The Yeats Journal of Korea/『한국 예이츠 저널』 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.14354/yjk.2012.37.169
Vol. 37 (2012): 169-184
W. B. Yeats and Ecology:
Ecology, Romantics, and Yeats:
A New Approach to Reading Poetry*1)
Young Suck Rhee
____________________________________
Abstract: This article discusses Yeats’s ecological poems. Probably this is a rare
article in Yeats scholarship, which treats him as an eco-poet. In fact, eco-poetry is
not new poetry, as we see some scholars deal with traditional poets, such as
Shakespeare. My essay is also an attempt to give eco-critics some correction in the
direction, because they are following something like Marxist and Feminist criticism.
Poetry is not a political slogan, nor is it a useless thing.
Key words: W. B. Yeats, Wallace Stevens, ecological poetry, eco-poetics, James
Longenbach
Author: Young Suck Rhee is professor of English poetry and creative writing for
poetry in the Department of English, Hanyang University, Seoul. He is a
painter and poet.
E-mail: [email protected]
____________________________________
제목: W. B. 예이츠와 생태주의 시: 생태주의, 낭만주의 시인, 예이츠: 새로운 시 읽기
우리말 요약: 이 논문은 예이츠의 생태 시를 논의한다. 본 논문이 예이츠를 생태 시
인으로 다루는 세계 최초의 논문 중의 하나가 될 것이다. 사실, 생태 시는 새로운 시
가 아니다. 셰익스피어 같은 시인도 생태 시인으로 다루는 학자가 있다. 본 논문은 또
한 마르크스나 페미니스트 비평의 길을 가고 있는 생태비평에 새로운 방향을 제시하
고자 한다. 시는 정치적 슬러로건도 아니며, 그렇다고 전혀 쓸모 없지도 않다.
주제어: W. B. 예이츠, 왈러스 스티븐스, 생태 시, 생태 시학, 제임즈 롱엔바크
저자: 이영석은 한양대학교 영어영문학과의 시창작과 영시 담당 교수이다. 그는 시인
이며 화가이다.
____________________________________
* This work was supported by the research fund of Hanyang University (HY-2011-G).
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I Introduction: Ecology
This paper redefines some of W. B. Yeats’s poems that have some key imagery
anchored in nature. We live in a different world, compared with the 19th and
20th century, and poets respond to the world differently. Poets write poetry in
a different way. That is to say, English poetry has since the 16th century had
different poets who developed new language: Spenser, Shakespeare, Donne,
Pope, Romantics, Modern poets, and post-Modern poets; or, historically,
neoclassicism,
Romanticism,
and Modernism.
The twenty-first
century
movement of new poetry has to wait until historians create a new term:
Ecologism (as from a term ecologists), Eco-poeticism, or simply eco-poetry
movement.
Last year I attended an international conference on poetry and poetics
held in Wuhan, China for two days from September 29 to 30, 2011 hosted
by the Chinese and American Association for Poetry and Poetics. There were
two sessions titled “Eco-poetry and Eco-poetics,” which attracted my attention.
The titles of the papers for the sessions were “The Evolution of a Canon:
Eco-poetry and Its Theoretical Implications” (Simon C. Estok); “Pastoral
Poetry or Eco-poetry?: . . . Wu Cheng’s Poetry” (Peter Huang); “William
Carlos Williams’s Environmental Response to Modern Painters” (Iris Ralph);
“On Mark Tredinnick’s Poetics of Place” (Liu, Bei); “Geopiety: A Theme of
Post-humanism in Gary Snyder’s Works” (Tan Qionglin); “Ecological
Consciousness in Edith Sitwell’s Three Atomic Age Poems” (Lai, Yan); “An
Ecological Theme of Humanity in Shakespeare Sonnets” (Gao Lianfang);
“Coleridge [from an] Eco-critical Perspective” (Dai Kuihua); “Geographical
Images and Their Implications in Emily Dickinson’s Poetry” (Du Xueqin);
−
“Escape and Watch Interpret[ing] Emily Dickinson’s Poetry” (Li Fenglan);
“Race, Gender, and Nature: Eco[feminism] in Alice Walker’s Poetry” (Wang
Dongmei); “A Thematic Study of The Forest by Susan Stewart” (Wu
W. B. Yeats and Ecology: Ecology, Romantics, and Yeats:
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Yeeming).1)
Eco-poetry is not new poetry, as we see the poets treated in the sessions,
whose poems are thought of as eco-poems. I also agree with most of the
scholars, who chose to discuss both traditional and new poets, that they are
eco-poets, who are concerned with nature. But then why do we need a new
term eco-poems? We have now arrived at a point of time in the history of
humanity, when we are forced, whether we like it or not, to reconsider where
we are and what to do with the environments. It seems to me that Mother
Nature is no longer in the minds of humans, whose life is solely dependent
on it, and Nature has, it seems, reached a point where it could no longer
sustain humanity and its civilization. Poetry must intervene and reawaken in
man the importance of nature again: it ought to be conscious of
environments.
