William Butler Yeats: Notes (1)
[ top ] Lake Isle of Innisfree - See Yeatss Autobiographies (1955; 1999 edn.): My father had read to me some passage out of Walden, and I planned to live some day in a cottage on a little island called Innisfee, and Innisfree was opposite Slish Wood where i meant to sleep. / I though that having conquered bodily desire and the inclination of my mind towards women and love, I should live, as Thoreau lived, seeking wisdom. There was a story in the county histoory of a tree that had once grown upon that island guarded by some terrible monster and borne the food of the gods. A young girl pined for the fruit and told her lover to kill the monster and carry the fruit away. he did as he had been told, but tasted the fruit; and when he reached the mainland where she had waited for him, he was dying of its powerful virtue. And from sorrow and from remorse she too ate of it and died. I do not remember whether i chose the island because of its beauty or for the storys sake, but I was twenty-tow or three before I gave up the dream. / I set out from Sligo about six in the evening, walking slowly, for it was an evening of great beauty; but though I was well into Slish Wood by bedtime, I could not sleep, not from the discomfort of the dry rock I had chosen for my bed, but from my fear of the woodranger. Somebody had told me, though I do not think it could have been true, that he went his round at some unknown hour. I kept going over what I should say if found and could not think of anything he would believe. However, I could watch my island in the early dawn and notice the order of the cries of the birds. / I came home next day unimaginably tired and sleeping having walked some thirty miles party over rough and boggy ground. Dor months afterwards, if I alluded to my walk, my uncles general sevant (not Mary Battle, who was slowly recovering from an illness and would not have taken the liberty) would go into fits of laugher. She beleived I had spent the night in a different fashion and had invented the excuse to deceive my uncle, and would say to my great embarrassment, for I was as prudish as an old maid, And you had a good right to be fatigued. (1950 edn., pp.72-73; 1999 edn., p.85.)
Lake Isle of Innisfree - borrowed language?: When Yeats writes of the deep hearts core in his Lake Isle of Inisfree, he may be stealing a phrase to Rose Kavanagh in her poem on Gerald Griffin. In that poem, Kavanagh imagines Griffin living and writing in the London gloom which barred the heavens blue / From thy deep Celtic eyes - and sending his music - i.e., poems, and in particular Gille Machree - back oer the waves to Irelands holy shore. He does so, in her imagining, rather as St. Patrick is called back to Ireland by the people (or the spirit) of the country: twas from her deep hearts core / She called thee: Gille Machree, come home, I pray - / In my green lap of shamrocks sleep, asthore! (See Rose Kavanagh and Her Verses, ed. Matthew Russell, S. J., Dublin: M. H. Gill 1909, p.40; also under Kavanagh, q.v., Notes, infra.) [ top ] Hibernian Tales - or, properly, Royal Hibernian Tales is a rare chapbook, once widely known and cited by W. M. Thackeray in his Irish Sketch Book (1842). From it Yeats derived his story Donald and His Neighbours which he included in Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry (1888), p.299ff. [see epub version -online]. There is an article on the book by Séamus Ó Duilearga in Bealoideas (1940) which makes reference to Yeats and Thackeray - see JSTOR first page, attached.
[ top ] Cathleen Ni Houlihan (I): the phrase the walk of a queen is to be found in in Emily Lawlesss Grania: : The Story of an Island (London: Smith, Elder & Co. 1892).
[ top ] Cathleen Ni Houlihan (II): In Nationality and Imperialism, AE [ George Russell] wrote: The national spirit, like a beautiful woman, cannot or will not reveal itself wholly while a coarse presence is near, an unwelcome stranger in possession of the home. It is shy, hiding itself away in remote valleys, or in haunted mountains, or deep in the quiet of hearts that do not reveal themselves. (Lady Gregory, ed., Ideals in Ireland, 1901; rep. in Mark Storey, ed., Poetry and Ireland Since 1800: A Source-book, Routledge, p.143.)
