Abstract
The last book of essays to appear in Yeats’s life, entitled plainly Essays 1931–1936, along with his Introduction to The Oxford Book of Modern Verse bring together an eclectic array of texts that chart his main preoccupations in the first part of the twentieth century. From critical analysis of modern poetry to investigations of George Berkeley’s philosophy, Balzac’s novels and AE’s poetry, to an inspired commentary on Indian mysticism, the book, when seen as a whole, constitutes yet another attempt by Yeats to fuse his diverse interests into a more or less coherent argument that emphasises the crucial role of poetry in the foundation of a modern nation.
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Notes
- 1.
John Kelly , A W.B. Yeats Chronology (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2003), 268.
- 2.
W. H. Auden , ‘The Public v. the late Mr. William Butler Yeats’ in The Complete Works of W. H. Auden: Prose, Volume II, 1939-1948, ed. Edward Mendelson (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2002), 5.
- 3.
Conor Cruise O’Brien, ‘Passion and Cunning: An Essay on the Politics of W. B. Yeats’ in Passion and Cunning: Essays on Nationalism, Terrorism, and Revolution (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1988), 8–61.
- 4.
McCormack disputes Klaus Peter Jochum’s explanation (which was partly written in response to McCormack’s earlier article ‘Samuel Beckett and the Negro Anthology’) that the Goethe-Plakette was given by ‘not the worst of the lot’ and that ‘it was not intended as a political gesture’. ‘Yeats and the Goethe-Plakette: An Unpublished Letter and Its Contexts’, YA15, 284, 285. For McCormack, even if the medal was not political, Yeats’s acceptance of it was in that he allegedly meant to give support to the Nazi regime. Blood Kindred, 91–92.
- 5.
Roy F. Foster , ‘Fascism’ in W. B. Yeats in Context, 220.
- 6.
Cullingford, Yeats, Ireland and Fascism, 200.
- 7.
Howes makes a strong case for the importance of the big house in the development of a nation. Yeats’s Nations, 104–110.
- 8.
Braerton, The Great War in Irish Poetry, 73–74. See also North, The Political Aesthetic of Yeats, Eliot, and Pound, 1–2.
- 9.
Quoted in Foster, ‘Fascism’, 218.
- 10.
Sheils, W. B. Yeats and World Literature, 38–39.
- 11.
Hassett explores the resemblance between Ruddock and Farr. W. B. Yeats and the Muses, 172.
- 12.
The praise gained some balance with time, for initially Yeats found himself ‘lost in admiration and astonishment’ for Turner, whose work seemed to Yeats ‘my own purified & exalted’ (InteLex 6339).
- 13.
Of all the dramatic appearances in Yeats’s life, Ruddock’s arrival in Majorca in May 1936 in a state of mental breakdown rivals that of Maud Gonne ’s at the doorstep of his (hers in fact) house at 73 St. Stephen’s Green in November 1918, while George was pregnant and ill with pneumonia. Therefore much as she resembled Farr, Ruddock also partook of some of the less desirable features, like histrionics, of Gonne and possibly of Mabel Dickinson, who had scared Yeats with a claim of pregnancy in June 1913.
- 14.
W. B. Yeats, ‘“Portrayed before his Eyes ”: An Abandoned Late Poem’, ed. W. Gould, YA6, 214.
- 15.
McAteer, Yeats and the European Drama, 155.
- 16.
T. S. Eliot, To Criticize the Critic and Other Writings (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska 1965), 58.
- 17.
Despite the fact that the anthology was intended to cover poetry since 1900, Yeats decided early on that he would prefer to ‘begin from the death of Tennyson instead of the arbitrary 1900’ (InteLex 6273).
- 18.
See OBMV 1 and Pater, The Renaissance, 130.
- 19.
Yeats consciously attempted to pattern after Wellesley, confessing to her already on 22 December 1935 that he was ‘trying to emulate [“Fire”] in [The Herne’s Egg]’ (LDW 45).
- 20.
Charles Baudelaire , ‘The Painter of Modern Life’ in Baudelaire, Selected Writings on Art and Literature, trans. P. E. Charvet (London: Penguin, 2006), 403, 405.
