Gyres, Vortices and a Fisher King: The Mythopoetics of Modernism
Yeats was a magician. Of course I mean that in an overblown, figurative sense – “he was a magician of language, transmuting the raw matter of life into the rare metal of poetry.”
But I also mean it literally. Long before he was a modernist, William Butler Yeats was a Magician. Originally, he was content to be a part of Madame Blavatsky’s theosophical movement. Blavatsky was a popular mystic throughout Europe beginning in the last decade of the 1800’s, who claimed that her spiritual insights and her knowledge of the hidden world and its secrets came from ancient, deathless Tibetan masters. A firm believer in the occult powers that surround us, she nevertheless forbid her students direct experiment with black magic. Yeats would not be denied. He began his own studies in the supernatural, one experience of which was so intense, he wrote, "that he lost control of himself and beat his head on the table."
He was expelled from the theosophists and promptly joined the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, an organization that, far from restricting the use of magic among its initiates, took as its mission the acquisition of powers over those mystical forces which thread through our experience of quotidian life, that bind the physical and the divine.
Yeats flourished in the Golden Dawn, quickly proceeding through the tightly hierarchical ranks of magistry, eventually becoming an initiate in the inner-most order of the hierarchy.
Yeats' interest in Magic was not entirely a quirk; he was by no means the only young writer round about the turn of the last century to be fascinated at the possibility of an occult world, behind and beneath our own. T. S. Eliot and James Joyce had been theosophists. Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of the hyper-rational Sherlock Holmes, spent a good chunk of his last years earnestly seeking evidence of the fairies he knew were there, just beyond vision. The appeal of theosophy and other Magical orders wasn’t limited to writers: Thomas Edison. Paul Gauguin. William James, Carl Jung. Elvis Presley, for a while.
The dream of a hidden knowledge, the revelation of which would demonstrate, once and for all, the unity underlying a world that seemed daily more fragmented: This is an understandable urge, perhaps. However: Magic at the turn of the last century wasn’t characterized solely by an earnest quest for enlightenment, with perhaps some harmless experimentation thrown in. Occult sects flourished beneath the surface of fin de siècle Europe, tinged with all sorts of unsavory alliances: Satanists indulged in their Black masses, the order of the Rosy Cross put on avante-Garde art shows. The mage Sar Peladan sought to reform the Catholic church, inserting an order of Wizards into the priesthood whose authority would be subordinate only to the Pope. Tensions between magical societies occasionally erupted into overt conflict, and their fights were dirty, political, all encompassing – little prophecies of the new style of conflict that would come to characterize the 20th century. Yeats himself had been a footsoldier in the great Magical war raged throughout Paris during thew 1890’s, as Peladan and his ally Stanislas Gauita led the fight against the imperialist incursions of the English mages of the Golden Dawn. There were magical assassinations: in 1893 the unfrocked priest Abbe Boullan dropped dead as the result of what his friends claimed, in a court of law (and as he himself had predicted), was a magical attack.
So. The allure of the occult is not unique to these proto-modernists and their ilk, of course. The notion of a secret wisdom, a hidden system that might be divined through the study and practice of ancient, rumored texts, has been a kind of shadow dream throughout history. It demarcates the mystical traditions within the major religions; it’s evident in the neoplatonic philosophies of the Renaissance, the hidden peoples that European country folk tracked through the backlands; we see it in the alchemical efforts of the 17th century from which, in part, our modern scientific method emerges. But my talk today is not about the tradition of Magic per se. What I am interested in here is the very particular allure that magical systems held for a select group authors and artists at the turn of the last century, the ones that we sometimes lump together and refer to as the great modernists. Far from being a tangential, disreputable and slightly embarrassing component of the early lives of these writers, the fascination with intricate, often overtly magical systems was central to the development of the literary sensibilities that we’ve come to refer to as Modern. An interest in magic was, I will argue, both a symptom and an expression of the peculiar state of mind from which Modernism emerges. More than that: magical systems, whether discovered, created or suspected, are one of the driving forces between the creation of some of the great Modernist works, canonical in our era.
In Modernism, magic works. Not in transmuting lead into gold, or conjuring devils. But in providing a system upon which new, strange and modern texts can be created.
Gyres
“Had Yeats died instead of marrying in 1917,” writes Richard Ellman, one of Yeats' earliest biographers, “he would have been remembered as a remarkable minor poet who achieved a diction more powerful than his contemporaries, but who, except in a handful of poems, did not have much to say with it.” No one would've argued, back in 1917, that Yeats was not a master of his craft. Since the 1880's he'd regularly reinvented his poetic method, consciously submitting himself to a series of influences through which he sought to refine his craft. It is to his credit when, in 1912, a brash young American poet of no repute showed up on his doorstep and promised to make him Modern in return for a job as his secretary, the much older, mildly famous Yeats did not tell Ezra Pound to shove off. Instead, he hired Pound, and under Pound’s influence his poetry did indeed begin to change, to harden and remove itself from the hazy mysteries of the Celtic twilight that he'd helped to initiate. Ellmann’s claim notwithstanding, Yeats did have subjects to write about – his personal romantic turmoils, the public upheavals that beset Ireland and the rest of Europe. He sought to connect these subjects, to make them cohere in his poems and on the stage, at least, in the figure of some character from irish mythology or from his own personal mythos. But Ellman is right, I think, in claiming that prior to 1917 Yeats could find no effective fusion of form and content, of personal and public yearning.
So what happened in 1917? What was it about his marriage that gave Yeats “something to write about,” something that would allow him to fuse form and content, the subjective and objective worlds?
