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W.B.

Yeats and World Literature


I hear the Shadowy Horses, their long manes a-shake,
Their hoofs heavy with tumult, their eyes glimmering white;
The North unfolds above them clinging, creeping night,
The East her hidden joy before the morning break,
The West weeps in pale dew and sighs passing away,
The South is pouring down roses of crimson fire.
W.B. Yeats and World Literature
The Subject of Poetry

Barry Sheils
University College Dublin, Republic of Ireland
© Barry Sheils 2015

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
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be identified as the author of this work.

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The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:

Sheils, Barry.
W.B. Yeats and world literature: the subject of poetry / by Barry Sheils.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4724-2553-9 (hardcover: alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-4724-2554-6 (ebook)
— ISBN 978-1-4724-2555-3 (epub)
1. Yeats, W. B. (William Butler), 1865–1939—Criticism and interpretation. 2. Yeats,
W. B. (William Butler), 1865–1939—Influence. I. Title.
PR5907.S36 2015
821’.8—dc23
2015005738

ISBN: 9781472425539 (hbk)


ISBN: 9781472425546 (ebk – PDF)
ISBN: 9781472425553 (ebk – ePUB)

Printed in the United Kingdom by Henry Ling Limited,


at the Dorset Press, Dorchester, DT1 1HD
Contents

Acknowledgments   vii
List of Abbreviations   ix

Introduction   1
1 Yeatsian Transmissions: Between Kiltartan and the Sky   27
2 Folklore and the New World of Text   65
3 ‘Put into English’: The Monoglot Translator and World Literature   101
4 ‘Woman’ and the Poetics of Destitution   131
5 Fanatic Subjectivity in the Modern State   161

Bibliography   183
Index   193
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Acknowledgments

I would like to acknowledge A.P. Watt at United Agents on behalf of Caitríona


Yeats for granting me permission to reprint copyrighted material from Yeats’s
Uncollected Prose Vol.1. Ed. J.P. Frayne (London: Macmillan, 1970).
A portion of Chapter 2 of this book was published as ‘“Dark Cognition”: W.B.
Yeats, J.G. Herder and the Imperfection of Tradition’ in Irish Studies Review 20.1
(2012): 299–321 (http://www.tandfonline.com), and a revised version of Chapter 5
appeared under the title ‘Poetry in the Modern State: The Example of W.B. Yeats’s
“Late Style” and “New Fanaticism”’ in New Literary History 45.3 (2014): 483–
505 (http://newliteraryhistory.org). I acknowledge The Taylor & Francis Group
and Johns Hopkins University Press respectively for permission to republish this
work. I also thank the Centre for Irish Studies at Charles University, Prague, in
whose publication The Politics of Irish Writing (Ed. K. Jenčová et al., 2010) I
rehearsed my thoughts on ‘Easter 1916’.
Additional acknowledgements go to Ann Donahue at Ashgate for her editorial
expertise, to the academic readers whose reports on my draft manuscript were
knowledgeable and always constructive, and to the artist Rosie O’Gorman of Cow
House Studios in Wexford (http://www.rosieogorman.com) for providing me with
the cover image.
This book evolved from a PhD thesis written under the supervision of Michael
Bell at Warwick University. I would like to thank Michael for his many and
varied insights on the work in its early stages, and for the enduring example his
intellectual conviviality provided. Thomas Docherty and Ed Larrissy read and
commented on my thesis, and the book was finished for the first time while I was
working as a lecturer at Swansea University. There I joined a great community
of students and colleagues, including John Goodby, Richard Robinson and Steve
Vine, in whose spirited conversations I always found encouragement. I have been
extremely fortunate with my families. I have benefitted from the support and
kindness of Gabriel, Rosaline and Helen Sheils, and I owe an incalculable debt to
my partner Julie Walsh whose buoyancy of spirit remains always my major source
of inspiration.
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List of Abbreviations

Au W.B. Yeats, Autobiographies (London: Macmillan 1979).

CL Intelex The Collected Letters of W.B. Yeats. Gen. ed. John Kelly (Oxford:
Oxford University Press Intelex Electronic Edition, 2002), letters
cited by Accession number.

CT 93 W.B. Yeats, The Celtic Twilight: Men and Women, Dhouls and
Faeries (London: Lawrence and Bullen, 1893).

CT 02 W.B. Yeats, The Celtic Twilight (London: Lawrence and Bullen,


1902).

E&I W.B. Yeats, Essays and Introductions (London: Macmillan, 1961).

Ex W.B. Yeats, Explorations (London: Macmillan, 1962).

KT W.B. Yeats, The King’s Threshold: Manuscript Materials. Ed.


Declan Kiely (Ithaca; London: Cornell University Press, 2005).

L The Letters of W.B. Yeats. Ed. Allan Wade (London: Rupert Hart-
Davis, 1954).

M W.B. Yeats, Memoirs: Autobiography – First Draft, Journal. Ed.


Denis Donoghue (London: Macmillan, 1972).

Myth W.B. Yeats, Mythologies (London: Macmillan, 1934).

OBMV W.B. Yeats (ed.), The Oxford Book of Modern Verse 1892–1935
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1936).

P&I W.B. Yeats, Prefaces and Introductions. Ed. William O’Donnell


(London: Macmillan, 1988).

PP Poets to a Poet 1912–1940: Letters from Robert Bridges, Ernest


Rhys, W.B. Yeats, Thomas Sturge Moore, R.C. Trevelyan and Ezra
Pound to Rabindranath Tagore. Ed. Bikash Chakravarty (Calcutta:
Visva Bharati, 1998).

UP1 W.B. Yeats, Uncollected Prose Vol. 1. Ed. J.P. Frayne (London:
Macmillan, 1970).

UP2 W.B. Yeats, Uncollected Prose Vol. 2. Ed. J.P. Frayne (London:
Macmillan, 1975).
x W.B. Yeats and World Literature

V W.B. Yeats, A Vision, 1937 edition (London: Macmillan, 1992).

VP W.B. Yeats, The Variorum Edition of the Poems of W.B. Yeats. Ed. P.
Allt and R.K. Alspach, (New York: Macmillan, 1957).

VPl W.B. Yeats, The Variorum Edition of the Plays of W.B. Yeats. Ed.
R.K. Alspach (London: Macmillan, 1966).

WB The Works of William Blake: Poetic, Symbolic and Critical, Vol. 1.


Ed. Edward John Ellis and William Butler Yeats (New York: AMS
Press, 1973 [1893]).
Introduction

The Venture

In 1900, after publically declaring his support for the anti-British forces in the
Boer War, W.B. Yeats was rumoured to have been deprived of a family subvention
by his loyalist uncle George Pollexfen who was then chief executive of the
family’s shipping and grain-supply business, W.G.T. Pollexfen Company Ltd.1
The company operated internationally, but its headquarters were in Sligo, roughly
locatable between ‘Knocknarea’ and ‘Ben Bulben’, a good walk from ‘The Lake
Isle of Innisfree’, a stone’s throw from ‘Drumcliffe churchyard’, set back from
Rosses Point, and just down the road from Lissadell House: it was a silent and
invisible partner in the production of a famous poetic myth. After all, it was
from his mother’s well-heeled, Pollexfen-funded ‘Sligo girlhood’ that Yeats had
borrowed his longing for the West of Ireland, and from the example of her thrift
when living in exile in London, and her ultimately fatal ‘anxiety about money’,
that he had learned his starkest lesson about modern economy (Au 31). As his
father would never tire of reminding him, the poet was a Pollexfen as well as being
a Yeats.2
Having learned this familiar lesson, Yeats was strategically placed to cope with
disinheritance. By the turn of the century he had cultivated smart, almost lucrative
relations with Maud Gonne’s neo-Fenian associates in Dublin, and with the new
benefactress of his literary theatre, Lady Augusta Gregory. He wrote the following
gumptious half-truth to Gregory in the same centurial year: ‘In a battle, like
Ireland’s which is one of poverty against wealth, one must prove one’s sincerity,
by making oneself unpopular to wealth. One must accept the baptism of the gutter’
(L 339). The irony of such a declaration, issued to a woman whose considerable
material holdings he would go on to borrow, spend and invest for most of the
remainder of his life, did not overshadow its rhetorical brilliance, and Yeats
published it openly a full 35 years later in his autobiographical volume Dramatis
Personae (1935) (Au 410). Here, among various related reminiscences on the
inception of the Irish national theatre against the backdrop of violent uprising
in South Africa, he reflects also on an enterprising suggestion of the novelist
George Moore. ‘[D]riven to frenzy by the Boer War’, Moore had concocted a

1
 Roy Foster, W.B. Yeats: A Life, The Apprentice Mage, Vol. 1 (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1997), 228.
2
 On one occasion, having received money from his son, John Butler Yeats opined:
‘it was like a Yeats to send this money and make no fuss about it. It was like a Pollexfen
to have it to send.’ J.B. Yeats, Letters to his son W.B. Yeats and Others (New York: Dutton,
1946), 229. Quoted in William H. Murphy, Family Secrets: William Butler Yeats and His
Relatives (New York: Syracuse University Press, 1995), 6.
2 W.B. Yeats and World Literature

‘project of lecturing in America [on a pro-Boer and pro-Irish platform] against


an Anglo-American alliance, much talked of at the time’ (Au 431). Yeats had felt
considerable enthusiasm for the venture:

Less because of any harm [Moore] may do the Anglo-American alliance than
because it will help to make [Ireland’s] extremists think about the foundations
of life and letters, which they certainly do not at present. To transmute the anti-
English passion into a passion of hatred against the vulgarity and materialism
whereon England has founded her worst life and the whole life that she sends
us, has always been a dream of mine, and Moore may help in that transmutation.
(Au 431–2, my emphasis)

Though doubting the efficacy of performing the sometimes-extreme politics


of Ireland on the stage of the New World, Yeats nonetheless appreciated, and
continued to appreciate in his memoir, the act of ‘transmutation’ implied by
Moore’s proposal. Through America the narrow constitutional fight between
Ireland and England could become generalised as the worldwide fight between
spirituality and vulgar materialism.
This is one of the best-rehearsed of Yeats’s Manichean formulations of global
modernity: spirituality versus materialism. But the role of American transmutation
within this deceptively binary formulation is worthy of further exploration. America
represents the transmutation of constitutional politics into a general spiritual
philosophy, but also, I suggest, of constitutional politics into global economics.
Yeats doesn’t declare it outright, but what was most exciting about America was
its capacity to launder money: New World capital dissociated from the polluted
symbols of the British Empire could be mobilised against English materialism;
you could have American money and still be unpopular to English wealth. The
poet’s practice bears this theoretical irony out. Not exempt from the necessity of
making a living, Yeats had long been writing Irish stories for the American Press;
and from 1902 the New York lawyer and collector John Quinn would become the
most reliable patron of the poet’s Irish theatre and both the artisanal concerns with
which the poet was associated: the Dun Emer and the Cuala Industries. Quinn also
helped to organise – in emulation of Moore’s idea – lucrative US lecture tours.
Indeed, in his first American tour of duty in 1903–04, Yeats cleared a considerable
profit of £646 speaking on Irish themes.3 His story of squaring his account with
Lady Gregory in the wake of this success is ostentatiously old-fashioned but also
brimful of pride. It shocked him that he owed her ‘Five hundred’, but the matter
was simply resolved: he ‘wrote to an American lecture agent, earned the money
and paid it back’ (Au 408). Here we have a poet baptised by the Irish gutter but
rarely lacking in cash assets, whose enterprise creates capital that, in the end, far
exceeds a family subvention from uncle George.
An apocryphal story, as told by Samuel Beckett among others, concerns the
award of the Nobel Prize to Yeats in 1923. Having called with the good news and

3
 Murphy, Family Secrets, 120.
Introduction 3

started on his congratulatory oration, the Lord Mayor of Dublin is impatiently


interrupted by the poet: ‘yes, yes, just tell me what it’s worth! How much will
I get?’4 The reader might expect that one embellish such an anecdote with a
satisfied remark or two about the discrepancy between high art ideals and financial
opportunism. But our business here is not to audit the poet’s personal accounts,
which, however impeachable, can only in the end provoke the banal accusation
of hypocrisy. We can say with some certainty that for all his high talk of heredity
– familial, aristocratic, and national – Yeats’s cultural possessions were largely
borrowed, and that the resourcefulness of his lateral relationships proved just
as important to his work as his inheritances. But rather than provide yet another
empirical account of how the author came by a room – or in this case a Norman
tower – of his own to write in, this study will consider how a greater appreciation
for global economic relations in the early twentieth century necessarily opens the
biography of a single poet to the geopolitical dilemmas of modern poetry.
Already we can see how extrinsic relations to South Africa and America
influenced Yeats’s ostensibly nationalistic expression; neither is it inconsequential
that the poet’s Nobel windfall was made possible by a close alignment of
international competition and literary value. But money was not simply the
abstraction of social relations that allowed Yeats the personal freedom to write
poetry; it also, more broadly, determined the language and form of his writing.
For example, the poet was accused (once more in 1900) on the pages of the Sinn
Féin organ the United Irishman of wanting Ireland to play the ‘missionary nation
[…] for spirituality, for ideality, for simplicity in the English-speaking world’.5
Indeed he did. But what those arguing for a more self-sufficient, Irish-language
nationalism deemed an egregious betrayal was equally a form of literary advantage
in a world economy where the missionary nation – Ireland – could transmute base
English materialism into poetry. Again, this cultural profiteering is backlit by New
World ontology: Yeats was trading in a language liberated from its proper home.
Much like Marx’s commodity, defined by its vagrancy and deceptive autonomy,
the poet’s characteristically Irish brand of English literature flourished in a market
of translation and exchange. He was well paid for speaking of the spirituality of
the Irish language, but only ever in English.
This book is the first study of Yeats’s poetic modernity to scrutinise within his
writing the relation between the order of poetic expression and the effects of money,
trade and globalisation. It will build on a spate of recent works connecting a world
systems theory of economic and social modernity to the institutionalisation of
modern, specifically modernist, literature, in order to consider how the international
circulation of literary objects and values recursively impacts on forms of literary
production. It will be shown that, though expressive of cultural nationalism,
Yeats’s work discovers its modernity through accepting and exploiting its worldly
relations. In W.H. Auden’s famous elegy ‘In Memory of W.B. Yeats’ the Irish

4
 Deirdre Bair, Samuel Beckett: A Biography (New York: Summit, 1990), 610.
5
 Foster, The Apprentice Mage, 220.
4 W.B. Yeats and World Literature

poet’s reputation lies at the mercy of the ‘importance and noise of tomorrow /
when the brokers are moving like beasts on the floor of the Bourse’.6 Granted,
Auden was writing in a period of economic depression and World War, and before
Yeats became one of the most written about and institutionally embedded poets
of the twentieth century. But, even so, his critical ambivalence sets the industry
standard for ‘Yeats Studies’: Auden’s Yeats is both a comforting remnant of the
poetic per se, in an age when ‘true’ poetry has begun to seem impossible, and a
complacent ‘beautiful soul’, living and dying in shameful ignorance of modern
economic and political realities. This accounts for the compelling mix of revenge
and redemption detectable throughout Auden’s poem. Most specifically, Auden
insinuates that ‘silly’ dead Yeats was mistaken in trying to exempt his ‘mad Ireland’
and the Irish weather from what all the instruments agreed upon, namely the
gloomy political and economic forecast of 1939. Weather cannot be nationalised,
the poem suggests, nor can nations be exempted from the weather systems of the
world. It is hard to disagree; and yet the question of whether or not Yeats can still
be considered ‘our’ contemporary – implicit in all studies such as this one – seems
to depend on whether the poet was mistaken about air pressure, cold fronts and
other such systematic energies blowing ceaselessly and invisibly across sovereign
borders, or whether he understood them only too well.

Irish Modernism: 1900

We can say of the institutionalisation of literary modernism over the last century that
it has had two minimum conditions: an imaginary space beyond the political space
of the nation through which literature can ‘happen’; and a sense of simultaneity,
usually nominated as a particular year, in which the extant order of the world
is deemed to have fundamentally changed. Along with many other soon-to-be-
modernists, Yeats was both a poet and a mythographer of his own literary moment.
In his 1936 introduction to the Oxford Book of Modern Verse he tells one version
of modernism’s most traditional story as follows: ‘in 1900 everybody got down
off his stilts; henceforth nobody drank absinthe with his black coffee; nobody went
mad; nobody committed suicide; nobody joined the Catholic Church; or if they
did I have forgotten.’ ‘Victorianism had been defeated’ he concludes, and hard
on the heels of that defeat came the redundancy of Victorianism’s ostentatious
antagonist, literary decadence, whose spiritual heartland had always been Paris
(OBMV xi). In the second volume of his autobiographies, The Trembling of the
Veil (1922), Yeats announces this same epochal shift away from literary Paris with
a mix of regret and terror: ‘I say, “After Stéphane Mallarmé, after Paul Verlaine,
after Gustave Moreau, after Paul Puvis de Chavannes, after our own verse, after all
our subtle colour and nervous rhythm, after the faint mixed tints of Conder, what
more is possible? After us the Savage God”’ (Au 348). Considering the prestige

6
 W.H. Auden, ‘In Memory of W.B. Yeats’, W.H. Auden: Selected Poems. Ed. Edward
Mendelson (London: Faber and Faber, 1979), 80–82.
Introduction 5

of Parisian modernism in the first decades of the twentieth century, it remains


somewhat paradoxical to state that true modernity had already absconded from the
capital of European art – it was a city that had from Yeats’s perspective ossified
into a monument for La Belle Epoque. Although once a Paris-facing decadent
himself, part of the so-called ‘Tragic Generation’ of writers including Oscar Wilde
and Lionel Johnson, it became imperative to ‘[g]ive up Paris’, as he was to counsel
his friend and collaborator John Millington Synge as early as 1896 (E&I 299).
George Moore too, he noted with some approval, was to come ‘to hate his own
past in [Emile] Zola’ (Au 452). Only with Paris renounced could one confront the
‘savage’ non-European gods of twentieth-century modernity.
This conception of a modernist break with a definitively European, Paris-
centric past is bound to be overdetermined, of course; but among its necessary, if
insufficient conditions we might include the ‘Balkanisation’ of Europe propelled
by small-nation nationalisms such as Ireland’s, the corruption of the centralising
bourgeois narratives of historical progress, the international expansion and
increasing complexity of financial markets, and the representation of a unitary
world space through the development of new technologies such as the phonograph,
the telephone, the cinema and the radio. The cultural theorist Friedrich Kittler
has proposed ‘1900’ as a shorthand for a shifted ‘discourse network’ in which a
romantic-era hermeneutics, conjuring metaphysical origins, national languages
(mother tongues) and the bureaucratic apparatus of the European state, was
replaced by the plurality and ‘histrionics’ of the media age.7 Where once
there was investment in singular meaning – exemplified by the pure breath of
the romantic poet’s sigh – in 1900 there is only the flight from meaning into
media: interference, multiple voices, the manipulation and recording of sound
and nonsense. Paradoxically, a world made smaller by technology, but also by
politics and economics, was also a more fractured world; as Eric Hobsbawm puts
it, a world ‘bound together ever more tightly by the bonds of moving goods and
people, of capital and communications, of material products and ideas’ had at
the same time ‘drifted into division’.8 David Harvey describes a similar paradox
when he points to the modern coincidence of the compressed spatialisation of the
world tied to colonial administration and its ‘insecure temporality’ indexed to the
opening of stock and capital markets and the internationalising of trade after 1850.
This unified but destabilised modern world is exemplified for Harvey by ‘an age in
which the artefacts of the past or from afar began to trade as valued commodities’.
Not only do culturally distinguished objects become internationally available
with increasing speed in the latter half of the nineteenth century, but the traversing
of space this availability entails, from one zone of economic development
to another, doubles as a kind of time travel: thus, the ‘foreign craft market’ is
perfectly consistent with the temporal revival of the craft tradition promoted by

7
 Friedrich A. Kittler, Discourse Networks: 1800/1900. Trans. Michael Metteer with
Chris Cullens (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), 178, passim.
8
 Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Empire: 1875–1914 (London: Abacus, 1994), 13.
6 W.B. Yeats and World Literature

those like William Morris in Britain, and through this spatio-temporal dislocation
the commodity becomes allegorical of modernity itself.9
The imbrication of the antique and the foreign within the modern commodity
form, and the corresponding inscription of place within a globalising economy of
exchange, has hardly been acknowledged in the existing critical literature on Yeats’s
work; and yet, as we shall see, the scene of modern Ireland, which is also, for the
poet, the scene of ancient idealism and the living tradition, is significantly founded
on modes of geographic displacement. As a disciple of Morris’s (though also a
Morris apostate10), a life-long admirer of Japanese prints and Indian spiritualism,
as well as the editorial advisor on his sisters’ artisanal publishing ventures, Yeats
was intimate with international commodification: namely, the processes through
which local crafts were reproduced within international archives and primitive
traditions supplemented by modern technology. We might consider, in particular,
the 1906 Irish Industrial Exhibition in New York where Dun Emer craft goods,
including some of Yeats’s books, were sold as ‘authentic’ products from ‘home’.11
Such occasions replayed the phantasmagorical reproductions of the non-European
world within the market interiors of the great London and Paris Exhibitions of
the 1850s, except by 1906 the site of valorisation was America and the exotic
commodities for exchange ostensibly European.
I shall argue that Yeats’s work is tied to the productions of these modern
world interiors – or globes. Even when professing his unwillingness to endure ‘an
international art, picking stories and symbols where it pleased’, and asserting the
distinction of his cultural reference points within Ireland – replacing Prometheus
with ‘Patrick or Columcille, Oisin or Finn’ – his perspective of Ireland-as-place
is invariably supplemented by Ireland’s relative position in a converging world
space (Au 193–4). In this respect we might augment Dipesh Chakrabarty’s
arresting phrase ‘provincialising Europe’, meant to suggest the possibility of an
‘enlightened’ resistance to European historicism, by proposing that this was a
process already taking place – albeit ironically – within Europe’s own provinces.12
The cultural self-centring of the Irish Revival, whilst a form of stake-holding in
a nineteenth-century Europe of distinct but related national cultures, was also, in
the context of colonialism and expanding global markets in the twentieth-century,
a portent of the fracture of Europe’s classical idealisation. We encounter famous
renderings of this fracture in Yeats’s formulised late lyrics. The ‘twenty centuries
of stony sleep’ in ‘The Second Coming’ (1920) constructs a retrospective myth

9
 David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), 272.
10
 Yeats became frustrated with a brand of socialism he associated with Morris’s
followers (though not with Morris himself) whose economic histories ignored ‘religion’
and the qualities of belief necessary to effect a ‘change of heart’ in society. ‘I did not read
economics, having turned Socialist because of Morris’s lectures and pamphlets, and I think
it unlikely that Morris himself could read economics’ (Au 146).
11
 Murphy, Family Secrets, 131–9.
12
 See Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and
Historical Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 2–23.
Introduction 7

of European temporality only in order to anticipate its falling apart in the age of
Bolshevik revolution and World War (VP 401). ‘Meru’ (1934) is more explicit
still as a farewell to Judeo-Christian linearity and the aesthetic privileges once
guaranteed to a Mediterranean geography: ‘Egypt and Greece, good-bye, and
good-bye, Rome!’ Were things better before under ‘the semblance of peace’ and
through ‘manifold illusion’, the sonnet asks, or is the new globally appointed
‘desolation of reality’ to be preferred (VP 563)? Whether Yeats’s geographical
references extend as in this case to the exotically global Mount Meru and Everest,
or contract to the exotically Irish Croagh Patrick, Ben Bulben and Knocknarea,
it is the alternate broadening and narrowing of perspective that significantly
destabilises the representation of political space. Yeats’s ‘savage god’ marks the
entry of non-classical and ostensibly primitive material into Europe’s imaginary;
but it is also suggestive of new economic relations no longer dressed-up in the
clothes of European ‘civilization’, denoting the meeting-point between Yeats’s
‘rough beast’ – a new god in waiting – and Auden’s ‘beast’-like brokers stalking
‘the floor of the Bourse’. On the one hand, a network of Irish, Asian and African
locales anticipates the ground for an anti-colonial critique; on the other it augurs
capitalist globalisation and the affiliated savagery of twentieth-century race
philosophies.
John Brannigan has argued that, once deprived of place and language, a
globalised Irishness often came to rely on the ‘Great Memory’ of race for its
identity.13 Specifically, the idealised Irish-American narrative systematically
erased the existence of the racialised other – most starkly, the African-American
labourer. Brannigan’s keynote example is a Golden Blush tobacco advertisement,
published in the Irish Independent in the auspicious year of 1922, which depicts
the happy and incorruptibly ‘white’ eventuality of successful ‘Irish’-American
manufacturers producing their valued commodity in Virginia for sale to the Irish
back in Dublin. Yeats’s expression of race ideology has already been extensively
studied, but it is nonetheless worth reminding ourselves of this potential connection
between transatlantic venture, the de-territorialisation of national culture, and
paranoia concerning race degeneration. While the anti-decadent imperative of
scientific eugenics attained its most extreme notoriety through the politics of
European fascism, it emerged also in Yeats’s work as a deferred symptom of the
poet’s longstanding ambivalence concerning a specifically Irish modernity: the
scientific question of life was tied to the poet’s need to make a living, the poetic
qualities of Ireland’s national life and the location of a living tradition. Once more,
1900 provided Yeats with his significant tipping point:

Since about 1900 the better stocks have not been replacing their numbers, while
the stupider and less healthy have been more than replacing theirs. Unless there
is a change in the public mind every rank above the lowest must degenerate, and,
as inferior men push into its gaps, degenerate more and more quickly. (Ex 423)

13
 John Brannigan, Race in Modern Irish Literature and Culture (Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press, 2009), 16–17.
8 W.B. Yeats and World Literature

This is from On the Boiler (1939), Yeats’s much-maligned and self-contradictory


polemic against modern society in which he predicts a coming civil war between
the docile masses and the skilled riders of machines, the new aristocrats on metal
horses. The prediction is based upon the crisis of political sovereignty across
Europe, ominously manifest in the 1930s, but for Yeats already implicit in the
Irish Civil War of 1922–23 and in the savage temperament of modernity underway
since 1900. Most significantly, however, he turns his attention to America,
in particular to the United States army, which had begun organising its troops
according to tests of ‘mother-wit’. His concern is for the Irish immigrants, whose
intelligence has been scoring ‘lowest in the scale’ (426). On the one hand, such
IQ tests only corroborated the eugenicist arguments of the period, with which
Yeats had vocally agreed: namely, that national intelligences, including Ireland’s,
were in decline in the twentieth century on account of bad breeding.14 On the
other, they provoked the poet to reconsider his position: might it be that the
definition of intelligence is at fault? Is it not the case, in fact, that ‘we Irish are
nearer than the English to the Mythic Age’? He tentatively draws out this old
counter-argument by giving the example of Mayo boys and girls ‘looking at a
film or a magazine page for the first time’ who are so mythopoeically alive in their
primitivism they cannot recognise pictorial representations of natural objects (Ex
427n). Since this underdeveloped sense of objectivity had long been held as the
basis of Irish cultural superiority (and of Yeats’s poetic subjectivity), the value of
an international objective standard of intelligence must be called into question.
Yeats intimates this much, but resists writing anything conclusive against his
newer, more savagely objective and eugenicist perspective. Instead he ends this
meditation by quoting the Irish ballet dancer Ninette de Valois who had lived much
of her life in England and would go on to form the first ballet school in Turkey:
‘“The Irish”, she said, “are adaptable immigrants, the bigger and emptier a country
the better it pleases them. When England fills up, they will disappear; they will
lunch in bed instead of merely breakfasting there, they will be scared off by the
Matriculation papers”’ (Ex 428). The romanticised suggestion that Irish life will
not submit to modern standardisation sits uncomfortably alongside the New World
fantasy of an empty space where population control is not the concern that it is
in Europe. The America that measures intellectual degeneration, and through this
philistine culture of measurement perhaps comes to embody such degeneration,
is equally the transcendent, post-European destination for the non-standardisable
Irish migrant – who also doubles as the successful Irish entrepreneur. Such is the
intricacy of twentieth-century modernity. In light of the fact that Yeats gives us

14
 Yeats quotes confidently from texts by two prominent eugenicists of the period,
Lewis M. Terman (The Measurement of Intelligence (New York: Arno Press, 1975 [1916]))
and Raymond Catell (Fight for the National Intelligence (London: P.S. King & Son, 1937)).
This literary relationship between Yeats and the eugenicists has been discussed most fully
by Donald Childs in Modernism and Eugenics: Woolf, Eliot, Yeats, and the Culture of
Degeneration (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
Introduction 9

de Valois’s opinion as a response to the Irish having been situated in the same
‘theatrical’ province of adaptability as the Jews, it seems that the national question
has become continuous with global questions of migrancy, diasporic and racial
identity, Americanisation, and what recent theorists discussing the modern concern
with the mobility and governance of populations have termed biopolitics.15
In line with the common wisdom that Yeats was, and remains by reputation,
the national poet of Ireland, his imaginary retreat from Paris after 1900 may be
read as a withdrawal from international literary space, as well as from more global
philosophical concerns. The critic Pascale Casanova has written in this vein in
The World Republic of Letters, suggesting that Yeats’s oeuvre, dominated by an
assertion of national determination in the face of an imperial power, paved the way
for, rather than itself fulfilled, the accomplishment of international literariness.
In Casanova’s account such literariness can only emerge in accordance with the
privileged space-time of Paris. It follows, then, that Yeats’s achievement, turning
to Irish folklore and helping to establish an Irish theatre, may be deemed a mere
staging post en route to a global James Joyce or Samuel Beckett. Of course, such
historical narratives as the one proposed by Casanova in her section entitled
‘The Irish Paradigm’ are enduringly (and comically) vulnerable to the charge
of overwriting the complexity of the particular case in pursuit of one general
salvific rule.16 However, it is not my intention in this book to defend the living
texture of a particular literature against the inevitable vulgarity of trying to make
literary production globally intelligible; I want rather to point out as of formative
significance how her vision of Paris, as the semi-autonomous international space
wherein national literatures come to compete and ultimately to be recognised as
objects for literary evaluation, remains problematically tethered to a nineteenth-
century model of cosmopolitanism – and cosmopolitan literature – which Yeats
was driven, consciously and unconsciously, to reject.