- 21.
Friedrich Nietzsche , The Birth of Tragedy, trans. Shaun Whiteside (London: Penguin 2003), 16.
- 22.
Richard Buckle , Diaghilev (New York: Atheneum, 1979), 182.
- 23.
See W. B. Yeats, ‘A Note on National Drama’, in Literary Ideals in Ireland, 17. Responding to Eglinton’s point that ‘Wagner’s music, or fragments of it, will go down to posterity without the words’, Yeats tried to establish the composer as an early example of an artist appealing only to ‘the best intellects of our day’. John Eglinton , ‘National Drama and Contemporary Life’, 25, and Yeats, ‘John Eglinton and Spiritual Art’ in Literary Ideals in Ireland, 32 (CW9 418–22).
- 24.
Yeats saw Debussy’s Nuages and Sirènes, in which his attention was captivated by Loië Fuller’s ‘floating ribbon of cloth’ (CW1 208). See Paul Holmes , Debussy (London: Omnibus Press, 2010), 146.
- 25.
Jean-Michel Rabaté , 1913: The Cradle of Modernism (Malden: Blackwell 2007), 25.
- 26.
T. S. Eliot, The Annotated Waste Land with Eliot’s Contemporary Prose, ed. Lawrence Rainey (Yale and New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), 199.
- 27.
Perloff has shown the early Eliot as being a playful poet, with an ear attuned to the slightest variations of sound. In her reading, he becomes a precursor of the self-referential and self-questioning projects of contemporary American poets like Steve McCaffery or the Language group. 21st Century Modernism (Malden: Blackwell, 2002), 158–180.
- 28.
Ezra Pound , ‘Affirmations, II: Vorticism’, The New Age, 11 (14 January 1915), 277.
- 29.
NLI MS 30,354. I would like to thank Neil Mann for indicating that fragment to me.
- 30.
T. S. Eliot, Collected Poems 1909-1962 (London: Faber and Faber 2002), 62. Eventually Yeats did not include any passage from The Waste Land in The Oxford Book.
- 31.
John Kelly , ‘Yeats and Eliot’, YA20, 204.
- 32.
W. B. Yeats, The Variorum Edition of the Plays of W. B. Yeats, ed. Peter K. and Catherine C. Alspach (New York: Macmillan, 1966), 1308.
- 33.
Whitworth argues that ‘the image [of the disembodied hands of the speaker in ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’] echoes others of hands and arms disconnected from their owners’. This leads Whitworth to suggest that ‘these hands emblematize two important aspects of modern poetry. One is the impersonality of modernist writing […]. The other aspect is to do with agency: while in some cases the subject appears to have delegated its work to disembodied hands, in others the hands have escaped altogether’. Reading Modernist Poetry (Malden: Blackwell, 2010), 1, 2.
- 34.
The poem has been criticized for depriving the daughter of her humanity and implying her ‘subordinate relationship to male culture’, as she is also protected against possible male threats; Elizabeth Butler Cullingford, Gender and History in Yeats’s Love Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 137; see also Joyce Carol Oates , ‘”At Least I Have Made a Woman of Her”: Images of Women in Twentieth-Century Literature’, Georgia Review 37 (1983), 7–30; and Marjorie Perloff , ‘Between Hatred and Desire: Sexuality and Subterfuge in “A Prayer for My Daughter”’ YA7, 29–50. However, Howes has demonstrated that the daughter figure symbolizes a ‘continuity of traditional, aristocratic culture’, which for Yeats, would have been synonymous with poetical culture. Yeats’s Nations, 117. Also, Hassett has shown that possibly offensive ideas like the dismissal of ‘opinions’ and ‘rootedness’ gain a positive meaning when viewed against the wider context of Yeats’s writings. W. B. Yeats and the Muses, 143–144. Moreover, Grene points out that the daughter represents ‘the recovery of an unself-conscious unity of being’. Yeats’s Poetic Codes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 208.
- 35.
