Julia Schwartz

January 12, 2004

Yeats and Whitman – Interpretations of Higher Learning

            William Butler Yeats and Walt Whitman offer two differing views of higher education in their two poems, “The Scholars” and “When I heard the learn’d astronomer.” While Yeats views academics as pretentious esoterics in denial of the truth of their passions, Whitman cannot understand the facts and figures that lecturers present, but is able to understand their amazement with the astronomy itself in a more hands on manner.

            In “The Scholars,” Yeats scorns the “bald” scholars who “shuffle” about and grow miserable whilst trying to understand the deeper meanings of life through mathematics and philosophy. He resents their struggles, thinking them pretentious. He finds that their discoveries, come to after long hours of academic toil, are merely the same common facts that any ordinary person – “their neighbor[s]” would know. Essentially, Yeats sees scholars putting on an act in order to gain the superficial respect of the population, but he feels that he sees through their acts, and ultimately scorns their actions.

            Yeats’ disdain for academics is shown through his poem, and begins with his initial description of the scholars – old, forgetful men. He adds in the adjective “respectable,” but it is almost a ridicule of the old, “wise” scholars and their work to help out younger scholars – for if the old scholars know nothing, they have nothing to teach the young. He cites scholars as attempting “to flatter beauty’s ignorant ear,” pitying the scholars for trying to find beauty in scholarship, for, as Yeats thinks, beauty is something that moves beyond calculations and logarithms, and into the world of belief.

            While Whitman in his poem shares the identical latter belief of Yeats, he does not have a disdain for the astronomical lecturer; instead, he merely discusses his lack of understanding for the mathematical and scientific principles behind the science of astronomy. Facts and figures – “proofs, figures… / … charts and diagrams…” – mean nothing to him. They are “unaccountable,” making him physically sick. However, after he “wander’d off by [himself],” he saw the universe as the astronomers did, just in a different way.

            To Whitman, the universe and all the celestial beauty of the stars is not found within the mathematical distortions, but in the “mystical night air,” and the contemplations he is able to find when he looks up “in perfect silence in the stars.” The truth of the matter is that both the astronomer and Whitman see the same thing, only through different means. Whitman does not make any attempts to ridicule the astronomer for seeing the universe mathematically, however, as Yeats does. Instead, he simply comes to the realization that there is beauty in the universe in the stars, and moves beyond the way that one finds it.