Abstract
The self-division between an artist and a political activist that Yeats struggled with in the last years of the nineteenth century led him, as we have seen, to conceive of the idea of poetical culture which found the contemplation of literature and drama to be the foundation of life. However, Yeats never fully accepted that aesthetic vision of life, and by the time it was given a thorough expression in IGE, he had already gone past it.
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
Notes
- 1.
Yeats would persistently maintain this pose throughout 1905. He took a particular dislike to the Abbey actor, Robin Farquharson (Robin de la Condamine), whose acting he regarded as aggravatingly ‘feminine, emotional & histrionic’ (CL4 118); writing to Synge, he spared Farquharson no rancour: ‘I think he is the most despicable object I ever set eyes on’ (CL4 131). In late December 1905/early January 1906, when a number of actors decided to secede from the reconstituted Irish National Theatre Society, he got the impression that Maire Walker wished to follow them and establish a new theatre. He immediately threatened her with legal action, assuming that by pressing down on her, he would scare all those who allegedly supported her; he told Lady Gregory, ‘I merely want to get it into these peoples heads that we are dangerous—that one director at any rate has an awful temper—we are not fighting Miss Walker but the combination behind her’ (CL4 271–72). Even though he admitted in another letter of the same day that he ‘was wrong’ (CL4 286), he had been ‘enjoying the game’ (CL4 277).
- 2.
Friedrich Nietzsche , The Anti-Christ, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols, trans. Judith Norman, eds. Aaron Ridley and Judith Norman, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2005), 157.
- 3.
Friedrich Nietzsche , Beyond Good and Evil, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1989), 101. The idea that creativity, especially artistic creativity, is spurred by spiritual and aesthetic fetters seared itself into Yeats’s memory and returned in A Vision’s construction of the Daimonic Self (see Chapter 6). Donoghue points to Nietzsche having a similar influence on Yeats, this time from The Gay Science. Yeats (London: Fontana/Collins, 1971), 55.
- 4.
Anthony Bradley , Imagining Ireland in the Poems and Plays of W. B. Yeats: Nation, Class and State (New York: Palgrave, 2011), 54.
- 5.
See Introduction to CW4, xxxi–xxxii.
- 6.
Yeats mentioned it along with ‘Two plays for dancers (Cuala)’ and ‘Swans at Coole’ in a letter to Lady Gregory of 29 January 1919. On 20 February he queried Macmillan about the date of publication of both CA and The Wild Swans at Coole. InteLex 3562, 3572.
- 7.
Edward Marx demonstrates that rather than Pound in 1913 it was the Japanese poet Yone Noguchi who ‘as early as 1907’ first ‘proposed Yeats should study the Noh’. ‘Nō Dancing: Yone Noguchi in Yeats’s Japan’, YA17, 51.
- 8.
Schuchard, The Last Minstrels, 195.
- 9.
Alexander Nehamas , Nietzsche: Life as Literature (Boston: Harvard University Press, 1985), 174. Nehamas argues that Nietzsche’s non-essentialist idea of the self does not preclude a sort of finality to be achieved in the creative act, ‘The self-creation Nietzsche has in mind involves accepting everything that we have done and, in the ideal case, blending it into a perfectly coherent whole’. Nietzsche, 188–89.
- 10.
Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, 28. The figure of the strong poet may thus come to replace the philosopher as cultural hegemon, ‘The final victory of poetry in its ancient quarrel with philosophy—the final victory of metaphors of self-creation over metaphors of discovery—would consist in our becoming reconciled to the thought that this is the only sort of power over the world which we can hope to have’. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, 40. Therefore the only way philosophy can retain its position in the modern world leads through the adoption of poetic standards of the continuous creation of new vocabularies; as he states in an essay on Heidegger, the poetic thinker per se: ‘the aim of philosophical thought is to free us from the language we presently use by reminding us that this language is not that of “human reason” but is the creation of the thinkers of our historical past’. Richard Rorty , Essays on Heidegger and Others (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 16.
- 11.
Ben Levitas, ‘Nationalism and Postcolonialism’ in W. B. Yeats in Context, ed. David Holdeman and Ben Levitas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 181.
- 12.
Pilkington, Theatre and State in Twentieth-Century Ireland, 42.
- 13.
Ibid., 42.
- 14.
Frazier, Behind the Scenes, 90.
- 15.
Pilkington, Theatre and State in Twentieth-Century Ireland, 43.
- 16.
Mathews, Revival, 139.
- 17.
Quoted in Mathews, Revival, 138.
