한국 예이츠 저널


Vol. 11 (1999) 159-175
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.14354/yjk.1999.11.159
The Aesthetics of W. B. Yeats
and Derek Walcott*1)
Young Suck Rhee (Hanyang University)
I
This paper discusses the aesthetic aspects of two modern poets, W. B. Yeats and
the poetry, which is not visual, that is, not “modern” or contemporary, will be open
to you. To put it bluntly, you will be in the dark as far as modern and
contemporary poetry is concerned. To catch up with and appreciate modern poetry,
you will have to keep your eyes open to the new phenomenon.
When young, Yeats and Walcott each wanted to be a painter. (Walcott still
paints from time to time.) William Butler Yeats (1856-1939) was born in Dublin,
son of the painter John Butler Yeats and Susan Pollexfen. His family moved to
London when he was 2, and back to Dublin when he was 16. His childhood
holidays were spent in County Sligo. He studied at the Dublin Metropolitan School
of Art from 1884 to 1886. His brother Jack Yeats was the most important
Impressionist painter in Ireland.
In the meantime, Derek Walcott (1930- ) was born and raised in the West
Indies. Early on he wanted to be a painter like his father, but instead, like Yeats,
* This work was supported by the 1999 Research Grant provided by Hanyang University.
160
Young Suck Rhee
Walcott has been writing poetry and plays for some four decades. Early on he
apprenticed himself to the poetry of English tradition - in particular the Elizabethans
and Jacobeans, Yeats, Hardy, and Robert Lowell. Still, Walcott spends part of the
year in the West Indies, in his home painting and writing poetry. Both of the poets
are verbal painters, and painters with a brush as well. Walcott is still painting in his
leisure time. Aesthetics is part of their poetics.
Derek Walcott. So, what I will do in this paper is to mainly build up the
theoretical background of their aesthetic theory. Toward the end of this paper there
may appear the differences in their poetry. While developing their aesthetics, I will
deal with their poems as poems, of course focusing on their strong visual
characteristics.
I assume that the poetics of twentieth poetry has to a large extent depended on
painting, and that, in particular, the movement of poetry led by Ezra Pound and his
imagist theory was based on such poetics. If you want to comprehend modern
poetry, you will have to read and understand a large number of books on the
relationship between poetry and painting. Many of those books have been published
by well-known publishers, including Harvard and Yale University Press in America
and Cambridge University in England. Of them, some of the important titles include:
Peter Hall, The Revolution in the Visual Arts and the Poetry of William Carlos
Williams (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994); Charles Altieri, Painterly Abstraction in
Modern American Poetry (University Park, Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State UP,
1995; Originally. Cambridge UP 1989.); J.D. McClatchy, Poets on Painters: Essays
on the Art of Painting by Twentieth-Century Poets (Berkeley: U of California P,
1988); Alan Robinson, Poetry, Painting, and Ideas, 1885-1914 (London: The
Macmillan Press Ltd, 1985; It deals with Symbolism, Impressionism, Imagism,
Abstract Expression, the London Vortex, Yeats, Hulme, Pound); William Marling,
William Carlos Williams and The Painters, 1909-1923 (Athens: Ohio: Ohio UP,
1982; Erik Ingvar Thurin, Whitman Between Impressionism and Expressionism:
The Aesthetics of W. B. Yeats and Derek Walcott
161
Language of the Body, Language of the Soul (London: Bucknell UP, 1995.); Michael
Webster, Reading Visual Poetry after Futurism: Marinetti, Apollinaire, Schwitters,
Cummings (New York: Peter Lang, 1995.) And there is a book that specializes in
Yeats’s work in relation to the visual arts: Elizabeth Bergmann Loizeaux, Yeats and
the Visual Arts. (New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1986.)
What does this phenomenon say to us? One thing is that the 20th century is the
century of the visual, with the invention of movies, TV, video cassette players,
typewriters and personal computers. Is it possible to understand and appreciate poetry
without being familiar with the visual, or art? Maybe not. If you try to appreciate
poetry unequipped with the deep understanding of art, you will not be able to do so.