[ top ] Wanderings of Oisin: the ending of the poem, in which Oisin professes that he would be happier with his pagan companions in Hell than with the saints in Heaven - I will go to Caoilte, and Conan, and Bran, Sceolan, Lomair, / And dwell in the house of the Fenians, be they in flames or at feast - is reminiscent of the tradition of service to ladies described by C. S. Lewis in The Allegory of Love (1936): Frauendienst may be any of these, or any combination of them. It may even be the open enemy of religion - as when Aucassin roundly declares that he would rather follow all the sweet ladies and goodly knights to hell than go without them to heaven. [chap. 1; p.22; see full text of Lewis, op. cit., attached.] [ top ] The Oxford Book of Modern Verse (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1936), was greeted harshly, Auden calling it the worst book ever issued under the Clarendon imprint as including Margaret Ruddock and 17 pages of Buddhist poems by Lady Gerald (Dorothy) Wellesley, which Yeats had actually doctored while also producing good poems of his own from her originals, such as The Three Bushes; other women-poets incl. were Michael Field, Lady Gregory, Mary Coleridge, Alice Meynell, Vita Sackville-West, Edith Sitwell (19pp.), and Sylvia Townsend Warner; along with 14 of T. S. Eliot, as well as 17 poems by Oliver St. John Gogarty (but no one will count), while excluding Austin Clarke to the latters intense chagrin. Yeats was criticised especially for excluding Wilfred Owen and other war poets who plead for the suffering of their men, since passive suffering is not a theme for poetry (Introduction). [ top ]
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Golden Dawn (1): The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, fnd. in Paris by Stanislas de Guaïta as Kabbalistic Order of the Rosy Cross, 1883 - though supposedly based on earlier tradition established by a certain medieval Fr. Rosenkreuz. Mme Blavatsky wrote of the motto (Demon est Deus Inversus) espoused by Yeats: This symbolic sentence in its many-sided forms is certainly most dangerous and iconoclastic in the face of all the dualistic later religions - or rather theologies - especially so in the light of Christianity. (H. P. Blavatsky, The Secret Doctrine, I, pp.411-24; quoted by Virginia Moore in The Unicorn, VI: 29, [q.d.] n.; see The Arcane Archive [online].) [ top ]
[ top ] Jacob Bryant, author of A New System; or, An Analysis of Ancient Mythology, 2 vols. (1775-76), held in Coole Park Library, with a 13-line autograph note by W. B. Yeats, sold at Sothebys in 1972 and purchased by F. Edwards at £260. Yeatss note as follows: Bryant [sic] had a great influence on William Blake. This work especially influenced him so far as I can judge from a rather hasty search in it ... the influence of Bryant is strong in the later Prophetic Books, Jerusalem particularly. ... Bryant made Blakes symbolism rather [?arbitrary] and ugly, I think. WBY further notes that the book was not available in the British Library when he was writing on Blake. (Signed & dated 1901) The book was acquired by Richard Gregory in 1779 in a contemp. tree calf gilt copy Bound by Baumgarten - an elusive craftsman - acc. to booksellers hand-written note the verso of the front free endpaper of each vol.) See Sotheby Sale : Printed Books formerly in the Library at Coole, The Property of Lady Gregory, London: Sotheby & Co., Auction Catalogue, 20-21 March 1972; Lot 70.)
