Jonathan Janssen

March 10, 2010

ENG 564

Pawlowski

Hegelian Triadic Structure and the Poetry of Yeats, Pound and Eliot

Modernism, in its many forms, can be described as an epic

battle of ideas playing out on the stage of reality. As nations

freed themselves from centuries of oppressive rule, great debates

erupted worldwide as to what new forms of government would be

best to replace the antiquated monarchies that were on the

decline. The moment was much the same for art, especially

literature, with authors throwing off the shackles of previous

artistic conventions and entering a forum where artists

vehemently defend their aesthetic politics in order to shape the

art of the coming age. This situation could not be truer than in

the cases of the ‘holy trinity’ of modern poetry, W.B. Yeats,

Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot, who exemplify the modern ideal, not

only by breaking away from historical forms and taking an active

hand in shaping the next wave of poetry, but more importantly, by

integrating their life, politics and art into a single dynamic

force of change in the world.

When confronted with the aesthetic politics of the writers,

in their essays and in their poetry, it can be easy to see how

many of their ideas actually appear to oppose one another,

especially in the case of Yeats and Pound. This may seem strange,

given the tremendous impact the three poets had on modern poetry

as a group and the overwhelming enthusiasm and respect showed to

Yeats and Eliot by Pound. Looking deeper into their influences

reveals all three men were familiar with philosophy and

incorporated elements of Hegel in their thinking. Here lies a key

that can be useful in decoding how these poets were able to

balance their differences and change literary convention

together. In earlier models of thought before Hegel, when two

conflicting ideas resisted one another, they became locked in

static opposition, with neither side giving way. Hegel’s,

sometimes ‘organic’, view of reality offered an alternative

interaction between opposing forces through a concept he called

‘negation’ (Spenser and Krauze). During this period of negation,

both opposing ideas scrutinize one another closely and force one

another to reveal their insufficiencies and internal stresses. By

breaking each other down, the two ideas form a more intimate and

complex rapport, exploring difference, opposition, reflection and

relation in a more dynamic way (Spenser and Krauze). Through this

process, the two ideas become more mutable and able to move

toward a “whole”, creating a new idea that is a synthesis of the

previous ideas.

This triadic structure described by Hegel can be seen being

played out in the works and ideas of the three Modernist poets.

Yeats and Pound take the role of oppositional forces within the

movement of Modernism, approaching it from different places --

Yeats being tied strongly to the previous age and more reserved

in his demeanor and Pound extremely more radical in outlook and

possessing an air of superiority. Through their discourse, a

space is created in the world for Eliot to emerge, who serves as

the agent of synthesis, a distillation of their greatest ideas.

This comparison can most easily be seen when looking at key

themes and the way in which each poet deals with them in their

works. The themes that will be explored here are the specific

versus the abstract and nature versus supernature. The works of

Yeats, Pound and Eliot reveal this Hegelian pattern by

challenging one another, setting the old against the new, and

letting the future of poetry be created from this tumultuous

process.

One quality of poetry that Ezra Pound touts to an almost

dogmatic degree is the notion of focusing on the concrete rather

than the abstract, going as far as to say “Go in fear of the

abstract. (“Literary Essays” 5)” He seems to find particular evil

in mixing the concrete with the abstract, claiming that it dulls

the subject matter. Examples of this devotion to describing the

tangible can be found all over his works. One such place is here,

in Canto LI:

With usury has no man a good house / made of stone, no

paradise on his church wall / With usury the stone cutter is

kept from his stone / the weaver is kept from his loom by

usura / wool does not come into market / the peasant does

not eat his own grain / the girl’s needle goes blunt in her

hand (Cantos 250)

In describing his disgust for the practice of usury, Pound does

not rely on some kind of abstract symbol to show its evil,

instead he simply lets the situation speak of the evil on its own

by describing the terrible condition of the village as best he

can. When describing the people, his lines are even free of

adjectives, such as ‘sad’ or ‘bitter’ which may be taken

differently by each reader, in order to preserve the authenticity

of the moment and keep the scene free of his judgments. Another

excellent example of Pound’s attention to physical details is in

his famous poem In a Station at the Metro, “The apparition of

these faces in the crowd; / petals on a wet, black bough

(Personae 111)”. There is nothing there that the mind must wonder

about; it is simply a stunning image that is easily pictured by

the reader with no extraneous language.

This total focus on the concrete would seem to be at odds

with Yeats’ style. Yeats obviously comes from an older school of

poetry, which Pound is terribly aware of, constantly reminding

others of the fact that “…Yeats is a Symbolist, not an Imagist….

