YEATS'S POETRY AND POETICS

Also by Michael J. Sidnell

DANCES OF DEATH: The Group Theatre of London in the Thirties

DRUID CRAFT: The Writing of the Shadowy Waters: Manuscripts of W. B. Yeats (transcribed, edited and with a

commentary by M. J. Sidnell, G. P. Mayhew and D. R. Clark)

THE SECRET ROSE, STORIES BY W. B. YEATS: A Variorum Edition (edited by P. L. Marcus, W. Gould and M. J. Sidnell)

SOURCES OF DRAMATIC THEORY, 1: Plato to Congreve and 2: Voltaire to Hugo (editor)

Yeats's Poetry and Poetics

Michael J. Sidnell

palgrave macmillan

* Text © Michael J. Sidnell 1996 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1996

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To Warwick Gould, collaborator and friend.

Contents

Acknowledgments ix

Preface (and Retrospect) xi

Abbreviations xv

Poetics

1 'Marbles of the Dancing Floor': Image, Symbol and Dancer 1

2 'Written Speech': Writing, Hearing and Performance 19

Fellow Poets

3 Joyce and Yeats: A Daintical Pair of Accomplasses 41

4 'Tara Uprooted': In the Seven Woods in Relation to Modernism 62

5 Yeats, Synge and the Georgians 74

Phantasmagoria

6 The Presence of the Poet: or, What Sat Down at the Breakfast Table? 97

7 Mr. Yeats, Michael Robartes and their Circle 108

Faery Brides

8 First Work for the Stage: Earliest Versions of The Countess Kathleen 139

9 The Allegory of The Wanderings of Oisin 160

Notes 176

Index 187

vii

Acknowledgments

The references to Yeats's work in these essays have been brought up to date and made consistent, but apart from this and the correc­tion of a few minor errors, I have not followed the example of the poet himself but have left the previously published essays in their original forms.

An earlier version of 'Written Speech ... ' was published in The Harp: IASAIL-Japan Bulletin 8, 1993. It is reprinted here from Yeats Annual, 11 (London: Macmillan 1995), edited by Warwick Gould. 'A Daintical Pair of Accomplasses ... ' was first published in Litters from Aloft: papers delivered at the Second James Joyce Seminar, McMaster University (Tulsa: University of Tulsa in co-operation with McMaster University Library), edited by Ronald Bates and Harry J. Pollock. 'Tara Uprooted ... ' is reprinted, by permission of Cornell University Press, from Yeats: An Annual of Critical and Textual Studies, 3 (1985) edited by George Bomstein and Richard Finneran (copyright 1985 by Cornell University). 'Yeats, Synge and the Georgians ... ' is reprinted from Yeats Annual, 3 (London: Macmillan, 1985), edited by Warwick Gould. 'The Presence of the Poet ... ' is reprinted from Yeats the European (Savage, Maryland: Barnes & Noble, 1989, edited by A. Norman Jeffares. 'Mr. Yeats, Michael Robartes and their Circle' is reprinted from Yeats and the Occult (Toronto: Macmillan of Canada, 1976), edited by George Mills Harper. 'The Allegory of The Wanderings of Oisin' is reprinted from Colby Library Quarterly, XV, 2 (1979), edited by Douglas Archibald. 'First Work for the Stage ... ' is reprinted from W. B. Yeats: Centenary Essays on the Art of W. B. Yeats (Ibadan, Nigeria: Ibadan University Press, 1965), edited D. E. S. Maxwell and S. B. Bushrui. I am most grateful to the editors who first published these essays and gave me some excellent suggestions and advice, and to the publishers for permission to reprint them here.

Trinity College, Toronto, and the English Department of the University of Toronto have regularly and generously supported my work over many years, and I have appreciated, also, the financial support provided from time to time by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Many librarians and cura­tors have been enormously helpful, notably those at the University

ix

x Acknowledgments

of Toronto's Robarts and Fisher Rare Books Libraries; the Trinity College Library; the National Library of Ireland; the British Library; the Cambridge University Library; the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Centre at the University of Texas; the University of Kansas Library; the Henry E. Huntington Library; the Houghton Library of Harvard University; and the Manuscript Division and Berg Collections of the New York Public Library. I wish especially to recall invaluable help from the late Dr Lola Szladits, the former Director of the Berg Collection.

I thank Charmian Hearne of Macmillan for her encouragement and attentiveness in the production of this book and, for their editing skills, Anne Rafique and Kim Yates. Finally, I cordially thank the many Yeatsians of several continents from whose writ­ings, conversation and scrutiny these essays have benefited, and particularly those whose friendship heightens the pleasure of a common concern. An acknowledgment of the special debt that l­and this volume - owe to one of them is made in the dedication.