[ top ] Walter Pater: though influenced by his style - pervasively in the esoteric fiction - Yeats ultimately formed a dismissive idea of the stylistic master of the aesthetes: Surely the ideal of culture expressed by Pater can only create feminine souls. The soul becomes a mirror not a brazier. (Estrangement: Extracts from a Diary Kept in 1909, in Autobiographies, 1955, p.477; quoted in G. J. Watson, ed., W. B. Yeats: Short Fiction, Harmondsworth: Penguin 1995, p.258 [notes to Rosa Alchemica]. [ top ] Algernon Swinburne: At the death of Swinburne Yeats told his sister: I am the King of the Cats; quoted in Jeffrey Meyers, Manic Power: Robert Lowell and His Circle (London; Macmillan 1987, p.26.) The sentence was echoed by Roethke at Yaddo in May 1950. Meyers writes of [t]he American emphasis on immediate success, the idea of art as a competitive business and a gladiatorial conception of the writer, encouraged by Hemingway … [ top ]
[ top ] Arthur Symons: Symons visited the Aran Islands with W. B. Yeats [1895] and wrote that he felt: [s]o far from civilisation, so much further out of the world than I have ever been before. Further: We seemed also to be venturing among an unknown people, who, even if they spoke our own language, were further away from us, more foreign than people who spoke an unknown language and lived beyond other seas. (Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands, London 1918, p.303, 306; quoted in Patrick Sheeran, The Novels of Liam OFlaherty: A Study in Romantic Realism, UCG 1972, p.28.) [ top ]
[ top ] James Joyce: Joyce attended the première of Yeats The Countess Cathleen (8 May 1899), watching from the gods; clapped vigorously at Florence Farrs singing of the lyric Who Goes with Fergus?, though surrounded by Irish-Ireland protesters incl. Skeffington, who protests against the type of our people [as] a loathesome brood of apostates in the Freemans Journal (10 May 1899); later told his brother Stanislaus that he counted Cathleen Ni Houlihan by Yeats and Gregory political claptrap (My Brothers Keeper, p.187). [See further remarks on Yeats-Joyce connection under Joyce > Notes > Literary Figures > W. B. Yeats - supra.]
[ top ] T. S. Eliot: In Notes Towards A Definition of Culture (London: Faber & Faber 1948), Eliot writes: And here we may remark that when a dominant class, however badly it has performed its function, is forcibly removed, its function is not wholly taken over by any other. The flight of the wild geese is perhaps a symbol of the harm that England has done to Ireland - more serious, from this point of view, than the massacres of Cromwell, or any of the grievances which the Irish most gladly recall. (p.46.) The resemblance between Yeatss and Eliots view of this matter - both as regards the role of an aristocracy and the fate of Ireland - might suggest a conversation on the topic between them.
[ top ] Daniel Corkery: In Seamus - I, a story in The Hounds of Banba (1920), Corkery writes of the young woman Monica OSullivan: Of Monica, Seamus used always to speak, to speak quite openly, in the phrase Naisi uses of Deirdre in Mr. Yeatss play, My Eagle! - and we never cavilled at it. [...] Was ever any other girl so much of a piece? - figure, bearing, voice, spirit? Her background that windy night was one of the myths - the story of Emer, of Fand, of Deirdre. / She greeted me in Irish [...]. (p.80.) [ top ] Oswald Spengler: Yeatss personal library - now held in the National Library of Ireland - contains copies of The Decline and Fall of the West, respecting which 45 and 96 sheets of photocopy annotations were made by Roger Parisious in 1968. (See the selected list of many such annotations in his library, attached.) [ top ]
George Orwell: A copy of the Collected Poems [1933] (Macmillan 1939), formerly owned by George Orwell and at one time by Richard Rees, is held in the National Library of Wales. [COPAC record, online; accessed 22.10.2010.] [ top ]
[ top ] Una Ellis Fermor attributes the power of Yeatss language to its origin in the speech of Irish peasants, arguing that the unconscious and spontaneous revelation of the living imagination was embodied in the living speech of the people of Ireland in his own day (1964, p.62). [See Loreto Todd, The Language of Irish Literature, 1989, p.73]. ALSO, Yeats knew that words had to be allied to a powerful and passionate syntax (Essays and Introductions, pp.521-22; Loreto, op. cit., p.74]
[ top ] Conor Cruise OBrien: OBrien remarks on Yeatss inveterate use of violent as a term of encomium, e.g., Cuchulain Comforted: violent and famous, strode among the dead. (Passion and Cunning, 1988, q.p.). Noe also that the story of Cruise OBriens successfully getting Yeats to admit that he has not read Carlyle (but his wife has) is told in an interview with R. M. Smyllie in W. R. Rodgers, Irish Portraits and reprinted in Patricia Boylan, All Cultivated People (1988), p.34.
