Abstract
Michael Robartes and the Dancer (1921), is a volume with two central preoccupations: sexuality and politics.1 It celebrates both the Easter Rising of 1916 and Yeats’s marriage in October 1917 to Georgie Hyde-Lees. Yeats’s initial contention is that sex and politics do not mix; that women should eschew political or intellectual conflict in order to cultivate the wisdom of the body. “Opinion”, according to the male speaker in the first poem, is “not worth a rush”, and in the culminating poem, “A Prayer for My Daughter”, Anne Yeats is admonished to “think opinions are accursed”, to shun “the opinionated mind” of her father’s former love, Maud Gonne. Even the heroes of “Easter 1916”, including Constance Markievicz who spent “her nights in argument/ Until her voice grew shrill”, have given themselves to a “passionate intensity” of political opinion that ultimately turns the heart to “stone”.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
See Edmund Burke, Works (London: George Bell, 1882) II, 368; and Ex 270–1.
Richard Ellmann, Yeats: the Man and the Masks, 2nd edn (New York: Norton, 1979) p. xi. (Hereafter cited in the text as Ellmann.)
See Elizabeth Heine “‘W.B. Yeats’ (sic) Map in His Own Hand’”, Biography, I (1978) pp. 48–9.
Joseph Hone, W. B. Yeats, 2nd edn (London: Macmillan, 1962) p. 306. (Hereafter cited in the text as Hone.)
For a fuller account of Yeats’s dealings with Iseult Gonne at this time, see also George Mills Harper, W. B. Yeats and W. T. Horton (London: Macmillan, 1980), p. 65.
Giorgio Melchiori, The Whole Mystery of Art (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1960) p. 116.
For a general discussion of this tradition see Mario Praz, The Romantic Agony, 2nd edn (London: Collins, 1960), Chapters IV and V. (Hereafter cited in the text as Praz.) For a more specific discussion see Melchiori, pp. 114–30.
For an account of their courtship and marriage see Francis Stuart, Black List/Section H (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1971).
The identification was made by A. N. Jeffares, W. B. Yeats: Man and Poet, 2nd edn (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962) p. 244.
Frank Kermode, Romantic Image, 2nd edn (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1961) p. 89.
W. B. Yeats, John Sherman and Dhoya, ed. Richard Finneran (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1969), pp. 54–5.
Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Complete Poetical Works, ed. Thomas Hutchinson, 2nd edn (London: Oxford University Press, 1943) p. 19. (Hereafter cited in the text as Shelley.)
For a full discussion of this poem and its influence, see Praz, Chapter 1. For another source (in a poem by J. S. Le Fanu) for “a terrible beauty” see G. F. Dalton, “The Tradition of Blood Sacrifice to the Goddess Eire” in Studies, LXIII: 252 (Winter, 1974) 343–54.
Walter Pater, The Renaissance, ed. Donald Hill (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1980) p. 230. (Hereafter cited in the text as Pater.) The reference to Shelley was contained in all versions of Pater’s work except the 1893 text.
See, for example, Yvor Winters, The Poetry of W. B. Yeats (Denver: Swallow Press, 1960) p. 10, and Bloom, p. 321.
See George Bornstein, Transformations of Romanticism in Yeats, Eliot, and Stevens (University of Chicago Press, 1976) p. 63.
For a discussion of Yeats’s debt to “Frost at Midnight” and “Dejection: an Ode”, see Beryl Rowland, “The Other Father in Yeats’s ‘A Prayer for My Daughter’”, Orbis Litterarum, 26 (1971); Daniel Harris, Yeats: Coole Park and Ballylee (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974) pp. 147–8;
Douglas Archibald, Yeats (Syracuse University Press, 1983) pp. 1–12.
For an excellent discussion of “Demon and Beast” see Peter Ure, “Yeats’s ‘Demon and Beast’”, Irish Writing, 31 (1955) pp. 42–50.
See Jon Stallworthy, Between the Lines (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963) pp. 38–42.
Joyce Carol Oates, “‘At Least I Have Made a Woman of Her’: Images of Women in Twentieth-Century Literature”, Georgia Review, 37 (1983) p. 17.
William Wordsworth, The Poetical Works, ed. E. de Selincourt, 2nd edn (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952) II, 140.
It has not, as far as I know, been pointed out that Yeats’s belief echoes Coleridge’s “Dejection: An Ode”: We in ourselves rejoice! And thence flows all that charms or ear or sight, All melodies the echoes of that voice, All colours a suffusion from that light. Yeats’s lines seem to be a condensation of Stanzas III, IV, and V of “Dejection”: S. T. Coleridge, Complete Poetical Works, ed. E. H. Coleridge (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1912) I, 366.
For a brilliant exploration of the wedding ceremony and its ritual importance in dissolving the father’s quasi-incestuous “ownership” of his daughter, see Lynda E. Boose, “The Father and the Bride in Shakespeare”, PMLA, 97 (1982) pp. 325–47.
Editor information
Copyright information
© 1997 Deirdre Toomey
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Cullingford, E.B. (1997). Yeats and Women: Michael Robartes and the Dancer . In: Toomey, D. (eds) Yeats and Women. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-25822-2_7
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-25822-2_7
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-0-333-69816-7
Online ISBN: 978-1-349-25822-2
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature & Performing Arts CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)