Auden based the form of "September 1" on W.B. Yeats's "Easter 1916".
William Butler Yeats (1865 - 1939) was an Irish poet and playwright. According to The Poetry Foundation: "He belonged to the Protestant, Anglo-Irish minority that had controlled the economic, political, social, and cultural life of Ireland since at least the end of the 17th century. Most members of this minority considered themselves English people who happened to have been born in Ireland, but Yeats was staunch in affirming his Irish nationality." He was interested in mysticism but grounded his poems in the material world. " W.H. Auden eulogized Yeats in a poem - the relationship between the two poets was, according to Mike Douse of The Yeats Society, one of "vehement ambiguity". Douse says that |
|
“in the second half of his life Auden developed an almost obsessive fear of the danger of Yeats's kind of outlook, and much of the story of Auden's development as a poet after 1940 is also the story of his struggle to exorcise the persistent spirit of Yeats: his hardening of the conviction that the greatest threats to individual freedom in the modern world were a direct legacy of the Romantic outlook upon which Yeats prided himself.”
This is perhaps detailed in what Mendelson says about Auden’s turning away from some of his poetry later in life –
"He did not drop these poems because he disagreed with their politics-vaguely Marxist in the first poem, even more vaguely idealis- tic in the second-but because he distrusted their power to convince his readers that he and they were on the right side in the great struggles of the age, that they were "the just" who exchanged messages through "ironic points of light." Auden also wanted to drop his most popular love poem, "Lay your sleeping head, my love," apparently because it gave a romanticizing gloss to brief, unfaithful sexual love; but he was persuaded by friends to let the poem remain." (105)
Kai-ling Liu compares the views of the two poets. She says that:
“Yeats’s poetic statements often end…on a note of acceptance – acceptance of everything life has to offer…Yeat’s “Acceptance” of life, in fact, often seems very much like a renunciation – where poetry is concerned – of what actually happens in life...” Conversely, Bayley concludes that Auden’s poetry produces in us the attiitures which “will be of value to us in our actual world and enable us to live effectively in it”. 215
Yeats is more likely to examine the “terrible beauty” of an event – the mix of beauty from evil and the irony – while Auden’s earlier works make a call to action, and his later works to remove the romantic notion of the ability of poetry to “perform deliberative work on matters of public consequence” (Burt).
Liu goes on to make a comparison between the two on the power of their poetry:
“To Yeats, “Communist, Fascist, Nationalist, clerical, anticlerical, are all responsible according to the number of their victims. I have not been silent: I have used the only vehicle I possess – verse.” And Auden’s social conscience is summarily reflected in his poem “New Year Letter” when he said “Whenever an impasse occurs/use the good offices of verse” 216.
But she notes the different ways in which their poetry is written – she says that the speaker of “September 1” is engaged with the people, while the speaker of Yeats’s “September 1913” is elevated above them.
Marjorie Perloff comments on Yeats’s “On Being Asked for a War Poem”, which says,
"I think it better that in times like these
A poet's mouth be silent, for in truth
We have no gift to set a statesman right;"
Perloff says that at the outbreak of World War I, Yeats remained aloof from the events of the war. She cites the Easter Rising as a change in his mindset, writing:
“In an important letter to Lady Gregory, [Yeats] wrote: If the English conservative party had made a declaration that they did not intend to rescind the Home Rule Bill there would have been no rebellion. I had no idea that any public event could so deeply move me—and I am very despondent about the future. At this moment I feel that all the work of years has been overturned, all the bringing together of classes, all the freeing of Irish literature & criticism from politics. . . “
Yeats’s fascination with the “terrible beauty” led him to dismiss war poets like Wilfred Owen, saying:
“The writers of these poems were invariably officers of exceptional courage and capacity . . . but felt bound . . . to plead the suffering of their men. In poems that had for a time considerable fame, written in the first person, they made that suffering their own. I have rejected these poems for the same reason that made Arnold withdraw his Empedocles on Etna from circulation; passive suffering is not a theme for poetry. In all the great tragedies, tragedy is a joy to the man who dies; in Greece the tragic chorus danced.”
What Yeats did see as a subject can be found in his statement: “We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.” (238). Perloff suggests that Yeats’s desire in focusing on this quarrel with the self, and the relation of "Easter 1916" to his love for Maud Gonne, whose husband was among the massacred, is one of the reasons why this poem is not a call to action - his focus is not the call, but the events themselves.
