Yeats's Re-Enchanted Nature

Abstract

[From the introductory paragraphs] [...] Yeats’s image of post-Enlightenment mankind as “passive” before nature hints at his interest in magic and mysticism, as well as his desire to search in and through nature and its “great memory” for deeper, original truths (E&I 28). However, the statement also posits his work, and the work of his contemporaries, as an attempt to combat and reconfigure a mechanized nature, and to reformulate it as something active, mysterious and, in many ways, occult. Recent criticism has begun to reassess the “secularization thesis” associated with modernity, which characterizes modernization as coterminous with increasingly rational modes of thought and with the rejection of spirituality.2 Revealing a re-enchantment with both the natural world and the mind in early and high modernist writings, this turn has emphasized the rejection of Enlightenment values in the art of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth- centuries. Indeed, Yeats’s attraction to occult spirituality has been central to such understandings of modern writing. Timothy Materer has traced clearly Yeats’s rebellion against his father’s positivistic skepticism, and the foundational work of earlier scholars such as Kathleen Raine and George Mills Harper has been harnessed in recent criticism to situate Yeats’s anti-Enlightenment philosophy in the broader context of modernist enchantments.3 Fundamental to this new interest in magical or occult thought in modernist writings is the fascination with reimagining the world in ways contrary to post-Enlightenment positivism. Yeats’s assertion that his generation combatted a vision of “mechanized” nature places him firmly within this active reimagining. [...]