Grief and Meter

Elegies for Poets after Auden

Sally Connolly

• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Year: 2016
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Critique littéraire nord-américaine
• eBook ISBN:
  9780813938653

The elegizing of poets is one of the oldest and most enduring traditions in English poetry. Many of the most influential and best-known poems in the language—such as Milton's "Lycidas," Shelley's "Adonais," and Auden's "In Memory of W. B. Yeats"—are elegies for poets.

In Grief and Meter, Sally Connolly offers the first book to focus on these poems and the role they play as a specific subgenre of elegy, establishing a genealogy of poetry that traces the dynamics of influence and inheritance in twentieth- and twenty-first-century poetry. She identifies a distinctive and significant Anglo-American line of descent that resonates in these poems, with British poets often elegizing American ones, yet rarely the other way around. Further, she reveals how these poems function as a means of mediating, effecting, and tracing transatlantic poetic exchanges.

The author frames elegies for poets as a chain of commemoration and inheritance, each link independent, but when seen as part of the "golden chain," signifying a larger purpose and having a correspondingly greater strength. Grief and Meter provides a compelling account of how and why these poems are imbued with such power and significance.

1

W. H. AUDEN

Criticism & Celebration

“In Memory of W. B. Yeats” has been the touchstone genealogical elegy of the twentieth century and beyond. For the purposes of this study, Auden is vital since his great elegiac innovation, the way in which he modifies, revises, and particularizes the form in the two poems considered here—“In Memory of W. B. Yeats” and “The Cave of Making”—is accomplished by seizing on the very idea of poïesis itself. These poems make the case for the craft of poetry as an act of making. This making subsumes the poet like the dyer’s hand, all the while foregrounding the aesthetic autonomy of the work, which can then endure the poet’s death untainted by the life. This chapter thus demonstrates that it is this formal and aesthetic autonomy that is the saving grace of poetry in both these poems, enabling Auden to divorce the messy and often unseemly lives and opinions of the makers from their acts of making.

Auden underscores the notion of the poem as a made thing in “In Memory of W. B. Yeats” by foregrounding the versus of inherited forms through the rigid beat of the trochaic tetrameter that hammers throughout the quatrains of the final section (“Earth receive an honoured guest / William Yeats is laid to rest,” 42–43). These stanzas, of course, metrically echo both the abba quatrains of the first part of Shakespeare’s “The Phoenix and the Turtle” and the aabb quatrains of Blake’s “The Tyger,” but Auden transmutes this shape into something especially elegiac and authoritative. Shakespeare’s imperative “Let” (“Let the bird of loudest lay,” 1; “Let the priest in surplice white,” 13) becomes an allowance accorded specifically to poetry and poets (“Let the Irish vessel lie / Emptied of its poetry,” 44–45; “Let the healing fountain [that is, poetry] start,” 63). The solemn trochaic beat Auden establishes as an elegiac form in this poem pulses through twentieth-century genealogical elegy, and many of those that follow in this Yeatsian line of descent adopt the form not only as a way of encoding the repetition and return of versus but also as a shorthand for poetic indebtedness. A series of genealogical elegies formally modeled upon Auden’s poem—including Brodsky’s “Elegy for T. S. Eliot,” Heaney’s “Audenesque” (for Joseph Brodsky), and John Matthias’s “Elegy for Seamus Heaney”—form the spine of this present study.

By divorcing the maker from the made in this elegy, Auden considerably expands the remit of the genre and licenses those elegists who follow him to criticize as well as celebrate the dead poet. At the end of the poem, Auden asserts that Yeats’s most valuable gift was to teach his successors “how to praise” (65), and this chapter shows how Auden in turn teaches those elegists after him how to criticize a dead poet constructively. In so doing, he creates one of the most influential genealogical elegies since “Lycidas” and establishes some of the form’s key preoccupations and concerns for the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

“In Memory of W. B. Yeats”

In his commonplace book A Certain World (1970), Auden observes that “poets seem to be more generally successful at writing elegies than any other literary genre. Indeed, the only elegy I know of which seems to me a failure is ‘Adonais.’ ”¹ This “failure” is elucidated by Auden in “Yeats as an Example,” in which he argues that Yeats’s greatest achievement was to transmute the “occasional poem” from “an official performance of impersonal virtuosity or a trivial vers de société” into “a serious reflective poem of at once personal and public interest” (193).² Comparing Yeats’s elegy “In Memory of Major Robert Gregory” (1918) to Shelley’s “Adonais,” Auden argues that the former “never loses the personal note of a man speaking about his personal friends in a particular setting” even as “at the same time the occasion and the characters acquire a symbolic public significance,” whereas in the latter, “both Shelley and Keats disappear as people” (193). Auden thus deems “Adonais” to have failed in its poetic purpose both because the dead poet disappears twice, first in death itself and then again behind the elegy’s devices and didacticism, and because the living poet is subsumed by his own act of commemoration. Even though the first line of Auden’s own “In Memory of W. B. Yeats” refers not to the poet’s death but to how he “disappeared in the dead of winter,” Auden here defines Yeats’s greatest poetic achievement as his resistance to the mutual disappearance of the elegized and the elegist.

