“Secret Communion”: Yeats’s Sexual Destiny

Abstract

Yeats, said Richard Eilmann, “explicitly asked for candid biography”. He cited Yeats’s revelations about Lionel Johnson’s alcoholism in the 1909 lecture “Friends of My Youth”: “I would wish to be spoken of with just such candour when I am dead.”¹ Though not before. When Austin Clarke, who was contemplating a biography of Yeats in the early 1930s, nervously broached the question of Maud Gonne with his prospective subject, the response was a stern “Sir, do you seek to pry into my private life?”² Yeats added more kindly that one must not give offence to the living.

When I think of life as a struggle with the Daimon who would ever set us to the hardest work among those not impossible, I understand why there is a deep enmity between a man and his destiny, and why a man loves nothing but his destiny.… Then my imagination runs from Daimon to sweetheart, and I divine an analogy that evades the intellectchrw(133).… I even wonder if there may not be some secret communion, some whispering in the dark between Daimon and sweetheart. (Myth 336)