Of all poets who took (or may silently have taken) exception to The Oxford Book’s selections (and the general response was crushingly disapproving), Yeats took the trouble to write only to Eliot, ‘This morning I got, in a letter from a friend, an extract from The Observer saying that in my forthcoming anthology I preferred MacNeice & Auden to you. I have done nothing of the kind’ (InteLex 6704).
- 36.
This point could be elaborated into a story of mutual misunderstanding between the poets. Whereas Yeats focuses on Eliot’s faulty technique (satirical, in Yeats’s opinion, except for occasional flourishes as in Murder in the Cathedral) but accepts his thought (at least as expressed in the essays), Eliot criticises Yeats for his thought but commends his technique. In his review of CA (which, of all Yeats’s works, seems to share much with Eliot’s own convictions), Eliot mildly mocked Yeats as being ‘not “of this world.”’ Even though he then tried to alleviate the critical implication by suggesting the difference may be ‘not only personal, but national’, he ended again on a deprecating note: ‘Mr. Yeats’s mind is a mind in some way independent of experience’. ‘On Yeats’s Unknown and Unknowable World’, in The Critical Heritage, 231. However, in the same review, ‘Ulysses, Order, and Myth’, Eliot praised Yeats’s poetry, which he characterized as groundbreaking, and commended it again in his lecture.
- 37.
Edna Longley , Yeats and Modern Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 48. In a similar vein, Matthews observes that while for Eliot tradition ‘forms an autonomous order in which the individual poet is reduced to the role of catalyst’, for Yeats, ‘tradition relates to both artistic and lived experience’. Yeats as Precursor, 5.
- 38.
Donoghue, Yeats, 28–29.
- 39.
Greaves, Transition Reception and Modernism, 15. Pound, The Letters, 91. The use of the word ‘expression’, for Greaves, refers to ‘the expression of something subjective, something deeply and personally felt’. But he acknowledges that what Pound desired and helped Ford to realize was the need for ‘the direct rendering of things’. Transition, Reception and Modernism, 16.
- 40.
Greaves, Transition, Reception and Modernism, 17.
- 41.
Eliot, ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, 58.
- 42.
Greaves, Transition, Reception and Modernism, 24.
- 43.
Eliot, The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism, 84–85.
- 44.
Ibid., 85.
- 45.
Eliot, ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, 56.
- 46.
T. S. Eliot, ‘Yeats’ in On Poetry and Poets (New York: The Noonday Press, 1976), 299.
- 47.
Quoted in Kelly, ‘Yeats and Eliot’, 192.
- 48.
Ibid., 227.
- 49.
Terri A. Mester , Movement and Modernism. Yeats, Eliot, Lawrence, Williams, and Early Twentieth-Century Dance (Fayetteville: The University of Arkansas Press, 1997), 33, 34.
- 50.
Grene, Yeats’s Poetic Codes, 216.
- 51.
Paul de Man , Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke and Proust (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), 12.
- 52.
Lee Zimmerman, ‘Singing Amid Uncertainty: Yeats’s Closing Questions’, YA2, 35–45.
- 53.
Sean Pryor , W. B. Yeats, Ezra Pound and the Poetry of Paradise (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2011), 110.
- 54.
Diggory sees this acceptance of ‘the sanction of external authority’ and yet recognizes ‘that authority as the self is the definitive experience of the [American] tradition of the self’. Yeats and American Poetry, 6.
- 55.
Eliot, ‘Yeats’, 308.
- 56.
Ezra Pound , Ezra Pound to his Parents: Letters 1895-1929, ed. Mary de Rachewiltz, et al. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 565.
- 57.
Ezra Pound , ‘Canto XVII’ in The Cantos of Ezra Pound (New York: New Directions, 1983), 76.
- 58.
Daniel Albright , ‘Early Cantos I-XLI’ in The Cambridge Companion to Ezra Pound , ed. Ira B. Nadel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 79.
- 59.