For Auden's own words on Yeats, one may wish to see this article from the Kenyan Review.
As a minor note – Perloff says of the play that Yeats worked on shortly after the outbreak of World War I:
"his own Noh play, At the Hawk’s Well, designed by Edmund Dulac and danced by Michio Ito, a disciple of Nijinsky from the Ballet Russe, had its first performance (4 April 1916) at Lady Cunard’s at what turned out to be, ironically enough, a war charity affair".(227)
This is perhaps detailed in what Mendelson says about Auden’s turning away from some of his poetry later in life –
"He did not drop these poems because he disagreed with their politics-vaguely Marxist in the first poem, even more vaguely idealis- tic in the second-but because he distrusted their power to convince his readers that he and they were on the right side in the great struggles of the age, that they were "the just" who exchanged messages through "ironic points of light." Auden also wanted to drop his most popular love poem, "Lay your sleeping head, my love," apparently because it gave a romanticizing gloss to brief, unfaithful sexual love; but he was persuaded by friends to let the poem remain." (105)
Kai-ling Liu compares the views of the two poets. She says that:
“Yeats’s poetic statements often end…on a note of acceptance – acceptance of everything life has to offer…Yeat’s “Acceptance” of life, in fact, often seems very much like a renunciation – where poetry is concerned – of what actually happens in life...” Conversely, Bayley concludes that Auden’s poetry produces in us the attiitures which “will be of value to us in our actual world and enable us to live effectively in it”. 215
Yeats is more likely to examine the “terrible beauty” of an event – the mix of beauty from evil and the irony – while Auden’s earlier works make a call to action, and his later works to remove the romantic notion of the ability of poetry to “perform deliberative work on matters of public consequence” (Burt).
Liu goes on to make a comparison between the two on the power of their poetry:
“To Yeats, “Communist, Fascist, Nationalist, clerical, anticlerical, are all responsible according to the number of their victims. I have not been silent: I have used the only vehicle I possess – verse.” And Auden’s social conscience is summarily reflected in his poem “New Year Letter” when he said “Whenever an impasse occurs/use the good offices of verse” 216.
But she notes the different ways in which their poetry is written – she says that the speaker of “September 1” is engaged with the people, while the speaker of Yeats’s “September 1913” is elevated above them.
Marjorie Perloff comments on Yeats’s “On Being Asked for a War Poem”, which says,
"I think it better that in times like these
A poet's mouth be silent, for in truth
We have no gift to set a statesman right;"
Perloff says that at the outbreak of World War I, Yeats remained aloof from the events of the war. She cites the Easter Rising as a change in his mindset, writing:
“In an important letter to Lady Gregory, [Yeats] wrote: If the English conservative party had made a declaration that they did not intend to rescind the Home Rule Bill there would have been no rebellion. I had no idea that any public event could so deeply move me—and I am very despondent about the future. At this moment I feel that all the work of years has been overturned, all the bringing together of classes, all the freeing of Irish literature & criticism from politics. . . “
Yeats’s fascination with the “terrible beauty” led him to dismiss war poets like Wilfred Owen, saying:
“The writers of these poems were invariably officers of exceptional courage and capacity . . . but felt bound . . . to plead the suffering of their men. In poems that had for a time considerable fame, written in the first person, they made that suffering their own. I have rejected these poems for the same reason that made Arnold withdraw his Empedocles on Etna from circulation; passive suffering is not a theme for poetry. In all the great tragedies, tragedy is a joy to the man who dies; in Greece the tragic chorus danced.”
What Yeats did see as a subject can be found in his statement: “We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.” (238). Perloff suggests that Yeats’s desire in focusing on this quarrel with the self, and the relation of "Easter 1916" to his love for Maud Gonne, whose husband was among the massacred, is one of the reasons why this poem is not a call to action - his focus is not the call, but the events themselves.
For Auden's own words on Yeats, one may wish to see this article from the Kenyan Review.
As a minor note – Perloff says of the play that Yeats worked on shortly after the outbreak of World War I:
"his own Noh play, At the Hawk’s Well, designed by Edmund Dulac and danced by Michio Ito, a disciple of Nijinsky from the Ballet Russe, had its first performance (4 April 1916) at Lady Cunard’s at what turned out to be, ironically enough, a war charity affair".(227)