Though you persist, only a small bit of
i) Walcott
II
This section is to be divided into two subsections. In each Walcott’s and Yeats’s
views of art will be discussed. In Walcott discussion I will derive his aesthetics and
poetics from his own words and from the interview and essays by various Walcott
scholars, all of which are contained in the book, Critical Perspectives on Derek
Walcott compiled and edited by Robert D. Hamner, Professor of English and
Humanities at Hardin-Simmons University.
Of many of the essays (52 essays by many scholars; of these, eight were by
Walcott himself) some of them are particularly interesting and invaluable to my
purpose: “Society and the Artist” (1957) by Derek Walcott, “The Art of Poetry”
(1986) by Edward Hirsch, “Painters and Painting in Another Life” by Edward Baugh,
“The Language of Exile” by Seamus Heaney, “The Painter as Poet: Derek Walcott’s
162
Young Suck Rhee
‘Midsummer’” by Robert Bensen, “Divided Child” by J.D. McClatchy. To develop an
aesthetic theory of Walcott, I also derive a lot from various parts of many other
essays. The 52 essays are in a chronological order, and searching for and weaving
the poet’s aesthetic pieces of mind from the first essay to the last would be most
productive; but as this paper is a comparison of two poets, I chose to read only a
couple of essays that seem to be directly relevant to my efforts to compare him and
Yeats.
The first essay is “Society and the Artist” (1957) by Derek Walcott. This is
probably one of Walcott’s earliest essays, in which he tells us what an artist is and
why he had to leave his country. To him a true artist is all on his own; yet he is in
this world, which put him into a great dilemma. He says:
In a sense, every artist is on his own. But it is the most difficult profession in
the world to be on your own when you are, if you are any good, the property of
this world and not of the next.
The poets know the hopelessness of the situation. ... As an honest working man,
he will have earned perhaps four pounds a year, and it is pretty certain that he
will do any other work reluctantly. (Hamner 16)
As a matter of fact all artists who create “pure” works of art hardly make any
money at all until they happen to be found out by a critic or a patron and are loved
by a great majority of people. So does the poet if he wants to write only pure
poetry. What was worse for him in the islands,
There is not a good publisher in the islands. There is one art dealer in Jamaica.
There is no true theatre building in the entire archipelago, ... There is no such
thing as a real collector or patron of the plastic arts, but hotels change hands
every day. ... Consequently they pack their manuscripts and head for Europe. (17)
What Walcott emphasizes at the end of the essay is, the “artists are part of what can
The Aesthetics of W. B. Yeats and Derek Walcott
163
be one of the finest and most beautiful of countries. I mean these islands. Without
them Greece would have been a Tourist resort, and these island[s] will be beautiful
but dumb.” (17) His essay “Society and the Artist” stresses the importance of the
society providing help to the artist as he is a vital force to make his country a
Greece.
That Walcott has depended on the visual arts for his poetry is well demonstrated
in Edward Baugh’s essay, “Painters and Painting in Another Life.” Walcott has been
under the influence of both the Renaissance painting and his childhood friend, the
painter Dunstan St. Omer, or the “16th century European creative vigor and St.
