, to the image of the dance as metaphor for the cyclical theory of history—a theory that places violence in perspective (II)—to the urge, using the swan metaphor, to escape from the mortal world, followed by the recognition that "the swan has leaped into a desolate heaven" (III), to the short statement of despair (IV), litany of self-mockery (V), and finally the apocalyptic coda of Part VI, where a particularly horrific scene of medieval violence is reimagined.

Wood never quite gives this outline of the poem's "plot"—a plot whose deep structure is then to be analyzed. Rather, he begins by asking what the word violence means, invoking, for example, Giorgio Agamben's conception of violence as having the status of the sacred: "It is what lies at the basis of the very distinction between holiness and monstrosity." Or again, he cites David Lloyd's comment that the "ubiquitous and seemingly endless violence" we encounter today is "constitutive of modernity"—a statement that when taken out of context is mere truism. Wood further refers to "the symbolic and systemic violence Slavoj Zizek emphatically points to" (in his 2008 book Violence), to Walter Benjamin's discussion of Rechtsgewalt—the violence of the law itself—and to Hannah Arendt's concept of the "state-owned means of violence." There are also citations from Barthes, Freud, Raymond Williams, and Philip Pettit, and Wood cites Zizek as saying that "there is something inherently mystifying in a 'direct confrontation' with violence." In the end, however, Wood gives us the unobjectionable summarizing generalization that "Violence as Yeats helps us to understand it—whether personal, political, or apocalyptic—is always sudden and surprising, visible, unmistakable, inflicts or promises injury and is fundamentally uncontrollable."

But does Yeats in fact help us to "understand" violence? It seems unlikely, given that his own attitude toward violence was so conflicted. His famous aphorism "We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry" applies especially well to "Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen." For...