Preface (and Retrospect)

The earliest essay in this volume is an account of the genesis and evolution of The Countess Cathleen, which Yeats made into an al­legory of what he saw as Maud Gonne's self-destructive political fanaticism, hoping thus to heighten her self-awareness and also to divert her attention to the theatre and to himself. But he was so close to the referred subject, and their relationship was so troubled, that he became involved in two kinds of adaptation at once, trying to make the play conform and keep up with the changing realities of Maud Gonne's actions, situation and responses, and trying to make the story into a play that would be thoroughly stageworthy. For, from the very first, 'the dream itself' of a 'painted stage' took a good deal of his love: he was wooing the theatre as well as the woman. The two enterprises were simultane­ous rather than - as 'The Circus Animals' Desertion' suggests -sequential, and they got in each other's way. His ambitions for the theatre and his love for Maud Gonne inspired Yeats to take up the Countess Cathleen story but the love's problems and perplexities fatally disturbed the development of the play. In the early drafts, fairies, representing a teeming pagan underworld and constituting a link with his Fairy and Folk Tales, were Yeats's major addition to his source; but they were cut from the personae and the scene, and their place taken by a disheartened poet with a nostalgia for pagan Ireland. There was a play that did not get written, as well as the one that did; and there is a vein of the poetic process evident in the manuscripts that is inaccessible to the biographical interpretation that Yeats himself encouraged and which remains extraordinarily dominant. Looking now at those early manuscripts of The Countess Cathleen, the abandoned fairy scenes and characters assume more significance. So much of the vitality of the early conception and drafting of the play was lost in the 'tapestry' (Yeats's word) that emerged!

Manuscript drafts are the residue and evidence of energy that has gone into the hammering out of images in the poetic smithy. The manuscripts of Yeats's early work - those of The Shadowy Waters in which the fantastic seabar figures appear, are another striking example - show how much of that energy was dissipated,

xi

xii Preface (and Retrospect)

how much invention discarded, in the search for unity and com­pleteness. By contrast, the later Yeats managed to retain into the finished work much more of the process that went into its attain­ment. That this articulation of process along with the achievement of finish constitutes performance and that such performance is a key feature of Yeats's developing poeticS and his poetic power are assumptions underlying the latest essay in this volume, 'Marbles of the Dancing Floor ... ', which is concerned with his image-making. It is a new attempt to come to terms, from this particular viewpoint, with poetic and theatrical performance in Yeats; to offer a brief account of how he drew on the images of visual artists partly out of necessity and partly out of a habitual tendency to think of poetic art as analogous with the plastic arts from which he so commonly drew his examples. The essay ends with Yeats back in the theatre, seeking a collaboration of poetry with the most highly performative artistic image of all: the dancer not as verbal construction but as live performer. This essay on the image and the dancer is intended to complement the one on 'Written Speech ... ', which is also con­cerned with performance. In this case, the performance of language is at issue. In the context of Yeats's poetics, it explores the relations - always fraught but particularly so in Ireland - between written and spoken poetry.

The two essays on Yeats's conception of the poet and his playing of that role are linked through 'phantasmagoria', Yeats's defiant term for the transmutations effected by the poetic imagination. The later of the two, 'The Presence of the Poet ... ', is more concerned with the poet in a social context, while the earlier essay, 'Mr. Yeats, Michael Robartes and their Circle', offers a way out of mere oc­cultism (which Yeats deployed as an evasion of some otherwise ir­resolvable problems of poetics) into an early postmodernist parody of the relations between philosophy, poetry and scholarship, an elaborate mixed-genre edifice of new ruins and finished fragments, devised by Yeats at the most acute crisis of his career, as he began work on what became A Vision.

Some of the fragments just referred to occur in the notes to Michael Robartes and the Dancer, which was apparently decisive in the composition of Finnegans Wake, the source of method and matter that one would suppose to have derived from A Vision itself but for an impossible chronology. An exposition of this particular connection between the works of Yeats and Joyce is part of the

Preface (and Retrospect) xiii

project of 'A Daintical Pair of Accomplasses ... ', along with what I take to be an even more formative and critical one, the debt of Finnegans Wake to Yeats's longest poem, 'The Wanderings of Oisin' - the books, as it were, of the father (Finn McCool) and his son (Oisin), survivors of the Battles of Gabra and of the Fenian ethos; both works immersed in night and dream; both circular in form.

