"No artist tolerates reality" – Nietzsche. To what extend is this true in the work of Yeats and Eliot?

Résumé du document

"No artist tolerates reality", as far as this quotation of Nietzsche is concerned, it is true that artists – and therefore writers – cannot tolerate reality, and that is the reason why they often aim at changing this reality through their art, and in the case of writers, through their written work. That is also why every literary movement has been created in reaction to a previous movement or as a rejection of the context of this time. Nevertheless, even though they have been doing this since art exists, artists cannot get along without reality neither, for they are inevitably living in it. Artists are using art and artistic creation to express a rejection of reality, but in order to do so they necessarily have to consider what reality is and what it lacks which makes them unable to tolerate it.

Extraits

[...] Their aim was to express feelings as they were perceived, stressing on the sensual perception rather than the rational experience. Thanks to the development of these new modernist techniques, poets like Yeats and Eliot were able to express their rejection of reality and to convey their intolerance through their work. On the one hand, Yeats and Eliot obviously did not tolerate the reality in which they were leaving and this can be demonstrated by three main points in their work. [...]

[...] All things considered, what seems important for Yeats and Eliot is the reconstruction of the culture, as Eliot evoked it in 'What the Thunder Said' in Wasteland when he mentions five cities Jerusalem, Athens, Alexandria, Vienna and London which were all destroyed during history and eventually all rebuilt. It is true that artists do not tolerate reality, but that is not the most important thing. What is to bear in mind is that, consequently, the role of artists is to improve this reality and thus to improve the future, thanks to their talent and their art. And that is exactly what Yeats did when he decided to establish the Abbey Theatre in Dublin in 1904 in order to spread culture and art in people's everyday life. [...]

[...] Indeed, they both were convinced that past times were much more valuable than the reality they were living in. They thus tolerated reality insofar as it was a past reality, that is to say a better and wiser reality than the one they were obliged to bear in the decadent modern world. Finally, despite most of what could be understood in their work, we can affirm that Yeats and Eliot were tolerating reality for they both seemed to worry about this world they were living in and they wondered what would happen in the future. [...]

[...] Bibliography Smith, Stan. The origins of modernism: Eliot, Pound, Yeats and the rhetorics of renewal. New York; London: Harvester Wheatsheaf Stead, Christian Karlson. Pound, Yeats, Eliot, and the modernist movement. New Brunswick, N.J. : Rutgers University Press Baldick, Chris. The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms. New York: Oxford University Press Webliography "Modernism." Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia Nov 2006, 03:53 UTC. [...]

[...] Another important point in the work of Yeats and Eliot is the use of the Modernism tool mentioned previously: the complexity of language. Indeed, the two poets often use intricate ways to express themselves and the way they see or feel things. For instance, in his poem A Coat, Yeats uses the metaphor of a coat he is taking off to explain he will be sincere in his writing and will not try to hide behind metaphors anymore. However, as he is saying that, he is once again using a metaphor. [...]