On the Place on Excrement

Abstract

Similarly I found W. B. Yeats, another modern poet celebrated by the New Critics as an exponent of the worldless autotelic poem, to be profoundly committed to this finite world—and to the related cause of Irish independence from British colonial rule. This was not only the case with Yeats’s late poems, where it is apparent; it is also the case with the poems emanating from his “Phases of the Moon,” system, which, in reading them contrapuntally, I found to be a device intended paradoxically to undermine the Modernist obsession with myth by rendering it inoperative. A closer reading than that of the New Critics was even true of “Sailing to Byzantium,” the “autotelic poem” par excellence, where the poet, in the very act of begging to be taken into the “artifice of eternity,” celebrates the dying body to which he is inexorably attached.