THE ISLE OF FREEDOM

W.B. Yeats is the most universally admired poet of the modern period, but he is not often considered a true modernist. Being modern was not part of Yeats's program in poetry or in politics. As early as 1886, he used “modern” as a natural term of opprobrium, and fifty years later he distinguished himself and his contemporaries from “revolutionists” like Eliot by saying, “we wrote as men had always written” (El, p. 499). As a young man and as an aged poet, Yeats recoiled from the modern world built by technology, a world that had created the urban masses and was in turn sustained by them, and he felt a distaste for poetry that spoke of this world. Thus Yeats can seem an anomaly in the modern period, his long life in the twentieth century the accidental survival of a poet who might well have succumbed, as Johnson and Dowson did, to a more timely end.

Yet it may be unreasonable to refuse the term “modern” to any poet not entirely positive about the modern world, a world that has been uncomfortable with itself from the beginning. W.J. McCormack suggests instead that “Yeats is more revealing of the values of Modernism than Eliot is, precisely because he is less ‘pure’ a Modernist.” Yeats's life and work show as well as those of any poet how aesthetic modernism emerges from modernity's quarrel with itself. Because he was a Victorian and still something of the nineteenth-century liberal he affected to hate, Yeats suffered these conflicts as a personal quarrel, an internal contest between individualism and nationalism, right and duty, freedom and history.