Yeats & Arnold, Negri & Brad, was Re: A Modest Proposal for The Empire

Carrol Cox cbcox at ilstu.edu
Mon Dec 24 15:12:30 PST 2001


An addendum to my response to Chuck, in reference to the polar opposites I mentioned there.

"For England may yet keep faith . . ."

W. B. Yeats

"Charge once more, then, and be dumb! Let the victors, when they come, When the forts of folly fall, Find thy body by the wall!

Matthew Arnold

By the way, liberated zones and dual power are not quite the same as socialism in one country. But they can be sneered at as though they were. Probably in new forms we can't yet recognize, the route to any future humans might have.

Yeats and Arnold were in many ways not so far apart; like independent marxists they each had this contradictory desire to be both part of and yet somehow "above" and independent of the cultural and/or political forces with which they (sort of) identified. The (meticial _and_ political) balance of Yeats's line is both exquisite and intolerable. Fall from that balance and one can only hope that the victor's will find thy body by the wall.

Carrol



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