Mr. Yeats, Michael Robartes and Their Circle

Abstract

In Yeats, vision and belief, more than informing the “ content” of the poetry, determine its structural conventions, by which I mean chiefly: the use of personae in narrative, dialogue, or dramatic forms; allegory and symbolism; ritual and myth. To suppose that Yeats employed certain (curious) conceptions of reality which “ work” in the poetry and which are of interest only insofar as their explication helps to reveal his aesthetic mastery is as mistaken as to suppose that the poetry is the neutral vehicle of occult lore, traditional learning, and metaphysical speculation. Far from being an essentially lyric poet who happened to be interested in holistic philosophies, Yeats strove constantly to overcome the limitations of the lyric in the creation of more expansive and inclusive structures. This is part of his greatness and it is intimately connected with the conflict in the man and his work between a passionate attachment to nature and an insistent quest for transcendent reality. The more expansive structures in which Yeats tried to accommodate lyrical utterances arc of three major kinds: a mythology of self based on the romantic conception of the integrity and allegorical significance of all the occasions of the individual life; a systematic metaphysic of the history of humanity and the destiny of the individual soul; and, combining these two, an elaborate fiction in which actuality, metaphysic, and vision and all his artistic products (lyrics, plays, essays, and stories) are loosely bound together as the adumbration of a unity unrealizable in the present.