15
 I refer principally to the work of Michel Foucault who in his Collège de France
lectures discusses the supplementation of the classical territorial conception of sovereignty
with biopolitical sovereignty in the period of modernity. The sovereign power ‘to take life
or let live’ has been gradually replaced with the power ‘to make live and let die’. Michel
Foucault, Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at The Collège de France 1975–1976. Ed.
M. Bertany, F. Ewald and A. Fontana, trans. D. Macey (New York: Picador, 2003), 241.
Giorgio Agamben’s writings on sovereignty and the historicity of ‘life’ are also highly
influential in this field, especially: Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Trans.
Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998); and The Open: Man and
Animal. Trans. Kevin Attel (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004).
16
 See, for example, the following bold claim: ‘As against the commonly held view
that each national particularism, each literary event, each work of literature is reducible to
nothing other than itself, and remains incomparable to any other event in the world, the Irish
case furnishes a paradigm that covers virtually the entire range of literary solutions to the
problem of domination – and these in almost perfectly distilled form.’ Pascale Casanova, The
World Republic of Letters. Trans. M.B. Debevoise (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2007), 320.
10 W.B. Yeats and World Literature

It will seem simply contradictory, however, to suggest that Yeats’s move ‘to
give up’ Paris for Ireland opens the way towards a modern poetics of globalisation,
unless we come to appreciate certain key characteristics of Ireland as Yeats
conceived it. We should begin, then, by acknowledging of Yeats’s Ireland that it
was essentially English-speaking, though haunted by the Irish language; diasporic,
with large immigrant populations in London and the United States; post-colonial
in its geopolitical relations both with the imperial power of Britain and with other
British colonies, especially Egypt and India17; in a perpetual crisis of sovereignty,
ranging in the poet’s lifetime from constitutional dependency on Britain to post-
Independence partition; and increasingly saleable as a racialised commodity in the
New World. Specifically, this book will consider two movements within Yeats’s
ostensibly national poetics. First, there is the paradoxical extent of its international
reference points, including Shakespeare’s England, Goethe’s Germany, classical
Greece and Persia, and beyond the classical European imaginary, New World
America, and South and East Asia. Each of these cultural extroversions underwrites
in some way Yeats’s conception of Ireland, and serves, at least partially, to
release his poetry from a political sphere dominated by the island’s contested
sovereignty and the discourse of ‘de-anglicisation’ most often associated with his
contemporaries Douglas Hyde and D.P. Moran. We shall see how this international
mobility of reference contributes to Yeats’s conception of Irish national life as both
pre-political and extra-territorial. Second, there is the process by which this extra-
territorial openness announces the crisis of global assimilation associated with
accelerated means of cultural exchange and the extended dominion of English-
language literature. The poet’s Mephistophelean vitality, though it appeared to
free him from the territorial and philological claims of old European politics, also
introduced him to the perilous innovations and reductions of the global market.
In the remainder of this introductory chapter I shall set out in more detail
the theoretical co-ordinates which will elucidate this book’s titular terms: world
literature and the subject of poetry. It has been common practice in the contemporary
field of world literature to privilege the study of the European novel and its global
transplantations – to such an extent that there may be said to exist a formative
tension between the existential character attributed to poetic experience, on the
one hand, and the essentially prosaic task of analysing and archiving the mutation
of literary genres across space and time, on the other. Though this tension must
be acknowledged – as per my engagement with Heideggerean poetics in the next
section – it must also be challenged. It will be important to consider the quality
of rapprochement between poetic subjectivity and the procedures of the global
archive, including the transactions of the global market, both as it emerges within
Yeats’s work and remains legible as a more general characteristic of modernist
writing in English.

17
 Yeats’s interest in Egypt was largely mediated through Lady Gregory’s longstanding
commitment to Egyptian nationalism; his interest in India derived from his occult studies,
but also, as we shall see, through personal collaborations with Rabindranath Tagore and
Shri Purohit Swãmi.
Introduction 11

The National Subject of Poetry

In 1946 when the philosopher Martin Heidegger famously re-posed the romantic
poet Friedrich Hölderlin’s question ‘and what are poets for in a destitute time?’
he was sure to draw attention to the lateness of the age. ‘We hardly understand
the question today’, Heidegger averred, ‘how then shall we grasp the answer that
Hölderlin gives?’18 Of course, it is now later still and increasingly, as here, the
poet’s question is being read in English translation; consequently, our chances
of grasping its meaning appear even more remote than before. That said, we can
find in Heidegger’s own troubled, and troubling, estrangement from the poetic
question the basis for organising our thought on the worldliness of modern poetry,
and its corresponding relation to the nation (derived from natio, the past participle
of ‘to be born’).
As already indicated, because current studies of world literary space have
focussed to such a large extent on prose, it can often seem as though poetry, properly
speaking, belongs to a range of distinct pre-modern traditions, confined by place,
language and prosodic convention. Franco Moretti has recently pointed out that
contributing to this conception of poetry as anachronistic in the modern world is an
identification between prose and the age of the European Bourgeoisie – specifically
the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: ‘Prose as analysis first of all; Hegel’s
“unmistakeable definiteness and clear intelligibility”, or Weber’s “clarity”. Prose
as not inspiration – this absurdly unjustified gift from the gods – but work: hard,
tentative never perfect. And prose as rational polemic: Nora’s emotions [in Ibsen’s
A Doll’s House], fortified by thought’.19 The bourgeois subject, characterised by
his sincerity, is obliged to struggle for the straight sentence, both in order to open
himself to fair exchange and to justify his economic fortune by dint of his labour.
At the level of composition, this labour consists in the accumulation of prosaic
detail.
Heidegger allows Hölderlin to respond to his own question concerning the
enduring value of poetry in an expansive age of prose by quoting from the poet’s
1790s elegy ‘Bread and Wine’. What are poets for? Poets reveal the conditions
of our dwelling in the world: ‘a measure ever endures, / Common to all; yet to
each his own is allotted, too, / Each of us goes toward and reaches the place that
he can’.20 Importantly, Heidegger immediately supplements Hölderlin’s standing
insistence that each of us ‘reaches the place that he can’ with a more historically
compromised counter-poetic from the twentieth century, that of Rainer Maria
Rilke. Rilke exemplifies the bind of a poet in a destitute time whose venturing
forth beyond ‘place’ into the modern world entails a paradoxical forgetting of
poetry. Heidegger suggests that Rilke’s encounters with unboundedness – what

18
 Martin Heidegger, ‘What are Poets For?’, Poetry, Language, Thought. Trans.
Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper Collins, 2001), 87–139: 89.
19
 Franco Moretti, The Bourgeois: Between History and Literature (New York;
London: Verso Books, 2013), 181.
20
 Heidegger, ‘What are Poets For?’, 93.
12 W.B. Yeats and World Literature

he calls ‘the open’ – as well as designating his unwitting Americanism and


‘solicitation for trade’, are hostile to the task of ‘thinking our way soberly into
what poetry says, to come to learn what is unspoken: That is the course of the
History of Being’. Whereas in Hölderlin the poet ‘stands firm’, in Rilke there
are only moments ‘in which to make a contrived myth out of the figure of the
poet’.21 Considering the vast extent of critical writing on the poetic figure of ‘W.B.
Yeats’ – always reflecting Yeats’s own self-important exercises in autobiography
– we can suggest that the Irish poet, no less than Rilke, would on this matter have
met with Heidegger’s consternation. Like Rilke, Yeats was a child of Nietzschean
aesthetics whose combination of mythopoeia and biography could only signal in
Heidegger’s terms the triumph of the modern, entrepreneurial will over poetry.22
There are two evaluative points for us to take from Heidegger’s presentation of
modern poetics: one a point of appreciation, the second a query. The first follows
from the fact that Heidegger refuses to simply oppose Hölderlin and Rilke as if
they represented, respectively, an ideal poetry imagined in national terms and a
modern anti-poetry of global exile. This is because, on the one side, poetic dwelling
as an ecstatic worldliness – Hölderlin’s ‘standing firm’ – cannot be reduced to a
poetics of local or national identifications; and on the other, it is precisely the Rilke
commitment to venturing into ‘the open’ which problematically localises the will
and fixates the ‘I’. As Heidegger puts it: ‘what Rilke experiences as the open is
precisely what is closed up, unlightened, which draws on in boundlessness, so that
it is incapable of encountering anything unusual, or indeed anything at all.’23 This
is to say that Rilke’s poetic fault is not that through the mobility of his modernism
he lacks an identity, but that through his ceaseless movement into an idealised
anonymous space he runs the risk of affirming an identitarian politics. According
to Heidegger the poet is not truly at home in the world when his subjective
identity is in this fashion secured, and, consequently, the local nationalist and
the cosmopolitan internationalist remain identifiable aspects of the same modern
destitution: as the modern poet travels into the perilous unknown so he becomes
more himself and thereby alienates himself from true poetry.
Notwithstanding the strictures Heidegger places here on the ventures of poetic
internationalism and the seductions of travel, we can appreciate an important
note of complexity in his refusal to oppose prematurely the question of nation
or locale with that of the world. Insofar as he situates the imperilled question of
poetry between worldliness and the world market of ‘businesses and exchanges’,
and considers as essential the imbrications of poetry and experience, his study is
germane to the concerns of this book.24 His is an attempt to distinguish being at

21
 Heidegger, ‘What are Poets For?’, 93.
22
 Scholars have long recognised Yeats’s formative but imprecise debt to Nietzschean
Lebensphilosophie. See, in particular: Denis Donoghue, Yeats (Glasgow: William Collins
Sons & Co., 1971); and Otto Bohlmann, Yeats and Nietzsche (London: Macmillan, 1982).
23
 Heidegger, ‘What are Poets For?’, 104.
24
 Heidegger, ‘What are Poets For?’, 132.
Introduction 13

home in the world from the metaphysical identification of subject and object which
typifies what he calls in a different essay ‘the age of the world picture’ – an age
defined by the extent and rapidity of its commercial transactions and the prestige
of its technological reproductions.25 Heidegger remains problematically elusive,
however, on the question of whether poetic dwelling is at all recoverable beyond
the mere act of remembering that it has been covered over and forgotten in a
global age. We have no satisfactory answer to the question of how a modern nation
could remain a meaningful site of dwelling in the world – in Hölderlin’s terms, a
measure which ‘ever endures, / common to all’ – without becoming a sovereign
territory dedicated to capital accumulation and technological domination over
nature. It seems to me that this limitation of Heidegger’s critique of modernist
poetics becomes most apparent when he refuses to accept that Rilke’s declared
objection to Americanisation dictates a significant and reflective difference within
modernity’s processes: ‘this Americanism is itself nothing but the concentrated
rebound of the willed nature of modern Europe’, writes Heidegger, suggesting that
Rilke’s critique of the New World can only be self-defeating.26
By seeing in America only the completion of a long tradition of European
metaphysics of identity (which covers over and forgets poetry), Heidegger pays
short shrift to the modernist premise that the world has undergone a radical shift
in the early twentieth century. Of course it would be ludicrous to dispute a basic
continuity between nineteenth- and twentieth-century capitalist modernity, but it
is certainly plausible to suggest that a new world of extra-European factors at
the end of the age of nautical expansionism had come to meaningfully alter the
terms of this modernity’s expression. Might the European subject of bourgeois
(inter-)nationalism, whose prose imperilled poetry, now himself be imperilled in
the twentieth century as the global economy incites a perpetual crisis of national
sovereignty, reflected in globalised warfare, increasingly compressed global
markets and the reflexive conditions of post-colonialism? Indeed, Heidegger’s
insistence on the European metaphysics of subjectivity underlying the advances
of globalisation provides no account of the potential dissolution of the European
Bourgeoisie and reordering of international space figured expressively in the
supplementation of realist fiction and its narratives of expansion and progress
by a modernist aesthetic of compression and combination. Accordingly, his look
backwards to Hölderlin for his poetic ground seems to undersell the potential for
poetry’s modern(ist) re-emergence, albeit in savage costume and volatile temper,
from beneath the conventions of nineteenth-century prose.

25
 ‘The world picture does not change from an earlier medieval to a modern one;
rather, that the world becomes picture at all is what distinguishes the essence of modernity.’
Martin Heidegger, ‘The Age of The World Picture’ (1938), Off the Beaten Track. Ed. and
trans. Julian Young and Kenneth Haynes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002),
57–85: 68.
26
 Heidegger, ‘What are Poets For?’, 111.
14 W.B. Yeats and World Literature

It is my suggestion that Yeats belongs to this moment of poetic re-emergence


and, accordingly, that his Ireland represents not simply a belated iteration of
bourgeois (inter)nationalism, but also its dissolution. In order to consolidate this
argument we shall have to unpick another theoretical co-ordinate, this time the
grounding of European cosmopolitanism in the work of Immanuel Kant.
When Kant proposed the image of a league of nations in his essay ‘Idea for a
Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View’, he summoned the spirit of
the ‘Amphictyonic League’ which was formed in Ancient Greece for the protection
of a religious shrine.27 The sacred space of modernity’s endgame so imagined should
hardly surprise us given Kant’s providential language for historical enlightenment
– on one register enlightenment is always ‘Nature’s’ accomplishment. However,
it should also not escape our attention that the sacred space of the shrine was
re-inscribed by Kant in terms of human political accomplishment. According to
Kant, the space of a modern league of nations will be one which privileges discord
between men and between nations in order to raise man and nation alike from
unsociable self-contentment into the disciplined art of sociability. No consensus
will be derived without ‘labour and trouble’. Kant envisages an international space
in which nations can meet for competition, a neutral space between nations in
which debate can take place and consensus can be won through reason. This is the
basis of both the cosmopolitan and liberal ideals which ensure that ‘[i]n a league
of nations, even the smallest state could expect security and justice’.28 Importantly,
however, this security and justice is premised on the ‘smallest state’ already being
in existence. Probably the reader of this book has already considered how liberal
politics, while it encourages rationalised solutions to political problems and forms
of innovation driven by competition, struggles to accommodate new subjectivities.
But this is worth considering once more with our current discussion in mind,
because Yeats’s Ireland, achieving its most significant independence from Britain
in 1922, was one such ‘new’ subject appealing for international recognition. The
question of how international law goes about recognising new nations – nations
which emerge from secession, partition, post-imperial independence – remains,
to this day, a vexed one. And Kant’s idea that the whole world would have a
space in which to present itself to itself as a league of contestants, each of whom,
whilst differing in size, is effectively equal according to the dignity of reason,
is surely deficient: it turns out that the world is neither whole nor divided into
clearly definable parts. Moreover, once the sacred space where national claims
are supposed to be exchanged and sociably conceded becomes a birthing pool for
unforeseen claims, the false stability of the image of the whole is revealed.
Recalling the nation’s derivation from natio (from the verb ‘to be born’),
tumultuous birth is, appropriately enough, one of Yeats’s most powerful poetic

27
 Immanuel Kant, ‘Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View’,
Kant in History. Ed. and trans. L.W. Beck (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1963),
11–26: 19.
28
 Kant, ‘Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View’, 19.
Introduction 15

tropes: ‘And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, / Slouches towards
Bethlehem to be born?’ (‘The Second Coming’); ‘Being by Calvary’s turbulence
unsatisfied, / The uncontrollable mystery on the bestial floor’ (‘The Magi’ (1914));
‘A terrible beauty is born’ (‘Easter 1916’ (1916)) (VP 318, 401, 390). The violence
of these annunciations has particular resonance as a way of rereading the sacred
space inscribed by Kant as the space of human political accomplishment. The
birthing of ‘post-colonial’ nation states such as Ireland in the twentieth century,
in the wake of one form of empire (Britain, France) and in vague anticipation of
another (USA), announces itself with violent irony: the representation of the self
which is not possessed by the self; or what Homi K. Bhabha, after Jacques Lacan,
calls the division of the subject at the point of its enunciation.29 Yeats astutely
captures this dilemma when he writes of Irish subjectivity that it is caught ‘between
the upper and the nether millstone – between the influence of America and the
influence of England, and which of the two is denationalising us most rapidly
it is hard to say’ (UP1 223).30 The new nation cannot take itself as imperially
whole, since it is bothered by the old nation of which it was once a part, the
possibility of further new nations which are as yet but a part of it, and indeed by
the possibility of new supranational agglomerations: hence, the inevitable spectre
of civil war between the existent and the inexistent which attends and qualifies
all of its political self-assertions.31 In this way, the asymmetry of the pre-modern
sacred space is recalled in the midst of secular, cosmopolitan self-assertion, and
the space of dignified contest with the other becomes, against itself, the potential
scene of self-sacrifice once more.
Although Yeats scholars have traditionally preferred to characterise the poet’s
nationalism as the source for either his mythologising of the pre-modern or bad
propagandist poetry, we shall read it here in a post-Kantian vein as consonant
with the theoretical conundrum of how life is to be governed – given form – in a
world space. This approach flies in the face somewhat of Yeats’s own querulous
statement that the nation is not theoretical, but it offers the only convincing account
of his vacillation between deeming Ireland and Irish life the poetic salvation of
modern Europe, and dismissing nationalism altogether as un-poetic or ephemeral.
In fact, despite what many of his critics say, I maintain that Yeats is a theoretical
poet whose work demands an equally theoretical engagement.32 Bhabha’s seminal

29
 Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994), 36.
30
 W.B. Yeats, ‘The Irish Intellectual Capital: Where is it?’ (UP1 222–5).
31
 ‘In place of the polarity of a pre-figurative self-generating nation “in-itself”
and extrinsic other nations, the performative [nation] introduces a temporality of the in-
between.’ Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 212.
32
 Roy Foster points to the instruction Yeats gives in his 1895 essay ‘Irish National
Literature II: Contemporary Prose Writers’ that novelists should ‘cast off a habit of mind
which would compress a complex, indecipherable nation into the mould of a theory […]’
(UP1 370). Interestingly, Foster cuts the quotation there and relegates the conclusion of the
sentence to an endnote: ‘[…] invented by political journalists and forensic historians’. Roy
Foster, Words Alone: Yeats and His Inheritances (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011),
16 W.B. Yeats and World Literature

study The Location of Culture, which theorises the conditions for post-Kantian
and post-colonial nationhood, provides significant precedent for my approach
here, especially its controversial focus upon the liminal cultural space where
the aesthetic, poetic and sensuous aspects of experience intermingle with, and
potentially obscure, our understanding of geopolitical structure.33 We can draw a
useful comparison between this conception of liminal cultural space and readings
of Ireland’s situation in the early twentieth century as ‘paradigmatic’ (Casanova)
or ‘unique’ (Fredric Jameson).34 Existing in the shadow of the imperial centre –
resisting it, exploited by it – but also supplementing it economically, culturally and
linguistically, the ambiguity of Ireland’s global position (in the parlance of world
systems theory, the ‘semi-periphery’) comes to mark, in more general terms, the
intersection of aesthetics and politics: Yeats’s Ireland becomes the space where
the formal question of representation interrupts a binary conception of power
relations.
To develop this question of Ireland, we can turn to David Lloyd’s works
Nationalism and Minor Literature: James Clarence Mangan and the Emergence
of Irish Cultural Nationalism (1987) and Anomalous States: Irish Writing and
the Postcolonial Moment (1993). For Lloyd, nineteenth-century Irish literature
offers an example of a counter-canonical minor literature. In addition to Mangan
he lists Thomas Moore, William Carleton, Samuel Ferguson, Thomas Davis,
John and Michael Banim, Gerald Griffin, and J.J. Callanan, as comprising a
tradition or project of writing in English which reflects the uneven social and
political development of the place ‘Ireland’. Lloyd suggests that a minor literature
such as Ireland’s ‘pushes further the recognition of the disintegration of the
individual subject of the bourgeois state, questioning the principles of originality
and autonomy that underwrite that conception of the subject’.35 According to
Lloyd there are two modernisms: one which writes out of the same condition of
unresolved marginality as minor literature, and another competing modernism of
a reactionary stripe which promises a writer’s ‘total identification with the race at
just the moment when the autonomy of the individual can be perceived to have

44, 184n. The division is significant if only because Foster, a biographer and empirical
historian himself, seems intent on casting Yeats as an avatar of anti-theory. In fact, the
kind of theory the poet comes down against would not pass muster as what we recognise
as ‘theory’ within the university today: indeed, the ‘journalistic’ and the ‘forensic’ are what
modern ‘theory’ – and likewise Yeats – most often subjects to interrogation.
33
 For an engaging interrogation of ‘liminality’ as a discursive tool, and the inherent
dangers of ‘third space’ rhetoric which can seem obscurantist when placed beside more
strictly materialist and politically determined conceptions of space, see the introduction
to Norbert Bugeja, Postcolonial Memoir in the Middle East: Rethinking the Liminal in
Mashriqi Writing (New York: Routledge, 2012), 1–35.
34
 Fredric Jameson, ‘Modernism and Imperialism’, Nationalism, Colonialism and
Literature (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990), 43–68: 60, 67.
35
 Lloyd, Nationalism and Minor Literature, 25.
Introduction 17

been eroded’.36 Yeats is a difficult proposition in this regard: a minor poet and
self-professed ‘brother of a company’ who is also a self-conscious over-reacher.
Accounting for posterity in ‘To Ireland in Coming Times’ (1892), he writes with
self-fulfilling superiority: ‘Nor may I less be counted one / With Davis, Mangan,
Ferguson, / Because, to him who ponders well / My rhymes more than their rhymes
tell’ (VP 137–8). This ‘more’ to tell is troubling if we identify it simply with the
poet’s lateral move to ‘big-house’ aristocratism and self-conferred legitimacy
over and above the social and political affinities which originally influenced his
writing. Certainly, in light of his disinterred ‘major’ Irish tradition of canonical
figures, Dean Swift, Bishop Berkeley and Edmund Burke, which he occasionally
eulogised in racial terms, Yeats might well be thought to have forsaken the politics
of minor literature altogether. However, his surpassing of nineteenth-century
Irishness cannot be attributed solely to reactionary politics, as it is also his means
for recognising how an immanent minority, conceived in oppositional terms within
the constitutional state of the United Kingdom, is transmitted beyond itself into
a broader set of global economic relations. The minor status, which marked out
Ireland’s situation in the nineteenth century, proved dialectically vulnerable over
the course of Yeats’s lifetime, with the fact of independence in particular forcing a
fuller reckoning with the objectifying processes of modern statecraft from which
the national ‘experience’ could not exempt itself. The national exception found
itself becoming the global rule.
In a more recent study, Jahan Ramazani, a critic equally concerned as Lloyd
to discern counter-hegemonic and post-colonial trends within the field of literary
modernism, labels Yeats a ‘bricoleur migrant’ poet on the basis of the poet’s habitual
residence in London and frequent forays into non-European subject matter.37
Admittedly, it would be unwarranted to exempt Yeats’s poetic appropriations of
Japanese and Indian cultures from the charge of Orientalism, a discourse which,
according to Edward Said, concerns itself with building an internally consistent
world picture of the exotic Orient ‘despite or beyond any correspondence or lack
thereof, with a “real” Orient’.38 Yet, Ramazani finds in Yeats’s transnationalism
examples of aesthetic disruption, what he calls ‘counterdiscursive frictions’ and, in
keeping with Said’s own judgement on Yeats, a potentially anti-colonial poetics.39
A rather fabulous paradox develops, then, of a poet who emerged from a minor
tradition of Irish writing but withdrew its potential for emancipatory politics;
and, concurrently, who emerged from a romantic-Orientalist tradition of literary
representation but resisted its colonialist implications. Reflecting on the same
nineteenth-century tradition of literature as that designated ‘minor’ by Lloyd,
Yeats struggles with just these terms of his artistic emergence in the following

36
 Lloyd, Nationalism and Minor Literature, 24.
37
 Jahan Ramazani, Transnational Poetics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2009), 33.
38
 Edward Said, Orientalism (London: Penguin Books, 1998 [1978]), 5.
39
 Ramazani, Transnational Poetics, 11.
18 W.B. Yeats and World Literature

passage: ‘Of course, too, the tradition itself was not all English, but it is impossible
to divide what is new, and therefore Irish, what is old, and therefore Irish, from
all that is foreign, from all that is an accident of imperfect culture, before we have
had some revelation of Irish character, pure enough and varied enough to create a
standard of comparison’ (Ex 235). The contradictions are manifold: what is Irish
is articulated in English, it is new but also old, and in the eventual moment of its
true revelation it will become both ‘pure enough’ and ‘varied enough’ to create
an international standard of comparison – when such standardisation is exactly
what we are led to believe the poet writes to resist. There is an inevitable sense
that Yeats has beguiled himself with his own rhetorical ambition here; but these
aporias, as well as marking a modernist poet’s re-inscription of nineteenth-century
prose, express the force of vacillation between the ancient and narrow ground of
place, bound always to self-fracture, and the modern heterogeneity of the globe,
bound always to abstract itself to the point of indifference. Ultimately, it is this
movement between poles that underlies Yeats’s most grandiose claims about the
importance of Irish national writing to the world.

The Address of World Literature

The plinth of world literary studies today is adorned with two potent quotations,
one from Goethe, the other from Marx and Engels, both consigning something
called ‘national literature’ to a past age.

