William Butler Yeats: Quotations (2)

The Works of William Blake: Poetic, Symbolic and Critical, ed. Edwin John Ellis & W. B. Yeats, Vol. 1 (London: Bernard Quaritch 1893): ‘Sometimes the mystical student, bewildered by the different systems, forgets for a moment that the history of moods is the history of the universe, and asks where is the final statement - the complete doctrine. The universe is itself that doctrine and that statement. All others are partial, for it alone is the symbol of the infinite thought which is in turn symbolic of the universal mood we name God.’ (p.239.) ‘As natural things and intellectual things differ by discrete degrees, so do intellectual things differ by discrete degrees from emotional. We have thus three great degrees the first of which is external: the first two possessing form, physical and mental respectively, and the third having no form nor substance - dwelling not in space but in time only.’ (pp.239-40.) ‘The systems of philosophy and dogmas of religion are to the mystic of the Blakean school merely symbolic expressions of racial moods or emotions - the essences of truth - seeking to express themselves in terms of racial memory and experience - the highest degree cloaking itself, as it were, in the second. The German produces transcendental metaphysics, the Englishman positive science, not because either one has discovered the true method of research, but because they express their racial moods or affections. The most perfect truth is simply the dramatic expression of the most complete man. “no man can think, write, or speak,” says Blake in the second Natural Religion booklet, “from his heart but he must intend the truth.[”] Thus all sects of philosophy are from the poetic genius adapted to the weaknesses of every individual.’ (pp.240-41.) For longer quotations from The Ellis-Yeats edition of The Works of Blake and Yeats’ annotations on his own copy made in May 1900, see Ricorso, Library “Authors” [infra]. [Cont.]

The Works of William Blake (1893) - cont. “The Necessity of Symbolism” [intro. chap.]: ‘The Hindu, in the sculptured caverns of Elephanta; the gipsy, in the markings of the sea shell he carries to bring him good fortune; the Rosicrucian student [ftn.] in the geometric symbols of medieval magic, the true reader of Blake in the entangled histories of Urizen and his children, alike discover a profound answer to the riddle of the world. Do they find anything in their obscure oracles that cannot be known from the much more intelligible dialectics and experiments of modern science and modern philosophy? To answer this question it is necessary to analyze the method whereby the mystic seeks for truth, and to inquire what the truth is he seeks for. Blake has discussed the first portion of his problem in many places, but particularly in two tractates called “There is no Natural Religion”. By Natural Religion he understood attempts to build up a religious or spiritual life from any adjustment or “ratio” of the impressions derived from the five senses. These impressions may, indeed, be used in poetry and prophesy as a key to unlock religious truths, but “correspondence”, as Swedenborg called the symbolic relation of out to inner, is itself no product of nature or natural reasons, beginning as it does with a perception of a something different from natural things with which they are to be compared. “Natural Religion” was two-fold to Blake. It was a solution of problems and a restraint of conduct: when only a restraint it was deadening, when only a solution it was […; q.p.] (See further in RICORSO Library, “Literary Classics” - W. B. Yeats, infra.)

The Poetry of William Blake, ed. & sel. by W. B. Yeats (Routledge, 1893; reiss. 1910), Introduction: ‘[…] The great contest of imagination with reason is described throughout “The Prophetic Books” under many symbols, but chiefly under the symbolic conflict of Los, the divine formative principle which comes midway between absolute existence and corporeal life, with Urizen, “the God of this world” and maker of dead law and blind negation. Blake considered this doctrine to be of the utmost importance, and claimed to have written it unde the dictation of spiritual presences. “I have written this poem from immediate dictation,” he wrote, of “Jerusalem”, “twelve or sometimes twenty or thirty lines at a time without premeditation, and even against my will. The time it has taken in writing was thus rendered non-existent, and an immense poem exists which seems the labour of a long life, all produced without labour or study.” It is not possible in a short essay like the present to do more than record these things, for to discuss and to consider what these presences wer would need many pages. Whatsoever they were, presences or mere imaginings, the words they dictated remain for our wonder and delight. There is not one among these words which is other than significance and precise to the laborious [xxxv] student, and many passages of simple poetry and the marvel of the pictures remain for all who cannot or will not give the needed labour. Merlin’s book lies open before us, and if we cannot decipher its mysterious symbols, then we may dream over the melody of evocations that are not for our conjuring, and over the strange colours and woven forms of the spread pages.’ (pp.xxxv-i; for longer extracts, see RICORSO, Library, “Irish Literary Classics” - W. B. Yeats, infra.]

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‘Old Gaelic Love Songs’, review of Douglas Hyde, Love Songs of Connacht], in Bookman (1893), rep. in Robert Welch, ed., W. B. Yeats: Irish Folklore, Legends and Myth, Penguin 1993, pp.91-94: ‘As for me, I close the book [Hyde’s Love Songs of Connacht] with much sadness. Those poor peasants lived in a beautiful if somewhat inhospitable world, where little had changed since Adam delved and Eve span. Everything was so old that it was steeped in the heart, and every powerful emotion found at once noble types and symbols for its expression. But we - we live in a world of whirling change, where nothing becomes old and sacred, and our powerful emotions, unless we be highly-trained artists, express themselves in vulgar types and symbols. The soul then had but to stretch out its arms to fill them with beauty, but now all manner of heterogeneous ugliness has beset us. A peasant had then but to stand in his own door and think of his sweetheart and of his sorrow, and take from the scene about him and from the common events of his life types and symbols, and behold, if chance was a little kind, he had made a poem to humble generations of the proud. And we - we labour and labour, and spend days over a stanza or a paragraph, and at the end of it have made, likely as not, a mere bundle of phrases. Yet perhaps this very stubborn uncomeliness of life, divorced from hill and field, has made us feel the beauty of these songs in a way the people who made them did not, despite their proverb: A tune is more lasting than the song of the birds, A word is rnore lasting than the riches of the world. We stand outside the wall of Eden and hear the trees talking together within, and their talk is sweet in our ears.’ (End; Welch, op. cit., p.94.)

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‘Irish National Literature, I: From Callanan to Carleton’, The Bookman (July 1895). Extract: ‘[S]ome of my countrymen include among national writers all writers born in Ireland, but I prefer, though it greatly takes from the importance of our literature, to include only those who have written under Irish influence and of Irish subjects.’ [MOORE, DAVIS, MITCHEL] ‘borrowed the mature English methods of utterance and used them to sing of Irish wrongs or preach of Irish purposes. Their work was never quite satisfactory, for what was Irish in it looked ungainly in an English garb, and what was English was never perfectly mastered, never wholly absorbed into their being.’ [J. J. Callanan by contrast achieved] ‘greater simplicity and charm’; ‘despite their constant clumsiness and crudity, they brought into the modern world the cold vehemence, the arid definiteness, the tumultuous movement, the immeasurable dreaming of the Gaelic literature’ (Frayne, 1970, Vol. I, p.360-64). ‘Irish National Literature, III’, The Bookman ( Sept. 1895): ‘[T]hough they [Hyde’s Love Songs of Connacht] have none of the verbal extravagance of the bards, they seem to be continually straining to express something which lies beyond the possibility of expression, some vague, immeasurable emotion’. ‘Irish National Literature, IV: A List of the Best Irish Books’ (The Bookman, Oct. 1895; rep. in Frayne, ed., Uncollected Prose, Vol. 1, p.385ff): ‘The most that read Irish national literature read from patriotism and political enthusiasm, and make no distinction between literature and rhetoric’; castigates educated readers who ‘are themselves full of a different, but none the less noisy, political passion, and are, with some admirable exceptions, too anti-Irish to read an Irish book of any kind, other than a book of jokes or partisan argument’; ‘the professor of literature at Trinity College, Dublin [i.e., Dowden] is one of the most placid, industrious, and intelligent of contemporary critics when he writes on an English or a German subject, but the “introduction” to his last book of essays […] accused Irish writers with great heat of “raving of Brian Beru” […] and having neither scholarship nor “accuracy” […] It is too empty of knowledge and sympathy to influence to any good purpose the ignorant patriotic masses, and it comes with enough authority to persuade the undergraduates and the educated classes that neither the history, nor the poetry, nor the folklore, nor the stories which are interwoven with their native mountains and valleys are worthy of anything but contempt.’ (Frayne, I, pp.382-87).

