Three Speculations

Abstract

Yeats’s mind, it has often been suggested, was influenced profoundly by iconography, and not least in his deployment of fabulous creatures: unicorns, sphinxes, rough beasts, mechanical birds. His own imagery often seems a blend of visual and literary sources, sometimes remembered over a long distance of time yet with the excitement of novelty, as they were rediscovered in his memory. The literary sources can sometimes be affirmed more positively, especially in the cases where Yeats annotated books, as for instance in the case of the Byzantium poems, about which he also wrote to friends. The artificial bird of those poems has a long literary ancestry. I spent a lot of time once trying to trace literary sources for the bird but after finding several, decided I had gone far enough — indeed too far — when I found the bird in the Latin writings of Liutprand, Bishop of Cremona (c.922-72). Would Yeats really, I asked myself, have read the bishop’s mediaeval Latin? Many years after this, Sir Eric Maclagan’s son showed me his father’s copy of Collected Poems in which Sir Eric had recorded in the margin of “Sailing to Byzantium” that he had told Yeats c.1910 about Liutprand’s account of the mechanical bird (NC 215–16).