Yeats and the Language of Symbolism

Abstract

In reading any poem we have to know at least two languages: the language the poet is writing and the language of poetry itself. The former exists in the words the poet uses, the latter in the images and ideas which those words express. And just as the words of a language are a set of verbal conventions, so the imagery of poetry is a set of symbolic conventions: This set of symbolic conventions differs from a symbolic system, such as a religion or a metaphysic, in being concerned, not with a content, but with a mode of apprehension. Religions, philosophies, and other symbolic systems are as a rule presented as doctrines; poetic symbolism is a language. Sometimes a symbolic system, such as classical mythology may lose its doctrinal content and so become purely linguistic, but this does not affect the distinction. So while poetry can be made of any account of spiritual reality because it is itself the language of spiritual reality, it does not follow that poetry represents something truer, because broader, than religion or philosophy. The French language is a much broader thing than the philosophy of Montaigne or Pascal, and we can learn French without being converted to any Frenchman's views; but the French language itself represents no truth.