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  • The Later Affluence of W. B. Yeats and Wallace Stevens by Edward Clarke
  • Justin Quinn
The Later Affluence of W. B. Yeats and Wallace Stevens. By Edward Clarke. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.

Edward Clarke's book reads the late poems of Wallace Stevens and W. B. Yeats as prophesies of last things. For him, these poets engage with deep truths of human life and death, drawing mainly upon a Christian tradition that meditates upon the soul as it passes to the afterlife. He observes these poets lingering on the edge, in poems like "Of Mere Being" and "The Black Tower," as they gaze behind them at the life of man, and then look forward to a vista, as Stevens has it, "without human meaning, / Without human feeling" (CPP 476), when the soul is folded back, through anagogy, into unworldly immensities. By drawing upon a wide range of literary and theological texts, he characterizes Yeats and Stevens primarily as hierophants. Through their long apprenticeship in literary art, they have, in Clarke's view, access to realms of the spirit that are generally occluded by modernity, with its causal, mechanistic model of the world.

Most academic readers will find this tough to swallow. Immersed in the material conditions of publishing, tracing the ways literary texts are imbricated in politics and history, and in some cases, ultimately desiring to abandon poets like Yeats and Stevens in favor of works that intervene more visibly in culture, we may be tempted to dismiss summarily Clarke's project as obsolescent. Clarke knows this and equably admits the validity of much recent historical-materialist criticism; his cavil, however, is that literary texts are not exhausted by such practices. We need them as ways to meditate on our own deaths: these poets bring us to the edge, accompanied by their psycho-pomps, and help us understand our lives as bounded, approaching their termini, and requiring fitting words—just as, on a more practical level, we require such words at the ceremony of a funeral. In a secular world, poetry retains a spiritual luster that is often demanded on such occasions (as well as at marriages) by people with no professional investment in the art.

In his words of judicious, grand praise on the book's back cover, Charles Altieri says that "Harold Bloom's readings of Stevens are only pale shadows of Clarke's unfolding of Stevens's visionary side." Certainly, Clarke invokes the same romantic canon as Bloom; but where the latter posits oedipal struggle as the main generator of this tradition, Clarke views these poets as hierophants or vates, who experience the same spiritual revelation and write out of that. Clarke's version of influence is of deep calling unto deep: for his purposes, it is not necessary to ferret out Stevens' marginalia in, say, his copy of Wordsworth, or even present evidence of direct allusion within the poems; rather, he sketches a Christian mystical tradition within which both poets can be read, as the revelation vouchsafed by earlier mystical poets is experienced once again centuries into the future. Clarke's exemplary reading of "Not Ideas About the Thing But the Thing Itself" demonstrates how the poem fits into a poetic-mystical tradition of heavens, hells, and longed-for worlds. The main material connection is these poets' adherence to literary craft, especially evident [End Page 111] in the case of Yeats, for whom rhyme and meter were the guiding principles (asked where he got his ideas, he replied, when "looking for the next rhyme").

Anxious to read Stevens and Yeats as post-Christian poets, we have tended to exclude this context. Stevens' deathbed conversion story also has distracted us, leading us back into biography, when perhaps we have a surfeit of facts already. Mysticism, or spiritual belief, without ecclesiastic structure is what Clarke shows us in Stevens and Yeats. Clarke frequently uses the word "anagogy," which, in its obsolete meaning, according to the OED, denotes "spiritual elevation or enlightenment, esp. to understand mysteries." To say that his book deals in obsolescences of this type is not a criticism, but rather alerts us to the promising alternative he offers. Literary criticism emerged out of biblical...

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