A quick aside on Modernist poets

There is something annoying about ‘footnote’ poets: Eliot, Pound, Yeats; that is, Modernism packed with obscure references.

I recently read Yeats's 1919. To view the poem in a ‘classical’ way, in which a poem is strong if its vision is concentrated, economical and thematically and visually unified, then it’s a piss-poor poem. 1919 covers the ‘Black and Tan’ years following the end of World War I; Yeats chooses to drop in diffusely references to Herodotus and the Persians’ burning of the Acropolis with fin-de-siècle dancers with Plato and fourteenth-century shape-shifters. The overall first impression I’m left with is exactly the same as that drawn from a conversation with a drunk – senseless lurching.

But 1919 is a powerful poem. Its imagery is rich, even if so diffuse that it stretches our powers of analogy. What we're dealing with is a different type of poetry which requires a different rubric.

A man in his own secret meditation

Is lost amid the labyrinth he has made

In art or politics.