Chaucer, Yeats and the Living Voice

Abstract

Chaucer had become important to Yeats in 1905 through the gift of the Kelmscott Chaucer from a circle of friends, which Lady Gregory had organised for Yeats’s fortieth birthday. Certainly there is no doubting the strength of Yeats’s initial response; in a letter of 3 August 1905 he tells A. H. Bullen: “my imagination is getting so deep in Chaucer that I cannot get it down into any other well for the present” (L 457). The actual debt to Chaucer that the quotation used above as epigraph might suggest has been traced by Ronald Schuchard in “The Minstrel in the Theatre: Arnold, Chaucer, and Yeats’s New Spiritual Democracy”. Schuchard sees Yeats’s enthusiasm for Chaucer around 1905 as bound up with the inception of the Abbey Theatre and with Yeats’s interest in oral verse, whether spoken from the stage, recited to the psaltery or even disseminated through the countryside by the wandering minstrel. Yeats’s hopes for the Abbey Theatre would eventually have it as, in Schuchard’s words, “a sort of speech guild for culture, using its workshops to restore all the spoken arts, training minstrels and reciters for the countryside as well as actors for the stage” (YA 2 15). What Yeats valued in Chaucer was a simple, vigorous, immediately apprehensible language — the “vivid irresistible phrase” — that could appeal to all social classes.