Edmund Gosse: in his Introduction to Restoration Plays (London: Dent 1912; new edn. 1932; rep. 1968), Gosse remarks about the heroic drama introduced by Roger Boyle [Lord Orrery] that [i]t must be remembered that, whether in rhymed or blank verse, tragedy under Charles II was delivered in a kind of undulating sing-song. Some idea of its effect may perhaps be gained from Mr. Yeats experiments in the delivery of verse in his Irish theatre. This was pleasing to the noble amateurs who patronised the stage, and it gave the audience, eager for self-improvement, an impression of being in the best company. The tradition of Elizabethan acting [ ] was entirely lost [when the theatres opened again [ ]. (p.ix.) Further speaks of Thomas Betterton, the actor who played Owen Tudor for Boyle; see under Roger Boyle, supra. [ top ] Horace Plunkett wrote in his diary entry about Yeat as the young Poet - a rebel - a mystic - an ass - but really a genius in a queer way (cited in Peter McDonald, The Necessary Nan, review of The Collected Letters of W. B. Yeats, ed. Warwick Gould, et al., OUP 1997; in Times Literary Supplement, 5 Dec. 1997.)
Reg Skene: Reg[inald] Skene produced the entire cycle of the Cuchulain plays at Univ. of Winnipeg in 1969, later publishing, The Cuchulain Plays of W. B. Yeats (London: Macmillan 1974) [ top ] The Cornell Yeats - Introduction: The volumes in this series will present the manuscripts of W. B. Yeatss poems (all extant versions), plays (complete insofar as possible) and other materials (including selected occult writings) from the rich archives preserved in the collection of Senator Michael B. Yeats, the National Library of Ireland, and elsewhere. The primary goal of the editors is to achieve the greatest possible fidelity in transcription. Photographic facsimiles will be used extensively to supplement the texts. They will be essential reference works for scholars who wish to establish authoritative tests of the published works. Note: 2 items at Emory (Stephen Enniss, Curator of the Literary Collections at the Robert W. Woodruff Library, Emory Univ.); also items from MBY (Michael Yeats) and NYPL. Bibl. cites Edward OShea, A Descriptive Catalog of W. B. Yeatss Library (NY & London: Stanford UP 1984). See also Cornell Series as listed on the publishers web site, infra [copy] and in Ricorso [infra].
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Scrambled Irish: Yeats contributed The Irish Censorship to The Spectator (29 Sept. 1928), asserting that they do not understand that you cannot unscramble eggs; also contributed The Censorship and Thomas Aquinas to Irish Statesman, quoting Aquinas in refutation of the puritanical usage of the term indecent (to mean calculated to excite sexual passion) in the Bill of 1929, writing of Raphaels representation of the Blessed Virgin an entirely voluptuous body with all the patience of his sexual passion.
