Yeats and Art as a Form of Religious Experience

Abstract

For W. B. Yeats, the transfiguration of the mundane into the sacred in one’s vision can be achieved not only through participating in religious ritual, but also through poetry and other forms of art. In the poet’s words addressed to Gordon Craig on 23 May 1910, concerning the revision process of the verse version of the play, The Hour-Glass, first published in The Mask in Florence, Italy, in April 1913, one finds a representative expression of the poet’s understanding of epiphanic revelation as made possible through poetics as much as through religious experience: ‘I conceive of the play as a ritual. It must not give all to the first hearing any more than the Latin ritual of the Church does, so long as the ultimate goal is the people’ (Clark and Clark, 2001, p. 869). A few years earlier, writing to Frank Fay in January 1904 about The Shadowy Waters, first published as a dramatic poem in The North American Review in May 1900, and On Baile’s Strand, first published in In the Seven Woods (1903), Yeats described the former text in words that might be used to describe epiphanic revelation: ‘The whole picture as it were moves together — sky and sea and cloud are as it were actors. It is almost religious, it is more a ritual than a human story’ (Clark and Clark, 2001, pp. 864–5, p. 848). As late as July 1929, writing to Thomas Sturge Moore in excitement during the rehearsals of Fighting the Waves (first published in 1934), which is a ballet version of The Only Jealousy of Emer (first published in 1919), excitement provoked by the opportunity of using the masks made by the Dutch sculptor Hildo Van Krop, Yeats reasserted that: ‘I always feel that my work is not drama but the ritual of a lost faith’ (Clark and Clark, 2001, p. 899).