“Leda and the Swan” as Iconic Poem

Abstract

“One more word on ‘Leda and the Swan’ is three too many” has been apologetically or defiantly intoned by critics about to commit three thousand. The brevity, force, ambiguousness, of Yeats’s poem continuously challenge, so I too join their number. I shall not rehearse the names of this vast horde: are they not written in the bibliographies and in the footnotes even unto the third generation? Yet it would be arrogant not to allude to those critics who have decisively shaped my own response.¹ “Leda and the Swan” has been read in context of A Vision, of whose text it is indeed part; it has been read, sometimes exclusively, as parable of the poet and his daimon as though Yeats were an overseas agent of the Hartford insurance business; a poem about to be born and thrown aside by the poet as in Mallarmé’s Don du Poème; as a species of Lawrentian sexual encounter; it has been discussed as part of the dramatic structure of the volume of poems in which it made a third and more public appearance; its sources in visual and plastic art have been deployed with rigour by Giorgio Melchiori who displays for us the complex forces that entered into the poem’s making, while Leo Spitzer has given us sensitive close reading and elegant generalization.² The best criticism has been that which does not attempt to limit the significance of the sonnet by fiat.