(Parkinson, 260)” Examples of this more abstract focus is found

in much of Yeats’ poetry. Take these lines, for example, from

Beneath the Round Tower:

Upon a grey old battered tombstone / In Glendalough beside

the stream, / Where the O’Bynes and Byrnes are buried, / He

stretched his bones and fell in a dream / Of Sun and Moon

and that a good hour / Bellowed and pranced in the round

tower; (Yeats 137)

Though this poem is making a reference to an actual valley where

an ancient tower stands, it is not treating the subject matter

with the concreteness hounded for by Pound. As one reads Beneath

the Round Tower, they come to realize that tower and the

activities taking place there are being used in an abstract

sense. The tower serves to represent a bridge between the heavens

and the earth, the celestial bodies are not the literal sun and

moon, but symbolic representations of cosmic forces, and even the

main character in the poem is playing the part of an Irish

everyman as opposed to a biographical sketch of an actual person.

The reader is not meant to come away experiencing a real moment

from the history of the tower, but instead a mystical, dream

moment from the supernal nature of the tower. The message

transmitted is not as direct as Pound’s attack on usury in his

Canto, but more of an invitation to the reader to look beyond the

material world.

Looking to Eliot, one can see these once opposing forces of

concrete and abstract finding a kind of harmony within his

poetry. It is though he sees physical reality as having a dual

purpose, not only as a means to represent the condition of the

material world, but to also show how that condition is a

reflection of the abstract ideas at play in the world. Take this

portion of The Waste Land:

What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow /

Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man, / You cannot

say, or guess, for you know only a / A heap of broken

images, where the sun beats, / And the dead tree gives

no shelter, the cricket no relief, / And the dry stone

no sound of water (Eliot 53)

On the surface, Eliot’s concrete imagery is easy to recognize.

His harsh and unforgiving landscape describes the state of the

world after the Great War in visceral terms that create a sense

of desolation for the reader. Pound was surely proud of Eliot’s

accomplishments, but it would be foolish to leave Yeats out of

the picture. Eliot’s images are so expertly crafted, they also

serve to describe the blasted spiritual landscape of the post-war

world. The question posed about the roots not only asks what

literal life might grow from this scene of tragedy, but also asks

if anything good whatsoever will be able flourish again in the

world after so much horror. This concept is not concrete in the

least, but Eliot is able to make the depiction of the roots among

the stones both a symbol and an image at once. Where Pound is

concentrating on exposing the truth through concrete images of

the real and Yeats is revealing the abstract truths that lie

behind all common things, Eliot is showing that the concrete and

abstract truths of the world are inexorably linked to one another

and it is nearly impossible to interact with one without

interacting with the other. Another example of Eliot’s ability to

blur the concrete and the abstract is from his poem The Love Song

of J. Alfred Prufrock, where the evening is described as “…spread

out against the sky / Like a patient etherised upon a table;

(Eliot 3)”. This image of an anesthetized patient is of the

precise, concrete nature craved by Pound, but its use to describe

an evening evokes an abstract quality, as if the time of day has

been anthropomorphized. 

Being a positivist, Pound had little patience for dealings

with the supernatural and the occult. His devotion to poetry as a

force for political and social change left no room for mystical

means to affect the world, but only real, concrete actions that

mean something in physical reality. These ideals can be found in

another of his cantos, Canto LIII:

Yeou taught men to break branches / Seu Gin set up the

stage and taught barter, / taught the knotting of the

cords / Fou Hi taught men to grow barley / 2837 ante

Christum / and they know still where his tomb is / by

the high cypress between the strong walls. / the FIVE

grains, said Chin Nong, that are / wheat, rice, millet,

gros blé and chick peas / and made a plough that is

used five thousand years…. / Hoang Ti contrived the

making of bricks / and his wife started working the

silkworms… (Cantos 262)

Pounds emphasis on man’s ability to provide for himself without

the need of spiritual guidance is evident. He describes trades

and skills, such as farming and masonry, which have been handed

down for generations by humanity and help to keep the people

prosperous. Even the dead ancestor who is credited for

discovering how to grow barely is not revered as an ancestral

spirit, but merely locked away in a tomb, the barley his only

manifestation.

