The Political Aesthetic of Yeats, Eliot, and Pound

Abstract

The politics of Yeats, Eliot and Pound have long been a source of discomfort and difficulty for literary critics and cultural historians. In The Political Aesthetic of Yeats, Eliot and Pound, Michael North offers a subtle reading of these issues by linking aesthetic modernism with an attempt in all these writers to resolve basic contradictions in modern liberalism. The many contradictions of modernism, which is seen as inwardly personal yet impersonal, subjective and yet beholden to tradition, fragmented and yet whole, mark the reappearance in art of these political contradictions. Though Yeats, Eliot and Pound certainly attempted to resolve in art problems that could not be resolved in actuality, their very attempt resulted in a politicised aesthetic, one that confessed their inability to do so. Yet this aesthetic retained an element of critical power, precisely because it could not cover up the political contradictions that concerned it; the poetry remains a valid criticism of the status quo and even in its failure suggests the beginnings of an alternative.

Kafkaesque Cinema in the Context of Post-fascism

“…After all, Kafka is one of the key figures in the canon of literary modernism and it is now well established in modernist studies that there is a connection between modernism and the crisis of liberalism. 11 Kafka's texts contain the seeds of critique of the nineteenth century belief in progress as an evolutionary trajectory of social improvement. Pascale Casanova has emphasized how his texts are distrustful of social institutions, the legitimacy of the justice system, and the law; 12 furthermore, his disbelief in progress as something static that simply declares the superiority of bourgeois liberalism is embodied in one of his famous aphorisms stating: "Belief in progress doesn't mean belief in progress that has already occurred.…”

W.B. Yeats and World Literature

“…His poem 'The Statues' is another standout example in this respect: a poem, as Michael North wittily remarks, which 'requires more commentary than it repays'. 29 Generously we might suggest that 'The Statues' reconstructs the classical European space by retracing how Pythagorean geometry and Phidias's statuary 'put down all vague Asiatic immensities' and created a European type of beauty. This genealogy, however, is only one strand of the poem's densely allusive fabric which pitches Alexander the Great's venture into India alongside an empty statue of the Buddha, the occult cat Grimalkin, Shakespeare's Hamlet -'a fat / Dreamer from the Middle Ages'and the Irish patriot Patrick Pearse.…”

La política crítica del agonismo estético. Una lección a partir de T. S. Eliot

“…Nótese que este pasaje de Cuatro cuartetos exactamente retoma, si bien ahora en confrontación con la autoridad absoluta de Dios, la caracterización agonal de la experiencia poética expresada en "La tradición": por un lado, el "saber" entregarse del sujeto (i. e., ante la autonomía del poema) al sentimiento y/o emociones indisciplinadas, sin articular; y, por el otro, su labor de tener que recuperar el pasado frente a las dificultades de la época moderna. La tensión agonal descansa en que el sujeto debe -y solo puede-en dicho horizonte, y caóticamente, tratar; su contradicción es siempre irreductible.19 North desarrolla atentamente esta cuestión enNorth, 1991, pp. 108-117.…”