Lucia’s artistic awakening.” (7) Edward Baugh begins his essay with this: “In
recreating the St Lucia of his memory in Another Life, Walcott draws heavily on
images from painting and related arts, especially photography. Sculpture, etching,
pottery, dance also contribute, and music provides a major “cluster” of images and
allusions.” (Hamner 239) This imagery is to recall Walcott’s youthful dream of a
society dedicated to art. In this poem, the imagery of painting and allusions to actual
painters -Harold Simmons and Dunstan St Omer, and paintings are to celebrate the
lost life. Baugh further says that “painting is not only a subject of the poem, but
also an important aspect of its style and texture.” (239)
All over the poem, Another Life Walcott colors and frames his views as in a
painting:
the frieze of coal-black carriers, charbonniers,
erect, repetitive as hieroglyphs. (29)
A peel of lemon sand
curled like a rind across the bay’s blue dish. (65-6)
the hills stippled with violet
as if they had seen Pissaro. (74)
164
Young Suck Rhee
the framed yellow jungle of
the groyned mangroves meeting
the groyned mangroves repeating
their unbroken water-line. (149)
Walcott had wanted to become a painter in his childhood, copying masters’
paintings in water color. One book that inspired the young mind was Thomas
Craven’s A Treasury of Art Masterpieces: From the Renaissance to the Present Day
(New York, 1939). Walcott refers to this book:
a book that I used as my imaginary museum and where I had learned all I now
know about the old masters and the great painters ... a large black book from
which I copied, in watercolour, a number of great paintings: Turner’s “Fighting
Temeraire Toward To Her Last Berth,” Goya’s “Night Execution” as my father
had once copied Millet’s “The Gleaners.” (Hamner 240)
Walcott’s Another Life provides a key to understanding how he applies the
painting to the art of poetry. Though painting and poetry use a different medium,
there must be something that they share, and the epigraph of its first chapter, The
Divided Child, gives the answer; it is from Malraux’s Psychology of Art:
An old story goes that Cimabue was struck with admiration when he saw the
shepherd boy, Giotto, sketching sheep. But, according to the true biographies, it is
never the sheep that inspire a Giotto with the love of painting: but, rather, his
first sight of the paintings of such a man as Cimabue. What makes the artist is
the circumstance that in his youth he was more deeply moved by the sight of
works of art than by that of the things which they portray.
Then what makes what Walcott is as poet? His circumstances: his father as painter
and a lot of input from him, and his education of the European literature, as well as
his hometown, as he had earlier realized the importance of his islands to become a
The Aesthetics of W. B. Yeats and Derek Walcott
165
true artist.
However, Walcott admits toward the end of his Another Life that he failed as
painter but that he had “a different gift”:
... I rendered
the visible world that I saw
exactly, yet it hindered me, for
in every surface I sought
the paradoxical flash of an instant
in which every facet was caught
in a crystal of ambiguities,
I hoped that both disciplines might
by painful accretion cohere
and finally ignite,
but I lived in a different gift,
its element metaphor... (58-9)
It will also be interesting to see how Walcott mixes for the creation of a poetic
vision his religious feeling toward art and his love toward his country in a beautiful
way. First, the epiphanic moment of his dedication to art is a dedication to his
country:
Our father,
who floated in the vaults of Michelangelo,
Saint Raphael,
of sienna and gold leaf ... (44)
Second, his epiphanic moment is further intensified and expanded to get him to be
identified with art and religion and his islands:
Thin water glazed
166
Young Suck Rhee
the pebbled knuckles of the Baptist’s feet.
In Craven’s book.
Their haloes shone like the tin guards of lamps.
Verrochio. Leonardo painted the kneeling angel’s hair.
Kneeling in our plain chapel,
I envied them their frescoes.
Italy flung round my shoulders like a robe,
I ran among dry rocks, howling, “Repent!” (23)
The painting referred here is “The Baptism of Christ” painted by Andrea del
Verrochio and his 17-year old apprentice named Leonardo da Vinci. (Hamner 242)
Another important attitude Walcott takes when he writes a poem: he learns it
from the old masters and Vermeer. Walcott’s island when he was young is locked in
amber, as in a painting by a painter:
There
was your heaven! The clear
glaze of another life,
a landscape locked in amber, the rare gleam ... (3)
On the concept of reality being locked in glazes: Walcott may have recalled Craven’s
comment on Vermeer: “His textures are such perfect replicas that his table covers
and stuffs strike the eye, not as painted illusions, but as actual materials preserved in
amber glazes.” (Hamner 245) Walcott praises Vermeer:
... A cracked coffee cup,
A broken loaf, a dented urn become
Themselves, as in Chardin,
Or in beer-bright Vermeer,
Not objects of our pity. (Castaway 42)
The Aesthetics of W. B. Yeats and Derek Walcott
167
The most Walcott-like characteristic in the poetry of Walcott seems to have been
derived from the principle of the Impressionism, particularly Cezanne. On this aspect,
Sven Birkerts in his essay, “Heir Apparent” (a discussion of Midsummer by Derek
Walcott), has an insightful observation:
Walcott is trying to fix, in sharp, living lines, the particular texture of his inner
life during the course of two summers. ... Like Cezanne, who painted hill after
hill because hills were not what he was interested in, Walcott writes poem after
poem with little differentiation of subject. His settings and descriptions are, in a
sense, pretexts. He would like to throw out as much as possible in order to clear
a path to his real object: language becoming poetry.
