David Orr : Vendler’s Yeats

Review of Helen Vendler, Our Secret Discipline: Yeats and Lyric Form (Harvard University Press), at The NY Times (11.05.2008) :

W. B. Yeats is, of course, one of the Rightest Poets imaginable. Vendler’s new book, Our Secret Discipline: Yeats and Lyric Form (Harvard University Press, $35), is an attempt to explain, as she puts it, “the inner and outer formal choices Yeats made, the cultural significance his forms bore for him,” and “the way his forms ... became the material body of his thoughts and emotions.” That’s no small task: Yeats was a technician’s technician whose massive output is a blizzard of stanza shapes and metrical variations. Fortunately, Vendler relishes the nitty-gritty of douzains and dizains, and the result is a meticulous, enlightening and strangely flawed study that adds plenty to the Yeats canon. If you’re looking for a general introduction to the poet, this isn’t the book for you (it’s 425 pages and drier than chalk dust), but scholars will find years of material here. Vendler’s method is straightforward: each chapter takes up one of Yeats’s potential formal quandaries — the Byzantium poems, the sonnets, the sequences and so forth — and then attempts to determine why and how Yeats made the technical choices that he did, often with helpful reference to biographical or historical facts.

The results can be impressive. Vendler is especially persuasive when tracing the evolution of a poem; one of the book’s first studies is a detailed analysis of “After Long Silence” in which Vendler carefully walks us through Yeats’s development of the poem, in particular the lines “Unfriendly lamplight hid under its shade, / The curtains drawn upon unfriendly night.” She’s also very good at explaining what different forms meant to Yeats. In her discussion of the 12-poem sequence “Supernatural Songs,” for instance, Vendler notes that the sequence ends with a Shakespearean sonnet that seems at odds with the more primitive forms that precede it. But for Yeats, as she explains, the sonnet represents an ultimate refinement of artistic poise, making it the perfect vehicle to reflect the tension between ascetic life and sexual life that animates the entire sequence. It’s an intriguing, well-argued point.