Yeats & the Symbolists

dreams music the imagination

Blood and the Moon (1933) Blessed be this place, More blessed still this tower; A bloody, arrogant race Uttering, mastering it, Rose like these walls from these Storm-beaten cottages -In mockery I have set A powerful emblem up, And sing it rhyme upon rhyme In mockery of a time Half dead at the top.

Samuel Palmers The Lonely Tower (1881)

a rorscach inkblot

Thematic Apperception Test

All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music . . . the mere matter of a poem, for instance . . . should be nothing without the form, the spirit, of the handling . . . this mode of handling should become an end in itself.
The Renaissance: Studies in Art & Poetry (1877) Walter Pater (English art critic)

De la musique avant toute chose, Et pour cela prfre lImpair Plus vague et plus soluble dans lair, Sans rien en luie qui pse ou qui pose. (ll.1-4) Of music before everything-And for this like the Odd more-Vaguer and more melting in air, Without anything in it which weighs or arrests. (ll.1-4) translation by Eli Siegel

Art potique (1884) Paul Verlaine (French symbolist poet)

music

Prelude Laprs-midi Dun Faune (1894) Claude Debussy (French composer)

The purpose of rhythm, it has always seemed to me, is to prolong the moment of contemplation, the moment when we are both asleep and awake, which is the one moment of creation, by hushing us with an alluring monotony, while it holds us waking by variety, to keep us in that state of perhaps real trance, in which the mind liberated from the pressure of the will is unfolded in symbols (Part 3). The Symbolism of Poetry (February 1900) W. B. Yeats (Irish poet, critic, & playwright)

All sounds, all colours, all forms, either because of their preordained energies or because of long association, evoke indenable and yet precise emotions . . . call down among us certain disembodied powers, whose footsteps over our hearts we call emotions (Part 2).
The Symbolism of Poetry (February 1900) W. B. Yeats (Irish poet, critic, & playwright)

I doubt indeed if the crude circumstance of the world, which seems to create all our emotions, does more than reect, as in multiplying mirrors, the emotions that have come to solitary men in moments of poetical contemplation . . . for unless we believe that outer things are the reality, we must believe that the gross is the shadow of the subtle, that things are wise before they become foolish, and secret before they cry out in the market-place. (Part 2). The Symbolism of Poetry (February 1900) W. B. Yeats (Irish poet, critic, & playwright)

emotional symbol? intellectual symbol?

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detail from

Salome (1876)
Gustave Moreau

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The Wounded Angel (1888-1893)

Hugo Simberg

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The Virgin of the Colombes (1895)

Carlos Schwabe

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The Death of the GraveDigger (1895-1900)

Carlos Schwabe

In the Hyacinth Garden (1900)

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Carlos Schwabe

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The Wave (1906)

Carlos Schwabe

The Faun (1923)

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Carlos Schwabe

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Astarte (1926)
Nicholas Kalmakoff

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Christ of St. John of the Cross (1951)

Salvador Dali

How can the arts overcome the slow dying of mens hearts that we call the progress of the world, and lay their hands upon mens heart-strings again, without becoming the garment of religion as in old times? (Part 4)
The Symbolism of Poetry (February 1900) W. B. Yeats (Irish poet, critic, & playwright)

Yeatsian Symbols a tower the rose birds the moon Trees sh