“Shelley Plain”: Yeats and Katharine Tynan

Abstract

“And did you once see Shelley plain?” — with this question the young Katharine Tynan sought to mollify her exasperation with W. B. Yeats after still another of his absent-minded faux pas, which were usually brought on by his absorption in poetry.¹ She admits that “in those days we all bullied Willie Yeats” because “we did not want to live, breathe, eat, drink, and sleep poetry: and he would have you do all those things if you allowed him” (TY 166–7). One of the major themes of Yeats’s later work would be the choice between perfected art or perfected life, and surely the idealistic Willie Yeats learned early the social price of poetic enthusiasm. Although Tynan comments in her memoirs that Yeats “must have suffered all through his youth from being unlike his fellows: a white blackbird among the others, a genius among the commonplace” (TY 165), she does not conceal her own part in ridiculing him. In his introduction to A Book of Irish Verse, Yeats indicates a clear understanding of the conflict between social and aesthetic graces by remarking of Aubrey de Vere, “He loves the mortal arts [e.g., “rapid writing, ready talking, effective speaking to crowds”] which have given him a lure to take the hearts of men, and shrinks from the immortal, which could but divide him from his fellows.”²