The Poet Resigns: Essays on Poetry in a Difficult Time

Can Poems Communicate?

97 Can Poems Communicate? Where does one go in one’s writing,” the grand old poetcritic Donald Davie once wondered, “if the King James Bible has become a recondite source?” (21). The problem Davie framed is an old one, and was already eating away at W. B. Yeats in the 1890s, when he worried over whether there was a public language through which poems could connect with the wider world. What can a poet do when he or she can’t expect a shared frame of cultural reference with an audience? Yeats has taken a lot of criticism over the decades for his interest in the supernatural, but much of Yeats’ thinking about magic was actually a way of thinking about the nature of symbolic communication, and the place of symbols in modern life. Consider the following passage from his 1901 essay on magic: I believe in the practice and philosophy of what we have agreed to call magic, in what I must call the evocation of spirits, though I do not know what they are, in the power of creating magical illusions, in the visions of truth in the depths of the mind when the eyes are closed; and I believe in three doctrines, which have, as I think, been handed down from early times, and been the foundations of nearly all magical practices. These doctrines are:—(1) That the borders of our mind are ever shifting , and that many minds can flow into one another, as it were, and create or reveal a single mind, a single energy. (2) That the borders of “ 98 The Poet Resigns our memories are as shifting, and that our memories are part of one great memory, the memory of Nature herself. (3) That this great mind and great memory can be evoked by symbols. (29) There are two ways to read this passage. What we might call the strong interpretation would stress the supernaturalism. In this view, Yeats is talking about a kind of collective soul, or group dreaming, or telepathy, or symbols that radiate throughout creation. I prefer what we might call the weak interpretation of the passage. In this view, Yeats is saying something not too different from what people like Jung or Northrop Frye or any number of structural anthropologists have said: that there are large cultural systems of symbols and images, that these symbols and images inform our thinking and unite groups of people in terms of their assumptions and ideals, often in ways those groups do not apprehend consciously. Of course in actuality both strong and weak readings apply. Yeats wants to get away from Arnoldian skepticism, and the atheism of his Darwinian father: hence the supernaturalism. He also wants to get away from the individualism that the triumphant late-Victorian bourgeoisie rode down the boulevards of the capitals of Europe like a giant white pachyderm: hence the interest in collective experience. The weak reading, with Yeats trying to articulate his sense that communication depends upon large, enduring sets of collectively apprehended symbols, is the reading relevant for present purposes. The problem, for him, was that modernity had become inimical to such symbolic systems. Just after the passage above he writes: I often think I would put this belief in magic from me if I could, for I have come to see or to imagine, in men and women, in houses, in handicrafts, in nearly all sights and sounds, a certain evil, a certain ugliness, that comes from the slow perishing through the centuries of a quality of mind that made this belief and its evidences common over the world. (30) Yeats’ disgust with modernity has many sources. The most unpleasant moments of his childhood took place in then hyper-modern London, where he was despised for his Irishness. He identified modernity with the English oppressors of Ireland. In addition, the intellectual atmosphere of his childhood home was saturated with Pre-Raphaelitism, with 99 Poetry in a Difficult World the medievalism of Ruskin, and with William Morris, who wondered, in his great essay “How I Became a Socialist,” whether modern civilization was “all to end in a counting-house on the top of a cinder-heap?” (280). But the problem is also one of communication, and, ultimately, of cultural cohesion. In Yeats’ view, we were once united by a “centuries old quality of mind” that modern, urban, industrial capitalism has somehow swept to the sidelines...