High modernism and the history of automatism (Ireland, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, William Butler Yeats)

This dissertation describes the aesthetics and politics of Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, and William Butler Yeats by placing their work in the context of automatism. The choice of these writers is not arbitrary: these three are the most famous poets who expressed conservative or even fascistic political views. As opposed to studies which tend to use this fact as a justification for finding conservative tendencies in their poetic output, I show how their poetry is conservative in aesthetic and psychological terms, but also progressively Utopian. While this latter tendency may be repressed or largely unrealized in these writers, its traces suggest how political views correlate with aesthetic choices. One of the major aesthetic choices to be made concerns the amount of control an artist exerts over his or her work. Thus, the dialectical relationship between chance and control acts as a guideline by which I read the three poets. In the end, I suggest that their work often possesses a high level of complexity that is tamed through repressive controlling mechanisms. After presenting the major issues in modernist aesthetics, I explain how the political and aesthetic paradoxes of High Modernist poetry make more sense when read in relation to the history of automatism. I argue that automatism, once thought to be a marginal element of certain avant-garde movements, actually engages many of the historical operators that dominated the twentieth century. More specifically, I show how the various manifestations of automatism in fact combine the spiritualist and technological discourses that contemporary studies of Modernism tend to bifurcate. Finally, I explore how these discourses suggest ways of incorporating automatic procedures into critical practice itself.