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A Background and Editorial Response to
Angela Pancella's U2/W.B. Yeats Connection Piece
by Khoa Tran
 While
it is fairly safe to assume that the majority of the readers
who frequent this site are familiar with U2, Yeats is perhaps
less accessible to the general public these days. This, then,
is intended to be a response and a companion-piece to fellow
@U2 writer Angela Pancella's excellent U2-Yeats
Connections piece. While I don't exactly qualify as an authoritative
scholar of Yeats's life and works (though I have studied him
academically and on my own time), I hope that I will be able
to provide a good introduction to those uninitiated, in addition
to highlighting and expanding upon some specific points in Angela's
own article.
William Butler Yeats, who is arguably the greatest and certainly
the most renowned poet that Ireland has yet produced, is a difficult
character to pin down. His verse is beautiful, yet oftentimes
indecipherable. He had lofty ideals while at the same time being
rather unashamedly elitist in his political views. He espoused
Irish art and culture while he wasn't exactly Irish himself.
He was the "Last Romantic" and also perhaps the "First
Modernist." He was a complex man whose own uniqueness is
definitely reflected in his body of written work.
Yeats was born in Dublin, Ireland in 1865. His family, of the
English aristocratic class, had lived in Ireland for over two
centuries at that point; what we now know as the independent
Republic of Ireland was then still completely under British
rule, and was so until the early 1920s. So, as Angela points
out in her article, like the members of U2, Yeats was a Protestant
Anglo-Irish man living in a predominantly Irish Roman-Catholic
society. If you have a listen to some of his voice recordings,
you'll hear that he definitely did not speak with what we would
consider to be an Irish accent. He was immensely interested,
however, in ancient Irish culture and folklore, and much of
his earlier verse (have a crack at "The Madness of King
Goll") is impenetrable to those without an understanding
of his subject matter and references. And though he had a lofty
view of the old "Romantic Ireland" his view is somewhat
descended when some of his verse deals with the members of the
Irish-Catholic working class ("September, 1913" immediately
springs to mind). Strangely enough, though, considering this,
and considering again that he wasn't exactly Irish himself,
he was a vocal supporter of the movement for Irish independence,
though I have a feeling that this was more than just partly
due to his being madly in love with Maud Gonne, an prominent
figure in Irish Nationalist politics at that time. Though he
proposed to her on several occasions, she never accepted, and
forever remained his "Beatrice," a love unattainable,
but an inspiration for much of his best-known poetry. She, in
fact, was the woman for whom was there no Second Troy to burn.
Yeats was a man with very lofty poetic ideals. In many ways,
he can be called the Last Romantic, as he was very much concerned
with aesthetic ideals in his verse. His poem, "Leda and
the Swan," was originally intended to be a political piece
written for a political purpose. He felt however, as he wrote
the poem, that the imagery of "lady and bird" simply
took over, and the political content of the poem was simply
removed from it as he stayed true to his aesthetic priorities.
At the same time, however, he was also a (if not the) major
poetic figure of the early twentieth century, and his style
and technique can be said to lend itself to his being given
the title of being the "First Modernist." Oversimplifying
somewhat, Romanticism was a literary movement that began in
the late eighteenth century and continued through much of the
nineteenth century. The poets of the Romantic period (Coleridge,
Byron, Shelley, Wordsworth, et al.) generally preferred feeling
and emotion over logic and form, the intangible and sublime
to the tangible and concrete. Also oversimplifying, Modernism
as a literary movement generally espoused an emphasis on an
experimentation in poetic form - Modernist poetry is often intentionally
difficult, as the poets (Elliot, Pound, et al.) believed in
making the reader work towards an understanding of the poetry.
Yeats was immensely concerned with how his words sounded together.
Angela writes that "an attentive reader responds more to
the emotion than to any literal sense. The abstract quality
of the words - and the way their sounds fit together create
something akin to music." Though his verse is often impenetrable
to the average reader, Yeats was a wordsmith who almost never
used superfluous words simply for their sound and lyrical quality.
If you dig deep enough, you can figure out what Yeats is trying
to say (or, at least you can figure out enough to argue it to
death with another Yeats student). And though there are often
layers upon layers of meaning in Bono's work, one could probably
argue that oftentimes he's more concerned with aural aesthetics
than with meaning.
Though he was a poet in modern times (at least relatively so),
I would disagree somewhat that his concerns were those which
a modern audience could identify with, as he often dug deep
into the esoteric and the mystical, basing much of his later
work on his own occult ideas and developments, and moving away
from the general trend of the 20th century's increasing concern
with science and industrial progress. "The Second Coming,"
"Leda and the Swan," and "The Mother of God,"
(this last poem famous among U2 fans because it was recited
by Bono in a recording) are all annunciation stories of sorts,
signaling ends of eras and the beginnings of others. Leda's
rape by Zeus brings about the destruction of Troy and the rise
of the Classical Greco-Roman era, an era which ends with the
Birth of Christ, whose own era Yeats foretells in an gloomily
apocalyptic tone in "The Second Coming."
An interesting tidbit about Van Morrison and "Crazy Jane
on God": the reason he drops Yeats references everywhere
is that Yeats's estate refused to allow Van Morrison to use
the poem in its entirety on the album (though Van rather cockily
suggests in a 1985 interview that his own lyrics are better
than Yeats's). Yeats's estate has apparently been very uncooperative
with allowing popular artists to record songs based on his lyrics
still under copyright (I don't profess to understand how they
let Joni Mitchell get away with it, since she too was rather
confident in saying that she "improved" upon his "The
Second Coming" for her own "Slouching Towards Bethlehem").
With all of their artistic similarities, the divergence between
U2 and Yeats is rooted in the political. Though Yeats tended
to put aesthetics above politics in his work (it does make an
appearance here and there throughout his canon), he himself
was rather unfortunately sympathetic towards fascism, as were
many other intellectual figures of his time. Bono, meanwhile,
is most definitely a left-leaning man when it comes to the political
issues of the day, and his political stances are often reflected
in the song lyrics he writes. To his credit, like most of these
other figures, Yeats was later also turned off by the atrocities
with which fascism was associated in the Second World War. W.H.
Auden eulogises Yeats beautifully with a few lines from his
1939 (the year Yeats died) poem, "In Memory of W.B. Yeats":
...
You were silly like us: your gift survived it all:
...
Earth, receive an honoured guest:
William Yeats is laid to rest.
References:
The Norton Anthology of 20th Century Literature. W.W. Norton
& Company. 2000: New York.
"Yeats, William Butler". The 2002 Websters' Encyclopedia
Decurtis, Anthony. Interview from the October 1985 issue of
Record Mag. Transcribed by Jack Zelensky, and found at http://www.harbour.sfu.ca/~hayward/van/reviews/1985.html
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