William Butler Yeats: Commentary (4)
Elizabeth Butler Cullingford, Yeats, Ireland and Fascism (London: Macmillan 1981; 1985): Although undoubtedly proud of his own Irish blood, Yeats saw racial differences as distinguishing features, not grounds for discrimination. He was particularly opposed to anti-semitism. Had Mussolini been anti-semitic from the beginning it is debatable whether Yeats would ever have been deluded by him. As it was, Mussolini only passed racist laws in 1938 as a direct result of Hitlers influence. There is some debate about whether anti-semitism is an essential part of fascism or merely a useful diversionary tactic, but many scholars insist that it is fundamental to the fascist outlook. In that case, Yeats was certainly not a fascist: indeed he felt that there was a special kinship between the Jews and the Irish. Both were persecuted races, scattered over the face of the earth by the Diaspora and the Great Famine. (Quoted in David Krause, The De-Yeatsification Cabal, rep. in Yeatss Political Identies, ed. Jonathan Allison, Michigan UP 1996, pp.299.) Stephen Putzel, Reconstructing Yeats: The Secret Rose and The Wind Among the Reeds (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan 1985), 242pp., ill. Part II of the Tables of the Law is an indictment of the narrator and Aherne, who both hide behind the trappings of Catholicism. Aherne understands the reason for his misery: I have seen the whole, and how can I come against to believe that a part is the whole? I have lost my soul because I have looked out of the eyes of the angels. (TL, 30; VSR, 163). This is the dilemma of all Yeatsian visionaries. The mystic and the martyr find their way to the heart of God , but Aherne is neither, and so he is lost. He seeks to reconcile the new order of freedom and spirit with orthodox Catholicism, but it cannot be done. He refuses to let go, and so is trapped between the end of the old epoch and the beginning of th enew. The narrator is full of an anguish of pity for Aherne because Catholicism which had seized him in the midst of the vertigo he called philosophy ... had failed to do more than hold him on the margin (TL, 28-29, VSR, 162-63). Unlike the narrator, Aherne has only accomplished a half-retreat ito orthodox religion; his visionary experience has blocked a full retreat. / Here, as in the beginning of the story, the narrator's real concern is not for Aherne, but for himself. [...]. See also the earlier remark: this precious lost book fiction reappears over twenty-five years later in A Vision- without the preciosity of Aherne's account [when] Robartes finds the Speculum Angelorum et Hominorum propping up the bed of a beggar maid [...; p.120.]; available online.)
Joep Leerssen, Ireland and the Orient, in Oriental Prospects: Western Literature and the Lure of the East, ed. C. C. Barfoot, Theo dHaen (Amsterdam & Atlanta: Rodopi B.V. 1988), pp.161-74 [rebutting Edward Said]: Said himself, as I pointed out before, has given an influential interpretation of Yeats as a third world intellectual: a poet who wants to emancipate his countrys imagination, who wants imaginatively to repossess his country. Yeats is too much a European exoticist himself to be analysed in terms of a downtrodden colonial who vindicated his native culture against the oppressor's hegemony. Yeats shares that tendency which is also evident in Mangan: that exoticism has been internalised, and encompasses ones own country. (p.172.) [ top ] Conor Cruise OBrien, Passion and Cunning: An Essay on the Politics of W. B. Yeats, in A. N. Jeffares & K. W. Cross, eds., In Excited Reverie (1965), rep. in Passion and Cunning and Other Essays (NY: Simon & Schuster 1988), pp.8-61. [On No Second Troy:] If the snobbery endemic in his class and generation takes in his writing from now on an almost hysterical intensity, it is, I think, that he felt himself to have undergone, in his political years, a kind of contamination, a loss of caste, through the contagion of the throng, and that in the end, he had suffered a deep injury to his pride. One must accept, he had written to Lady Gregory near the end of his political involvement, the baptism of the [19] gutter. (10 April 1900; Letters, ed. Wade, p.338.) The foul ditch and the abounding gutter became recurring symbols of disgust in his later poetry. In the same letter in which he accepted the baptism of the gutter, he spoke of trying to get someone to resign from something in favour of MacBride of the Irish Brigade - the man whom Maud Gonne would marry three years later. [Quotes … she had taught me hate / kisses to a clown] There are moment when he felt ashamed of this hate, but it proved enduring. (p.20.) [Cont.]
