Abstract
I have been acquainted with Mr. Yeats for a longer time than I have with any other man named in this book, but I seem to myself to know very little about him, for he is extraordinarily alooffrom life. His aloofness is different from that of Mr. Galsworthy who is perturbed about mankind. Mr. Yeats is totally unconcerned about problems of any sort. He is more interested in the things men do than in men themselves. He prefers the symbol to the thing symbolized. The harshest condemnation I ever heard him utter was delivered on ‘A.E.,’ of whom he said that he had ceased to be a poet in order to become a philanthropist! I met him last in Chicago, and I felt when we parted that I knew no more of him then than I knew when I first met him ten years earlier. Our meeting followed on the fact that I had sent a one-act play, entitled The Magnanimous Lover,1 to him. It seems to me now to be a crudely-contrived, ill-written and violent piece, but when I sent it to Mr. Yeats I thought it was a remarkable work. It was performed after the production of Stanley Houghton’s Hindle Wakes and Mr. Galsworthy’s The Eldest Son, which have similar themes, but was written several years before they were performed. One evening, a few weeks after I had sent the manuscript of The Magnanimous Lover to him, I received a letter from Mr. Yeats, written in that queer, illegible, thick style which is so difficult to read.
North American Review (New York) CCXI (Feb 1920) 225–37; (March 1920) 402–10. Reprinted in Some Impressions of My Elders (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1923) PP. 248–86.
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Notes
Not included in The Letters of W. B. Yeats, ed. Allan Wade (London: Macmillan, 1954).
Not included in The Letters of W. B. Yeats, ed. Allan Wade (London: Macmillan, 1954).
At the time when there was a chance of Yeats’s getting the professorship of English at Trinity College, he had come to a greater admiration of the classical English poets. In a letter (3 January 1913) to Lady Gregory he tells her that he was ‘writing with new confidence having got Milton off my back’. Another letter (7 May 1913) tells of Gogarty advising him to go to Dublin, but the very thought ‘fills me with gloom and fury’. See Austin Clarke, ‘W. B. Yeats’, Dublin Magazine, XIV, no. 2 (Apr—June 1939) 6-to and
John Eglinton, ‘Life and Letters’, Irish Statesman (Dublin) II (Feb 1920) 181.
In London Yeats met the poets whom he organised into creating the Rhymers’ Club. The Rhymers furnished much of the talent for the fin-de-siècle reviews, the Yellow Book and the Savoy. Among the members were Ernest Dowson, Victor Plarr, Richard Le Gallienne, Aubrey Beardsley, John Davidson, Lionel Johnson, Arthur Symons and Ernest Rhys. One thing they all had in common, an admiration for the traditions of Rosetti in verse and of Pater in prose. For a time Yeats was heavily, though never wholeheartedly, affected by them. He was especially friendly during the years 1890 to 1895 with Lionel Johnson, and after that until the end of the century with Arthur Symons, with whom he shared lodgings in the last months of 1895 and in January 1896. See R. K. R. Thornton, ‘The Poets of Rhymers Club’, MA thesis (University of Manchester, 1963).
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© 1977 Macmillan Publishers Limited
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Ervine, S.J. (1977). Some Impressions of My Elders: William Butler Yeats. In: Mikhail, E.H. (eds) W. B. Yeats. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-02992-1_36
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