A Portrait of the Artist as an Old Man: The Late Style and Politics of W. B. Yeats

Abstract

Yeats’s dubious views on the ideal government, enmity against democracy, infatuation with aristocracy, and scandalous inclinations toward fascism and eugenics make his late politics open to ongoing discussion and continue to draw attention from a number of critics. In particular, his brief entanglement with the Blueshirt Movement and misbegotten attempt to write marching songs for it lead one to a pointed question: if his poetic enterprise was truly cultural, not political per se—a radical transfer of nationalist energies from the political to cultural spheres. Given such a question, this article aims at examining the “late” politics of Yeats through the lens of the discourse of aesthetic lateness articulated by Edward W. Said. Said suggests that musicians and writers can create a style that enables them to embody intransigence, difficulty, and unresolved contradiction—lateness as opposition and as going against the grain. If old age withholds any possibility of resolution, does it only bring about the perpetuation of a human predicament in continuing conflict or unexpectedly afford the recognition that art can ultimately escape the impairment of the body? Although it is admitted that late style of an artist may be taken to be the expression of not the arrival at any transcendence or ascending to sublimity but an open-ended longing, is it ultimately marked by the irreducible insistence of the transience of the human form including art itself? I will look into the points at which all those questions meet up with the grandiosity of the Yeatsian vision associated with the poet’s embarrassing proclivity toward fascism in his late life.