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Preface
‘What then?’ the ghost of Plato asks in a late poem that surveys a life very much like that of Yeats himself: friends, family, a house and garden. But the interrogation that persists above all is of the poet’s legacy. He declares, ‘ “Let the fools rage, I swerved in naught, / Something to perfection brought;” / But louder sang that ghost: “What then?”’ Nearly a century later, scholars and everyday readers alike continue to be drawn to the reiterated question posed by Plato’s ghost when offered a short four-stanza litany of the seeming achievements of the artist, impresario, public figure, historical thinker. Did Yeats use his fame and public voice with responsibility in tumultuous times? Did his work vindicate the friendship he had won among a fraternity of artists and thinkers and public women and men? Was he a good father, husband, lover? Did he ever manage to produce the perfection of great art? All of these questions remain open to literary criticism and history as generations of scholars and students continue to pore over the legacy of Yeats’s seventy-three-year life.
Yeats’s work covers a publishing history which began in 1885 and spanned Victorianism to modernism. He had a career as writer and director for the stage which began in 1892 and continued through decades of theatrical experiment. His life as a writer of critical and esoteric prose was surmounted by the two complete versions of a world and art-historical system, A Vision written in collaboration with his wife, George. By middle age, the Nobel Prize-winning Yeats was ‘A sixty-year-old smiling public man’, a senator who took an active part in everyday politics in the new Irish Free State, a performer whose lectures and readings could fill Carnegie Hall.
Above all, Yeats remains a figure whose work intersects at multiple points with the story of world literature. His voice is at once regional the County Sligo family origins to which his writing returned throughout his career and to which his body was (probably) returned for burial; national occupied in the political struggles and petty disputes of a small country at the western seaboard of Europe; international a writer whose audiences, interlocutors, and interests spanned Asia and the Americas as well as European literature from Plato through Dante to Blake and Shelley; and otherworldly both in terms of an emerging new Einsteinian science and astronomy and the less tangible worlds of communicators, astrologers, and the tarot.
The forty-two chapters in this book consider Yeats’s early toil, his practical and esoteric concerns as his career developed, his friends and enemies, how he was and is understood. This book brings together critics and writers who have considered what Yeats wrote and how he wrote, moving between texts and their contexts in ways that leads the reader through Yeats’s multiple selves as poet, playwright, public figure,
and mystic. The book cannot be encyclopaedic and neither can it ever be wholly consistent, but among the virtues of the Oxford Handbook series is that volumes like this can bring together a variety of views, establish a dialogue, and in this instance add to the Yeatsian sense of dialogue, the antinomial or deliberately divided way of thinking that Yeats relished and encouraged. Wedded to the questioning of certainty in a poem like ‘What then?’ is the deliberate ‘Vacillation’ of another late work. This book aims to put that sense of a living dialogue in tune both with the history of Yeatsian criticism and with contemporary critical and ethical debate, not shirking the complexities of Yeats’s more uncomfortable political positions or personal life. It is hoped that the book will speak of Yeats’s life and work from the times in which we find ourselves, and provide one basis from which future Yeats scholarship can continue to participate in the fascination of all the contributors here in the satisfying difficulty of this great writer.
Our collaboration as editors and contributors grew out of other collaborations and networks, especially the many gatherings at the Yeats International Summer School, where we served as co-directors. Many of the contributors in this book met in Sligo, and while it is invidious to mention individuals, we would like to thank Jonathan Allison, Meg Harper, Anne Margaret Daniel, and James Pethica for their invitations to be inducted into the community of the Summer School. For more than half a century the work of the Yeats Society Sligo has been a model for a cultural community which links the work of local and international expertise. We would like to thank those in Sligo who unconditionally shared their knowledge along with their hospitality, among them Martin and Maura McTighe, Damien and Paula Brennan, Susan O’Keeffe, and the inestimable Martin Enright. The International Yeats Society has done tremendous work in expanding the boundaries of where and how W. B. Yeats is read, and we would like to acknowledge the work of those who have organized conferences and edited the journal, including Sean Golden, Catherine Paul, Alexandra Poulain, Charles Armstrong, and Rob Doggett. We owe many thanks to all three of these organizations for the opportunities they continue to provide for scholars to embark on an enterprise such as this book.
We are grateful to Jacqueline Norton at OUP for commissioning this volume and to Aimee Wright and others at OUP for bringing it to publication. The valuable comments of a number of anonymous readers refined the initial plan considerably. We express our thanks to the Department of English and Related Literature at the University of York and Maynooth University Department of English for research support, the F. R. Leavis Fund at the University of York and the National University of Ireland for supporting costs associated with production. Stephen Grace did immense work with the initial task of standardizing the referencing throughout a very big book indeed.
Matthew Campbell would like to thank Valerie Cotter for her unconditional support and for her willingness to spend at least an annual fortnight for five years in the (admittedly beautiful) county of Sligo. Maeve and Hannah Campbell got dragged along too sometimes and might have had fun. Lauren Arrington would like to thank Ali Shah for learning to tolerate the Irish weather.
