Moving from Geoffrey Hill or Christopher ricks as Critics to someone like Patrick Kavanagh there is a distinct shifting of gears. Downwards. What follows are scattered notes on Kavanagh's stated attitudes about Yeats. References are to three books edited by Antoinette Quinn: CP Collected Poems 2004, PK Patrick Kavanagh a Biography 2nd ed 2003 and APC A Poet's Country: Selected Prose 2003
Kavanagh's last printed poem.. (CPp259) first published in 1966
Yeats
Yeats, it was very
easy for you to be frank,
With your sixty years
and loves (like Robert Graves).
It was thin and, in
fact, you have never put the tank
On a race. Ah!
Cautious man who no sin depraves.
And it won’t add up,
at least in my mind
To what it takes in
the living poetry stakes.
I don’t care what
Chicago thinks; I am blind
To college lecturers
and the breed of fakes;
I mean to say I’m not
blind really,
I have my eyes wide
open, as you may imagine,
And I am aware of our
own boys, like Ben Kiely
Buying and selling
literature on the margin.
Yes Yeats, it was
damned easy for you, protected
By the middle classes
and the Big Houses
To talk about the
sixty year old public protected
Man sheltered by the
dim Victorian public muses.
Kavanagh
was invited to talk at a symposium in Chicago in April 1965 to celebrate the Centenary of
Yeats' birth (Quinn PK 428 ff). Quinn wrote that Kavanagh "Had serious
reservations about appearing to do obeisance to Yeats". He decided to take the
free trip but treat the event with contempt.
Friday 30th April ‘All hell broke loose.’ Pk had asked to speak last.
By coming this long distance to speak about or
around w.b.yeats it presumes that we think him a great poet and a great man.
But I have always had reservations about Yeats. The fact he wasn’t Irish and
never wrote a line that an ordinary Irish person would read is not against him.
No true poet ever wrote for the ordinary man or woman…. (Qtd Quinn PK 430)
When asked in the
ensuing debate what motivated his attack on Yeats Kavanagh replied:”Spite”. As
insults were traded Stpehen Spender, the moderator intervened to say there was
no point in continuing a discussion which amounted to little more than a
trading of insults. (Quinn PK 430)
In his published
writing Kavanagh was more ambivalent. Though the ambivalence may be a fault of style rather than attitude.
From a Review of Joseph Hone, W.B. Yeats in The Standard, 26th Feb 1943 p.2 (qtd Quinn, APC p177)
The foundation of the Abbey Theatre, his reactions to 1916 and the constant delight of his poetry are rich compensations for having to suffer the crowds of silly women and charlatans in Yeats litany of saints. What a marvellous technician he was. He could produce magic in verse almost automatically. He was a brilliant poet yet somehow I feel that a truly great poet would not have been all his life the mere mirror of the phases of his time but would have spoken the unchanging beauty.
In an article called
George Moore’s Yeats published in the Irish Times, Yeats centenary supplement,
June 1965 after he had returned from Chicago, Kavanagh’s attitude is harder to
pin down. He tends to ramble. He sounds like he’s talking to himself and can’t be bothered
to go back and sort out exactly what is his opinion. Great
critical literary intelligence he is not.
He reads as though he hasn’t got the material under control: has too much to say and in consequence never quite says anything clearly. And there’s a vein of sly spite which recalls the vindictiveness underlying ‘On Raglan Road’.
He begins with a
fairly emphatic statement (182): I fear
we are getting too serious about Yeats. There is no doubt now that he was a
great poet and probably the last great poet the earth will produce.
He then qualifies
Great…It implies bad heroic art-like Rodin’s or even Michelanglo’s…I don’t
think Yeats was great in that way, and that he had enough of small simplicity
in him to be truly great.
And yet I wonder had
he?
If I seem to be a bit wobbly about Yeats’
simple greatness, it is not so
much the detachment of his verse as his ability to integrate himself with
Bourgeois society. (184)
In presenting the
grounds of his judgement Kavanagh reveals the weakness of his
criteria and the limitation of his criticism.
There is another defect in Yeats-his dislike of ideas. He
maintained that ideas were for the pulpit, It may be that he knew his limitations.
Reading De Quincey’s reminisces of the Lakers….Coleridge and Wordsworth and
Southey-I couldn’t think of him as a man in the intellectual class of these.
Nor has the written a poem as memorable as the
least of these-Southey’s Blenheim. (184)
Kavanagh doesn’t quote
the poem, but it begins…
IT was a summer
evening,
Old Kaspar's work was
done,
And he before his
cottage door
Was sitting in the
sun,
And by him sported on
the green
His little grandchild
Wilhelmine.
She saw her brother
Peterkin
Roll something large
and round
Which he beside the
rivulet
In playing there had
found;
He came to ask what he
had found,
That was so large, and
smooth, and round.
To argue
that Yeats wasn’t on the same intellectual level as Coleridge is to say little:
very few people were or have been on STC’s level. To lump Wordsworth and Coleridge
and Southey together as equally intellectual is ludicrous. To pretend Yeats
never wrote anything as good as the verses quoted above is either evidence of stupidity or willful perversity.
But then no poet writes for posterity except
accidentally, And the worst one can say of Yeats is that he was a real man of
letters. Real men of letters hardly ever produce immortal poetry, You could
hardly call Shakespeare a man of letters, Pope was, in a an oblique sort of
way, Not Swift.
Here the
ground of the judgement has disappeared. In what way did Swift and Pope differ in their approach
to writing, and how could their conditions compare with Shakespeare’s. What
exactly is a ‘Man of Letters’ if PK, who made his living from
journalism of one sort or another, wasn't a “Man of Letters”?
These are pub verdicts
which might sound good over the Guinness but don’t stand scrutiny in print.
He
finished by admitting his equivocation but he is certain of W.B.Y’s bad
influence on Irish writers. “A common passport is not a common ground”
I know I have written equivocally of Yeats and
yet I know that he was a nearly great poet.
He had compromised the ultimate integrity.”185
And what is the ultimate integrity we ask ourselves. And the statue refuses to respond:
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