Lucy McDiarmid, from "The Treason of the Clerks," in Saving Civilization: Yeats, Eliot, and Auden Between the Wars (Cambridge University Press, 1984).

Lucy McDiarmid considers how the relation between social engagement, and art or intellectual activity is represented in the work of W.B Yeats, T.S. Eliot and W.H. Auden. From Ireland's anti-colonial revolution through two world wars, there was great pressure on these writers to define their stance with regard to art's social responsibility, and in McDiarmid's view, each responded in a different way to the struggles of history.

There is a slight shift in this idea from Yeats to Eliot to Auden that reflects the increasing ontological independence of poetry from society in the poets' literary criticism. The "saved" world of the work of art becomes more separate from the unsaved civilization around it with each generation of poets. In "Long-Legged Fly" and "Lapis Lazuli," Yeats implies a remote causal connection between art and the world of political action. In "Little Gidding" Eliot presents art and history as parallel, non-intersecting planes, neither one absolute. In "In Memory of W.B. Yeats" and "At the Grave of Henry James" Auden insists on the dangers of confusing the two realms, to such an extent that his denial of relation between them is as strong as his positive statements about art.

In "Long-Legged Fly" Yeats backs into a definition of the artist's relation to saving civilization; the poem's this-is-the-house-that-Jack-built structure moves backward, in what Whitaker calls "causal regression," from history as effect to art as cause.•1• The structure embodies a rejection of political engagement, as the poem retreats from the urgent crisis of the first stanza, a crisis that demands political action ("That civilization may not sink"), to the second stanza's more muted apocalypse ("That the topless towers be burnt"), to the final stanza's act of creation ("There on the scaffolding reclines / Michael Angelo"), in the remote, sacred space where the civilization saved at the poem's opening is made in the first place.

Notes

1. Thomas R. Whitaker, Swan and Shadow: Yeats's Dialogue with History (Chapel Hill, 1964), 127.