indeed

by John B.

Posted to Poetry and Politics on 2003-03-16 14:54:00

Parent message is 404511
his philosophy of history is a dangerous ideal – like Hegel it’s an end-game theory… everything becomes inevitable, unavoidable, and already done. He struggled to proclaim the free will of an individual within such an interplay of order and disorder (as yeats perhaps subjeectively saw it) in A Prayer for my Daughter… he answer was a violence against freewill, a control and ceremonialisation of self – to traditionalise individuals… how can we escape the inevitable switch between Christianity and post-Christianity? Yeat’s could answer that. His theories are not beyond critique, but, I agree, his life must have been extraoridnarily… mystical. I’ve felt akin to him a few times in my own experiences – however, remember, his real life was very different from is literary one. In real life he was very much an avergae man, with average human inadequacies and failings. And his family/personal life was very different from his political one. He never got over Maud Gonne’s rejections (proposed to her just before he proposed to his wife!!!) … he was very…. preconscious.