Status Updates From Axel's Castle: A Study in t...

The real subject of valery’s poetry is the conflict between the limiting contingencies of life and the laws of the mind, the conflict between the palpable, sensual world and the abstract reveries of the mind.

Pure intellect: consciousness turned in upon itself. Valery found that “action cramps and impoverishes the mine” and that the ‘method’ or ‘theory’ of doing anything is far more interesting than the thing done. Once a principle has been grasped, it’s useless to waste one’s time applying it. The moms of Leonardo Da Vinci was a symbol of pure intellect

Paul Valery studied Mallarme’s technique of developing and emphasizing the forms of language, equating it to algebra and ordinary literature to arithmetic. He was bored by literature and sentiment. Once he understood the principal and how to apply it, he found his will dissipating. He gave up verse and took a job at the ministry of war in Paris. Commuting himself to ‘tracing the outline of one’s own nature.’

Yeats once had a dream where Bernard Shaw (a contemporary who went in the opposite direction of Yeats, Shaw being a Marxist and interested in sociology and politics) appeared in the form of a sewing machine, smiling at him from afar. Yeats was married to a medium and spent several years transcribing and interpreting the visions of various spirits. He was a symbolist who in his later years came back to reality.

Yeats spent his early years writing symbolist poetry, but realized that the life of the imagination is inimical to reality, and began writing poems more grounded within life’s limits: “when day begins to break / I count my good and bad / being wakeful for her sake / remembering what she had / What eagle loop still shows / while up from my hearts root / so great a sweetness flows “

Romanticism was a reaction against the mechanistic explanations of human nature passed forth by classicism. Wordsworth and Byron vindicated the worth of the individual. They saw the self as unalienable from nature, a part of its synchronicities. Flaubert restrained his romantic impulses; he subordinated the artists-as-hero to the task of burrowing into the mores of society and its effects on the individual.