[See also Denis Donoghues reaction to O'Briens essay under in OBrien - supra.] Daniel Albright, ed., The Poems of W. B. Yeats[Everyman's Library] (London: J. M. Dent 1990, 1992) - Notes on The Wanderings of Oisin: This long poem was Yeatss first important success - Oscar Wilde, one of its earliest reviewers, praised its nobility of treatment and nobility of subject matter, delicacy of poetic instinct, and richness of imaginative resource [The Artist as Critic, ed. Richard Ellmann, p.150]. Yeats was not to become a distinguished narrative poet - he tended to rely on an abundance of cunningly contrived tropes and pictures, all presented at about the same speed, where a more economical poet, like Chaucer or William Morris, would offer swift summary gestures and a better control of pace. Kinesthetic precision, fascination with weapons, tools, and other action-helpers, sympathy for muscular strain, were all missing from Yeatss armamentarium. As Wilde noted, the reader becomes exasperated by Yeatss interest in out-glittering Keats. In addition, the characters in his narrative poems are often figments of various extreme passions, trying to escape from the confines of a human identity - for example, not one of these personages has a sense of humour. But in this poem Yeats succeeded by confining the narrative elements to a kind of frame: the hero gallops over the sea to three islands, each a flat picture, a domain of suspended animation, where the action slows to zero or mechanically repeats itself - a lyric parody of narrative. Yeats never again found a plot for a narrative poem that lent itself so well to his gifts / The sources of the fable were mixed. See full-text version in RICORSO Library, Criticism > Major Authors, via index, or attached.)
[ top ] Ronald Schleifer, Yeatss Postmodern Rhetoric, in Leonard Orr, ed., Yeats and Modernism (Syracuse UP 1991), pp.16-34: An examination of a complex, double conception of rhetoric in Yeats is neither universal nor accidental, but it arises at a particular historical moment within the limits of particular discursive possibilities. It arises within the rhetoric of modernism, yet points to the related phenomenon of postmodernism. In the famous definition of the mythical method, T. S. Eliot describes and exemplifies the complexity of the modernist rhetoric that I am examining. In using the myth Eliot writes, in manipulating a continuous parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity, Mr. Joyce is pursuing a method which others must pursue after him ... It is simply a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history. It is a method already adumbrated by Mr. Yeats, and of the need for which 1 believe Mr. Yeats to have been the first contemporary to be conscious. ... It is, I seriously believe, a step toward making the modern world possible for art. (Ulysses, Order and Myth, in Selected Essays, ed. Frank Kermode, NY: Harcourt 1975, pp.177-78.) What concerns me here is less Eliots understanding of Joyces achievement than his description of the panorama of contemporary life and its articulation in language. For I contend that the mythical parallel described by Eliot is, in fact, what he explicitly denies that it is in his review of Ulysses - simply a kind of scaffolding that Joyce uses, then discards, after contemporary history, with its futility and anarchy, rises up and is represented in language. / In this, Eliot repeats a recurrent gesture of modernist rhetoric: he delimits a phenomenon that is not capable of being reduced to order- that is not even susceptible to linguistic order - and he asserts [16] that, nevertheless, it is parallel to the classical order of myth that somehow underlies its surface disorder. (pp.16-17.) [Cont.]
