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Yeats’ Voice in the Text

Cormac McCarthy’s use of voice in No Country for Old Men and The Road must be read as an invocation of the Romantic Sublime through ventriloquizing Yeats’ poetics. Additionally, the use of Yeats provides these texts with an underlying sense of a tragic universe in which humans are ultimately responsible for their own fates; there is no divine intervention. Both McCarthy and Yeats privilege a kind of literary redemption that is only made possible through storytelling. In his Byzantium poems Yeats’ utilizes the tropes of Symbolism to imbue his poetry with a redemptive power that is explicitly bereft of divine intervention. While, his use of those tropes is what characterizes Yeats as a Symbolist rather than a Romantic—though his work retains, and makes use of, several Romantic idioms—the Symbolist movement is itself a reinterpretation of Romanticism with the Symbolist poets offering their own peculiar, and possibly even blasphemous, poetic displacement of the Sacred and Sublime.

According to Olivier Sécardin in his article “La Poésie Impie Ou Le Sacre Du Poète: Sur Quelques Modernes,” poets-like Baudelaire, Mallarmé, and Rimbaud had the beautifully blasphemous ambition to give birth to a new conception of the sacred—though Rimbaud later renounced this poetic ambition. Previously, the sacred had been confined to the Romantic experience of the Sublime—a Platonic transcendence whose inscrutable profundity language had to strive to reach. However, with the advent of poetic modernity, in a line that can be traced directly through these Symbolist poets, it is the immanence of poetic structure that contains and distills the sacral dimension. The poem is “sacred because it is secret, locked up on itself and from the inside. It is secret in the etymological meaning of the word secretus: it is the mystery” (213-14). For these poets, poetry is the dreaming language, the language of dream, the language of the unconscious “lost tongue,” and therefore a new “sacred text” which deposes the idea of Platonic transcendence within structure. Thus the experience of the Sublime ceases to exist out in Nature but rather exists solely within the realm of language. Within this metaphysical paradigm, redemption is deemed to be no longer possible from Nature and must instead become a human project of linguistic aesthetics. The aesthetic religion that Yeats envisages offers a different and altogether new approach to the problem of the art/metaphysics relationship. Within Yeats’s metaphysical project of literary redemption, the poem itself becomes a kind of redemptive ritual magic.

Yeats’ vision of poetry as word magic is further refined in the “Byzantium” poems. As such, it seems obvious that Cormac McCarthy further extends Yeats’ vision of the poet as vatic visionary with his multiple unambiguous references to Yeats. It is also important to notice that McCarthy most particularly references the early, and most explicitly metaphysical, “Byzantium” poems. Additionally, it is equally important to recognize that McCarthy explicitly engages with the entire metaphysical project that underlies those poems. Most reviewers generally agree that the ubiquitous “fire” referred to in The Road is hope, spiritual belief, or truth, but I think only Barbara Bennett, in her article “Celtic Influences on Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men and The Road” has recognized the metonymic use of “fire” as a symbol to refer to the tradition of storytelling. In my own analysis, it is understood that, for McCarthy, this “fire of storytelling” must also include poetics, language, and signification systems generally.

*I also drink cold fucking coffee and grade student essays.