Yeats, Vendler, and Byzantium

Abstract

Helen Vendler, in her magisterial Our Secret Discipline: Yeats and Lyric Form (2007), provides us with the tools with which to register the traditional formal elements of poetry, and she does so for the most part with her usual subtlety, clarity and thoroughness. However, as some of the first reviewers of the book note, her approach is not without its problems. The reviewers perceive, in general terms, an ‘enactment fallacy’ in some of her readings, where certain metrical patterns, say, are associated with specific responses. I believe that to force meaning onto form is symptomatic of a bigger problem in Vendler's readings (though it is one which appears less often), that of a ‘semantic fallacy’. In this case meaning derived from form is forced upon the content of a poem. My example in this essay is her very subjective reading of ‘Sailing to Byzantium’, which she conducts in the name of an objective analysis. The essay shows that it is unwise, certainly in the case of Yeats, not to take into account surrounding factors concerning form, such as manuscript and publication evidence, as well as tendencies in the author himself.