Lauren Arrington
Matthew Campbell
PART I SUCH FRIENDS: PREDECESSORS AND COLLABORATORS
11. Yeats and Renaissance Italy: ‘C ourtly images’
Edna Longley
12. Tradition and Phantasmagoria: Dante and Shakespeare
Hugh Haughton
13. Talking Back to History: From ‘September 1913’ to ‘Easter, 1916’
Geraldine Higgins
14. ‘Knights of the Air’: Yeats, Flight and Modernity
16. Yeats in Fascist Italy
17. The 1930s: ‘That day brings round the night’
18. W. B. Yeats: The Senate and the Stage
19. ‘Cast a cold eye’: Death in Wartime
PART IV GENRES AND MEDIA
PART V PLAYING YEATS
Zsuzsanna Balázs
35. Playing Yeats
Patrick Lonergan
36. Dance
Susan Jones
PART VI READING YEATS
37. Imperfect Forms
Stephanie Burt
38. Yeats’s Visionary Comedy
Matthew Campbell
39. Yeatsian Masculinities
Lucy McDiarmid
40. Late Style
Wayne K. Chapman
41. Editing Yeats
Warwick Gould
POSTSCRIPT
42. Yeats and Contemporary Poetry: Twelve Speculative Takes
Vona Groarke
List of Illustrations
7.1 Mrs William Butler Yeats; public domain 86
11.1 Antonio Mancini, Augusta Gregory, courtesy of the Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin 150
16.1 Yeats and Pound in Rapallo. Courtesy of Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin 241
29.1 Sturge Moore sketch for the Cuala Press edition of Yeats, ‘Byzantium’. Reproduced by permission of the Senate House Library, University of London 461
29.2 Cuala Press illustration to ‘The Song of Wandering Aengus’. Reproduced by permission of the Board of Trustees, Trinity College Dublin 462
30.1 W. B. Yeats, Dun Emer Press Prospectus, proof of final version (1903), the Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations
30.2 W. B. Yeats, Dun Emer Press Prospectus, draft. Courtesy of Special Collections/University Archives, Ellen Clarke Bertrand Library, Bucknell University, Lewisburg, PA 477
30.3 Annotations by Emery Walker and Elizabeth Corbet Yeats on W. B. Yeats, Dun Emer Press Prospectus, proof recto; the Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations 478
30.4 Annotation by Emery Walker on W. B. Yeats, Dun Emer Press Prospectus, proof verso; the Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations 479
30.5 Annotations by Emery Walker, W. B. Yeats, Dun Emer Press Prospectus, proof; the Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations
30.6 Annotations by Elizabeth Corbet Yeats, on W.B. Yeats, Dun Emer Press Prospectus, proof; the Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations 481
30.7 Lily Yeats/Brigid O’Brien, ‘Three Musicians’ (c.1930); John J. Burns Library, Boston College. Courtesy of Museum Textile Services 487
30.8 Lily Yeats/Brigid O’Brien, ‘Three Musicians’ (1935); John J. Burns Library, Boston College. Courtesy of Boston College Media Technology Services 488
33.1 Tamijuro Kume, photograph reproduced by permission of the Museum of Modern Art, Kamakura & Hayama, Japan 530
35.1 Furniture plot for The Words Upon the Window Pane by W.B. Yeats, directed and designed by Tómas Mac Anna, Abbey Theatre at the Queen’s Theatre, 1960; reproduced courtesy of Abbey Theatre Archive 559
35.2 Micheál Mac Liammóir in The Countess Cathleen, 1953, reproduced courtesy of Gate Theatre Digital Archive 560
35.3 At the Hawk’s Well by W. B. Yeats, Lyric Theatre, Belfast. Lyric Theatre/O’Malley Archive, reproduced courtesy of Hardiman Library, University of Galway 562
35.4 Geoffrey Golden as Concobar and Edward Golden as Fergus in Deirdre by W. B. Yeats, a special performance to mark the Yeats centenary year, Abbey Theatre at the Queen’s Theatre, 1965. Reproduced courtesy of Abbey Theatre Archive 565
35.5 Programme cover for Sacred Mysteries, the third annual Yeats International Festival, Peacock Stage, Abbey Theatre, 27 August 1991. Reproduced courtesy of Abbey Theatre Archive 566
List of Abbreviations
Au Autobiographies. London: Macmillan, 1955.
ARGYV Neil Mann, A Reader’s Guide to Yeats’s ‘A Vision’ (Clemson, SC: Clemson University Press, 2019).
BC The Book of the Courtier, trans. Thomas Hoby, Everyman’s Library (London: J. M. Dent, 1928).
CL InteLex The Collected Letters of W. B. Yeats, gen. ed. John Kelly, Oxford University Press (InteLex Electronic Edition), 2002. Letters cited by aAccession number.
CL1 The Collected Letters of W. B. Yeats: Volume I, 1865–1895, ed. John Kelly and Eric Domville. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986.
CL2 The Collected Letters of W. B. Yeats: Volume II, 1896–1900, ed. Warwick Gould, John Kelly, and Deirdre Toomey. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997.
CL3 The Collected Letters of W. B. Yeats: Volume III, 1901–1904, ed. John Kelly and Ronald Schuchard. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994.
CL4 The Collected Letters of W. B. Yeats, Volume IV, 1905–1907, ed. John Kelly and Ronald Schuchard. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005.
CL5 The Collected Letters of W. B. Yeats, Volume V, 1908–1910, ed. John Kelly and Ronald Schuchard. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018.
CW1 The Poems, second edition, ed. Richard J. Finneran. New York: Scribner, 1997.
CW2 The Plays, ed. David R. Clark and Rosalind E. Clark. New York: Scribner, 2001.
CW3 Autobiographies, ed. William H. O’Donnell and Douglas N. Archibald, assisted by J. Frasier Cocks III and Gretchen Schwenker. New York: Scribner, 1999.
CW4 Early Essays, ed. Richard J. Finneran and George Bornstein. New York: Scribner, 2007.
CW5 Later Essays, ed. William H. O’Donnell, with assistance from Elizabeth Bergmann Loizeaux. New York: Scribner, 1994.
CW6 Prefaces and Introductions: Uncollected Prefaces and Introductions by Yeats to Works by Other Authors and to Anthologies edited by Yeats, ed. William H. O’Donnell. London: Macmillan, 1988.
CW7 Letters to the New Island, eds. George Bornstein and Hugh Witemeyer. London: Macmillan, 1989.
