An American Inflection of Yeats: the Agrarian Movement’s Reception of Yeats

Abstract

I set out in this article to draw on the ways in which Yeats can be (mis)appropriated and (mis)read within changing contexts, particularly against the backdrop of the reception of Yeats by the Agrarian Movement in the US South. The Agrarian oppositional configuration between the South and modernity is founded on the modern sublimation of tradition into the concrete substance of contemporary poetic actuality, which the Agrarian critics continued to discover in Yeats. They molded Yeats into a model poet for their own development of a southern consciousness and minted him as a sign of such integration and completion. Nonetheless, what is striking in the Agrarian reception of Yeats is the vain attempt to reframe the poet as a fixed and contained signifier of a set of values remaining constant, whether Yeats is defined as traditionalist or as modern, or as an eclectic mixture of the two. Such an anxiety at the very heart of southern modernity brings about an yearning to assert the continuities between modern poetry and the tradition through Yeats while revealing a pressure of the regional and the historical that calls any seamless continuity into question. The Agrarian reception of Yeats demonstrates that an adequate notion of the governing features and forces behind each re-reading and re-nuancing of the original impulse will continue to change and that the disorienting orientation of the local reception of Yeats will continue to exist.