Download W. David Soud. Divine Cartographies: God, History, and Poiesis in

The Yeats Journal of Korea/한국 예이츠 저널 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.14354/yjk.2016.50.297
Vol. 50 (2016): 297-300
[Book Review]
W. David Soud. Divine Cartographies: God,
History, and Poiesis in W. B. Yeats, David
Jones, and T. S. Eliot (Oxford University
Press, 2016. 246 pages)
Young Suck Rhee
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Abstract: A book review
Key words: Yeats, Jones, Eliot, God, history
Author: Young Suck Rhee is Distinguished Research Professor of Poetry in the
Department of English, Hanyang University, Seoul, 133-791, Korea. He
divides his time between teaching, writing poetry, and painting.
E-mail: [email protected] / [email protected]
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제목: W. 대이비드 수드, 신성의 시학: W. B. 예이츠, 데이비드 존스, T. S. 엘리
엇에 있어서의 신, 역사, 시의 생성
우리말 요약: 서평
주제어: 예이츠, 존스, 엘리엇, 신, 역사
저자: 이영석은 한양대학교 영어영문학과의 영시 담당 교수이다. 그는 시를 가르치고,
쓰고, 그림을 그리는 데 시간을 배분한다.
____________________________________
A
three-part book, Divine Cartographies by W. David Soud is a refreshing
and interesting attempt to read from the perspective of religion and theology
three poets, W. B. Yeats, David Jones, and T. S. Eliot. It seems to be an
almost new attempt at reading Yeats, Jones, Eliot; Soud’s new critical
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Young Suck Rhee
application could also be extended to reading such great poets as Auden,
Duncan, Ginsberg, Heaney, R.S. Thomas; to Geoffrey Hill, too. The author in
this book has read Yeats’s late poems (“Long-legged Fly,” “Vacillation,”
“Meru,” “The Gyres,” “Lapis Lazuli”), Jones’s Anathemata, and Eliot’s Four
Quartets, and may soon intend to read the plays of Yeats and Eliot, and
other poems by Jones, which will also highlight some new and interesting
religious aspects of the three poets. What Soud has done in this book brings
us back to the fact that good poetry could be both sacred and profane. John
Donne had already written poetry that is both sacred and profane; Yeats’s
“Crazy Jane” poems are new poems based on the same poetics. As well
illustrated by Soud, Jones’s Anathemata and Eliot’s Waste Land can be put in
the same category: thus, Soud draws attention to this particular aspect of the
poetry of Yeats, Jones, and Eliot.
In his Afterword, Soud points out that “Yeats’s mastery can impart such
vividness and momentum to a poem that, in his more rigorous works, the
depth and precision of his thought can easily escape a reader’s full attention”
(218). That could happen, and a poem could be a thought, philosophy, or
theology; it is, however, rather similar to feeling. To understand what a poem
is, it may be necessary to understand the religion and theology that form the
backbone of such a poem. But when we read or hear a poem, and even
when we read a quasi-religious poem, such as Donne’s, what we get first is
feeling. No matter how well a poem is made, of course, if it is hollow
without content, we may find it boring. This is why Soud’s study of the
three poets’ works from this perspective matters.
The structure of the book is simple, consisting of three chapters: 1. The
Divine Self at Play: History and Liberation in the Late Poems of W. B.
Yeats; 2. The Figure and the Map: The Anathemata of David Jones; 3. The
Silence and the Moment: The Dialectical of Poetics of Four Quartets. Yeats
and Eliot are well known, while Jones is little known (and the reason for
W. David Soud. Divine Cartographies:
God, History, and Poiesis in W. B. Yeats, David Jones, and T. S. Eliot
299
this may be that his poetry looks traditional at a glance and that his poetry
has had to stand beside Pound’s and James Joyce’s. David Jones (1895-1974)
is a poet with unique backgrounds: art training and being a private soldier.
“In 1924 he worked with Eric Gill, the stone-carver and engraver whose
strong Roman Catholic feeling and belief are reflected in his work.” The
Anathemata (1952) is a long religious poem. So, it contrasts well with Eliot’s
Four Quartets. Yet Yeats and Jones neither compare nor contrast well, except
that both some times were deeply religious writers in some sense: Yeats in
some of his late works and Jones in The Anathemata. As a result, Yeats is
hardly mentioned in his discussion of Jones in the second chapter.
This book combines the three poets in an interesting yet loose way: in
terms of both form and content hardly do they have anything in common.
Jones’s poetic language is very different from Yeats’s, although he may be a
bit similar to Eliot’s. That may be why Jones is placed between Yeats and
Eliot. The common thread that goes through the three poets is religion and
theology. The first chapter on Yeats discusses the influence of and
interactions with Indian priests, and traces the influences as shown in some of
Yeats’s poems
me
—
— the discussion of which seems the best part of this book to
: The first chapter title, The Divine Self at Play: History and
Liberation in the Late Poems of W. B. Yeats, has subtitles as follows: The
Encounter with Purohit; Yeats’s Studies with Purohit; The Philosophy of the
Yoga Sutras; “Long-legged Fly” and Yoga; The Appeal of Tantra; Towards A
Vision B; Eternity and Time in A Vision B; “Vacillation”; “Meru”; “The
Gyres”; “Lapis Lazuli”; An Incomplete Vision. The second chapter, The
Figure and the Map: The Anathemata of David Jones, is composed of
Intellectual Backgrounds; From Sacramental Theology to Sacramental Poetics;
Jones and Mysticism; The Form of The Anathemata; Poetic Agency in The
Anathemata. The third chapter on Eliot, The Silence and the Moment: The
Dialectical Poetics of Four Quartets, has subtitles: Eliot and the Ascendancy
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Young Suck Rhee
of [Karl] Barth; Contexts: Barth, Eliot, and Liberal Protestantism; Theologies
of Immanence and Transcendence; From Theology to Poetics; The Rose
Garden in “Burnt Norton”: From Vision to Dialectic; The Fall into History;
From the Moment to Incarnation; The Moment and Christian Praxis.
This book opens the discussion of theology in poetry: how it could help
enrich the texture and hues of poetry, not to mention the religious thought in
it, as in Yeats, Jones, and Eliot, thus opening the new possibility of studying
further poets, Auden and Heaney and others, and further works of the three
poets, Yeats, Jones, and Eliot. The last three poets are in a sense a
Mondrian, a Kandinsky: “if, some eighty-plus years after the birth of
abstraction, we still take an interest in the art of its progenitors, we are
obliged, I believe, to examine the ideas that shaped it, however odd and alien
those ideas may look to us today” (219).
Manuscript peer-review process:
receipt acknowledged: Aug. 16, 2016.
revision received: Aug. 22, 2016.
publication approved: Aug. 29, 2016.
Edited by: Jooseong Kim