Our Secret Discipline: Yeats and Lyric Form
By Helen Vendler
Belknap, 428 pp., illustrated, $35
In her preface to "Our Secret Discipline," Helen Vendler tells us that 50 years ago, as a graduate student at Harvard, she planned to write her dissertation on Yeats's poetry; then on reflection decided that, at age 22, she didn't know enough to write about a poet who kept going until age 73 (she wrote on Yeats's plays instead). So it is fitting that after producing substantial works about some of her favorite poets - Stevens, Herbert, Keats, and Shakespeare - as well as collections of essays (three of them during the past 10 years) she should return to her first love in a book whose value may exceed anything she has hitherto produced. It is the first exhaustive account of Yeats's lyric styles as they revealed themselves in 50 years of verse forms as "the necessary and skilled embodiment of the poet's moral urgency."
Vendler is the ideal close reader and listener to undertake the very large task of coming to terms with Yeats's poetry. Over the years that poetry has been written about by a good many close readers like William Empson and Yvor Winters, Hugh Kenner and Donald Davie, but it is surprising how relatively little they considered matters of verse technique. The great merit of Vendler's approach is that she never rests content with merely identifying and describing Yeats's formal choices but goes on to consider how such forms are employed in the service of moral and human content.
Rather than moving chronologically through the work, from Yeats's early lyrics to "Cuchulain Comforted" and "The Black Tower," she proceeds in a more indirect manner, dividing poems up among various rhythmic and stanzaic categories. Her opening chapter selects three poems from different stages of Yeats's career, each of which is relatively clear in speech and does not depend for its comprehension on any esoteric knowledge, as do many of the visionary ones. "An Irish Airman Foresees His Death," "Easter 1916," and "After Long Silence" are poems that any reader would agree show Yeats at his finest and need no special pleading or "keys" to unlock their beauties. With "After Long Silence" Vendler has recourse, as she does at other places in the book, to Yeats's manuscripts, by way of helping us to follow "the poet's creative thinking as it motivates the evolution of the poem." As for "Easter 1916," which Harold Bloom once found was, in its clarity, uncharacteristic of Yeats, Vendler finely brings out its complicated clarity, but also points out something about the poem that I, at least, had never noticed: that the date of the Easter rebellion, April 24, 1916, is encoded in the structure of those four stanzas (April is the fourth month), with their alternate line groupings of 16, 24, 16, 24. "Easter 1916" returns in the chapter titled "The Nationalist Measure," about poems in trimeter quatrains. Vendler emphasizes the "nervous" rapidity of the poem's trimeter by rewriting it - an exercise she often practices as a heuristic device - in pentameters whose "stately breadth" is inappropriate for the lively and quick step of the poem as Yeats wrote it. She is intrepid and only occasionally over-ingenious, not only in rewriting poems to establish the rightness of Yeats's choice, but in breaking them up by italicizing words to bring out how they cultivate "magical, non-rational, non-etymological relations" among themselves.
Her dedication, announced in the preface, to write a book "taxonomically focused on Yeats's lyric style" is scrupulously borne out in her appendices to some chapters that further classify and enumerate poems - such as the ones in trimeter quatrains, which she lists in chronological order and on whose special features she provides notes. She is fond of doing graphic diagrams so as to further highlight poetic taxonomies: At times her commentary can be overwhelming, as it was for me in a long chapter on Yeats's ballads and another one on his "Supernatural Songs," poems of his with which I have the most difficulty. But the book rises to full majesty in a chapter ("The Renaissance Aura") on Yeats's poems in ottava rima, the rhymed pentameter stanzas of which (abababcc) imitate "lofty song." (One of Vendler's students called it Yeats's "senatorial" form.) The song can be heard thrillingly in "Sailing to Byzantium," "The Statues," "The Circus Animals' Desertion," and - most grandly and compellingly - in "Among School Children," a "philosophical poem for everyone," as she calls it. Summing up the ottava rima form, she writes that its "Renaissance associations" are "brought forcibly into modernity by Yeats's modifications of its traditional architectonics, its diction, and its 'flow.' . . . He has removed the genre from a chiefly descriptive or speculative function, and made it sympathetic to intellectual and emotional autobiography." For her, as for this reader, "Among School Children" and the 15 other ottava rima poems are "the most accomplished chapter in the history of Yeats's styles."
As someone who has taught Yeats's poetry for decades, I took this book personally and was shocked to see, even after repeated readings of them aloud, talking and writing about them, how much I had missed in the technical effects that lie at the very heart of Yeats's aesthetic and human accomplishment. As T. S. Eliot once remarked, we cannot say where technique begins or where it ends. Readers who have assumed they were familiar, even intimate, with his body of lyric verse will read Vendler's pages and find their eyes have been opened, in Hart Crane's words, to "new thresholds, new anatomies."
William H. Pritchard is professor of English at Amherst College. His most recent book is "Updike: America's Man of Letters."