[ top ] William Bonney, ‘He Liked The Way His Finger Smelt: Yeats and the Tropics of History, in Yeats and Postmodernism, ed. Leonard Orr (Syracuse UP 1991): ‘[…] Yeats frequently indicates that he is aware of both the inevitably linguistic essence of human perception and of the consequently unstable and contradictory qualities thereby introduced into consciousness. History cannot transcend verbiage because the world only exists to be a tale [for] coming generations, a tale that is largely incoherent, it seems, for even in the conceptual utopia of Byzantium, according to Yeats, language had been the instrument of controversy. [Mythologies, 1959, p.301; A Vision, Macmillan 1937 [sic] 279] Linguistic structures generate myth and thought, which, in turn, foster human culture. But Yeats declares, All civilisation is held together by artificially created illusions [recte manifold illusions]; thought is merely trash and tinsel; and myth is without empirical substantiation, consisting only of Statements our nature is compelled to make and employ as a truth though there [40] cannot be sufficient evidence and is therefore worthy of annulment because a myth that cannot be ... consumed becomes a spectre. Overall, however, There is no improvement: only a series of sudden fires, each ... as necessary as the one before it. [Coll. Plays, 210; Coll. Poems, NY: Macmillan, 1966 Edn., p.284] / Within this context, Yeats deprecatingly judges his own ontic syntheses to be just a phantasmagoria in which I endeavour to explain my philosophy of life and death (CP, 453). Even A Vision is merely my lunar parable, my dream, although he laments nevertheless the destructiveness of the semantic perversions that he witnesses in Ireland, and of the mechanical logic and commonplace eloquence which give power to the most empty mind ... crushing as with an iron roller all that is organic and negating thereby vital mythic unity, as being a most un-Celtic thing. [A. N. Jeffares, A Commentary on the Poems, of W. B. Yeats, Stanford UP 1984, pp.159, 188] Yeatss acultural historical transformations are necessarily violations of linguistic coherence and are signalled, figuratively, by cacophony, the irrational cry ... the scream of Junos peacock, [ref28] and, literally, by absurdities such as those that occurred in 1916 when the commandant-general and president of the provisional government, Patrick Pearse, surrendered in the post office, the repository of failed words and thus the monument of futile causes. (pp.40-41; for full text, see Ricorso Library, Criticism/Major Authors, infra.) Mitsuko Ohno, Yeats and Religion, in Irish Writers and Religion [IASIL Japan Ser., No. 4] (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe 1992): Yeats wrote in The Celtic Twilightthat among the country people in Sligo, where he had spent many youthful summers, there were people who saw faeries and banshees. The ancient villages were full of spirits and ghosts, and also full of people who claimed they had witnessed other-world creatures. Even those who doubted Hell and ghosts believed, Yeats writes, in faeries; a woman says: Hell was an invention got up by the priest to keep people good; and a man says: No matter what one doubts, one never doubts the faeries for they stand to reason. These views illustrate the state of the Christian faith among the people of rural Ireland. From what is disclosed in The Celtic Twilight, it is apparent that there existed a mixture of folk elements from the pre-Christian era and Christian orthodoxy. These mixed beliefs seem to have been widely accepted among the local people of Western Ireland, but in Yeatss work they are treated in such a way as to appeal to sophisticated readers in England and elsewhere as exotic and charming. By Yeatss time there had developed a taste for such material, where earlier they might have been shuffled off as merely crude and uncivilized. (Cont.)
Robert Welch, Irish Poetry from Thomas Moore to W. B. Yeats (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1980): Yeats believed that through mythology one could find a way back into the deepest energies of the race, energies that were associated with the energy of personality itself. (p.211.) [Numerous quotations from this text are registered various author-files of Ricorso.] [ top ] Robert Welch, States: Transformations in Modern Irish Writing (London: Routledge 1993): His [Yeats] ambition was to write for race and reality, which meant that he wanted to get at the mathematics of the inner forms of the Irish nature, because by doing so he would activate the latent energies of life itself. (p.65.) [Numerous quotations from this text are registered various author-files of Ricorso.] Robert Welch, Irish Folklore, Legend and Myth (London: Penguin 1993), Introduction: speaks of An ambition to write for his country a literature that wouls be urgent, risky, troublesome and, at the same time, totally in line with tradition. (p.xx; quoted in Ashleigh McDowell, UU Diss., UUC 2011.) [Cont.]
