Chard deNiord: Yeats

Yeats’ poetry spans several decades, beginning in the first half of his career during the last decade of the 19th century with an idyllic Irish muse that morphed after meeting Pound just prior to WWI, his breakup with Maude, and then his marriage to George into his great second career in which his obsession with magic transformed into not just A Vision but his great poems of loss, apocalypse, and political elegy, despite his fascist sympathies. He transcended Edwardian manners and propriety with a vatic sensibility that combined Irish mythology with Modernist imagery and themes. This is very cursory. But there you have enough to see how Procrustean it would be to call Yeats merely Edwardian. And how dare you question whether I have anything intelligent to say about Yeats? Just kidding. Say it all you want. So: a few final words about Yeats. He doesn't have to be Edwardian, just as he doesn't have to be Victorian per se in the first half of his career, although he certainly has traits of both. But in his case the parts simply don't add up to make wholes in either case. He's too anomalous, sometimes in an egregious way, to be Victorian. Edwardian, or Modernist. Pretty sui generis. So why are literary aegis tags necessary, especially with regard to poets like Yeats and Frost? And I guess I'd add Hardy too. Such tags are tails wagging the dogs. Let ‘em go.