The Yeats Journal of Korea/ 한국 예이츠 저널 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.14354/yjk.2018.55.

179
Vol. 55 (2018): 179-189

The Poetic Self in the Poetry of W. B. Yeats

and T. S. Eliot
Cheolhee Lee

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Abstract: This essay looks into the poetic self as realized in Yeats’s and Eliot’s
poems. Both poets want to swerve from the present condition/ status. But there is a
difference between them: Yeats’s poetic self wants to be liberated from our present
being while Eliot’s hopes to confronts God by negating “self.” In general Yeats tends
to depend on the descriptions of the natural world while Eliot deals with the
abstractive ideas.
Key words: the present, freeing from the present, Yeats, Eliot, poetic self.
Author: Cheolhee Lee teaches in the Department of English, Gunsan University in Korea.
E-mail: cheolheewise@naver.com
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제목: 예이츠와 엘리엇의 시에서 시적 자아 탐색하기

우리말 요약: 번 연구의 주된 목적은 예이츠와 엘리엇의 시적 자아가 추구하는 최종
목적(방향)을 찾아보는 것이다. 그 목적에서의 차이를 발견함으로써 시적 자아의 이상
향을 찾을 수 있다는 것이 본 연구의 장점이다. 그 결과 예이츠는 시적 자아의 “개인
적 해방”을 추구하는가 하면 엘리엇의 경우 “자아비우기”를 통해 절대자 수용을 강조
한다는 점을 알 수 있었다.
주제어: 현재, 현재로부터의 해방, W. B. 예이츠, T. S. 엘리엇, 시적 자아
저자: 이철희는 군산대학교 영문과에서 가르치고 있다.
____________________________________

I. Introduction

T his paper is to study Yeats’s and Eliot’s poetic self in their poems,
focusing on the differences between them. As many researches recognize it,
both poets seem to have different temperaments, which “differed as much as
180 Cheolhee Lee

their poetic idioms, and so did their underlying values and assumptions”
(Patke 16). But it may be worthwhile to study it more precisely, investigating
how the poetic self in each poet really performs in their poetry. It is certain
that the poetic self in their works offers very different perspectives. The way
they express their wishes is different, one calling himself the last Romantic
and the other being a pioneer in Modernism. Anyhow both have swerved
from the present, because they are not satisfied with it. This paper studies
how and what the poetic self is expressing in their poems in order to achieve
the super-reality.

II. The Aspects of the Poetic Self in Yeats and Eliot

Eliot’s poetic self is relatively simple, compared with Yeats’s, if we see

only a few aspects. As Christian poet Eliot demands self-denial to rediscover
human essential/ true lives, and asks us to return to God and God’s World.
The best way to do so is a “negative way”: the poetic self demands to
negate the present or remove selfishness in the present. This implies that the
present could never satisfy our lives, and Eliot asks man to seek for
something which they need to be dependant on, which is being embodied in
his poems, especially in Four Quartets. But it seems difficult to attain that
condition: you could, however, achieve it by way of ignorance, dispossession,
and a new way you are not in, as illustrated in his poem:

In order to arrive at what you don’t know

You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance.
In order to possess what you do not possess
You must go by the way of dispossession.
In order to arrive at what you are not
You must go through the way in which you are not. (CPP 181)
 The Poetic Self in the Poetry of W. B. Yeats and T. S. Eliot 181

This seems very paradoxical and confusing, but it reflects modern reality.
Leaving all things behind to face the Absolute: it is the first requisite. Only
following an “altogether negative way,” our life could redeem our
truthfulness. One of them is to abandon the present being in order to get into
another world or to absolutely choose other ways. The major way is through
self-denial; there is no other way. The real method to rediscover our present
self is paradoxically by way of abandoning our inner/ hidden selves, which is
not like our present way.
But “although the Word (Logos) is common to all, most people [today]
live as if each of them had a private intelligence of his own” (Quinn 14).
This is how Eliot diagnoses modern life, in his Four Quartets. After all, man
regards his own thoughts and judgements as the best, rejecting anything that
controls him and neglecting God and His principle of the universe. The result
is that forgetting self he completely negates the present itself, and constantly
seeks for reality:

We must be still and still moving

Into another intensity
For a further union, a deeper communion
Through the dark cold and the empty desolation. (CPP 183)

“Still and still” is an emphasis, meaning the continuity of human action to

seek a human value. And “self-surrender” is the core of this action, and it is
essential for man. To see the thing that is invisible to man is the first
prerequisite. Being absolutely alone, man should “fare forward” (“Dry
Salvages” III), resulting in communion with God. To “fare forward” implies
incessantly making an effort solely dependant on God’s will. In that process,
private judgements should be excluded, as they constantly change. It means
that human action and thought always wave losing the center. By depending
182 Cheolhee Lee

on God’s thoughts and intentions, man could achieve “wholeness,” a union

with God or the Absolute:

