The Sign of the Times: Yeats, Pound and Heartfield

A brief thought about the poets W.B. Yeats and Ezra Pound and the public temperament leading up to and during the World Wars.  I don’t believe it to be mere reduction to note the shapes of the symbols of their fixations, the gyre and the swastika. For Yeats (and his wife), they stood aside and perplexed by the vortex of the times and attempted by way of spiritualism and the occult to retrieve some notion (specifically in his book, A Vision) of what was happening historically; he looked at the vortex from without it as if he were not engaged himself in history, but once they gazed into the wheel of it it was all bound up in the complexities of assigning faculties to references to phases of the moon.  Pound on the other hand looked straight down into and out of the gullet of Fascism as if he were himself it’s tongue, and thus directly spun the vortex, a sense for which the swastika was a natural symbol.

There is another notable figure now that comes to mind, John Heartfield, whom also viewed the temperament of his times, but from a true artist/semioticians perspective.  His “O Tannenbaum...” a commentary on the violent absolutist form that fascism took (in the swastika), revealed the torquing temperament of the times by the simple bending of a tree’s branches.  The tree in this instance is a symbol of the folkish and natural origins of National Socialism in Europe. Thus the tree is twisted into a symbol of violent abrupt transformation and the breakneck speed of modernism.  

In these three examples it might be said can be seen the different ways that humans deal with the changing conditions of life or perceptions of truth.  We can stand aside and attempt to draw some spiritual or metaphysical sense from it and engage it safely from a distance or through a glass as if we were in a laboratory. On the other hand we could step into it and let it absolutely control us and become one and lost in it as our only solution.  Or, we could recognize our part in the making of it from the start, and from this awareness of choice in the matter, recreate a new and better solution.