- 18.
Ibid., 138.
- 19.
Holloway, Impressions, 81.
- 20.
‘Jacques’ , ‘A Queer Hero: In Mr. Synge’s New Play’ in The ‘Playboy’ Riots, ed. James Kilroy (Dublin: The Dolmen Press, 1971), 12.
- 21.
‘The People and the Parricide’ in The ‘Playboy’ Riots, 19.
- 22.
Nationalist papers, Sinn Fein and Moran’s Leader, duly mocked his self-depiction as a nationalist and justified the riots (Life1 364).
- 23.
Frazier, Behind the Scenes, 92.
- 24.
John Millington Synge, The Collected Letters of John Millington Synge, Volume 1, 1871–1907 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 76.
- 25.
D. P. Moran, The Philosophy of Irish Ireland (Dublin: James Duffy and Co.), 93.
- 26.
Ibid., 37.
- 27.
Mathews, Revival, 97.
- 28.
Nicholas Grene , ‘J. M. Synge’, in W. B. Yeats in Context, 144.
- 29.
The year 1908 saw Yeats continuing to fight not only popular opinion, as he conceived it, but also his former associates, such as the Fay brothers who, tired of dealing with what they deemed Yeats’s rebarbative ideals, resolved to secede from the Abbey securing the rights to its plays . Also, Annie Horniman’s decision to withdraw from sponsoring the Abbey led to unprecedented financial worries on the directors’ part. Arthur Symons suffered a psychotic breakdown, a blow that Yeats did not expect: ‘I have had very sad news. Arthur Symons brain has given way’ (InteLex 972). Early in 1909 Lady Gregory ‘nearly slipped away’ due to a cerebral haemorrhage (Life 1 398). By June, Yeats resignedly wrote to her, ‘What a terrible year it has been’ (InteLex 1167).
- 30.
In his journal, Yeats says, ‘In what toils, in what life, in what war of the Amazons did women, whose beauty is more than the promise of physical pleasure and an easy path to it, win their beauty? For Castiglione says, speaking the high Urbino thought, that all such beauty “is the spoil and monument of the victory of the soul”’ (Mem 157). In a similar context, the same quotation from Castiglione appears in A Vision (1925): ‘Botticelli, Crivelli, Mantegna, Da Vinci […] make Masaccio and his school seem heavy and common by something we may call intellectual beauty or compare perhaps to that kind of bodily beauty which Castiglione called “the spoil or monument of the victory of the soul”’ (168). The quotation from Castiglione complements the earliest of several of Yeats’s definitions of Unity of Being: ‘the subordination of all parts to the whole as in a perfectly proportioned human body’ (Ex 250, CW3 164). The perfect proportion is to be just such a spoil or monument that the artist triumphantly erects in his work.
- 31.
Ezra Pound , The Letters of Ezra Pound , ed. D. D. Paige (New York: New Directions, 1974), 197. Despite the fact that Pound did not think too highly of the introduction, considering it too much like “Pater, Fiona Macleod and James Matthew Barrie’, he conceded that The Classic Noh Theatre of Japan was ‘all that could be done with the material’. The Letters of Ezra Pound , 197.
- 32.
Ernest Fenollosa and Ezra Pound , Noh, or Accomplishment: A Study of the Classical Stage of Japan (London: Macmillan, 1916), 17.
- 33.
Murakato Akiko , ‘“Fenollosa on the Noh” as It Was: Lecture V. No. Washington, 12 March, 1903’, Review of English Literature 50 (1985), 13.
- 34.
Ibid., 16.
- 35.
Mary de Raschewiltz et al., Ezra Pound to his Parents: Letters 1895–1929 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 351.
- 36.
See Pound, The Letters, 88.
- 37.
Ezra Pound , Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (London: The Ovid Press, 1920), 12.
- 38.
In the nine months that separated the completion of ‘At Stratford-on-Avon’ and the beginning of work on ‘Edmund Spenser’, Yeats repeatedly came to defend the freedom of literature as well as theatre and their independence from morality and the political issues of the time. In October 1901, he had to respond to Fred Ryan (writing pseudonymously as ‘Irial’ in the United Irishman) who claimed, among others, that Yeats showed himself to be immoral when he publicly stated that literature was ‘the principal voice of the conscience’ (UP2 262). In a spirit that could now be called Rortyan, Yeats referred to works like Don Quixote, Hamlet and Anna Karenina to support his idea: ‘A great writer will devote perhaps years, perhaps the greater part of a lifetime, to the study of the moral issues raised by a single event, by a single group of characters’ (UP2 263).