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‘The Literary Movement in Ireland’ (1901): ‘[T]he Celtic movement, which has hitherto interested but a few cultivated people, is about to become a part of the thought of Ireland. [/…/] Before 1891, Unionists and Nationalists were too busy keeping one or two simple beliefs at their fullest intensity for any complexity of thought or emotion; and the national imagination uttered itself, with a somewhat broken energy, in a few stories and in many ballads about the need of unity against English, about the martyrs who had died at the hands of England, or about the greatness of Ireland before the coming of England. They built up Ireland’s dream of Ireland, of an ideal country weighed down by immemorial sorrows and served by heroes and saints, and they taught generations of young men to love their country with a love that was the deepest emotion they were ever to know; but they built with the virtues and beauties and sorrows and hopes that would move to tears the greatest number of those eyes before whom the modern world was beginning to unroll itself; and, except where some rare, impersonal impulse shaped the song according to its will, they built to the formal and conventional rhythm which would give the most immediate pleasure to the ears that had forgotten Gaelic poetry and not learned the subtleties of English poetry. The writers who made this literature or who shaped its ideals, in the years before the great famine, lived at the moment when the middle class had a philosophy and a literature full of the civic virtues and, in all but [its] unbounded patriotism, without inconvenient ardours. They took their style from Scott and Campbell and Macauley, and that “universally popular” poetry which is really the poetry of the middle class, and from Bèranger, and from that “peasant poetry” which looks for its models to Burns here and there a poet or story-teller found an older dream among the common people or in his own mind, and made a personality for himself, and was forgotten; for it was the desire of everybody to be moved by the same emotion as everybody else, and certainly one cannot blame a desire which has thrown so great a shadow of self-sacrifice. [/…/] The fall of Parnell and the wreck of his party and of the organisations that supported it were the symbols, if not the causes, of a sudden change […] They were followed by movements and organisations that brought the ideas and the ideals which are the expression of personalities alike into politics, economics, and literature. Those who looked for the old energies, which were the utterance of the common will, were unable to see that a new kind of Ireland, as full of energy as a boiling pot, was rising up amid the wreck of the old kind, and that the national life was finding a new utterance. This utterance was so necessary that it seems as if the hand that broke the ball of glass, that now lies in fragment full of an new iridescent life, obeyed some impulse from beyond its wild and capricious will. More books about Irish subjects have been publishes in these last eight years than in the thirty years that went before them, and these books have the care for scholarship and precision of speech which had been notoriously lacking in books in Irish subjects. An appeal to the will, a habit of thought which measures all beliefs by their intensity, is content with a strenuous rhetoric; but an appeal to the intellect needs an always more perfect knowledge, an always more malleable speech.’ [184-86]; [Gives account of old IPP indignation at the unpatriotic character of the new movements and their literary expression] […; cont.]

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‘The Literary Movement in Ireland’ (1901): - cont.: ‘Contemporary English literature takes delight in praising England and her Empire, the master-work and the dream of the middle class; and, though it may escape from this delight, it must long continue to utter the ideals of the strong and wealthy. Irish intellect has always been preoccupied with the weak and with the poor, and now it has begun to collect and describe their music and stories, and to utter anew the beliefs and hopes which they alone remember.’ [187] ‘Irish literature may prolong its first inspiration without renouncing the complexity of ideas and emotions which is the inheritance of cultivated men, for it will have learned from the discoveries of modern learning that the common people, wherever civilisation has not driven its plough too deep, keeps a watch over the roots of all religion and all romance.’ [188] ‘the peasant remembers such songs and legends, all the more, it may be, because he has though of little but cows an sheep and the like in his own marriage, for his dream has never been entangled with reality. the beauty of women is mirrored in his mind, as the excitement of the world is mirrored in the minds of children, and like them he thinks nothing but the best worth remembering.’ [190] ‘The children of the poor and simple learn from their unbroken religious faith, and from their traditional beliefs, and from the hardness of their lives, that this world is nothing, and that a spiritual world, where all dreams come true, is everything; and therefore the poor and simple are that imperfection whose perfection is genius.’ [191; cont.]

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‘The Literary Movement in Ireland’ (1901) - cont.:‘The movement of thought which has made the good citizen, or has been made by him, has surrounded us with comfort and safety, and with vulgarity and sincerity. One finds alike its energy and its weariness in churches which have substituted a system of morals for spiritual ardour; in pictures which have substituted conventionally pretty faces for the disquieting revelations of sincerity; in poets who have set the praises of those things good citizens think praiseworthy about a dangerous delight in beauty for the sake of beauty […] Blake said that all art was a labour to bring that golden age, and we call romantic art romantic because it has made the age’s light dwell in the imagination of a little company of studious persons. When the valley and clay had almost become clay and stone, the good citizens plucked up their hear and took possession of the world and filled it with their little compact thoughts; and romance fled to more and more remote fairyland, and forgot that it was every more than an old tale which nobody believes. We are now growing interested in our countries, and the discovery that the common people in all countries that have not given themselves up to the improvements and the devices of good citizens, which we call civilisation, still half understand the sanctity of their hills and valleys […] is making us half ready to believe [here quotes Ecclesiasticus] that the forms of nature may be temporal shadows or realities.’ [195; …] we cannot know how many these countries are until the new science of folklore and the almost new science of mythology have done their work […] but Ireland […] will have begun a change that, whether it is begun in our time or not for centuries, will some day make all lands holy lands again. […] [195]. (Commissioned by and first printed in North American Review, Dec. 1899, rep. with emendations in Lady Gregory, ed., Ideals in Ireland (1901; rep. from original in John Frayne, ed., Uncollected Prose, Vol. 2, 1975, pp.184-96.)