Yeats’s untiring endeavours to found a school of verse delivery that relies on the subtlest of effects is curiously in tune with Pound’s idea of ‘active harmony’ (21) that paid particular heed to the minute connections between individual chords. Although Yeats would hardly have endorsed the view that ‘music is the art most fit to express the fine quality of machines’ (52), he did enlist George Antheil to compose the score for Fighting the Waves and The Only Jealous of Emer and would have concurred with Pound’s general appraisal of the collapse of music and poetry after the 12th century (43). Ezra Pound , Antheil and the Treatise on Harmony (Chicago: Pascal Covici, 1927).
- 60.
Hassett , W. B. Yeats and the Muses, 192.
- 61.
Ibid., 192.
- 62.
The phrase ‘doubly a woman’ may also be applied to Margot Ruddock, whose duality was represented even at the level of name: Ruddock and Collis. Finding a balance, a Unity of Being in her verse, would, according to Yeats, enable her to regain control over her tormented self so that ‘Margot Ruddock may become Margot Collis again, and forget amid the excitement of the Boards that more perilous excitement’ (CW6 190). Schizophrenia, like mediumship, may be conceived of as a particularly acute case of creative imbalance in an individual (see Chap. 8).
- 63.
Cullingford, Gender and History in Yeats’s Love Poetry, see especially Chap. 1, 11–24.
- 64.
Stan Smith , ‘Porphyry’s Cup: Yeats, Forgetfulness, and the Narrative Order’, YA5, 44.
- 65.
Tim Armstrong , Modernism, Technology and the Body. A Cultural Study (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 152.
- 66.
See Cullingford, Gender and History in Yeats’s Love Poetry, 271–277.
- 67.
W. B. Yeats, The Senate Speeches of W. B Yeats, ed. Donald R. Pearce (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1960), 158.
- 68.
Ibid., 158.
- 69.
Ibid., 159, 160.
- 70.
Howes, Yeats’s Nations, 139.
- 71.
Emilie Morin , ‘W. B. Yeats and Broadcasting, 1924-1965’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 35 (2015), 151.
- 72.
Eliot, Collected Poems , 178. Longley lucidly discusses the mutual misprisions and disagreements between Yeats and Eliot, Yeats and Modern Poetry, 44–55.
- 73.
Kelly, ‘Yeats and Eliot’, 221–222.
- 74.
John Kwan-Terry , ‘Ash-Wednesday: A Poetry of Versification’ in The Cambridge Companion to T. S. Eliot, ed. A David Moody (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 132.
- 75.
W. B. Yeats, Yeats and Sturge Moore: Their Correspondence, 1901-1937 (London: Keegan Paul, 1953), 80.
- 76.
Ibid., 75.
- 77.
W. J. McCormack, ‘We Irish’ in Europe: Yeats, Berkeley & Joseph Hone (Dublin: University College Dublin, 2010), 27.
- 78.
Ibid., 53.
- 79.
Ibid., 93.
- 80.
Harold Bloom , Shelley’s Mythmaking (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959), 123.
- 81.
Honoré de Balzac , Louis Lambert, trans. K. P. Wormeley (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1889), 89–90.
- 82.
Ibid., 70.
- 83.
W. B. Yeats, The Variorum Edition of the Poems of W. B. Yeats, 855.
- 84.
Yeats, The Variorum Edition of the Plays of W. B. Yeats, 67. Marcus reads this poem’s introduction of bards as a reference to ‘sacrificial rites’. Yeats and Artistic Power, 158–159.
- 85.
Quoted in Curtis Bradford , Yeats at Work (New York: The Ecco Press, 1978), 167.
- 86.
Gould’s account of Yeats’s interest in Balzac and the latter’s influence on the poet hints at this dual impulse towards system building and simultaneously challenging the system. Gould observes that, ‘For Yeats, the artistic vision of a Balzac or a Dante was of theatrical intricacy and completeness, just as it was manifold in its growth and symbolical ordering. It was sustaining, too, as a life-illusion’. ‘A Crowded Theatre: Yeats and Balzac’ in Yeats the European, ed. A. Norman Jeffares (Gerrard’s Cross: Colin Smythe, 1989), 71.
- 87.
Quoted in Bradford, Yeats at Work, 160.
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Pietrzak, W. (2017). The Modern World and Yeats’s Discontents. In: The Critical Thought of W. B. Yeats. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-60089-5_7
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