The poets these essays discuss are varied; their poems are very old and
new and from both the East and the West. The oldest is Wu Cheng
(1249-1333,
吳澄) of the Yuan Dynasty of China, and the youngest Susan
Stewart (1952-
) of the US. The poets discussed are: Wu Cheng,
Shakespeare, Coleridge, Emily Dickinson, Edith Sitwell, William Carlos
Williams, Gary Snyder, Mark Tredinnick, Alice Walker, and Susan Stewart.
Besides, two poets are mentioned in the Wikipedia entry “ecopoetry”:
John Burnside and Mario Petrucci; There is an anthology of ecopoetry,
Ecopoetry: A Critical Introduction (J Scott Bryson, ed. University of Utah
Press, 2002); There is a journal Ecopoetics that specializes in ecopoetry and
ecopoetics.2) Two manifestoes of ecopoetry appear in Wikepedia, also. Despite
all this, there seems to be no consensus as to what ecopoetry is and what its
poetics is. It seems to me, however, that many poems by ecopoets sound like
political slogans. Politics and poetry do not mix well, as we do know well. I
think that eco-critics should not do what Marxist and Feminist criticism have
done. We should wait and work hard to see good poets, who are
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ecology-conscious, write wonderful poems, as Romantic poets and Modernist
poets have done. It is important, and necessary, to go back to the old poetry,
and reread it from new ecology-conscious perspectives, and simultaneously it
is now vitally important to create new didactic or pure non-didactic poetry
for nature and the Earth and earthlings.3) This is why I attempt to reread
some of Yeats’s poems, from the perspective of eco-poetics.
Yeats had begun as nature poet and kept writing poems about nature
throughout his life. But as he grew old, his attention shifted from nature to
the nature of humans. Some of the poems are of great interest to the readers.
They are neither eclogues nor pastorals, but the core imagery in the poems is
anchored in nature. Richard Ellmann reads them as symbolist poems, as the
elements in nature symbolize the inner feelings of the poet. He distinguishes
Yeats and Wordsworth. The latter renews man’s bond with nature, while the
former represents what’s inside man by way of the natural:
Wordsworth’s theme had been the renewal of man’s bond to nature; Yeats’s
was the uncovering of a secret nature in which all outward things took
their character from internal pressures. The mighty presence which for
Wordsworth was outside man was for Yeats inside and all the scenic
elements, such as stars, sea, winds, and woods, became emblematic of
forces operative within the mind as upon things. (111; italics my emphasis)
Nature poetry plays a dual role. It depicts nature and humans at the same
time. The stars are the stars, the sea is the sea, winds are winds on the one
hand. On the other, the scenic elements represent the poet in a certain place
and at a certain time: something vital is operative in so complex a way.
Only the poet can express it.
W. B. Yeats and Ecology: Ecology, Romantics, and Yeats:
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II Eco-poetics and Ecological Literacy
Critics use the prefix, “eco-,” to coin new words, such as eco-poetry,
eco-poet, eco-poetics. However, poets are not eco-activists. Poets are well
aware that poets are part of nature and respond to their environs. However,
as dwellers of the Earth, they seem to sense the dangers of industrialization
and of consumer cultures of today. But some, as a result, write poems that
point in the main to the endangered Earth and its inhabitants: they are
eco-activist poets. Most poets are not eco-activists and yet can be deeply
concerned with the place they live in, but some eco-activist poets write
poems promoting ecological literacy.4) At this moment, though we are not
eco-activists, we poets also should pay attention to what we can do to
improve and promote ecological literacy. The eco-poems can be used for
practical educational purposes: that is, to heighten the awareness of Mother
Nature. Here’s what ecological literacy means:
Ecological literacy (Orr 2006) and ecosystem concept (Odum 1971) in its
broadest sense can be defined as an ability to “read” the many interwoven
relationships (i.e., biotic and abiotic) that are comprised of Earth. But what
does that mean? Is it logical to assume that we can read the Earth?