Nowadays, national literature doesn’t mean much: the age of world literature
is beginning, and everybody should contribute to hasten its advent. (Goethe’s
Conversations with Eckermann, 1827)

National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more


impossible, and from many national and local literatures, a world literature
arises. (The Communist Manifesto, 1848)40

It hardly needs saying that by themselves these pithy and future-minded statements
neither provide a sufficiently differentiated understanding of nationhood nor make
clear the relation between existing national literatures and prospective worldliness.
Clearly it is difficult to make the word ‘world’ mean something in particular –
it is the Joycean master-joke – but the words ‘national’ and ‘local’ are no less
problematic. Can we envisage a world without any national subjects, without at
least the ghost of sociable difference exemplified through the idea of a League of
Nations? If we allow that nations overlap on the same geographic territory with
conflicting narratives and conflicting temporalities – like the United Kingdom and

40
 Both of these statements are quoted at the beginning of Franco Moretti’s seminal
essay, ‘Conjectures on World literature’, New Left Review 1 (Jan. 2000), 54–68: 54. They
can also be found passim in Christopher Prendergast (ed.), Debating World Literature
(London; New York: Verso, 2004).
Introduction 19

Ireland – then how are we to translate them both together onto a worldly level? Do
we further allow, with Benedict Anderson, that national traditions are not defined
solely by geographic enclosures, but are mobile, diasporic and ‘long distance’ in
their imaginative identifications?41 And at what point do we say of any ‘minor’
locale that it has indeed reached the world? If the aim of studying world literature
were simply to denigrate the edifice of the nation or to pose a futile opposition
between the national and the worldly or universal, then we could dismiss the
endeavour as fatally naïve, but it seems to me that world literature returns us to
the old questions of the nation and nationalism from a new angle; it asks us, in
particular, to consider the sovereign paradox between national exceptionalism and
global exemplarity in the modern age.
The paradox employed by Casanova when describing the development of
Ireland’s literary identity through Parisian space as internationally ‘paradigmatic’
reflects also the historical shift described by Moretti concerning the development
and morphology of literary genres across national or cultural borders. According
to Moretti, a first epoch of world literature in which ‘a mosaic of local cultures’
created ‘new forms by divergence’ gives way in the era of late capitalism to a
world literary system ‘unified by the international literary market’ whose ‘main
mechanism of change is convergence’.42 A twentieth-century Ireland whose
declaration of national difference paradoxically revealed its material and
ideational convergence with other nations, frames much of Yeats’s disaffection
in the middle and late parts of his career: a disaffection which nonetheless proved
to be poetically effective. Later on in this book we shall come to consider this
poetics of disaffection as related to the controversial topics of eugenics and
fanaticism. Before that, however, we shall have the opportunity to consider how
the anthologising endeavours of Yeats’s folklore in the 1880s and 1890s anticipate
some of the major disciplinary binds that preoccupy the contemporary student of
global literature.
When the critic David Damrosch proposes the anthology as the contemporary
means of organising diverse literary materials ‘from Akkadian epics to Aztec
incantations’, he is not simply instructing reading strategies in English and
Comparative Literary Studies departments.43 Rather, in much the same way as Yeats

41
 Benedict Anderson’s work Imagined Communities remains the most compelling
and influential argument for the abiding historical power of nationalism. Part of his more
recent work The Spectre of Comparisons: Nationalism, Southeast Asia and the World has
attempted to consider how national communities persevere in the late twentieth-century
predicament of explicitly globalised labour relations and dispersed national population
groups. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, revised edition (London; New York:
Verso, 1991 [1983]); Benedict Anderson, The Spectre of Comparisons: Nationalism,
Southeast Asia and the World (London; New York: Verso, 1998).
42
 Franco Moretti, ‘Evolution, World-Systems, Weltliteratur’, Distant Reading
(London; New York: Verso, 2013), 121–37: 134.
43
 David Damrosch, What is World Literature? (Princeton; Oxford: Princeton
University Press, 2003), 110.
20 W.B. Yeats and World Literature

through his folklore anthologies produced a bricolage in English of Celtic cultures,


so the world literature scholar by re-describing the field of literary representation
resets the terms of cultural comparison, and even resets our perceptual habits
with respect to the temporal and spatial co-ordinates of our experience. This said,
no matter how apparently diverse the material gathered or how widely the net is
cast, the menace of formal convergence is ever-present, manifesting itself as the
demand for anthological representativeness. The necessary fear when approaching
the topic of world literature is of its undertow of assimilation. A unified field
of study meant to describe a reduction in diversity of literary forms due to the
intensities of global economic exchange can only be suspected of perpetuating
the very conditions it describes: and this especially, it must be said, when many of
the major anthologists and methodologists of world literature live and work in the
United States. ‘Goethe’s cultural dream immediately forces a question upon us’,
accepts Moretti: ‘Weltliteratur: world literature, human literature? Or the literature
of imperialism?’44
In this way, the modern world literature anthology revisits a general question
concerning the project of the European Enlightenment – and, inferentially, the
cultural prestige of Paris. Voltaire’s ironic preface to his Philosophical Dictionary
written in 1764 provides a definitive instance of reflection upon the bind of the
modern compendium of ‘world’ materials:

This book does not demand continuous reading; but at whatever place one opens
it, one will find matter for reflection. […] It is only really by enlightened people
that this book can be read; the ordinary man is not made for such knowledge;
philosophy will never be his lot. Those who say that there are truths which
must be hidden from the people, need not be alarmed; the people do not read;
they work six days of the week and on the seventh go to the inn. In a word,
philosophical works are made only for philosophers, and every honest man must
try to be a philosopher, without planning himself on being one.45

Voltaire’s self-parody here is important to recognise because it en-frames the


philosophe’s project of universal knowledge within the problem of transmission:
the book as a container of what is known is also a text that has to be read. ‘Books
govern the world’, he writes elsewhere, and yet ‘how few people read’.46 In one
sense Voltaire is serving a warning to those encyclopaedists, anthologists and
museum curators who would come after him, including proponents of world
literature, amassing general knowledge outside of and across traditional linguistic,
religious and national boundaries. Enlightenment compendia of natural science,
folklore, mythology and modern literature invariably confront not only the

44
 Franco Moretti, ‘Modern European Literature: A Geographical Sketch’, Distant
Reading, 1–43: 39.
45
 Voltaire, Voltaire’s Philosophical Dictionary. Ed. and trans. Herman Woolf
(Sydney: George Allen and Unwin Ltd., 1945), 2.
46
 Voltaire, Voltaire’s Philosophical Dictionary, 25.
Introduction 21

obstinacy of their subject matter – i.e. the limits of objective knowledge – but
also the obstinacy of their readership. The inadequacy of the contract between the
authors and their existing readership is what Voltaire so ingeniously points to when
he addresses (but also, inevitably, doesn’t address) another potential audience of
‘unenlightened’ readers. The irony of this is not entirely self-defeating. His two
claims, that ‘philosophical works are made only for philosophers’ and that the
uneducated populace who ‘work six days of the week, and on the seventh go to
the inn’ have no time to read books, combine as a commonplace truth. And yet,
it would seem that the form of Voltaire’s dictionary is designed to contradict this
‘truth’. Small enough to be carried in the ordinary man’s pocket, it is also a book
which expressly ‘does not demand continuous reading’, thereby freeing the reader
from the constraints of privilege, of having excessive leisure time in which to read,
and potentially challenging the class proprietorship of knowledge. In other words,
the form of Voltaire’s writing contests the hopeless situation he describes: the how
of the dictionary has become more important than the what.
By drawing our attention, however briefly, to the internal organisation of the
dictionary rather than to the general truths it references, Voltaire approaches what
we might call today the recognition of textuality. The modern catalogue form,
dictionary alphabetisation and miniaturisation – concerning not only the scale
of the book, but each entry which condenses vast material into pithy summary
– may well be taken for granted in a culture of general ‘reference’ books or
internet search engines; but once considered as terms of a formal strategy each
of these features becomes explicitly vulnerable to the crimes of disproportion,
false equivalence, anachronism or omission. It would seem that Voltaire’s lesson
is a modal one, and connected to the mischief of his writing voice: namely, that
every universalist endeavour is resisted by its own esoteric textuality. Therefore,
to receive knowledge in the mood of solemnity, as if it were simply addressed
to you and its meaning absolutely clear, is necessarily to err. Indeed, we might
easily agree that Kant’s famous question ‘What is Enlightenment?’ cannot be
answered in separation from the question what or who is enlightened? Is it the
whole space we call ‘the world’, or only a small coterie of cosmopolitan readers
inside it? Perhaps our conclusion would only be hopelessly negative – there is no
such thing as enlightenment – were it not for the insight contained in Voltaire’s
reflective self-parody concerning the genre of the compendium: namely that
comic self-consciousness is the reflective means by which enlightenment crosses
and dissolves borders of class, language or nationality.
There are two specific reasons for pursuing this short commentary on Voltaire’s
dictionary. First, it is clear that much modernist poetry – Yeats’s included –
incorporated encyclopaedic reference, the deliberate distortion of scale and ellipsis
into its aesthetic plan. Second, the realisation that the contemporary study of world
literature inherits Voltaire’s textual predicament means that it must confront the
question of its own generic character. There is little doubt that the positivism of
Moretti’s work, especially in Graphs, Maps, Trees, has been a goad to critics for
whom the singularity of the literary experience and the primacy of close reading is
22 W.B. Yeats and World Literature

the sine qua non of literature departments.47 Not only does his scientific, or quasi-
scientific, sociology apparently contradict the literary sensibility as traditionally
conceived, but its simultaneous suggestion of a grand récit concerning the global
diffusion of literary genres flies in the face of well-established ‘postmodernist’
orthodoxy concerning relativism and multiplicity: Lyotard’s local narratives
were only ever epiphenomenal upon Immanuel Wallerstein’s world systems
theory, Jameson, Damrosch and Moretti seem to suggest! Wallerstein’s study of
the ‘Modern World System’ explicates a singular, though hierarchised modernity
defined by the exploitative relation between core monopolistic powers and a global
periphery (importantly intermediated by the more ambiguous ‘semi-peripheral’
zone).48 As Moretti expresses it: through the development of capitalism ‘the
world becomes one, and unequal: one, because capitalism constrains production
everywhere on the planet; and unequal, because its network of exchanges requires,
and reinforces, a marked unevenness between the three areas [core, periphery,
semi-periphery]’.49
If the sociological confidence of this world picture has affronted some literary
critics, the affiliated anti-hermeneutic of ‘distant reading’ has proved even more
controversial. Moretti frames his suggestion that we ‘focus on units that are much
smaller or much larger than the text: devices, themes, tropes’ with a provocative
vision of studying literary history which ‘will become “second hand”: a patchwork
of other people’s research, without a single direct textual reading’.50 Significantly,
however, when thought about through the lens of modern poetry, such a perspective
can only be the iteration outside of what is already going on inside the text. After
all, much modern poetry is notoriously rebarbative, hostile to the simple-minded
incursions of anything like the ‘single direct reading’, and, simultaneously, both
less and more than itself. Individual poems which reference multiple poetic
traditions and place anachronistic and ‘second-hand’ lines deliberately side-by-
side along with translations and diverse registers of speech and writing achieve a
seminal mobility between their diminished formal autonomy and the grandiosity
of their historical ambition. This is the accomplishment of canonical modernist
works such as T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land or Ezra Pound’s The Cantos, but also,
as we shall see, of Yeats’s poems from The Wind Among the Reeds through to
his Last Poems, all of which explore, or perhaps expose, the textuality of the
reference book. Instead of simply collating (and quantifying) different historical
and geographic forms, and charting formal morphologies, the world literature
anthology – likewise the graphs, tables and stylometric analyses produced by the
Stanford Literary Lab and other such high-tech enterprises – must be revealed

47
 Franco Moretti, Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary History
(London; New York: Verso, 2005).
48
 Immanuel Wallerstein, World-Systems Analysis: An Introduction (Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 2004), 28, 97.
49
 Moretti, ‘Evolution, World-Systems, Weltliteratur’, 126.
50
 Moretti, ‘Conjectures on World literature’, 57.
Introduction 23

in this light as itself a modern form par excellence, and its processes of ‘distant
reading’ considered a paradoxical form of textual development from within. If we
needed evidence that Moretti shares Voltaire’s mischievous acceptance of such a
modern paradox, that global reference might become itself a matter of local style,
we could point to his prefatory note to ‘Conjectures’ in which he admits that the
‘fatal formula [of] distant reading’ was originally meant as a joke: ‘a moment
of relief in a rather relentless argument. But no one seems to have taken it as a
joke, and they were probably right’.51 In other words, hyperbole, the serious joke
of the Enlightenment descended from Voltaire and close to what Yeats termed
comedy’s ‘entire wakefulness’ (E&I 243), remains for us the definitive feature of
contemporary world literature as a modernist project.

Chapter Development

The aim of this book is neither to simply advocate a dogmatic world literature
approach, nor to denigrate its ‘one world’ paradigm of study as fundamentally
dystopian; rather, it is to detect in the discourse and method of ‘world systems
analysis’ a question of modern form which bears upon Yeats’s poetry. The irony
will not be lost on the reader that Yeats’s many claims for Ireland’s cultural
superiority are based on its political and economic underdevelopment: ‘because
Ireland is backward everyone is unique’ (Ex 433). In this sentiment we can detect
a typically romantic gesture back to a feudal or pre-capitalist age, but also a
structural articulation of Ireland’s semi-peripheral status within the conditions
of a globalising modernity: Yeats’s Ireland exists in the aesthetically privileged,
though unstable position in-between the core economic powers of Europe and the
exploited peripheries of the world. My purpose here is to advance our understanding
of Yeats’s extensive cultural relations within this unified global space, but also,
significantly, to deploy Yeats as a case study for interrogating the broader question
of how poetic language and experience can survive globalisation. Across the five
chapters of this book, we shall encounter various responses to this question.
Chapter 1, ‘Yeatsian Transmissions: Between Kiltartan and the Sky’, begins
with a general consideration of the importance of global circulation to Yeats’s
poetics. By recognising how the poet vacillates continually between the sub-
national locale and international space we arrive at an appreciation of the worldly
conditions for his work. If through this movement we can discern the formal
dilemma of a global poetics, we can also witness in it the basis of Yeats’s claim
for Ireland’s national vitality: a nation that is at once less and more than itself.
Supplementing the familiar conception of Ireland’s national space as engaged in
a definitive constitutional dispute with the UK, I will look at what I term, after
Moretti, the ‘wave relations’ of globalisation which overdetermine the national
scene and mark it as exemplary of the semi-peripheral situation. There are, I
suggest, three amplitudes to the global wave as registered in Yeats’s work: the

51
 Franco Moretti, Foreward to ‘Conjectures on World Literature’, Distant Reading, 44.
24 W.B. Yeats and World Literature

Celt, the small European nation and the New World commodity. The ways in
which each of these different amplitudes overlap and interfere with each other
structures the development of the subsequent two chapters. In Chapter 2, ‘Folklore
and the New World of Text’, I demonstrate how the somewhat predictable and
much-remarked-upon Celticist and Irish Nationalist resonance in Yeats’s early
folklore can only be fully understood when put into correspondence with two more
distant cultural co-ordinates: namely an eighteenth-century European heritage of
folk representation, and a New World aesthetic of synthesis and combination. We
shall see how, with an emphasis on translation and retelling, the folklore anthology
contains the germ of the world literature archive. The anxiety of translating (or not
translating) from the ‘original’ Irish language into a characteristic Irish version
of English is discernible across Yeats’s folkloric works. In the following chapter,
‘“Put into English”: The Monoglot Translator and World Literature’, translation
remains a central concern as we go on to consider Yeats’s stake-holding in English
as the world language, and as the language of the new global market. Via his
engagements with Tagore, Shri Purohit Swãmi, and Ernest Fenollosa’s Japanese
Noh Manuscripts, Yeats constructs an aesthetic of world folk, claiming both the
privileges of a common or vernacular English and the perspective of cultural and
linguistic displacement.
The first three chapters of this book will have emphasised the productivity of
Yeats’s cultural transmissions within a global space increasingly defined by the
dominance of the English language. There is a certain delight in observing how
these worldly freedoms operate within and across his ostensibly national poetics.
The final two chapters, however, will confront more fully the crises of poetic and
political sovereignty which accompany these freedoms, and which we most often
associate with the age of late capitalism. According to an accelerating economic
process by which the world is increasingly seen to combine as one exilic and
unaccountable state, the exceptional zone of interference between the political
and economic centre and the periphery becomes exemplary. When ‘the centre
cannot hold’ – when the political binaries of colonialism are obscured by market
relations – the whole world becomes, aesthetically speaking, semi-peripheral. In
this fashion, an indeterminate zone such as Ireland – Ireland’s ‘unique’ situation
in the early twentieth century (Jameson) – can only announce the further historical
crisis of sovereign indeterminacy.
I pursue this logic in Chapter 4, ‘“Woman” and the Poetics of Destitution’.
My argument here is that there is a significant overlap in Yeats’s work between
questions of Ireland’s constitutional independence, the conceptual field of ‘life’
as associated with the history of European aesthetics, and the fate of the nation
in the de-territorialised world economy. If ‘man or animal’ is the open question
which accompanies the notional ‘citizen’ of globalisation, whose rights can never
be assured and whose state is a state of perennial indecision, then for Yeats it is a
conundrum best approached through the figure of woman. After a consideration
of Yeats’s gendered metaphysics, I offer new readings of ‘Easter 1916’, and the
Introduction 25

‘Crazy Jane’ poems to explore the fate of poetic vitality – gendered as feminine –
in ‘a destitute time’.
In the final chapter, ‘Fanatic Subjectivity in the Modern State’, I challenge the
view that Yeats’s famed and troubling post-Irish Independence and post-partition
distemper is simply attributable to his romantic personality, ‘traditionalism’, and
hatred of modernity. Rather, by considering the historical cunning of his rhetorical
strategies of complaint, I pay attention to the ways in which his poetry uncovers its
relation to modern political and economic formations. Yeats’s introduction of the
term ‘fanaticism’ to his poetic and essayistic vocabularies will help my argument
here, as it describes an important overlap between the forbidding asymmetry of
constitutional violence in the modern world and the anachronistic virtues of poetic
enthusiasm and inspiration. Poetic dwelling turns to protest and forms of self-
obliteration in Yeats’s late work, while birth (natio) is shrouded in old age. The
untimely fate described in this chapter is not, I claim, that of Yeats alone, but that
of modern poetic subjectivity itself.
This page has been left blank intentionally
Chapter 1
Yeatsian Transmissions:
Between Kiltartan and the Sky

I know that I shall meet my fate,


Somewhere among the clouds above;
Those that I fight I do not hate,
Those that I guard I do not love;
My country is Kiltartan Cross,
My countrymen Kiltartan’s poor,
No likely end could bring them loss
Or leave them happier than before.
Nor law, nor duty bade me fight,
Nor public men, nor cheering crowds,
A lonely impulse of delight
Drove to this tumult in the clouds;
I balanced all, brought all to mind,
The years to come seemed waste of breath,
A waste of breath the years behind
In balance with this life, this death.
(‘An Irish Airman Foresees His Death’)

An ‘Irish’ Airman

Although its title suggests a poem about the fortitude of any Irish airman, the
extensive critical heritage informs us that ‘An Irish Airman Foresees His Death’
(1918) is also about the fortitude of one Irish airman in particular, namely Major
Robert Gregory, the son of Yeats’s patron and long-time artistic collaborator Lady
Gregory. We know that Yeats wrote four elegies for Gregory, who was shot down
over Italy in January 1918 while flying scouting missions for the Royal British
Flying Corps, and that this poem is the only one of these four composed as if
from Gregory’s perspective – the only self-elegy, in other words.1 By comparing
the sentiment of the other three poems – ‘Shepherd and Goatherd’ (1919), ‘In
Memory of Major Robert Gregory’ (1918) and ‘Reprisals’ (pub. 1948) – critics
have long noticed how the passing of Gregory, the lonely Irish Airman, came to
represent for Yeats a more general cultural loss. There were certain of Gregory’s
personal characteristics, including his art and his martial skill, which through

1
 For a biographical account of Yeats’s writings on the occasion of Robert Gregory’s
death, see Roy Foster, W.B. Yeats: A life. Volume Two: The Arch-Poet (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2003), 117–20.
28 W.B. Yeats and World Literature

the course of these poems became transfigured into impersonal and immemorial
virtues. In ‘Reprisals’, Gregory’s military honour is juxtaposed to ‘the half-drunk
or whole mad soldiery’ running amok in Ireland in the wake of the First World
War. In ‘Shepherd and Goatherd’, he is remembered playing his pipes among the
hills such that when he played them ‘it was their loneliness, / The exultation of
their stone, that cried / Under his fingers’. And when mentioned as the final of
those friends who cannot sup with Yeats and his wife at Thoor Ballylee in ‘In
Memory of Major Robert Gregory’, the dead man is invoked as ‘Soldier, scholar,
horseman, he, / As ’twere all life’s epitome’ (VP 791, 339, 327). Significantly,
in ‘An Irish Airman Foresees His Death’ the dead, lamented man is still alive,
which is important because it allows us to see Gregory in his most generalised
form as a Nietzschean hero confronting death with equanimity. Having ‘balanced
all’ from such a height, and at such a heightened moment, that of his impending
death, the Airman is shown to combine the artistic ideal of a full life lived – cast
retrospectively – and life as it is being lived. Thus we have a prospective elegy.
So far, so familiar, perhaps, since this only confirms Yeats’s reputation for high
artistic latitudes and for looking askance at the chaos below. Does it matter, in this
context, that Major Robert Gregory was flying a Sopwith Camel, a single-seat
fighter plane equipped with twin machine guns; or that the pilot’s ‘lonely impulse
of delight’, reminiscent of the Paterian flame of fin de siècle aestheticism, may
have been lit just as he was about to strafe those he consolingly does not hate?
Conventional critical wisdom tells us that it does not matter: Yeats was always
looking for the symbol inside the thing rather than the thing itself, we are told, so
the technical features of the aircraft pale to insignificance beside the poetic deed
of being airborne and about to die.2 This may be so, but it is hardly pedantic to
point out that this scene of aesthetic bliss takes place aboard a modern, military
machine, and that its range of transcendence relies upon the real technology of
flight. If, indeed, this is the war poem Yeats said he would never write, it is neither
rutting à terre together with Wilfred Owen’s or Isaac Rosenberg’s infantry rats,
nor sounding with Filippo Tommaso Marinetti the fanfare for destruction and the
sublimity of the machine.3 Whilst Yeats’s airman exemplifies tragic joy over and
above the ‘passive suffering’ of those who laboured in the trenches, the vehicle
of his deportment still lacks the bombast of ‘The Future’.4 Yeats’s plane is less a
machine than a poetic principle.

2
 It was Ezra Pound who most memorably characterised Yeats’s way of seeing the
world: ‘and Uncle William dawdling around Notre Dame / in search of whatever / paused
to admire the symbol / with Notre Dame standing inside it’. Ezra Pound, The Cantos of Ezra
Pound (New York: New Directions, 1993), 548.
3
 Yeats famously rejected the poetry of the Great War in his introduction to the Oxford
Book of Modern Verse on the grounds that ‘passive suffering’ was no fit subject for poetry
(OBMV xxxiv); in 1916 he wrote a brief lyric ‘On Being asked for a War Poem’ which
begins: ‘I think it better in times like these / A poet’s mouth be silent’ (VP 359).
4
 The final clause of the 1909 Futurist Manifesto includes the line: ‘We will sing […]
the sleek flight of planes whose propellers chatter in the wind like banners and seem to
Yeatsian Transmissions 29

Philippe Lacoue Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy have suggested that every
romantic and post-romantic lyric contains the theory of its own origin.5 The modern
lyric understands itself as a fragment, in other words, as a part dissociated from
its whole. Giorgio Agamben reminds us that ‘all modern poems after Mallarmé
are fragments, in that they allude to something (the absolute poem) that can
never be evoked in its integrity, but only rendered present through its negation’.6
This seems particularly apt with respect to ‘An Irish Airman’ whose single-cell
autonomy doubles as a theatre of deprivation signalling, in the negative, a world
of heteronomous attachments and experiences: ‘I do not hate’, ‘I do not love’, ‘No
likely end could bring them loss / Or leave them happier than before’ (VP 328). Its
manner of poetic address – the speaker’s prospective elegy to himself – underlines
this negative reflection since its heroic projection – it will have been thus – is
always in danger of foreclosing the unpredictability of present-tense experience.
How closely matched are sublime heroism and suicidal depression in this case?
Whilst the pilot’s ‘wasted breath’ indicates the heroic acte gratuite forever
unrecognised in an un-heroic world, its stated repetition surely slides towards self-
abjection. This is where the vehicle of the poem becomes more conspicuous than
perhaps Yeats intended it to be, as the plane is not only a convenient metaphor
for aesthetic disinterest soaring above the muddle of the world, but also a closed
chamber designed to isolate the vulnerable subject from inhospitable ‘tumult in
the clouds’. The paradox of aesthetic expression and formal compression finds its
technological imperative in the feat of air travel.
According to Peter Sloterdijk, it is definitive of ‘our’ modernity, which found
its ‘primal scene’ in the First World War, that the habitable world’s ‘primary
givens’ are thematised and manipulated in a process he terms environmental ‘ex-
plication’.7 The gas attacks at Ypres and the establishment of flying squadrons
and bombing raids, for example, ex-plicated the human relation to air. No longer
invisible and benign, a condition of natural being (and breathing) in the world, air,
after the War, became conspicuous as a problem, always potentially poisonous,
and the carrier of untold technologies of destruction. No longer did men fight men,
suggests Sloterdijk, men fought to control their environment; and it was mastery
of the environment which guaranteed victory in war. That Yeats places Gregory,
his breath-conscious exemplar of chivalric valour, in a machine which could only
render such valour obsolete is an historical irony, certainly; but it is further detectable
as a poetic irony insofar as our soldier and elegist lacks both a visible antagonist

cheer like an enthusiastic crowd.’ Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Selected Writings. Ed. R.W.
Flint (London: Secker & Warburg, 1972), 42.
5
 Jean-Luc Nancy and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, The Literary Absolute: The Theory
of Literature in German Romanticism. Trans. P. Bernard and C. Lester (New York: State
University of New York Press, 1988), 12, 44.
6
 Giorgio Agamben, Stanzas: Word and Phantasm in Western Culture. Trans. R.L.
Martinez (Minneapolis; London: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 32.
7
 Peter Sloterdijk, Terror From the Air. Trans. A. Patton and S. Corcoran (Los
Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2009), 9.
30 W.B. Yeats and World Literature

and a receptive audience. The poem’s internal symmetry is countered by the


fundamental asymmetry of its reception. We, the readers, have not been addressed
directly by this Irish Airman; rather, owing only to happenstance it seems, we have
managed to tune ourselves in to his wave length as he is in the midst of addressing
himself. Here Yeats extends the Victorian convention of the dramatic monologue
practiced most influentially by Robert Browning and theorised by John Stuart Mill
in his essay ‘What is poetry?’.8 Significantly, the lyric understood in this way as an
overheard soliloquy isolated from the context of a whole play, places an editorial
demand upon the reader. Self-consciously exiled from the whole drama, which
would allow direct correspondence between addressor and addressee, the ‘lonely’
lyric voice requires from the reader explication of its own absent conditions.
Jahan Ramazani points the way here by reminding us how unusual it is for
a military poem of any stripe to lack an afterlife image: there is no implied
redemption in Yeats’s poem; and unlike Tennyson’s famous Victorian elegy for
the Duke of Wellington, which celebrates the dead man as a soldier who fought
nobly for an official cause, the Irish Airman is left only with the existential thrill
of his own finitude. This is because, says Ramazani, ‘the Fenian Yeats could
hardly look to the continued life of the British Empire as a source for the dead
airman’s redemption’. Formally speaking, the elegy ‘is made to transcend politics,
ironically, for a political reason – the logjam in which Irish nationalism found itself
during World War I’.9 Two things are significant in this explication. The first is that
Gregory’s aesthetic disinterest is allied to his Irishness: his supreme ‘balance’ and
dedication to form is attributable to his being at one remove from the immediate
patriotic attachments of the War. The second is that Gregory’s ‘inbetweenness’,
suspended in transmission, is indicative of Ireland’s political situation at the time:
the suspended Home Rule Bill of 1912, the political crisis precipitated by the 1916
Dublin Rising and incipient War of Independence at the time of Yeats’s writing in
1918. This was a volatile time during which there was no sovereign Irish nation
to address, certainly no unitary Irish audience willing to recognise the sacrifice of
those men who fought for Britain in the War. The Airman’s declared allegiance to
his ‘country’ Kiltartan Cross is especially significant in this context: why else does
the sub-national locale take precedence except to emphasise not only the spatial,
but also temporal disjunction between the finitude of place and the abstraction
of the air in which he finds himself? Ireland – the pilot’s Irishness – can only be
understood in the movement between these two co-ordinates, the sub-national and
the supranational: at one level Ireland is essentially local, immanent, minoritarian
in ethos and always falling short of full national sovereignty; at the other level it is

8
 ‘[I]f we may be excused the seeming affectation of the antithesis, we should say that
eloquence is heard, poetry is overheard. Eloquence supposes an audience; the peculiarity
of poetry appears to us to lie in the poet’s utter unconsciousness of a listener.’ John Stuart
Mill, ‘What is Poetry?’, The Broadview Anthology of Victorian Poetry and Poetic Theory.
Ed. T.J. Collins and V.J. Rudle (Toronto: Broadview Press, 2005), 1212–20: 1216.
9
 Ramazani, Transnational Poetics, 99.
Yeatsian Transmissions 31

a movement of transnational flight and essentially diasporic in nature. Ireland’s is


a state of misrecognition, conceived as either local or exilic and failing forever to
settle on a single temporality. In this respect it was appropriate enough that when
the ‘Irish’ Airman Robert Gregory was shot down over Italy on 23 January 1918 it
was because his own side misrecognised him as the enemy.
To deem the First World War a crisis of Irish national identity might appear
an egregious distortion of perspective – the substitution of a major for a minor
event – were it not that the crisis of sovereignty exemplified by Ireland as a
suspended, not-yet-actualised, state would become the most general principle of
Yeatsian historiography. Nineteen eighteen, the year of Gregory’s death, did not
simply provide the material conditions for a specific crisis but also the discursive
conditions which enabled the poet to reflect on it:

They [Yeats’s occult ‘communicators’] drew their first symbolic map of that
history, and marked upon it the principal years of crisis in July 1918, some days
before the publication of the first German edition of Spengler’s Decline of the
West, which, though founded upon a different philosophy, gives the same years
of crisis and draws the same general conclusions. (V 11)

This is from ‘An Introduction to A Vision’, appended to its primary text in 1928.
As is well known, A Vision (1925, 1937) formalised Yeats’s vacillation ‘Between
extremities’ (VP 499) – between Kiltartan and the sky – according to the phases of
the moon. The occult correspondences have been productively explored elsewhere
and will not detain us here except as a footnote to Yeats’s encyclopaedic modernism
(more of which below); indeed, the symmetries of ‘The Great Wheel’ in A Vision
and the way the Eurocentric history of literary personalities maps onto the Great
Platonic Year of world history is less interesting in its detail than in the fact of its
dynamism – its perning gyres turning between the full and the nought. What the
equipoise of ‘An Irish Airman’ disguises, and what its prominent technological
metaphor of the aeroplane implies, is rendered schematically explicit in A Vision,
namely the dissonance between local and global scales. Yeats declares with Oswald
Spengler in 1928 a consciousness, belonging to 1918, that there is no fixed state of
sovereignty under the conditions of modernity.10
At the full, ‘under the frenzy of the fourteenth moon’, as Yeats’s persona
Michael Robartes informs us in ‘The Phases of the Moon’ (1919), ‘The soul begins
to tremble into stillness / To die into the labyrinth of itself’ (V 60). This is the
plane of pure subjectivity which cannot, however, bear its own local intensities.
Robartes again:

10
 Spengler’s is an extravagant exploration of modern decadence – the impossibility
of being inside a national culture – which results from the hypertrophied world-historical
complexion of the western mind. Oswald Spengler, The Decline of The West. Trans. Charles
Francis Atkinson (New York; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991).
32 W.B. Yeats and World Literature

When the moon’s full those creatures of the full


Are met on the waste hills by countrymen
Who shudder and hurry by: body and soul
Estranged amid the strangeness of themselves. (V 62)

The inference is one of civil war: countrymen estranged from one another at the
very moment of their greatest definition. Again, the material conditions play a part
in this conception, and Yeats’s adverting to the fact that the first main section of
A Vision, ‘The Great Wheel’, was finished at Thoor Ballylee in 1922 in ‘a time of
Civil War’ (V 184) rings out as a note of emphatic corroboration: empirical events
have borne out the book’s meta-historical form! As the subject, by force of will,
becomes most itself, it splits in two: a fissure which propels personality and history
back towards the plane of objectivity and the world. Here, at the other extremity,
things have no will at all: ‘insipid as the dough before it is baked / They change
their bodies at a word’ (V 63). This is the world of dead material abstracted beyond
living use. What is finally missing from this hyperbolic vacillation between fissile
intensity and blank extension is a mediating and containing state of stability – an
official ‘national’ register of space and time. All is movement and transmission
between the painfully compressed and the fatally estranged.
In his poem ‘Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen’ (1921) Yeats expresses the
complexities of this economy with a memorable, and disillusioning, image: ‘We
pieced our thoughts into philosophy, / And planned to bring the world under a rule,
/ Who are but weasels fighting in a hole’ (VP 429). All that was excluded about the
First World War from an ‘An Irish Airman’ is included in this poem which recycles
Yeats’s own aesthetic myths, revealing them in a new, less flattering light. So not
only do the ‘weasels fighting in a hole’ provide a startling image of ignoble and
subterranean skirmishing reminiscent of the trenches, which countermands the
aesthetic imperium of flight, they also signal the disintegration of the Airman’s
remembered locale, Kiltartan Cross: now there is ‘violence upon the roads’.
Empirically, the reference is to the de-mob delirious Black and Tans (‘drunken
soldiery’) who by terrorising the Irish countryside (‘leave the mother, murdered at
her door, / To crawl in her own blood’) inscribe the agony of a World War onto the
landscape of the nation. But historiographically, the same violence is proof of the
perning gyres through which – and according to Blakean contraries – everything
becomes its opposite. Now the apparently benign vacillation between locale and
buoyant exile is turned to reveal its dark other: the scald of intimate experience
and the uncaring plasticity of the world-in-abstract. Not only can there be found
in the poet’s own local country ‘incendiary’ and ‘bigot’, but in the world at large
there are morphological energies which cannot be controlled by the poet’s formal
sense of value. The admissible ecstasy of ‘tumult in the clouds’ has become in this
poem ‘a tumult of images’ let loose by the ‘blind’, rapacious hysteria of public
opinion. The dynamic interpenetration of these different realms is dramatised
by a high formal solitude repeatedly ‘troubled’, ‘marred’ and ‘broken in upon’.
This is suggestive of why, and with good justification, Yeats originally entitled
Yeatsian Transmissions 33

‘Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen’, his poem about the comparable troubles of
poetic subjectivity and Irish national sovereignty, ‘Thoughts Upon the Present
State of the World’ (VP 428).

