Ailment of Launguage, Faulkner

When Williams talks about language not being a barrier, it brought to mind a particular passage in Faulkner's As I Lay Dying in which Addie describes language as the threads from which to spiders hang on a sing bar, trying desperately to swing toward each other, but the distance is too great, and the strings (or language rather) too inadequate a tool to help them. (still faulkner devoted his life to the use of language.) Reading Yeats, it is a question, the answer of which I keep going back and forth between, whether Yeats is on one side of the debate or the other. Often he seems to allow things to be undefined, or questionable and if not convoluted, then vague. Is this a statement on the inadequacy of language, a simple preference, a blunder or something else all together?

This was particularly interesting in reference to Image from a Past Life in which multiple perspectives are employed. Is he the first to use the technique, or at least as effectively? if so it is as if Yeats has presented the solution to the problem with which Faulkner will create his masterpieces. His most successful and famous texts use this device (to cure languages ailment?) while the novels in which he abandons this technique fall a little flatter.

Initial poetry reading

First I just wanted to say that after struggling a bit with some of the poetry, reading it aloud helped a lot. This sounds terribly lame, but I wanted to mention it in case anyone was having a hard time also. Yeats early poetry felt really impersonal to me. I wonder if that has to do with the time that he was writing (as in most poetry looked something like this) or his voice just not being developed, or if this will change. Even the love poem, T0 an Isle in the Water, the only one of the few we read in which Yeat's seems to be the narrator or speaker as well as the author, seems a little shallow or underdeveloped. I also wondered what statement, if any he was making about Ireland, since it is already an Isle in the water. Was he an expatiate already saying he would even be willing to go back to Ireland for this woman, or what? I think it's hard to write a love poem and make a statement at the same time, as one will generally overshadow the other. His poetry also includes a lot of references which are not in our common historical or linguistic lexicon. I imagine this was different for the people reading his poetry when it was initially published, but perhaps it wasn't. Is Yeats, like we discussed Joyce was, an author who deliberately put puzzles, ambiguities or little known/personal references into his work that would take some time, effort to understand? Or is this just going to be a constant struggle for us, being contemporary Americans? On a totally tangential and off topic note, I thought The Ballad of Moll Magee was a really good and complete poem. It was the only one that I got any sort of emotional response from (though it was the only one I felt confident in my reading of).