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‘Celtic Element in Literature’ (1897; with postcript of 1902; rep. [with notes of 1924] in Essays & Introductions, 1961, pp.173-88) [begins by citing ‘sentences’ from Renan, and more so, from Arnold in his Study of Celtic Literature’): ‘Matthew Arnold, in The Study of Celtic Literature, has accepted this passion for Nature, this imaginativeness, this melancholy, as Celtic characteristics, but has described them more elaborately [than Ernest Renan]. The Celtic passion for Nature comes almost more from a sense of her “mystery” than her “beauty”, and it adds “charm and magic” to Nature, and the Celtic imaginativeness and melancholy are alike “a passionate, turbulent, indomitable reaction against the despotism of fact”.’ Yeats, Essays & Introductions, 1961, p.173-88; p.173.) ‘How well one knows these sentences, better even than Renan’s, and how well one knows the passages of prose and verse which he used to prove that wherever English literature has the qualities these sentences describe, it has them from a Celtic source. Though I do not think any of us who write about Ireland have built any argument from them, it is well to consider them a little, and see where they are helpful and where they hurtful. If we do not, we may go mad some day, and the enemy root up our rose-garden and plant a cabbage-garden instead. Perhaps we may re-state a little Renan’s and Arnold’s argument.’ (p.174) ‘When [175] Matthew Arnold wrote, it was not easy to know as much as we know now of folk-song and folk-belief, and I do not think he understood that our “natural magic” is but the ancient religion of the world, the ancient world of Nature and that troubled ecstasy before her, that certainty of beautiful places being haunted, which it brought into men’s minds.’ (Ibid., p.175-76.) ‘Once every people in the world believed that trees were divine and could take a human or grotesque shape and dance among the shadows […] All the old literatures were full of these or of like imaginations […] this way of looking at things’ (p.175.) ‘The Old Irish and the old Welsh, though they had less of the old way than the makers of the Kalevala, had more of it than the makers of the Sagas, and it is this that distinguishes the examples Matthew Arnold quotes of their ‘natural magic’, of their sense of “the mystery” more than of “the beauty” of Nature. When Matthew Arnold wrote, it was not easy to know as much as we know now of folk-song and folk-belief, and I do not think he understood that our “natural magic” is but the ancient religion of the world, the ancient world of Nature and that troubled ecstasy before her, that certainty of beautiful places being haunted, which it brought into men’s minds.’ (Essays & Introductions, p.175-76.) […; cont.]

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‘Celtic Element in Literature’ (1897) - cont.: ‘All folk literature that keeps the folk tradition, delights in unbounded and immortal things […] Cuchulain in the folk-tale had the passion of victory, and he overcame all men, and died warring upon the waves, because they alone had the strength to overcome him […] Oisin, new come from his three hundred years of faeryland, and of the love that is in faeryland, bids Saint Patrick cease his prayers a while and listen to the blackbird, because it is the blackbird of Derrycarn that Finn brought from Norway three hundred years before, and set its nest upon the oak-tree with his own hands […] surely if one goes far enough into the woods, one will find there all that one is seeking?’ (p.179) […] ‘All folk literature has indeed a passion whose like is not in modern literature and music and art, except where it comes by some straight or crooked way out of ancient times. Love was held to be a fatal sickness in ancient Ireland.’ (p.180.) [Cont.]

‘Celtic Element in Literature’ (1897) - cont.: ‘[…] Nor do the Irish weigh and measure their hatred […] The ancient farmers and herdsmen were full of love and hatred, and made their friends gods, and their enemies the enemies of gods, and those who keep their traditions are not less mythological. From this “mistaking dreams”, which are perhaps essences, for “realities”, which are perhaps accidents, from this “passionate, turbulent reaction against the despotism of fact”, comes, it may be, that melancholy which made all ancient peoples delight in tales that end in death and parting, as modern peoples delight in tales that end in marriage bells; and made all ancient peoples, who, like the old Irish, had a nature more lyrical than dramatic, delight in wild and beautiful lamentations.’ Further: ‘Men did not mourn merely because their beloved was married to another, or because learning was bitter in the mouth, for such mourning believes that life might be happy were it different, and is therefore the less mourning, but because they had been born and must die with their great thirst unslaked.’ (Ibid., 180-82; quoted [in small part] in Aaron Kelly, Twentieth-Century Literature in Ireland: A Reader's Guide to Essential Criticism, Palgrave Macmillan 2008, p.10.) [Cont.]

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‘Celtic Element in Literature’ (1897), cont.: ‘Matthew Arnold quotes the lamentation of Llywarch Hen as a type of the Celtic melancholy, but I prefer to quote it as a type of the primitive melancholy’ (Ibid., p.183.) ‘Matthew Arnold asks how much of the Celt must one imagine in the ideal man of genius, I prefer to say, how much of the ancient hunters and fishers and of the ecstatic dancers among hills and woods must one imagine in the ideal man of genius? Certainly a thirst for unbounded emotion and a wild melancholy are troublesome things in the world, and do not make its life more easy or orderly, but it may be the arts are founded on the life beyond the world, and that they must cry in the ears of our penury until the world has been consumed and become a vision. Certainly, as Samuel Palmer wrote, excess is the vivifying spirit of the finest art, and we must always seek to make excess more abundantly excessive. Matthew Arnold has said that if he were asked “where English got its turn for natural magic”, he “would answer with little Fount that it got much of its melancholy from a Celtic source, with no doubt at all that from a Celtic source it got nearly all its natural magic.”’ (p.184.) ’ [Cont.]

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‘Celtic Element in Literature’ (1897) - cont.: ‘I will put this differently and say that literature dwindles to a mere chronicle of circumstances, or passionless fantasies, and passionless meditations, unless it is constantly flooded with the passions and beliefs of ancient times, and that of all the fountains of the passions and beliefs of ancient times in Europe, the Slavonic, the Finnish, the Scandinavian, and the Celtic, the Celtic alone has been for centuries close to the man river of European literature. It has again brought the “vivifying spirit” “of excess” [sic] into the arts of Europe. [Here Yeats cites Renan on the story of Lough Derg as providing the ‘framework’ of the Divine Comedy] The reaction against the rationalism of the eighteenth century and the symbolical movement, which has come to perfection in Germany with Wagner, in England in the Pre-Raphaelites, in France in Villiers de L’Isle Adam and Mallarmé, in Belgium in Maeterlinck, has stilled the imagination of Ibsen and D’Annunzio, is certain the only movement that is saying new things.’ (Ibid., p.185.) 1902 Postcript: ‘I could have written this essay with much more precision and have much better illustrated my meaning [187] if I had waited until Lady Gregory had finished her book of legends, Cuchulain of Muirthemne, a books to set beside the Morte D’Arthur and the Mabinogion.’

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‘Celtic Element in Literature’ (1897) - cont.: ‘No Gaelic poetry is so popular in Gaelic-speaking places as the lamentations of Oisin, old and miserable, remembering the companions and the loves of his youth, and his three hundred years in fairyland, and his faery love.’ (In W. B. Yeats: The Major Works, ed. & annot., Edward Larrissy, 1997, p.375; quoted in Lindsay Grattan, MA Dip. Essay, UUC 2010.)