CW8 The Irish Dramatic Movement, eds. Mary FitzGerald and Richard J. Finneran. New York: Scribner, 2003.
CW9 A Vision (1925), ed. Catherine E. Paul and Margaret Mills Harper. New York: Scribner, 2008.
CW10 Later Articles and Reviews: Uncollected Articles, Reviews, and Radio Broadcasts written after 1900, ed. Colton Johnson. New York: Scribner, 2000.
CW12 John Sherman and Dhoya, ed. Richard J. Finneran. New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1991.
CW13 A Vision: The Original 1925 Version, ed. Catherine E. Paul and Margaret Mills Harper. New York: Scribner 2008.
CW14 A Vision: Tthe Rrevised 1937 Eedition, ed. Margaret Mills Harper and Catherine E. Paul. New York: Scribner, 2015.
E&I Essays and Introductions. London and New York: Macmillan, 1961.
Ex Explorations, selected by Mrs W. B. Yeats. London: Macmillan, 1962; New York: Macmillan, 1963.
Life 1 W. B. Yeats: A Life, I: The Apprentice Mage, by R. F. Foster. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.
Life 2 W. B. Yeats: A Life, II: The Arch-Poet, by R. F. Foster. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.
Mem Memoirs: Autobiography—First Draft Journal, transcribed and edited by Denis Donoghue. London: Macmillan, 1972; New York: Macmillan, 1973.
MNY B. L. Reid, The Man from New York: John Quinn and his Friends (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968).
Myth 2005 Mythologies, ed. by Warwick Gould and Deirdre Toomey. Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.
NLI National Library of Ireland.
QC John Quinn Memorial Collection, New York Public Library.
SS Senate Speeches. The Senate Speeches of W. B. Yeats, ed. Donald R. Pearce. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1960; London: Faber and Faber, 1961.
VP The Variorum Edition of the Poems of W. B. Yeats, ed. Peter Allt and Russell K. Alspach. New York: Macmillan, 1957.
VPl The Variorum Edition of the Plays of W. B. Yeats, ed. Russell K. Alspach, assisted by Catharine C. Alspach. New York: Macmillan, 1966.
YA Yeats Annual.
YAACTS Yeats: An Annual of Critical and Textual Studies, ed. Richard J. Finneran (publishers vary, 1983–1999).
YGYL W. B. Yeats and George Yeats: the Letters, ed. Ann Saddlemyer. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011.
Notes on Contributors
Nicholas Allen is the director of the Willson Center and holds a Professorship in Humanities in the department of English at UGA. He has published several books on Ireland and its literature, has been the Burns Visiting Scholar at Boston College, and has received many grants and awards, including from the Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Irish Research Council.
Charles Armstrong is a Professor of English at the University of Agder. He is currently co-director of the Yeats International Summer School, vice president of the International Yeats Society, and president of the Nordic Association of English Studies. He is the author of Reframing Yeats: Genre, Allusion and History, Figures of Memory: Poetry, Space and the Past, and Romantic Organicism: From Idealist Origins to Ambivalent Afterlife, and has also co-edited five essay collections.
Lauren Arrington is Professor of English at Maynooth University, where she also serves as Head of Department. She is the author of three monographs, most recently The Poets of Rapallo: How Mussolini’s Italy shaped British, Irish, and U.S. Writers. She has held visiting fellowships at Boston College, Trinity College Dublin’s Long Room Hub, the Harry Ransom Center, Cambridge University’s CRASSH, and the New York Public Library. She was founding editor of the journal International Yeats Studies. Her writing has appeared in popular and scholarly publications including the TLS, Public Books, LARB and LitHub.
Zsuzsanna Balázs is Assistant Professor of Communication at Óbuda University in Budapest. Her PhD research at National University Ireland, Galway explored queer structures of feeling in W. B. Yeats’s and Gabriele D’Annunzio’s drama, focusing on unorthodox representations of gender, power, and desire in light of the playwrights’ queer and feminist networks.
Fran Brearton is Professor of Modern Poetry at Queen’s University Belfast. Her books include The Great War in Irish Poetry, Reading Michael Longley, and, as co-editor, The Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish Poetry and Incorrigibly Plural: Louis MacNeice and his Legacy.
Stephanie Burt is Professor of English at Harvard. Her work has appeared in ELH, Essays in Criticism, the London Review of Books, and many other journals in Britain, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, and the US. Her latest books are After
Callimachus: Poems and Translations and For All Mutants, a chapbook of poems about superheroes.
Matthew Campbell is Professor of Modern Literature at the University of York. He is the author of Irish Poetry under the Union and Rhythm and Will in Victorian Poetry. He has edited or co-edited five other books, including The Cambridge Companion to Contemporary Irish Poetry and Irish Literature in Transition, 1830–1880. He was the Director of the Yeats International Summer School from 2014 to 2019.
Wayne K. Chapman is Professor Emeritus of English at Clemson University, founding director of Clemson University Press (2000–2016), and editor of The South Carolina Review (1996–2016). He has written or edited numerous books on Yeats, including Yeats and English Renaissance Literature; The Countess Cathleen: Manuscript Materials, with Michael Sidnell; Yeats’s Collaborations: Yeats Annual 15, with Warwick Gould; ‘Dreaming of the Bones’ and ‘Calvary’: Manuscript Materials; The W. B. and George Yeats Library: A Short-title Catalog; Yeats’s Poetry in the Making: ‘Sing Whatever Is Well Made; Rewriting The Hour-Glass: A Play Written in Prose and Verse Versions; W. B. Yeats’s Robartes–Aherne Writings: Featuring the Making of His ‘Stories of Michael Robartes and His Friends’, and ‘Something that I read in a book’: W. B. Yeats’s Annotations at the National Library of Ireland, 2 volumes.
