[Joseph Fennie]

In recent discussions we’ve mentioned Yeats’ ideas of “true” art and his abhorrence for “popular” art. In his poem, “Upon a House Shaken by the Land Agitation”, he worries whether “true” art will ever be created again, writing, “How should the world be luckier if this house, / Where passion and precision have been one / Time out of mind, became too ruinous / To breed the lidless eye that loves the sun?” Here I think Yeats is possibly alluding to Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. Yeats is concerned that no one will ever again run out to witness the sun, since the middle class of Ireland is too concerned with “popular” art that is produced simply for the masses. This reflects the way in which Yeats holds the artist in the highest regard. Since Plato links the sun to The Good, Yeats links the artist who sees the sun to be the individual who has the insight to The Good. This section of the poem ultimately returns to Yeats’ belief of the “true” artist creating art out of passion and precision instead of something mass produced to please the people (Ireland’s middle class). What does the class think of this connection? Do you think that Yeats truly believed that the artist had an insight to The Good that Plato had explained many centuries ago?

[Devon Poniatowski]

The link to Platonic philosophy is really interesting! It seems to me that Yeats is looking down on the middle class that labors for security—content with the dull, artificial flame within the cave, not valorous enough to seek beyond the domain of learned protection. Yeats’s motif of the color grey also plays into this idea—modernity as a sun-less, (truth-less?) province. If Plato’s form of THE GOOD is the ultimate object of knowledge, it makes sense that Yeats is drawing on the cloistered mind of the poet/artist to conjure the notion of “truth” and passion.

Joe’s reading of “Upon a House” inspires me to consider this: the house in the poem may represent the “artistic essence”—built carefully, with dedication and toil. In its loneliness, it is threatened by the common strife of the Irish middle class (that also threatens the evolution of art in society). It seems plausible that Yeats would craft a metaphoric poem, which draws on the political conditions (land wars?), in relation to its “ruinous” affect on the artist and the notion of “The Good” in Irish society. We see this admission by Yeats in “To a Shade,” where he declares that the true artists of yore “had enough sorrow before death” and are “safer in the tomb.” This is Yeats’s resignation from modernity, as he encounters this realization: the society he is observing exists in a vacuum of ingenuous labor and “grey” reality.

• This reply was modified 12 years, 6 months ago by Devon Poniatowski.

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