[ top ] David Lloyd, Anomalous States: Irish Writing and the Post-colonial Moment (Dublin: Lilliputian Press; Duke UP 1993) - remarking in Yeats's ambivalence in Easter 1916: Though Yeats acknowledges those who became national martyrs, it is clear the poet is disturbed not only by the violence they engaged in but by the level of their sacrifice which in a very real way transcended language. And in transcending language, such a saccrifice not only displaces the poets authority but subverts the faith that many cultural nationalists had in th eower of literature and language to transform a nation. (p.84; quoted in Patrick McBride, UG essay, UUC 2009.) G. J. Watson, Irish Identity and the Literary Revival (London: Croom Helm 1979): Yeats [...] saw the prime aim of [his] work at the outset as the necessity to bring back dignity to the image of Ireland , both at home and abroad [...] To present Ireland in his art as tragic heroine rather than comic ape. (p.90.) On Yeatss use of heroic figures: though they suggest a world of rarefied heroic dignity, Yeats does not try to enforce in them or through them any kind of exemplar moral for the Ireland of his own times [while] it was that very imprecision that made it so stirring an inspiration for it meant different things to different men and in doing so filled the minds of his countrymen with dreams and clothed in glamour his countrys past (p.94-95.) On Yeats and the Easter Rising: The rising is seen as a spontaneous self-contained gesture, a heroic act cutting across history, as it were, rather than as the culmination of a few centuries of insurrectionary thought and tradition. Yeatss tone is carefully designed to convey a note of surprise, a sense of unexpectedness. (Ibid., p.111.) [The foregoing quoted in Ashleigh McDowell, UU Diss., UUC 2011, and Emma Carroll, MA Diss., UU 2011.)
[ top ] Edward Said, Nationalism, Colonialism and Literature: Yeats and Decolonization [Field Day Pamphlet, No. 15] Derry 1988, 24pp.: For Yeats the over-lappings he knew existed between his Irish nationalism and the English cultural tradition that both dominated him and empowered him as a writer was bound to cause an over-heated tension, and it is the pressure of this urgently political and secular tension that one may speculate caused him to try to resolve it on a higher, that is, non-political, level. Thus the deeply eccentric and aestheticised histories he produced in A Vision and the later quasi-religious poems are elevations of the tension to an extra-worldly level. (p.13.) Seamus Heaney [1] - ‘In the Midst of the Force Field, in The Irish Times (28 Jan. 1989); rep. in Yeatss Political Identities, ed. Jonathan Allison (Michigan UP 1996), pp.257-60: [...; discussing Cuchulain Comforted - One of the greatest ever death-bed utterances,:] [...] by using the terza rima form, a three-line, triple-rhyming stanza which he had never before employed in over half a century of composing verse, and by using it at this precise moment, on the verge of death, Yeats was awakening new music from the ancient harp of European poetic tradition. To treat the theme of the spirits journey to the land of the dead, and to do it in terza rima, the metre of The Divine Comedy, was to call the great poets of western civilisation to keep a vigil at his bed. Homer had sent Odysseus down, Virgil had sent Aeneas, Dante had sent himself in a dream, and now Yeats was sending his shadow-self in the form of Cuchulain. What he was experiencing was being given form and meaning even as it was happening. It was as if Shakespeare had arranged to die not years after the end of his stage career but during the first production of The Tempest, at the moment when Prospero declares that he will break his staff and drown his book. / It is this dramatic genius and unifying purpose that give Yeatss work its glamour and concentration. Everything is gathered into the artifice, and the artifice is all transformative and dynamic, part of an action of self-completion and self-renewal. The energy and containment are just equal to each other, so there is exhilaration in being near to the vitality of it all. Reading Yeats, I can feel at times a transmission of dangerous force such as I felt as a child, standing alone in fields close to the tremble of electric poles, under the sizzle of the power lines. / But the master would not thank me for that technological image. The whole push of his endeavour was against the further encroachment of the scientific spirit. Yet perhaps he would not have resisted the electric image so strongly, since electricity retains the force of a natural miracle, and Yeatss overall intent was to clear a space in the mind and in the world for the miraculous, for all kinds of rebellion against the tyranny of physical and temporal law. Indeed, it is time we redirected our attention to this visionary courage in his oeuvre and laid off pressing him too trimly into our own cultural arguments, and even blaming him for our predicaments. (See full text in Ricorso, Library, Criticism / Major Authors, infra.)
