A Study of Yeats’ Poetry

The simultaneous presence of these two kinds of consciousness is, according to Eliot, the condition of religious poetry. Another mark of Eliot's later poetry, beginning with "Ash-Wednesday" is religious consciousness. As he puts it in "Religion and Literature" : "It is our business , as readers of literature, to know what we like. It is our business, as Christians, as well asreaders of literature to know what we ought to like. It is our business as honest men not to assume that whatever we like is what we ought to like;and it is our business as honest Christians not to assume that we do likewhat we ought to like." 2 The last thing Eliot would wish for would be the existence oftwo literatures, one for the Christian compunction and the other for the pagan world. There cannot be a sacred literature apart from the secular and vice-versa. Eliot cannot think of a morality apart from the sense of the supernatural. His complaint against modern literature is of the same kind. It is not that modern literature is ' immoral' or even ' amoral'; it is simply that it repudiates, or is wholly ignorant of our most fundamental and important beliefs; and that in consequence its tendancy is to encourage its reader to get what they can out of life while it lasts, to miss no experience that presents itself and to sacrifice themselves, if they can make any sacrifice at all, only for the sake of tangible benefits to themselves and others in this world either now or in the future. Thus Eliot repudiates any hierarchy either of the priority of religious or secular literature. For him, the two are relative and therefore need to supplement each other. It is, therefore, doubtful to say that Eliot's later poetry is religious because he in1927 converted to Anglo-Catholicism marking a shift as some say,

Change, we know, is part of any deconstructive strategy, and when one must change, one changes to an opposite position. That is how after living his early life on the inherited religion, Eliot came in 1927 to adopt Catholicism as his acquired religion. Eliot is, in this andother contexts, an evolutionist. Religion, like tradition, he would say, is not merely inherited but also acquired and acquired with labour. Even otherwise, to know Christianity as a whole, he had to know its Catholic form. Deconstruction does not suffer dogma; it is open ended and flexible. Its ethics is the ethics of synthesis, of reconciliation of opposites. It is, therefore, wrong to believe that Eliot's position in his later poetry is in any way at odds with his early poetry. If we hold these two kinds as different, they are also the same in the evolutionary senseof the word. According to Eliot, there aretwo forms of impersonality in relation to two kinds of poetry : "that which is natural to a more skilful craftsman

The first, accordingly, is that which Eliot calls the ' anthology piece'. "The second impersonality is that of the poet, who, out of intense and personal experience, is able to express a general truth; retaining all the particularity of his experience, to make a general symbol." 4 This is what characterizes Yeats' poetry; having been a great craftsman in the first kind he became a great poet in the second. It is not that he became a different man as Eliot has hinted. One feels sure that the intense experience of youth had been lived through— and indeed, without this early experience, he could never have attained anything of the wisdom which appears in his later poetry. Eliot's own development has not been much dissimilar. His early poetry can be said to have a different kind of impersonality, the impersonality of a craftsman, ie, the one whose individual poems for all their intra-textuality can be read separately. But his later poetry, the poetry of wisdom, particularly, Four Quartetscan be read as a whole only. Using deconstructive insight to analyse Yeats' poetry, Eliot says, "Most men either cling to the experience of youth, so that the writing becomes insincere mimicry of the earlier work, or they leave the passion behind and write only from the head, with a hollow and wasted virtuosity."5 There is another, and even worse temptation:, "that of becoming dignified public figure with only a public existence."6 In the case of Eliot, the journey from his early to later poetry, each single phase, and for that matter, each single poem is a link in a chain of causality, a transitiory phase of evolution. That is why we cannot say at one single point of his development that he has definitely progressed. At the most, one can say that each poem is new and yet old, old and yet new.

1. Abrams, M.H. (1953). The Mirror andthe Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical'Tradition. London: Oxford University Press. 2. Antrim, Harry (1971). T. S. Eliot's Concept of Language. Gainsville: University of Florida Press. 3. Barthis, Roland. Elements of Semiology, tr. Annette Lavas and Colin Smith.New York: Hill and Wang. 4. Beehler, Michael (1989). T. S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens and the Discourse of Difference. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press.

Department of English, Village – Karira, District – Mahendragarh, Haryana