Howard T. Young, The Line in the Margin: Juan Ramón Jiménez and His Readings in Blake, Shelley, and Yeats

Abstract

Of all the major English-language poets in this century, none, I think, has had so little impact upon continental European writers as William Butler Yeats. The issue, however, is not one of “reputation” in the conventional academic sense, but rather of the nature of Yeats’s European readership and the characteristic forms of their response. Of course there is no shortage of critical essays on Yeats in European scholarly journals, and his significance for Anglo-American poetry is regularly acknowledged, but it is a recognition that has been framed almost exclusively within a university context and discourse. Unlike, for example, T. S. Eliot or Ezra Pound, without whose example, negative as well as positive, the shape of much continental poetry would be radically different, Yeats simply has not attracted writers of the first magnitude for whom his works constitute a living voice from which to learn and with which to quarrel. And to the extent that there is considerable truth in Pound’s dictum — “The best criticism of any work … comes from the creative writer or artist who does the next job” — this silence has effectively left Yeats without a real continental readership.