Not too many years ago a large percentage of families in the US made
their living as traditional family farmers. They planted by the almanac of
the moon and predicted the weather by watching the sky and biological
signs, such as the thickness of tree bark and animal activities, working with
the land in a manner that was nurturing to the Earth and sustaining for
humans and other species. They did this not with the use of modern
technologies such as electronics and synthetic chemicals, but by
understanding nature’s patterns, cycles and nested systems. Our long history
of coexisting with our surroundings is written in the rocks, plant and animal
ecology and on the “ecosociocultural fabric” of relationships between
humans and other species (Mueller 2009b). Many of us worldwide have lost
our ability to understand these relationships of the Earth because today we
live our lives differently. Understanding of patterns in nature is
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deemphasized or ignored for a human economy based on the exchange of
money for material stuff and conveniences of life. Along with the loss of
how to observe ecological relationships as commonsense, there are now
detrimental effects on the health of North Americans due to this lack of
experience in the outdoors: asthma (Akinbami 2006), diabetes (Bloomgarden
2004), and perhaps even “nature-attention deficit disorder” (Louv 2005). . . .
Although the US education system concentrates on educating youth in a
manner in which they can become financially successful, this idea does not
equate with psychological happiness or subjective well-being, and too often
happiness is concomitant with the production, exchange, distribution,
consumption and disposal of material stuff, i.e., relations based on
consumerism. (Mitchell 195-96)
Educators like Mitchell believe we should teach students the importance of
environments and discuss how to teach students to be ecologically literate.
The article is not about poetry and does not talk about how to teach
ecological poetry and literature.
III. Romantics and Yeats
Some of Yeats’s poems are eco-poems, on which my essay will, I hope,
shed some light. Yeats’s nature poetry is different from Wordsworth’s or
Shelley’s nature poetry. I hesitate to call Wordsworth and Shelley eco-poets,
because they sing nature directly and because, when they lived, the world
was not like our world; likewise, I hesitate to call Yeats a nature poet, for
—
the same reason. But Yeats’s ecological poems I prefer this term to
eco-poems, because the latter sounds to me like eco-activist poems by
—
eco-activists, though I respect and encourage them with all my heart are not
songs of nature. Yeats’s ecological poems show a complicated process in
relation to nature. Even the early poems he wrote in close contact with
nature cannot be outright nature poems, as Wordsworth’s. Shelley,
W. B. Yeats and Ecology: Ecology, Romantics, and Yeats:
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Wordsworth, and Yeats, for instance, are different. Shelley, like Yeats, often
uses nature symbolically, but what he does is quite natural: he depicts what
is indescribable, what is abstract, like intellect, by way of the natural
phenomena, which is supremely beautiful.
First, Shelley’s “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty”:
Let’s see how Shelley makes use of the images of nature to express his
“intellectual beauty.” The intellectual beauty is invisible to man, but the
images the poem uses help the readers visualize what the intellectual beauty
is:
The awful shadow of some unseen Power
Floats though unseen among us, visiting
−
This various world with as inconstant wing
As summer winds that creep from flower to flower,Like moonbeams that behind some piny mountain
shower,
It visits with inconstant glance
Each human heart and countenance;
−
Like hues and harmonies of evening,
−
Like clouds in starlight widely spread,
Like memory of music fled,
−
Like aught that for its grace may be
Dear, and yet dearer for its mystery.
(Stanza I, “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty,” Heath 797)
This is stanza I, in which Shelley borrows nature’s elements, such as summer
winds, flower, moonbeams, piny mountain shower, hues and harmonies of
evening, clouds in order to express what is invisible. Shelley was a keen
observer of nature.5) He was both a natural scientist and poet; so, his poetry
is different from other Romantic poets. This poem begins with half
knowledge of “[t]he awful shadow of some unseen Power.” We have not
seen it; it is unseen. Then, the poet begins to give some hint: “it [f]loats
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though unseen among us.” It is unseen, yet it floats. The image of some
shadow that floats, that of a bee or butterfly; or that of the summer winds;
or that of the moonbeams behind some piny mountain; Like that, the
intellectual beauty visits human heart. Like hues and harmonies of evening,
like clouds, or like something dearer than anything, it visits human heart with
inconstant glance. Like this, a poem is a process of natural phenomena taking
place in the reader, who shares the same experiences in nature with the poet.