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“Modern Irish Poetry”, in Justin McCarthy, gen. ed., Irish Literature (Washington 1904, Vol. III, pp.vii-xiii): ‘[The] Irish Celt is sociable, as may be known from his proverb, “It is better to be quarreling than to be lonely,” and the Irish poets of the nineteenth century have made songs abundantly when friends and rebels have been at hand to applaud. The Irish poets of the eighteenth century found both at a Limerick hostelry, above whose door was written a rhyming welcome in Gaelic to all passing poets, whether their pockets were full or empty. Its owner, himself a famous poet, entertained his fellows as long as his money lasted, and then took to minding the hens and chickens of an old peasant woman for a living, and ended his days in rags, but not, one imagines, without content. Among his friends and guests had been Red O’Sullivan, Gaelic O’Sullivan, blind O’Heffernan, and many another, and their songs had made the people, crushed by the disasters of the Boyne and Aughrim, remember their ancient greatness. / The bardic order, with its perfect artifice and imperfect art, had gone down in the wars of the seventeenth century, and poetry had found shelter amid the turf smoke of the cabins. The powers that history commemorates are but the coarse effects of influences delicate and vague as the beginning of twilight, and these influences were to be woven like a web about the hearts of men by farm laborers, peddlers, potato diggers, hedge schoolmasters, and grinders at the quern, poor Minstrels who put the troubles of their native land, or their own happy or unhappy loves, into songs of an extreme beauty. But in the midst of this beauty was a flitting incoherence, a fitful dying out of the sense, as though the passion had become too great for words, as must needs be when life is the master and not the slave of the singer. / English-speaking Ireland had meanwhile no poetic voice, for Goldsmith had chosen to celebrate English scenery and manners; and Swift was but an Irishman by what Mr. Balfour has called the visitation of God, and much against his will; and Congreve by education and early association; while Parnell, Denham, and Roscommon were poets [vii] but to their own time. Nor did the coming with the new century of the fame of Moore set the balance even, for his Irish melodies are too often artificial and mechanical in their style when separated from the music that gave them wings. Whatever he had of high poetry is in “The Light of Other Days”, and in “At the Mid Hour of Night”, which express what Matthew Arnold has taught us to call “the Celtic melancholy”, with so much of delicate beauty in the meaning and in the wavering or steady rhythm that one knows not where to find their like in literature. His more artificial and mechanical verse, because of the ancient music that makes it seem natural and vivid, and because it has remembered so many beloved names and events and places, has had the influence which might have belonged to these exquisite verses had he written none but these. / An honest style did not come into English-speaking Ireland until Callanan wrote three or four naive translations from the Gaelic. “Shule Aroon” and “Kathleen O’More” had indeed been written for a good while, but had no more influence than Moore’s best verses. Now, however, the lead of Callanan was followed by a number of translators, and they in turn by the poets of Young Ireland, who mingled a little learned from the Gaelic ballad writers with a great deal learned from Scott, Macaulay, and Campbell, and turned poetry once again into a principal means for spreading ideas of nationality and patriotism. They were full of earnestness, but never understand that, though a poet may govern his life by his enthusiasms, he must, when he sits down at his desk, but use them as the potter the clay. Their thoughts were a little insincere, because they lived in the half-illusions of their admirable ideals; and their rhythms not seldom mechanical, because their purpose was served when they had satisfied the dull ears of the common man. They had no time to listen to the voice of the insatiable artist, who stands erect, or lies asleep waiting until a breath arouses him, in the heart of every craftsman. Life was their master, as it had been the master of the poets who gathered in the Limerick hostelry, though it conquered them not by unreasoned love for a woman [viz., Mary Hynes], or for native land, but by reasoned enthusiasm, and practical energy. No man was more sincere, no man [viii] had a less mechanical mind than Thomas Davis, and yet he is often a little insincere and mechanical in his verse. When he sat down to write he had so great a desire to make the peasantry courageous and powerful that he half believed them already “the finest peasantry upon the earth”, and wrote not a few such verses as / “Lead him to fight for native land, / His is no courage cold and wary; / The troops live not that could withstand / The headlong charge of Tipperary” / and to-day we are paying the reckoning with much bombast. His little book has many things of this kind, and yet we honor it for its public spirit, and recognise its powerful influence with gratitude. He was in the main an orator influencing men’s acts, and not a poet shaping their emotions, and the bulk of his influence has been good. He was, indeed, a poet of much tenderness in the simple lovesongs “The Marriage”, “A Plea for Love”, and “Mary Bhan Astór”, and, but for his ideal of a fisherman defying a foreign soldiery, would have been as good in “The Boatman of Kinsale”; and once or twice when he touched upon some historic sorrow he forgot his hopes for the future and his lessons for the present, and made moving verse. / His contemporary, Clarence Mangan, kept out of public life and its half-illusions by a passion for books, and for drink and opium, made an imaginative and powerful style. He translated from the German, and imitated Oriental poetry, but little that he did on any but Irish subjects has a lasting interest. he is usually classed with the Young Ireland poets, because he contributed to their periodicals and shared their political views; but his style was formed before their movement began, and he found it the more easy for this reason, perhaps, to give sincere expression to the mood which he had chosen, the only sincerity literature knows of; and with happiness and cultivation might have displaced Moore. But as it was, whenever he had no fine ancient song to inspire him, he fell into rhetoric which was only lifted out of commonplace by an arid intensity. In his “Irish National Hymn”, “Soul and Country”, and the like, we look into a mind full of parched sands where the sweet dews have never fallen. A miserable [viii] man may think well and express himself with great vehemence, but he cannot make beautiful things, for Aphrodite never rises from any but a tide of joy. Mangan knew, nothing of the happiness of the outer man, and it was only when prolonging the tragic exultation of some dead bard that he knew the unearthly happiness which clouds the outer man with sorrow, and is the fountain of impassioned art. Like those who had gone before him, he was the slave of life, for he had nothing of the self-knowledge, the power of selection, the harmony of mind, which enables the poet to be its master, and to mold the world to a trumpet for his lips. But “O’Hussey’s Ode” over his outcast chief must live for generations because of the passion that moves through its powerful images and its mournful, wayward, and fierce rhythms. / “Though he were even a wolf ranging the round green woods, / Though he were even a pleasant salmon in the untamable sea, / Though he were a wild mountain eagle, he could scarce bear, he, / This sharp, sore sleet, these howling floods.” / Edward Walsh, a village schoolmaster, who hovered, like Mangan, on the edge of the Young Ireland movement, did many beautiful translations from the Gaelic; and Michael Doheny, while out “on his keeping” in the mountains after the collapse at Ballingarry, made one of the most moving of ballads; but in the main the poets who gathered about Thomas Davis, and whose work has come down to us in The Spirit of the Nation, were of practical and political, not of literary, importance. / Meanwhile Samuel Ferguson, William Allingham, and Aubrey de Vere were working apart from politics; Ferguson selecting his subjects from the traditions of the bardic age, and Allingham from those of his native Ballyshannon, and Aubrey de Vere wavering between English, Irish, and Catholic tradition. They were wiser than Young Ireland in the choice of their models, for, while drawing not less from purely Irish sources, they turned to the great poets of the world, Aubrey de Vere owing something of his gravity to Wordsworth, Ferguson much of his simplicity to Homer, while Allingham had trained an ear, too delicate to catch the tune of but a single master, upon [x] the lyric poetry of many lands. Allingham was the best artist, but Ferguson had the more ample imagination, the more epic aim. He had not the subtlety of feeling, the variety of cadence of a great lyric poet, but he has touched, here and there, an epic vastness and naiveté, as in the description in Congal of the mire-stiffened mantle of the giant specter Alananan mac Lir, striking against his calves with as loud a noise as the mainsail of a ship makes, “when with the coil of all its ropes it beat the sounding mast.” He is frequently dull, for he often lacked the “minutely appropriate words” necessary to embody those fine changes of feeling which enthrall the attention; but his sense of weight and size, of action and tumult, has set him apart and solitary, an epic figure in a lyric age. / Allingham, whose