ii) Yeats
Compared with Walcott, Yeats seems to have gone differently, the other way
round. Yeats begins as a Pre-Raphaelite to become a Blakean “painter,” by way of
the realistic Rembrandt-inspired art. But eventually a Classical painter; throughout his
life his poetry in essence remains a painting that leans toward Classicism. As in the
case of Walcott, Yeats’s circumstance helps fashion what he is. His father John
Yeats as painter, his brother Jack as painter too, his involvement with the editing of
Blake as painter-poet, and above all his enrollment in Dublin’s Metropolitan School
of Art, Kildare Street, in sight of his father’s alma mater and his meeting with
George Russell (AE) there, and his life-long contacts with art and painter friends.
Yeats’s essay, “William Blake and His Illustrations to The Divine Comedy” is an
important source, in which Yeats’s idea of art is well demonstrated. Though he is
talking about Blake, what he says is what he believes in art. It seems to me possible
to regard what he comments on the art of Blake as his own idea of art; this could
be the very principle of Yeats’s poetry:
168
Young Suck Rhee
The limitation of his view was from the very intensity of his vision; he was a
too literal realist of imagination, ... and because he believed that the figure seem
by the mind’s eye, when exalted by inspiration, were ‘external existences,’ symbols
of divine essences, he hated every grace of style that might obscure their
lineaments. To wrap them about in reflected lights was to do this, and to dwell
over-fondly upon any softness of hair or flesh was to dwell that which was least
permanent and least characteristic, (E & I 120)
Yeats further explains by borrowing from Blake why the line should be “distinct,
sharp and wiry” for art to be perfect. If not, it is nothing but weak imitation:
The great and golden rule of art, as well of life, is this: that the more distinct,
sharp and wiry the bounding line, the more perfect the work of art, and the less
keen and sharp, the greater is the evidence of weak imitation, plagiarism and
bungling. (120)
This is what Blake and Yeats believe in art; probably Picasso might have said a
similar thing. But Monet and Bonnard would not agree with them. In art there is no
golden rule, but a born artist who can transcend it to create a new art. Walcott may
or may not agree with what Blake and Yeats just said, for in principle Walcott is an
Impressionist tending to diverge from their aesthetic; particularly the later Walcott
does so.
In the same context, the principle of the particular and that of the universal in
art and literature are discussed by Yeats. First, Yeats quotes Blake:
General knowledge is remote knowledge; it is in particular that wisdom consists,
and happiness too. Both in art and life general masses are as much art as a
pasteboard man is human; this every idiot knows. But he who enters into and
discriminates most minutely the manners and and intentions, the characters in all
their branches, is the alone wise and sensible man, and on this discrimination all
art is founded .... As poetry admits not a letter that is insignificant, so painting
The Aesthetics of W. B. Yeats and Derek Walcott
169
admits not a grain of sand or a blade of grass insignificant, much less an
insignificant blot or blur. (122)
In fact, this is the essence of Yeats’s poetic theory; if you add “abundance and
exuberance,” Yeats’s poetics is complete. “To seek a determinate outline, to avoid a
generalised treatment, and to desire always abundance and exuberance” (123): those
are what Yeats has sought in his poetry throughout his poetic career.
In the meantime, is there anything that both Yeats and Walcott share in the
theory of aesthetics and poetics? Yes: toward the end of their poetic career; Walcott
is still working, so in his latest work.
