Almost a century ago, T.S. Eliot had made a pertinent
remark about the writer’s relationship with the man, which, like any other
serious statement, is not an absolute truth, and yet touches upon a fundamental
point compelling serious consideration. The statement in question is the
following: the poet has not a “personality” to express, but a particular
medium, which is only a medium and not a personality, in which impressions and
experiences combine in peculiar and unexpected ways. Impressions and
experiences which are important for the man may take no place in the poetry,
and those which become important in the poetry may play quite a negligible part
in the man, the personality. Clarifying his statement further, Eliot elaborates
as follows:
We can only say that a poem,
in some sense, has its own life; that its parts form something quite different
from a body of neatly ordered biographical data; that the feeling, or emotion,
or vision, resulting from the poem is something different from the feeling or
emotion or vision in the mind of the poet.
The question that Eliot’s statement intends to answer
may, or may not, be acceptable to all of us, but all of us would agree that the
question about the relationship between the man and the writer is a fundamental
one, compelling our critical attention, more so in the case of Kipling and
Yeats as both of them are often viewed as autobiographical writers whose
personalities inform their poems as much as their public statements related to
subjects such as nations and cultures, races and ethnicity. With the passage of
time that followed the period of these two prominent poets, we are now better
placed to make a more mature, that is more dispassionate, estimate of the
relationship in their cases between the man and the artist.
This paper intends to work out in the cases of Kipling
and Yeats the dynamics of relationship between their personalities and their
poetical works. In the writings of both Yeats and Kipling there are moments
when the poet oversteps the personality, but there are also moments when the
personality overrules the poet, leaving no ambiguity about the fact that in all
moments the poet and the personality are inseparable. The high and the low in each
shows that, after all, poets are humans too, and as such vulnerable to cultural
biases and prejudices inherited from the social environment. As Northrop Frye
has remarked:
It’s not surprising if
writers are often rather simple people, not always what we think of as
intellectuals, and certainly not always any freer of silliness or perversity
than anyone else. What concerns us is what they produce, not what they are, and
poetry, according to Milton, who ought to have known, is “more simple,
sensuous, and passionate” than philosophy or science.
Frye’s observation seems to have greater pertinence in
the cases of Yeats and Kipling than in the case of any other poet. So even if
the poet’s personality is not always absent from his poetry, it is finally what
these poets have produced that should engage us rather than their statements
outside the bounds of poetry.
Prof. Bhim S. Dahiya is retired from the Department of English, Kurukshetra University, India. He may be contacted at bhimsdahiya@gmail.com.
Prof. Bhim S. Dahiya is retired from the Department of English, Kurukshetra University, India. He may be contacted at bhimsdahiya@gmail.com.