Yeats’ 1917 marriage to Georgie Hyde-Lees didn’t seem very promising, at first. He was 52, a lifelong bachelor, and she was 25. He’d carried a torch for the beautiful revolutionary Maude Gonne all his life. He’d had asked her to marry him several times, and after each wise refusal she’d work her way into his poetry once again, often to terrific effect (and occasionally not). Yeats’ poetry might have benefitted from Maude’s rejection, but it was a dangerous game, this bad habit of proposing marriage to someone named Gonne. Earlier in 1917 he’d actually proposed marriage to Maud’s daughter, Yseult, and had thankfully been turned down. I can’t imagine that Georgie Hyde-lees, the intelligent, rather sophisticated young woman who accepted Yeats’ proposal in October of that year, was going into the marriage blindly. She would certainly have been aware of his rejection by the Gonne women, and would also have been aware of his lifelong obsession with magic, mysticism, séances, fairies – anything which held out the possibility of that secret wisdom of the hidden order that underlie the world, just beyond the grasp of rational apprehension. He felt sure it was out there. The long desire to uncover this hidden wisdom – like the obsession for Maude Gonne – had been the driving force behind many of his earlier poetic successes, but now – also like his obsession with Maude Gonne – it threatened to turn into an embarrassing hang-up, a poetic dead-end. As far as poetic inspiration goes, it’s safe to say, unfulfilled desire has a sell-by date.
Anyway, a few days after their marriage, while they were staying in a hotel outside of Ashdown forest in England, Georgie decided to try her hand at one of the old parlor-tricks and past-times of the theosophists, automatic writing. The writer is supposed to drain his or her mind of conscious thought, become an empty vessel to be filled by what voices were there – whether these voices came from some spirit world or one's own subconscious -- and to begin writing.
For Yeats, the results of his young wife’s experiment were electrifying. Her handwriting had changed. The contents of the script were jumbled, chaotic, at first, but they seemed to employ images and language he himself had explored in his earlier writings. He was astonished by what Georgie had produced, and he quickly arranged nightly sessions with “the communicators,” as he referred to those intelligences who seemed to be communicating to him through his wife’s script. As time progressed, and as Georgie’s hand became weary with writing, the communicators kindly volunteered to communicate through Georgie’s voice, and to take questions. Yeats had lots of questions for them, and transcripts of their back and forths – the ensuing dialogues between Yeats and the communicators – can at times read like a transcript of an interview between an earnest young journalist trying to make sense of the ramblings of a partially senile, visionary old poet – with Yeats as the timidly inquisitive journalist. The nightly interviews turned, increasingly, towards the delicate, hidden connections that seemed to unite the personal, psychological struggles of the individual over the course of a lifetime with the vast historical forces that shape cultures, humanity at large over the course of eons.
Yeats became so enraptured by the fragmented insights that they seemed to provide, the clues as to the hidden relationships between the individual and humanity, personal and public, subjective and objective states, that he avidly volunteered to give up poetry for good and devote his remaining life to making sense of the wealth of mysteries the communicators were providing him with. But he’d mistaken their purpose, the communicators corrected him. He was not to give up his creative work. “No,” they said. “We have come to give you metaphors for poetry.”
A few metaphors provided by the communicators make their way into the poetry he wrote during 1917 and 1918. Gyres, towers, even a lampoon of himself trying to make sense of a book written in a lost language he’d never decipher. But before he could turn his attention to anything else, he realized, before he could make effective use of these metaphors, he needed to systematize the information they had provided him with, and he turned his full attention to doing so. In 1925 (and again, in an edited and revised version in 1937), Yeats published a book containing his account of the system he’d derived from those long conversations with the communicators: A Vision.
Make no mistake: A Vision isn’t poetry. It’s a system: an enormously complex, occasionally confounding but remarkably coherent system. I don’t claim to have mastered it (it defies mastery, I think), nor can I give you a full account of the system here. But a few highlights will serve my purpose:
Through the wisdom of the communicators, Yeats thought that he had discovered an archetypal pattern, by which all of human history, as well as individual human psychology, can be made to make sense. He envisioned two intersecting gyres, raveling and unraveling in opposite directions (see figure one). The gyres represent forces which he identified most often with the “subjective” on the one hand, and the “objective” on the other, and they play out simultaneously in shaping both history and the individual psyche. In history, he contended, it takes anywhere from between 1600 and 2200 years for the full completion of a single raveling and unraveling. Ellman describes it thusly:
Man or movement is conceived of as moving from left to right and then from right to left; no sooner is the fullest expansion of the objective cone reached then the counter-movement towards the fullest expansion of the subjective cone begins. For example, if we apply the cones to history, at the time of Christ objectivity was at its fullest expansion; the self was struggling to escape from personality, to be lost in “otherness,” while at the time of the renaissance, subjectivity was at its fullest expansion, and great personalities were everywhere realizing themselves to the utmost. In our time, history is swinging back again towards objectivity, for the cycles continue in eternal recurrence. Mass movements, such as democracy, socialism, and especially communism, are for Yeats evidences of this shift towards objectivity, when every man tries to look like his neighbor and repress his individuality. (Ellmann 231-32).
This pattern – two intersecting, spiraling gyres – could be seen in terms beyond the “subjective and objective. They could also be seen, as Yeats writes, to describe a whole host of antitheses, all those pairings and opposition that trouble the poetic mind: Yeats writes of these antinomies as “beauty and truth, value and fact, particular and universal, quality and quantity, the bundle of separated threads as distinguished from those that are still in the pattern, abstracted types and forms as distinguished from those that are still concrete, man and Daimon, the living and the dead, and all other images of our first parents.”
The gyres were further systematized: in A Vision he describes each full turn of the gyre as being divided into 28 cycles (mirroring the 28 phases of the moon), each of which is characterized by a certain set of traits or conditions that influence individual psyches and historical periods and peoples differently. And periods and peoples, through whom these gyres perpetually wind and unwind, are themselves made up of parts, each responding differently to the phases that these gyres are cycling through: the human psyche, for instance, is made up of what Yeats referred to as four faculties: The will, the mask, the creative mind, the body of fate. Perhaps I should let Yeats describe how he envisions these faculties:
When I wish for some general idea which will describe the great wheel as a individual life, I go to the Commedia dell Arte or improvised drama of Italy. The stage manager or Daimon offers his actor an inherited scenario, the Body of Fate, and a Mask or role as unlike as possible to his natural ego or Will and leaves him to improves his Creative Mind the dialogue and details of the plot. He must discover or reveal a being which only exists with extreme effort, when his muscles are as it were all taut and all his energies active. But this is antithetical man. For primary man I will go to the Commedia dell’ Arte in its decline. The Will is weak and cannot create a role, and so, if it transform itself, does so after an accepted pattern, some traditional clown or pantaloon. It has perhaps no object but to move the crowd, and if it “gags” it is that there may be plenty of topical allusions. In the primary phases man must cease to desire Mask and image by ceasing from self-expression, and substitute a motive of service for that of self-expression. Instead of the created Mask he has an imitative Mask and when he recognizes this, his Mask may become the historical norm, or an image of mankind (Yeats 84).
