On Yeats's 'popular Poetry'

GO DOWN

INTO THE

STREET

Brief Reflection on Yeats's concept of 'Popular Poetry'

By Vaglioni Pierluigi

In his 'Literature in Ireland', Thomas MacDonagh makes some considerations about the contribuition Irish writers made to English language, in terms of what he called a 'colloquial directness'.

English literature has had some difficulty in getting rid of the phraseology, the inversions, the poetic words, the cumbrous epithets, the mannerism, of its pastoral and of its genteel days. (...) The English reading of the early Anglo-Irish writers filled their memories with those old, stale things; but the individual Anglo-Irish literature of which I write has no such lumber. It is the record of the speech of the people, the living word--sometimes, no doubt, heightened, to the old phrase, but of a directness that Wordsworth would have adored. Indeed it would seem that the desire of Wordsworth for a Literature written only in the common language of the people is best

fulfilled

in

the

work

produced

in

Ireland.

1

MacDonagh was speaking of the whole Irish literary tradition, but with a particular focus on the nineteenth century writers, and the passage focuses on the voice of the writer, and on the audience it should be addressed to. Yeats must have read carefully those essays not only for the personal association with MacDonagh and the others 'men dead', but also because of his own estetic interest for the language of poetry. His own verses contributed to the debate 1Thomas

MacDonagh, Literature in Ireland, London: Fisher Unwin, 1916,pp. 33, 34.

2

about the nature of poetry and whether it should be public or private and express itself in a literary or in a political way. If at the beginning of his career Yeats seemed to have been in favour of the public commitment of poetry, the years of his political disillusionment he had given way to a much more intimate poetry centred on the self more than on the public. Art in Yeats's thought had to be an elevating thing to be received by an ideal society and consequentely adopting a proper language. Having chosen for himself the role of the bard of the 'Ireland in The Coming Times' Yeats draw the co-ordinates according to which the literary movement should move. 'To The Rose Upon The Rood of Time' can be considered as a sort of poetical manifesto of the Irish Literary Revival; poets should sing 'Erin and her ancient ways' and forget about the 'things that crave'. As already stated Yeats's poetry was addressed to an ideal society, to a 'Land of Heart's Desire' rather than to the real Ireland and it is possible to misunderstand his message for an elitiste attitude. Yeats's society was shaped on the romantic version of the Celtic society which the folklore had handed down to the romantic generation: an organic community in where the poets served as a means of communication between a caste of noble warriors and the depositary

of

the

people's

wisdom,

the

peasants.

This,

considered the tone and the structure of poetry, must convey noble and ispiring thoughts without being pretentious.

I wanted to write 'popular poetry' like those Irish poets, for I believed that all good literatures were popular, and even

3

cherished the fancy that the Adelphi melodrama, which I had never seen, might be good literature, and I hated what I called the coteries. I thought that one must write without care, for that was of the coteries, but with a gutsy energy that would pull all straight if it came out of the right heart.

2

The passage states Yeats's intentions beside conveying the idea that poetry should be addressed to two opposite classes. Through verse, preferably his own, experience, history, politics and the legendary 'Erin and her ancient ways' should be received and become a part of the culture of the uneducated classes.

...Go down into the street and read to your baker or your candlestick-maker any poem which is not 'popular poetry'. I have heard a baker, who was clever enough with his oven, deny that Tennyson could have known what he was writing when he wrote, 'Warming his five wits, the white owl in the belfry sits,' and once when I read out Omar Khyyàm to one of the best candlestick-makers, he said, 'What is the meaning of "I came like water and like wind I go"?'. Or go down in to the street with some thought whose meaning must be plain with everybody; take with you Ben Johnson's 'Beauty like sorrow dwelleth everywhere,' and find out how utterly its enchantment depends on an association of beauty and sorrow which written tradition has from the unwritten ...

2W.B. Yeats, 3W.B. Yeats,

Essays and Introductions, London: Macmillan, 1969, pp. 4-5. Essays and Introductions, London: Macmillan, 1969, p. 7.

4

3

The allusion to the unwritten tradition recalls both the popular poets whom MacDonagh was also writing about and the popular pratice of handing down the national culture by oral means. The meaning of the passage seems clear: the people has the potentiality to receive the message from art, if the artist helps them to get it. In doing this the latter must not lower the rank of his art, but create one able to be received from more people than the poetry of the coteries, that, as he said, 'presupposes ... more than it says'.

The means trough which he succeed to achieve

such an aim are clear even at the simplest level of reading: his verses are written to be understood by everybody, uncultured people included, still he is nevertheless able to maintain the complexity of structure, of images and of the poetic language. From 'Crossway', through the lyrics of Responsibilities, to 'The Tower', the general register of Yeats's poetry keeps a "colloquial directness" in its attempt to get close to the canons of the unwritten tradition. In 'September 1913' the poet conveys a series of complex ideas by using images close to the dull reality he is describing in the poem. On the other hand the line "Romantic Ireland is dead and gone/Is with O'Leary in the grave" suggests Yeats's wish to adhere to the schemes of the oral tradition, with the refrain, repeated at the end of each stanza, entering the people's mind as one from a popular ballad. Similarly the protagonists of 'Easter 1916' are described by an ordinary language before being transported in the realm of Irish mithology. The movement from "the casual comedy" to a tragedy of "terrible beauty" is underlined by the introduction of an

5

oxymoron which, again, partakes of the characteristics of the popular ballad's refrains. These are only two examples demonstrating how the language of the poet, taken from the one of the people, is drawn back directly to the popular heritage enriched by the association with highest poetic forms and eventually renewed. Yeats succeeded in this way, in one his designs, that, as he wrote, was of being accounted 'True brother of a company/That sang, to sweeten Ireland's wrong,/Ballad and story, rann and song...'.

6