David Dwan is Professor of English Literature and Intellectual History at the University of Oxford. His books include The Great Community: Culture and Nationalism in Ireland, The Cambridge Companion to Edmund Burke (co-edited with Chris Insole), and Liberty, Equality and Humbug: Orwell’s Political Ideals. He is also the author of several essays on Yeats.
Katherine Ebury is Senior Lecturer in Modern Literature at the University of Sheffield. She is the author of Modernism and Cosmology: Absurd Lights and Modern Literature and the Death Penalty, 1890–1950, and the editor, with James Fraser, of Joyce’s Nonfiction Writing: Outside His Jurisfiction. She has written articles and chapters on topics including science and technology, representations of law and justice, and animal studies, with questions about Yeats and modernism often central to her critical practice.
R. F. Foster is Emeritus Professor of Irish History at Oxford and of Irish History and Literature at Queen Mary University of London. His many prizewinning books include Modern Ireland 1600–1972, Paddy and Mr Punch, The Irish Story: telling tales and making it up in Ireland, the two-volume authorized biography of W .B. Yeats, Vivid Faces: the revolutionary generation in Ireland 1890–1923, and On Seamus Heaney. A Fellow of the British Academy, an Honorary Member of the Royal Irish Academy, and the holder of several honorary degrees, he is also a well-known cultural commentator and critic.
Alan Gillis is from the North of Ireland, and teaches English at The University of Edinburgh. His most recent poetry collection, The Readiness, was published by Picador in 2020, following four collections with The Gallery Press: Scapegoat, Here Comes the Night, Hawks and Doves, and Somebody, Somewhere. As a critic he is the author of Irish
Poetry of the 1930s and co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish Poetry, both published by Oxford University Press. From 2010 to 2015 he was editor of Edinburgh Review
Warwick Gould FRSL, FRSA, FEA is Emeritus Professor of English Literature in the University of London, and Senior Research Fellow of the Institute of English Studies (in the School of Advanced Study), of which he was Founder Director 1999–2013. He is co-author of Joachim of Fiore and the Myth of the Eternal Evangel in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, and co-editor of The Secret Rose, Stories by W. B. Yeats: A Variorum Edition, The Collected Letters of W. B. Yeats, Volume II, 1896–1900, and Mythologies. He has edited Yeats Annual for thirty years.
Nicholas Grene is Emeritus Professor of English Literature at Trinity College Dublin and a Member of the Royal Irish Academy. His books include The Politics of Irish Drama), Yeats’s Poetic Codes, Home on the Stage, The Theatre of Tom Murphy: Playwright Adventurer, and Farming in Modern Irish Literature.
Vona Groarke is a poet and Senior Lecturer at the University of Manchester. Her Selected Poems won the 2017 Pigott Prize for Best Irish Poetry Collection and her eighth poetry collection, Link, was published by The Gallery Press in 2021. Former Editor of Poetry Ireland Review (where she edited Issue 116, a special issue dedicated to W. B. Yeats), she lives in south County Sligo, nowhere near Innisfree.
Adam Hanna is a Lecturer in Irish Literature in the English Department of University College Cork, Ireland. He joined University College Cork as an Irish Research Council Government of Ireland Postdoctoral Fellow in 2015. Before this, he taught in the English departments of Trinity College Dublin, the University of Bristol, and the University of Aberdeen. He has trained and practised as a solicitor and is a co-founder of the Irish Network for the Legal Humanities. He is the author of Northern Irish Poetry and Domestic Space and the co-editor (with Jane Griffiths) of Architectural Space and the Imagination: Houses in Art and Literature from Classical to Contemporary. His second monograph, Poetry, Justice, and the Law in Modern Ireland, was published in 2022.
Margaret Mills Harper is Glucksman Professor in Contemporary Writing in English at the University of Limerick. She was Director of the Yeats International Summer School 2013–2015 and was President of the International Yeats Society. She regularly contributes to the Yeats Annual and has a huge number of publications on Yeats with Clemson, Oxford, and Cambridge University Presses. She published on Joyce with Palgrave Macmillan and contributed major articles on contemporary Irish literature to several outstanding journals of Irish literature. In September 2015 her long-awaited study on A Vision came out, co-edited with Catherine Paul as Volume 14 of The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats.
Susan Cannon Harris is Professor in the Department of English and the Keough Naughton Institute for Irish Studies at the University of Notre Dame. Her book Irish Drama and the Other Revolutions: Playwrights, Sexual Politics, and the International
Left, 1892–1964 considers modern Irish drama in the context of the international dramatic, sexual, and socialist revolutions that shaped the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Her first book, Gender and Modern Irish Drama was awarded the Donald Murphy Prize for a Distinguished First Book and the Robert Rhodes Prize for Books on Literature by the American Conference for Irish Studies. Her scholarship on Irish literature has also appeared in Modern Drama, Theatre Journal, Eire-Ireland, The James Joyce Quarterly, and The Cambridge Companion to J. M. Synge
Joseph Hassett is a graduate of Canisius College and Harvard Law School, holds a PhD in Anglo-Irish Literature from University College Dublin, and was a visiting scholar at St John’s College, Oxford. His most recent book is Yeats Now: Echoing into Life. Other books include W. B. Yeats and the Muses and The Ulysses Trials: Beauty and Truth Meet the Law. He lives and practises law in Washington, DC.
Hugh Haughton is Emeritus Professor of Modern Literature at the University of York. He is the author of The Poetry of Derek Mahon and the editor of The Chatto Book of Nonsense Poetry, The Letters of T. S. Eliot, Vols 1 and 2, Second World War Poems, and Freud, The Uncanny. He has written numerous essays on twentieth-century British and Irish poetry, including recently on Thomas Kinsella, Michael Longley and Eiléan Ni Chuilleanáin.