[ top ] Stilts: In his Preface to The Oxford Book of Modern Verse (1936), Yeats said, we all got down off our stilts - perhaps meaning chiefly himself. The Circus Animals Desertion has a corresponding reference to Malachi, stilts and all as one of the things he discarded in his mature poetic. Curtis Bradford has pointed out that, in the draft-version of the poem, he used the phrase the men on stilts (Curtis Bradford, Yeats at Work, S. Illinois UP 1965). See also Richard Ellmann, Yeats: The Man and the Masks (1948): […] purging his style of its more obvious dream-like trappings, in a word, seeming to get off his stilts. (p.293.) [BS] [ top ]
[ top ] Raging youths: Richard Ellmann quotes Maud Gonnes autobiography, in Yeats: The Man and the Masks (1948; rev. edn. 1962), where she speaks of his autobiography and the fact that they gave little indication of the intensity and enthusiasm which raged in his youth since the self-possessed old man had buried the extravagant boy; Frank OConnor said Every time I leave the old man I feel like a thousand dollars; AE (George Russell) called him The Poet of Shadows in Some Irish Essays (1906). [pp.1-4]
Hugh Lane Gallery: WBY signed a letter to The Irish Times (Dec. 1904; printed 5 Jan. 1905), appealing for donations to the value of £30,000 or £40,000 to purchase the collection of impressionist paintings ‘chosen by experts from the Staats-Froves and Durand-ruel Collections, and admitted to be the finest representation of modern French art outside Paris, currently showing at the Royal Hibernian Academy. with Jane Barlow, Augusta Gregory, S. H. Butcher, Douglas Hyde, Edith Oe. Somerville, Martin Ross, Emily Lawless, W. B. Yeats, Geo. W. Russell (“AE”). (Denson, op. cit, p.54.) [ top ] Sao Paolo U.: The William B. Yeats Chair of Irish Studies was established under an agreement between Brazil and Ireland, signed on 29 Sept. 2009 by Franco Maria Lajolo, Vice-President of the Universidade de Sao Paulo Sandra Margarida Nitrini, Dean of the Faculty of Humanities, on one side, and Ambassador Michael Hoey, representing Ireland on the other, with a view to promoting lasting cooperation between the Embassy and University in future. The Chair is coordinated by Professor Laura P. Z. Izarra (Professor Hon. Causa NUI/Maynooth) and guest-directed by Dr. Munira H. Mutran. [ top ]
[ top ] Minting Ireland: Yeatss authorship of the report of the irish Coinage Commission as Coinage of Saorstat Eireann (1928) is suggested by its inclusion in Wades Bibliography of Yeats as item 317 [Wade 317]. The work has 11 plates. [ top ]
[ top ] Bloom v. Hough: Harold Bloom praised Brenda S. Webster, Yeats: A Psychoanalytical Study (1975), as the best book on Yeats while Graham Hough condemned it as the work of an opinionated bitch. (See Times Literary Supplement, 14 Feb. 1975). [ top ] Clubs & Hons.: W. B was in receipt of Civil List pension of £150 due to influence of Asquith and others since 1910; Academic Committee of English Letters; member of United Arts, Sackville St., and Stephens Green club and Kildare St. clubs; in London, Royal Societies, and Savile Club (after Jan. 1917); offered membership of the Athenaeum, 16 Feb. 1937, without entrance fee (Rule 2). (See Brenda Maddox, Yeatss Ghosts, HarperCollins 1999).
[ top ] Gaol-gaels: Garret Fitzgerald writes of the Sinn Féin leaders incarcerated after 1916, Some 70 were arrested, most of whom were sent to British prisons, a number of them to Gloucester jail. These included my father and professor Eoin MacNeill who, as president of the Irish Volunteers, had unsuccessfully sought to countermand the 1916 rising. During their year in prison these prisoners invented an imaginary Irish festival in honour of W. B. Yeats and persuaded the rather nervous governor, who knew little of Ireland, to lay on a special meal for the occasion, which they greatly enjoyed! (Review of Sean McConville, Irish Political Prisoners 1848-1922: Theatre of War, in The Guardian, 29 March 2003.)
[ top ] Under Ben Bulben?: Yeats was buried at Roquebrune and disinterred for removal to Ireland by Irish corvette in corvette Macha, and reinterred at Drumcliff in keeping with his wishes, Sept. 1948. Identification was performed by reference to the length of his bones and a steel truss which he wore for a hernia problem. The neighbouring grave was occupied by Alfred George Hollis, who also had a steel corset, giving rise to possible confusion. A third rumour to the effect that the grave was reused during the war or after in order to effect the burial of a clochard (tramp) has been repudiated. (See Ann Saddlemeyer, Life of Georgie Yeats, OUP 2002.) For an earlier variant of this matter see Brenda Maddox, Yeatss Ghosts: The Secret Life of W. B. Yeats (NY: HarperCollins 1999): As to the interment and exumation, Maddox suggests DNA testing, but echoes Yeats on being told that he had confused Missolonghi with Mussolini: ‘But … does … it … really … matter?