If it’s not an eco-poem, what is it?
Next, Wordsworth’s “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud”:
I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o’ver vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a cloud,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.
…………………………………
For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils. (Abrams 211)
The poet pictures to himself a cloud, which is the poet himself that floats
high over the hills, and the cloud suddenly sees a host of golden daffodils
beside the lake fluttering and dancing in the breeze. Then, in the last stanza,
we learn that it is his imagination that he is one with nature. And then his
heart fills with pleasure, and dances with the daffodils. This poem is simple
but beautiful, appealing to the readers. It is a nature poem, but if some will
write it again today, it can be called an eco-poem. Where could the readers
W. B. Yeats and Ecology: Ecology, Romantics, and Yeats:
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find such a host of daffodils near them? Maybe the only thing that he could
find is something else, some vast fields with cultivated plants; many other
plants and flowers have been destroyed long time ago. Bees and butterflies,
all insects, birds, snakes, frogs will be gone, eventually, the sky vacant with
no dancing formation of birds flying in it, with smog taking the place of
white clouds. Is it really the nature in which we could live, in one hundred
years? If all bees and butterflies are gone, we could not live, because there
will not be any more grain of wheat and barley.
—
Yeats’s poems using Ireland as nature animals, plants, minerals, elements,
—
—
and the universe in relation to Irish country-people his mental and physical
—
6)
activities are ecological poems.
An ecological poem is different from an
eclogue (a pastoral dialog) or a pastoral. A poem written in relation to nature
and/or human nature is an ecological poem. We have always thought that we
are part of nature, and that we cannot live without nature. As ecological poet,
Yeats did not write poems of didactic nature, though some are concerned
with some social issues. Rather, the poems that concern politics, ideology, art,
philosophy, civilization, and so on demonstrate his belief and thoughts. They
do not purport to teach the readers; sometimes, they seek to persuade the
readers, as David Orr claims,7) but they are not didactic at all. Even pure
poetry exists to appeal to the readers.
Now Yeats’s “The Lake Isle of Innisfree”:
I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made:
Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.
And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes
dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the
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cricket sings;
There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet’s wings.
I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
I hear it in the deep heart’s core. (Allt 117)
This poem was written in London while Yeats was in London in 1890. It is
not a simple poem of only Yeats’s escapist nostalgia, as some critics and
readers think. It is a poem, which expresses his idea of a paradise on Earth;
Yeats had once read Thoreau’s Walden and wanted to live on Innisfree, as
Thoreau did. It is important to know that both Thoreau and Yeats wanted to
live in harmony with nature. But, as James Longenbach asks, is it a useful
poem for us?8) Would Yeats have written the same poem if he had
experienced World War I (1914-1918) and the Irish Civil War (28 June 1922
-24 May 1923)? Maybe yes and no. Yes: it was inspired by old Irish poems.
Recently Maura Grace Harrington has discovered the sources of this poem, in
three medieval poems of Ireland.9) No: Yeats might have been concerned
more with the reality around him, as we see in the long poem Meditations in
Time of Civil War. “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” consists of three stanzas: in
stanza 1 the poet-speaker has a wish to go, build a cabin, and raise a
honey-bee hive and cultivate nine bean-rows, in the paradise. Stanza 2 is
what the paradise is, an isle Innisfree in Sligo where he had spent his
childhood. In stanza 3, the speaker is still dreaming, but soon realizes that he
is on the grey pavements, only hearing the lake water lapping in the deep
heart’s core. This poem also poses a question of what we have to do,
between nature and city life; if we cannot make a choice, we need to be in
harmony with it.
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IV. Yeats and Ecological Poetry
What poetry do we need now? We have already experienced two extreme
cases of poetry: didactic and pure poetry. Ecological poetry could be neither
didactic nor pure, or didactic or pure, or nothing like that. We need a poetry
that is both beauty and truth, and it can be in any form and content but has
to be true and beautiful. We can find many kinds in Yeats. Let me classify
Yeats’s poetry into subcategories, though not exhaustive, without discussing
them in detail [Hopefully I will be able to further read them in future.]:
1. Ecological poems of nature, with the imagery of animals, plants,
elements, and universe (ecological: bird, unicorn, hare, autumn, swans,
dolphin, dawn, twilight, glimmer, fly, cat, long-legged bird, bee-loud
glade, rose, etc.) [other poets including, i.e., Romantic poets, Frost,
Williams, Kim Chunsoo (Korean Modernist poet)]
2. Ecological poems of man about place, space, rhythm, cycle, and A
Vision poems [other poets including Donne, Blake, Williams, Pound]
3. Ecological poems with music: songs and ballads [other poets including
Shelley, Blake, Wallace Stevens, Gertrude Stein, Kim Chunsoo,
Picasso]
4. Radical ecological poems, such as “Circus Animals’ Desertion” [other
poets including Pound and Eliot, the latter with “The Waste Land.”]
