V. V. Jain, W. B. Yeats as Literary Critic and Vinod Sena, The Poet as Critic: W. B. Yeats on Poetry, Drama and Tradition

Abstract

These two books, both from India, cover much the same ground: Yeats’s prose, Yeats the critic. Interest in Yeats from Indian scholars appears to be undiminished, but anyone expecting from these works an Eastern perspective, or an emphasis on Yeats’s Eastern interests, will be disappointed. In many instances, these books not only cover some of each other’s territory, but, one is bound to say, they cover some very familiar ground. Yeats’s prose was indeed long neglected and much derided, and even today many who accept or even embrace the poetry will draw the line there: the critical prose is not always taken seriously. Such a state of affairs may be unfortunate, but it is not remedied by special pleading or repetition, true especially of Jain’s book in which Yeats in unnecessarily defended on every issue and raised to a saintliness he would not have wished. Donald Stauffer, Thomas Parkinson, T. R. Henn, Peter Ure, F. A. C. Wilson had all taken note of the prose in the Fifties, and the next decade brought more focus: serious attempts to reconstruct critical postures and aesthetic principles. The subject is by no means exhausted, but what is needed are not surveys (and both books approximate that description), but specific explorations of Yeatsian “affinities,” such as those promised at the end of Jain’s volume: Yeats’s views, say, of French writers and poets.