Preface

"Have you forgotten, that a poem is not a text?"

A poem is so easily reduced in the process of analysis that I have chosen to put the two poems upon which I will base my discussion first. I try to work with each of these two poems in full, not imposing ideas on the text but drawing them from it, so that I will be able to validate my statements before I come to the point of making them. I aim to make the terms of my reading convey an adequate sense of direction so that the introduction of the term "symbol" into the comparative section comes as no surprise.

These poems have been read in certain terms, and these terms are necessarily artificial. But once a poem is given over to a reading, that reading is not artificial if it is anchored in the text. The contradiction between 'reading' and 'text' cannot be entirely resolved. How can a reading be true to a text, and, more specifically, is "my" reading true to these poems?

I am interested in the more conscious process of writing, and how it relates to the form that writing takes at a certain point in time (history). This relies on several variables, which determine the questions that I ask of the text; the relationship, for the writer, of language to reality, which 1) is a question of the origin and status of language, 2) may be related to the religious attitudes of the age, and 3) influences his or her use of language above all in creative writing; a question therefore which is not specific to a single period of art, but which does characterize that period.

The answers I want to convey, and their implications, are concerned with the internalization of reference and the internal tension and quality of reality that constitutes symbol. The relation of a form of literature to an age in a place (Europe) is the relation between two sign systems--a parallel relationship, analogical and form-giving, unlike the relationship between poetry and reality, which is a constant issue . Therefore I try to distinguish in my discussion and in my terminology what defines art and what defines modern art.

In working out a theoretical comparison, I propose that Baudelaire and Yeats present a valid historical comparison despite the half-century that separates them. During that half century, French culture changed more quickly toward that of a modern society; and, although ideas did not necessarily flow from France into England, pressures were brought to bear on English society which forced it into an intellectual turmoil which France had suffered earlier in the century. The same succession of romantic, decadent, symbolist and modern writers appeared in each country; Baudelaire and Yeats anticipated the Symbolist (Imagist) movements in their respective countries. Arthur Symons' book, The Symbolist Movement in Literature , provided the most direct contact that Yeats had with the French symbolists, but it was Yeats (the poet) who taught Symons (the scholar). The direct influence bears little importance in comparison with the indirect influences, which brought two poets, so widely separated, to evolve a similar poetic stance.