The semester is winding down. I only have two more lectures before it’s time to really buckle down for exams and paper writing. It’s hard to believe I’ve been in Dublin for an entire semester already and even harder to imagine what the next six months have in store!
At the moment I’m doing preliminary reading for a paper on Yeats’s poetry. My topic (as usual) is probably going to deal with the intersection of gender and politics, particularly in relation to the poem “Leda and the Swan.” If anyone is really (I mean really) interested in what I come up with let me know and I can provide a brief discussion of it later. You know… once it’s written.
I decided that a pretty good place to start reading for this paper was with an excerpt from the book <em>Inventing Ireland</em>, by Declan Kiberd. He’s the head of my program, by far the most brilliant person I’ve ever met, and has written or edited the most cutting edge research in Irish literature pretty much across the board. At Thanksgiving dinner the other night my course was joking about his tendency to ask us questions because “he really doesn’t know the answer.” Well, Declan, if you don’t know the answer that’s probably because God hasn’t created the answer yet. We’ll work on it and get back to you.
As usual, reading Declan’s argument got me to thinking, both about Yeats and life. This excerpt talks about the difference between form and content in poetry and how, for Yeats, it often seems that form comes before content. This thought was one I had never even considered before. How could a man who spent his entire life making art in an attempt to influence the creation of a nation care more about form than content? Thankfully, Declan is the kind of man who inspires enough confidence that you don’t shut his book when you read a sentence like “Yeats has little to say and much to express: and what he expresses is the unimportance of ideas or content” and instead read on in hopes that he’ll enlighten you.
The explanation came a few pages (and many brilliant points) later: “The poet, if he were to wait for knowledge, might never begin his quest: and so he must start with the search for a form.” This, of course, makes perfect sense. Yeats couldn’t possibly envision the final product (a new and independent Irish State) that he hoped for and so instead began to seek it out by creating a form that it might take. It certainly wasn’t perfect or wholly successful–as I’ve spent the last weeks learning many, many wonderful artists eluded him and even the Irish public frequently failed to go along with his plans–but it provided a starting point for a national discourse that was rooted in the arts and literature. This couldn’t possibly be related to Dublin now being a UNESCO City of Literature.
And what does all of this say about life? Well, just as I’ve spent the last several weeks beginning to see the shape of the Irish literary canon, I’ve also spent a lot of time beginning to see the shape of myself. I’ve discovered that the person I thought I was when I got here was, in fact, just a form that I had given myself to fit the situation that I was in at the time. The person I am currently is, I’m sure, yet another form that fits my goals, opportunities, and curiosities. Neither of those forms are going to match the person I will be in six months or six years or six decades, but they’re working pretty well as a starting point until I discover the content that might begin to dictate my form rather than the other way around.
Don’t worry, my next post (which I <em>promise</em> to post sooner rather than later) will be all about Thanksgiving fun! Look forward to stories of roasting turkeys, introducing Ireland to candied sweet potatoes, and someone going into anaphylactic shock (not as a result of the sweet potatoes)!
And in the interest of not plaguerizing…
Kiberd, Declan. ”Revolt into Style–Yeatsian Poetics.” <em>Inventing Ireland</em>. London: Vintage, 1995. 305-316. Rpt. in <em>Yeats’s Poetry, Drama, and Prose</em>. Ed. James Pethica. New York: Norton, 2000. 340-346.