If Yeats descriptions here seem obscure or strained, we shouldn’t be too surprised. In A Vision, after all, Yeats is seeking to do something pretty audacious: to systematize the ineffable, to find the pattern that links humans to history, flesh to spirit. The task is one that by definition will elude conventional means of exegesis. And so, in A Vision, we are treated to a potpourri of different descriptive features, efforts at explication, some overlapping, occasionally contradicting or producing paradoxes. There are literary analogies, such as that of the Commedie Del Arte, there are poetic tropes and metaphors, there are the visual aids, there are diagrams and charts.
So what are we to make this odd and formative episode in Yeats’ life? Perhaps the best way to address that question is to start with another – what did Yeats make of it? What did it allow Yeats to do?
Well, it allowed for some pretty amusing parlor games, I imagine. A system such as this could be used like an astrologer might use a horoscope, or a fortune teller use a tarot deck: as a means of classification, cattily or profoundly. And Yeats used his system in both ways, classifying friends and family variously, depending on mood and insight: As Ellmann writes:
Everyone was given a phasal number; in the Yeats household at Oxford in 1920 and 1921…the poet would often shoot some searching question at an unsuspecting guest whose answer would reveal where he could be typed on the lunar cycle. Mrs. Yeats and John butler Yeats belonged to phase 18, where unity is beginning to break up, though a ‘wisdom of the emotions’ is still possible. Lady Gregory was in phase 24, where codes of conduct must dominate; and George Russel, in spite of his vigorous objections, was put in phase 25, where the self accepts some ‘organized belief’. Ezra Pound was originally in the highly subjective phase 12, but Yeats moved him among the humanitarians of the late objective phases after seeing him feed the cats at Rapallo (Ellman 240).
Some of the classifications that Yeats’ system gave rise to certainly seem inconsequential – surprisingly so, given the effort he put into elaborating the system contained within A Vision.
But the system elucidated in A Vision had a far greater impact on Yeats’ poetic method than providing a diverting past time. The poetry he writes after his labors in systematizing the ideas presented in A Vision are replete with imagery, metaphor and structures explored in A Vision. More than that: the consciousness of a complex but coherent system underlying the material he worked with seems to have given Yeats a confidence and authority not always present in his earlier poetry. Knowledge of the system outlined in A Vision is by no means necessary to appreciate this later poetry – in fact, it often provides nothing much more than a vague sense of how some of the images resonate. In fact A Vision is of less use for us in understanding Yeats’ later poetry than it was for Yeats in writing it. It allowed him to become Modern. How, and why? Why should systems, however fantastical, be of such necessity in becoming Modern?
Vortices
The easiest answer might be a good place to start: because the old systems seemed to be breaking down. They seemed to be unable to accommodate the contingencies of modernity, however you describe “modernity”: evolution. Technology. The alienation of urban life and industrial capitalism. A growing awareness of the dizzying heterogeneity of beliefs, certainties, ways of being in the world. The old certainties, the paradigms which had provided common contexts, vocabulary and syntax for literary expression seemed increasingly unable to accommodate modernity.
Anxieties about modernity are not modern, of course: we can find traces of the anxieties about what modern life was doing to established modes of literary discourse as far back as Tennyson. By the 1890’s, however, anxieties about modernity and the inadequacies of old systems became self-conscious, became the subject themselves of the conversation: more and more people referred to the era in which they lived as the “decadence,” the “Fin du Siècle.” And when the century turned, almost on cue, the next generation of artists exploded the old paradigms and sought to replace them with systems for regarding the new era and the world that were themselves modern. The first decade of the 20th century becomes the age of “isms:” cubism, imagism, pointillism, futurism, expressionism, vorticism. Each “ism,” with its inevitable, stirring manifesto, is an effort to uncover – to create, really – a new system that might accommodate the new world.
Imagism, first, and Vorticism, later, were Ezra Pound’s pet “isms.” Imagism sought to impose the impersonal, reflective qualities of the new technology of photography onto poetry. Vorticism, as elaborated by his friend Wyndham Lewis in their premier edition of the literary journal BLAST, took the vortex as its symbol – a precursor, in some important ways, to Yeats’ gyres. For Pound and Lewis, the vortex was the work of art that itself embodies all the swirling energies of its era, as well as the psyche of the artist that created it. That idea, itself – that the psyche of the individual may provide insight as to the patterns of history – and vice versa – is one that was as formative to early psychology as it was beloved by artists.
For Pound, the vortex was a useful but incomplete symbol for poetic expression, and not long after the second volume of BLASTcame out, Pound stopped using the term. But he didn’t give up the restless urge to uncover (or create) systems that would reveal the hidden significances of history and the human psyche. For the later Pound, this effort often manifest itself in the championing and elucidation of fragments and characters of history that had been passed over (or over written) by conventional historians. He’d fix upon a detail or personality and tease from it a significance that helped to make sense of the world, identify it as a fragment revelatory of an invisible, profoundly significant pattern: The renaissance condotierre –warrior and patron of the arts – Sigismundo Malatesta was one such personality to embody the vortex; Andrew Jackson’s efforts at Bank-busting did, too; the obscure economic theories of one Major Douglas; the notion of the toxic effect of usury upon culture. In Pound’s writings these theories and personalities and historical moments are more than just fragments of forgotten lore. They take on a talismanic significance: they are the means whereby Pound is able to derive a way of understanding experience that is powerful, antinomian, and (in his case particularly) appalling, leading him to some fairly ugly ideas – his fascism, his anti-Semitism.