The technique that both Yeats and Walcott have aimed at is different; but as
Blake did, each poet has strived to achieve “a mastery over artistic expression. The
technique of Blake was imperfect, incomplete, ... but where his imagination is perfect
and complete, his technique has a like perfection, a like completeness.” (127) As a
matter of fact, both Yeats and Walcott have achieved a mastery over artistic
expression. To the reader, they have reached the heaven to “bring fire.” Here follow
the supreme results by both. First, Yeats’s:
Long-Legged Fly
That civilization may not sink,
Its great battle lost,
Quiet the dog, tether the pony
To a distant post;
Our master Caesar is in the tent
Where the maps are spread,
His eyes fixed upon nothing,
A hand under his head.
Like a long-legged fly upon the stream
His mind moves upon silence.
170
Young Suck Rhee
That the topless towers be burnt
And men recall that face,
Move most gently if move you must
In this lonely place.
She thinks, part woman, three parts a child,
That nobody looks; her feet
Practice a tinker shuffle
Picked up on a street.
Like a long-legged fly upon the stream
His mind moves upon silence.
That girls at puberty may find
The first Adam in their thought,
Shut the door of the Pope’s chapel,
Keep those children out.
There on that scaffolding reclines
Michael Angelo.
With no more sound than the mice make
His hand moves to and fro.
Like a long-legged fly upon the stream
His mind moves upon silence. (Yeats 617-8)
This poem is characterized by its particularity and serene power, which is as tight as
a fully drawn bow. Its form is perfect, so it could bring fire from heaven. The
reader feels fire burning in his heart.
Walcott, likewise, can make a fire of love through a mastery over artistic
expression. To me, - and to the reader in general, I assume - his form is perfected
in a way different than that of Yeats.
Egypt, Tobago
.....
The Aesthetics of W. B. Yeats and Derek Walcott
171
He lies like a copper palm
tree at three in the afternoon
by a hot sea
and a river, in Egypt, Tobago.
Her salt marsh dries in the heat
where he foundered
without armour.
He exchanged an empire for her beads of sweat,
the uproar of arenas,
the changing surf
of senators, for
this silent ceiling over silent sand this grizzled bear, whose fur,
moulting, is silvered for this quick fox with her
sweet stench, ... (Walcott 369)
As Seamus Heaney points out, “Walcott’s poetry has passed the stage of
self-questioning, self-exposure, self-healing to become a common resource.” His
poetry is “awash with love of people and places and language: love as knowledge,
love as longing, love as consummation, at one time the Sermon on the Mount, at
another Anthony and Cleopatra.” (Hamner 308)
III
In closing, I would like to set the two poets apart by referring to the two major
strands of art: classical and Impressionistic strands, because all I have discussed
above, I believe, originates in one way or another from the two characteristics.
172
Young Suck Rhee
Elizabeth Bergmann Loizeaux’s Yeats and the Visual Arts is the most comprehensive
work on the relationship between Yeats’s poetry and fine art. An important aspect
Loizeaux observes in Yeats’s poetry is the sculptural aspect found in his form. It
certainly is a keen observation and points to the essence of Yeats’s poetry. However,
sculpture has a long history behind it. It is, also, important to draw a parallel
between Yeats and a particular sculptor. Yeats’s parallel would be Michael Angelo;
both Yeats and the sculptor have clean, classical line and voluptuous volume. The
work they both create is an object of inspiration and deep feeling. I have talked
about the classical strand.
And despite his being under the influence of Renaissance art in childhood,
Walcott’s poetry in essence is “visual” rather than sculptural, giving us luminosity
and lustre; it looks more like Cezanne than a Renaissance master. Walcott is more
like an Impressionist painter in his poetry, no matter what he now paints as a
painter. By contrast, this aspect of Walcott’s is absent in Yeats’s poetry. Even in his
Pre-Raphaelite poetry Yeats is not ambiguous, though his poetry gives mysterious
lustre to the reader.
Works Cited
Altieri, Charles. Painterly Abstraction in Modern American Poetry. University Park,
Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State UP, 1995; Originally. Cambridge UP
1989.
Hall, Peter. The Revolution in the Visual Arts and the Poetry of William Carlos
Williams. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994
Hamilton, Ian. ed. Oxford Companion to 20th-Century Poetry. Oxford: Oxford UP,
The Aesthetics of W. B. Yeats and Derek Walcott
173
1996
Hamner, Robert D., ed., Crititical Perspectives on Derek Walcott. Washington, D.C.:
Three Continents Press, 1993.