The reconciliation of opposites is as fundamental to Eliot as it was to

Heraclitus. . . . . Such spiritual release and reconciliation are the chief
reality for which he strives in a world that has seemed to him increasingly
threatened with new dark ages. (Young 171)

Conciliation is the state, in which man can not confront the Absolute or God;
but by giving the poetic self up, he can meet the Absolute or God, resulting
in a ‘reconciliation.’ By way of “the reconciliation of opposites” we could
arrive at the chief reality, or the super-reality.

On the other hand, Yeats’s poetic self is more complicated. Speaking of

Yeats’s poetic self, Soud claims that there are two kinds of poetic self, and
between them is liberation (38). Yeats means that the individual self is “priviate”
and “real.” Yeats’s poetic self wants to be liberated from all things, which
corresponds with Eliot’s final destination. For Yeats, through individual and real
self, “liberation” comes. Compared with Eliot’s poetic self, Yeats’s is “the
sensible impression of the free mind” (Cowell 27). Yeats demands “individual
liberation,” while Eliot suggests that we should meet God through freeing poetic
self; Yeats’s self is achieved as illustrated in “Sailing to Byzantium”:

O sages standing in God’s holy fire

As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing-masters of my soul.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity. (VP 408)
 The Poetic Self in the Poetry of W. B. Yeats and T. S. Eliot 183

Individual self isn’t satisfied with the present, as in Eliot. Real self is to try
to be harmonious with God’s holy fire. Yeats’s poetic self wants to deviate
from the present conditions as Eliot hopes to be away from the present and
get into God’s world. In Yeats’s case, as Matthew diagnoses it, “the speaker
yearns to be gathered into ‘the artifice of eternity” (131). That is, the
speaker’s mind and soul are fused into an object (Byzantium). In short, the
“things and I are the One,” Like Eliot, Yeats seeks for “eternity.” Yeats’s
poetic self, however, wants to be in “Byzantium.” What the speaker really
wants is, through Byzantium, to reach ‘liberation,’ meaning “linking emotion
and desire with incarnation” (Ryan 3). As to incarnation, Yeats and Eliot
differ: Yeats, through individual and real self, could attain ‘liberation’ whereas
Eliot, through getting rid of poetic self, gets to a new stage. Though Yeats’s
poetic self first gives up self (which is dissatisfied with the present), it,
through an object, could attain another self of intensity. Yeats’s poetic self
identifies with Byzantium. The self wants to be an artifact, a golden bird,
and to be freed from his present self, getting into another world, such as “the
pristine and preserved world” (Kimball 216). Soud also says that “Yeats, by
purifying ‘the individual self’, could attain ‘a purified personality’” (‘real
self’) (38). Individual self must get to the liberation. One of the ways for
Yeats to get liberated is:

Yeats’s “tragic joy” that is, that “the sublime transforms the painful spetacle
of destruction and death into a joyful assertion of human freedom and
transcendence” (Ramazani 163)

Through “tragic joy,” a kind of self-releasing, Yeats’s poetic self is

sublimated into completely new self. His poetic self‘s final destination is to
become another thing through liberation, as it is unsatisfied with the present
he faces. Eliot also hopes to deviate from the present, to be one with God.
184 Cheolhee Lee

The moment Eliot’s poetic self is liberated, it becomes one with God; Yeats’s
poetic self, through the object (Byzantium), is transformed into another
sublimation, or “dramatic self-liberation” (Jooseong Kim 77). Unterecker says
this:

The idea that perfection, complete fulfilment, can be reached and held only
for a moment is not only Yeats’s. He merely found a new image for it, he
called it the point where the gyre (the movement of human life) becomes a
sphere-in the same way as for Eliot it is the point of intersection of the
temporal with the timeless. (33)

Unterecker’s evaluation is very precise. As contemporary poets, Yeats and

Eliot are interested in the invisible world. Both want to swerve from the
present and be absorbed into something that we do not know definitely. Both
are interested in “freedom” of human soul. The difference may be that for
Yeats it is the freedom of mind, while for Eliot it is an encounter with God.

