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What have contemporary poets, as distinct from literary critics and historians, learned from Yeats's poetry? In the view of W. H. Auden, "His main legacies to us are two. First he transformed a certain kind of poem, the occasional poem, from being either an official performance of impersonal virtuosity or a trivial vers de societé into a serious reflective poem of at once personal and public interest. . . . Secondly, Yeats released regular stanzaic poetry, whether reflective or lyrical, from iambic monotony; the Elizabethans did this originally for dramatic verse, but not for lyric or elegiac."1
Of these two legacies, it is the first which is my subject, although the second is not entirely irrelevant. Auden's praise for Yeats's occasional poems has been echoed by other poets; recently Charles Tomlinson has observed that "Yeats revivifies for us the language of courtesy that we know from the seventeenth century." He "has found a poetic style for domesticity, one that never descends to the banal and one that bestows on its human subject the kind of more-than-individual importance which Jonson gives to his figure of the lady in 'To Penshurst'."2
A number of critics have speculated that it is the "poems of civilization" as Yeats himself called them, the occasional poems such as "Easter 1916," "A Prayer for my Daughter," "Coole Park, 1929," and "Parnell's Funeral," that, rather than the more overly philosophical poems, constitute Yeats's central achievement and are the cause of his continuing popularity.3 But it remains to define Yeats's real contribution to the form: how does he transform the occasional poem into "something new and important in the history of English poetry" (Auden 313)?
According to the definition of Samuel Holt Monk, an occasional poem is one which celebrates "particular events of a public character-a coronation, a military victory, a death, a political crisis. Such poems are social and ceremonial, and they demand of the writer tact as well as talent. They are public and formal, blending poetry with rhetoric and oratory, and their tone is that of the forum, not of the intimate conversation or private meditation."4 Beginning with this definition, which Monk applies to such poems as Dryden's "Annus Mirabilis," one can see immediately that a poem like Yeats's "Easter 1916"...