pleasant destiny has made him the poet of his native town, and put “The Winding Banks of Erne” into the mouths of the ballad singers of Ballyshannon, is, on the other hand, a master of “minutely appropriate words”, and can wring from the luxurious sadness of the lover, from the austere sadness of old age, the last golden drop of beauty; but amid action and tumult he can but fold his hands. He is the poet of the melancholy peasantry of the West, and, as years go on, and voluminous histories and copious romances drop under the horizon, will take his place among those minor immortals who have put their souls into little songs to humble the proud. / The poetry of Aubrey de Vere has less architecture than the poetry of Ferguson and Allingham, and more meditation. Indeed, his few but ever memorable successes are enchanted islands in gray seas of stately impersonal reverie and description, which drift by and leave no definite recollection. One needs, perhaps, to perfectly enjoy him, a Dominican habit, a cloister, and a breviary. / These three poets published much of their best work before and during the Fenian movement, which, like Young Ireland, had its poets, though but a small number. Charles Kickham, one of the “triumvirate” that controlled it in Ireland; John Casey, a clerk in a flour mill; and Ellen O’Leary, the sister of Mr. John O’Leary, were at times very excellent. Their verse lacks, curiously enough, the oratorical vehemence of Young Ireland, and is [xi] plaintive and idyllic. The agrarian movement that followed produced but little poetry, and of that little all is forgotten but a vehement poem by Fanny Parnell and a couple of songs by T. D. Sullivan, who is a good song writer, though not, as the writer has read on an election placard, “one of the greatest poets who ever moved the heart of man”. But while Nationalist verse has ceased to he a portion of the propaganda of a party, it has been written, and is being written, under the influence of the Nationalist newspapers and of Young Ireland societies and the like. With an exacting conscience, and better models than Thomas Moore and the Young Irelanders, such beautiful enthusiasm could not fail to make some beautiful verses. But, as things are, the rhythms are mechanical, and the metaphors conventional; and inspiration is too often worshiped as a Familiar who labors while you sleep, or forget, or do many worthy things which are not spiritual things. / For the most part, the Irishman of our times loves so deeply those arts which build up a gallant personality, rapid writing, ready talking, effective speaking to crowds, that he has no thought for the arts which consulted the personality in solitude. He loves the mortal arts which have given him a lure to take the hearts of men, and shrinks from the immortal, which could but divide him from his fellows. And in this century, he who does not strive to be a perfect craftsman achieves nothing. The poor peasant of the eighteenth century could make fine ballads by abandoning himself to the joy or sorrow of the moment, as the reeds abandon themselves to the wind which sighs through them, because he had about him a world where all was old enough to be steeped in emotion. But we cannot take to ourselves, by merely thrusting out our hands, all we need of pomp and symbol, and if we have not the desire of artistic perfection for an ark, the deluge of incoherence, vulgarity, and triviality will pass over our heads. If we had no other symbols but the tumult of the sea, the rusted gold of the thatch, the redness of the quicken-berry, and had never known the rhetoric of the platform and of the newspaper, we could do without laborious selection and rejection; but, even then, though we might do much that would be delightful [xii], that would inspire coming times, it would not have the manner of the greatest poetry. / Here and there, the Nationalist newspapers and the Young Ireland societies have trained a writer who, though busy with the old models, has some imaginative energy; while the more literary writers, the successors of Allingham and Ferguson and De Vere, are generally more anxious to influence and understand Irish thought than any of their predecessors who did not take the substance of their poetry from politics. They are distinguished too by their deliberate art, and by their preoccupation with spiritual passions and memories. / The poetry of Lionel Johnson and Mrs. Hinkson is Catholic and devout, but Lionel Johnson’s is lofty and austere, and like De Vere’s never long forgets the greatness of his Church and the interior life whose expression it is, while Mrs. Hinkson is happiest when she embodies emotions, that have the innocence of childhood, in symbols and metaphors from the green world about her. She has no reverie nor speculation, but a devout tenderness like that of St. Francis for weak instinctive things, old gardeners, old fishermen, birds among the leaves, birds tossed upon the waters. Miss Hopper belongs to that school of writers which embodies passions, that are not the less spiritual because no Church has put them into prayers, in stories and symbols from old Celtic poetry and mythology. The poetry of “A.E.,” at its best, finds its symbols and its stories in the soul itself, and has a more disembodied ecstasy than any poetry of our time. He is the chief poet of the school of Irish mystics, in which there are many poets besides many who have heard the words, ‘ If ye know these things, happy are ye if ye do them,’ and thought the labors that bring the mystic vision more important than the labors of any craft. / Mr. Herbert Trench and Mrs. Shorter and “Moira O’Neill” are more interested in the picturesqueness of the world than in religion. Mr. Trench and Mrs. Shorter have put old Irish stories into vigorous modern rhyme, and have written, the one in her “Ceann dubh Deelish” and the other in “Come, Let Us Make Love Deathless,” lyrics that should become a lasting part of Irish lyric poetry. “Moira O’Neill” has written pretty lyrics of Antrim life; but one discovers that Mrs. Hinkson or Miss Hopper, although their work is probably less popular, come nearer to the peasant passion, when one compares their work and hers with that Gaelic song translated so beautifully by Dr. Sigerson, where a ragged man of the roads, having lost all else, is yet thankful for ‘the great love gift of sorrow,’ or with many songs translated by Dr. Hyde in his ‘Love Songs of Connacht,’ or by Lady Gregory in her Poets and Dreamers. / Except some few Catholic and mystical poets and Professor Dowden in one or two poems, no Irishman living in Ireland has sung excellently of any but a theme from Irish experience, Irish history, or Irish tradition. Trinity College, which desires to be English, has been the mother of many verse writers and of few poets; and this can only be because she has set herself against the national genius, and taught her children to imitate alien styles and choose out alien themes, for it is not possible to believe that the educated Irishman alone is prosaic and uninventive. Her few poets have been awakened by the influence of the farm laborers, potato diggers, peddlers, and hedge schoolmasters of the eighteenth century, and their imitators in this, and not by a scholastic life, which, for reasons easy for all to understand and for many to forgive, has refused the ideals of Ireland, while those of England are but far-off murmurs. An enemy to all enthusiasms, because all enthusiasms seemed her enemies, she has taught her children to look neither to the world about them, nor into their own souls, where some dangerous fire might slumber. / To remember that in Ireland the professional and landed classes have been through the mold [sic] of Trinity College or of English universities, and are ignorant of the very names of the best Irish writers, is to know how strong a wind blows from the ancient legends of Ireland, how vigorous an impulse to create is in her heart to-day. Deserted by the classes from among whom have come the bulk of the world’s intellect, she struggles on, gradually ridding herself of incoherence and triviality, and slowly building up a literature in English which, whether important or unimportant, grows always more unlike others; nor does it seem as if she would long lack a living literature in Gaelic, for the movement for the preservation of Gaelic, which has been so much more successful than anybody foresaw, has already its poets. Dr. Hyde has written Gaelic poems which pass from mouth to mouth in the west of Ireland. The country people have themselves fitted them to ancient airs, and many that can neither read nor write sing them in Donegal and Connemara and Galway. I have, indeed, but little doubt that Ireland, communing with herself in Gaelic more and more, but speaking to foreign countries in English, will lead many that are sick with theories and with trivial emotion, to some sweet wellwaters of primeval poetry.’ [End.] Textual Note: formerly the Introduction to A Book of Irish Verse, 1895; rev. edn. 1900, and eds. to 1912, and 1920; 1920, 4th edn., with Preface of 1900, stating that changes have been made in the original Introduction since ‘some phrases in the introduction which seemed a little petulant in form’ (signed 15 Aug. 1899.) such changes are chiefly the revision of ‘contention’ [1895] to ‘strife’ [1900], and, here, ‘quarreling’ [1904]; note also, in the 1895 Introduction, from 1904 version: ‘the seas of literature are distraught by storms and currents, and full of the wrecks of Irish anthologies’; [this book] ‘intended only a little for English readers and not at all for Irish peasants, but almost wholly for the small beginning of that educated and national public, which is our greatest need and perhaps our vainest hope.’ [1895, p.xxvii.]