Seán Hewitt is Teaching Fellow in Modern British and Irish Literature at Trinity College Dublin. He is the author of J.M. Synge: Nature, Politics, Modernism, Tongues of Fire, and All Down Darkness Wide, and is Poetry Critic for The Irish Times
Geraldine Higgins is Associate Professor of English at Emory University and Director of Emory’s Irish Studies Program. Her publications on Irish literature include Brian Friel, Heroic Revivals from Carlyle to Yeats, and her editorship of Seamus Heaney in Context. She is the curator of the National Library of Ireland’s exhibition ‘Seamus Heaney: Listen Now Again’.
Susan Jones is Emeritus Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford and Fellow of St Hilda’s College. She writes on modernism, women’s writing, Joseph Conrad, and the history and aesthetics of dance. She has published many articles, and books on Joseph Conrad and on Literature, Modernism, and Dance appeared with Oxford University Press. She is Director of Dance Scholarship Oxford and is currently writing a book for Oxford University Press on Samuel Beckett and Choreography.
Elizabeth Bergmann Loizeaux is Professor of English emerita, Special Assistant to the Provost, and Past Associate Provost for Undergraduate Affairs at Boston University. She is the author of Yeats and the Visual Arts, Twentieth-Century Poetry and the Visual Arts, and numerous essays on modern poetry. With Neil Fraistat, she co-edited Reimagining Textuality: Textual Studies in the Late Age of Print. Beth has served on the faculty of the Yeats International Summer School, and with fellow faculty member, actor Sam McCready, wrote and performed Yeats’s Gallery, a multimedia performance of Yeats’s poems with commentary, first presented at the Folger Shakespeare Theatre, Washington,
DC. Before moving to BU, Beth taught at the University of Maryland, College Park, where she is Professor of English emerita.
Patrick Lonergan is Professor of Drama and Theatre Studies at National University of Ireland, Galway, and a member of the Royal Irish Academy. He has edited or written Theatre and Globalization (winner of the 2008 Theatre Book Prize), The Theatre and Films of Martin McDonagh, Theatre and Social Media, and Irish Drama and Theatre Since 1950 (Bloomsbury, 2019). Forthcoming publications include a study of Shakespeare and the modern Irish theatre, and a short book on Irish theatre histories and the Anthropocene.
Edna Longley is a Professor Emerita at Queen’s University Belfast. She is the author of Yeats and Modern Poetry and Under the Same Moon: Edward Thomas and the English Lyric.
Claire Lynch is Professor of English and Irish Literature at Brunel University London. She is the author of Irish Autobiography, Cyber Ireland: Text, Image, Culture, and several articles and chapters on modern and contemporary Irish writing. Claire’s first book of creative non-fiction, Small: On Motherhoods, was published by Hachette in 2021.
Lucy McDiarmid is the author or editor of eight books. Her most recent monographs are At Home in the Revolution: what women said and did in 1916 and Poets and the Peacock Dinner: the literary history of a meal; she is completing a book on recent Irish poetry. The Vibrant House: Irish Writers and Domestic Space (edited with Rhona Richman Kenneally) was published in 2017. She has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, and the National Endowment for the Humanities, and is Marie FrazeeBaldassarre Professor of English at Montclair State University.
Peter McDonald is the editor of The Poems of W.B. Yeats for the Longman Annotated English Poets series: Volume 1 (1882–1889) and Volume 2 (1890–1898) were published in 2020, and Volume 3 (1899–1910) is forthcoming in 2023. He is an Irish poet and critic: his eight books of poetry include Collected Poems and The Gifts of Fortune, and his volumes of literary criticism include Mistaken Identities: Poetry and Northern Ireland, Serious Poetry: Form and Authority from Yeats to Hill, and Sound Intentions: The Workings of Rhyme in Nineteenth-Century Poetry. He is the editor of Louis MacNeice: Collected Poems, and the translator of The Homeric Hymns. He is a Student of Christ Church, and Professor of British and Irish Poetry, in the University of Oxford.
Akiko Manabe is Professor of English at Shiga University, Japan. She specializes in American and Irish modernist poetry and drama. She has recently focused on the Japanese influence on European and American modernism, especially in relation to the traditional theatre of Noh and kyogen. Recent publications include the co-authored Hemingway and Ezra Pound in Venezia and the co-edited Cultural Hybrids of (Post) Modernism: Japanese/Western Literature, Art and Philosophy; and articles on Yeats, Pound, Hemingway, and Hearn in Etudes Anglaises, Yeats and Asia, and International
Yeats Studies. Since 2017 she has produced a series of performances of new kyogen based on the works of Yeats and Hearn in Ireland and Japan.
Neil Mann has written extensively on Yeats’s esoteric interests and A Vision, contributing articles to the Yeats Annual and elsewhere, creating the website YeatsVision.com in 2002, and co-editing two collections of essays, Yeats’s A Vision: Explications and Contexts with Matthew Gibson and Claire Nally, and Yeats, Philosophy, and the Occult with Matthew Gibson. His A Reader’s Guide to Yeats’s A Vision came out in 2019.
Emilie Morin is Professor of Modern Literature at the University of York. She has published widely on Irish modernism. Her articles on Yeats have appeared in the Yeats Annual and the Historical Journal of Radio, Film and Television, and she has recently edited a special issue of International Yeats Studies on Yeats and mass communications with David Dwan. Her most recent book is Beckett’s Political Imagination.