“Hast thou seen the rose in the steel dust?” Pound asks, rather plaintively, in one of the Pisan Cantos, using an image beloved to him: a horseshoe magnet, moving its twin prongs beneath the disorder of steel dust cast upon a piece of paper, will organize the individual particles into a rose-pattern. It was that force that moved beneath the pages of history that Modernists sought – the one that could lead to the elucidation of poetic patterns within a text.
Fisher Kings
Pound rather took over when his friend T.S. Eliot showed him a tentative manuscript of the poem that was to become known as “The Wasteland.” With much of the same brashness with which he approached Yeats in 1912 and promised to make him modern, Pound took an ax to Eliot’s early draft. His editorial work was mostly directed at compressing the poem, ridding it of its descriptive, poetic passages, and Eliot attested to the improvements made upon the draft by dedicating the final product to Pound, calling him “Il Miglior Fabbro,” the better craftsman (after Dante, in which the poet refers to the shade of his brother poet, glimpsed in Hell). The truth is, though, the subject matter and tone of “The Wasteland” didn’t sit well with Pound, though he mostly kept his hands off it. He considered it a little indulgent in its Christian despair, its angsty yearning for a myth whereby the fragments of modern life might be made to cohere. But he recognized its importance: this, he helped to impress upon the world, was a modern poem.
The frustrations of reading “The Wasteland” are surely born of the same qualities that make it fascinating. Eliot and Pound were aware of the poem’s potential to breed resentment amongst students assigned to read it in 1B classes. Eliot half jokingly wrote up the notorious appendix to the poem when his publisher requested more material to fill up the blank pages of the book that would contain it. This is a poem that seems to cry out for such an appendix, with its fragments of popular song, its multimedia format, its often obscure literary allusions, the freedom with which it unravels and reweaves fragments of myth, its juxtapositions, its blending of personal and cultural histories.
What are we to make of such a fragmented poem? One answer? We make something of it. “I can connect nothing with nothing,” the voice in the poem tells us, while it invites us to find such connections. No: not find, but to make such connections. “The Wasteland” is a poem about the loss of a system whereby order can be discerned and significance created – whether that system is a religious one, a tradition, a common culture or a common body of myth. But it is a poem that requires us to tease out precisely such a system for ourselves. We read the appendix, google the allusions, reference the myths. We marry the fragments the poet has shored against his ruin to our own: the poem becomes universal and personal. Like a good Modernist poet, we make the system whereby significance is bestowed upon a text, upon experience. The “Wasteland” makes us modern.
Mythopoetics
I’ve called this talk “the mythopoetics of Modernism,” and it’s time I justify that title. The term mythopoia, greek for “myth-making,” was the title of a rather heavy-handed poem that the young J.R.R. Tolkien wrote in 1931, defending the function of myth against the view espoused by his friend C.S. Lewis, who regarded myths as little more than beautiful lies. The term has come to refer to a literary text that contains its own created and self-sufficient mythos, from which it simultaneously gathers significance and upon which it imbues significance. Tolkien is the most commonly cited example of the author of such a text, but the effort predates him. William Blake created his own mythology, and so did Richard Wagner, and H.P. Lovecraft and George Lucas and a whole host of lesser aspiring fantasists that fill the pages of their books with genealogies and maps and references to made-up religions and imaginary histories.
But we need to rescue the term, I think, and see it as part of uniquely modernist effort. Every text, it could be said, contains its own mythology – its networks of beliefs, assumptions, common parlance and textual associations that allow it to cohere, to make sense. All of literature, communication itself, the structuralists tell us, depends upon such a system, rules, relationships and references that are consensual and uninterrogated and translucent.
But the modernists – Yeats, Pound, Eliot, and others (Joyce, Woolf, Strachey) – had the good or bad fortune to be writing at a time when the old systems seemed to be failing, and World War I was a nail in the coffin of past certainties. Time and again, an urgent need for new systems within which texts might regain significance can be discerned in their works. The system might consist in a new way of looking at the world, as with imagism or cubism; it might be spun outwards from a personal enthusiasm or epiphany, as with Pound and Joyce. It might be an intricate amalgam of astrology, occult sciences and ancient beliefs, communicated in the handwriting and voice of a young spouse.
This need for a system, acute in the work of the Modernists, could of course be dangerous: when they failed – when in their weakness they mistook their myths as reified fact – the results could be far more than embarrassing – the results could be abhorrent. The reification of provisional and personal myths explains the nearly universal early Modernist sympathy for fascism (and Pound’s later full-throated endorsement of it).
But this brash, audacious questing around for a system that would explain everything: this is also what imbues the modernist writers with such perpetual modernity. A their best, these writers evince a willingness to adopt, provisionally, a system that enables them to create. And if such a system is unavailable for adoption, it will be created. At their most creative, their most modern, modernist writers created their own systems, the myths their texts lived by. It is, of course, not the systems themselves – whether sloppy or intricate, implicit or explicitly laid out – which we remember. It is the art that they enabled. These myths, the systems themselves, could be dispensed with, sloughed off over time, or consciously rejected later. In their wisest hours, the modernists recognized that the myths and systems themselves – the gyres, vortices, the fisher kings – were dispensable. It was what these myths engendered that became of value – the texts that could only find voice through a provisional acceptance of such magical systems and contrived symbols.
After the war, when Yeats returned to Ireland an internationally famous poet, a sometime politician and “public man,” as he called it in A Vision, he was always a little cagey when approached with the inevitable question: “All that stuff in A Vision – did you actually believe it?” In his 1920 introduction to A Vision, he answered the question directly:
Some will ask whether I believe in the actual existence of my circuits of sun and moon. Those that include now all recorded in one circuit, now what Blake called the ‘pulsaters of an artery,’ are plainly symbolical, but what of those that fixed, like a butterfly upon a pin, to our central date, the first day of our Era, divide actual history into periods of equal length? To such a question I can but answer that if sometimes, overwhelmed by miracle as all men must be when in the midst of it, I have taken such periods literally, my reason has soon recovered; and now that the system stands out clearly in my imagination I regard them as stylistic arrangements of experience comparable to the cubes of Wyndham Lewis and to the ovoids in the sculpture of Brancusi. They have helped me to hold in a single thought reality and justice (Yeats 25).