'Oisin' is also the subject of an essay which takes up its author's challenge that 'Oisin needs an interpreter' and, Yeats's contempt for the genre notwithstanding, does so in terms of allegory. 'Oisin', said Yeats, was the poem to which The Countess Cathleen was a 'counter-truth', in the senses, perhaps, of a contrast between pagan and Christian; between human and faery; between the social world and the Otherworld; between realized (though insufficient) and un­realized love; between symbolic, mythologically based, rather private poetry and the adaptation of a moral narrative to the public stage. But in numerous ways the two works also confirm each other's 'truths', one of which is the poetic necessity of frustration, despair, or tragedy. Yeats drew on this and other discoveries that he had made in the exhausting composition of 'Oisin' for the rest of his career, and he drew on imagery from it, too. It is still an under­rated poem not only as foundational but in itself.

'Tara Uprooted ... ' is concerned with another rather neglected work, In the Seven Woods, which is overlooked because, as a book, it no longer exists. Originally, the book contained two long poems, as well as a play. In separating the long poems from the lyrics Yeats obscured the features of a major transformation in his poetry and poetics; one that, moreover, constituted an important model for Eliot, Joyce and other modernists, notably in Yeats's discovery of 'the mythological method'. I argue in 'Tara Uprooted ... ' and in 'Yeats, Synge and the Georgians' that Yeats was both a major precursor of modernism and a considerable poetic nuisance to his younger contemporaries, who could neither dismiss nor digest his work; and that Yeats remained resistant to modernism, partly in response to what may have been the greatest challenge to his writing and the greatest influence on it - the life and work of John Synge.

In these brief remarks, as in the arrangement of the book, I have not followed the chronological order of the writing of these essays because it would necessarily have more to do with my develop­ment than with that of their subject, but there may be some interest

xiv Preface (and Retrospect)

in that chronology in that, in their own way, the essays are not un­representative, I believe, of the critical reception of Yeats's work over the course of thirty years.

Abbreviations

Yeats's Works

Au AVA

AVB E&I

Ex

L

Mem

Myth OBMV

UP1

UP2

VP

VPI

VSR

Autobiographies (London: Macmillan, 1955). A Critical Edition of Yeats's A Vision (1925), ed. George

Mills Harper and Walter Kelly Hood (London: Macmillan, 1978).

A Vision (London: Macmillan, 1962). Essays and Introductions (London and New York:

Macmillan, 1961). Explorations, sel. Mrs W. B. Yeats (London: Macmillan,

1962; New York: Macmillan, 1963). The Letters of W. B. Yeats, ed. Allan Wade (London:

Rupert Hart-Davis, 1954; New York: Macmillan, 1955).

Memoirs, ed. Denis Donoghue (London: Macmillan, 1972; New York: Macmillan, 1973).

Mythologies (London and New York: Macmillan, 1959). The Oxford Book of Modern Verse, 1892-1935, chosen by

W. B. Yeats (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1936). Uncollected Prose by W. B. Yeats, vol. I, ed. John P.

Frayne (London: Macmillan; New York: Columbia University Press, 1970).

Uncollected Prose by W. B. Yeats, vol. 2, ed. John P. Frayne and Colton Johnson. (London: Macmillan, 1975; New York: Columbia University Press, 1976).

The Variorum Edition of the Poems of W. B. Yeats, ed. Peter AlIt and Russell K. Alspach (New York and London: Macmillan, 1957; corrected third printing, 1966).

The Variorum Edition of the Plays of W. B. Yeats, ed. Russell K. Alspach (London and New York: Macmillan, 1966).

The Secret Rose, Stories by W. B. Yeats: A Variorum Edition, 2nd edn, ed. Warwick Gould, Phillip 1. Marcus and Michael J. Sidnell (London: Macmillan, 1992).

xv

xvi Abbreviations

Works by Others

CW1

D FBMV

FW

P

SH

SPE

u

Wade

J. M. Synge, Collected Works, Vol. 1: Poems, ed. Robin Skelton (London: Oxford University Press, 1962).

James Joyce, Dubliners (New York: Viking Press, 1969). The Faber Book of Modern Verse, ed. Michael Roberts

(London: Faber & Faber, 1936). James Joyce, Finnegans Wake (New York: Viking Press,

1939). James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,

(New York: Viking Press, 1959). James Joyce, Stephen Hero (New York: Grove Press,

1963). T. S. Eliot, Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot, ed. Frank Kermode

(London: Faber & Faber, 1975). James Joyce, Ulysses, New Edition (New York: Random

House, 1961). Allan Wade, A Bibliography of the Writings ofW. B. Yeats,

3rd edn, rev. Russell K. Alspach (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1968).

P