Poetry in the Modern State: the example of W.B. Yeats's 'Late Style' and 'New Fanaticism'

Sheils, Barry

Abstract

In this article I propose to connect Yeats’s “new fanaticism” and his “late style”—a term I have borrowed from Edward Said to describe the preposterous self-consciousness of the poet’s old age. There are two major aspects to my argument: first, that Yeats’s repeated use of violence as a poetic device, especially when he was an old man—inter-generational murder, hunger strike, political protest, or severe cultural critique—was not simply the cathartic exaggeration of a malcontent but the basis of a dialectical imagination. Second, that Yeats’s “new fanaticism” expresses the predicament of modern poetry as it finds itself, according to Hegel’s influential genealogy of the modern, stranded in the discrepant time/space between art and philosophy, between the classical world of sensuous forms and the modern state. I argue that poetic nonsynchronicity or disjointedness as it occurs in Yeats’s work, itself situated between the modes of Victorian neo-romanticism and twentieth-century modernism, frames an exemplary mode of historical thinking in and of the modern world.

Citation

Sheils, B. (2014). Poetry in the Modern State: the example of W.B. Yeats's 'Late Style' and 'New Fanaticism'. New Literary History, 45(3), 483-505. https://doi.org/10.1353/nlh.2014.0022

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Jan 1, 2014
• Online Publication Date: Jun 30, 2014
• Publication Date: 2014
• Deposit Date: Oct 3, 2016
• Journal: New Literary History
• Print ISSN: 0028-6087
• Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 45
• Issue: 3
• Pages: 483-505
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/nlh.2014.0022