Yeats was a magician. Of course I mean that in an overblown, figurative sense – “he was a magician of language, transmuting the raw matter of life into the rare metal of poetry.”
But I also mean it literally. Long before he was a modernist, William Butler Yeats was a Magician. Originally, he was content to be a part of Madame Blavatsky’s theosophical movement. Blavatsky was a popular mystic throughout Europe beginning in the last decade of the 1800’s, who claimed that her spiritual insights and her knowledge of the hidden world and its secrets came from ancient, deathless Tibetan masters. A firm believer in the occult powers that surround us, she nevertheless forbid her students direct experiment with black magic. Yeats would not be denied. He began his own studies in the supernatural, one experience of which was so intense, he wrote, "that he lost control of himself and beat his head on the table."
He was expelled from the theosophists and promptly joined the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, an organization that, far from restricting the use of magic among its initiates, took as its mission the acquisition of powers over those mystical forces which thread through our experience of quotidian life, that bind the physical and the divine.
Yeats flourished in the Golden Dawn, quickly proceeding through the tightly hierarchical ranks of magistry, eventually becoming an initiate in the inner-most order of the hierarchy.
Yeats' interest in Magic was not entirely a quirk; he was by no means the only young writer round about the turn of the last century to be fascinated at the possibility of an occult world, behind and beneath our own. T. S. Eliot and James Joyce had been theosophists. Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of the hyper-rational Sherlock Holmes, spent a good chunk of his last years earnestly seeking evidence of the fairies he knew were there, just beyond vision. The appeal of theosophy and other Magical orders wasn’t limited to writers: Thomas Edison. Paul Gauguin. William James, Carl Jung. Elvis Presley, for a while.
The dream of a hidden knowledge, the revelation of which would demonstrate, once and for all, the unity underlying a world that seemed daily more fragmented: This is an understandable urge, perhaps. However: Magic at the turn of the last century wasn’t characterized solely by an earnest quest for enlightenment, with perhaps some harmless experimentation thrown in. Occult sects flourished beneath the surface of fin de siècle Europe, tinged with all sorts of unsavory alliances: Satanists indulged in their Black masses, the order of the Rosy Cross put on avante-Garde art shows. The mage Sar Peladan sought to reform the Catholic church, inserting an order of Wizards into the priesthood whose authority would be subordinate only to the Pope. Tensions between magical societies occasionally erupted into overt conflict, and their fights were dirty, political, all encompassing – little prophecies of the new style of conflict that would come to characterize the 20th century. Yeats himself had been a footsoldier in the great Magical war raged throughout Paris during thew 1890’s, as Peladan and his ally Stanislas Gauita led the fight against the imperialist incursions of the English mages of the Golden Dawn. There were magical assassinations: in 1893 the unfrocked priest Abbe Boullan dropped dead as the result of what his friends claimed, in a court of law (and as he himself had predicted), was a magical attack.
So. The allure of the occult is not unique to these proto-modernists and their ilk, of course. The notion of a secret wisdom, a hidden system that might be divined through the study and practice of ancient, rumored texts, has been a kind of shadow dream throughout history. It demarcates the mystical traditions within the major religions; it’s evident in the neoplatonic philosophies of the Renaissance, the hidden peoples that European country folk tracked through the backlands; we see it in the alchemical efforts of the 17th century from which, in part, our modern scientific method emerges. But my talk today is not about the tradition of Magic per se. What I am interested in here is the very particular allure that magical systems held for a select group authors and artists at the turn of the last century, the ones that we sometimes lump together and refer to as the great modernists. Far from being a tangential, disreputable and slightly embarrassing component of the early lives of these writers, the fascination with intricate, often overtly magical systems was central to the development of the literary sensibilities that we’ve come to refer to as Modern. An interest in magic was, I will argue, both a symptom and an expression of the peculiar state of mind from which Modernism emerges. More than that: magical systems, whether discovered, created or suspected, are one of the driving forces between the creation of some of the great Modernist works, canonical in our era.
In Modernism, magic works. Not in transmuting lead into gold, or conjuring devils. But in providing a system upon which new, strange and modern texts can be created.
Gyres
“Had Yeats died instead of marrying in 1917,” writes Richard Ellman, one of Yeats' earliest biographers, “he would have been remembered as a remarkable minor poet who achieved a diction more powerful than his contemporaries, but who, except in a handful of poems, did not have much to say with it.” No one would've argued, back in 1917, that Yeats was not a master of his craft. Since the 1880's he'd regularly reinvented his poetic method, consciously submitting himself to a series of influences through which he sought to refine his craft. It is to his credit when, in 1912, a brash young American poet of no repute showed up on his doorstep and promised to make him Modern in return for a job as his secretary, the much older, mildly famous Yeats did not tell Ezra Pound to shove off. Instead, he hired Pound, and under Pound’s influence his poetry did indeed begin to change, to harden and remove itself from the hazy mysteries of the Celtic twilight that he'd helped to initiate. Ellmann’s claim notwithstanding, Yeats did have subjects to write about – his personal romantic turmoils, the public upheavals that beset Ireland and the rest of Europe. He sought to connect these subjects, to make them cohere in his poems and on the stage, at least, in the figure of some character from irish mythology or from his own personal mythos. But Ellman is right, I think, in claiming that prior to 1917 Yeats could find no effective fusion of form and content, of personal and public yearning.
So what happened in 1917? What was it about his marriage that gave Yeats “something to write about,” something that would allow him to fuse form and content, the subjective and objective worlds?
