Phantasmagoria: the Personality of Coleridge in the Earlier Prose of Yeats

Abstract

When telling of how Lionel Johnson was capable of recounting apocryphal stories from his own life as though they were true, Yeats admitted that ‘these conversations were always admirable in their drama, but never too dramatic or ever too polished to lose their casual accidental character; they were the phantasmagoria through which his philosophy of life found its expression’ ([1922] Au 306). This comment could easily be seen as referring to Yeats’s own memoirs, as well as to his method of criticism.