5. Philosophical poems (cyclical and ecological), with the imagery of dawn,
twilight, bird’s song, civilization, etc.
Conclusion
In closing, I would quote Yeats and James Priest. First, Priest: a Briton
and head gardener of Claude Monet’s Giverny garden, 44 miles northwest of
Paris, France. Gardening seems to be an apt analogy to the writing of
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ecological poetry. What follows is Lauter’s interview with Priest, who is the
head gardener of Monet’s garden in Giverny:
‘Monet was gardening with an artist’s eye,’ he says. ‘He would make a
backwash of blue, and put a little bit of yellow, purple. He drops in this
color.’
The feel of a painting is what Priest hopes the garden will evoke for
visitors.
‘Monet spent his life trying to go further in everything, and especially
further in the way he looked at light, and its perfections, and the way he
tried to translate that into feelings,’ says Priest, noting that his favorite
Monet paintings are of the water lilies. ‘It’s a unique garden that you can’t
copy, in my eyes.’
But during Monet’s life time, when the garden was private, he could
easily let areas go untended on a whim, or when he didn’t need them for
painting. . . .’ (Lauter, “English Gardener Puts His Touch on Monet’s
Garden.”; italics my emphasis)
Poets who write eco-poems should be like Monet the gardener. Without their
ideal garden in their mind, how could they depict it on canvas; sometimes
they can “let areas go untended.” If the gardening is about how to write an
ecological poem, the next is about what to do with Mother Nature. It is
explicitly about a war condition, but we can stretch the meaning of the
poem:
Yeats:
The bees build in the crevices
Of loosening masonry, and there
The mother birds bring grubs and flies.
My wall is loosening; honey-bees,
Come build in the empty house of the stare.
We are closed in, and the key is turned
On our uncertainty; somewhere
A man is killed, or a house burned,
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Yet no clear fact to be discerned:
Come build in the empty house of the stare. (Allt 424-25)
This is stanza 1, section VI “The Stare’s Nest by My Window,” Meditations
in Time of Civil War (1923). Two great themes are in tandem, but it is
meaningful that the bees come first. Nature comes first. In the 10-line stanza,
lines 5 and 10 ask the bees to come build in the stare’s nest. “We are
closed in, and the key is turned/On our uncertainty; . . .”: this is where we
are on our only planet. As in the civil war, we are closed in, and the key is
turned/On our uncertainty. This is not only a poem about the Irish Civil War:
it is both about our present condition, and about where we should go from
here, on the only and sole Earth.
Notes
1) See the conference proceedings: Lianggong Luo, et al. eds. Dialog on Poetry and Poetics: The
First Convention of Chinese and American Association for Poetry and Poetics, September 29-30,
2011, Wuhan, China.
2) Ecopoetics: (145 Carding Machine Road, Bowdoinham, ME 04008. [email protected].). It
publishes “poetry, essays, fiction, translation, interviews: a (more or less) annual journal dedicated
to exploring creative-critical edges between making (with an emphasis on writing) and ecology
(the theory and praxis of deliberate earthlings)” (Wikipedia).
3) See M. Ivana Trevisani Albisola Bach, et al. “Manifesto of the Italian Ecopoetry” (2003). It is,
as I find, the oldest manifesto of its kind. The latest one by James Engelhardt’s “The Language
Habitat: an Ecopoetry Manifesto” (2007). See the sources and references in Wikipedia.
4) See Debora B. Mitchell and Michael P. Mueller, “A Philosophical Analysis of David Orr’s
Theory of Ecological Literacy: Biophilia, Ecojustice, and Moral Education in School Learning
Communities,” Cultural Studies of Science Education 6 (2011): 193-221.
