marigold
Reptile Researcher
Posts: 22
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Post by marigold on Jul 17, 2022 21:09:27 GMT -5
“The room just seems to be illumined. Knowledge of life ebbs from the god’s mind. Creation mourns a friend.” - James Merrill
Welcome to the second gathering of the Hyacinth Society where each week we read romantic literature that is in some way grounded in fin de siecle culture.
This week we read W.B. Yeats’ early essay “the Autumn of the Flesh”. Throughout his career, Yeats had a habit of setting down different “first principles” that would explain where he was trying to venture aesthetically and philosophically. While this would be far from his final time trying to dictate the direction of his project, it is a fascinating time to look in on him and sheds light on our own project of looking at the literature of the “Decadents” and things relevant to them. If Roxy is there and has something to say about the piece I’ll be glad to read it and bounce off of that. If not, I’ll post my own thoughts in a little while.
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marigold
Reptile Researcher
Posts: 22
Likes: 4
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Post by marigold on Jul 17, 2022 23:24:44 GMT -5
From the beginning of his career, Yeats was deeply influenced by Wilde. And in this early work we essentially have Wildean prophecy shorn of its paradoxical plumage. He is talking of a poetry which leaves the phenomenal world behind for the land of pure Imagination. He offers a brief genealogy of art that starts with Homer and makes of modernity a series of sensory cataloguers. He talks about the small group of people who are leaving rationality and the sensory behind in favor of essences and interiority.
This stance would never be abandoned, yet the rhetoric of it would flip to its opposite and back a number of times in Yeats’ career. In fact, at the very beginning of the essay we are told that this oratory is the result of such a flip. He speaks of how he used to only love descriptive and declamatory books. It should be noted that this flip is not an abandonment of fundamental principles on the part of Yeats, but rather the turning of cogs in a complex process of Becoming which could be thought of as the “daimonic”. The daimon, or more broadly speaking, the “Other Self” is a key component of Yeatsian thought and biography. He was fundamentally concerned with the full integration of the self by the embracing of one’s opposite. His concept of his own actual daimon (the ancient idea for a kind of intermediary between humans and gods which give poets and prophets their inspiration) was the spirit of a dead man who had an opposite personality and life to Yeats who he communicated with sometimes through automatic writing. It should also be carefully noted that Yeats was skeptical about this process of communication, much more so than is usually noted even by literary historians. He used it as a form of imaginative inspiration and as a way of delving into his unconscious.
All of this is to say that while Yeats would meet Pound about 10 years after the writing of this essay and become influenced by his Modernism project of hard edges and surfaces, that he never abandoned the essential devotion to Imagination in the high sense. All of his flips and counter flips were daimonic enfoldings- steps on the same path of bringing everything into his work that he needed to construct his interior landscapes. His life was a continuous art of Becoming and to enter a study of his art is to follow the road to the Other World.
It’s a wonderful essay which introduces us to a lot of concepts and figures we will be focusing on in coming months. He read the aesthetes and decadents and was engaging with them profoundly here. He dropped the stereotypical aspects of their character which reactionaries have always objected to and is focusing on their visionary aspect: the return of the full imagination.
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marigold
Reptile Researcher
Posts: 22
Likes: 4
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Post by marigold on Jul 18, 2022 1:38:37 GMT -5
Alright, I am going to consider this thread closed.
We’ll convene next Sunday at 7 pm PST. Private message me on here if you want to participate and I’ll send you the next work we will be covering. It will be another essay. This one a bit longer and somewhat more difficult. It will also be from earlier in history. Now that we’ve had some aesthetic grounding we will be going back and proceeding in a slightly more systematic way through the era.
Best wishes,
Diggory Deathshead
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Post by Isadora Is a Door on Jul 18, 2022 1:45:26 GMT -5
Hiya Cinth
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Post by twigz on Jul 18, 2022 3:21:59 GMT -5
idk if 667 is the right forum for your essay publications lol
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Post by the panopticountolaf on Jul 18, 2022 6:55:33 GMT -5
why did you only give folks four hours to meet 😭
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marigold
Reptile Researcher
Posts: 22
Likes: 4
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Post by marigold on Jul 18, 2022 8:34:48 GMT -5
idk if 667 is the right forum for your essay publications lol It’s the perfect place for it.
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Post by R. on Jul 18, 2022 9:35:29 GMT -5
You have my most sincere apologies for not participating, as someone fairly new to this form of literature I considered myself unqualified to comment on a piece of literary criticism regarding it. I would however like to receive the next text.
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