Heaney, Seamus. “The Language of Exile,” Critical Perspectives on Derek Walcott.
Compiled and Edited by Robert D. Hamner. Washington, D.C.: Three
Continent Press, 1993.
Jeffares, A. Norman. A New Commentary on the Poems of W. B. Yeats. London:
The Macmillan Press Ltd., 1984.
Loizeaux, Elizabeth Bergmann. Yeats and the Visual Arts. New Brunswick: Rutgers
UP, 1986.
Marling, Williams. William Carlos Williams and The Painters, 1909-1923. Athens:
Ohio: Ohio UP, 1982.
McClatchy, J. D. “Divided Child,” Critical Perspectives on Derek Walcott. Compiled
and Edited by Robert D. Hamner. Washington, D.C.: Three Continent Press,
1993.
______. ed. Poets on Painters: Essays on the Art of Painting by Twentieth-Century
Poets (Berkeley: U of California P, 1988.
Jeffares, A. Norman. A New Commentary on the Poems of W. B. Yeats. London:
The Macmillan Press Ltd., 1984.
Robinson, Alan. Poetry, Painting, and Ideas, 1885-1914. London: The Macmillan
Press Ltd, 1985.
Thurin, Erik Ingvar. Whitman Between Impressionism and Expressionism: Language
of the Body, Language of the Soul. London: Bucknell UP, 1995.
Walcott, Derek. Collected Poems 1948-1984. London and Boston: Faber and Baber,
1986.
_________. Another Life. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1973.
_________. The Castaway and Other Poems. London: Jonathan Cape, 1965.
Webster, Michael. Reading Visual Poetry after Futurism: Marinetti, Apollinaire,
174
Young Suck Rhee
Schwitters, Cummings. New York: Peter Lang, 1995.
Yeats, W. B. ed. Peter Allt and Russel K. Alspach. The Variorum Edition of The
Poems of W. B. Yeats. New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc., 1957.
________. Essays and Introductions. New York: Collier Books, 1968.
The Aesthetics of W. B. Yeats and Derek Walcott
175
Yeats와 Walcott의 미학
우리말요약
이 영 석 (한양대)
이 논문의 전제는 Yeats와 Walcott 둘 다 “화가”라는 데에, 그래서 그들의 예술
관이 시에 대한 견해로 풀이될 수 있는 작가들이라 점이다.
Yeats와 Walcott는 예술의 두 큰 줄기로 구분되어 질 수 있다. 즉, 고전주의와
인상주의가 그것이다. 본 논문이 논의한 각 개념들과 이론들의 출발점은 이 두 가지
이다. Loizeaux은 Yeats를 가장 광범위하고 깊이 있게 시각예술의 관점에서 다루고
있는데, 그녀의 결론은 Yeats의 시가 조각적이라는 것이다. 이 결론은 날카로운 관
찰인데도, 그녀는 Yeats가 본질적으로 Classicism의 form을 지니고 있다고 까지는
지적하지 못하는 것 같다. 본 논문은 지나친 단순화의 위험에도 불구하고, Yeats를
그러한 기질의 시인이라는 결론을 내린다. 그러나, 그가 고전주의 시인이라는 말과
는 전혀 다르다는 것도 지적해 둔다.
반면에, Walcott은 초기의 자기 주변의 영향과 자신의 성향에도 불구하고, 기질
과 태생적으로 인상주의적 경향을 보이는 시인이다. 그의 시적 기법은 인상주의 화
가 Cezanne에 근접한다고 보아도 좋은 것 같다.
그러나, 두 시인 모두 “artistic expression”으로서의 technique는 완벽하게 다듬은
것으로 받아 드려진다. 두 시인의 최고의 시들은 형식에는 판이한 차이를 보이나,
“하늘에서 불을 가져오는”데에는 성공한다. 둘 다 우리에게 위대한 시적 유산을 남
긴 시인들이다.