'The Old Poet Need Not Be the Old Fogey'

In 1940, Louise Bogan writes of Yeats not long after the poet's death:

“[P]oets use words, and with words, thoughts and opinions are apt to leak in. And if they are childish opinions, or if the thoughts have stiffened, are mawkish or reactionary, the last poems become ridiculous and unreadable in a later period. Aging Wordsworth and Browning did not do the concept of the old poet as sage any good turn, but Hardy and Yeats have again proved that the old poet need not be the old fogey or the old fool.”

The book at hand is Last Poems and Plays, and she calls its poems “the most naked and terrible he ever wrote.’ These would include “The Circus Animals’ Desertion,”which I remember reading aloud to myself in my bedroom when I was high school:

“Those masterful images because complete

Grew in pure mind but out of what began?

A mound of refuse or the sweepings of a street,

Old kettles, old bottles, and a broken can,

Old iron, old bones, old rags, that raving slut

Who keeps the till. Now that my ladder’s gone

I must lie down where all the ladders start

In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.”

Bogan writes of these late poems: “They call up terror; they do not soothe; they shed cold and ruthless light on man, his motives, and his works; and they keep repeating the unpalatable truth that life is horror and failure as well as joy and accomplishment, that patterns superimposed on man cannot reach his devious and cruel heart.”

Twenty-five years ago this week I interviewed William Murphy, a Yeats scholar at Union College in Schenectady, N.Y. He had just published Family Secrets (Syracuse University Press), in which he takes on the entire Yeats clan. Sixteen years earlier he had published Prodigal Father, a biography of John Butler Yeats, the painter, raconteur and father of the poet. By the time I met with him, Murphy was fed up with the whole bunch and described W.B. Yeats’ obsessions with mysticism and the occult as “silly.” Murphy told me:

“Willie was not always an easy fellow to get along with. He was a very arrogant and abrasive character. Nobody seemed to like him.”

The Yeats poems I still enjoy are in the later volumes, but Bogan’s words about the late-life work of many poets are true to my experience of reading them. I write all of this because I am about to read Geoffrey Hill’s first posthumously published volume, The Book of Baruch by the Gnostic Justin (Oxford University Press, 2019), and I’m hoping Bogan is wrong.