Claire Nally is an Associate Professor of Modern and Contemporary Literature at Northumbria University, where she researches Irish Studies, Neo-Victorianism, Gender, and Subcultures. She is the author of Envisioning Ireland: W. B. Yeats’s Occult Nationalism and Selling Ireland: Advertising, Literature and Irish Print Culture 1891–1922 (written with John Strachan). She has co-edited a volume on Yeats, and two volumes on gender, as well as the international library series ‘Gender and Popular Culture’ for Bloomsbury (with Angela Smith). She has written widely on a number of modern and contemporary topics, and her most recent monograph is Steampunk: Gender, Subculture and the Neo-Victorian
Francis O’Gorman has written widely on English and Irish literature, 1780 to 1920. He retired as Saintsbury Professor of English Literature at the University of Edinburgh in 2022.
Cóilín Parsons is Associate Professor of English and Director of Global Irish Studies at Georgetown University. He is the author of The Ordnance Survey and Modern Irish Literature and has co-edited Relocations: Reading Culture in South Africa and Science, Technology, and Irish Modernism. He is currently completing a monograph on astronomy and modernist literature.
Geraldine Parsons is a Senior Lecturer in Celtic and Gaelic at the University of Glasgow. Her primary interests are in medieval Irish literature and language. Her work on fiannaíocht/the Finn Cycle expands her temporal range, with eighteenth-century reflexes of the tradition another focus of research.
Adam Piette is Professor of Modern Literature at the University of Sheffield. He is the author of Remembering and the Sound of Words: Mallarmé, Proust, Joyce, Beckett; Imagination at War: British Fiction and Poetry, 1939–1945; and The Literary Cold War, 1945 to Vietnam. He co-edited The Edinburgh Companion to Twentieth-Century British and American War Literature with Mark Rawlinson and co-edits the international poetry journal Blackbox Manifold with Alex Houen.
Jack Quin is a British Academy postdoctoral fellow in the Department of English Literature at the University of Birmingham. He has articles on literature and the visual arts published or forthcoming in Modernism/modernity, Modernist Cultures, Irish Studies Review, and New Hibernia Review. His monograph W. B. Yeats and the Language of Sculpture was published by Oxford University Press in 2022.
Justin Quinn is Associate Professor at the University of West Bohemia. He is the author of several studies of poetry, including Between Two Fires: Transnationalism and Cold War Poetry. With Gabriela Kleckova he edited Anglophone Literature in Second-Language Teacher Education: Curriculum Innovation through Intercultural Communication.
Jahan Ramazani is University Professor and Edgar F. Shannon Professor of English at the University of Virginia. He is the author of Poetry in a Global Age; Poetry and Its Others: News, Prayer, Song, and the Dialogue of Genres; A Transnational Poetics, The Hybrid Muse: Postcolonial Poetry in English; Poetry of Mourning: The Modern Elegy from Hardy to Heaney, and Yeats and the Poetry of Death: Elegy, Self-Elegy, and the Sublime. He is the editor of ‘Poetry and Race,’ a special issue of New Literary History, and of The Cambridge Companion to Postcolonial Poetry; a co-editor of the most recent editions of The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry and The Norton Anthology of English Literature (2006, 2012, 2018); and an associate editor of The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics.
Nathan Suhr-Sytsma is Associate Professor of English at Emory University in Atlanta. His publications focus on poetry in the contexts of African, Irish, and postcolonial studies, as well as literary engagements with religion and with climate crisis. The author of Poetry, Print, and the Making of Postcolonial Literature, he is completing a book about twenty-first-century African poetry and literary institutions.
Tom Walker teaches in the School of English at Trinity College Dublin. His publications on various aspects of Irish writing and modern poetry include Louis MacNeice and the Irish Poetry of his Time, which was awarded the Robert Rhodes Prize for Literature by the American Conference for Irish Studies.
PART I SUCH FRIENDS
Predecessors and Collaborators
CHAPTER 1
SELF- MAKING
CLAIRE LYNCH
In March 1921, W. B. Yeats finished the first draft of his memoir, sealed it in an envelope, and marked it, ‘Private. Containing much that is not for publication now, if ever.’1 Yeats’s envelope, for all it requests privacy, also equivocates. There is, it seems, an imagined future where publication might be possible, a future self who may come to read the contents as no longer private. The envelope, even more so than the manuscript it contained, expresses the central dilemma of autobiography: how should a writer balance the desire to reveal the self, with the instinct to conceal it?
One of the most prolific and, arguably, the most influential Irish autobiographer of the twentieth century, Yeats published a series of major autobiographies between 1915 and 1935. Throughout his career, Yeats’s life-writing was self-consciously concerned with constructing a distinctive sense of individual identity alongside a portrait of Irish literary and political life, as he observed it. The extensive scope of his autobiographical work allows us to chart the simultaneous evolution of the individual and the nation; or, as his biographer Roy Foster has it, the way in which Yeats ‘adapted his public persona in order to emerge as a founding father of the new nation in 1922’.2 We find his life story in numerous biographies, in literary histories of the Irish Revival and modernism, in the memoirs and fictions of his peers, in his own extensive autobiographical writing, and in so much of his poetry, political speeches, and dramatic writing. Indeed, so much has been written by and about Yeats on the subject of his personality and sense of self that, far from remaining a discreetly ‘private’ memoirist, his biography has come to be read as ‘the history of his country’.3 At times, the overwhelming scale of Yeats studies threatens to overshadow the accounts he left of himself, in his own words. As Foster writes, in his definitive biography of the poet, Yeats’s ‘life has been approached over and over again,
1 The anecdote is recounted on the dust jacket of Denis Donoghue’s edition of W. B. Yeats, Memoirs: autobiography – First Draft Journal (London: Macmillan, 1972).