Yeats’ 1917 marriage to Georgie Hyde-Lees didn’t seem very promising, at first. He was 52, a lifelong bachelor, and she was 25. He’d carried a torch for the beautiful revolutionary Maude Gonne all his life. He’d had asked her to marry him several times, and after each wise refusal she’d work her way into his poetry once again, often to terrific effect (and occasionally not). Yeats’ poetry might have benefitted from Maude’s rejection, but it was a dangerous game, this bad habit of proposing marriage to someone named Gonne. Earlier in 1917 he’d actually proposed marriage to Maud’s daughter, Yseult, and had thankfully been turned down. I can’t imagine that Georgie Hyde-lees, the intelligent, rather sophisticated young woman who accepted Yeats’ proposal in October of that year, was going into the marriage blindly. She would certainly have been aware of his rejection by the Gonne women, and would also have been aware of his lifelong obsession with magic, mysticism, séances, fairies – anything which held out the possibility of that secret wisdom of the hidden order that underlie the world, just beyond the grasp of rational apprehension. He felt sure it was out there. The long desire to uncover this hidden wisdom – like the obsession for Maude Gonne – had been the driving force behind many of his earlier poetic successes, but now – also like his obsession with Maude Gonne – it threatened to turn into an embarrassing hang-up, a poetic dead-end. As far as poetic inspiration goes, it’s safe to say, unfulfilled desire has a sell-by date.
Anyway, a few days after their marriage, while they were staying in a hotel outside of Ashdown forest in England, Georgie decided to try her hand at one of the old parlor-tricks and past-times of the theosophists, automatic writing. The writer is supposed to drain his or her mind of conscious thought, become an empty vessel to be filled by what voices were there – whether these voices came from some spirit world or one's own subconscious -- and to begin writing.
For Yeats, the results of his young wife’s experiment were electrifying. Her handwriting had changed. The contents of the script were jumbled, chaotic, at first, but they seemed to employ images and language he himself had explored in his earlier writings. He was astonished by what Georgie had produced, and he quickly arranged nightly sessions with “the communicators,” as he referred to those intelligences who seemed to be communicating to him through his wife’s script. As time progressed, and as Georgie’s hand became weary with writing, the communicators kindly volunteered to communicate through Georgie’s voice, and to take questions. Yeats had lots of questions for them, and transcripts of their back and forths – the ensuing dialogues between Yeats and the communicators – can at times read like a transcript of an interview between an earnest young journalist trying to make sense of the ramblings of a partially senile, visionary old poet – with Yeats as the timidly inquisitive journalist. The nightly interviews turned, increasingly, towards the delicate, hidden connections that seemed to unite the personal, psychological struggles of the individual over the course of a lifetime with the vast historical forces that shape cultures, humanity at large over the course of eons.
Yeats became so enraptured by the fragmented insights that they seemed to provide, the clues as to the hidden relationships between the individual and humanity, personal and public, subjective and objective states, that he avidly volunteered to give up poetry for good and devote his remaining life to making sense of the wealth of mysteries the communicators were providing him with. But he’d mistaken their purpose, the communicators corrected him. He was not to give up his creative work. “No,” they said. “We have come to give you metaphors for poetry.”
A few metaphors provided by the communicators make their way into the poetry he wrote during 1917 and 1918. Gyres, towers, even a lampoon of himself trying to make sense of a book written in a lost language he’d never decipher. But before he could turn his attention to anything else, he realized, before he could make effective use of these metaphors, he needed to systematize the information they had provided him with, and he turned his full attention to doing so. In 1925 (and again, in an edited and revised version in 1937), Yeats published a book containing his account of the system he’d derived from those long conversations with the communicators: A Vision.
Make no mistake: A Vision isn’t poetry. It’s a system: an enormously complex, occasionally confounding but remarkably coherent system. I don’t claim to have mastered it (it defies mastery, I think), nor can I give you a full account of the system here. But a few highlights will serve my purpose:
Through the wisdom of the communicators, Yeats thought that he had discovered an archetypal pattern, by which all of human history, as well as individual human psychology, can be made to make sense. He envisioned two intersecting gyres, raveling and unraveling in opposite directions (see figure one). The gyres represent forces which he identified most often with the “subjective” on the one hand, and the “objective” on the other, and they play out simultaneously in shaping both history and the individual psyche. In history, he contended, it takes anywhere from between 1600 and 2200 years for the full completion of a single raveling and unraveling. Ellman describes it thusly:
Man or movement is conceived of as moving from left to right and then from right to left; no sooner is the fullest expansion of the objective cone reached then the counter-movement towards the fullest expansion of the subjective cone begins. For example, if we apply the cones to history, at the time of Christ objectivity was at its fullest expansion; the self was struggling to escape from personality, to be lost in “otherness,” while at the time of the renaissance, subjectivity was at its fullest expansion, and great personalities were everywhere realizing themselves to the utmost. In our time, history is swinging back again towards objectivity, for the cycles continue in eternal recurrence. Mass movements, such as democracy, socialism, and especially communism, are for Yeats evidences of this shift towards objectivity, when every man tries to look like his neighbor and repress his individuality. (Ellmann 231-32).
This pattern – two intersecting, spiraling gyres – could be seen in terms beyond the “subjective and objective. They could also be seen, as Yeats writes, to describe a whole host of antitheses, all those pairings and opposition that trouble the poetic mind: Yeats writes of these antinomies as “beauty and truth, value and fact, particular and universal, quality and quantity, the bundle of separated threads as distinguished from those that are still in the pattern, abstracted types and forms as distinguished from those that are still concrete, man and Daimon, the living and the dead, and all other images of our first parents.”
The gyres were further systematized: in A Vision he describes each full turn of the gyre as being divided into 28 cycles (mirroring the 28 phases of the moon), each of which is characterized by a certain set of traits or conditions that influence individual psyches and historical periods and peoples differently. And periods and peoples, through whom these gyres perpetually wind and unwind, are themselves made up of parts, each responding differently to the phases that these gyres are cycling through: the human psyche, for instance, is made up of what Yeats referred to as four faculties: The will, the mask, the creative mind, the body of fate. Perhaps I should let Yeats describe how he envisions these faculties:
When I wish for some general idea which will describe the great wheel as a individual life, I go to the Commedia dell Arte or improvised drama of Italy. The stage manager or Daimon offers his actor an inherited scenario, the Body of Fate, and a Mask or role as unlike as possible to his natural ego or Will and leaves him to improves his Creative Mind the dialogue and details of the plot. He must discover or reveal a being which only exists with extreme effort, when his muscles are as it were all taut and all his energies active. But this is antithetical man. For primary man I will go to the Commedia dell’ Arte in its decline. The Will is weak and cannot create a role, and so, if it transform itself, does so after an accepted pattern, some traditional clown or pantaloon. It has perhaps no object but to move the crowd, and if it “gags” it is that there may be plenty of topical allusions. In the primary phases man must cease to desire Mask and image by ceasing from self-expression, and substitute a motive of service for that of self-expression. Instead of the created Mask he has an imitative Mask and when he recognizes this, his Mask may become the historical norm, or an image of mankind (Yeats 84).