5) Shelley is said to have carried a notebook, in which he observed nature and recorded its
phenomena. Some lines in “Ode to the West Wind” seem to have come from what he had
observed in nature:
Thou who didst waken
The blue Mediterranean, , where he lay, ,
Beside a pumice isle in Baiae’s bay,
…
…
…
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And saw in sleep old palaces and towers
Quivering within the wave’s intenser day,
.
Shelley saw the Mediterranean change in color: “Shelley once observed that, when reflected in
water, colors are ‘more vivid yet blended with more harmony,’” as in section II, “Ode to the
West Wind” (Abrams 705).
Thou
For whose path the Atlantic’s level powers
Cleave themselves into chasms, while far below
The sea-blooms and the oozy woods which wear
The sapless foliage of the ocean, know
………………………………
…
Thy voice, and suddenly grow grey with fear,
And tremble and despoil themselves: Oh hear!
Shelley’s note says that “[t]he vegetation at the bottom of the sea . . . sympathizes with that of
the land in the change of season,” as in section II, “Ode to the West Wind” (Abrams 705).
6) Some use the term eco-poetry, but it seems to me confusing. Eco-poetry has nothing to do with
eco-activity or eco-activists. If not, I suggest we use the term ecological poetry, as I define it
above. We have destroyed much of Earth; we have been fast depleting natural resources to fulfill
our excessive desires for material wealth and physical comfort: architecture, transportation,
communication, and almost everything else are at the great cost of nature. Man is an
over-spender, and does not need all that he imagines he needs. We ought to turn our attention
to keeping Earth healthy and sustainable; if not, we will see the end eventually, in less than a
century: we see all kinds of bad signs. Now we are not naïve to expect Earth will last for
good. It will disappear into the void again, but we ought to keep it safe until we come to a
natural death with our only planet Earth. For the moment, in this dire age, we have to pay
attention to and write ecological poetry for our imagination to go back to and take tender care
of nature. Yeats was one of the great leading thinker poets, who seemed to understand the
cycles of the world or the universe, though the term ecological poems was not used in his time.
Or he would not have imagined that we would be in danger in one century, not in two
thousands.
7) See David Orr, “Politics of Poetry,” Poetry 192. 4 Summer Break (Jul.-Aug., 2008): 409, 418.
Orr says that . . . “poetry and politics are both matters of verbal persuasion (409). . . . One of
the problems with political poetry, then, is that like all speech, it exists at the mercy of time,
history, and other people. . . . And as a maker of poems, a poet is always engaged in battle,
though the opponents may be unclear, the stakes unknowable, and the victories and defeats felt
far away, in different domains, by people other than himself” (Orr 418).
There is another David Orr who was “[f]ormerly a professor of political science at the
University of North Carolina[.] [H]e is now a professor of environmental studies at Oberlin
College in Ohio. In between these academic pursuits, Orr chose to live as Thoreau did,
W. B. Yeats and Ecology: Ecology, Romantics, and Yeats:
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deliberately and wisely. He moved, with his wife, to a plot of land in Arkansas. Far from any
towns, Orr built a house and lived there for 11 years” (Mitchell 197).
8) See James Longenbach, “An Examination of the Poet in a Time of War,” The Antioch Review
67.1 (Winter 2009): 15+. His essay discusses Yeats’s and Wallace Stevens’ poems: Yeats’s “The
Lake Isle of Innisfree” and Stevens’ “The Death of a Soldier” and “The Snow Man.” Yeats
seems to have made his poem universal by omitting the shop window water ball he has seen in
London; Stevens has made some changes in the first poem, which looks less urgent, and has
written the second poem, which looks stern and urgent, once we are aware of their occasions. It
seems that Longenback believes poetry is to be useful but that it isn’t enough to fulfill our
social responsibility by writing poems.
9) See Maura Grace Harrington, “A Millennium’s Journey into ‘The Deep Heart’s Core’: William
Butler Yeats’ ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’ and Green Martyrdom,” Yeats Eliot Review 26.1
(Spring 2009): 17-20. Medieval hermits wanted to encounter God in solitude, as in Yeats’s poem.
The three poems that are similar to Yeats’s are “The Hermit” attributed to St. Manchan of
Offaly and “The Hermit” and “The Hermits’ Song” by unknown writers 18.
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Manuscript peer-review process:
receipt acknowledged: Mar. 1, 2012.
revision received: Apr. 25, 2012.
publication approved: Apr. 27, 2012.
Edited by: Beau La Rhee