Abstract
Yeats, said Richard Ellmann, “explicitly asked for candid biography”. He cited Yeats’s revelations about Lionel Johnson’s alcoholism in the 1909 lecture “Friends of My Youth”: “I would wish to be spoken of with just such candour when I am dead.”1 Though not before. When Austin Clarke, who was contemplating a biography of Yeats in June 1936, nervously broached the question of Maud Gonne with his prospective subject, the response was a stern “Sir, do you seek to pry into my private life?”2 Yeats added more kindly that one must not give offence to the living.
When I think of life as a struggle with the Daimon who would ever set us to the hardest work among those not impossible, I understand why there is a deep enmity between a man and his destiny, and why a man loves nothing but his destiny. … Then my imagination runs from Daimon to sweetheart, and I divine an analogy that evades the intellect. … I even wonder if there may not be some secret communion, some whispering in the dark between Daimon and sweetheart. (Myth 336)
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.
Notes
Richard Ellmann, Yeats: The Man and the Masks (1948; 2nd edn New York: Norton, 1979) p. 5. Hereafter cited as YMM; references in text. See also YT 74.
Austin Clarke, in E. H. Mikhail (ed.), W. B. Yeats: Interviews and Recollections (London: Macmillan, 1977) II, 352. The episode is of June 1936.
An unpublished letter to Pound indicates that “The Double Vision of Michael Robartes” was completed by 1 July 1918. See George Mills Harper, The Making of Yeats’s A Vision: A Study of the Automatic Script (London: Macmillan Press, 1987) I, 54, 423. Hereafter cited as MV; references in text.
For further discussion of this point see John Harwood, Olivia Shakespear and W. B. Yeats: After Long Silence (London: Macmillan Press, 1989) pp. 153–60.
Joyce Carol Oates, “‘At least I have made a woman of her’: Images of Women in Twentieth-Century Literature”, Georgia Review, 37 (Spring 1983) 17.
See MV II, 397; also Francis Stuart, Black List, Section H (1971; London: Martin Brian and O’Keefe, 1975) pp. 30–3, for his side of the story.
Lady Emerald Cunard of Iseult in August 1916, as reported in Joseph Hone, W. B. Yeats (1865–1939) (London: Macmillan, 1942) p. 303.
Michael Sidnell, “The Presence of the Poet: Or What Sat down at the Breakfast Table?”, in A. Norman Jeffares (ed.), Yeats the European (Gerrards Cross, Bucks: Colin Smythe, 1989) pp. 134–35. Hereafter cited as YE; references in text.
Maud Gonne had also spent a good deal of time among the thickets near the head of Howth after her return to Dublin in 1882 — the year John Butler Yeats moved his family to Howth: “The heather grew so high and strong there that we could make cubby houses and be entirely hidden and entirely warm and sheltered from the strong wind that blows over the Head of Howth. After I was grown up I have often slept all night in that friendly heather” — Maud Gonne MacBride, A Servant of the Queen: Reminiscences (London: Gollancz, 1938) p. 17.
Quoted in Ronald Schuchard, “An Attendant Lord: H. W. Nevinson’s Friendship with W. B. Yeats”, YA7 (1990) 111.
Editor information
Copyright information
© 1997 Deirdre Toomey
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Harwood, J. (1997). “Secret Communion”: Yeats’s Sexual Destiny. In: Toomey, D. (eds) Yeats and Women. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-25822-2_8
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-25822-2_8
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)