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Poetry and Ireland: Essays by W. B. Yeats and Lionel Johnson (Dublin: Cuala MCMVIII [1908]): ‘Our attacks, mine especially, on verse which owed its position to its moral nd political worth, roused a resentment which even I find hard to imagine today, and our verse was attacked in return for all that it had in common with the accepted poetry of the world, and most of all for its lack of rhetoric, its refusal to preach a doctrine or to consider the seeming necessities of the cause’ (pp.13-4); ‘I believed in those days that a new intellectual life would begin, like that of Young Ireland, but more profound and personal, and that could we get a few plain principles accepted, new poets and writers of prose would make an immortal music.’ (p.15); ‘… and we artists, who are the servants not of any cause but of mere naked life, and above all … protesting individual voices’ (p.16; all quoted in Chris Corr, ‘English Literary Culture and Irish Literary Revival’, PhD Thesis, UUC 1995, 38-39.

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Letter to The Irish Worker (1913): ‘I charge the Dublin nationalist newspapers with deliberately arousing religious passion to break up the organisation of the workingman, with appealing to mob law day after day, for publishing the names of workingmen and their wives for purposes of intimidation. And I charge the Unionist Press of Dublin and those who directed the police with conniving in this conspiracy.’ (Quoted in Frank Tuohy, Yeats: An Illustrated Biography, Macmillan 1976, p.144).

King of the Great Clock Tower (1934), Prefatory notes, Sect. II: When Huguenot artists designed the tapestries for the Irish House of Lords, depicting the Battle of the Boyne and the siege of Derry, they celebrated the defeat of their old enemy Louis XIV, and the establishment of a Protestant Ascendancy who was to impose upon Catholic Ireland, an oppression copied in all its details from that imposed upon the French Protestants.’ [Here speaks of the ‘vacillation’ of Archbishop William King and the Irish clergy]; ‘The Irish House of Lords, however, when it ordered the Huguenot tapestries, probably accepted the weavers’ argument that the Battle of the Boyne was to Ireland what the defeat of the Armada had been to England. Armed with this new power, they were to modernise the social structure, with great cruelty but effectively, and to establish our political nationality by quarrelling with England over the wool trade, a Protestant monoply [sic]. At the base of the social structure, but hardly within it, the peasantry dreamed on in their medieval sleep; the Gaelic poets sang of the banished Catholic aristocracy; “My fathers served their fathers before Christ was crucified” sang one of the most famous [viz, Aoghan O’Rahilly]. Ireland had found new masters and was to discover for the first time in its history that it possessed a cold, logical intellect. That intellect announced its independence when Berkeley, an undergraduate of Trinity College, wrote in his Commonplace Book, after a description of the philosophy of Hobbes, Newton and Locke, the fashionable English philosophy of his day, “We Irish do not think so”. An emotion of pride and confidence at that time ran through what there was of an intellectual minority. [… &c.] [/…/] [Sect. III] The influence of the French Revolution awoke the Irish peasantry from their medieval sleep, gave them ideas of social justice and equality, but prepared for a century disastrous to the national intellect. Instead of the Protestant Ascendancy with its sense of responsibility, we had the Garrison, a political party of Protestant and Catholic landowners, merchants and officials. They loved the soil of Ireland; the returned Colonial Governor [James Butler, Duke of Ormonde] crossed the Channel to see the May flowers in his park; the merchant loved with an ardour I have not met elsewhere, some sea-board town where he had made his money, or spent his youth, but they could give to a people they thought unfit for self-government, nothing but a condescending affection. They preferred frieze-coated humanists, dare-devils upon horseback, to ordinary men and women; created in Ireland and elsewhere an audience that welcomed the vivid imagination of Lever, Lover, Somerville and Ross. These writers, especially in the first [?] have historical importance, so completely have they expressed a social phase. Instead of the old half medieval peasantry came an agrarian political party, that degraded literature with rhetoric and insincerity. Its novels, poems, essays, histories showed Irish virtue struggling against English and landlord crime; historical characters that we must admire or abhor according to the side they took in politics. Certain songs by Davis, Carleton’s Valentine McClutchy, Kickham’s Knocknagow, Mitchel’s History of Ireland, numberless forgotten books in prose and verse founded or fostered the distortion we have not yet escaped. In the eighties of the last century came a third school: three men too conscious of intellectual power to belong to party. George Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde, George Moore, the most complete individualists in the history of literature, abstract, isolated minds, without a memory or a landscape. It is this very isolation, this defect, as it seems to me, which has given Bernard Shaw an equal welcome in all countries, the greatest fame in his own lifetime any writer has known. Without it, his wit would have waited for acceptance upon studious exposition and commendation. [Sect. IV: …] Dublin had once been a well-mannered, smooth-spoken city. I knew an old woman who had met Davis constantly and never knew that he was in politics until she read his obituary in the newspaper. Then ca[me] agrarian passion; Unionists and Nationalists ceased to meet, but each lived behind his party wall an amiable life. This new dispute broke through all the walls; there were old men and women I avoid because they have kept that day’s bitter tongue. Upon the other hand, we began to value truth. According to my memory and the memory of others, free discussion appeared among us for the first time, bringing the passion for reality, the satiric genius that informs Ulysses, The Playboy of the Western World, The Informer, The Puritan and other books, and plays; the accumulated hatred of years was suddenly transferred from England to Ireland. James Joyce has no doubt described something remembered from his youth in that dinner table scene in The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, when after a violent quarrel about Parnell and the priests, the host sobs, his head upon the table: “My dead King”. We had passed through an initiation like that of the Tibetan ascetic, who staggers half dead from a trance, where he has seen himself eaten alive and has not yet learned that the eater was himself. [Sect. V:] As we discussed and argued, the national character changed, O’Connell, the great comedian, left the scene the tragedian Parnell took his place. When we talked of his pride; of his apparent impassivity when his hands were full of blood because he had torn them with his nails, the proceeding epoch with its democratic bonhomie, seemed to grin through a horse collar. He was the symbol that made apparent, or made possible (are there not historical limbos where nothing is possible?) that epoch’s contrary: contrary, not negation, not refutation; the spring vegetables may be over, they have not been refuted. I am Blake’s disciple, not Hegel’s: ‘contraries are positive. A negation is not a contrary.’ (Quoted fully in A. N. Jeffares, A New Commentary on the Poems of W. B. Yeats, 1984, pp.333-35; Jeffares explanatory notes incl. the following: the tapestries in the House of Lords were designed by Melcior Van der Hagen, woved by Jan Van Beaver (chief weaver), and manufactured by Baillie of Dublin; two of six contracted were completed; Mary Voisin, m. Edmond Butler, was Yeats’s paternal great-great-great-grandmother; Swift’s ‘well-known sermon’ is ‘A Sermon on the Wretched Condition of Ireland’, in Works (1784), XII, pp.122-37.