International Literary Space

Let us consider in more detail the literary complexion of Yeats’s ‘world’. First
of all there is the familiar claim, which Louis MacNeice made most pithily in
1941, that Yeats was rescued from fin de siècle aestheticism whose spiritual home
was Paris by Ireland: ‘Most of the Poets of the 90s lost themselves in the sands.
Yeats escaped because he harnessed the aesthetic doctrine to a force outside itself
which he found in his own country.’11 MacNeice deems it felicitous that Yeats was
able to counteract the abstraction of a decadent art-for-art’s-sake model of poetic
composition with the force of an historical nationalism that was simply unavailable
to his fellow London Rhymers, Lionel Johnson or Arthur Symons. Describing the
precise operation of this force is more difficult than stating it exists, however,
especially when MacNeice wants, paradoxically, to propose Ireland as a counter-
cosmopolitan sign which raises Yeats’s international significance as a poet. While
the marriage of technical excellence to an historical imperative produces an ideal
vision of poetic practice, MacNeice’s appraisal requires a further theorisation of
an autonomous (or semi-autonomous) literary space if it is not to collapse into a
simply deterministic model of a national poetics.
As mentioned in the introduction to this book, Pascale Casanova’s consideration
of the global configurations of literary production – or the production of ‘literature’
– conceives of ‘international literary space’ as an ostensibly autonomous zone
inside which the evolution of literary forms takes place. As the site of the historical
development of literariness this space ostensibly transcends nation-based politics,
but it is nonetheless only ever translated out of national conflicts. Casanova writes
that ‘literary space translates political and national issues into its own terms –
aesthetic, formal, narrative, poetic – and at once affirms and denies them’.12 In
other words, the autonomy, which defined the institution of European and then
world literature, remains tied to national prestige; and the dream of a literary
space beyond politics, according to Casanova’s exposition, is enduringly tied to
the unequal competition of the global economy. Paris plays a central role in this
account: the Greenwich meridian of world literary time, notional centre of the
world literary marketplace from the sixteenth century to at least the middle of
the twentieth century, and la ronde for writers of different nationalities seeking
international recognition by having their work translated into French. Paris grew
into the glamour of the garret, la bohème and the literary avant garde.13

11
 Louis MacNeice, The Poetry of W.B. Yeats (London: Faber and Faber, 1967), 45.
12
 Casanova, The World Republic of Letters, 86.
13
 ‘International literary space was formed in the sixteenth century at the very moment
when literature began to figure as a source of contention in Europe, and has not ceased to
enlarge and extend itself since.’ Casanova, The World Republic of Letters, 11.
34 W.B. Yeats and World Literature

That Yeats’s Paris was not quite the literary Mecca that it would become for
Joyce or Beckett is well acknowledged, and it can be accounted for in Casanova’s
schema by understanding his dependence on national difference. The Dublin-
London axis was paramount to his work and questions of asserting Irish national
prestige dominated his aesthetic. This failure to fully attain the Parisian sphere,
the third space of literary internationalism beyond the oppositional politics of
nationalism, is neatly redeemed, however, once Casanova views the poet as a
place-marker in the ‘paradigmatic’ development of Irish literature overall. Joyce’s
and Beckett’s emancipation from national politics was paradoxically enabled
by Yeats’s strategies of national invention: Yeats created the differential field
which they then transcended. The idea that Joyce’s modernism surpassed but
also completed Yeats’s project of creating a distinctively literary culture is fairly
commonplace in narratives of Anglophone modernism, but it necessarily, and in
my view problematically, downplays the potential for Yeats having anticipated
Joyce in terms of acknowledging the global spaces of literary production.
With this possibility in mind it will be useful to revisit the French qualities
of some of Yeats’s early verse and the operation of Irishness within this trans-
cultural movement. Though first mediated by Arthur Symons, Yeats had a long-
lasting affinity with Francophone symbolism, especially with the plays of Auguste
Villiers de l’Isle-Adam and the poetry of Paul Verlaine. Importantly, this was never
a straightforward identification. Yeats’s aesthetic argument in the ‘Symbolism of
Poetry’ (1901) owes a clear debt to Symons’s path-breaking study The Symbolist
Movement in Literature (1899). Where Symons had championed French
Symbolism for its evasion of ‘the old bondage of exteriority’,14 Yeats celebrated
the poetic symbol in more expansive terms as ‘a casting out of descriptions of
nature for the sake of nature, of the moral law for the sake of the moral law,
a casting out of all anecdotes and of that brooding over scientific opinion that
so often extinguished the central flame in Tennyson’ (E&I 163). Yeats revived
this last line in which he criticises Tennyson from a personal conversation he had
had with Verlaine in Paris in 1894. It was a conversation he recounted in writing
several times, including in an article he wrote for the Savoy in 1896 (UP1 399) and
then again in his autobiography, published in 1922: ‘“Tennyson is too noble, too
anglais; when he should have been broken-hearted, he had many reminiscences”’
(Au 342). Verlaine remained long on the poet’s mind. The doctrinaire line from
Verlaine’s ‘Art Poetique’ – ‘Prends l’eloquence et tord-lui son cou!’ [‘Take rhetoric
and wring its neck’] – comprised for Yeats, along with Walter Pater’s ‘pure gem-
like flame’ and Mallarmé’s dream of short lyrics of ‘pure essences’, a key legend
for the symbolist genius of poetry. But it also came to stand for those he would
come to call ‘the tragic generation’ of the 1890s: those London poets who could
not learn to embrace the vicissitudes of life.
Significantly, in his 1906 essay ‘Discoveries’ Yeats admires Verlaine not for
his poetics of purified speech and symbolist technique, but for the strength of his

14
 Arthur Symons, The Symbolist Movement in Poetry (London: William Heineman,
1899), 9.
Yeatsian Transmissions 35

feeling for life and his principled infidelity: ‘our deceit will give us style, mastery,
that lofty and severe quality Verlaine spoke of’ (E&I 271). This pits Verlaine
against Verlaine, vital inconsistency against technical purity, in a manner that
befits Yeats’s fundamental ambivalence on the question of an international art. In
1936, once more recalling the symbolist movement of the 1890s, he writes:

‘We must purify poetry of all that is not poetry’, and by poetry they meant poetry
as it had been written by Catullus, a great name at the time, by the Jacobean
writers, by Verlaine, by Baudelaire. Poetry was a tradition like religion and
liable to corruption, and it seemed that they could best restore it by writing lyrics
technically perfect, their emotion pitched high, and as Pater offered instead of
moral earnestness life lived as a ‘pure gem-like flame’ all accepted him for
master.

But every light has its shadow, we tumble out of one pickle into another, ‘the
pure gem-like flame’ was an insufficient motive […]

When my generation [the tragic generation] denounced scientific humanitarian


pre-occupation, psychological curiosity, rhetoric, we had not found what ailed
Victorian literature. The Elizabethans had these things, especially rhetoric.
(OBMV xxvi)

Here the vital imperfections of Elizabethan England’s theatrical culture stand


in significant correspondence with late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century
Ireland. As Shakespeare’s England once rebuked Racine’s neo-classical formalism,
so Yeats’s Ireland countered, or at least complicated, the ascendancy of French
symbolism in the fin de siècle. Deliberative ambivalence regarding the legacy
of nineteenth-century French poetry was remarkably consistent in Yeats’s case,
dating back to 1892 – two years prior to the poet’s meeting with Verlaine – when
in an article entitled ‘Hopes and Fears for Irish Literature’ he summarised his
position thus:

The influence of that school which calls itself, in the words of its leader, Verlaine,
a school of the sunset, or by the term which was flung at it, ‘as a reproach, and
caught up as a battle cry’, decadence is now the dominating thing in many lives.
Poetry is an end in itself; it has nothing to do with thought, nothing to do with
life, nothing to do with anything but the music of cadence, and beauty of phrase.
[…] I well remember the irritated silence that fell upon a noted gathering of the
younger English imaginative writers once, when I tried to explain a philosophy
of poetry in which I was profoundly interested, and to show the dependence, as
I conceived it, of all great art and literature upon conviction and upon heroic
life. (UP1 248)

Yeats’s complaint, already formed in 1892, is that the perfect, and perfectly
translatable literary symbol lacks the historical force of life. Predictably enough it
is the enigma of the Irish nation that provides his necessary counter-model.
36 W.B. Yeats and World Literature

We can see, then, that on the one hand Yeats was open to the influence of French
verse. It served as a useful third term beyond the uncomfortable constitutional
dyad of Britain and Ireland and framed an appeal to universal literary values which
surpassed those enshrined by the canon of Victorian poetry: France authorised
Yeats to reject, at various times, both Tennyson and Wordsworth, for example. On
the other hand, however, his work entailed a rejection of French cosmopolitanism
and the supremacy of Paris as a literary space. The counsel he famously gave to
Synge to ‘give up Paris’ was only a version of the advice he had been following
himself for years. The complexity of Yeats’s position was worked out through
his poetic practice and marked most conspicuously in the lyrics which comprise
the collection often regarded as the culmination of his early-period work, The
Wind Among the Reeds (1899). Although he carries the prominent Rose symbol
over from work he had completed in the 1880s and had attributed to the influence
of Blake and the mystic Jakob Boehme, many of the individual poems in this
collection strike a French symbolist note. In ‘He Bids His Beloved Be at Peace’,
for example, the ‘Shadowy Horses’, later ‘The Horses of Disaster’, ‘plunge’
through 12 hexameter lines to find a ‘deep twilight of rest’.15 It is not only the
lineation which marks this lyric out as imitating the style of French decadence
but also its symbolic creatures, the exaggerated resignation of its apostrophe (‘O
vanity of Sleep, Hope, Dream, endless Desire’), its abstract geography (‘The
North’, ‘The East’, ‘The West’, ‘The South’) and its slow tempo depicting the
enervation of desire. We might cite as antecedents here Verlaine’s ‘C’est l’extase
Langoureuse’ [‘It’s languour and ecstasy’] with its vain apostrophe to the absent
spirit of the woods, ‘Ô le frêle et frais murmure!’ [‘Fresh, frail murmur!’], or the
similarly titled ‘La Tristesse, la Langueur’ [‘The sadness, the languor’]. The ‘âme
du loup’ [the ‘soul of the wolf’] which cries inside the poet’s voice in ‘Le Son du
Cor’ [‘A hunting horn’] is another potential correspondence.16 This said, Yeats’s
‘He Bids His Beloved Be at Peace’ is not a French symbolist poem; and it is those
traits which are not French which become most valuable for our discussion of
literary space.
Throughout The Wind Among the Reeds, lyrics composed in hexameters also
make use of specific material from Irish mythology. In this hybridity we might
find a plausible explanation for what is going on in the collection, and in Yeats’s
poetic development more broadly: namely, that the international form of French
symbolism is adapting itself to a national subject matter. Certainly this model
has some descriptive power, suggestive of that ‘combination’ which according to
Casanova ‘constitutes the literary world’, and the ‘compromise’ between ‘foreign

15
 This lyric was originally entitled ‘Michael Robartes bids his Beloved be at Peace’
(VP 154). Many of the lyrics in The Wind Among the Reeds were originally attributed to
named dramatic personae: Robartes, Aengus, Aedh. It is owing to later revised editions of
the collection that we have become used to the anonymous pronoun, ‘He’.
16
 Paul Verlaine, Selected Poems. Trans. Martin Sorrell (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1999), 69, 115, 113.
Yeatsian Transmissions 37

form and local materials’ adverted to by Moretti. Nonetheless this attribution of


form and material to the foreign and the local respectively remains insufficient as an
explanatory model of literary production because of its neglect of the possibility of
native form.17 The important idea of a native form – a form necessarily overwritten
by another form – is typically problematic in Yeats’s case since he is possessed
of two ‘nativities’, the Irish and the English, both of which are reflected in The
Wind Among the Reeds. Let us consider some examples. ‘The Song of Wandering
Aengus’, though it invokes the Irish aisling form, also references the English Tom
O’Bedlam tradition – that the poem was also called ‘Mad Song’ confirms this
(VP 149). Irish place names (‘The host is riding from Knocknarea / And over the
grave of Clooth-na-Bare’) and dramatic personae borrowed from Irish mythology
(Aedh, Aengus) pose formal questions concerning the potential of Irish words to
converge with the music of English rhymes. There is a note telling us to pronounce
‘Mocharabuiee’ ‘as if spelt Mockrabwee’ in order that it rhyme with ‘Dooney’,
though the word ‘Dooney’ is left fully anglicised in the text; were Dooney written
out in Irish it would read Dúnaigh (VP 178–9). In the syntax of the collection there
are possible traces of Irish-language prosody. The use of the present progressive
tense, for example, seems to mimic contemporary translations from Irish poetry:
‘We who still labour by the cromlech on the shore […] / Being weary of the
world’s empires, bow down to you’; ‘But I, being poor, have only my dreams’
(VP 161, 176). In a similar vein much has been written about the measure of
Yeats’s earlier lyric ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’ in which the six-beat line appears
to be extended to seven: ‘I wíll aríse and gó nów, and gó to Innísfrée’ (VP 117).
This extension has been said to accentuate intra-lineal repetitions and assonances
typical of Irish-language prosody, or, at the very least, through the enigmatic
‘now’ of lines 1 and 9, and the ‘there’ of lines 2, 3, and 5, to express the superfluity
of ‘Celtic’ longing.18 Perhaps enough ink has been spent on the difference between
an extra beat, as in the first line just quoted, and an extra syllable count in a line
such as ‘Drópping from the véils of the mórning to whére the crícket síngs’ (15
syllables, but only 6 beats). Certainly the quality of the poem’s excess is irregular,
as Michael Golston’s corroborative count makes clear ‘13-13-14-9 / 13-15-13-9 /
13-13-13-8’. The hexameter at no point becomes a heptameter: instead the poem
interlaces a range of meters, from the Francophile hexameter, to the ‘ghostly voice
of the folk ballad’, to ‘biblical cadence’.19

17
 Moretti accepts that the binary model of ‘compromise’ between foreign form and
local content is only a partial explanation of the development of international literature.
‘For me, it’s more of a triangle: foreign form, local material – and local form’, he writes.
Despite this geometric formulation, it remains unclear in Moretti’s work how local form
is to be defined and represented in general terms except as a trace of what under modern
conditions can no longer be manifest. Moretti, ‘Conjectures on World Literature’, 65.
18
 See Michael North, The Political Aesthetics of Yeats, Eliot, and Pound (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1991), 26.
19
 Michael Golston, Rhythm and Race in Modernist Poetry and Science (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2008), 175–6.
38 W.B. Yeats and World Literature

Despite its Irish-national casting, the English ballad tradition is well


represented in Yeats’s early lyrics, as are the European traditions of the sonnet
if we consider, along with Helen Vendler, that many of Yeats’s 12-line poems,
including ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’ or ‘He Bids His Beloved Be at Peace’,
also qualify as ‘curtal’ sonnets.20 The cumulative effect of this syncretism, well
beyond the importation of French symbolism into Ireland, is a profound but also
self-conscious overdetermination. Biographical, cultural, political and linguistic
meanings exist side by side and on top of one another within individual lyrics, as
well as across the collection as a whole, inevitably interfering with any attempt to
define a specific provenance.
On the subject of whether Yeats adapts to the cadence and ‘nuance’ of
Verlaine’s lyrical forms, then, we can conclude that he does, but only while
situating such formal endeavours within a vast historical echo chamber which
necessarily distorts them and renders their minor perfections incomplete. This is
best exemplified through the 43 pages of notes which Yeats appended to the 1899
volume of The Wind Among the Reeds: notes which refer individual lyrics to the
subjects of Irish mythology, contemporary anthropology, politics and translation.
The glossary or encyclopaedia has become an important part of the Yeatsian
aesthetic, a fruit of his self-conscious cultural eccentricity, in a way that is quite
alien to the lyricism of Verlaine. At the time of publication this aesthetic was not
fully appreciated, with one reviewer, Francis Thompson, accusing ‘the clumsy
expedient of explanatory notes’ of being ‘quite inartistic’.21 But it is this apparent
lack of artistry which points to the vital connection between Yeats’s nineteenth-
century Irish inheritance and the modernist archive of world materials. The truth
is that through these notes he was extending a scholarly practice embedded in
Ireland’s popular antiquarianism, but also using and abusing the same by replacing
direct ‘scientific’ translations from Irish with creative syntheses and international
allusions. The glossary in The Wind Among the Reeds does not refer to a single
tradition as much as showcase the means by which this tradition is preserved and
produced anew for the modern world.
Yeats’s long poem The Wanderings of Oisin (1889) is an instructive precedent
here, in which the poet’s precocious control over a variety of metrical conventions
(tetrameter, pentameter and hexameter), stanza forms, and rhyme schemes, gives
the lie to Oscar Wilde’s contemporary suggestion that it was the work of a naïf.22

20
 ‘Curtal’ sonnets are, according to their conceptual originator Gerard Manley
Hopkins, ‘sonnets with properties resembling the sonnet proper’. For example, a ‘curtal’
sonnet may be divided into stanzas of six and four lines, and thereby resemble the Petrarchan
sonnet’s eight and six. Gerard Manley Hopkins, Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins. Ed.
Robert Bridges (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1918), 6. For an extended discussion
of Yeats’s ‘curtal’ sonnets see Helen Vendler, Our Secret Discipline: Yeats and Lyric Form
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 147–82.
21
 Francis Thompson in the Academy, quoted in Foster, The Apprentice Mage, 217.
22
 Wilde wrote of Yeats that ‘[h]e is very naive and very primitive and speaks of
his giants with the air of a child’. Oscar Wilde, ‘Mr Yeats’s Wanderings of Oisin’, Pall
Yeatsian Transmissions 39

As is clear, the poem conscientiously appropriates its subject matter and narrative
structure from scholarly translations of Irish-language literature, in particular
from ‘The Dialogue of Oisin and Patrick’. Yeats would have been aware of John
O’Daly’s translation of this text in the Transactions of the Ossianic Society (1859).
The Ossianic Society was committed to publishing Irish manuscripts accompanied
by ‘literal translations and notes’ and the resulting journals were appropriately
academic in their tone and apparatus.23 As well as including copious footnotes, and
listing sources, variants and connections to local landmarks, O’Daly’s translation of
‘The Dialogue’ is anguished about its inconsistency when translating place names,
sometimes rendering them in English (‘Galway’), sometimes for the purposes
of rhyme scheme leaving them in Irish: for example, ‘the hounds at Drumlish’
(anglicised) is rhymed with ‘the streams about Sliabh Mis’ (not anglicised).24
This is a habit Yeats adopted for himself (as seen above with ‘Dooney’ and
‘Mocharabuiee’); but whereas for O’Daly it was symptomatic of a ‘rugged and
uneven’ translation struggling with its fidelity to the Irish originals, for Yeats it
became a more straightforwardly aesthetic felicity.25 Yeats’s poem disregards
the extensive notations which were typical of the Ossianic society publications,
and, though retaining some sense of location, writes over with a conspicuously
symbolic geography O’Daly’s scrupulous identification of local landmarks. If, in
this fashion, The Wanderings of Oisin refuses its debt to its source material, then
we might be tempted to say of the notes appended to The Wind Among the Reeds
that they move in the opposite direction, back towards procedures of cultural
authentication and narrow fidelity to Irish originals. However, their combination of
global anthropological reference, occult speculation, and interpretation produces
a glossarial aesthetic in which the Irish-language source materials remain largely
absent. As well as describing occasional material from his own dreams, Yeats
refers generically to ‘the old Gaelic literature’ and summons folkloric hearsay:
‘A woman of Burren in Galway says […]’ (VP 805, 806). But his most detailed
citations come from international works, including John Rhys’s Celtic Heathendom
(1896), James Frazer’s The Golden Bough (1890, 1900) and The Count Goblet
D’Alviella’s Symbols: Their Migration and Universality (1894) (VP 809, 811). We
are invited to ask the question, long asked of the notes to T.S. Eliot’s The Waste
Land (1922): do such notes constitute an intrinsic part of the collection’s aesthetic
totality, or do they remain extraneous and largely incidental? If Yeats’s case is
a less celebrated one than Eliot’s, it is no less enigmatic. As I will argue in the
next chapter, the combination of the scientific impersonality of the archive with
the scandal of personal hoax and invention in The Wind Among the Reeds proves
germane to our understanding of modern literariness.

Mall Gazette, 12 July 1889, reprinted in A Critic in Pall Mall (London: Methuen & Co,
1919), 160.
23
 John O’Daly (ed.), Transactions of the Ossianic Society for the year 1856, Vol. 4
(Dublin: The Ossianic Society, 1859), 1–63, xiii.
24
 O’Daly (ed.), Transactions of the Ossianic Society, 17.
25
 O’Daly (ed.), Transactions of the Ossianic Society, xxxii.
40 W.B. Yeats and World Literature

Wave Relations

MacNeice’s now standard claim that Ireland saved Yeats from ‘the sands’ of
international abstraction runs up against Casanova’s suggestion that it is only
through contact with ‘international literary space’ that national literature can
become ‘literary’ at all. But are these really incompatible truths, or do they perhaps
only point us to a further consideration of the character of literary space which
was changing at the same time as Yeats was learning to occupy it? My evolving
argument that Yeats’s celebrated ‘invention’ of an Irish tradition was underwritten
by processes of geopolitical transference requires further consolidation of how
such ostensibly external processes are represented inside his work. It is true that
from The Wanderings of Oisin (1889) and Cathleen Ni Houlihan (1902) to his
late Byzantium poems (1927, 1929) ‘that’ other world consistently provided Yeats
with his necessary perspective on ‘this’ one. But for me, more significant than
the accomplishment of an aesthetic perspective is how reliably the poet focuses
on and renders conspicuous those means of transmission which allow him his
perceptions from afar.
For example, in the 1915 lyric ‘The Collar-Bone of a Hare’ the poet ventures
to a happy land of free exchange over the water, where he learns ‘that the best
thing is / To change my loves while dancing / And pay but a kiss for a kiss’. There
he imagines finding a collar-bone through which to look back at the ‘old bitter
world’ of absolute fidelity and the perpetual marriage scene (VP 154). This collar-
bone is the Yeatsian telescope through which distance is marked and the proximate
world of fixed (national) commitments is notionally translated into different
and exchangeable forms. Unsurprisingly, in the age of Bell and Edison, we can
uncover a Yeatsian telephone too: the seashell. Of course, there is a significant
difference between what David Trotter calls a ‘telephonic’ literature, where post-
1927 the telephone has become normalised as a ‘protocol of cultivation’, and the
more discursive suggestion of a telephonic imagination. In Trotter’s terms, Yeats’s
is not a telephonic literature for two reasons: one, because telephony is not fully
realised as a vocabulary within Yeats’s work, as it is in D.H. Lawrence’s poem
‘Bare Almond Trees’ for example (‘Do you telephone the roar of the waters over
the earth?’); and two, because in Yeats, the ideationally telephonic inhibits as well
as facilitates communication. Ultimately, Trotter’s study of telephonic literature
concerns the establishment of a new kind of realism where distance communications
cease to be a significant problem of representation.26 My focus is with the prior
modernist preoccupation with telephonic malfunction, not only because it remains
of relevance today, but because it also identifies in telecommunication the very site
and problem of modern dislocation. Friedrich Kittler has written that the primal
sound of modernity is the sound of transmission itself, whether that is the white
noise of the gramophone bespeaking temporal dislocation, or of the telephone

26
 David Trotter, Literature in the First Media Age: Britain Between the Wars
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), 74, 30, 47.
Yeatsian Transmissions 41

bespeaking spatial dislocation. The modernist writer is forced to acknowledge that


his language is thrown into an indefinite space – a space in-between – within which
it can be distorted, interfered with, contracted by speed, its words elongated and
so on. What for Kittler constitutes the histrionics of a ‘1900’ discourse network
also implies a space traversed by wires and waves, which, even as they connect
globally, produce new forms of interference.27 This, I suggest, is a prominent
Yeatsian theme.
In the twin pastorals which open the standard edition of Yeats’s Collected
Poems, the speaker envisages addressing himself to an ‘echo-harbouring’ shell. In
‘The Song of the Happy Shepherd’ (1885) the shell rewords ‘in melodious guile’
the poet’s ‘fretful words’, comforting him in the midst of a new and unfamiliar
world of scientific learning. It is the operation of a mouthpiece and earpiece in
one which translates the speaker’s narcissism into blind communion with his other
self, creating what the poem calls a ‘pearly brotherhood’ (VP 64–7). In ‘The Sad
Shepherd’ (1886) a less optimistic version of telephonic technology is described:
the same comforting shell is sought, but alas, ‘he sang softly nigh the pearly rim; /
But the sad dweller by the sea-ways lone / Changed all he sang to inarticulate
moan / Among her wildering whirls, forgetting him’ (VP 69). Here, white noise
(‘inarticulate moan’) has replaced communication, abandoning the speaker to a
comfortless state of pure transmission and non-recognition.
Over 30 years later Yeats picks up the signal once more when in ‘Meditations
in Time of Civil War’ (1923) the image of the seashell emerges once more:

Yet Homer had not sung


Had he not found it certain beyond dreams
That out of life’s own self-delight had sprung
The abounding glittering jet; though now it seems
As if some marvellous empty sea-shell flung
Out of the obscure dark of the rich streams,
And not a fountain, were the symbol which
Shadows the inherited glory of the rich. (VP 417–18)

The ambivalence dramatised in his early pastorals remains: the shell transmits
Homer’s song but also signals its absence. No longer can traditional life convey
itself in the eternal presence of the ‘abounding glittering jet’ of the fountain, rather
it resonates at a remove from itself in some ‘empty sea-shell’. Described as both
‘marvellous’ and ‘flung / Out of the obscure dark’ the shell conjures the miracle,
but also the anxiety, of the telephone; and, at the same time, according to the
guiding metaphor of this section of the poem, it represents the ‘Ancestral House’
in Ireland, standing at an historical distance from its own inherited tradition.
Yeats’s anachronistic and empty Big House, an emblem of something living
elsewhere in history, is an oversize telephone. This should not surprise us: Yeats’s

27
 Friedrich A. Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. Trans. G. Winthrop-Young
and Michael Wutz (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 45.
42 W.B. Yeats and World Literature

work is a sustained effort at telegraphy. The same fear of being lost in transmission
articulated by his sad shepherd in 1886 obtains also as the key dynamic of A Vision
in which ‘Frustrators’ continually sabotage the poet’s supernatural communication
with his ‘communicators’ (V 12–13). The poet can always be found looking
to pick up reception; whether it is from the top of his tower at Ballylee in ‘A
Prayer for My Daughter’, from the mouths of various Soho mediums, or from the
automatic writing of his wife, George Yeats, his concern is with the intricacies and
technologies of mediumship.
The relationship between the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century
interest in parapsychology and modern distance technologies – especially the
development from phonograph, to telephone, to radio – has been discussed
extensively by Kittler among others, but for present purposes we should not forget
that the underlying and unifying concern is with distance: the distance crossed
and the distance marked by the fluidity of a wave. As Rudolp Lothar put it in The
Talking Machine: A Technical-Aesthetic Essay, written in 1924: ‘Everything flows,
Heraclitus says, and in light of our modern worldview we may add: everything
flows in waves. Whatever happens in the world, whatever we call life or history,
whatever occurs as a natural phenomenon – everything transpires in the shape of
waves.’28 Wave technology, and thinking about the world in corresponding terms
as traversed by waves, allows that what is distant can be conceived as near, but
also that what is near at hand can be opened up to great distances. Every particular
space occupied by ‘one’ is simultaneously populated by the spectres of ‘others’.
Inevitably, there is a geopolitical aspect to this vision of modern, technological
haunting. Moretti articulates a version of this thought in terms apposite to world
literature:

