Yeats and the Sense of History

There is a beautiful and suggestive phrase in Yeats, where he describes himself as “A poet of my time, through my poetical faculty living its history.”

Initially I thought of a comparable image in Adorno, who talks about the necessity of seeing poetry as a “sundial telling the time of history”. A sundial is not of course “like” time but allows us to measure it, and something analogous is implied for poetry. Even the most ostensibly apolitical poems are nonetheless shadows cast by a history which is present in the shape of its absence.

Yeats’s metaphor, though, is quite different. Poetry is a particular seismograph or divining instrument through which history is lived, apprehended and experienced. No doubt Yeats “lives” history in other ways, but it’s as if the poetic faculty is attuned to history in some unique and incomparable way.

We’d then need to think though what this “living of history” might mean. And Yeats’s poetic faculty has deposited ample evidence for us to examine. Of course, there are many poems in which he directly addresses historical events, but many, in fact the vast majority, which do not. And it’s this latter category of poems which would arguably be the more interesting object of analysis in terms of the presence of history.

In order to do this, we need a sense of history which extends beyond battles and coronations. We need to think of history in its more inclusive sense, wherein all areas of our existence, our values, beliefs and practices are part of history. Our forms of life, which we initially at least take for granted, are part of history and will one day be looked back on as quaint, unaccountable or abhorrent by some future posterity (which will in turn feel itself exempt from history).

For literary criticism, the challenge in taking up Yeats’s quote, and Adorno’s too, is to examine literature in relation to history without renouncing close textual analysis. This textual analysis won’t of course have the same form as practical criticism but will take its first cues and clues from the text so to speak, nonetheless. It will be a criticism, or hermeneutic, which does not simply seek the meaning of content, but also the meaning of forms. I will try and suggest, at some later point, how this might be done, as well as outlining the particular history Yeats's poetry is “living”.

Before that, it’s worth remarking on the historical sense itself. Yeats doesn’t simply inhabit history but is also aware of being historical. It is not all individuals and not all eras that have this historical sense. As Lukacs points out, this historical sense is itself historical. That is, only at certain critical moments do people become aware of their existence, the very timbre of their life as being part of history, as reflecting and contributing to a larger historical narrative or period of seismographic change. And by history, we don't simply mean significant events like the 1916 Rising (this is many people’s working definition of what history looks like.) Rather it’s about history as a time when we are saying goodbye to one form of life and announcing or saluting the emergence of another, the contours and content of which certainly eludes us. "The old is dying and the new cannot be born". A sense that something is happening without being able to say what. This sense of one’s historicity is rare and changes existence itself. It changes existence, for example, in making you aware of the transient or arbitrary foundation of  your way of life. It is this combination of transience and arbitrariness which Walter Benjamin detects in the forms of the German Trauerspiel.

It is this, I think, we also find in Yeats, and which hasn’t really been written about in detail. I’d also be curious to hear which other writers people feel have this sense?