[ top ] Riversdale House (Rathfarnham, Co. Dublin): Developers seek to build apartments on Yeats house lands: Riversdale House, Ballyboden rd., Rathfarnham, Co. Dublin is the object of a challenge to a development plan to build 18 apartments on its lands; purchased by applications Roy Begley and Gerard Clarke for £1.53 in May 1999; applied to demolish the house, Aug. 1999 for construction of 28 apartments; its gates and piers and arched bridge added to record of protected structures by council, on recommendation of Arts, Heritage Gaeltacht and the Islands Ministry, Feb. 2000, the house being added on 12th June 2000; permission refused for apartments by Bord Pleanála, Dec. 2000; applicant served purchase notice, Sept. 2001; applied ad interim to erect 18 apartments; permission granted by council, March 2001, but successfully appealed by Bord Pleanála, Oct. 2001; High Court challenge made on the basis that the Bord erred in construing the provision of the S. Dublin Development Plan and the extent of the area surrounding the house to be protected. (See report by Mary Carolan, The Irish Times, 23 Nov. 2002.)
NLI Accessions (1972): The National Library acquired Poems Written in Discouragement 1912-1913 (Cuala Press 1913), The Hour Glass ([priv.] Cuala Press [1914], and Mosada ([priv.] Cuala Press 1943). See Report of the Trustees 1971-72 (1972). [ top ] Yeats Memorial: a tribute in bronze by Henry Moore erected by admirers of the poet was dedicated as the Yeats Memorial in Stephens Green, 26th Oct. 1967, being unveiled by An Taoiseach Jack Lynch; readings from the poetry of W. B. Yeats were given by Austin Clarke, Brendan Kennelly and Eavan Boland. The Memorial Committee was established in 1953 under the chairmanship of Lennox Robinson and inaugurated by a gift of £500 from the John J. Kelly, and later augmented by a generous gift from the Arts Council, with a sum of £5000 still being sought in 1967. The committee then comprised Raymond McGrath (Hon. Treas.), Michael Scott, James Johnson Sweeney, and William H. Walsh (Hon. Sec.), with an address at The Munster and Leinster Bank Ltd., 2 Lwr Baggot St., Dublin 2.
[ top ] Irish Academy of Letters [& Medals] - the prospectus (Sept. 1932): We have at present in Ireland no organisation representing Belles Lettres, and consequently means whereby we Irish authors can make known our views, nor any instrument by which action can be taken on our behalf. / There is in Ireland an official censorship possessing, and actively exercising, powers of suppression which may at any moment confine an Irish author to the British and American market, and thereby make it impossible for him to live by distinctive Irish literature [ ]. (Quoted in Geoffrey Elborn, Francis Stuart - A Life, Dublin: Raven Arts Press 1990, p.92.) [ top ] Portraits: There are noted portraits of W. B. Yeats by Albert Power, J. B. Yeats, George Russell, W. Strang, Sean OSullivan, Augustus John [Yeats at Renvyle, June 1930], John Sargent, Edmund Dulac, and Max Beerbohm (all rep. in W. B. Yeats: A Centenary Exhibition, with a foreword by James White (National Gallery of Ireland 1965). Other portrait can be found in Benedict Kiely, Yeatss Ireland, An Illustrated Anthology (Aurum 1993), Yeats as a Young Man, by John Butler Yeats (Municipal Gallery); Sean OSullivan, Yeats (Abbey Theatre Foyer), 1934 [used as cover to Times Literary Supplement, No. 4722, Oct. 1 Ireland [q.d.]. See also pictures from public and private collections rep. in A. N. Jeffares, W. B. Yeats, A New Biography (London: Hutchinson 1988). [ top ] Avies Platt: Platt met Yeats at a meeting of the Sex Education Society held in the Grafton Galleries, London, in 1937 - presided over by Norman Haire and addressed by the German endocrinologist Harry Benjamin speaking on the topic of rejuvenation. Avies was fascinated by Yeats on sight, and more so when she learnt his name after she offered to drive him to the ensuing party in her car (a battered Singer). He appeared to her to be the most striking-looking man I had ever seen: tall, somewhat gaunt, aristocratic, very dignified: a strong, yet sensitive face, crowned by untidy locks of white hair: horn-rimmed glasses, through which shone