Probably no one has more admiration for the poetry of W.B. Yeats, “the industrious adept of a batso mystical philosophy,” as Clive James puts it in the current issue of The Spectator, than Clive James. Reviewing a new book of Yeats scholarship, which he harpoons under the title Slogging to Byzantium, James points out that when it comes to Yeats’ “stone-dead rigmarole” — in other words, his theory of history’s gyres and such — “Genius has to be forgiven its foolishness. Newton was just as interested in his wacko chronology as in his celestial mechanics.” But James is not about to forgive the latest foolishness of wacko scholarship:
Except for Professor Ricks, who finds the later Yeats less a poet than a rhetorician, nobody sensitive to poetry doubts the magnificence of Yeats’s steadily maturing achievement, his wresting of complexity out of mere fluency; and the professor could have reached his contrary opinion only after a small asteroid had passed through his brain, perhaps while he was listening to Bob Dylan.
Is there any literary critic besides James who can write like that? If you know of any, please be so kind as to let me know. And please exempt all the usual suspects from Gore Vidal to James Wood. If the usual suspects have the required breadth of literacy, taste, knowledge and experience, chances are they don’t have the requisite humor.
