Jacqueline Genet, La Poétique de William Butler Yeats (Lille: Presses Universitaires de Lille, 1989) 452 pp.

Abstract

Though in his maturity Yeats knew success, fame and comfort, he certainly exemplifies Abraham Cowley’s statement that “a warlike, various, and a tragical age is best to write of, but worst to write in”. He was indeed, as MacNeice once said of T. S. Eliot, “loyal to his accidents — the accidents of age, origin and personality”, and was thus largely, and most successfully, determined as a poet by his contexts. What may have appeared to some as a detestable deficiency (remember Leavis’s acid remark that Yeats’s poetry was “little more than a marginal comment on the main activities of his life”) is considered by most Yeatsian scholars, half a century after his death, as his greater glory, and to this rule Jacqueline Genet, who for the past two decades has most prominently championed the cause of Anglo-Irish studies in France, is no exception. Following her first major study, William Butler Yeats: les fondements et l’évolution de la création poétique (1976), which she describes as an “essay in literary psychology”, and the many volumes of the poet’s prose writings translated into French, which she has edited, Jacqueline Genet offers us yet another massive contribution to the study of Yeats’s poetry. La Poétique de William Butler Yeats, however, will not be totally new to readers familiar with the state of Yeatsian studies in France.