Sacks pinpoints Yeats’s “In Memory of Major Robert Gregory” as the early-twentieth-century elegy that first definitively “dispensed with many of the comforting fictions of the genre,”³ and it is this that ultimately made Auden’s critical and appraising poem for Yeats possible. In his elegy for Gregory, Yeats plays with our elegiac expectations by adhering to many generic conventions even as he rejects the consolatory function such conventions had traditionally served.⁴ Adopting the octet stanza form and aabbcddc rhyme of Abraham Cowley’s seventeenth-century elegy “On the Death of Mr. William Hervey” (1656), the poem is structured around the traditional elegiac conceit of the procession of mourners paying obeisance to Gregory’s bier, though in the first six stanzas it inverts the convention by summoning a procession of Gregory’s fellow dead whom the reader ought to mourn. Only in the final stanzas does Yeats approach the figure of Gregory in the traditional elegiac mode, defining him by his occupations (“Soldier, scholar, horseman” [Variorum Edition, 78, 86]) and describing him as destined for an early death: “What made us dream that he could comb grey hair?” (88). In the twelfth and final stanza, however, the poem ruptures as Yeats’s grief can no longer be formalized, truncating the poem like the life it ostensibly celebrates. In the opening lines of the stanza it appears that grief no longer sets the elegiac process in motion, but vice versa: the poet relies upon the elegiac conceit of the pathetically fallacious “bitter wind” (89) rattling the shutter to prompt his remembrance and to bring “to mind” (90) episodes he can recall in the proper elegiac fashion with “some appropriate commentary on each” (93). Yet it quickly becomes clear that Yeats does not need the elegiac element to recall and re-create Gregory: the young man is still very much in his mind, and “but a thought / Of that late death took all my heart for speech” (95–96), silencing the poet and robbing him of any desire for vocalization even as it prompts him to a consummate act of speech. The dead now seem all too close and, Yeats suggests, cannot be constrained by the depersonalizing conventions of consolation.

Another of Yeats’s poems, however, has had perhaps an even more profound elegiac influence on his successors: “Under Ben Bulben” (Variorum Edition, 636–40), titled after the spot in Ireland where Yeats wished to be buried. Though not an elegy occasioned by the death of another, this late poem functions as a preemptive self-elegy similar to Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” in which Yeats attempts to control his posthumous influence on and critical reception by future generations by giving instructions to his inheritors from beyond the grave:

Irish Poets learn your trade,

Sing whatever is well made,

Scorn the sort now growing up

All out of shape from toe to top,

Their unremembering hearts and heads

Base-born products of base beds. (68–73)

Yeats closes his self-designed poetic sepulcher by inscribing an anti–sta viator that would later become his own epitaph: “Cast a cold eye / On life, on death. / Horseman, pass by!” (92–94). As we shall see, Yeats’s contingent and ambivalent elegy for Gregory (also, we should note, characterized as a “horseman”) and his self-elegy in “Under Ben Bulben” created the elegiac agenda that Auden was to address in his own poem for the dead Yeats.⁵ Though not in quatrain form, Yeats’s thudding tetrameter and couplet rhymes are undoubtedly echoed by Auden in the third section of “In Memory of W. B. Yeats.” Perhaps the most pointed echo, however, is in the poetic sentiment about form rather than the verse form itself: Yeats commends the “well made” poem to his successors who must learn their “trade”—the craft of poetry—while scorning those “unremembering” ill-versed poets embracing free forms without an appreciation of that from which they had been freed.

As Auden would later note in “Yeats as an Example,” when a poet “reads a poem written by another, he is apt to be less concerned with what the latter actually accomplished by his poem than with the suggestions it throws out upon how he, the reader, may solve the poetic problems which confront him now” (187). That Yeats had already attempted to enshrine his reputation in an elegy of his own fashioning was only one of the “poetic problems” that the figure of Yeats posed for Auden as an elegist. A second was that Yeats’s right-wing politics were also deeply problematic for anyone seeking to address his legacy. In later years, Auden could joke in the final extended clerihew of Academic Graffiti (1971) that “To get the Last Poems of Yeats, / You need not mug up on dates; / All a reader requires / Is some knowledge of gyres / And the sort of people he hates.” But in 1939, the year of Yeats’s death and the eve of the Second World War, Yeats’s political views threatened to damage his reputation as a poet irreparably. Through his elegy, Auden would attempt to address these problems in the very form that Yeats had modified for the twentieth century and made available to his successors: that of the personal and yet symbolically significant elegy.