Again, this positivist outlook only seems to conflict with

Yeats’ well known interest in the occult. This aspect of Yeats’

personality annoyed Pound to no end, with him actually saying “…

he could not stomach Yeats’ occult experiments. (Parkinson 260)”

Yeats had no such reservations about having information

transmitted through mystical visions or other occult means, such

as fortune telling and automatic writing, viewing the knowledge

gained via such paths just as valuable as any other. His poem The

Double Vision of Michael Robartes gives an example of a truth he

experienced during one of these visions:

On the grey rock of Cashel I suddenly saw / A Sphinx

with woman breast and lion paw, / A Buddha, hand at

rest, / Hand lifted up that blest; / And right between

these two a girl at play / That, it may be, had danced

her life away, / For now being dead it seemed / That

she of dancing dreamed. (Yeats 126)

Though these surreal images might seem superfluous to Pound, the

vision has left Yeats with a dramatic realization about life

being a kind of cosmic dance amidst the flow of time. He actually

describes a feeling of being ‘rewarded’ with this vision at the

end of the poem (Yeats 172). Where Pound is only concerned with

what humanity can learn from history and the material world,

Yeats knows the supernatural world holds keys to understanding

the natural world as well.

Though Eliot shows some early interest in the occult, he is

more of a dabbler compared to the in-depth study of mysticism

embarked upon by Yeats. Regardless, this does not prevent him

from believing that supernatural forces have an impact on the

real world and his eventual conversion to Anglicanism further

shows his belief in a world beyond the next. Though rather than

outright denying that knowledge can be transmitted from the

beyond, like Pound, or simply leaving the material world

altogether in order to pluck knowledge directly from the unknown,

like Yeats, Eliot provides the supernatural a path into the real

world in order to receive its messages. Take this passage from

the Wasteland:

…the wisest woman in Europe, / With a wicked path of

cards. Here, said she, / Is your card, the Drowned

Phoenician Sailor, (Those were the pearls there were

his eyes. Look!) / Here is Belladonna, The Lady of the

Rocks, / the Lady of the Rocks, / The lady of

situations. / Here is the man with three staves, and

here is the Wheel, (Eliot 54)

Literally speaking, nothing overtly supernatural is going on in

this scene, as the character in the poem is simply having their

fortune told which, to many, is more of a novelty than a means to

discover truth. Though, Eliot understands the magical power

intrinsic to the tarot cards and their appearance in the poem

gives the supernatural a means to transmit its message into the

physical world. Studying the cards the fortune teller reveals in

the poem: the drowning sailor, the Lady of Situations, the three

staves, the wheel, and the rest, all come together to reveal a

message that the world is corrupt, in a state of decay, with only

destruction and rebirth able to save it. In this scene, Eliot

clearly shows the supernatural world at play within the natural

world, each of them receiving equal space in reality.

Pound understood that enacting change in the world takes

time. His study of Hegel showed him how this occurs through the

process of negation and he knew that if Modern poetry was going

to succeed, he needed to hasten the process of acceptance. He saw

the elements he had to work with: Yeats, reminiscent of the past

but looking to the future; himself, innovative, but intense; and

Eliot, a new talent waiting to be shaped, and initiated this

process by his own hands. Yeats, Irish born, with his lyrical

leanings and metaphysical topics, possessed elements Pound wished

to see in the Modern, but in some ways relied too heavily on the

past to be the driving force himself. Pound, an American, with

his radical break from tradition and fanatical fervor, had the

vision needed to forge ahead, but was often too much for the

average person to handle. Pound saw much in their two extremities

that needed to be mediated by a fresh voice. As Pound and Yeats

broke each other’s works down, Pound handed Eliot the superior

remaining pieces and showed him how to put them together. Eliot

was the perfect choice for this synthesis. Not only was he an

American citizen of Irish descent, who spent part of his life in

both countries, his work is just cutting edge enough to excite

without intimidating. He could take best aspects of Yeats and

Pound and create a refined voice. Pound knew Eliot was the way to

introduce Modernism to the people in a way that they would

embrace it.

Modern poetry is, perhaps, one of the greatest literary

forms to have entered the world of art, and no finer exemplars of

the movement can be found than Yeats, Pound and Eliot. During

this turbulent time of great change in society, these three

writers found a way to rise above it and make a lasting

impression on the art of poetry. Amidst the violent clash of

ideas fighting for superiority, the three Modern poets harness

Hegel’s triadic structure, embodying its very essence, and emerge

victorious.

Works Cited

Eliot, T. S.. Collected Poems 1909-1962. Orlando: Harcourt, 1963.

Print.

Parkinson, Thomas. “Yeats and Pound: The Illusion of Influence.”

Comparative Literature Vol. 6, No. 3, 1954.: 256 – 264. Web.

Pound, Ezra. The Cantos of Ezra Pound. New York: New Directions,

1995. Print.

Pound, Ezra. Literary Essays of Ezra Pound. New York: New

Directions, 1968. Print.

Pound, Ezra. Personae: The Shorter Poems. New York: New

Directions, 1990. Print.

Spenser, Lloyd and Andrzej Krauze. Hegel. Duxford: Icon Books,

1996. Print.

Yeats, W. B.. The Collected Poems. New York: Scribner, 1996.

Print.