Recalling All the Olympians: W. B. Yeats’s “Beautiful Lofty Things,” On the Boiler and the Agenda of National Rebirth
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.2478/texmat-2014-0015Abstract
While it has been omitted by numerous critics in their otherwise comprehensive readings of Yeats’s oeuvre, “Beautiful Lofty Things” has been placed among the mythical poems, partly in accordance with Yeats’s own intention; in a letter to his wife, he suggested that “Lapis Lazuli, the poem called ‘To D. W.’ ‘Beautiful Lofty Things,’ ‘Imitated from the Japanese’ & ‘Gyres’ . . . would go well together in a bunch.” The poem has been inscribed in the Yeats canon as registering a series of fleeting epiphanies of the mythical in the mundane. However, “Beautiful Lofty Things,” evocative of a characteristically Yeatsian employment of myth though it certainly is, seems at the same time to fuse Yeats’s quite earthly preoccupations. It is here argued that the poem is organized around a tightly woven matrix of figures that comprise Yeats’s idea of the Irish nation as a “poetical culture.” Thus the position of the lyric in the poet’s oeuvre deserves to be shifted from periphery towards an inner part of his cultural and political ideas of the time. Indeed, the poem can be viewed as one of Yeats’s central late comments on the state of the nation and, significantly, one in which he is able to proffer a humanist strategy for developing a culturally modern state rather than miring his argument in occasionally over-reckless display of abhorrence of modernity.
Downloads
References
Bell, Vereen M. Yeats and the Logic of Formalism. Columbia: U of Missouri P, 2006. Print.
Google Scholar
Brown, Terrence. The Life of W. B. Yeats: A Critical Biography. London: Blackwell, 2001. Print.
Google Scholar
Childs, Donald. Modernism and Eugenics: Woolf, Eliot, Yeats and the Culture of Degeneration. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001. Print.
Google Scholar
Cullingford, Elizabeth. Yeats, Ireland and Fascism. New York: New York UP, 1981. Print.
Google Scholar
Ellmann, Richard. Yeats. The Man and the Masks. New York: Norton, 2000. Print.
Google Scholar
Foster, R. F. W. B. Yeats: A Life, I: The Apprentice Mage. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008. Print.
Google Scholar
Foster, R. F. W. B. Yeats: A Life, II: The Arch-Poet. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2005. Print.
Google Scholar
Gonne MacBride, Maud. A Servant of the Queen. Woodbridge: Boydell, 1983. Print.
Google Scholar
Gonne, Maud, and W. B. Yeats. The Gonne-Yeats Letters 1893-1938. Ed. Anna MacBride White and A. Norman Jeffares. New York: Norton 1993. Print.
Google Scholar
Gregory, Augusta. Lady Gregory’s Journals. Vol. 1. Ed. Daniel J. Murphy. New York: Oxford UP, 1978. Print.
Google Scholar
Hassett, Joseph M. W. B. Yeats and the Muses. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2010. Print.
Google Scholar
Jeffares, Norman A. A Commentary on The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1968. Print.
Google Scholar
Kelly, John. A W. B. Yeats Chronology. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2003. Print.
Google Scholar
McKenna, Bernard. “Yeats, On the Boiler, the Aesthetics of Cultural Disintegration and the Program for Renewal ‘of Our own Rich Experience.’” Journal of Modern Literature 35.4 (2012): 73-90. Print. doi: 10.2979/jmodelite.35.4.73
Google Scholar
Mills Harper, Margaret. Wisdom of Two. The Spiritual and Literary Collaboration of George and W. B. Yeats. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2006. Print.
Google Scholar
Ross, David A. Critical Companion to W. B. Yeats: A Literary Reference to his Life and Work. New York: Facts on File, 2009. Print.
Google Scholar
Soloway, Richard A. Demography and Degeneration: Eugenics and the Declining Birthrate in Twentieth-Century Britain. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1990. Print.
Google Scholar
Torchiana, Donald. W. B. Yeats and Georgian Ireland. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1966. Print.
Google Scholar
Vendler, Helen. Our Secret Discipline. Yeats and Lyric Form. Boston: Belknap, 2007. Print.
Google Scholar
Wood, Michael. Yeats and Violence. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2010. Print.
Google Scholar
Yeats, J. B. Passages from the Letters of John Butler Yeats: Selected by Ezra Pound. Ed. Ezra Pound. Dublin: Cuala, 1917. Print.
Google Scholar
Yeats, W. B. The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats: Volume III, Autobiographies. Ed. William H. O’Donnell and Douglas N. Archibald. New York: Scribner, 1999. Print.
Google Scholar
Yeats, W. B. The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats: Volume IV, Early Essays. Ed. Richard J. Finneran and George Bornstein. New York: Scribner, 2007. Print.
Google Scholar
Yeats, W. B. The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats: Volume V, Later Essays. Ed. William H. O’Donnell. New York: Scribner, 1994. Print.
Google Scholar
Yeats, W. B. A Critical Edition of Yeats’s A Vision (1925). Ed. George Mills Harper and Walter Kelly Hood. London: Macmillan, 1978. Print.
Google Scholar
Yeats, W. B. The Letters of W. B. Yeats. Ed. Allan Wade. London: Hart-Davis, 1954. Print.
Google Scholar
Yeats, W. B. Memoirs: Autobiography-First Draft: Journal. Ed. Denis Donoghue. London: Macmillan, 1973. Print.
Google Scholar
Yeats, W. B. The Variorum Edition of the Poems of W. B. Yeats. Ed. Peter Allt and Russell K. Alspach. London: Macmillan, 1966. Print.
Google Scholar
Yeats, W. B. Wheels and Butterflies. London: Macmillan, 1934. Print.
Google Scholar
Yeats, W. B., and George Yeats. The Letters. Ed. Ann Saddlemyer. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2011. Print.
Google Scholar
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
![Creative Commons License](http://i.creativecommons.org/l/by-nc-nd/4.0/88x31.png)
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.