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Oxford Book of Modern Verse (1936), Introduction: ‘passive suffering is not a theme for poetry. In all the great tragedies, tragedy is a joy to the man who dies […] If war is necessary, or necessary in our time or place, it is best to forget its suffering as we do the discomfort of fever, remembering our comfort at midnight when our temperatures fell, or as we forget the worst moments of more painful disease.’ (Quoted in Christopher Murray, ‘‘‘The Choice of Lives”: O’Casey versus Synge’, in Journal of Irish Studies [IASIL-Japan], XVII (2002), p.77.)

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‘General Introduction for My Work’ (1937, rep. in Essays and Introductions, 1961, &c.), Part I: ‘A poet writes always of his personal life, in [the] his finest work out of its tragedy, whatever it be, remorse, lost love, or mere loneliness; he never speaks directly as to someone at the breakfast table, there is always a phantasmagoria […]. A novelist might describe his accidence, his incoherence, he must not; he is more type than man, more passion than type. He is Lear, Romeo, Oedipus, Tiresias […]. He is part of his own phantasmagoria and we adore him because nature has grown intelligible, and by so doing a part of our creative power. […] The world knows nothing because it has made nothing, we know everything because we have made everything.’ (p.509.) [John O’Leary sent him to Davis and poets of the Nation:] I saw even more clearly than O’Leary that they were not good poetry. I read nothing but romantic literature; hated that dry eighteenth-century rhetoric; but they had one quality I admired and admire: they were not separated individual men; they spoke or tried to speak out of a people to a people; behind them stretched the generations […]. I hated and still hate with an ever-growing hatred the literature of the point of view. I wanted, if my ignorance permitted, to get back to Homer, to those that fed at his table. I wanted to cry as all men cried, to laugh as all men laughed, and the Young Ireland poets when not writing mere politics had the same want […].’ (p.511). ‘A generation before The Nation newspaper was founded the Royal Irish Academy had begun the study of ancient Irish literature. That study was as much a gift from the Protestant aristocracy which had created the Parliament as The Nation and its school, though Davis and Mitchel were Protestants, was a gift from the Catholic middle class where to create the Irish Free State.’ (p.511; see seq., under John O’Donovan, Rx]; ‘the Royal Irish Academy and its public with equal enthusiasm [511] welcomed Pagan and Christian; thought the Round Towers a commemoration of Persian fire-worship. There was little [for] orthodoxy to take alarm [at]; the Catholics were crushed and cowed; an honoured great-uncle of mine - his portrait by some forgotten master hangs upon my bedroom wall - a Church of Ireland rector, would upon occasion boast that you could not ask a question he could not answer with a perfectly appropriate blasphemy or indecency. When several counties had been surveyed but nothing published, the Government, afraid of rousing dangerous patriotic emotion, withdrew support; large manuscript volumes remain containing much picturesque correspondence between scholars.’ (p.512 [see seq. under James Hayes and Standish O’Grady].) ‘Behind all Irish history hangs a great tapestry, even Christianity had to accept it and be itself pictured there. Nobody looking at its dim folds can say where [513] Christianity begins and Druidism ends.’ (p.513-14.) ‘Sometimes I am told in recommendation, if the newspaper is Irish, in condemnation if it is English, that my movement perished under the firing squads of 1916; sometimes that those firing squads made our realistic movement possible. If that statement is true, and it so only so in part, for romance was everywhere receding, it is because in the imagination of Pearse and his fellow soldiers the Sacrifice of the Mass had found the Red Branch in the tapestry; they went out to die calling upon Cuchulain: “Fall, Hercules, from Heaven in tempests hurled / To cleanse the beastly stable of the world” In one sense the poets of 1916 were not of what the newspapers call my school. The Gaelic League, made timid by modern popularisation of Catholicism sprung from the aspidistra and not from the root of Jesse, dreaded intellectual daring and stuck to dictionary and grammar. Pearse and MacDonagh, and others among the executed men would have done, or [515] attempted, in Gaelic, what we did or attempted in English.