If Yeats descriptions here seem obscure or strained, we shouldn’t be too surprised. In A Vision, after all, Yeats is seeking to do something pretty audacious: to systematize the ineffable, to find the pattern that links humans to history, flesh to spirit. The task is one that by definition will elude conventional means of exegesis. And so, in A Vision, we are treated to a potpourri of different descriptive features, efforts at explication, some overlapping, occasionally contradicting or producing paradoxes. There are literary analogies, such as that of the Commedie Del Arte, there are poetic tropes and metaphors, there are the visual aids, there are diagrams and charts.
So what are we to make this odd and formative episode in Yeats’ life? Perhaps the best way to address that question is to start with another – what did Yeats make of it? What did it allow Yeats to do?
Well, it allowed for some pretty amusing parlor games, I imagine. A system such as this could be used like an astrologer might use a horoscope, or a fortune teller use a tarot deck: as a means of classification, cattily or profoundly. And Yeats used his system in both ways, classifying friends and family variously, depending on mood and insight: As Ellmann writes:
Everyone was given a phasal number; in the Yeats household at Oxford in 1920 and 1921…the poet would often shoot some searching question at an unsuspecting guest whose answer would reveal where he could be typed on the lunar cycle. Mrs. Yeats and John butler Yeats belonged to phase 18, where unity is beginning to break up, though a ‘wisdom of the emotions’ is still possible. Lady Gregory was in phase 24, where codes of conduct must dominate; and George Russel, in spite of his vigorous objections, was put in phase 25, where the self accepts some ‘organized belief’. Ezra Pound was originally in the highly subjective phase 12, but Yeats moved him among the humanitarians of the late objective phases after seeing him feed the cats at Rapallo (Ellman 240).
Some of the classifications that Yeats’ system gave rise to certainly seem inconsequential – surprisingly so, given the effort he put into elaborating the system contained within A Vision.
But the system elucidated in A Vision had a far greater impact on Yeats’ poetic method than providing a diverting past time. The poetry he writes after his labors in systematizing the ideas presented in A Vision are replete with imagery, metaphor and structures explored in A Vision. More than that: the consciousness of a complex but coherent system underlying the material he worked with seems to have given Yeats a confidence and authority not always present in his earlier poetry. Knowledge of the system outlined in A Vision is by no means necessary to appreciate this later poetry – in fact, it often provides nothing much more than a vague sense of how some of the images resonate. In fact A Vision is of less use for us in understanding Yeats’ later poetry than it was for Yeats in writing it. It allowed him to become Modern. How, and why? Why should systems, however fantastical, be of such necessity in becoming Modern?
Vortices
The easiest answer might be a good place to start: because the old systems seemed to be breaking down. They seemed to be unable to accommodate the contingencies of modernity, however you describe “modernity”: evolution. Technology. The alienation of urban life and industrial capitalism. A growing awareness of the dizzying heterogeneity of beliefs, certainties, ways of being in the world. The old certainties, the paradigms which had provided common contexts, vocabulary and syntax for literary expression seemed increasingly unable to accommodate modernity.
Anxieties about modernity are not modern, of course: we can find traces of the anxieties about what modern life was doing to established modes of literary discourse as far back as Tennyson. By the 1890’s, however, anxieties about modernity and the inadequacies of old systems became self-conscious, became the subject themselves of the conversation: more and more people referred to the era in which they lived as the “decadence,” the “Fin du Siècle.” And when the century turned, almost on cue, the next generation of artists exploded the old paradigms and sought to replace them with systems for regarding the new era and the world that were themselves modern. The first decade of the 20th century becomes the age of “isms:” cubism, imagism, pointillism, futurism, expressionism, vorticism. Each “ism,” with its inevitable, stirring manifesto, is an effort to uncover – to create, really – a new system that might accommodate the new world.
Imagism, first, and Vorticism, later, were Ezra Pound’s pet “isms.” Imagism sought to impose the impersonal, reflective qualities of the new technology of photography onto poetry. Vorticism, as elaborated by his friend Wyndham Lewis in their premier edition of the literary journal BLAST, took the vortex as its symbol – a precursor, in some important ways, to Yeats’ gyres. For Pound and Lewis, the vortex was the work of art that itself embodies all the swirling energies of its era, as well as the psyche of the artist that created it. That idea, itself – that the psyche of the individual may provide insight as to the patterns of history – and vice versa – is one that was as formative to early psychology as it was beloved by artists.
For Pound, the vortex was a useful but incomplete symbol for poetic expression, and not long after the second volume of BLASTcame out, Pound stopped using the term. But he didn’t give up the restless urge to uncover (or create) systems that would reveal the hidden significances of history and the human psyche. For the later Pound, this effort often manifest itself in the championing and elucidation of fragments and characters of history that had been passed over (or over written) by conventional historians. He’d fix upon a detail or personality and tease from it a significance that helped to make sense of the world, identify it as a fragment revelatory of an invisible, profoundly significant pattern: The renaissance condotierre –warrior and patron of the arts – Sigismundo Malatesta was one such personality to embody the vortex; Andrew Jackson’s efforts at Bank-busting did, too; the obscure economic theories of one Major Douglas; the notion of the toxic effect of usury upon culture. In Pound’s writings these theories and personalities and historical moments are more than just fragments of forgotten lore. They take on a talismanic significance: they are the means whereby Pound is able to derive a way of understanding experience that is powerful, antinomian, and (in his case particularly) appalling, leading him to some fairly ugly ideas – his fascism, his anti-Semitism.
