I know what techne means but the way you were using the term suggested you didn't. Heidegger has a very specific way of using it that complicates the relationship between craft and art and collapses to opposition. It's very hard to talk about it in an artistic context in the light of Heidegger without referring to his idea.
What precisely is Yeats's middle period? The period around The Tower for example? I am actually a big admirer of Yeats but find it quite reductive to talk about him as though he suddenly picked up the notion of public responsibility (vague term but kind of obvious) when as a writer who was self-consciously engaged with the creation of a national identity, surely he was always engaged with public responsibility?
At which stage did I say art and society are unconnected? There is obviously a link, but specifically connecting this to a half-baked idea of verse as you did (and then backtracking by spiralling it out to talking about art in general) is rather different. The question of 'high modernism' dying is much more vexed than you would think, and modernism, postmodernism and forms that some would consider pre-modernist have overlapped and coexisted a lot too. For example, would you call Beckett a modernist or postmodernist? He started writing in the age of Joyce and ended up writing for television, and doing things that were clearly in the light of postmodernist developments, but a lot of people can see a modernist thread running throughout his work. It's nowhere near as simple as you think.
I have no idea what 'idiosyncratic political surges' means but assuming you're referring to Nazism and the like, I don't think those repulsive ideologies and their supporters have anything to do with debates about art. Yes, the likes of Pound had hideous politics and these were entwined with their (often not without merit) art, but fascist and Nazi politics were developed by common thugs, not artists. They've always lived in the sewer, not in books, and that's exactly where they and their fans belong.
