Yeats and Violence

Yeats & Violence is a book about how poetry--- seen through the instance of a single poem---seeks to make sense of a turbulent and dangerous world. Poetry must introduce order and shape where there is none, and also, in certain crucial cases, remain faithful to the disorder and shapelessness of experience. Many poems manage the first of these tasks; very few manage both. W. B. Yeats's `Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen' (written and first published in 1921) is one of them. It is a work which asks what happens when what we perceive to be civilization crumbles. What apocalyptic events wait in the wings? What are history's victims ---and executors---to do except mock and mourn?

Michael Wood investigates the six parts of the poem, connecting them to Yeats's broader poetic practice, his interest in the occult, and his changing vision of Irish nationalism; to the work of other poets; and to Irish and European history between 1916 and 1923

I want to say of `Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen' what Frank Kermode very well said of `In Memory of Major Robert Gregory': `It is a poem worthy of much painful reading'. Worthy of much pleasurable reading too, of course; but the pleasure is not a denial of the pain. This book is at heart a response not only to the work of W. B. Yeats, and not only to a particular poem by W. B. Yeats but to particular lines within that poem, lines that have never left my mind since I first read them, and that seemed to be asking me to do something about them that I was too lazy or troubled or dazzled to do. They come from the first and last sections of the work

Now days are dragon-ridden; nightmare Rides upon sleep; a drunken soldiery Can leave the mother, murdered at her door, To crawl in her own blood, and go scot-free...

But now wind drops, dust settles; and thereupon There lurches past, his great eyes without thought Under the shadow of stupid, straw-pale locks, That insolent fiend Robert Artisson To whom the lovelorn Lady Kyteler brought Bronzed peacock feathers, red combs of her cocks.

The recurrence of the word `now' has a great deal to do with the power of these lines. What's interesting about now is how it shifts in time; and how it is never without a then.

Michael Wood was born and educated in England but has worked for much of his life in the United States, first at Columbia University and then at Princeton. He has written books on Luis Bunuel, Franz Kafka, Vladimir Nabokov, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez, as well as The Road to Delphi, a study of the ancient and continuing allure of oracles. Among his other works are America in the Movies and Children of Silence. A fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, a member of the American Philosophical Society, and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, he is a regular contributor to the London Review of Books and The New York Review of Books. His most recent book is Literature and the Taste of Knowledge. He is the editor of Edward Said's posthumous Late Style: Music and Literature against the Grain.