strange, otherworldly eyes. In her memoir, she retails his own account of the Steinach operation: It was Haire who had performed the operation and to understand what Yeats himself thought of the success of it one must have heard him testify with the vigour and emphasis with which he testified to me as we drove across London that night. I regard it, he said, as one of the greatest events, if not the supreme event, of my life. It is impossible to describe what I experienced when I came round from the anaesthetic. It was like a sudden rush of puberty, yet coming at a time of life that made it intelligible: it was something now that one could understand. I felt life flowing into me. Before the operation, I could scarcely walk across the room without holding on to a chair. I was tortured by desire but could do nothing, or if I tried was prostrate with exhaustion. I had not written, at least anything of worth, for years. But now I was completely cured. Ive been potent ever since. And above all I started writing again and with a zeal I had scarcely felt before, and in my own opinion what I have written since is some of the best work of my life. Platt identifies the energy of Yeatss later writings with his acceptance of sex as the fount from which life springs and explains his high estimate of the operation because by it he was enabled to attain heights he never would otherwise have attained and to finish his course in a way it would not otherwise have been finished. She first shared her information with Joseph Hone when he advertised in the TLS at the time of writing his life of Yeats, and later with Richard Ellmann whom Hone had passed her to. A serious illness prevented her from speaking further with Hone at the time. Her initial reason for attending the Haire session was her concern for her partner, an older man cited as M.M. and never identified. Haire expressed regret that that she had not availed of her meeting with Yeats to become his lover, eliciting her retort: You may know everything about sex but your know nothing about love. (See Platt, A Lazarus Beside Me (1946), reprint in the London Review of Books, 27 Aug. 2015, pp.29-32 - available online; accessed 18 Aug. 2015.) [ top ] Sylvia Plath: A. A. Alvarez, The Savage God (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson 1971; Norton Paperback 1990), narrates how Sylvia Plath leases the flat in which she committed suicide: One gloomy November afternoon she arrived at my studio greatly excited. As usual, she had been trudging the chill streets, house-hunting despondently and more or less aimlessly. A block away from the square near Primrose Hill where she and Ted had lived when they first came to London, she saw a To Let notice up in front of a newly refurbished house. That in itself was something of a miracle in those impossible, overcrowded days. But more important, the house bore a blue plaque announcing that Yeats had once lived there. It was a sign, the confirmation she had been looking for. That summer she had visited Yeatss Tower at Ballylee and wrote to a friend that she thought it the most beautiful and peaceful place in the world. Now there was a possibility of finding another Yeats tower in her favourite part of London which she could in some way share with the great poet. She hurried to the agents and found, improbably, that she was the first to apply. Another sign. On the spot she took a five-year lease of the flat, although the rent was more than she could afford. Then she walked across dark, blowy Primrose Hill to tell me the news. (p.43.) Plath and her husband Ted Hughes were much interested in primitive religion black magic in this period - if for different reasons. Alvarez explains: [Hughes] had never properly been civilised - or had, at least, never properly believed in his civilisation. It was simply a shell he sardonically put up for the sake of convenience and, as such, an apprehension of the animality of self was part of his physical presence, a quality of threat behind his shrewd, laconic manner. By contrast, the psychic gifts which Hughes claimed Plath possessed were more like a triumph of mind over ectoplasm. (p.45.)
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