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  • Myth, Language and Tradition: A Study of Yeats, Stevens, and Eliot in the Context of Heidegger’s Search for Being
  • Lisa M. Steinman
Myth, Language and Tradition: A Study of Yeats, Stevens, and Eliot in the Context of Heidegger’s Search for Being. By Wit Pietrzak. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2011.

Myth, Language and Tradition proposes that modernism can be unified “under the banner of the Heideggerian search for the truth of Being” (viii). The book describes its project as bringing Yeats, Stevens, and Eliot together “by recourse to Heidegger’s hermeneutics” (14) to offer “a comprehensive theory of modernism” (13). To make this case, Myth, Language and Tradition is divided into three parts (along with a brief introduction and conclusion): the first six chapters are on Heidegger and Yeats; chapters again numbered one through six in a second section are on Heidegger and Stevens. The numbered chapters [End Page 272] begin anew with part III, on Eliot. Although Eliot is afforded only three chapters, he serves as the capstone of the book. We are told the first two sections show how Heidegger’s hermeneutics lie “at the core of Yeats’s conception of myth and Stevens’s use of poetic language” (235), while “in the end it is Eliot who helps to shape these attempts into an epochal event” (299).

An introductory chapter first defines modernism using Michael Whitworth’s “twelve key tenets of the art of the period” (2) before turning to discuss the poets associated with three further “concepts” (vii), namely myth (Yeats), language (Stevens), and tradition (Eliot). There seems to be a somewhat circular argument here. That is, Heideggerian hermeneutics are said to undergird and unify modernism. Yeats, Stevens, and Eliot are proclaimed “modernism’s three key poets” (16) because their work features myth, language, and tradition, and these three “concepts” are found central to modernism because they can be linked to Heidegger. At times, too, the book’s explications of poems seem a bit forced. For example, discussing Stevens’ quest for glimpses of the truth of Being, and citing a line from “The Man with the Blue Guitar”—“I patch it [the world] as I can” (CPP 135)—Myth, Language and Tradition suggests that the idea “might be better expressed in tearing off the patches of the earth that veil the world” (199). A skeptical reader might wonder whether it is the explication, not the poem, that should be recast.

That said, the chapters devoted to Stevens in Myth, Language and Tradition do carefully work through a large number of Stevens’ poems, detailing the Heideggerian “undertones” (198 et passim). A discussion of “Yellow Afternoon” also initiates the claim that Stevens’ “understanding of poeticising mirrors Heidegger’s later fascination with language and poetry, but is also tinted with Derrida’s ardent dissemination” (207). Here and there, the theoretical, and ahistorical, accounts of the poems yield puzzling pronouncements. We are told, for example, that Stevens’ relative silence between the publication of his first two volumes must be explained by a working-through of philosophical problems, since otherwise the lack of new poems following the appearance of Harmonium seems “an unlikely furlough for a poet of such a stature” (183). Not only does the argument fail to mention that other circumstances might explain why Stevens produced few new poems between 1923 and the early thirties (his health problems, his push to become a Vice President at the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company, the birth of his daughter), but it seems to assume that in the twenties and early thirties Stevens was known as, or thought himself, a poet of “stature.” Yet Stevens said of Harmonium that it was difficult to “pick a crisp salad from the garbage of the past” (L 232), and he certainly noticed that the book was at first largely ignored (L 242). At the very least, what Myth, Language and Tradition means by “stature” is unclear, as it is also when the final lines of “Of Modern Poetry” are said to invoke the feeling of accomplishing something “of immense stature” (209); why skating, dancing, or combing one’s hair would count as such is not explained.

Revisiting earlier work on...

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