Prologue: ‘Of the planet of which they were part’

Abstract

Our world today is a labyrinth: it is time that we found our way out. Among poets of the twentieth century, I take Yeats and Stevens to be our best guides. Their poems remind us, in distinct ways, of an inward covenant written in our hearts. Stevens saw that our unfaithful age had put the gods to flight, but he also felt the need to write, near the end of his life, ‘We say God and the imagination are one . . . ’ (SCP: 524). The gods and God have vanished into the imagination and its literature, and criticism must set about consulting with them. Introducing his work as an old man, Yeats invoked the Upanishads because he would seek, in ‘age-long memoried self’ (Au: 272), the living and the dead, to gain more than the world gives. This deathless spirit, unaffected by fear and to be distinguished from our everyday selves, is revealed in the style of a poem, but it is always within us. The poems explored in this book are each at the end of one kind of time that precedes the beginning in another. By engaging with the forms of these late works that follow different paths back through western literature, we find ourselves on the threshold of tradition that gathers in the future, and from within, as revelation.