“Paracelsus in Excelsis”

Abstract

Reading the shrewdly angled introductions and dedicatory verses to Yeats’s early anthologies, one discerns that Yeats’s reading is always on display. When he was converted from a Shcllcyan vision of an international art “tribeless, nationless, a blossom gathered in No Man’s Land”¹ to his own vision of an Irish one, it was because he had read much Irish fiction for his early collections, including Representative Irish Tales (New York & London: C. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1891; Wade 215). The preface to that volume, published in March of that year, set out Yeats’s agenda, including “a new Irish literary movement — like that of ’48 — that will show itself at the first lull in this storm of politics”, a powerful attempt to shape a “true literary consciousness” out of the “penumbra of half-culture”, which prevailed because no “modern Irish writer has ever had anything of the high culture that makes it possible for an author to do as he will with life” (P&I 36–7). The volume’s sentimental “Dedication”² reminded “Exiles, wandering over many seas” of “the cause that never dies”. The preface (and indeed the whole book), was designed for “the Irish abroad” (VP 130v., CL1 197, 247), and tried to educate the “tourist” who had read Irish novels “written by and for an alien gentry” to the realities of class in Irish writing and reading: “It seems to be a pretty absolute law that the rich like reading about the poor, the poor about the rich” (P&I 30. 34).