Yeats

He was one of the greatest -- perhaps the greatest -- English-language poets of the twentieth century. And, perhaps, he was a man for all time: while his roots ran deep into the misty nineteenth-century romanticism of the "Celtic Revival," the implications of his poems -- particularly his last ones -- runs through the twentieth century to the present moment, and beyond. For those who see chaos overcoming, uncertainty prevailing, and the old order fragmenting, his visions offer both a sort of lyrical desperation -- and yet also a form of hope.

William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) was a study in contradictions: the quintessential Irish poet, he spent the bulk of his career in England; the arch-druid of sublime desire, the love of his life -- Maud Gonne -- never returned his feelings; a fierce and unbending critic of British colonial rule over Ireland, his political persuasions late in life drew him close to neo-Fascist elements such as the Irish "Blueshirts." He was also, in the midst of his poetic career, a dedicated Occultist and member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn (a mystical brotherhood unrelated to the modern far-right organization of that name). In that guise, he rubbed shoulders with acolytes of the arcane such as Aleister Crowley, S.L. MacGregor-Mathers, and Evelyn Underhill. As required of all initiates of that order, he designed and drew his own Tarot deck, the manuscript of which was preserved in his papers.

All of which seems more than a little odd with a poet whose voice and tone were, in his final decade, unmistakably modern. The 1930's, in addition to being a time of worldwide economic depression, were an era in which the returning shadow of war -- thought banished after the "Great War" -- gave rise to what became World War II. And Yeats's poetry both foreshadowed and embodied this growing sense of doom, never more eloquently than in "The Second Coming":

Turning and turning in the widening gyre   

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere   

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst   

Are full of passionate intensity.

The sense is clear: this is an apocalypse of human, not divine, making -- the blood-dimed tide is us. And yet, at the same time, Yeats celebrated his own humanity, age, and fragility, with more than a little dash of humor:

An aged man is but a paltry thing,

A tattered coat upon a stick, unless

Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing

For every tatter in its mortal dress

So many memorable phrases can be traced to him, and continue to resonate today: The Golden Apples of the Sun, No Country for old Men, Things Fall Apart, and many more. And among them, the title of Joan Didion's remarkable book of essays, which we'll soon be reading: Slouching Toward Bethlehem.

So read Yeats. Read him aloud, if you can, and dare! Here are direct links to his poems:

Sailing to Byzantium

The Circus Animals' Desertion

The Second Coming

In your responses below, see if you can make connections to the present moment, to where Yeats's words suddenly come back into relevance, and seem to speak to our present time:

Harlem Shuffle

Colson Whitehead is a writer whose fictions have always traversed reality in strange ways. From his début novel, The Inuitionist, which is set in an imaginary conflict between two different schools of elevator inspection, through to Apex Hides the Hurt, a novel about an advertising writer whose specialty is giving new names and tagline to old products -- including towns and cities -- Whitehead has followed his own particular muse. Some of his novels, such as The Colossus of New York and John Henry Days, are apparently so offbeat that their current Wikipedia entries are nearly blank! 

His previous novel, The Underground Railroad, delved deep -- metaphorically and literally -- into its subject, with its central proposition: what if the "Underground Railroad" were actually a railroad that ran under the ground? Here, with Harlem Shuffle, Whitehead returns to a less surrealistic conceit, that of a man  -- Ray Carney -- whose central conundrum is whether to listen to his better or worser angels -- and the worser ones are by far the most talkative. In some ways, it's a classic heist novel, following the usual array of 'best-laid schemes' up to the point of their execution, and of (of course) nothing quite going as expected. All this is set within a lovingly-crafted portrait of Harlem in the 1960's a time when its former glories, in the swing time of the Harlem Renaissance and the club scene, are long behind it, and its eventual gentrification -- underway as we speak -- was unforeseen and unforeseeable.

The Greeks had a word for this kind of battle within and for the soul -- a psychomachia, a war within one's head -- and Ray's is a lively and convoluted one. On the one hand, he's a used furniture dealer with an eye for a good bargain, a family to feed, a business to keep up (and keep the appearance of up) -- on the other hand, he's a low-key "fence" for stolen goods, one of those "businesses on the side" that sometimes usurp the one in the center.

So follow his story, enjoy its twists and turns. Is there a moral to it? Not likely, but that doesn't mean it's not a heck of a lot of fun.