‘General Introduction for My Work’ (1937, rep. in Essays and Introductions, 1961, &c.), Part I [cont.]): ‘Our mythology, our legends, differ from those of other European countries because down to the end of the seventeenth century they had the attention, perhaps the unquestioned belief, of peasant and noble alike; Homer belongs to sedentary men, even today our ancient queens, our mediaeval soldiers and lovers, can make a pedlar shudder. I can put my own thought, despair perhaps from the study of present circumstance in the light of ancient philosophy, into the mouth of rambling poets of the seventeenth century, or even of some imagined ballad singer of to-day, and the deeper my thought the more credible, the more peasant-like, are ballad singer and rambling poet. Some modern poets content that jazz and music-hall songs are the folk art of our time, that we should mould an art upon them; we Irish poets, modern men also, reject every folk art that does not go back to Olympus. Give me time, and a little youth and I will prove that even “Johnny, I hardly knew ye”, goes back. (p.516). WBY quotes Arnold Toynbee: ‘Modern Ireland has made up her mind, in our generation, to find her level as a willing inmate in our workaday world’ and continues: ‘If Irish literature goes on as my generation planned it, it may do something to keep the “Irishry” living, nor will the work of the realists hinder, nor the figures they imagine, nor those described in memoirs of the revolution. These last especially, like certain great political predecessors, Parnell, Swift, Lord Edwards, have stepped back into the tapestry. It may be indeed that certain characteristics of the “Irishry” must grow in importance. When Lady Gregory asked me to annotate her Visions and Beliefs I began, that I might understand what she had taken down in Galway, an investigation of contemporary spiritualism. […] If Lady Gregory had not said when we passed an old man in the woods, “That man may know the secret of the ages”, I might never have talked with Shri Purohit Swãmi or made him translate his Master’s travels in Tibet […].’ (p.517.) ‘I am convinced that in two or three generations it will become generally known that the mechanical theory has no reality, that the natural and supernatural are knit together […] Europeans may find something attractive in a Christ posed against a background not of Judaism but of Druidism’ / ‘I was born into this faith, have lived in it, and shall die in it; my Christ, a legitimate deduction from the Creed of St. Patrick as I think, is that Unity of Being Dante compared to a perfectly proportioned human body, Blake’s “Imagination”, what the Upanishads have named “Self”: nor is this unity distant and therefore intellectually understandable, but imminent, differing from man to man and age to age, taking upon itself pain and ugliness, “eye of newt, and toe of frog”. / Subconscious preoccupation with this theme has brought me A Vision, its harsh geometry an incomplete interpretation. The “Irishry” have preserved their ancient “deposit” through wars which, during the sixteenth and [518] seventeenth centuries, became wars of extermination; no people. Lecky said at the opening of his Ireland in the Eighteenth Century, have undergone greater persecution, nor did that persecution altogether cease up to our our day. No people hate as we do in whom that past is always alive, there are moments when hatred poisons my life and I accuse myself of effeminacy because I have not given it [the Irish legacy] adequate expression. It is not enough to have put it into the mouth of a rambling peasant poet. Then I remind myself that though mine is the first English marriage I know of in the direct line, all my family names are English, and that I owe my soul to Shakespeare, to Spenser and to Blake, perhaps to William Morris, and to the English language in which I think, speak, and write, that everything I love has come to me through English; my hatred tortures me with love, my love with hate. I am like the Tibetan monk who dreams at his initiation that he is eaten by a wild beast and learns on waking that he is himself eater and eaten. This is Irish hatred and solitude, the hatred of human life that made Swift write Gulliver and the epitaph upon his tomb, that can still make us wag between extremes and doubt our sanity.’ (pp.518-19; quoted [in large part] in Seamus Deane, Heroic Styles: The Tradition of an Idea, Field Day Pamphlet, No. 4, Derry: Field Day 1984, pp.9-10; note Deane’s comment, ‘The pathology of literary unionism has never been better defined’, p.10; also quoted in Una Kealy, ‘The Return of Radical Innocence in the Plays of W. B. Yeats’ [UUC MA 1999], p.60.) ‘A man just tonsured by the Druids could learn from the nearest Christian neighbour to sign himself with the Cross.’ (idem.), remarking that the Indians were being ‘forced to learn everything, even their own Sanskrit, through the vehicle of English’. [For comments on Gaelic [i.e. Irish] as his mother tongue, see under Irish language, infra.)

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‘General Introduction for My Work’ (1937) - Pt. III: ‘Style is almost unconscius. I know what I have tried to do, little what I have done. […] an Irish preference for a swift current mmight be mere indolence, yet Burns may have felt the same when he read Thomson and Cowper. The English mind is meditative, rich, deliberate; it may remember the Thames valley. I planned to write short lyrics or poetic drama where every speech [would] be short and concentrated, knit by dramatic tension, and I did so with more confidence because young English poets were at that time writing out of emotion at the moment of crisis, though their old slow-moving meditaiton returned almost at once. Then, and in this Enlgish poetry has folllowed my lead, I tried to make the language of poetry coincide with that of passionate, normal speech. I wanted to write in whatever language comes most naturally when we soliloquise, as I do all day long, puon the events of our own lives or of any life where we can see ourselves for a moment. […] It was as a long time before I had made a language to my liking; I began to make it when I discovered some twenty years ago that I must seek, not as Wordsworth thought, words in common use, but a powerful and passionate syntax, and a complete coincidence between period and stanza. Because I need a passionate syntax for passionate subject-matter I compel myself to accept those traditional metres that have developed with the language. Ezra Pound, Turner, Lawrence wrote admirable free verse, I could not. I would lose myself, become joyless like those mad old women. The translators of the Bible, Sir Thomas Browne, certain translators from the Greek when translators still bothered about rhythm, created a form midway between prose and verse that seems natural to impersonal meditation; but all that is personal soon rots; it must be packed in ice or salt. Once when [I was in] delirium from pneumonia I dictated a letter to George Moore telling him to eat salt because it was a symbol of eternity; the delirium passed, I had no memory of that letter, but I must have meant what I now mean. If I wrote of personal love or sorrow in free verse, or in any rhythm that left it unchanged, amid all its accidence, I would be full of self-contempt because of my egotism and indiscretion, and foresee the boredom of my reader. I must choose a traditional stanza, even what I alter must seem traditional. I commit my emotion to shepherds, herdsmen, camel-drivers, learned men, Milton’s or Shelley’s Platonist, that tower Palmer drew. Talk to me of originality and I will turn on you with rage. I am a crowd, I am a lonely man, I am nothing. Ancient salt is best packing. The heroes of Shakespeare convey to us through their looks, or through the metaphorical patterns their speech, the sudden enlargement of their vision, their ecstasy at the approach of death: “She should have died hereafter”, “Of many thousand kisses the poor last”, “Absent thee from felicity awhile”. They have become God or Mother Goddess, the pelican, “My baby at my breast”, but all must be cold; no actress has ever sobbed when she played Cleopatra, even the shallow brain of a producer has never thought of such a thing. The supernatural is present, cold winds blow across our hands, upon our faces, the thermometer falls, and because of that cold we are hated by journalist and groundlings. There may be in this or that detail painful tragedy, but in the whole work none. I have heard Lady Gregory say, rejecting some play in the modern manner sent to the Abbey Theatre, “Tragedy must be a joy to the man who dies.” Nor is it any different with lyrics, songs, narrative poems; neither scholars nor the populace have sung or read anything generation after generation because of its pain. The maid of honour whose tragedy they sing must be lifted out of history with timeless pattern, she is one of the four Maries, the rhythm is old and familiar, Imagination must dance, must be carried beyond feeling into the aboriginal ice. Is ice the correct word? I once boasted, copying the phrase from a letter of my father’s, that I would write a poem ‘cold and passionate as the dawn.’ (Essays and Introductions, 1961; pp.521-23.)

‘General Introduction for My Work’ (1937) - Part IV ‘[…] I am joined to the “Irishry” and expect a counter-renaiisance. No doubt it is part of the game to push that Renaissance; I make no complaint; I am accustomed to the geometrical arrangement of history in A Vision, but I go deeper than “custom” for my convictions. When I stand on O’Connell bridge in the half light and notice that discordant architecture, all those electric signs, where modern heterogeneity has taken physical form, a vague hatred comes up out of my own dark and I am certain that wherever in Europe there are minds strong enough to lead others the same vague hatred will have issued in violence and imposed some kind of rule of kindred. I cannot know the nature of that rule, for its opposite fills the light; all I can do to bring it nearer is to intensify my hatred. I am no Nationalist except in Ireland for passing reasons; State and Nation are the work of the intellect, and when you consider what comes before or after them they are, as Victor Hugo said of something or other, not worth the blade of grass God gives for the nest of the linnet.’ (p.526; END. the concluding sentence quoted in Terence Brown , Life of W. B. Yeats, Dublin: Gill & Macmillan 1999, p.354.

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‘General Introduction to My Plays’: ‘When I follow back my stream to its source I find two dominant desires: I wanted to get rid of irrelevant movement - the stage must become still that words might keep all their vividness - and I wanted vivid words.’ (Essays & Introductions, p.527.)