Now, trees and waves are both metaphors – but except for this, they have
absolutely nothing in common. The tree describes the passage from unity to
diversity: one tree, with many branches: from Indo-European to dozens of
different languages. The wave is the opposite: it observes uniformity engulfing
an initial diversity: Hollywood films conquering one market after another
(or English swallowing language after language). Trees need geographical
discontinuity (in order to branch off from each other, languages must first be
separated in space, just like animal species); waves dislike barriers, and thrive
on geographical continuity (from the viewpoint of a wave, the ideal world is
a pond). Trees and branches are what nation-states cling to; waves are what
markets do. And so on.29

As we know, for Moretti, in the era of late capitalism a world literary system unified
by the international literary market has replaced a mosaic of diverging literary
nations; correspondingly, when considering the terms of cultural mediation within

28
 Rudolp Lothar, The Talking Machine: A Technical-Aesthetic Essay (1924). Quoted
in Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, 71.
29
 Moretti, ‘Conjectures on World Literature’, 67.
Yeatsian Transmissions 43

a continuous global space, the wave metaphor has more descriptive purchase than
the metaphor of the tree. His penultimate sentence is characteristically hyperbolic;
after all, allowing that there is a meaningful historical distinction to be made
between nineteenth-century Europe’s international relations and twentieth-century
global market relations, it is still a narrow definition of the nation-state which
would seek to confine its self-identity to a model of geographical discontinuity. It
is the case, however, that modern nation-states for whom the crisis of sovereignty
is the norm – the boundaries of their subjectivity forever in dispute – relate to other
nations in ways altogether more volatile than the face-to-face contest envisaged by
Kant in his essay on cosmopolitanism. The essentially martial code of honour which
determines Kant’s league of nations is inadequate to the telegraphy of national
appropriation and imitation characteristic of the global marketplace, as well as
to the task of tracing those national imaginaries which are split or which remain
hidden and go unrecognised. But post-colonial states hardly ‘cling’ to the trees and
branches metaphor, not least since their roots are so clearly alien to themselves
– and it is in this light that I would like to suggest of Yeats’s metaphorics that
they are less essentially arborescent than they are often represented to be. Indeed,
Moretti’s identification of wave relations in a globalised literary system will prove
helpful for developing the worldly mediations of Yeats’s nationalism in the face of
a more truncated rhetoric regarding a narrowly based Irish tradition.
While he was agitating in Dublin for a return to ‘the old Irish Drama’ – short
plays without scenery performed ‘in barns’ – Yeats was also watching Ibsen and
Bjornson in London and proclaiming that theatre needed to be ‘free’ of traditional
concerns in order that it might be iconoclastic.30 These two facets of Yeats’s interest
– the traditional and the iconoclastic – are less estranged than they might first
appear to be when we consider how the empty stage, which epitomises for Yeats
the old Irish drama, chimes with the experimental naturalism of the Scandinavian
playwrights who had so scandalised the Victorian theatrical tradition. His 1902
play Where There is Nothing exemplifies this strange coincidence of negatives.
Here the subject consists of several ‘nothings’ which significantly overlap. There
is the ontological nothing at the heart of protagonist Paul Ruttledge’s Nietzschean
worldview, introduced into an Irish friary in the form of Sufi dancing, meditation
and the rhetoric of ecstatic nihilism. There is the cosmopolitan nothing of a play
which despite being notionally set in Ireland deals principally with self-delighting
abstractions. The opening scene is a recognisably Wildean one, set up on a ‘lawn
with croquet hoops, garden chairs and tables’ and involving characters possessed
of the empty perfection of those qui n’doptent point de patrie.31 And, finally, there
is the nothing of Ireland itself which beyond a few place names and a tinker’s
vernacular lacks any specific reality. This last absence is partially explained in
Yeats’s dedication to the play, written for Lady Gregory, in which he admits that by

30
 Foster, The Apprentice Mage, 235, 267–8.
31
 W.B. Yeats, Where There is Nothing, Plays For An Irish Theatre, Vol. 1 (London:
A.H. Bullen, 1903), 2.
44 W.B. Yeats and World Literature

going to London to make his living he had begun ‘to forget the true countenance of
country life’. Then he adds the important proviso that the old Irish tales had in the
meantime gained ‘a new strange, half unreal life’.32 Where There is Nothing is a
London-Irish play in other words, but also one which utilises the European literary
space. Ruttledge’s ‘I only know that I want to upset everything about me’ echoes
Rimbaud’s famous claim that the visionary poet is obliged to systematically
derange all of his senses.33 Ruttledge’s follow-up question-and-answer supports
the idea that the nation, translated into literary terms, both is and is not itself:
‘Have you not noticed that it is a complaint many of us have in this country? and
whether it comes from love or hate I don’t know, they are so mixed together here.’34
This ambivalence about identity frames the emergence of a hybrid ‘national’ style;
but now it is a style based on little or no content: the ‘native’ Irish material is
scant. Fundamental to the play’s prevalent sense of emptiness, and Ruttledge’s
corresponding conviction that the horizon of his country’s social and religious
conventions exists only to be transcended, is the metaphor of the road:

I want to go up that path and to walk along the highroad, and so on and on and
on, and to know all kinds of people. Did you ever think that the roads are the
only things that are endless; that one can walk on and on and on, and never be
stopped by a gate or a wall? They are the serpent of eternity. I wonder they have
never been worshipped. What are the stars beside them? They never meet one
another. The roads are the only things that are infinite. They are all endless.35

With the idea that roads coil, yet stretch endlessly, and transit across borders, we
are permitted to take them as a further metaphor for the metaphor of the wave.
By invoking the privilege of turning tramp before an open and endlessly shifting
horizon, Ruttledge alerts us to an important aspect of Yeats’s Irishness: namely
that it is underwritten by flight, empty space and mobility. As a locale with global
reach, Ireland has neither ‘a gate [n]or a wall’.
Going forward in this chapter we shall take seriously as a model of literary
influence and construction the metaphor of the wave traversing one continuous
global space. Of course, it has long been recognised that Yeats was a London poet
every bit as much as he was an Irish poet; indeed the vexed use of the term Anglo-
Irish alerts us to the conventional difficulties of situating the poet’s professed
Irishness. We know that he lived in London for great portions of his life and
that many of his nationalist allegiances, such as the Irish Literary Society, were

32
 W.B. Yeats, Where There is Nothing, n.p.
33
 W.B. Yeats, Where There is Nothing, 11. My reference is to Rimbaud’s famous
letter to Georges Izambard in which he writes: ‘Il s’agit d’arriver à l’inconnu par le
dérèglement de tous les sens’ [‘The point is to arrive at the unknown by the disordering of
all the senses’]. Arthur Rimbaud, Collected Poems. Ed. and trans. Oliver Bernard (London:
Penguin, 1986), 6.
34
 W.B. Yeats, Where There is Nothing, 11.
35
 W.B. Yeats, Where There is Nothing, 22–3.
Yeatsian Transmissions 45

fomented there. However, this recognition of Yeats’s hybridity can only begin
to account for the global structuration of his ‘Irish’ poetics. In order to explore
the ways in which Irish national space is continuous with the modern space of
globalisation in Yeats’s work, and the ways in which the nation is defined by its
distant relations within that space, I propose to identify in one continuous wave
three significant amplitudes: Ireland as defined in relation to the Celtic nations, to
other European small nations, and finally to the economy of the New World.

Celtic Affinities

The most proximate and most obvious distant relation in Yeats’s work is the
archipelagic one between Ireland and the other Celtic nations. As we shall see in
subsequent chapters, the term ‘Celtic’ is an enduringly difficult one, signifying
both an assertion of cultural difference and a discourse of political domination.
In Matthew Arnold’s famous lecture series On the Study of Celtic Literature –
work which Yeats read and explicitly responded to – the distinctive traditionalism
of the ‘Celtic’ countries (Ireland, Scotland and Wales) came to underwrite the
political and economic Acts of Union of 1707 and 1801.36 Arnold’s flattery of
the Celtic character and discernment of the ‘Celtic note’ in many of the great
works of ‘English’ literature, despite the obvious seriousness of its intention, was
a reflection of a historically structured commonplace: the United Kingdom (of
Britain and Ireland) conceived as a sturdy tree with Saxon bole and Celtic branches.
Assumptions concerning the primacy of the English language, the imperial
necessity for economic union, and the Saxon ‘science’ of good government,
predictably underlay his discursive investment in the figure of the Celt.37
The knot of Celticism, however, had been tied well before Arnold proposed
there be a Chair of Celtic Studies at Oxford in the 1870s, and tightly too, as both an
academic discipline and a sentimental phenomenon. In the 1760s, in the wake of
the suppression of the Jacobite Risings and the punitive Highland clearances, the
Scottish poet James Macpherson published his Ossian poems. Though ostensibly
a demonstration of Scotland’s ancient culture, these poems were framed from
the outset as a eulogy for a culture that demonstrably no longer existed. It was

36
 The lectures were delivered at Oxford, published separately in the Cornhill
Magazine and then published together in 1867.
37
 The following two quotations are well-known articulations of the Arnoldian
position: ‘For all modern purposes, I repeat, let us all as soon as possible be one people; let
the Welshman speak English, and, if he is an author, let him write English.’ ‘Sentimental,
– always ready to react against the despotism of fact; that is the description a great friend
of the Celt gives of him; and it is not a bad description of the sentimental temperament; it
lets us into the secret of its dangers and of its habitual want of success. Balance, measure,
success are just what the Celt has never had.’ Matthew Arnold, On the Study of Celtic
Literature, Matthew Arnold: Lectures and Essays in Criticism. Ed. R.H. Super (Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press, 1962), 297, 344.
46 W.B. Yeats and World Literature

here that the modern discourse of Celticism found its seminal textual problem.
Macpherson’s poems provided a Celticist imaginary convenient to the requirements
of a modern Britain, namely a Scottish tradition which was vibrant and proud, but
which lived through the English language and always in the past tense. This irony,
that putatively ancient Scottish poems might finesse the erosion of Scotland’s
political distinctiveness, was intersected by a further irony concerning the poems’
authenticity. Macpherson published three main works: Fragments of Ancient
Poetry in 1760, Fingal in 1761 and Temora in 1763, all reputedly translated from
the writings of the third-century Caledonian bard Ossian. ‘How far it comes up
to the rules of epopaea is the province of criticism to examine. It is only my
business to lay it before the reader as I have found it’: so wrote Macpherson in
his preface to the first edition of Fingal, establishing that the poems were to be
considered discoveries of tradition and not creative inventions.38 Immediately on
publication this claim was disputed, most vituperatively by Samuel Johnson, but
most commonly by Irish antiquarians who suspected the source material belonged
to Ireland rather than to Scotland.39 It didn’t really matter. In the face of the scandal

38
 James Macpherson, The Poems of Ossian and Related Works. Ed. Howard Gaskill
(Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1996), 36.
39
 In 1796 after Macpherson’s death the Highland Society of Scotland established
an authentication committee which, though providing further official sanction for
Macpherson’s work, did offer a qualification: it reported in 1805 that ‘although Macpherson
had not produced close translations of individual poems, he had nevertheless drawn on
the traditional tales collected in his tours, using certain recognisable characters, plots and
episodes’ (Poems of Ossian, xiii). This anticipates the modern sympathy with Macpherson’s
project, which establishes his ‘genuine’ sources as being the living oral culture he encountered
as well as the sixteenth-century Book of the Dean of Lismore, a manuscript containing
tales and story patterns similar to Macpherson’s. It leaves aside, however, the phantom
third-century Ossian manuscript which, it has been suggested, Macpherson had gone so
far as to fabricate in Gaelic as evidence for his English ‘translations’. Howard Gaskill has
argued that the manuscript controversy was a red herring. Although Macpherson claimed
that he obtained his material both from tradition and from ‘some manuscripts’ he didn’t say
that these manuscripts were from the third century. Dr Johnson’s vituperative response to
the Ossian publications – his demand for material proof – and Macpherson’s ambiguous
and evasive rejoinders are to blame for this distraction away from the folk sources to the
written sources. According to Gaskill, this overshadows our appreciation of the controversy
to this day. However, taking Gaskill’s point on board, it is still undecidable whether the lost
manuscripts the publisher Thomas Becket claimed to have possession of, and countless
others to have seen, were faithful transcripts of traditional ballads or retrospective
translations of Macpherson’s English poetry concocted as a defence. In the latter case we
would be confronted by the remarkable trajectory from traditional Gaelic ballad to English-
language embellishment to re-crudified Gaelic transcript, where the first and last texts bear
little resemblance to one another. Certainly, the suggestion that Macpherson composed
Gaelic ‘originals’ retrospectively to justify his English publications issues a cautionary note
to those who would attribute some de facto authenticity to a national language. Howard
Gaskill, Ossian Revisited (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1991).
Yeatsian Transmissions 47

of origin, the third-century Scottish bard, Ossian, who possibly didn’t exist,
became a Europe-wide phenomenon, collected by Herder, translated by Goethe,
and recited by Napoleon. Ossian’s poems marked a cultural moment in which the
virtues of historical fact were apparently replaced by those of historical feeling or
style.
As we have seen, Yeats’s The Wanderings of Oisin owes a clear debt to the
material collected and translated by nineteenth-century antiquarians, but equally,
as an exercise in style and Celtic border-crossing, it draws out the eighteenth-
century Macpherson controversy into a new form – we saw above that Yeats
relied heavily in his researches on the Transactions of the Ossianic Society. On
the one hand, as the author of The Celtic Twilight (1893) and a manifesto for ‘The
Celtic Theatre’ (1897), Yeats had to negotiate the political accusation from those
with more clear-cut Irish republican sympathies that his Celticist rhetoric was an
Arnoldian cover for the primus inter pares model of unionism which had prevailed
through the nineteenth century, and under which Ireland had grievously suffered.
On the other hand, ‘the Celtic’ was a cultural and linguistic sign which had already
circulated beyond the constitutional economy of Britain and Ireland through the
anthologies and universities of Europe. It was this transnational Celt which Yeats
most fully embraced in his response to the Arnoldian position in his essay ‘The
Celtic Element in Literature’ (1898): ‘Matthew Arnold asks how much of the Celt
must one imagine in the ideal man of genius. I prefer to say, how much of the
ancient hunters and fishers and of the ecstatic dancers among hills and woods
must one imagine in the ideal man of genius?’ (E&I 184). By distancing himself
from Arnold, Yeats also seems to have distanced himself from his primary term.
‘Celtic’ was a term he eventually ejected from his vocabulary around the turn
of the century on the grounds of its vagueness, expurgating exclamations such
as ‘O how Celtic!’ from the 1902 edition of The Celtic Twilight, which he had
originally published in 1893. D.P. Moran’s particularly scathing attack on Yeats’s
sponsorship of the Celtic movement and all of its insipid mongrelism in The
Philosophy of Irish Ireland would almost certainly have been a contributing factor
here.40 But perhaps we should qualify Yeats’s reasons, nonetheless. Rather than
assuming that his concern narrowed from the pernicious abstraction of the Celtic
to the more realistic and politically urgent circumstances of twentieth-century
Ireland, we might consider how his strategy is actually one of expanding the Celtic

40
 ‘Then we called ourselves Celts – a word which is supposed to stand for a people,
but who that people are no one seems to know, and indeed very few care. Beardless boys
studying for their degrees, and serious girls were haunted by the phrase; and literary articles
and literary discussion were studded with these two words, “natural magic” […] We now
knew the difference between English literature and Irish literature, and satisfied ourselves
that Shakespeare was demonstrably a Celt. Then yet another Irish make-believe was born,
and it was christened “The Celtic Note,” Mr Yeats standing sponsor for it.’ D.P. Moran, The
Philosophy of Irish Ireland (Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 2006), 104. Moran’s
articles, arguing for an ‘Irish’, not ‘Celtic’, Ireland, were first published over two years
(1898–1900) in the New Ireland Review.
48 W.B. Yeats and World Literature

element to the point of its utmost diffuseness. In his essay ‘The Celtic Element’,
instead of framing an objection to the politicised clichés of Celticism – the Celt’s
melancholy, magic and aversion to fact – Yeats provides us with its generalisation.
All ancient peoples possess the Celtic element, he claims. What for Arnold was a
constitutional property of the United Kingdom, and of English literature, becomes
for Yeats a property of the world and, consequently, a quality to be transmitted
from the Welsh Mabinogion, to the Finnish Kalevala, to the ‘Mahomedan King in
the song of Roland’ (E&I 179, 185, 187). Here at the very limits of its usefulness
as a term, the Celtic offers a view of a mobile set of relations which transmit
beyond the bole and branch model of Arnoldian political integration.
It is equally important that the scandal of fabrication and sentimentality of
Macpherson’s Ossian, which had attached itself to Celtic philology and antiquarian
scholarship as it travelled in the 1700s, cannot be excluded from Yeats’s late
nineteenth-century context. Goethe’s protagonist in The Sorrows of Young Werther
(1774), the most famous recipient of the Celtic transmission, reads Ossian’s ‘The
Songs of Selma’ while he descends into love-sickness and suicide. ‘Ossian has
ousted Homer from my heart’, Werther writes to his friend Wilhelm towards the end
of their correspondence: it is the Celtic bug which kills him; or, put another way,
it is the contagion of inauthenticity, of strong feeling without a classical centre.41
To be sure, contagion is hardly a flattering metaphor for the Celtic element, yet if
it is to fly by the centripetal dynamic of British constitutional politics it must be
granted this ambiguous quality of virulence. Virulent feeling serves quite well as
a description of the powers of romantic nationalism as it was drawn from the New
World and transmitted across Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries;
small nations, especially those keen to establish a collective feeling for their
national sovereignty beyond the determination of the large centralised powers
of Britain, France, Austria and Russia, sought in the Ossian poems an image of
themselves. Sweden, the German states, Finland, and Hungary, all produced or
adapted popular translations of Macpherson’s work within 40 years of its original
publication.42 Not only was this eighteenth-century Celtic moment, with its
emphasis on a ‘new mythology’, a way to contest the classicist values of the central
powers, but it also implicitly held out the possibility of a de-centred transmission
of affect between nations united by virtue of their smallness or minoritarian status.
Yeats, writing in what has been termed the second Celtic Revival over 100 years
after Macpherson, bears the mark of this Ossianic inheritance. In his original
manifesto for the ‘Celtic Theatre’, which soon became the Irish Literary Theatre,
he declared an intention both to correct the ‘misrepresentation’ of the London

41
 ‘In 1829 Goethe remarked to Henry Crabb Robinson that “Werther praised Homer
while he retained his senses, and Ossian when he was going mad.”’ Johann Wolfgang Von
Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther. Trans. Michael Hulse (London: Penguin Classics,
1989), 95, 143n.
42
 Howard Gaskill (ed.), The Reception of Ossian in Europe (London: Athlone Press,
2004).
Yeatsian Transmissions 49

stage – Ireland would not henceforth be known as the ‘locus natura of buffoonery’
– and to establish a matter of theatrical principle between the Celtic nations which
might somehow bypass those London conventions.43 In this we can discern the
promise of small nations attempting to dis-anchor themselves from an established
political centre. And one can say that Ossianic Celticism provided Yeats with his
first model for defining the national space according to multiple references outside
of, and at a distance from, itself.

The Technology of Small Nations

This leads us directly to the second amplitude of the Yeatsian wave: namely those
affinities which allowed Yeats to describe Irish culture as he saw it reflected in
other European nations.44 For Yeats Finnish folklore, Icelandic sagas, the symbolist
poetry of the Belgian poet Maurice Maeterlinck, and Norwegian theatre, all held
vital clues to Ireland’s cultural identity:

In the small nations which have to struggle for their national life, one finds that
almost every creator, whether poet or novelist, sets all his stories in his own
country. I do not recollect that Bjornson ever wrote of any land but Norway, and
Ibsen, though he lived in exile for many years, driven out by his countrymen,
as he believed, carried the little seaboard towns of Norway everywhere in
his imagination. So far as we can be certain of anything, we may be certain
that Ireland with her long National struggle, her old literature, her unbounded
folk-imagination, will, in so far as her literature is National at all, be more like
Norway than England or France. (Ex 161)

Smallness and an apparent fidelity to a local subject matter are more precious
to Yeats than either language or political conviction when it comes to defining a
national literature. He downplays the importance of the political on the basis of its
moral puritanism and instrumentality, and the linguistic on the basis of historical
example: ‘Was Milton an Englishman when he wrote in Latin or Italian, and
had we [the Irish] no part in Columbanus when he wrote in Latin the beautiful
sermon comparing life to a highway and to a smoke?’ (Ex 156). The only criterion
sufficient to a national literature, then, is a national subject matter which relates
directly to the people. The folkloric assumption underlying Yeats’s position here
seems awkwardly yoked onto the virtues of Ibsen’s nationality: Ibsen, known for
his naturalistic depiction of the bourgeois class, was hardly, in the first place, a
folkloric writer. Yet the analogy emphasises the complexity of the argument Yeats
was having with himself concerning a distinctively Irish literary space which at
the same time found precedent elsewhere in Europe. Yeats described his mentor
the Fenian John O’Leary as cut from the same agate as Italian nation-builder
Giuseppe Mazzini, and in an early poem called ‘How Ferencz Renyi Kept Silent’

43
 Foster, The Apprentice Mage, 184.
44
 Casanova, The World Republic of Letters, 248.
50 W.B. Yeats and World Literature

he raises a glass to the cause of Hungarian nationalism from a place he calls ‘the
Hungary of the West’ (VP 709–15). In this way the location of Ireland, and the
invention of an Irish locale, is determined through its distant relations with other
small European nations; and the authenticity of its national tradition, to use a
telling neologism from the poem on Renyi, is demonstrably ‘reiterant’. As Ireland
becomes itself by becoming ‘the Hungary of the West’ so we get a sense of the
theatrical reproduction which underlies small-nation nationalism.
This spirit of modern adaptation, translation and emulation underwriting
Yeats’s conception of a popular national tradition proved controversial when he
developed it through the 1890s. On the one side, the Gaelic League’s emphasis
on an Irish language revival pointed the way towards a more rigorous definition
of national immanence, while on the other, public commentaries such as those by
John Eglinton (pseudonym for the librarian and cosmopolitan contrarian William
Kirkpatrick Magee) declared their scepticism about Yeats’s claims for a ‘popular’
national poetry in ‘a scientific age’. Late in 1898, Yeats and Eglinton engaged in
public debate on the pages of the Dublin Daily Express, with Eglinton querying
the relevance of Yeats’s ‘national’ drama to the material facts of modern life:

The kinematograph, the bicycle, electric tramcars, labour-saving contrivances,


etc., are not susceptible of poetic treatment, but are, in fact, themselves the
poetry, not without a kind of suggestiveness, of a scientific age […] The epics of
the present are the steam-engine and the dynamo, its lyrics the kinematograph,
phonograph etc., and these bear with them the hearts of men as the Iliad and
Odyssey of former days uplifted the youth of antiquity, or as the old English
ballads expressed the mind of a nation in its childhood. (‘Mr. Yeats and Popular
Poetry’) 45

Eglinton’s is an astute diagnosis of his times, but the terms of his reply to Yeats’s
idea of a national tradition require some further interpretation. For Eglinton,
modern poetic treatments of ‘ancient’ and ‘local’ subject matter of the kind
proposed by Yeats, since bereft of their original social forms, can only be out of
temper with themselves. Almost by definition, he thinks, anachronistic adaptations
are unpopular because they lack a modern means of transmission: who among the
scientifically literate would want to read Yeats’s poems on ancient Irish mythology?
The thick end of his accusation against Yeats is that poetry which claims the
native popularity of a tradition is abandoning the facticity of modern life. But here
Eglinton is in danger of overstating his case, not least because he attributes to the
materiality of modernity an unhistorical transparency. Although plausibly correct
to name his age that of ‘the steam-engine and the dynamo, […] the kinematograph,
phonograph etc.’, this can only be a perceptible truth at all because of how such
technologies render themselves conspicuous through their reproductions of cultural
meaning. Crucially, one such reproduced cultural meaning in the late nineteenth

45
 John Eglinton, W.B. Yeats, A.E., and W. Larmine, Literary Ideals in Ireland
(London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1899), 42–3.
Yeatsian Transmissions 51

and early twentieth centuries was that of small-nation nationalism. Anderson has
pointed out the importance of the printing press to the construction of the ‘imagined
communities’ of the sixteenth century when the first books of vernacular literature
used the idea of a shared past to create a national community of readers – a print
culture – in the historical present.46 The same historicising principle as operated
within these first printed books survived into the late nineteenth century through
different media. The steam printing press, the phonograph, the kinematograph
and eventually the radio all served in some degree as national or nationalising
archives. As Walter Ong makes the case, ‘oral histories’ came to prominence once
the means of recording them provided a challenge to the primacy of the written
record.47 Only once the voice could be stored and replicated through time could
it serve as the pre-literate spirit of a simultaneously ancient and modern nation.
Though Yeats was no actual phonographer, his cultural arguments concerning the
primacy of collecting folklore and capturing folk vernaculars embody the ironies
of a phonographic authenticity.
In his essay ‘What is Popular Poetry?’ (1901) Yeats proposes a traditional
discipline to counter the English ‘romance’ which ‘clung about’ contemporary
verse: ‘If these [modern English] poets […] had a good tradition they would write
beautifully and move everybody as they move me’ (E&I 3). This is to say that
the ostensibly rooted discipline of popular poetry in small-nation nationalism
serves an aesthetic purpose beyond political parameters, moving imperceptibly
into a philosophical consideration of ‘the good’. Yeats’s idea of a popular national
tradition resides on the border between the qualitative (what is good) and the
quantitative (what is simply popular). Contrary to the implications of Eglinton’s
review, this is not a disavowal of technological modernity but an encapsulation
of the historical crisis of value it represents. In particular, Yeats is concerned
about the cultural atomisation that he sees represented by the individualism of the
English and the French lyric. From the perspective of small-nation nationalism,
it was conventional to see how modern vices of materialism and individualism
held sway in the larger nations; but such strategic opposition notwithstanding,
it was equally predictable to find a popular minor tradition relying upon modern
modes of transmission. Just as Wagner’s neo-romantic myth-making depended on
sophisticated technological apparatuses for creating vast spectacles, so we can say
of Yeats’s Irish peasantry that it was technologically reproduced.
The convergence between folkloric traditionalism and technological
reproducibility across national borders dissolves the standing opposition between
the Gaelic League’s strict national exceptionalism and Eglinton’s post-national
scientific modernism. It also creates the middle ground for Yeats’s national style

46
 Anderson, Imagined Communities, 37–46.
47
 ‘Our understanding of the differences between orality and literacy developed only
in the electronic age, not earlier.’ Walter Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of
the Word (New York: Routledge, 1990), 3.
52 W.B. Yeats and World Literature

which, as the following quotation implies, derives its theatrical authenticity not
from a fixed centre but from the multiplicity and mobility of its transmissions:

The French play delights in the well-ordered fable, but by leaving out the chorus
it has created an art where poetry and imagination, always the children of far-off
multitudinous things, must of necessity grow less important than the mere will.
[…] The Shakespearean drama gets the emotion of multitude out of the sub-plot
which copies the main plot, much as a shadow upon the wall copies one’s body
in the firelight. (E&I 215)

Contrary to the French neo-classical drama of Racine or Corneille which focuses


always on the main plot, the Shakespearean drama that Yeats so commends
privileges a dispersal of representations through the operation of the subplot.
Shakespeare is the exemplary popular artist, then, and sixteenth-century England,
as so often for Yeats, the historically paradigmatic ‘small’ nation. Borrowing
the shadow play upon the wall from Plato’s parable of the cave, Yeats makes
us question the proximity of the subplot’s artistic value to the nihilism of mere
‘copies’ or reproductions. As we know, for Plato the shadows were impoverished
representations of an original unity which could not be perceived in the
unenlightened world.48 But for Yeats, already in 1903 ‘altering the parable’ (VP
443), the shadows are projections of the body which, though moving away from, or
dispersing the integrity of the original, are paradoxically the only means by which
the original can be produced. It is interesting to note that this vision of aesthetic
productivity is complicit with processes of fracture and reproducibility associated
with modern technological culture. ‘We think of King Lear’, Yeats continues, ‘less
as the history of one man’ than as ‘the history of a whole evil time’ (E&I 215).
But this aesthetic accomplishment, he assures us, would be impossible without the
multiplicity of the subplot. The cacophony of Lear’s mind is replicated in the de-
structuring of theatrical space and once again in the cultural reception of the play;
which is to say, the popular genius of the play cannot reside singly within the spirit
of its hieratic protagonist, but must develop along with the multiple adaptations
and inevitable adulterations of that spirit.
Kinetic images flickering on a screen and apprehended from within a darkened
arena conjure the distinctive dream spaces of modern cinema. Fredric Jameson
has suggested that in the early twentieth century there was a ‘confluence of two
distinct formal developments, of movie technology on one hand, and of a certain
type of modernist or protomodernist language on the other, both of which seem
to offer some space, some third term, between the subject and the object alike’.49
Jameson values this shared ‘cinematographic perception’ for how it offers a way to
read the force of the political and the economic within modernist literature without
reducing literary form to the demand for verisimilitude or static objectivity. The
cinematic image is not private or personal, nor can it be said to depict an objective

48
 Plato, The Republic. Trans. Desmond Lee (London: Penguin Books, 2003), 240–43.
49
 Jameson, ‘Modernism and Imperialism’, 60, 67.
Yeatsian Transmissions 53

reality; in fact, according to Jameson, the moving image invites us to enquire


after the mode of perception itself. This mode of perception is ‘the third term’
between the subject and the object, which roughly maps onto the role of language
in literature: in modernist literature, as in the screening room, the medium has
become conspicuously mobile. Significantly, Jameson provides these comments on
modern cinema in the same essay where he singles out the ‘uniqueness of the Irish
situation’ – another ‘third term’, this time between the colonial centre and colonised
periphery. Such an association of modern, technologically induced perception and
geopolitical space invites us to affirm the complex interrelation between material
culture and ideology, specifically how literary strategies of self-representation in
a discrepant semi-political space can anticipate fields of experiential possibility
which new technologies then fulfil rather than simply produce. Yeats derived his
cinematic imagination from the Shakespearean subplot’s implication of theatrical
multiplicity and self-estrangement, which suggests that his sense of a national
tradition as counter to modern individualism was already yoked to the logic of
its mediation. In this respect, and without the poet’s timely articulation of the
connection, Yeats’s small nation may fairly be likened to a cinema space, resided
in by an audience who continue to regard themselves by the light of moving
images projected from elsewhere.