2 R. F. Foster, The Irish Story: Telling Tales and Making it up in Ireland (London: Penguin, 2001), 59.
3 Foster, The Irish Story, 59.
for the purpose of relating it to his art’.4 If Foster sees his biography of Yeats as uniquely shifting the focus from ‘principally about what he wrote’ to ‘principally about what he did’, he cannot avoid the conclusion that our interest in Yeats is bound up in his ‘capacity to transmute the events of a crowded life . . into art’.5 Art is at the centre of the discussion here since, as I will argue, fiction, artifice, and construction are essential elements of Yeats’s autobiographical writing. As Marjorie Perloff observes with some despair, Yeats’s autobiographies have often been taken as just a ‘source of information on the poet’s life’.6 To read Yeats’s autobiographies as literal, or as no more than supporting evidence, ignores at the very least his own attitude towards them.
In August of the same year he marked his memoir as ‘Private’, Yeats wrote to Olivia Shakespear: ‘I find this memoir writing makes me feel clean, as if I had bathed and put on clean linen. It rids me of something and I shall return to poetry with renewed simplicity.’7 At this stage at least, Yeats saw writing poetry and writing memoir as refreshingly different activities which, nonetheless, produce powerfully symbiotic work. Writing memoir is cathartic, cleansing work for Yeats. Yet memoir is hardly valued for its own sake at all, seen rather as a catalyst for reinvigorated poetry. There is in this an implicit power imbalance between memoir and poetry. On the one hand, poetry: inherently public, arch, high art. On the other, memoir: private, self-reflective, and, by comparison, inevitably quotidian. If writing memoir ‘rids’ Yeats of something, we might be forgiven for assuming that this early manuscript was marked ‘Private’ because it contained the results of the purge. Yeats sealed his memoirs in an envelope because it contained the dirty linen not suitable for his poetry.
In his letter to Shakespear, Yeats presents memoir and poetry as distinct modes, not only of writing but of thinking. While he was clear in his view that ‘a poet writes always of his personal life’, Yeats also understood that the ‘person’ and the ‘poet’ were not wholly synonymous beings.8 In his own terms, ‘the bundle of accident and incoherence that sits down to breakfast’ had to be recast through the act of writing in order to be ‘reborn as an idea, something intended, complete’.9 Yeats’s metaphor here is a revealing one. Writing poetry untangles, orders, even creates the poet. Writing poetry, Yeats suggests, is always, among other things, an act of self-discovery. It is, undoubtedly, tempting to read Yeats’s poetry in this way. In isolation, each poem might easily be read as a fresh act of Yeats’s witnessing and self-reflection. As a whole, his oeuvre is often recast as a portrait of the poet’s perspective as it shifted and evolved across the course of his lifetime. More than this, many of Yeats’s poems seem to invite an autobiographical reading, particularly those which employ the first
4 Life 1, xxvi–xxvii.
5 Life 1, xxvi.
6 Marjorie Perloff, ‘ “The Tradition of Myself”: The Autobiographical Mode of Yeats’, Journal of Modern Literature, 4:3 (1975), 537.
7 Quoted ‘Editors’ Preface’, CW3, 21.
8 CW3, 21.
9 CW3, 9.
person, linguistically, at least, blurring the line between the protagonist within the poem and the poet who creates it.
According to Marjorie Perloff, ‘The Wild Swans at Coole’ is the first of Yeats’s great autobiographical poems. In the poem, Perloff reads the protagonist as ‘a projection of the poet himself’, a figure who ‘recalls and implicitly judges those experiences in his past which reveal something essential about his personality as it responds to the outside world’.10 Crucially, Perloff notes, it is not just the poet as protagonist that gives ‘The Wild Swans at Coole’ autobiographical value; rather, it is the protagonist’s reflection of past selves. This is not a protagonist who exists only within the poem but, rather, steps outside it in an attempt to make sense of the larger project of self-making. The idea that a poem inevitably ‘reveal[s] something essential’ about the poet is perennially appealing. Indeed, to read ‘The Wild Swans at Coole’ without an autobiographical lens might seem deliberately obtuse. Nevertheless, readers resist simplistic interpretations in which a poem is ‘about’ the poet because we understand that poetry is more than that. By the same token, we must look at Yeats’s autobiographical writing as more than useful historical source material. As in poetry, life-writing gains its meaning as much from the text’s form and style as from its content. Among the most intriguing of these aspects, of course, is what aspects ought to be made public, and what might best be kept ‘Private’. Yeats’s envelope, so evocative and provocative, is the starting point here because it invites us to wonder what, precisely, he was so keen to keep from public view. With the publication of Denis Donoghue’s edition of the complete draft of Yeats’s Autobiography and Journal under the title Memoirs in 1972, one might argue that the idea of public and private versions of the text hardly remains a meaningful distinction. Donoghue’s painstaking work of transcription and editing maps the evolution of Yeats’s early drafts, allowing readers to compare the apparently private ‘memoir’ manuscript with the unapologetically public Autobiographies as they would later emerge. It surely goes without saying that writing changes between the first draft and the final publication proofs. Significant editing is, perhaps, particularly understandable in autobiographical writing when a mature author might easily be tempted to rework the personal indiscretions or technical weaknesses of an earlier draft. Yet what Yeats does in 1921 is quite different: he knows from the point of writing that the manuscript contains material he does not feel ready to publish. What was it about the first draft that he considered so unsuitable?
