Crazy Jane and Professor Eucalyptus: Self-Dissolution in the Later Poetry of Yeats and Stevens

… all talk about God, whether pro or anti, is twaddle.

—Wallace Stevens, quoting Professor Joad

Fol de rol, fol de rol.

—W. B. Yeats, "Crazy Jane Reproved"

PARTICULARLY IN THE TWO magisterial volumes The Tower and The Winding Stair, the later W. B. Yeats is a poet who might be typified by the weighty line, the bardic voice, forms like the poised ottava rima and meditative style that Helen Vendler calls "spacious" (Our Sacred Discipline 291). Late Wallace Stevens moves into sparer variants of his ongoing poetic preoccupations, offering himself as "a diffident minimalist," in Charles Altieri's phrase (321), substituting purgation for harmonium. These are overgeneralizations, of course. A parallel that interests me appears if I juxtapose two late sequences, focusing especially on each poet's late reworking, or redramatizing, of the poetic subject. The two texts I will consider are Yeats's Words for Music Perhaps and Stevens's "An Ordinary Evening in New Haven." They are not stylistically or thematically similar, though both represent somewhat analogous moments in each poet's career. Considered together, Yeats's Crazy Jane poems in particular (which form a large part of the sequence Words for Music Perhaps) and Stevens's multi-canto "An Ordinary Evening" represent ambitious experiments in creating dissolution by two wielders of powerful language. Both works explore the paradox implicit in highly skilled poets confronting the absence of the imagination, the seeming opposite of everything their abilities can and do make possible.¹

For Yeats, the effort involved following the magisterial poems of The Tower with the abjection and exultation of a different kind of mask, a different style, and arguably a different approach toward composition, than he had tried before. Words for Music Perhaps was published by Cuala Press in 1932 and then included in The Winding Stair and Other Poems (1933), two years before Yeats's seventieth birthday. The title of the sequence is ironically misleading: the twenty-five short poems of the sequence are not meant to be set to music—hence Yeats's playful "Perhaps." In March 1929, the poet wrote his old friend Olivia Shakespear, "I am writing Twelve poems for music—have done three of them (and two other poems)—no[t] so much that they may be sung as that I may define their kind of emotion to myself. I want them to be all emotion and all impersonal" (Letters 758). Indeed, the idea of Yeats writing for music seems to have amused both himself and his wife. R. F. Foster quotes George Yeats writing to Thomas McGreevy, a good friend, that "William … yesterday came dashing along from his cot to announce that he was going to write twelve songs and I had got to purchase 'a musical instrument' at once and set them to music. … All said songs being of a most frivolous nature!" (letter from February 11, 1929, qtd. in Foster 385). Given that she did not play a musical instrument, not to mention that it seems not to have mattered which musical instrument she was meant to buy, "frivolous" might be an understatement.

The twenty-five short poems of Words for Music Perhaps are technically very unlike some of Yeats's weighty and serious late poems, including the poems in magisterial ottava rima like "A Dialogue of Self and Soul" or "Coole Park, 1929" and "Coole Park and Ballylee, 1931." The poems that comprise Words for Music Perhaps are light and somewhat tune-like, with short stanzas, frequent uses of refrain, and tetrameter or trimeter rhyming lines suggestive of ballads or Shakespearean songs. The little lyrics are anything but frivolous, though. Instead, their light touch is part of a spiritual/intellectual purpose that includes the question of words' inherent musicality. The sequence foregrounds the idea of simple joy as wisdom, which is common to Yeats's late work. As an oft-cited (and often misquoted) passage in one of his last letters puts it,

I am happy, and I think full of an energy, of an energy I had despaired of. It seems to me that I...