In early 1939, with Europe upon the cusp of war, Auden elected to leave Britain for America. His controversial departure was seen by many as a dereliction of duty to his country of birth, and in the summer of 1940 a member of Parliament, Sir Jocelyn Lucas, even went as far as to ask in Parliament if Auden might be ordered back and conscripted into the army. Two days after Auden sailed into New York Harbor on January 26, 1939, Yeats, at the age of seventy-three, died at the Hôtel Idéal Séjour in Roquebrune Cap Martin on the French Riviera, where he was buried far from his preordained spot in the Drumcliff graveyard under the shadow of Ben Bulben in County Sligo, Ireland. A few days later, Yeats’s “Under Ben Bulben” (though composed five months earlier) was first published in the Irish Times, followed a month later by Auden’s “In Memory of W. B. Yeats” in the New Republic.⁶ This version of Auden’s elegy does not contain the second of the poem’s later three sections, which Edward Mendelson speculates was composed at roughly the same time as “The Public v. the Late Mr. W. B. Yeats,” a critical appraisal of the dead poet’s greatness that Auden submitted to the Partisan Review on March 18.⁷ The poem first appeared in its tripartite form in the London Mercury in April 1939. The version discussed here was published in the Collected Shorter Poems, 1927–1957 in 1966.

“In Memory of W. B. Yeats” was the first poem that Auden wrote as he began his life in America, and it would initiate an elegiac frenzy that lasted for a year, during which he would go on to write poems for Voltaire (February 1939), Herman Melville (March 1939), the playwright Ernst Toller (May 1939), and Sigmund Freud (September 1939). One of the poem’s greatest achievements is the tension generated by the interplay of versus and poïesis throughout; for as strikingly original as Auden’s elegiac voice is, the poem’s originating power also draws its potency from earlier elegies for poets, in particular “Adonais,” the poem that Auden’s essay decries for its depersonalization of both the dead and the living poet. Despite Auden’s negative appraisal, his elegy for Yeats ultimately addresses the same concerns that Sharp attributes to Shelley’s elegy of Keats: “not so much the death of an individual but rather the advent . . . of reading as a cultural praxis, and the bearing this has on the identity and person of the author.”⁸

Nor do the apparent ironies end there. As Lipking contends, the opening section of “In Memory of W. B. Yeats” is notable for the “utterly un-Yeatsian way in which it commemorates Yeats,” as Auden chooses not to adopt the style, form, and tone of Yeats’s poetics,⁹ and in many ways evokes comparison to Shelley’s poem more than to those of Yeats. Auden’s elegy opens with a frost-bound landscape, like that of “Adonais,” although instead of a pastoral locus, Yeats’s death takes place in a frozen urban wasteland far from the mystical settings of the Irish poet’s poems. Auden immediately places Yeats not in the context of death, as “Adonais” does with Keats in its first line (“I weep for Adonais—he is dead!”), but rather in the far more modern context of loss and absence: “He disappeared in the dead of winter” (1). Indeed, the first death we read of in the poem is not that of the poet but of the “dying day” (4). In the first stanza of “Adonais,” time also dies, as the hour of Keats’s death is commanded by Shelley to tell of how “with me / Died Adonais” (6–7). In “Adonais,” Shelley claims that “Grief made the young Spring wild, and she threw down / Her kindling buds, as if she Autumn were” (136–37). The pathetic fallacy is updated in Auden’s elegy as he anthropomorphizes mechanical “instruments” that are able to “agree / The day of his death was a dark cold day” (5–6). Nature seems indifferent to the poet’s death, as “Far from his illness / The wolves ran on through the evergreen forests” (7–8); unlike the deciduous trees of Shelley’s spring, Auden’s evergreen woods will never shed their buds in imitation of autumn. Although Mendelson suggests that Auden’s wolves hark back to “the grim wolf with privy paw” (128) that symbolizes anti-Protestant forces in Milton’s “Lycidas,”¹⁰ Auden’s pack of wolves appears to owe far more to Shelley’s metaphorical transformation of Keats’s critics into “herded wolves, bold o...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 W. H. Auden: Criticism & Celebration
• 2 Joseph Brodsky: Passport & Calling Card
• 3 John Berryman: Consuming & Compelling
• 4 Robert Lowell: Genealogy & Portraiture
• 5 Seamus Heaney: Tangential Elegies & Dantean Encounter
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index