in response to professor white's comment

Professor White asked: "how do you think that avoiding figurative language serves Yeats? Does it make his adjectival obsession necessary, more noticeable, or weaker? Are the two even related?"

I think that avoiding metaphors and similes brings much more attention to the noun at hand. This is because with figurative language, the reader's attention is split between the noun and the thing that it is being compared to. By omitting a metaphor, however, he needs to use other ways to describe his nouns and create rich imagery. He makes up for the missing figurative language with his “adjectival obsession.” I’ll copy the quotes I used in my previous post:

“sultry mud”

“wholesome sun has ripened”

“mummy wheat”

“mad abstract dark”

“sleep a long Saturnian sleep”

“unwearied eyes”

I really don’t think there’s much need for metaphors or similes with adjectives like those.

In response to the third question, adjectives and metaphors are connected only because they are both techniques to describe something. But the similarities end there. Adjectives are very direct way to describe a noun while with metaphors, you have to imagine the object that the noun is being compared to before you can imagine the noun itself. It’s an abstract and indirect way to create imagery and obviously many poets such as Bishop use it to great effect. I don’t, however, think that it is a “higher” path to imagery than adjectives because just as with all poetic techniques, there is a time and place for it to be used.

Look at Leda and the Swan. The whole idea of the poem is to make it have a primal and visceral feeling. I don’t think that that could be accomplished by using indirect methods of description such as metaphors. I’ll repost the poem for reference:

A sudden blow: the great wings beating still

Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed

By the dark webs, her nape caught in his bill.

He holds her helpless breast upon his breast.

How can those terrified vague fingers push

The feathered glory from her loosening things?

And how can body, laid in that white rush

But feel the strange heart beating where it lies?

A shudder in the loins engenders there

The broken wall, the burning roof and tower

And Agamemnon dead.

Being so caught up,

So mastered by the brute blood of the air,

Did she put on his knowledge with his power

Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?

This is a brutal scene and the feeling of the poem would not be best served by Yeats using metaphors. Hell, even the adjectives are pretty straightforward. But what’s brilliant about this is that Yeats takes a reductionist approach to his diction. Contrast the language of “sudden blow” to “sultry mud” (sultry mud being a phrase he uses in a previous poem). The word sultry is a pretty unique word to describe mud but “sudden” is a pretty standard word to describe a blow. This kind of goes back to our discussion about Kenneth’s poem, in which we decided that he used simple lines and diction to convey the instinctual and primitive nature of “desire” itself. Yeats uses his straightforward adjectives for the same purpose. The primal nature of a rape would not be conveyed well by using indirect methods of description like metaphors.