The Museum of the New World

But projected from where? In part, as we have already acknowledged, the poet’s
images were projected from London, the constitutional centre of the United
Kingdom, administrative centre of the British Empire, and Yeats’s most lucrative
literary marketplace where representations of Irishness were already common
currency. They were also projected from Paris as the literary centre of Europe and
a significant if contested term in Yeats’s struggle for literary legitimacy. Beyond
London and Paris, however, underwriting the plausibly de-centring networks of the
Celtic and other small European nations I have described, is another ‘elsewhere’,
but one which is more difficult to locate precisely on a map.
Yeats’s general recognition of the New World as an Irish cultural co-ordinate
should not be underestimated: he wrote journalistic articles for The Boston
Pilot and The Providence Sunday Journal in Rhode Island which were often
more radically nationalist than those he wrote for journals in London, or even
in Dublin.50 We know that Yeats toured America, giving lectures in universities
and public institutions on Irish matters, covering great distances on modern trains
where he said that he found it almost impossible not to compose poetry (L 427).51
50
 Yeats’s American journalism was facilitated through the political connections of
the Fenian John O’Leary. W.B. Yeats, Collected Letters To The New Island. Ed. Horace
Reynolds (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970 [1934]), 5.
51
 ‘Indeed I think that if some benevolent government would only shut one up in the
smoking car of a railway train and send one across the world one would really write two or
three dozen lyrics in the year’ (L 427).
54 W.B. Yeats and World Literature

In the same spirit, these modern transports presented him with one of the first
scenes of his wife’s automatic writing (V 8). He frequently referenced the New
World writing of Whitman, Thoreau and Hart Crane in his pursuit of a national
style, and, as we shall see in the next chapter, he incorporated a Western frontier
mythology into his Irish subject matter, and established New World simulation
at the heart of his national folklore. It is also telling that Yeats chose to publish
his poem on the Hungarian patriot Renyi in Boston in 1887, thus reflecting how
the relations between small European nations such as Ireland and Hungary were
often ‘discovered’ through American Diasporas performing their nationalities at a
distance from the original territory.
But of course the New World is never simply America; rather it indicates a long
historical process of dislocation from territorial reference indexed to the flow of
money and trade, which gained particular valence in the twentieth century under
the banner of ‘Americanisation’. I want to suggest, then, that Yeats’s New World
sensitivities help us to situate him within the broadest context of the global market.
More specifically, the cultivated eccentricity of Yeats’s Irishness with respect to
the sovereign powers of Europe – registered through his relations with other Celtic
cultures and small European nations – relocates his work, within a compressed
and hierarchised global space, on the ‘semi-periphery’. Moretti defines the
semi-periphery as ‘the transitional area where cultures move in and out of the
core’.52 It is a constitutionally imperfect zone according neither with the formal
power of the colonial and economic centre nor with the material vulnerability
of the exploited periphery. As such it comprises the exceptional situation where
political determination and cultural expression might be seen to diverge, if not
decisively, at least enough to allow a degree of formal reflexivity with respect to
the administrations of the imperial state.
As already remarked upon, Jameson has singled out early twentieth-century
Ireland as embodying this kind of situation: ‘one of overlap and coexistence
between two incommensurable realities which are those of the lord and the
bondsmen altogether, those of the metropolis and of the colony simultaneously’.53
For Jameson, ‘the style’ of metropolitan modernism (of E.M. Forster and Virginia
Woolf), especially the continuity between the streets of modern London and the
numinous metaphysics of infinity, is countered by the post-style concretisation of
Dublin as a colonial city in the distinctively semi-peripheral work of Ulysses. On
this reading we might place Yeats – a figure cast in the nomadic mould of Paul
Ruttlege in Where There is Nothing – as a metropolitan writer. In order to see why
this could only be a partial reading though, we would have to further develop
Jameson’s hypothesis. Jameson’s ‘alternative [semi-peripheral] modernism’ is
useful for describing new artistic and cultural possibilities beyond those defined
by the imperial centre, but his depiction of Joyce’s dedication to ‘finitude’, and

52
 Franco Moretti, ‘More Conjectures’, New Left Review 20 (March–April 2003),
73–81: 77.
53
 Jameson, ‘Modernism and Imperialism’, 60.
Yeatsian Transmissions 55

suspicion of the numinous, cannot gainsay the problems of global transmission.


For a semi-peripheral Joyce, transmission from one finite place to another is
bound to be cross-purposed: a mode of interference between elements rather
than a movement from the centre into open and empty space. Indeed, this would
seem to contribute to an understanding of the semi-periphery as anachronistic and
volatile in nature, rather than smoothly intermediary; but it also calls for a further
conceptualisation of how different finitudes relate. How do different national
monuments, motifs, and cultural tropes circulate without always collapsing
upon one core power and central co-ordinate? As well as announcing ‘the great
monument’ of Joyce’s Dublin – his ‘closed’, mapped city – as a reproach to the
commonplaces of openness and infinity which typify the colonial-metropolitan
style, we must also consider the practice of curating this Dublin in various global
relations: after all, it is only from such relations that the general meaning and
efficacy of the semi-periphery can ever emerge. This practice of curating diverse
cultural monuments extends Jameson’s argument relating to the situation of Ireland
by necessitating that we introduce the logic of the museum to the process of global
literary criticism. The museum – in a similar way to the world literature anthology
– originates from and remains close to the procedures of imperial expansion (the
move from the London street to the numinous realm of the British Empire), but
it also supplements these procedures by collecting finite objects and putting them
into strange relation with one another.
Moretti’s conception of the ‘modern epic’ – the encyclopaedic literary text
which reveals ‘a discrepancy between the totalising will of the epic and the
subdivided reality of the modern world’54 – indicates this form of aesthetic
complexity which cannot cohere except as a conspicuously forced ordering of
heterogeneous materials. The cataloguing impulses exemplified by Goethe’s Faust
Part 2 or Ulysses (both arguably written from the perspective of the global semi-
periphery: early-nineteenth-century Germany, twentieth-century Ireland) recall
the impersonality of the epic form conceived by Hegel as bodying forth the civic
virtues of the historical nation, and yet these texts reproduce the ambition of the epic
as a strained, conflicted and constitutionally imperfect expression of modernity.
Though Yeats once described Ireland as a ‘young’ and ‘epic’ culture among the
lyric cultures of modern Europe (UP1 273),55 we have seen how his incorporation
of the decadent French lyric into his extensively referential and heterogeneous
volume The Wind Among the Reeds nonetheless indicated an ‘epic’ culture of
strained modernity. We have also seen how the ‘unexhausted materials’ which
according to the poet lay within the Irish national character shared their origin with
Macpherson’s Ossianic hoaxes and existed incontrovertibly in relation to what

54
 Franco Moretti, Modern Epic: The World System from Goethe to García Márquez
(London; New York: Verso, 1996), 5.
55
 ‘[Ireland] is a young nation with unexhausted material lying within us in our still
unexpressed national character, about us in our scenery, and in the clearly marked outlines
of our life, and behind us in our multitudes of legends’ (UP1 273).
56 W.B. Yeats and World Literature

Eglinton termed the ‘epics of the present: the steam-engine and the dynamo’. It
is hardly contentious, therefore, to suggest that the ‘unity of culture’, which Yeats
would come to avow, had to be willed through the media of the reference book, the
anthology, and the edited volume; the Irishness of his materials could only be so
determined amidst the heterogeneous exiles of other world materials.
In other words, the modern epic is a kind of museum text. Through one lens the
stuff of the museum is colonial loot, through another it is the material of exile or
migration. Such a paradox can account for the ambivalence Yeats directs toward
the British Museum when discussing Indian poetry or the Japanese Noh. In his
introduction to Certain Noble Plays of Japan (1916), he recounts how the Print
Room of the British Museum was closed as a war-economy, meaning he could
only write from memory of the Japanese colour-prints which had once impressed
him so much. The Museum is a world co-ordinate capable of holding diverse
cultural materials which fire the poet’s imagination, but clearly also a place whose
opening hours are at the mercy of the imperial state. Yeats begins his introduction
to Tagore’s Gitanjali (1912) with a similarly two-faced reference to the Museum.
After recounting a conversation with ‘a distinguished Bengali doctor of medicine’,
he continues:

‘I know no German, yet if a translation of a German poet had moved me, I


would go to the British Museum and find books in English that would tell me
something of his life, and of the history of his thought. But though these prose
translations from Rabindranath Tagore have stirred my blood as nothing has for
years, I shall not know anything of his life, and of the movements of thought
that have made them possible, if some Indian traveller will not tell me.’ […] ‘An
Englishman living in London in the reign of Richard the Second had he been
shown translations from Petrarch or from Dante, would have found no books
to answer his questions but would have questioned some Florentine banker or
Lombard merchant.’ (E&I 387)

Once again the Museum is deserving of praise and yet falls short at the same
time: the authenticating reference which would exist for the notional German poet
does not exist for Tagore. The Museum is clearly failing in its duty to hold a
comprehensive archive, and yet Yeats delights in the consequence of this failure:
namely the unauthenticated rumour of foreign Genius transmitted over great
distances. This unpredictable transmission is what all artistic renaissances share, he
suggests. Tellingly, in the face of his own better judgment, which usually assaults
the philistinism of the banking class, Yeats shifts his favour from the authority of
the museum to the authority of the bank – ‘some Florentine banker or Lombard
merchant’ is deemed capable of knowing what the Museum does not. And thus
the poet allows us a brief insight into the contradictions of the world market. Less
concerned to authenticate foreign artefacts than encounter them in their exile,
he positions himself in eccentric relation to the Museum space and in doing so
renders the Museum’s imperial archive as constitutionally – not just accidentally
– imperfect: it is structurally incapable of understanding the new relations it helps
Yeatsian Transmissions 57

determine. It takes an exile to ‘know’ an exile, in other words, as it takes the Irish
Yeats among his English contemporaries to ‘know’ the Bengali Tagore. But such
familiarity, if it is to complicate the authority of the imperial centre, if it is to
remain semi-peripheral, has also been seen to appeal to merchants and bankers,
men of the world, which is to say to the fugal movements of global capitalism.
Yeats’s notorious disdain for those who ‘fumble in a greasy till’, for ‘hucksters’,
for ‘electric signs’ and ‘modern heterogeneity’, would seem to rule out of hand a
conscious complicity with the global market and American kitsch (VP 269, 289; E&I
526). And yet he was not above hypocrisy, at least not the kind that clings to every
beautiful soul thrown into a world of commodity exchange. A savvy self-publicist,
described memorably by George Moore as ‘a man of excessive appearance […]
an Irish parody of the poetry I had seen all my life strutting its rhythmic way in
the alleys of the Luxembourg Gardens’, his poetic persona, clothed or otherwise,
was never less than enterprising.56 His letters show a prodigious talent for judging
literary markets, surpassing even those whose profession it was to sell books. To
his publisher A.H. Bullen in 1905, he suggested, with the astute cynicism of a
marketing man, that by adding the name of ‘some Irish publishing house’ to go
alongside Bullen’s own on the title page of his new editions ‘Irish sales would be
greatly increased’ (CL Intelex 155). And on other occasions, despite an ongoing
commitment to the Arts-and-Crafts-inspired Dun Emer and Cuala Industries (run
by his sisters), he pushed keenly for having cheap editions of his poems and plays
available for ready and profitable circulation (CL Intelex 1234).
A particularly instructive case of Yeats’s entrepreneurship pits him once more
against Moore. In 1902 the two authors discussed the possibility of a theatrical
collaboration on the theme of a young intellectual fellow, who turns tramp
and takes himself to the roads. The project didn’t work out, with Yeats soon
withdrawing his cooperation, angering Moore in the process. According to Yeats’s
own account, Moore ‘threatened to get an injunction’ if Yeats used the scenario
they had considered (Au 453). But Yeats went ahead regardless, publishing the
offending play with the briefest of concessions, namely an introductory note
justifying his endeavour:

Where there is Nothing is founded upon a subject which I suggested to George


Moore […] we talked of collaboration, but this did not go beyond some rambling
talks […] Should he publish a story upon it some day, I shall rejoice that the
excellent old custom of two writers taking the one fable has been revived in a
new form. If he does I cannot think that my play and his story will resemble each
other. I have used nothing of his, and if he uses anything of mine he will have so
changed it, doubtless, as to have made it his own.57

56
 George Moore, ‘Ave’, Hail and Farewell. Ed. Richard Cave (Gerrards Cross,
Bucks: Colin Smythe, 1985 [1911]), 55–258: 78–9.
57
 This is the introductory note to Where There is Nothing published in the United
Irishman in November 1902. Quoted in Foster, The Apprentice Mage, 268.
58 W.B. Yeats and World Literature

Rejoicing in the ‘excellent old custom of two writers taking the one fable’ hardly
disguises the institution of competitive authorship lying beneath: copyright and
the creation of the public domain through the private ownership of ideas. This
is why, as well as celebrating an old traditional practice, Yeats is also implicitly
granting Moore permission to write his own version of the story in the hope
that any legal consequences of their disagreement can be prevented. There is a
striking point of contact between Yeats’s self-justification here through recourse
to custom and his well-known, if enigmatic phrase from the late essay ‘A General
Introduction to My Work’ (1937) concerning the work of poetic composition: ‘I
must choose a traditional stanza, even what I alter must seem traditional’ (E&I 522,
my emphasis). Often this statement proves an occasion for critics to congratulate
the poet on his enduring commitment to the prosodic disciplines of English verse
in the age of modernist experimentation. However, its acceptance of subterfuge
should not be taken lightly. Although what Yeats writes must ‘seem’ traditional,
there is, simultaneously, a frank acceptance that it is the ‘original’ work of an
individualised modern author. Creativity and individual profit are intertwined
here, and contextually attached to the history of copyright law. Paul Saint-Amour
has recently described how copyright was formalised and internationalised around
the turn of the century through a series of government acts and conventions,
most prominently the Berne Convention of 1896 which established copyright
privileges across sovereign borders, and the 1909 and 1911 Copyright Laws in the
US and the UK respectively.58 On this account Yeats’s ‘tradition’, his ‘excellent
old custom’, was inexorably becoming part of the author’s personal estate and
growing reputation as an international poet.
Let us take a further example to consolidate the case of Yeats’s capitalist muse.
It is broadly agreed that Douglas Hyde’s translations which would come to be
collected in Love Songs of Connacht (1893) influenced Yeats’s most famous early
lyric, ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’; a fact we deem critically significant because it is
indicative of Yeats’s relations to other Irish poets, his possible debt – though at one
remove – to Gaelic prosody, and the extent of his originality. The same lyric takes
on a different complexion again, however, and one less narrowly channelled, if we
take on board Yeats’s biographical reflection that what lay behind the poem was
his American dream of ‘living in imitation of [Henry David] Thoreau on Innisfree’
(Au 153). By this light we might account for the lyric’s vital note of affirmation.
But even then we have not exhausted contextual significance, for as well as
being both Irish and American, the lyric is also a product of Yeats having lived
in London. This is how Yeats describes finding the ‘rhythm of [his] own music’
in ‘Reveries over Childhood and Youth’, the first volume of his Autobiographies:
‘when walking through Fleet Street very homesick I heard a little tinkle of water
and saw a fountain in a shop-window which balanced a little ball upon its jet, and
began to remember lake water. From the sudden remembrance came my poem

58
 Paul K. Saint-Amour (ed.), Modernism and Copyright (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2011), 7–10.
Yeatsian Transmissions 59

“Innisfree”’ (Au 153). Critics usually draw a line here. The fact that the poem
was conceived while the poet contemplated a piece of ‘kitsch’ shopware on a
street reputed for the vice of journalistic opinion-mongering is seldom considered
relevant to the poem’s meaning. Granted, this is a trivial conception; but that is
not to say it is simply unpoetic. Rather it seems indicative of something within
the poem – at the very least its claim to possess an Irish locale – that the fountain
of Yeatsian tradition was discovered in ornamental miniature and presumably for
sale in a London shop, and that the poet, who dreamt of self-sufficient asceticism,
was himself at the apex point of his reverie performing the role of a window licker.
Biographical, historical and editorial contributions to the meaning of Yeats’s
work have been a mainstay of criticism for many years, though within this field
of scholarship the placements and revisions of individual poems have been
tested more for their national-political than their commercial contexts. George
Bornstein’s discussion of the original version of ‘September 1913’ published in
the Irish Times on Monday, 8 September 1913 under the title ‘Romance in Ireland’
is an exemplary case. Instead of the familiar elegy depicting Yeats’s isolation and
contempt for modern political and intellectual life in Dublin, Bornstein deduces
a new poem – this one considered vaguely engagé in its solidarity with working-
class strikers against the profiteering of Dublin oligarchs, on the basis that it was
published (strategically perhaps) alongside newspaper reports of the ongoing
‘Dublin Labour Trouble’.59 Although he concedes that Yeats’s position may have
been determined by personal enmities as much as by political principle, Bornstein’s
point remains a powerful one: a poem of political retreat can be legitimately re-
read as one of political engagement, and this despite the fact that, save for its title
and a few changes in punctuation, ‘Romance in Ireland’ consists of exactly the
same ‘linguistic codes’ as ‘September 1913’. Meaning can be determined by the
placement of words, but also by the placement of whole poems.
We may want to ask the question whether this basic truth is any less the case
when the contextual material is commercial rather than overtly political; when
instead of a labour dispute the artistic work is constellated with an advertisement.
Tim Armstrong points out that when perusing the Adelphi magazine in 1927 the
reader could turn ‘from the first printing of Yeats’s play The Resurrection […]
to [an advertisement for] a tour of Egypt with P&O’.60 Armstrong invites us to
speculate as to the ways in which this contiguity affects the meaning of the play.
The Greek, one of three speaking parts in the play, is characterised by his frequent
reminiscences over Egypt, over Alexandria in particular. It becomes the standard
by which he measures every other experience: ‘How could he know that I am
called a Christian? I wore the cap I brought from Alexandria’ he says at one point;
‘No they are not women. They are men dressed as women. I have seen something
like it in Alexandria’ he vows at another, upon witnessing Dionysian worshippers

59
 George Bornstein, Material Modernism: The Politics of the Page (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2001), 56–7.
60
 Tim Armstrong, Modernism: A Cultural History (Cambridge: Polity, 2005), 53.
60 W.B. Yeats and World Literature

on the street; and once more upon seeing the resurrected Christ, ‘He looks like a
statue out of some temple. I remember something of the kind in Alexandria’ (VPl
903, 913, 915). Needless to say the subject matter of The Resurrection is ‘high’
concerned with the aftermath of Christ’s death and the different modes of bearing
witness to it; nonetheless there is a ready facetious double-take for any reader
who has become conscious of the tourism advertisement in the Adelphi magazine,
along the lines of: want to wear an Egyptian hat and see transvestites dancing on
the streets? Want to peruse the likenesses of ancient gods? Go P&O! Of course
advertisements are usually supplemental and almost invariably refrain from the
direct address of political reportage: while politics overbears poetry, we might
say that commerce subsists, often invisibly, within it. As Anderson has written,
the ‘date at the top of the newspaper, the single most important emblem on it,
provides the essential connection – the steady onward clocking of [the nation’s]
homogenous empty time’.61 The advertisement, in contrast, less tethered to a
specific date than journalistic headlines, flies free of such national meaning and
unilateral temporality into the universal heterogeneity of the market.

Flight and Compression

I began this chapter by considering the metaphor of flight with Robert Gregory
the Irish Airman flying above and beyond political borders whose aesthetic
sensibility was sustained by force of technological compression. In the light of our
subsequent discussions of an expansive global space which is also continuous, and
productive of wave relations, we can appreciate the paradox exemplified by the
pilot flying beyond the limits of national borders into a space simultaneously more
open and more compressed than the one left behind. This paradox can further be
aligned with that of modern commodification whereby a superficial diversity of
world materials belies a structural convergence at the level of globalised capital.
I would like to end this chapter by considering the implications of this paradox
for Yeats’s poetics, where the Irish nation is registered outside of itself at various
wave amplitudes within a global space. Of course, the task of appreciating the
result of these transmissions is more taxing than simply noting the enrichment
of the national heritage by foreign materials. In fact these same revenues from
abroad may portend the erosion of national distinction altogether and threaten the
horizonal structure of living which had sustained an historical and aestheticised
feeling of national subjectivity. This threat is registered in Yeats’s work as a
destructive feeling of modernist singularity within his various Celtic, European
and global cultural extroversions. The move into a global space is also a move
to a singular point of crisis. The horizon of (national) difference, and likewise of
aesthetic perspective, is endangered by the totalising process of the world market.
W.J. McCormack has pointed to the ‘topographical stage’ of modernity
transferred from Ernest Renan’s opening paragraph in Poetry of the Celtic Races

61
 Anderson, Imagined Communities, 33.
Yeatsian Transmissions 61

to Arnold’s On the Study of Celtic Literature. In both these anthropological


travelogues ‘the scene is divided between a prosperous horizon represented by
lodging houses (temporary dwellings) and an eternal horizon represented by the
philology of stones, places, names’.62 What’s more, for both Renan and Arnold,
the horizon of modern prosperity revealing its philistine and marketised aspects
is in need of redemption by the eternal (non-modern) horizon of Celtic culture.
Renan, travelling through the Armorican peninsula in Brittany, contrasts Norman
vulgarity to a ‘reserved race [of Celts] living altogether within itself, heavy
in appearance but capable of profound feeling’.63 And Arnold does likewise,
contrasting the prosperous but philistine Saxon to the Welsh for whom ‘the past
still lives’.64 Given the well-known lines of influence from Renan to Arnold, it is
not altogether surprising that we can discern in their writing the shared conceit
that the material prosperity of modernity requires aesthetic supplementation from
a second space – here the space of the Celt. But this topographical strategy of
dividing the world scene into two parts, the eternal and the modern, transmits well
beyond the context of Celticism.
For example, in 1916, lecturing on the topic of nationalism in Japan, the
Indian-Bengali poet Tagore sounds distinctly Arnoldian (or is that Renanian?)
when standing on the outskirts of Yokohama town:

I know what a risk one runs from the vigorously athletic crowds in being styled
an idealist in these days, when thrones have lost their dignity and prophets have
become an anachronism, when the sound that drowns all voices is the noise of
the market place. Yet when, one day, standing on the outskirts of Yokohama
town, bristling with its display of modern miscellenies, I watched the sunset in
your southern sea, and saw its peace and majesty among your pine-clad hills,
– with the great Fujiyama growing faint against the golden horizon, like a god
overcome with his own radiance, – the music of eternity welled up through the
evening silence, and I felt that the sky and the earth and the lyrics of the dawn
and the dayfall are with the poets and idealists, and not with the marketmen
robustly contemptuous of all sentiment, – that, after the forgetfulness of his own
divinity, man will remember again that heaven is always in touch with his world,
which can never be abandoned for good to the hounding wolves of the modern
era, scenting human blood and howling to the skies.65

The division of this Japanese scene into two horizons is clear: ‘the noise of
the market place’ with its ‘display of modern miscellenies’ against ‘the golden
horizon’ of ‘pine-clad hills’ and the ‘great Fujiyama’. Admittedly, Tagore’s self-
consciousness before the ‘vigorously athletic crowds’ and ‘marketmen’ marks a

62
 W.J. McCormack, From Burke to Beckett: Ascendancy, Tradition and Betrayal in
Literary History (Cork: Cork University Press, 1994), 226–9.
63
 Ernest Renan, Poetry of the Celtic Races and Other Essays. Trans. W.G. Hutchinson
(London, 1896), 1–2. Quoted in McCormack, From Burke to Beckett, 226.
64
 Arnold, On the Study of Celtic Literature, 291.
65
 Rabindranath Tagore, Nationalism (London: Macmillan, 1917), 92–3.
62 W.B. Yeats and World Literature

significant departure from Arnold’s axiomatic confidence that modern philistinism


can be improved with culture. In other words, Tagore does not quite exhibit
Arnoldian conviction with respect to the redemptive qualities of the eternal
horizon of the non-market. Writing at the time of the First World War and the rise
of Japanese militarism – ‘Japan is all science’ Tagore avers in a private letter of
the time66 – it might have seemed to the Indian poet that the philistines had already
won. Indeed, occupying the invidious position of a Nobel-Prize-winning world
poet, accused by some in the West of eastern didacticism and by some in India of
western opportunism, Tagore was bound to be aware – even as he argued against
the principles of modern scientific organisation and the modern egoic politics of
nationalism – that his ‘idealism’ was vulnerable to being co-opted for just those
purposes he opposed. Aesthetic culture was liable to be used against itself in
ways that the nineteenth-century Arnoldian subject seemed not to countenance.
Accepting that there are unarticulated political ironies in the fact of a Bengali poet
viewing modern Japanese culture through Arnoldian eyes, for present purposes
what is most significant is how this transmission of discourse entails an underlying
continuity of global space.
When Yeats composes his own topographical scene in 1930s Dublin, we can
see how this continuity comes eventually to compress the duality of the eternal and
circumstantial horizons into a singular modernist experience.

When I stand upon O’Connell Bridge in the half-light and notice that discordant
architecture, all those electric signs, where modern heterogeneity has taken
physical form, a vague hatred comes up out of my own dark and I am certain
that wherever in Europe there are minds strong enough to lead others the same
vague hatred rises; in four or five or in less generations this hatred will have
issued in violence and imposed some kind of rule of kindred. I cannot know the
nature of that rule, for its opposite fills the light; all I can do to bring it nearer is
to intensify my hatred. (E&I 526)

We can discern the ancestry of Yeats’s ‘modern heterogeneity’ in Tagore’s


‘modern miscellenies’, Arnold’s ‘Saxon hive’ swarming from Liverpool, and
Renan’s worldly, plump and prosperous Norman vulgarity. Within this heritage
modernity is initially positioned as a figure of ambivalence within the cultured
subject (Arnold is Saxon, Renan is Norman) but reveals its more totalising aspect
in Tagore, and then in Yeats. Tagore’s anxiety that his ancient perspective may
be recycled as mere ‘idealism’ prepares the way for the reductive singularity of
Yeats’s meditation in which the eternal horizon has vanished entirely. In its place
we find an intensification of affect: hatred deputises for the missing, aestheticised
second space which had permitted Renan, Arnold, and even Tagore a historical
perspective. Yeats’s compressed mood incites a series of sinister and resentful
associations – ‘violence’, ‘rule of kindred’ – but also their immediate obfuscation:

66
 Krishna Dutta and Andrew Robinson, Rabindranath Tagore: The Myriad-Minded
Man (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995), 200.
Yeatsian Transmissions 63

‘I cannot know the nature of that rule.’ Oppositional politics is deemed impossible
amidst the electric light of revealed modernity. Consequently, we can say that
Yeats occupies the position of Arnoldian subjectivity, indeed addresses himself to
Arnold’s unredeemed historical object – the destitute scene of modern philistinism
– but that he also identifies with that ‘object’ in its perennial exile from a positive
historical destiny. Yeats has translated himself into his own electric sign:
affectivity without content, the theatricality of pure from. It is only thus, as his
own commodity in effect, that the poet is able to reflect in the same essay: ‘I am a
crowd, I am a lonely man, I am nothing’ (E&I 522).
It is tempting to think of Yeats’s excitement here as a product of ‘that low
dishonest decade’ of the 1930s. Certainly the peculiar pressures of European
politics, as well as the increasing power of the Catholic Church in post-Independence
Ireland, must be said to have contributed to the poet’s bad temper. However,
beyond such ready-to-hand sociological explanations, it is worth pondering the
poet’s philosophical narcissism confronting in the spectacle of modernity his own
image. This reflection is not uncommon in Yeats’s work, nor is it confined to the
hectoring final passages of his life. The division of Arnold’s anthropological topos
into eternal and circumstantial elements conforms to Charles Baudelaire’s epoch-
defining conception of artistic beauty outlined in his essay ‘The Painter of Modern
Life’.67 But the dissolution of this seminal distinction for Yeats as he stood on
O’Connell Bridge signals the very crisis of beauty which Baudelaire’s modernist
poetry came to embody. Discordant architecture, electric signs and other such
expressions of modern heterogeneity indicate the diverse extent of the globalised
market, but also its force of compression. When the circumstantial element of the
artwork determines the aesthetic experience, at the same time as obliterating the
eternal, non-modern horizon, it results in an intensification of affect (‘all I can do
[…] is to intensify my hatred’). Here we have the explication of what we have
seen to be implicit throughout all of Yeats’s national investments: namely, that
accompanying his understanding of Ireland as exceptional and non-modern, is
a continual inference of the compressed scene of global modernity. To say that
Yeats’s Ireland is a modernist construct is to recognise how its aesthetic privilege,
linked to its economic and political underdevelopment, is underwritten by a
complexity of international relations: Ireland finds itself outside of itself. It is these
same distant relations that portend a crisis of national and aesthetic distinction
when the authentic space of the nation is dispersed across the globe.

