Yeats, Stevens, Eliot: Eras and Legacies, an Interview with Marjorie Perloff

Edward Ragg

Your first book, published in 1970, was devoted to Yeats, and for several decades you have written about, taught, commented, and reflected on many of the major twentieth-century poets, as well as, more recently, their twenty-first-century inheritors, explicating, in particular, the evolution of modernist and postmodernist avant-gardes. How would you compare and contrast the changing reputations and influence of such now-canonical figures as Yeats, Stevens, and Eliot on poetry and poetics both in their own times and since?

Marjorie Perloff

Yeats, Stevens, Eliot? The major shift in our time is that Yeats is all but written out of histories of modernism, at least in the US. Courses on modernism tend to be almost exclusively on American modernism, and so Yeats does not figure. Then, too, given his dates (1865–1939), Yeats seems increasingly to be pushed back into the nineteenth century. After all, he still wrote his poems in metrical stanzas, and his "high" style has little in common with that of the American modernists from Pound and Eliot to H.D. and Marianne Moore (the latter, increasingly, seen as one of the central modernist poets), or Robert Frost and Langston Hughes. Contemporary students of poetry, and especially those in Creative Writing, hardly know he exists: he has been relegated to courses on Irish Literature or perhaps on the Decadence, which has become an important scholarly subject in recent years, witness Vincent Sherry's Modernism and the Reinvention of Decadence. Perhaps the questioning of Yeats's "modernism" is in part a necessary corrective: when I was going to graduate school in the 1960s, every other student of modernism was writing a dissertation on Yeats! Gayatri Spivak (then at Iowa) is a case in point.

Then again, Yeats remains an important poet for the broader public, especially in the UK, as is the case with Eliot. Eliot is also largely untaught in the Academy today, where his politics, his devout Christianity, and his misogyny make him a problematic subject in the age of trigger warnings. At the same time, Eliot is enormously popular with a broader public. I've just come back from teaching at the T. S. Eliot International Summer School in London and I can assure your readers that Eliot remains, for many poetry lovers, the great twentieth-century poet. His letters, now in the process of publication, already take up six volumes and roughly 5,000 pages: and that's only up to 1933 (Eliot died in 1965!). Someone is buying these massive volumes!

In 2017, Stevens is probably taught more widely than either Yeats or Eliot. He is acceptable to all as a "great" American poet, even if accusations of racism and conservative politics sometimes cloud the picture. As Stevens's lyric poetry recedes into the past, he is seen as the natural heir of Emerson, Whitman, and even Dickinson, though he barely knew her work. It is Stevens's Americanism (Eliot, after all, was an expatriate), his sense of time and place, his relation to pragmatist philosophy and impact on our later poets that puts him squarely at the center of things.

E.R.

In terms of their poetics and attitudes toward poetry, as expressed implicitly or explicitly in poems and often explicitly in their essays on poetry, are there revealing points of comparison, do you think, among these three poets? Have these points of comparison become more apparent with the passing of time and our evolving sense of modernism?

M.P.

Well, all three poets write a difficult, oblique, indirect poetry, meant to challenge the reader. And all three are aesthetes, who believe that Art redeems life, makes life worth living. They are not populists who believe poetry is part of everyday life! But there the similarity stops. One would never confuse the three. Yeats's aesthetic is still essentially romantic and features the antithetical poet, wearing a mask, confronting a hostile middle-class public. His poetry is highly rhetorical and dramatic and makes use of traditional stanzas. Eliot's poetry is much more thematic, dealing with ethical issues...