“Hast thou seen the rose in the steel dust?” Pound asks, rather plaintively, in one of the Pisan Cantos, using an image beloved to him: a horseshoe magnet, moving its twin prongs beneath the disorder of steel dust cast upon a piece of paper, will organize the individual particles into a rose-pattern. It was that force that moved beneath the pages of history that Modernists sought – the one that could lead to the elucidation of poetic patterns within a text.
Fisher Kings
Pound rather took over when his friend T.S. Eliot showed him a tentative manuscript of the poem that was to become known as “The Wasteland.” With much of the same brashness with which he approached Yeats in 1912 and promised to make him modern, Pound took an ax to Eliot’s early draft. His editorial work was mostly directed at compressing the poem, ridding it of its descriptive, poetic passages, and Eliot attested to the improvements made upon the draft by dedicating the final product to Pound, calling him “Il Miglior Fabbro,” the better craftsman (after Dante, in which the poet refers to the shade of his brother poet, glimpsed in Hell). The truth is, though, the subject matter and tone of “The Wasteland” didn’t sit well with Pound, though he mostly kept his hands off it. He considered it a little indulgent in its Christian despair, its angsty yearning for a myth whereby the fragments of modern life might be made to cohere. But he recognized its importance: this, he helped to impress upon the world, was a modern poem.
The frustrations of reading “The Wasteland” are surely born of the same qualities that make it fascinating. Eliot and Pound were aware of the poem’s potential to breed resentment amongst students assigned to read it in 1B classes. Eliot half jokingly wrote up the notorious appendix to the poem when his publisher requested more material to fill up the blank pages of the book that would contain it. This is a poem that seems to cry out for such an appendix, with its fragments of popular song, its multimedia format, its often obscure literary allusions, the freedom with which it unravels and reweaves fragments of myth, its juxtapositions, its blending of personal and cultural histories.
What are we to make of such a fragmented poem? One answer? We make something of it. “I can connect nothing with nothing,” the voice in the poem tells us, while it invites us to find such connections. No: not find, but to make such connections. “The Wasteland” is a poem about the loss of a system whereby order can be discerned and significance created – whether that system is a religious one, a tradition, a common culture or a common body of myth. But it is a poem that requires us to tease out precisely such a system for ourselves. We read the appendix, google the allusions, reference the myths. We marry the fragments the poet has shored against his ruin to our own: the poem becomes universal and personal. Like a good Modernist poet, we make the system whereby significance is bestowed upon a text, upon experience. The “Wasteland” makes us modern.
Mythopoetics
I’ve called this talk “the mythopoetics of Modernism,” and it’s time I justify that title. The term mythopoia, greek for “myth-making,” was the title of a rather heavy-handed poem that the young J.R.R. Tolkien wrote in 1931, defending the function of myth against the view espoused by his friend C.S. Lewis, who regarded myths as little more than beautiful lies. The term has come to refer to a literary text that contains its own created and self-sufficient mythos, from which it simultaneously gathers significance and upon which it imbues significance. Tolkien is the most commonly cited example of the author of such a text, but the effort predates him. William Blake created his own mythology, and so did Richard Wagner, and H.P. Lovecraft and George Lucas and a whole host of lesser aspiring fantasists that fill the pages of their books with genealogies and maps and references to made-up religions and imaginary histories.
But we need to rescue the term, I think, and see it as part of uniquely modernist effort. Every text, it could be said, contains its own mythology – its networks of beliefs, assumptions, common parlance and textual associations that allow it to cohere, to make sense. All of literature, communication itself, the structuralists tell us, depends upon such a system, rules, relationships and references that are consensual and uninterrogated and translucent.
But the modernists – Yeats, Pound, Eliot, and others (Joyce, Woolf, Strachey) – had the good or bad fortune to be writing at a time when the old systems seemed to be failing, and World War I was a nail in the coffin of past certainties. Time and again, an urgent need for new systems within which texts might regain significance can be discerned in their works. The system might consist in a new way of looking at the world, as with imagism or cubism; it might be spun outwards from a personal enthusiasm or epiphany, as with Pound and Joyce. It might be an intricate amalgam of astrology, occult sciences and ancient beliefs, communicated in the handwriting and voice of a young spouse.
This need for a system, acute in the work of the Modernists, could of course be dangerous: when they failed – when in their weakness they mistook their myths as reified fact – the results could be far more than embarrassing – the results could be abhorrent. The reification of provisional and personal myths explains the nearly universal early Modernist sympathy for fascism (and Pound’s later full-throated endorsement of it).
But this brash, audacious questing around for a system that would explain everything: this is also what imbues the modernist writers with such perpetual modernity. A their best, these writers evince a willingness to adopt, provisionally, a system that enables them to create. And if such a system is unavailable for adoption, it will be created. At their most creative, their most modern, modernist writers created their own systems, the myths their texts lived by. It is, of course, not the systems themselves – whether sloppy or intricate, implicit or explicitly laid out – which we remember. It is the art that they enabled. These myths, the systems themselves, could be dispensed with, sloughed off over time, or consciously rejected later. In their wisest hours, the modernists recognized that the myths and systems themselves – the gyres, vortices, the fisher kings – were dispensable. It was what these myths engendered that became of value – the texts that could only find voice through a provisional acceptance of such magical systems and contrived symbols.
After the war, when Yeats returned to Ireland an internationally famous poet, a sometime politician and “public man,” as he called it in A Vision, he was always a little cagey when approached with the inevitable question: “All that stuff in A Vision – did you actually believe it?” In his 1920 introduction to A Vision, he answered the question directly:
Some will ask whether I believe in the actual existence of my circuits of sun and moon. Those that include now all recorded in one circuit, now what Blake called the ‘pulsaters of an artery,’ are plainly symbolical, but what of those that fixed, like a butterfly upon a pin, to our central date, the first day of our Era, divide actual history into periods of equal length? To such a question I can but answer that if sometimes, overwhelmed by miracle as all men must be when in the midst of it, I have taken such periods literally, my reason has soon recovered; and now that the system stands out clearly in my imagination I regard them as stylistic arrangements of experience comparable to the cubes of Wyndham Lewis and to the ovoids in the sculpture of Brancusi. They have helped me to hold in a single thought reality and justice (Yeats 25).