67
 ‘Beauty is made up of an eternal invariable element, whose quantity it is excessively
difficult to determine, and of a relative, circumstantial element, which will be, if you like,
whether severally or all at once, the age, its fashions, its morals, its emotions.’ Charles
Baudelaire, ‘The Painter of Modern Life’, The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays.
Trans. J. Mayne (London: Phaidon Press, 1964), 1–40: 3.
This page has been left blank intentionally
Chapter 2
Folklore and the New World of Text

I deeply regret when I find that some folk-lorist is merely scientific, and lacks the
needful subtle imaginative sympathy to tell his stories well […] I object to the
‘honest folk-lorist’ not because his versions are accurate, but because they are
inaccurate, or rather incomplete.
(‘Poetry and Science in Folklore’, 1890, UP1 174).

Folkloric anthropology always takes the form of a metafiction. Not only are the
folktales themselves manifest fictions, but their framing narratives and anthology
editions tied to cultural and political identities are types of fiction too: fictions which
are less inclined to remain behind the scenes as the facilitating background to the
tales than to obtrude within those tales and take centre-stage as questions, caesurae
and academic opinions on provenance and authenticity. The major effect of this
obtrusive frame is a general textual unevenness in most folkloric anthropology as
the mechanical apparatus of scholarship collides with the production of national
or regional myths.
This textual conspicuousness in books of folklore has often been overlooked
with respect to studies of folk literature from late nineteenth-century Ireland,
the period designated variously the Celtic, the Irish, or the Gaelic Revival. The
common critical concerns to do with the ‘correct’ cultural designation for the
period and the literature it produced, and how any given folk collection might be
situated in the context of Irish politics, more often than not fail to reflect on how
these contemporary questions have already been anticipated and unsettled within
the books they are interrogating. As David Lloyd describes it, the instability of Irish
nineteenth-century literature was due to the different forms of its hybridisation.1
This was especially true of works of translation from Irish into English and was
manifest on the material page. Such variations as dual language editions of poems,
Irish poems with English prose translations, fully English-language editions of
tales with notes describing important Irish-language sources, to say nothing of the
continual re-inventions of the Hiberno-English dialect, inevitably produced a kind
of textual exuberance in nineteenth-century Irish literature.
As well as exploring how the material effects of the translated text structured
the procedures of Revivalist reading and writing about the Irish tradition, this
chapter reconnects the broad tradition of folklore to the epistemological concerns
of Enlightenment modernity: what can truly be known from a reading of the

1
 David Lloyd, Anomalous States: Irish Writing and the Postcolonial Moment
(Dublin: The Lilliput Press, 1993), 92–6.
66 W.B. Yeats and World Literature

anthropological text of ‘the people themselves’ (a favoured term of Yeats’s)?


There are two advantages to reading Yeats within this historical and philosophical
perspective, as I shall be doing. First of all, it reminds us that the uncomfortable
standoff between universalism and regional or national difference which afflicts
the contemporary paradigm of world literature is inherited from a paradox at the
centre of folkloric writing within Europe. Second, it returns us to Yeats’s early
Celtic folklore, not as evidence of his callow romanticism or sentimentality, but as
proof of his modernity.

‘Anthologia Celtica’

James Clarence Mangan’s Songs of the Munster Bards was first published in 1849,
then opportunistically re-published (and revised) twice during the Revival in 1883
and 1901.2 Ostensibly, it is a dual-language text with Irish-language poems mostly
from the eighteenth century on the left-hand page and Mangan’s poetic English
translations on the right. However, the correspondence between the right and left
pages is in no way straightforward since Mangan’s poems were worked up from
prior English prose translations undertaken by the editor John O’Daly (Seán Ó
Dálaigh). O’Daly, we might say, is the suppressed third term here, except that
his too is a conspicuous textual presence through various editorial interventions
made in the same spirit of scholarship which characterised the Transactions of
the Ossianic Society, ranging from discreet footnotes mentioning original sources
or transliterating place names, to extensive biographical essays introducing each
individual poet or ‘bard’, to notes on songs which have their musical notation
included explaining their Jacobite or Fenian origins. Both in its political and
authorial character, then, Songs of the Munster Bards is multiple, even dissonant:
from Mangan’s Celtic melancholy, to the Irish political content of the notes
and songs, to the Irish-language scholarship, first of O’Daly and then of W.M
Hennessey who revised the 1883 edition.
Douglas Hyde’s (An Chraoibín Aoibinn’s) 1893 Love Songs of Connacht
clearly inherits its form from Songs of the Munster Bards, though it is to James
Hardiman’s 1831 Irish Minstrelsy that Hyde refers in his preface. The seanchló-
style font for the Irish-language text is a shared and predictable feature of each
book’s look and Hyde continues the tradition of interspersing biographical essays
of poets with poetic translation – though unlike the Mangan edition Hyde’s essays
appear in both languages. Indeed, Hyde’s text, despite its single-editor status, is
even more proliferative than the Mangan edition, containing both literal and poetic
translations of the same poem. As he puts it in his preface, after identifying the
book’s dual audience of ‘Irishmen who take a just pride in their native language’

2
 James Clarence Mangan, Songs of the Munster Bards, 4th edition (Dublin: James
Duffy and Sons, 1901). W.M. Hennessey in his ‘Preface to the third edition’ refers to this
book as ‘Anthologia Celtica’, iii.
Folklore and the New World of Text 67

and ‘great philologists and etymologists […] hampered in their pursuits through
their unavoidable ignorance of the modern Irish idiom’:

[the book] has given me the opportunity of throwing some of these songs into
English verse – such as it is – in doing which I have differed somewhat from
yourself [the preface is addressed to the translator George Sigerson], Mangan,
Ferguson, and other translators, in endeavouring to reproduce the vowel-rhymes
as well as the exact meters of the original poems. This may give English readers,
if the book ever fall into the hands of any such, some idea of the more ordinary
and less intricate metres of the people, and of the system of Irish interlineal
rhyming, though I fear that the unaccustomed ear will miss most of it. My
English prose translation only aims at being literal, and has courageously,
though no doubt ruggedly, reproduced the Irish idioms of the original.3

There is something almost Cubist about this idea of rendering the same Irish song
twice into English, translating it each time with a different perspective in mind – in
one case the interlineal rhyming of Gaelic prosody, in the other the Irish idiom –
and unfolding both versions onto a single page. Hyde develops this variorum logic
even further by inserting questions, clarifications or variations parenthetically into
his own metrically intricate compositions:

A man can be sorrowful as well as a woman. Here is a little simple song I got
from an old man named O’Fallon in Ballintubber.

LONG AM I GOING
Long am I a-going
Inquiring for a ban-a-t’yee (Hausfrau)
Information of her I did not get
In town or in country.
Till I saw my darling
On the side of the Fairy’s Hill,
Her hair of the three tresses
A sweeping with wind.

Tis a pity without me to be (i.e. that I am not) married.


With the bright treasure of my heart,
On the brink by the great river
Or at the nearer ditch by its side.
Company of young women,
It is they who would raise my heart,
And I would be a year younger
If I were married to my desire.4

3
 Douglas Hyde, Love Songs of Connacht, 1st edition (London: T. Fisher Unwin,
1893), v–vi.
4
 Hyde, Love Songs of Connacht, 25.
68 W.B. Yeats and World Literature

Irregular lineation, lack of rhyme, unfamiliar syntax producing temporal


dislocation, gender confusion, and linguistic diversity, are all characteristics we
associate with early twentieth-century modernist writing. No doubt the reader will
be arrested by ‘Tis a pity without me to be (i.e. that I am not) married’ because of
how the editorial intervention cuts across the integrity of the line. It might seem
obvious that we suppress or refuse to vocalise the five words contained within
the brackets since they ruin Hyde’s internal rhyme and their register is somewhat
dissonant with the rest of the poem. Yet it is equally true that we cannot unread
what we have read, so that no matter how we sub-vocalise the five words we cannot
help but concede their textual conspicuousness. Equally, we might consider how,
even without the words in brackets, the line’s integrity remains questionable with
the Elizabethan-sounding ‘Tis a pity’ running alongside the strongly Hibernicised
‘without me to be married’. Combining linguistic and historical scholarship,
even pedantry, with the idea of a naïve poetic voice (which is itself comprised
of heterogeneous elements) produces an interesting splice effect – a prolepsis of
Pound’s Cantos, perhaps? – whereby it is impossible to tell whether the effect
is that of historical knowledge interrupting the aesthetic, or of a ‘new’ aesthetic
incorporating historical knowledge. Pound’s famous credo that ‘an epic is a poem
containing history’ might lead us only to the conclusion that all poetry, if it is
modern, is epic.
Text is the machine in the garden of the living Irish tradition. As Roland
Barthes characterises it, in his seminal and still helpful essay ‘From Work to Text’,
text is ‘a new object’ which is not, in fact, an object at all, but a ‘stereographic
plurality’. In contrast to what the reader of a canonical ‘work’ appreciates, what
the reader of text perceives ‘is multiple, irreducible, coming from a disconnected,
heterogeneous variety of substances and perspectives’. ‘Incidents’ of text are half-
identifiable: ‘they come from codes which are known but their combination is
unique.’5 This combinatory aesthetic, close also, I maintain, to the anthropological
anachronisms and assemblages Claude Levi-Strauss termed bricolage, is also
apt when considering how to read Songs of the Munster Bards or Love Songs
of Connacht. Instead of inscribing a single tradition, these texts situate a kind
of ‘explosion’ of fragments: different sources, competing political, cultural and
linguistic origins, as well as an ironic proliferation of editorial hinges trying to
keep these fragments together. I have already hinted at the exemplary modernism
of this effect. The scholarly footnotes in T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and the occult
schemas which belong, and yet do not belong, to Joyce’s Ulysses, are only the
most recognisable instances of an editorial and anthropological textuality which
owes a debt to the tradition of folkloric writing.
I propose we situate Yeats within this ‘stereographic’ tradition. Before doing
so however, we should acknowledge and address two significant objections: first,
that as the ideal poet of the living tradition Yeats’s work suppresses rather than

5
 Roland Barthes, ‘From Work to Text’, Image-Music-Text. Trans. Stephen Heath
(New York: Atheneum, 1977), 55–65: 59.
Folklore and the New World of Text 69

articulates textual difference; and second that because Yeats could neither speak
nor write in Irish, he could not hope to emulate the textual self-consciousness of
someone like Hyde.
We should remember that Yeats’s assured critical reputation as a poet of ‘the
living tradition’ and not an ‘international modernist’ (Kenner), mirrors a very
specific version of Ireland as a folkloric entity in itself.6 If we follow Seamus
Deane’s influential argument that Ireland suffered two major historical and
political misrecognitions, which he terms ‘Celtic Revivals’ – one associated with
Edmund Burke in the late eighteenth century, the other with Matthew Arnold in
the mid- to late nineteenth century – then we can account for the nation’s mythical
character as pre-modern, counter-revolutionary, sentimental, organic, traditional,
primitive, constituted of a primitive peasant class and an ancient aristocracy,
and so forth.7 This is by no means an unproblematic or non-contradictory set of
characteristics; and yet it is often, as a matter of critical convention, projected onto
Yeats, the poster boy for a tradition both ancient and English speaking, aristocratic
and peasant-based. Deane’s critique of this ideological version of Yeats, and the
ideology of Celticism more broadly, on the grounds that the myth of an Irish or
Celtic tradition inhibits Ireland’s theoretical conception of itself as a modern state
is, I will argue, too summary in its treatment of the textual means of this myth’s
production.
Deferring for the moment the intricacies of Deane’s presentation, as well as
the major textual examples which will form the basis of my counter-argument,
my central case is as follows: dating back to his early folklore collections, Fairy
and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry (1888), Representative Irish Tales (1891)
and, especially, The Celtic Twilight (1893), the process of cultural idealisation in
Yeats’s folklore is supplemented by an excessive textual self-consciousness. If
Hyde’s multi-lingual, classicist-modernist frontispiece to Love Songs of Connacht,
placing Irish-language and Ancient Greek epigraphs side by side, combined with
his scholarly-aesthetic interventions anticipates the ‘innovation’ of the modernist
lyric-epic form, then the 43 pages of anthropological and folkloric footnotes which
accompany Yeats’s 1899 volume The Wind Among the Reeds, citing Hyde, the
folklorist Patrick Joyce, James Frazer’s The Golden Bough and the Encyclopaedia
Britannica, suggest an affiliated stereographic ethos.
In fact, much work has been done on Yeatsian textuality: Yeats the inveterate
revisionist is ably captured in the numerous studies of his manuscript materials,
as is Yeats the bibliographic encoder by Jerome McGann. McGann emphasises
how, working under the influence of William Morris and the Arts and Crafts
movement in England, Yeats adopted a two-geared approach to publishing his
works, combining artisanal editions with those mass produced by the steam-

6
 Hugh Kenner, ‘The Making of the Modernist Canon’, Mazes: Essays by Hugh
Kenner (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1989), 28–42: 33–4, 37.
7
 Seamus Deane, Celtic Revivals (Winston-Salem, NC: Wake Forest University Press,
1985).
70 W.B. Yeats and World Literature

printing press (a nineteenth-century technology).8 ‘Yeats the last romantic’,


exemplified by the integrated book form of The Wind Among the Reeds with
its symbolic cover inscriptions or by the Dun Emer or Cuala Press collectors’
editions of his work, stands in parallel with ‘Yeats the modernist’ who is forever
at the mercy of technological modernity. An improved understanding of this
morphology throughout Yeats’s canonical works, and the suspicion it casts in
particular on the authoritative Collected Poems (from the first Collected Poems
of 1933 to the standard-issue Richard J. Finneran edition) has already led to a
deeper appreciation for the plurality of the Yeatsian ‘text’. Nonetheless, there is
more to say here regarding the characteristic relation between the romantic and the
modern, and the role of the folkloric within this relation.
As mentioned briefly in the last chapter, George Bornstein develops McGann’s
idea of ‘bibliographic codes’ in order to return the naïve aesthetic experience of
reading Yeats’s poetry to the ‘historicised object’ of the text, which is explicated in
terms of ‘page layout, book design, ink and paper, and typeface as well as broader
issues […] like publisher, print run, price, or audience’.9 One of Bornstein most
telling studies is of the early poem ‘When You are Old’, which opens with the lines,
‘When you are old and grey and full of sleep / And nodding by the fire, take down
this book’. ‘But which book?’ Bornstein asks. Is it the The Countess Kathleen and
Various Legends and Lyrics in which the poem was collected in 1892, or is it rather
the ‘elaborate, full-vellum, gilt-edged manuscript notebook’ entitled The Flame
of the Spirit that Yeats ‘presented to Maud Gonne as a love token’ the previous
year?10 Of course, Bornstein’s primary point is that the poem means something
different depending on the edition in which you read it: the reflexivity of ‘this
book’ encapsulates the broader dilemma of reading any book; to what extent does
the text I’m reading refer and/or depend upon its material form? The aura of ‘the
original manuscript’ of the poem, though inscribed in some subsequent editions in
the form of a dedication to Maud Gonne, is progressively erased as it is reprinted
in Poems 1895, Poems 1899, The Collected Poems, The Variorum Edition of the
Poems of W.B. Yeats, The Norton Anthology, 4th edition and so on. Bornstein’s
is not a straightforward complaint against this de-auratisation of the artwork in
‘the age of its mechanical reproduction’ – he later considers the relative merits of
publishing texts electronically – but rather against the commercial values which
dominate twentieth-century editorial policies.11 Nonetheless, it is impossible to
overlook a very general note of mourning for the lost original in a passage such
as this one:

8
 Jerome McGann, Black Riders: The Visible Language of Modernism (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1993), 3–15.
9
 Bornstein, Material Modernism, 7.
10
 Bornstein, Material Modernism, 47.
11
 Bornstein’s primary term ‘aura’ is taken from Walter Benjamin’s seminal modernist
essay ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, Illuminations. Ed. H.
Arendt, trans. Harry Zorn (London: Pimlico, 1999), 211–44.
Folklore and the New World of Text 71

For the Norton destroys the original bibliographic and contextual codes of
its contents. […] Gone here is any sense of the elaborate early presentations
of ‘When You are Old’ in the manuscript Flame of the Spirit or the printed
books of the nineties, which contributed so much to its meaning and social
embedding. Gone too are those carefully arranged sequences of verse in which
Yeats published the poem. The result is to strip away the historical embedding
of the poem and to present it as a purely linguistic and aesthetic object – without
any gesture towards what Benjamin would call its aura giving it a presence in
time and space, McGann its bibliographic codes gesturing towards its social
construction, or Shillingsburg its qualities of utterance distinguishing it from
sentence. The effect is similar to that of art museums which remove objects from
their historical sites and contexts – whether churches, monasteries, palaces, or
private houses – and place them in museums. Shearing away the iconic semantics
of the original contexts and sites, such museums strengthen the aesthetic aspects
of the objects at the expense of their historical and social ones.12

Bornstein characterises his bibliographic investigations here less as an attempt


to trace the textual process of historical generation or writing than as the
demonstration of an inexorable capitalist logic through which the ‘social and
historical organisation of the work’ has been suppressed in favour of the poem-
as-commodity. Without an equal interrogation of the bourgeois fetishisation of
‘the iconic semantics of original contexts and sites’, however, Bornstein’s sense
of the loss of aura is in danger of becoming un-dialectic melancholia. Is it really
the case, as he avers, that ‘few readers are likely to take the primary referent of
Yeats’s phrase from ‘When You Are Old’, ‘take down this book’, to be the Norton
Anthology of Poetry, 4th edition? If he is right, and this prospect is indeed unlikely,
we ought still to reflect on whether this should be the case: after all, an anthology is
hardly less of a ‘book’ than ‘the gilt-edged manuscript’. Indeed, the intimation of a
sacred text which pervades Yeats’s reflection on ‘this book’, as well as Bornstein’s
on ‘iconic semantics’, might in the end be considered better placed in the Norton if
we recognise the sacred status of the encyclopaedia or anthology-as-book in post-
Enlightenment Europe: the preferred medium of eighteenth-century philosophes,
nineteenth-century philologists, and contemporary popularisers of difficult poetry.
Although replacing the intimate book of love with the sacred book of knowledge
changes the meaning of the poem, it hardly diminishes it.
As well as being an age of careful bibliographic encoding of personal memoirs
and single-author books, the romantic era was rife with co-authored volumes
and anthologies. When Goethe spoke to Eckermann of ‘Weltliteratur’ he had in
mind, to be sure, anthologies of translations which would no doubt suffer from
the very same ‘shearing away’ of original bibliographic codes as the Norton
Anthology. Coleridge and Wordsworth, as is well known, used Thomas Percy’s
The Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765) as a prominent source-book for
Lyrical Ballads (1798). When Johann Gottfried Herder formulated his theories of

12
 Bornstein, Material Modernism, 52–3.
72 W.B. Yeats and World Literature

the Volk he required an intertextual compendium of folksongs translated from a


variety of different languages to support his case, which resulted in his Volkslieder
collections of 1778–79. Yeats, too, counts among his early works at least three
folklore collections. The point here, somewhat at odds with Bornstein’s, is that
folk anthologies create fault lines, unfamiliar juxtapositions and new editorial,
linguistic and poetic joinery. Moreover, this ‘stereographism’ is both a romantic
and a modernist phenomenon. The variorum aesthetic we identified in Mangan’s
and Hyde’s bi-lingual collections of folk literature is of the kind Bornstein abjures
because ‘it is designed for studying rather than for reading’.13 Yet why can we not
say that it exists both for study and for reading in just the same way as vernacular
bibles, say, or modernist poems?
My claim here is that the ‘stereographism’ of the folklore anthology not only
provided Yeats with his early subject matter, the matter of Ireland, but also with
a formative example of writing-as-historical-generation. The Celtic Twilight
is an early indication of this commitment to textual revision. But is it really
‘stereographic’ – does it really pursue the combinatory logic of textual form – if it
has no Irish-language ‘page-left’ to redress the dominance of the English? There
is much to say about Yeats’s ambivalence towards Hyde, and the Irish language
revival in the 1890s more generally, but most immediately we should rule out the
idea that because he could not understand Irish he could not hope to represent
the Irish folk. The commonplace opinion, that Yeats’s linguistic ignorance saw
him ‘eclipsed’ in the field of folklore first by Hyde then by Lady Gregory and
John Millington Synge, whilst understandable as a critical position is fatally
incomplete.14 This is mainly because it elides the difference between Yeats’s
personal lack of access to Irish, and a general lack of access to Irish in modern
Ireland. By the end of the nineteenth century the Irish language existed within the
textual economy as something both nearing extinction and worth preserving. It
was less a fixed origin outside of the English text than a formal sign circulating
within the English text as the question of revival itself: the process of becoming
other than itself, or of being in translation. Therefore, although it is true to say
that Irish is invisible in the Yeatsian text, it is nonetheless effectual in the text’s
symbolic economy just as it is in the first chapter of Joyce’s Ulysses when the
Englishman (Sassenach or foreigner) Haines, compiler of a Celtic chapbook,
speaks to the uncomprehending old woman in Irish. Though his Irish words are
elided, and the Irish language suppressed more generally throughout the novel,
their performative, inquisitive and textual effects are easy to detect from Stephen’s

13
 Bornstein, Material Modernism, 53.
14
 For example, James Pethica’s summary account of Yeats’s engagement with
folklore follows this narrative of the poet’s alienation from and gradual usurpation within
the field. ‘Yeats, Folklore and Irish Legend’, The Cambridge Companion to W.B. Yeats
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 129–44.
Folklore and the New World of Text 73

slightly cross, ‘Do you understand what he says?’ to Buck Mulligan’s Hiberno-
mocking, ‘Is there Gaelic on you?’15
Likewise, the excessive mediations, ellipses, acknowledged misrecognitions
and secrecies of Yeats’s The Celtic Twilight remain faithful to the economy of
extinction and preservation which is the fate of the Irish language and which is
indexed, as we shall see, to the fate of all European folk traditions. The familiar
accusation that Yeats’s occultism is a symptom of his retreat into a symbolic
economy of his own devising, away from the common language and customs of
the Irish folk, misses this point. The folk as both nearing extinction and worthy
of preservation appear always as textually hybrid, stereographic and secretive.
The languages and practices of the folk are occult; and if The Celtic Twilight is an
occult text it is also an essentially folkloric one.

L’esprit de l’escalier or Volksgeist?

In his 1901 essay ‘What is Popular Poetry’, after meditating on the obscure origins
of ‘good’ poetry, Yeats writes:

I learned from the people themselves, before I learned it from any book, that they
cannot separate the idea of an art or a craft from the idea of a cult with ancient
technicalities and mysteries. (E&I 10, my emphasis)

If we were inclined to expect here an account of the immediacy and simplicity


of ‘the people themselves’, Yeats surprises us by emphasising the ‘technicalities’
which underlie the practices of folk life. Folk practices (‘an art or a craft’) are
inextricable from textual secrets (‘ancient technicalities and mysteries’) and
thus produce, to cite Barthes once more, ‘a methodological field’. The people
themselves are textual inasmuch as they are not comprehensive (they do not
reveal a single meaning), but metonymic, signalling an ‘activity of associations,
contiguity, carryings-over [which] coincides with a liberation of symbolic energy’.
16
It is in this way that, for Yeats, the people precede the ‘book’.
In order to understand better ‘the people themselves’-as-text, and their place
in Irish Revival writing, we might consider a brief scene from John Millington
Synge’s ethnographic memoir, The Aran Islands, written in the same year as Yeats’s
essay on popular poetry. Throughout this text Synge is by no means uncritical of

15
 James Joyce, Ulysses (London: Penguin, 1992), 16.
16
 ‘[T]he work is a fragment of substance, occupying a part of the space of books
(in a library for example), the text is a methodological field. […] The logic regulating the
Text is not comprehensive (define ‘what the work means’) but metonymic; the activity
of associations, contiguity, carryings-over coincides with a liberation of symbolic energy
(lacking it, man would die); the work – in the best of cases – is moderately symbolic (its
symbolic runs out, comes to a halt); the Text is radically symbolic: a work conceived,
perceived and received in its integrally symbolic nature is a text.’ Barthes, ‘From Work to
Text’, 156–7, 158–9.
74 W.B. Yeats and World Literature

the Islanders he encounters, noting how close their primitive vision sits to the
banality of their peasant lives; nor is he uncritical of his own expectations as one
entrusted with an anthropological mission. For example, he is unafraid to describe
the boredom and frustration he experienced during his several summers staying on
the Islands between 1898 and the writing of the book, the constant vacillation he
found there between misery and splendour: ‘[I]t is only in the intonation of a few
sentences or some old fragment of melody that I catch the real spirit of the island,
for in general the men sit together and talk with endless iteration of the tides and
the fish, and of the price of Kelp in Connemara.’17 My nominated scene concerns a
moment of Synge’s whimsy which brings into focus this frustration with the search
for the ‘real spirit of the Island’. He is spending time with a young boy of ‘about
fifteen’ who is ‘singularly intelligent, with a real sympathy for the language and
the stories we read’.18 For the most part they are reading dual language editions
of folktales with the Irish and the English printed side by side; though the only
named text is Douglas Hyde’s Beside the Fire (1893). The intertextuality here is
not insignificant.
Synge is concerned to portray the boy as intelligent and critical, sceptical even,
but also as residually credulous or naïve:

One day I alluded to my trick of joining string.

‘You can’t join a string, don’t be saying it,’ [the boy] said; I don’t know what
way you’re after fooling us, but you didn’t join that string, not a bit of you.’19

Synge’s magic trick, described earlier in the book, of fooling the Islanders into
thinking he had miraculously re-joined a piece of cut string had been met by the
older people with a frank acceptance of it as a ‘supernatural’ phenomenon.20 The
boy, by contrast, begins to understand it for a trick. Synge clearly appreciates this
note of critical suspicion in the boy; and yet we might detect also an accompanying
note of melancholy since this exemplar of sharp island wit signals the dissolution
of Synge’s object of study: the primitive and the magical. It is little surprise, then,
that the folklorist and his subject ‘nearly quarrel’

because he wanted me to take his photograph in his Sunday clothes from Galway,
instead of his native homespuns that become him far better, though he does not
like them as they seem to connect him with the primitive life of the island. With
his keen temperament, he may go far if he can ever step out into the world.21

From Synge’s perspective, the boy by crossing to Galway is in danger of forsaking


his primitiveness and becoming a mere provincial. Synge, it seems, is invested

17
 J.M. Synge, The Aran Islands (New York: Dover Publications, 1998), 25.
18
 Synge, The Aran Islands, 77.
19
 Synge, The Aran Islands, 78.
20
 Synge, The Aran Islands, 72.
21
 Synge, The Aran Islands, 78.
Folklore and the New World of Text 75

in saving him from this fate, and from that of the world. By asserting that the
boy’s ‘native homespuns […] become him far better’, Synge seeks to preserve,
according to an aesthetic rule, a sense of anthropological ‘wonder’. This then
becomes their next topic of conversation: their names are, they agree (after some
hedging on Synge’s part), a ‘wonder’ to each other.
However, the reader may also wonder: not whether Synge is invested in
preserving folkloric enchantment (undoubtedly he is), but whether he can do so
without admitting to himself the ‘trick’ of folkloric enchantment. This is where
Synge’s ‘trick of joining string’ comes into full focus as a textual mechanism for
reflecting the Islanders’ ‘trick’ of primitiveness and credulity. Might it be that the
Islanders themselves are like miraculously complete strings in a world otherwise
cut up and dissociated? Might the Islanders’ apparent credulity in the face of
Synge’s ‘magic’ belie a deeper mockery at Synge’s credulity in the face of theirs?
Is Synge’s idle performance an unconscious recognition of his own desire to be
tricked and amazed? Is he, in other words, tricking himself? These possibilities of
projection and mirroring inform Synge’s simple interpretation of the boy’s critical
savvy as a modernising shift away from the primitive credulity of his parents.
The secret alternative is that the boy has failed to disguise his critical intelligence
with an appropriate image of primitiveness. Synge concedes as much by the act
of taking the boy’s photograph with ‘his native homespuns on’, knowing full well
the preferred alternative. The resulting photograph of ‘the primitive island boy’,
whom we know to be a boy familiar with the pangs of provincial and worldly
ambition, is a trick of primitive mystique which Synge clearly sees through but
at the same time invests in preserving. His anthropological double vision reminds
the reader that enchantment does not die when the means of its production become
apparent.
Synge’s work can reasonably be said to anticipate the field-work methodologies
of Bronislaw Malinowski, which came to supplant the ‘armchair anthropology’
of nineteenth-century authors such as James Frazer.22 This is so because, as an
auto-critical depiction of the offices of the anthropologist, The Aran Islands
foregrounds an account of the ethnographic encounter. The boy Synge encounters
is a repository but also a reader of folk literature: Synge’s depiction of the boy
as living tradition is already also a scholar’s archive, with Hyde’s books sitting
visibly on the shelves. These ironic notations encapsulate the peculiar reflexivity
of the Irish cultural revival and the fictional qualities of its founding object – the
Irish peasant.
But where do we situate Yeats in this intertextual field?