Certainly, Yeats writes with some candour about his adolescent sexual discoveries in the manuscript of Memoirs, as well as the failures and frustrations he encounters in his early sexual relationships. While these reflections might have been embarrassing in the form they take in the first draft, they were probably not damning. Perhaps, then, the request for privacy was not for the sake of the author himself, but in deference to the people he writes about. In their published form, Yeats’s early volumes of autobiography offer a detailed survey of Irish literary society. He was wise to be cautious about how his portraits might be received. If nothing else, the books were written in a time of
10 Perloff, ‘The Tradition of Myself’, 531.
libel; Yeats often reflected on Wilde’s case in his autobiographical writing. Yeats’s uncertainty about whether or not an appropriate time for publication would occur might be attributed to sensitivity over representing friends and lovers, or, at the very least, sufficient self-awareness not to publish while his most litigious peers were still alive. While plausible, this is hardly consistent with Yeats’s willingness to publicly express his opinions of others. In the end, it seems that Yeats’s desire to delay, if not wholly forbid, publication of the memoir was due neither to prudery nor the desire to preserve the dignity of others. His memoir was marked as ‘not for publication’ because it was unfinished. By the time he came to seal up the first draft in 1921, Yeats had long been concerned with the project of self-making, establishing habits of life-writing that were at once cripplingly introspective and grandly self-conscious. Although, as Gerald Levin argues, the autobiographies ‘were neither written nor planned as a whole’, their publication history presents them as a coherent project, completed over the course of a lifetime.11 Whether intended to be read in this way or not, the sheer extent of Yeats’s autobiographical output acts as a testament to his long-term interest in the genre. According to David Wright, Yeats’s ‘interest in explicit autobiography was strong as early as 1908’.12 His reports of reading the genre can be traced in his letters from as early as 1910, becoming more concentrated when George Moore’s Hail and Farewell was published in 1911. As a writer, Yeats embraced life-writing in multiple forms, reflecting on his own lived experiences at varying degrees of temporal distance and experimenting with forms that best reflected the role of memory. The journal format, for example, allowed Yeats to report his thoughts and experiences with immediacy. In a letter to Florence Farr in March 1909, Yeats describes what he designates ‘the Journal’ as the site of his hidden life-writing, the repository of the ‘amusing parts’ that could not, he felt, be published in his lifetime. ‘The Autobiography’, by contrast, written some twenty-five years after the events described, ‘required not merely an act of memory on Yeats’s part, but an approach to the meaning of the lives it recited, not least his own’.13 Both forms, the daily reporting and the considered retrospective, shared a common goal. Despite the differences in these forms of autobiographical practice, both were intimately tied up with Yeats’s focus on legacy-building. Both in terms of scale and scope, Yeats can be considered a dedicated, if not compulsive, memoirist. It is clear across both his private and published writing that he understood his reflections to have artistic and national significance. When Yeats thought and wrote about himself, it was never solely as an act of self-reflection. Yeats wrote memoir because he was preoccupied with a unique sense of responsibility. How was he to present himself, not merely as a singular individual but also as an agent of Irish history?
Yeats’s commitment to the autobiographical form in the early decades of the twentieth century was consistent with the political and literary zeitgeist. As Nicholas Allen
11 Gerald Levin, ‘The Yeats of the Autobiographies: A Man of Phase 17’, Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 6:3 (1964), 398.
12 David G. Wright, ‘The Elusive Self: Yeats’s Autobiographical Prose’, Canadian Journal of Irish Studies, 4:2 (1978), 42.
13 Donoghue, ‘Introduction’, in Mem, 9.
puts it, ‘Revelation was the Revival’s key mode and autobiography a central form of its aesthetic.’14 There was, it seemed, something uniquely relevant about autobiography as a means of both recording and constructing an age of revolution. More so than poetry and drama, prose autobiography offered the perfect confluence of form and subject, inviting the personal story to be mapped onto the national one. Yeats, like so many others, was intent on creating ‘an autobiographical art which would assert the place of his own tradition in Ireland, as the country moved toward apparent independence’.15 For this generation of Irish writers, the parallels were irresistible. Autobiography invited a narrative arc that moved from subjugated childhood to a rebirth into adult independence. Even more helpfully, it relied on a protagonist with an inherent sense of destiny and selfdetermination. If the Irish Literary Revival can be characterized as a period of identity crises on both personal and national scales, the writer’s life story may well be taken as its anthem. In their readiness to represent their own lives as symbolic of Ireland’s journey to independence, Yeats and his peers demonstrated a remarkable combination of arrogance and vision. As Declan Kiberd observes, ‘no [Irish] generation before or since lived with such conscious national intensity or left such an inspiring (and, in some ways, intimidating) legacy’.16 This ‘intimidating legacy’ can be read across all forms of Irish cultural and artistic expression. Yet it was autobiography that had the unique advantage of allowing an author to present him- or herself as both witness and agent of the period of momentous change. As popular among nationalist autodidacts as members of the Anglo-Irish establishment, autobiography emerged in twentieth-century Ireland in a number of rich and varied forms. Far from being unique, Yeats formed part of a generation engaged in acts of self-making that were always, also, acts of tradition building. Yeats, along with George Moore, Sean O’Casey, and many others, formed a generation of ‘compulsive self-interrogators whose mastery of multi-volume autobiography’ set the standard for autobiography in modern Ireland.17 For Yeats and other AngloIrish writers, the work of self-reflection also meant acknowledging a way of life in decline. As Elizabeth Grubgeld explains, the internal revolutions of identity politics that Anglo-Irish autobiographers engaged in, alongside the public ‘struggle’ of the nation, made ideal subject matter. These writers represented themselves as torn between two conflicting influences, the past, often seen through the lens of ‘family histories’, and the present, ‘their place within the Irish nation’. As Grubgeld observes:
Anglo-Irish autobiographers draw from their family histories a sense of continuity and dissolution, influence and irrelevance, identity and nothingness. They rail against their own class, and they defend its attitudes and actions; they assert their
14 Nicholas Allen, ‘Autobiography and the Irish Revival’, in Liam Harte, A History of Irish Autobiography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 149.
15 Life 1, 492.
16 Declan Kiberd, Inventing Ireland: The Literature of the Modern Nation (London: Vintage, 1996), 3.
17 Liam Harte, ‘Introduction’, in A History of Irish Autobiography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 2.