- 39.
Donoghue, ‘Orality, Literacy, and Their Discontents’, 150.
- 40.
Ezra Pound , ABC of Reading (New York: New Directions, 1960), 32, 33. T. S. Eliot, though less trenchantly than Pound or Yeats, also credited literature with the power to allow a people to thrive: ‘The people which ceases to care for its literary inheritance becomes barbaric; the people which ceases to produce literature ceases to move in thought and sensibility’. The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (London: Faber and Faber, 1948), 15.
- 41.
Ezra Pound , ‘How to Read’ in Literary Essays of Ezra Pound , ed. T. S. Eliot (New York: The New Directions, 1968), 21.
- 42.
Pound, The Letters, 60.
- 43.
Ibid., 151.
- 44.
James Longenbach , Stone Cottage: Pound, Yeats and Modernism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), 77.
- 45.
Peter Crisp , ‘Allegory and symbol—a Fundamental Opposition?’ Language and Literature 14 (2005), 336.
- 46.
Ezra Pound , A Memoir of Gaudier-Brzeska (New York: New Directions, 1970), 84.
- 47.
Ibid., 88.
- 48.
Ibid., 84.
- 49.
Longenbach, Stone Cottage, 81.
- 50.
In a review of the plays that the Abbey had performed in 1908, Yeats stated in no uncertain terms that ‘theatres cannot be democracies’ (UP2 377).
- 51.
Arthur Symons , ‘The Ideas of Richard Wagner’ in Studies in Seven Arts (London: Archibald Constable, 1906), 239, 265. The article first appeared in the Quarterly Review, July 1905, 73–108.
- 52.
Schuchard, The Last Minstrels, 189.
- 53.
Symons, ‘The Ideas of Richard Wagner’, 269.
- 54.
Ezra Pound , ‘Pastiche. The Regional’ The New Age 27 (30 Oct 1919), 448.
- 55.
Yeats borrows the idea that life is an inextinguishable well for poetic creation from Shelley, who asks in ‘On Life’ ‘What are changes of empires, the wreck of dynasties […] what is the birth and the extinction of religious and of political systems, to life?’ (970). When in A Defence of Poetry he asserts that all poetry ‘is infinite’ (1046) and ‘creates new materials of knowledge, and power, and pleasure’ (1049), he alludes to the ineffable nature of life whose intricacy is to be sung in verse. Shelley, Selected Poetry, Prose and Letters.
- 56.
Warwick Gould adds Walter Pater ’s essay on ‘Style’ as a likely precursor to Wilde’s and subsequently Yeats’s understanding of the concepts of mask and style. ‘The Mask before The Mask’, YA19, 11–12.
- 57.
Ibid., 22–23. As it appears, not only did the lyric, composed for Mabel Dickinson, come to dominate his thinking but also the very idea that is taken as its premise.
- 58.
This insight is discussed in 1920 when Yeats worked on the Four Years section of Autobiographies; there, he explains, ‘Among subjective men (in all those, that is, who must spin a web out of their own bowels) the victory is an intellectual daily re-creation of all that exterior fate snatches away, and so that fate’s antithesis; while what I have called “the Mask” is an emotional antithesis to all that comes out of their internal nature. We begin to live when we have conceived life as tragedy’ (CW3 163).
- 59.
J. B. Yeats, Letters to His Son, 90.
- 60.
Brendan McNamee , ‘Death and the Anti-Self’, in YA17, 361. McNamee asserts that the process of composing in Yeats is both ‘like death’ but ‘it is also the very apex of life’. ‘Death and the Anti-Self’, 360.
- 61.
Richard Greaves , Transition, Reception and Modernism in W. B. Yeats (London: Palgrave, 2002), 151, 153.
- 62.
Seamus Deane , ‘Imperialsm/Nationalism’ in Critical Terms for Literary Study, ed. Frank Lentricchia and Thomas McLaughlin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 359–64.
- 63.
Charles T. Malone , ‘Modernist Ethos in the Postcolonial Moment: Yeats’s Theory of Masks in W. B. Yeats and Postcolonialism, ed. Deborah Fleming (West Cornwall: Locust Hill Press, 2001), 266.
- 64.
McAteer. Yeats and European Drama, 4.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2017 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Pietrzak, W. (2017). Cutting the Irish Agate. In: The Critical Thought of W. B. Yeats. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-60089-5_4
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-60089-5_4
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-60088-8
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-60089-5
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)