19 July 2006
Taste in Poets
Filed under De Gustibus
Michael Bérubé posts about Yeats, mentioning in passing that he’s the greatest English-language poet of the 20th C.
I replied there that I prefer Stevens, Eliot, and possibly also Auden; but “prefer” is not quite the same thing as “consider the greatest.” Outside of some appreciative pockets, this kind of question is something I haven’t heard anyone take seriously since I was an undergrad, if then (though the problem trended more apathetic than contemptuous thereabouts).
I’m fascinated by Yeats’s mind, certainly, and I enjoy comparing A Vision to Lewis’s roughly contemporaneous encyclopedic (though decidedly non-occultic) works (The Art of Being Ruled, Time and Western Man, The Lion and the Fox, The Childermass, Paleface, and The Apes of God). But to say that “Sailing to Byzantium” makes, for example, the Four Quartets seem “thin and watery” is the type of error with which there can be no compromise, if you’re into that sort of thing.
2006-07-19 :: Jonathan
19 July 2006 @ 11:36 pm
No, it’s that “Sailing to Byzantium” makes the trousers-rolled line in “Prufrock” and the opening of “Gerontion” seem thin and watery. And the “something I haven’t heard anyone take seriously” bit is just too fashionable.
19 July 2006 @ 11:43 pm
Different maturity periods.
I personally would have liked and would like to spend more time arguing about who’s a greater, better, longer lasting, aesthetically superior writer in graduate school; but it just didn’t seem to be done.
20 July 2006 @ 7:38 am
Quite true, different maturity periods. And as I tried to suggest in my comment 12 in that thread (via the Great Poets/ 1975 Masters analogy), it’s best to take all this best-of talk with a light heart. (Though I really do believe that Yeats’s self-refashionishings are extraordinary in their intensity and variety.) After all, we don’t want to become the Christopher Ricks cited in comment 16, who declares that Yeats never wrote a true poem other than “Sailing to Byzantium.” Given that caveat, though, graduate school would do well with a bit more talk about what kind of writing pleases well and why — however informal.
20 July 2006 @ 10:26 am
It doesn’t, graduate school, because that kind of talk is regarded as quaint and altogether unsophisticated. I am coming to think that the true avant garde in literary analysis comes from precise aesthetic evaluation–a sabrmetric statistical analysis of which writers win ballgames and the critics who use them.