[ top ] Hazard Adams, The Book of Yeatss Vision: Romantic Modernism and the Antithetical Tradition (Michigan UP 1995): [...] The 1925 Vision, published privately by Yeats, was the outgrowth of several years of Mrs. Yeatss automatic speech and writing. Like her husband, Mrs. Yeats had occultist interests dating from before they met. Early in their marriage, worried about her husbands state of mind, she faked automatic writing to distract him, only to learn that she was indeed a medium of some sort. The 1925 edition of A Vision, hiding her mediumship behind an elaborate fiction, is supposedly a distillation of what Yeats gleaned from her automatic writing and speech. At [6] first glance, A Vision reports a quasi-astrological occult system of thought that purports to classify types of human character according to twenty-eight categories based on the phases of the moon, to offer a theory of reincarnation, and, further, to order all of Western history according to lunar cyclical symbolism. / But Yeats was not at all satisfied with the first published version and worked on an elaborate revision for more than a decade, producing the very different second version in 1937. By this time, Yeatss understanding of his wifes communications was more sophisticated, in part because he had read more philosophy. Also, and perhaps more important, he had now the time to query his own experience with the communications and to develop an attitude toward them. In the new version he raised questions about his own belief in what he called the system, and that led in turn to the question of its purpose and the larger issues of belief that were preoccupying writers at the time. Yeatss attention to this issue and other matters in the new and more elaborate frame he caused to enclose his account of the system made the 1937 version virtually a new book. / The new frame Yeats constructed provided an extremely dense environment for the abstract presentations inside it. A Vision was originally dedicated to Vestigia, the code name used in the Order of the Golden Dawn by Moina Bergson Mathers, sister of the philosopher and wife of the occultist MacGregor Mathers. In 1937 this dedication disappears, and the text begins with a group of three meditations entitled A Packet for Ezra Pound. There is included a section that describes the the experience with Mrs. Yeats, revealing the supposedly true source of the work. / Oddly enough, the second part of the book nevertheless presents a heavily revised and extended fictive explanation of the sources. The story told turns out to be a comic farce, in which Yeats revives certain characters from his earlier works and creates new ones. Thus, the introductory matter of A Packet for Ezra Pound presents one explanation of the systems genesis, allegedly true; and the second section of the book presents another, clearly fictive and so declared, in which Yeats himself is actually alluded to as one of the characters. For many people the true account is as fantastic as the fictive one. [...] (pp.6-7; for longer extracts, see Ricorso Library, Criticism / Major Authors - W. B. Yeats, infra.) [ top ] Marjorie Howes, Yeatss Nations: Gender, Class and Irishness (Cambridge UP 1996): The early Yeats was acutely aware of contemporary cultural connections between Celtic character and a cultured, nervous, bourgeois femininity. In his copy of Renans The Poetry of Celtic Races, Yeats wrote three marginal comments next to Renans description of the Celts femininity: Delicacy, a feminine race, and The Ideal of Woman. Yeats did not begin his engagement with Celticism by accepting the equation of femininity with racial inferiority and colonial status put forth by Celticists like Arnold. In struggles between opposing political and cultural discourses, including imperiailist and nationalist ones, some signs or values prove more convertible than others, like foreign currencies. In his earliest Celtic writings, Yeats struggled to construct an Irish nationality that incorporated, explicitly and implicitly, a trait that had become so closely associated with weakness and pathology that it was virtually impossible to convert it into a positive attribute: femininity. For a brief period, Yeats followed Arnold and Renans gendering of the Celt without reproducing their political corollaries to it. In some of his earliest essays he outlined a version of the Celtic spirit that combined two contrasting models of Irish national character, one that was Arnoldian, feminine and particular, and another that was anti-Arnoldian, masculine and universalist. / This combination appears in Yeatss 1886 review essays about Sir Samuel Ferguson. [...] (p.25; see further under Matthew Arnold, supra.) [Cont.]