The Unity of Being is a key concept for Yeats, and it is as much

important to Eliot. Yeats wants to unify the opposites of all things. And Eliot
says that man should be in harmony with God, as all things in the universe
change except God. According to Eliot, there is no thing to be constant. Both
poets seek for points when selves are freed from this world. It is achieved
when the poet, Yeats, arrives at Byzantium, as Arkins describes:

Because Byzantium, uniquely exemplifies Yeats’s cherished concept of Unity

of Being, so that in the poem “Sailing to Byzantium” the aged protagonist
achieves temporal unity by leaving Ireland to journey to Byzantium and in
the poem ‘Byzantium’ he achieves eternal unity when dolphins carry the
souls of the dead over the sensual seas to the mosaic pavement of
Byzantium and their purifying flames. (11)
 The Poetic Self in the Poetry of W. B. Yeats and T. S. Eliot 185

Here, Yeats finds his inner wish at Byzantium, as Eliot does at Burnt Norton,
East Coker, Dry Salvages, Little Gidding. The difference between the two
poets is Yeats’s liberation of poetic self and Eliot’s meeting with the
Absolute.
Similarly, Eliot uses the image of “dance”:

There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.

I can only say, there we have been: but I cannot say where
And I cannot, how long, for that is to place it in time. (CPP 173)

Obviously, the speaker and God are in union, though we can’t describe that
moment precisely in human time. Human’s time is classified as three kinds:
past, present, and future, and God’s time is eternal. Eliot describes human
time as “anxious worried women/ Lying awake, calculating the future,/ trying
to unweave, unwind, unravel/ And piece together the past and the future”
(CPP 185).
Men dancing are harmonized with the absolute/ God.: it’s “the very point
of intersection of the temporal with the timeless,” liberating man’s inner and
hidden greed. Eliot demands men to abandon their love and hope (CPP 180).

Yeats, however, says this:

Far-off, most secret, and inviolate Rose,

Enfold me in my hour of hours; where those
Who sought thee in the Holy Sepulchre,
Or in the wine-vat, dwell beyond the stir
And tumult of defeated dreams. (VP 160)

Eternity is described as “hour of hours,” “Holy,” “defeated.” We can see the

Rose in this world, but it transcends our life. Rose is freed from both the
186 Cheolhee Lee

individual self and the real self. And it symbolizes eternity as in Eliot’s
“Rose Garden”(CPP 171). But Yeats grapples with change:

Another emblem there! That stormy white

But seems a concentration of the sky;
And, like the soul, it sails into the sight
And in the morning’s gone, no man knows why;
And is so lovely that it sets to right
What knowledge or its lack had set awry,
So arrogantly pure, a child might think
It can be murdered with a spot of ink. (VP 490)

It talks about “the idea of change and mutability” (Smith 55). All things in
the universe are in constant flux. The speaker’s inner self wishes that the
swan and self could communicate with each other, self being absorbed in a
swan (object). The speaker assimilates with the object (swan), freeing himself
from his inner greed. Stallworthy comments: “The insomniac artist imagines
himself in a symbolic landscape” (86). With the speaker’s self absorbed in an
atmosphere, the poetic self becomes one with the swan “avoiding abstract
jargon in favour of metaphor and personification” (Parkinson 9), so he longs
to be in harmony with it. The opposite of the poetic self is the swans, as
“the swans, still there, unwearied still, seem untouched by, impervious to the
temporal world” (Regueiro 101). Yeats’s “swans” and “Byzantium” correspond
with Eliot’s “dancing.” It is eternity, fixity contrasting with human conditions
and the world.
“Yeats is attempting to balance natural elements with supernatural ones”
(Foley 11). Eliot says that modern man is only interested in the visible thing,
neglecting the unseen world. “Yeats’s intention is not Byzantium but new
Byzantium” (Ellmann 149). The object (a natural thing) is altogether
transformed into another world. Dyson comments on Yeats’s and Eliot’s self:
 The Poetic Self in the Poetry of W. B. Yeats and T. S. Eliot 187

Both poets were, and remained, religious-which indicates that the recognition
of possible evasion and complacency was in no sense, for either, a final
word. Both believed in ‘tradition’ not only as a kind of monument of the
past-a remarkable yet dusty museum-but as a dynamic concept, interwoven
in cultural, and perhaps religious continuity, beyond the ‘individual self.’
(Dyson 50)

III. Conclusion

Most interesting is that both Yeats and Eliot swerve from the present they
face. Reality does not satisfy their poetic selves. However, there is a
difference in them: Yeats’s poetic self, having been transformed, arrives at
another self or reality: it does not deny the new reality; Eliot, leaving reality
behind, reaches into another perfect being, God. Although both having begun
with “self-liberation” reach into two different destinations in their poetry.

Works cited

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 The Poetic Self in the Poetry of W. B. Yeats and T. S. Eliot 189

Manuscript peer-review process:

receipt acknowledged: 26 Mar. 2018.
peer-reviewed: 2 Apr. 2018.
revision received: 16 Apr. 2018.
publication approved: 23 Apr. 2018.