Yeatsian Cosmology

Abstract

The conjunction of W. B. Yeats and the new physics, perhaps even of Yeats and any science, may seem a strange one given the poet’s predilection for the occult, the magical and the irrational. Although the image of Yeats as implacably hostile to science has become pervasive in criticism, as a child and up to his early manhood he possessed a passionate interest in science. Stephen Coote, in his biography of Yeats, emphasises that at school he was considered to show an ‘exceptional ability’ in mathematics and the natural sciences; his father believed that he would become a scientist (1997, pp. 28–9). In Yeats’s Autobiographies, he depicts his young self as a reader of Darwin, Haeckel and Huxley, a collector of butterflies and with his own theory ‘as to the colour of the sea-anemone’ (1999, pp. 56–60). He also presents himself confronting a ‘pious geologist’ with the fact of evolution by means of his knowledge of fossils (1999, p. 60). Rónán McDonald forcefully points out that ‘The image of the Irish Revival as anti-scientific… has been thoroughly scotched in recent years’ by work such as Gregory Castle’s Modernism and the Celtic Revival and Sinead Garrigan-Mattar’s Primitivism, Science and the Irish Revival (2012, p. 152); however, this insight needs to be applied to Yeats’s whole career and to other sciences than anthropology.