[ top ] Richard Allen Cave, ed., Selected Plays (Penguin 1997), Introduction - remarks on The Land of Hearts Desire (1894): it might be argued that, despite the Irish setting, a fairy enchantment is not an especially Irish subject. What makes it peculiarly so for an Irish audience is the focus on the threshold, for the concept of the threshold means much to the Gaelic sensibility. According to Celtic belief, states of in-between-ness, physical and temporal, were respected as times for acquiring or losing great personal powers. In dramatic terms they afforded Yeats a context for achieving what under his fathers guidance he had long considered the primary objective of [xv] theatre; the staging of moments of intense life, “passionate action or somnambulistic reverie”. They were states not of being but of becoming and as such were decisive, irrevocable. They actual doorway on stage here becomes the correlative of the central characters access to self-awareness, since it gives entrance to a representative of some challenging, alien nature or world, the Other in Jungian terms, against which Mary Bruins self has to seek definition. Whether consciously or not, Yeats had hit on a powerful, archetypal symbol in the threshold which in terms of drama had its roots less in English than in classical Greek theatres. I was too a stage-image which at this exact point in time Maeterlinck was reviving and exploring with a vibrant and eerie immediacy in his plays The Intruder, Interior and The Death of Tintagiles. Ancient and modern usage endowed this focus on the ominous doorway with considerable authority. (pp.xv-vi.) Quotes from Circus Animals Desertion: Character isolated by a deed / To engross the present and dominate memory; also quotes: all the finest poetry comes logically out of the fundamental action and that it was erroneous to believe that some things are inherently poetical and to try to pull them on to the scene at every moment. (p.xx.) [Cont.]
[ top ] Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction[1966] with a new Epilogue (Oxford UP 2002) - pp.104-06 [on Yeats]: And of course we have it now, the sense of an ending. It has not diminished, and is as endemic to what we call modernism as apocalyptic utopianism is to political revolution. When we live in the mood of end-dominated crisis, certain now-familiar patterns of assumption become evident. Yeats will help me to illustrate them. / For Yeats, an age would end in 1927; the year passed without apocalypse, as end-years do; but this is hardly material. When I was writing A Vision, he said, I had constantly the word terror impressed upon me, and once the old Stoic prophecy of earthquake, fire and flood at the end of an age, but this I did not take literally. Yeats is certainly an apocalyptic poet, but he does not take it literally, and this, I think, is characteristic of the attitude not only of modern poets but of the modern literary public to the apocalyptic elements. All the same, like us, he believed them in some fashion, and associated apocalypse with war. At the turning point of time he filled his poems with images of decadence, and praised war because he saw in it, ignorantly we may think, the means of renewal. The danger is that there will be no war. ... Love war because of its horror, that belief may be changed, civilization renewed. He saw his time as a time of transition, the last moment before a new annunciation, a new gyre. There was horror to come: thunder of feet, tumult of images.' But out of a desolate reality would come renewal. In short, we can find in Yeats all the elements of the apocalyptic paradigm that concern us. (here p.105; available at Goodreads - online; accessed 13.04.2015.)
Frank Kermode, Ezra Conquers London, review of Ezra Pound: A Portrait of the Man and His Work, Vol. 1, by A. David Moody, in The New York Review of Books (1 May 2008), pp.21-24: [...] One of his stated ambitions was to meet W. B. Yeats, whom he regarded as the greatest poet of the day. This he achieved with remarkable speed, and his long friendship with the Irish poet was fruitful on both professional and personal levels. The time he spent later with Yeats in the country at Stone Cottage, a winter retreat in Sussex where each worked on his own and on the others poetry, offers an unusual instance of a little-known young poet decisively affecting the style of an illustrious senior; for Pound was determined to bring Yeats down to a style of common speech, while prosecuting his own campaign against the English iambic pentameter. Yeats is teased in the Cantos, but both poets benefited from Pounds determination to teach and learn. [Cont.]
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