‘The Passionless Passion of Slaughter’: Heroism and the Aesthetics of Violence

This paper will set out the premise for my new comparative study of Kipling and Yeats, which will be published by Oxford University Press in 2015, before discussing one particular aspect of the comparison. Titled Meeting Without Knowing It: the Entangled Lives of Rudyard Kipling and W.B. Yeats, the book is structured as a parallel biography and attempts to re-establish the two poets as literary contemporaries. Its narrative is focused, however around several close comparative readings of their poetry, short fiction and political rhetoric. Reading the two poets in parallel often yields remarkable discursive echoes. For example, both men were similarly preoccupied with the visual arts, with folklore, balladry and the demotic voice. Both struck vatic postures, and made bids for public authority premised on an appeal to what they considered the ‘mythopoeic’ impulse in fin de siècle culture.

My study traces these shared concerns principally to their late nineteenth-century artistic upbringing, and to the closely linked social circles which they inhabited in fin de siècle London. It is, in fact, their very mutuality during the 1890s which lent rancour to their ideological division during the Boer War. After 1903 Yeats denounced Kipling in the press, and when the latter became increasingly involved in Irish politics the two men became, effectively, political enemies. However, acrimony and recrimination only served to bind together all the more intimately, in an argumentative spiral of revolving discourses, two men who were often proximate but who actually met only in cartoons and satirical gossip.

Following this introduction to my method, the particular axis of comparison that I would like to discuss is Yeats and Kipling’s mutual concern with heroism and violence. As Robert d’Humières once remarked of Kipling, both men tend to prioritize the aesthetic potential in a decisive or violent action over its ethical ramifications. This tendency manifests itself early in the 1890s, in such poems as Kipling’s “The Ballad of Boh Da Thone” and in Yeats’s early literary criticism of Samuel Ferguson and Standish O’Grady. Both saw conflict as a regenerative process, and long predicted the approach of a cataclysmic European war. In addition, both poets’ political commitments compelled them to emphasise blood-bonds, heroic narratives and native ties to the land—indeed, mutual echoing of imperialist and anti-colonial voices, as they dispute a common ground, is something that becomes startlingly clear when comparing Kipling and Yeats. In the ten years from the 1912 Ulster Crisis, through the Great War to the Irish Civil War, the sanguinary discourses they had set in motion during the fin de siècle also rebounded upon them destructively. Kipling’s son was killed on the Western Front, while Yeats feared his mythic drama had inspired the Easter Rising. Both poets spent the remainder of their lives harbouring a self-accusatory remorse, and issuing grim prophecies for the future of European civilization. This aggressive legacy has continued to challenge and disturb their poetic successors.

Dr. Alexander Bubb is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at King’s College London. His current project concerns the popularization of Middle Eastern and South Asian classics by the mid-Victorian publishing world. His interest in the European encounter with India is historical as well as literary, and he spent last year as a postdoctoral researcher at Linnaeus University in Sweden, working on the archive of a colonial railway contractor. He is shortly to publish his first monograph, a comparative biography of Rudyard Kipling and W.B. Yeats entitled Meeting Without Knowing It. He may be contacted at alexander.bubb@kcl.ac.uk.