22
 Malinowski’s Argonauts of the Western Pacific: An account of native enterprise
and adventure in the Archipelagoes of Melanesian New Guinea, 1922, is widely regarded
as a seminal text in the development of the anthropological methodological field, especially
its reflections upon ethnography as a practice. Bronislaw Malinowski, Argonauts of the
Western Pacific (Abingdon: Routledge, 1922).
76 W.B. Yeats and World Literature

Give up Paris, you will never create anything by reading Racine, and Arthur
Symons will always be a better critic of French literature. Go to the Aran Islands.
Live there as if you were one of the people themselves, express a life that has
never found expression. (E&I 299, my emphasis)

It was thus, using once more a favoured term, ‘the people themselves’, that Yeats
recalled inspiring Synge with the Geist der Volk; a memory deemed little more
than a fancy by most critics nowadays, a Yeatsian esprit de l’escalier intended
to take a good part of the credit away from another writer’s originality. Before
meeting Yeats, Synge was already attending lectures on Celtic civilizations at the
Sorbonne and possessed a scholarly interest in the Irish language which Yeats
could not match. After their meeting, Synge continued to learn Irish, attended
further lectures by Marie Henri d’Arbois de Jubainville, and dedicated a large
portion of his energies to a field study of the Irish peasant class. There is little doubt
that de Jubainville, contributing expert on the Grimm library’s The Cuchullin Saga
and in the 1890s preparing the ground for his Cours de Littérature Celtique, was
a more estimable scholarly authority on the cultural history of Ireland than Yeats’s
Celtic avatar, the Tory ‘gentleman’, man of letters and author of Early Bardic
Literature of Ireland (1879), Standish O’Grady. Such an unflattering scorecard
might lead us to think of Yeats’s self-aggrandising retrospect as nothing more than
a symptom of his exclusion from scholarly circles. It has long been suggested
that Yeats’s equally grandiose and retrospective claim that he and Lady Gregory
sought not the reality of the peasant but of the ‘peasant’s imagination’ indicated
his final abandonment of the material concerns of the historical Irish peasant. This
may be so, but we should be wary of interpreting the poet’s vampiric preference
for the nutritional worth of the peasant imagination as a simple dereliction of the
peasant’s mortal reality. Yeats’s ‘idealism’ has itself become a consoling myth
to those critics who would rather not consider the production of his texts. We
might consider instead, and against the critical grain, how the poetic, synthetic
and indeed surrealist aspects of the Yeatsian folklore gesture at the difficulty of
historical representation.
For example, in the third section of The Celtic Twilight we are introduced to
‘a man with a Mohawk tattooed upon his arm’: ‘No matter what one doubts, one
never doubts the faeries, for, as the man with the Mohawk Indian on his arm said,
they stand to reason’ (CT 93 11–12; CT 02 8).23 Here is a comic, obtrusive and
explicitly textual character standing in for the Irish peasant. I shall have to say
more about the irony of his appearance later, but for now we should concentrate
only on how he strikes the reader as fabricated and dreamlike: almost a clown.
Fast-forward to the automatic transcription performed by George Yeats from 1917
and thereafter translated by Yeats for A Vision (1925; 1937) and we have little
problem appreciating the exemplarily modernist and proto-surrealist proliferation
of the Yeatsian text. Not only are there two bodies (Yeats’s and his wife’s) involved

23
 W.B. Yeats, The Celtic Twilight, 1893 and 1902 editions, respectively. The problem
of editions will be explained below.
Folklore and the New World of Text 77

in the combinatory act of writing, but the screed, though apparently spontaneous
and expressive, reflects an impressive depth of book learning. Return to the man
with the Mohawk tattoo standing in a work of nineteenth-century Irish or Celtic
folklore, invoking both ‘reason’ and ‘faeries’ in the same sentence, and we may
reflect how the archive and naïve life collide in a work of folklore just as much
as in an act of automatic writing. According to Yeats, mediumistic writing is
fragmentary and uneven:

In the middle of one subject another will be interpolated; solemn sentences,


in the midst of matter of fact statement, sometimes a meaningless sentence
where all the rest is plain. […] The mood shifts, the surface seems to melt away
and then another surface and another – a perpetual change of consciousness –
allegory or vague religious sentences […] interrupting some practical advice [or
information] often so definite and simple that we seem talking merely to some
particularly business-like and well-informed acquaintance.24

He could easily be writing about folklore here. The ‘communicators’ and


‘frustrators’, those ghostly presences standing behind the text of A Vision, who
variously communicate and withhold their knowledge, share a hermeneutic
function with the folk informant. The proliferation of a text which appears in
different voices, on different registers, yet holds within it an original obscurity, is
without doubt a legacy of the folkloric anthology – an early production of world
literature on the European scale. It has a particular resonance certainly as the
preserved record of a nearly extinct language in Ireland, but reflects also the more
general condition of the European folk who are always found in translation, as
well as in the hybrid forms of modern poetry. It is to this broad inheritance that we
shall now turn and, in particular, to the line of J.G. Herder’s formative collocation
of poetry and the Volk, in order to explain why our characterisation of Yeats’s
folklore is not simply a matter of late nineteenth-century Irish cultural expression,
but also of modern thought.

The Paradoxes of the European Folk

It is indisputable that folklore was both historically germane to modern scientific


and encyclopaedic impulses and methodologically consolidated by science once
natural science had been valorised in eighteenth-century Europe.25 Its emphasis

24
 Excerpted from George Mills Harper’s Yeats and the Occult (London: Macmillan,
1976), 130–71, in Armstrong, Modernism, 126.
25
 Diarmuid O’Giollain, underlining the context of Enlightenment scientism and
political modernity from which the study of folklore emerged, states that ‘Folklore is
predicated on the death of tradition’: ‘“Folklore” was conceptualised towards the end of
the eighteenth century, coined as a word in 1846 and institutionalised from the end of the
nineteenth century on.’ O’Giollain, Locating Irish Folklore: Tradition, Modernity, Identity
(Cork: Cork University Press, 2000), 8, 32.
78 W.B. Yeats and World Literature

upon collecting, archiving, and categorising tell us this much. And yet, although
folklore en-framed the modern scientific conception of the world, and was itself
unafraid to enlist the powerful idea of natural authenticity, it also provided a means
of preserving the inauthentic, the forged, the invented and the merely imagined.
As we shall see, it was through a corresponding theory of poetic language, and
its relation to ‘the folk’ and folkloric representation, that this kind of preservation
could be viewed as its own form of knowledge.
The fact that Yeats’s affinity with the broad European tradition of folkloric
writing has hardly been acknowledged is a consequence of two critical conventions:
the tendency to view Yeats as removed from the mainline of European thought
and a conviction that Yeats’s folklore is best read politically as an ideological
inheritance from Edmund Burke and Matthew Arnold. In Celtic Revivals, Seamus
Deane describes successive Celtic Revivals in the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries as ‘part of the history of European Romanticism’ and yet, significantly,
his argument remains almost exclusively focussed on the legacy of Burke and
Arnold. Indeed he argues that Yeats’s development of a traditional aesthetic is
only comprehensible in the light of Burkean and Arnoldian assumptions about the
Celt and the Anglo-Saxon.26 After observing a sectarian division emerging from
the tradition of Celticism, between those for whom a more specifically Gaelic
revival at the beginning of the twentieth century constituted a grand narrative of
continuity – the Irish Catholics – and those for whom such political specificity
constituted an historical betrayal – the Anglo-Irish Protestants – Deane suggests
that Yeats’s Celticism ends up as a form of Anglo-Irish disgruntlement powered
by his alienation from an Irish tradition he had once imaginatively sustained. This
in turn, Deane contends, leads the poet to chauvinistically overwrite the complex
reality of modern Ireland.27

26
 Deane, Celtic Revivals, 28–50.
27
 It has been suggested that Deane displays a naïve belief in the possibility of
disentangling Yeats’s mythical sensibility from historical actuality here. See Peter
McDonald, Serious Poetry: Form and Authority from Yeats to Hill (Oxford: Clarendon,
2007), 151. Certainly I would agree that it marks a limit of Deane’s project that he prefers to
consider Yeats’s myth-making as politically suspicious. His occasional failure to recognise
this limit leaves him open to over-assertive statements about romanticism and aesthetics. For
instance, in Celtic Revivals he notes that romanticism (which he nominates as the tradition
of Coleridge, Blake, Carlyle and William Morris) considered history as ‘essentially engaged
with the imagination and, therefore, almost indistinguishable from aesthetics’ (30). This is a
problem, according to Deane, because it puts historical reality in the service of myth. In the
specifically Irish context he notes that John Millington Synge and Austin Clarke, as well as
Yeats, created ‘imaginatively useful’ rather than ‘historically accurate’ ideas about Ireland,
‘yielding a sense of the artist’s enterprise in a world which, without these metaphorical
suasions, would remain implacably hostile’ (32). As a consequence of trying to expose this
historical ‘inaccuracy’, Deane ends up impoverishing Yeats’s whole aesthetic into an ideal
obligation ‘to despise the modern world, and to seek rescue from it’ (33), which raises a
reflective question about Deane’s own apparent access to the material of history.
Folklore and the New World of Text 79

Deane broadens this argument in the lectures which make up Strange Country.28
Once again he locates the peculiarity of Ireland within the Europe-wide discourse
of ‘the Celt’ and Celticism, but here contends, more powerfully, that the modern
invention of the Irish tradition emerged from a reactionary sentiment, especially
that propounded by Burke in the wake of the French Revolution. He describes how
the traditional continuity of the Irish nation was an idea adopted and tutored by
Burke in order to recall the commercial culture of modern England to her proper
self against the threat of modern revolution embodied by the French Republic. The
projected national character of Ireland was, in this view, little more than a means of
finessing the philistine tendencies of England. And it was fated to become, through
the political Act of Union in 1801, a cultural guarantor of Britishness: a model of
modern economic statehood which could ideologically deny the modern, French
Republican theory of the state through the strategic mobilisation of nostalgia. To
live under the sign of Burke’s Celticism, and in particular its inflection as the
‘folklorish’ tradition, was to live with a theoretical deficit. Here is Deane on
Burke’s idea of tradition:

It is the aesthetic of the actual – an aesthetic which refuses the inclusion of


distance and impartiality or disinterestedness as integral to its structure. And
that aesthetic is conjoined with its political counterpart, the attribution to a
community of a psychology that celebrates the actual, that remains immersed in
the local, the folklorish – or, more importantly, refuses the theoretical.29

This results in a central irony for Deane, namely that Burke’s tradition, his idea
of traditional continuity, relies upon a central absence or loss of tradition, and
therefore has nostalgia inscribed at its core. The life of tradition relies upon its
own obituaries. By implication, as a proponent of the Irish tradition – which is
always, surreptitiously, an Anglo-Irish tradition – Yeats follows in the footsteps of
Burke, as well as of other influential Celticists such as James Macpherson whose
Ossianic poems in the 1760s promoted folkloric and mythic images of national
particularity at a time when the Act of Union between Scotland and England was
an accomplished fact. Indeed, Macpherson’s poems provide the most useful co-
ordinate here, since once they were controversially ‘exposed’ as being invented, or
synthesised from a number of anachronistic sources, rather than, as Macpherson
once claimed, translated from an original Gaelic manuscript, they were seen to
exemplify the ideology of mourning for a tradition that had never existed.30 It

28
 Seamus Deane, Strange Country: Modernity and Nationhood in Irish Writing since
1790 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997).
29
 Deane, Strange Country, 19.
30
 Deane is not the only critic to point out the precedent of Scotland with respect to the
rise of cultural nationalism in Ireland: Fiona Stafford, Luke Gibbons and Howard Gaskill
have all noted it. Howard Gaskill, Ossian Revisited (1991), and ‘Herder, Ossian and the
Celtic’, Celticism. Ed. Terence Brown (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1994), 257–72; Fiona Stafford,
The Sublime Savage (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1988); Luke Gibbons, ‘The
Sympathetic Bond: Ossian, Celticism and Colonialism’, Celticism, 272–92.
80 W.B. Yeats and World Literature

was these same stereographic ‘epics’ of the Scottish tradition, we might suggest,
that inscribed the original blemish on the Celtic imaginary: namely that the Celtic
tradition is invented and therefore inauthentic.
I have précised Deane’s work here not only because it has been so influential
in its own right, but also because it typifies to some degree the current orthodoxy
on Celtic and/or Irish Revivalist politics. While his attempts to understand the
production and representation of the category ‘Celt’ and to overturn naïve or
racial readings of Irish cultural exceptionalism should be welcomed, I suspect that
his valuation of the revolutionary state (and its theory) over the idea of national
tradition underestimates the theoretical and aesthetic aspects of folk traditionalism.
I believe this can be accounted for by his reading of Burke, whose anti-revolutionary
unionism is seen to underwrite more general conceptions of national character
and folklore. The alternative European heritage that I propose emerges from the
thought of Herder whose conception of the Volk and national character might be
seen to be both critical and theoretical. By locating Herder as a touchstone in our
ongoing consideration of Yeats’s folkloric writing I want to suggest they share a
textual predicament. Although this is not a study of direct influence – I am not
claiming that Yeats had anything more than a passing familiarity with Herder’s
work – certainly we can say that the traditions of folklore and Celticism inherited
by Yeats owe as much, if not more, to Herder as they do to Burke.31
The idea of the Volk, designating for Herder the cohesive power or expressive
genius of every individual nation, had a Celtic aspect at its inception. When
Herder published his Volkslieder in 1778 it contained three translated fragments
from Macpherson’s Ossianic poems, a work which he had already recommended
for translation in the face of the scandal of their origin to other luminaries on
the German cultural scene, including Goethe. He was effusive in his praise of
Celtic Geist, writing of its savage lyricism, ‘Know then, that the more savage,
that is the more freedom loving a people is, the more savage, that is, alive, free,
sensuous, lyrically active its songs must be’.32 He even used Ossian as an example
for Germany, ‘You believe that we Germans should also have many more such
poems as I indicated when speaking of Scottish romance – I not only believe it, but
I know it’.33 ‘[A]live, free, sensuous, lyrically active’ are all significant terms here,

31
 Yeats certainly did have access to broader European ideas of the folk and folk
art through his contact with William Morris in particular, but also through the cultural
influences of Carlyle, Ruskin and Pater.
32
 J.G. Herder, ‘Excerpt from a Correspondence on Ossian and the Songs of Ancient
Peoples’ (1773), The Rise of Modern Mythology: 1680–1860. Ed. Feldman, Burton and
Richardson, Jr. (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1972), 228–30: 229.
33
 Herder, ‘Excerpt from a Correspondence on Ossian and the Songs of Ancient
Peoples’, 229. Herder’s correspondence on the subject of Ossian with the Irish soldier
Harold raised his suspicions about the authenticity of the poems, yet his enthusiasm for them
exceeded mere antiquarian doubt. The reasons for this are, as we shall see, philosophical.
For a fuller discussion of this topic, see H.T. Betteridge, ‘The Ossianic poems in Herder’s
Volkslieder’, The Modern Language Review 30.3 (July 1935): 334–8.
Folklore and the New World of Text 81

suggesting at once the picturesque attributes of another more primitive culture


than his own and the ethical values which Herder would like his Kultur to emulate.
There is no doubt that Herder was pitching his ideas of Kultur and Volk in
the bright light of the Enlightenment; no matter how he critiqued the claims of
rationalism and cosmopolitanism, or, speaking politically, eighteenth-century
French expansionism, his project for ‘making’ a culture reflected encyclopaedic
and natural-scientific methodologies.34 For example, when he writes that ‘the
mythology of every people is an expression of the particular mode in which they
viewed nature’, he makes an implicit claim to understand nature and the structure
of ‘genius’ which is common to the huge variety of cultural expressions in the
world.35 Even as each nation is assured of its unique character, it is inevitably
placed within a larger anthropological narrative and understood according to both
its geography and level of historical development. Herder enacts this same world-
literature paradox where the exceptional culture is also universally exemplary by
translating, indeed mistranslating, folksongs from other cultures into the German
language and anthologising them.36 How is the multifarious collection Volkslieder
possible – a collection which includes Spanish ballads, Italian folksongs as well as
English, German, Nordic and Scottish songs – without our admission on Herder’s
behalf that he has failed to capture the expression of any culture apart from his
own? After all, each foreign expression not only originates within a particular
culture but also expresses a particular understanding of nature which is alien to the
German understanding.
But even when accepting that his translations constitute a ragtag of
appropriations whose representations are essentially alien to the perspective of
any other culture than the German, Herder has not resolved the broader question of
modern exploitation. The apparently innocent gesture of affirming other cultures as
‘unknowable’ – the ‘savage’ Celt for example – still identifies them as recognisable
ideas to be manipulated. Folklore as it was formalised in the nineteenth century

34
 Critics have long abandoned the idea that Herder was an irrationalist simply
opposed to the ideas of the French Enlightenment. As F.M. Barnard is quick to point out,
Herder’s idea of nationhood was not an atavistic retrenchment in the face of intellectual
revolution: ‘Herder was undoubtedly among the first to acclaim the French Revolution not
as a cataclysmic lapse of continuity but as the most continuously significant occurrence since
the Reformation. Similarly, despite pioneering the idea of nationhood in its modern sense,
he was fully awake to the dangers of racist variants and ethnic imperialism.’ F.M. Barnard,
Herder on Nationality, Humanity, and History (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press,
2003), 4–5. R.E. Norton makes a similarly succinct case for considering the sophistication
of Herder’s response to the Enlightenment’s rationalism: ‘This traditional view of Herder
as an irrational iconoclast, as the irresistible opponent of a moribund Enlightenment, has
by now lost much of its argumentative force and integrity.’ Herder’s Aesthetics and the
European Enlightenment (Ithaca; London: Cornell University Press, 1991), 1.
35
 J.G. Herder, ‘Reflections on the Philosophy of the History of Mankind’, The Rise of
Modern Mythology: 1680–1860, 233.
36
 Betteridge, ‘The Ossianic poems in Herder’s Volkslieder’, 334–5.
82 W.B. Yeats and World Literature

is exemplary in this respect. Although its increasingly ‘scientific’ and universalist


approach to collecting folk artefacts seems in outright contradiction to Herder’s
valorisation of the incommensurable life of different Volk traditions, it is equally
true that the objectification of folk cultures is made easier once a particular
culture’s life expression is deemed self-sufficient and meant only for itself. Indeed,
we might say that the nineteenth-century folklorists deliberately cultivated the
illusion that the folk were self-sufficient and entirely unaffected by the gaze of the
folklorist in order to facilitate collecting and archiving folk ‘objects’. In this way,
the essential, unknowable life of Herder’s Volk traditions became the philosophical
condition – the desired but inaccessible ‘thing-in-itself’– for a universal, modern
representation of the folk.
Hans Georg Gadamer describes this problem, whereby the folkloric impulse
towards historical relativism promotes a universalist perspective, as one of the
paradoxes of romanticism. Just as the practice of promoting particular cultures
ends up availing itself of Enlightenment techniques of collecting, archiving and
classifying, so the apparent rejection of scientific method in favour of emotional
sympathy creates convenient forms for future scientific projects:

The great achievements of romanticism – the revival of the past, the discovery of
the voices of the peoples in their songs, the collecting of fairy tales and legends,
the cultivation of ancient customs, the discovery of worldviews implicit in
languages, the study of the ‘religion and wisdom of India’ – all contributed to
the rise of historical research, which was slowly, step by step, transformed from
intuitive revival into detached historical knowledge.37

Herder’s, and later Yeats’s, ‘intuitive revivals’ are implicated in this process of
turning other cultures into a resource for the modern European subject. According
to Gadamer, by archiving these resources – exotic scenes, images of primitive
life – justifying them, and making them, at least from a formal perspective,
understandable, romanticism results in a ‘radicalisation of the Enlightenment
project’.38 This leads directly to the age of historicism:

Nineteenth-century historiography […] is the last step in the liberation of the


mind from the trammels of dogma, the step to objective knowledge of the
historical world, which stands on a par with the knowledge of nature achieved
by modern science. 39

This returns us to Deane’s standard critique of Celticism and the Irish tradition,
where he understands the romantic myths of the past to support a reactionary
ideology. Now that we have followed how this anti-modern form of modernity
– the tradition which is designated by Gadamer as romanticism – prepares for

37
 Hans Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method. Trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G.
Marshall, 2nd edition (London: Sheed and Ward, 2001), 275.
38
 Gadamer, Truth and Method, 275.
39
 Gadamer, Truth and Method, 275.
Folklore and the New World of Text 83

rather than obstructs the growth of scientific knowledge, we can ask a further
question of Deane’s characterisation of modern theory. ‘Theory’, for Deane, as the
commitment to reflecting on society at a productive distance from customary life,
is undermined by the Irish folk tradition’s commitment to particularity and what
he terms ‘the aesthetic of the actual’. Yet if we follow Gadamer’s thought, that the
theoretical conception of the world would seem to depend on forms of romantic
identification with a particular artefact or structure of feeling, then we enter a
more difficult terrain. Although the analytic impulse of modern science works to
distinguish authentic from inauthentic materials – the ‘historically accurate’ from
the ‘imaginatively useful’ as Deane puts it in Celtic Revivals – it is nonetheless
dependent on these materials being discovered, invented or synthesised by the
agency of romanticism so they exist in the first place and can be given over for
analysis. Do we suggest, in light of this persistent question of historical origin,
that theory supports the analytic method of natural science and nineteenth-
century historiography against the romantic myths of national traditions, or do
we characterise theory more broadly as that which also grounds the process of
synthesis and literary combination manifest in these traditions – which would be
to say that without these traditions there is no theory? My question, then, is, can
we find, pace Deane, through the terms of the folk tradition the beginnings of a
literary and textual conception of theory?40
Certainly we find in Herder’s writing seminal acts of resistance to the
reduction of theory and science to the analytic method. It follows from this
that the characterisation of Herder as an unwitting contributor to the method of
scientific historicism is only partial. By contending that ‘making’, ‘expressing’
and ‘synthesising’ are forms of human knowledge every bit as important as those
results of analysis which had so dominated the advance of the natural sciences
in the eighteenth century, Herder implies that the national folk traditions formed
out of these acts cannot be seen as simple objects offered for analysis. This is
what allows him to endorse the ‘alive, free, sensuous, lyrically active’ qualities of
Macpherson’s Ossianic fragments, even once their historical authenticity has been
called into question by scientific antiquarianism, and even when they are ‘known’
only through egregious mistranslations. Macpherson’s work should be assessed
according to judgement of its expressive, syncretic quality as well as according to
historical scholarship.
This judgement is itself a species of Enlightenment thought, of course; but
even if the claim to be able to judge the effect of Macpherson’s language is
universalising, it allows the origin of this language to remain obscured in a way that
the analytic method would not allow. Herder’s remarks on this crucial difference
can be found in an early work, ‘Essay on Being’ (1764), where he describes

40
 Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy find in German Romanticism the
birth of literary theory. This ‘literary absolute’ suggests a fruitful way of thinking about the
theoretical provenance of the folk and also of disrupting strictly rationalist conceptions of
theory. The Literary Absolute: The Theory of Literature in German Romanticism, 12.
84 W.B. Yeats and World Literature

the difference between the Newtonian method – where natural phenomena are
understood according to scientific laws – and the experience of sensation.41 He
develops the distinction, which emerged from Locke and Baumgarten’s nascent
‘science of aesthetics’, between strict scientific logic and ‘sensate cognition’,
where the latter implies a knowledge produced by sensation different in kind from
that produced by analysis.

Since aesthetics in general is closely related to our bosom, since it deals with the
subtlest experiences of sensation, instead of with principles of reason, its coil
is also more difficult to unwind than that of other, more complex metaphysical
concepts.42

Aesthetic sensation here can be characterised paradoxically as both simple and


difficult: it is ‘not’ such a ‘complex metaphysical concept’, yet ‘its coil’ is also
‘difficult to unwind’. This is because sensation provides the occasion for two
conflicting inclinations: one intent on tracing an effect to its objective cause
or origin, the other determined to capture the power of the effect. In fact, there
are two potential objects here, an object of analysis and a felt object, where
knowledge of the latter depends on keeping its origins obscure. If in order to know
a sensation one must be subject to or must live with its power, then an attempt to
clarify the sensation according to its causes may work out as an affront to true
knowledge. Herder was sympathetic to this paradoxical perspective, and sought to
derive knowledge from expressive sensation while insisting on a level of original
obscurity. He termed this kind of knowledge ‘sensate’ or ‘dark’ cognition.43

41
 Again, we can see how Yeats inherited the structure of Herder’s thought when
repeatedly expressing his dissatisfaction with what he deemed to be the mechanistic
vision of a Lockean universe: ‘Locke sank into a swoon; / The garden died; / God took the
spinning-jenny / Out of his side’ (VP 439).
42
 J.G. Herder, Sämmtliche Werke. Ed. Bernhard Suphan, Vol. IV (Berlin:
Weidmannsche Buchhandlung, 1877), 21; quoted in Norton, Herder’s Aesthetics and the
European Enlightenment, 2.
43
 ‘[A]ll of my representations are sensate – they are dark – sensate and dark were long
ago proven to be synonymous expressions’ (Herder, ‘Essay on Being [Versuch über das
Sein]’, Werke, 11). Norton provides an excellent close reading of this essay. See Herder’s
Aesthetics and the European Enlightenment, 11–50. For a discussion of the positive
valuation of obscurity and its relation to the science of aesthetics see also Jeffrey Barnouw:
‘There are many passages in Herder’s writings where “dark” or “obscure ideas” take on a
particular power and resonance. Is this part of an irrationalist reaction against Enlightenment
epistemology? […] on the contrary […] Herder’s positive evaluation of the obscure carries
forward a main theme of Leibniz’s insight into the virtues of confused ideas.’ Barnouw,
‘The Cognitive Value of Confusion and Obscurity in the German Enlightenment: Leibniz,
Baumgarten, and Herder’, Studies in Eighteenth Century Culture 241 (1995), 29–50: 29.
The terrain set out by Barnouw suggests why Herder, though possessing a critical impulse
to bring obscure truths to distinctness, begins to formally recognise mankind’s habituation
in darkness, and the indistinctness of man’s original consciousness which ends up having to
be excavated from under the blaze of clear and distinct objects.
Folklore and the New World of Text 85

The simplicity of the folk – often characterised as naivety or primitiveness


– retains the paradoxical difficulty which belongs to sensation. The scientific
explanation of the folk according to a universal, anthropological law of folk
origins, while it makes sense as a political or historical narrative, forecloses
a certain sensate experience of folk life. The further danger inherent in this
foreclosure is the reduction of all folk traditions to an identical set of conditions.
Herder makes the theoretical link between his interest in the Volk and ‘dark’ or
‘sensate’ cognition in his ‘Essay on the Origin of Language’.

The Imperfection of Language

In ‘Essay on the Origin of Language’ (1772), Herder argues both against the ‘divine
origin of language’ and against the view that language is what distinguishes man
(and man’s soul) from animals. Instead he writes that ‘[w]hile still an animal, man
already has language’.44 The position here, premised on the physicality of language,
its ‘nervous structure’, is in keeping with the profane qualities of Herder’s work as
evidenced by his writing on the Hebraic tradition where he insists that the sacred
book of the Bible should be viewed as a piece of folk literature.45 Interestingly,
however, his is a profanity pitched against the piety of a strand of Enlightenment
enquiry, as well as of traditional religion.

One of the upholders of the divine origin of language discerns and admires
divine order in the fact that all the sounds of all the languages known to us can
be reduced to some twenty odd letters. Unfortunately the fact is wrong, and the
conclusion still wronger. There is no language whose living tones can be totally
reduced to letters, let alone to twenty.46

Herder shows how the theological assumption that language is of divine origin is
allied to an analytic reduction of language to a set of fundamental components –
i.e. letters. The implication is that man’s privileged link with God is based upon
rational order which is exhibited by the grammar of language. In other words, only

44
 J.G. Herder, ‘Essay on the Origin of Language’, On the Origin of Language: Jean-
Jacques Rousseau and Johann Gottfried Herder. Trans. J.H. Moran and A. Gode (New
York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Co, 1966), 85–166: 87.
45
 Herder did not reject the divine metaphysic outright but he did grant a kind of
divine agency to the poet. Instead of imitating what the transcendent God had already
created – static nature – the poet genius is endowed with the ability to imitate the act of
creation itself. ‘In giving names to all, and ordering all from the impulse of his own inward
feeling, and with reference to himself, he becomes an imitator of the Divinity, a second
Creator, a true poetes, a creative poet’ (Herder, ‘The Spirit of Hebrew Poetry’, The Rise
of Modern Mythology: 1680–1860, 236–41: 240). This is the philosophical antecedent to
Yeats’s famous metaphor of the lamp: ‘that soul must become its own betrayer, its own
deliverer, the one activity, the mirror turn lamp’ (OBMV xxxiii).
46
 Herder, ‘Essay on the Origin of Language’, 92.
86 W.B. Yeats and World Literature

insofar as language derives from reason is it of divine origin. Herder contests this
view by insisting that although language and reason must belong equally to man’s
nature, they cannot be simplified by reference to some transcendent origin.47 He
complains that contemporary discourse on the subject leads to a false opposition:
‘Down one way, language appears to be so superhuman that God had to invent it;
down the other, it is so inhuman that every animal could invent it if it were but
to take the trouble.’48 The mistake of other writers, according to Herder, is that in
their rush to identify the origin of language outside of man’s use of it they depend
upon the mechanism of perfect rationality, to such an extent that in the end it is
immaterial whether language’s origin is with God or animal nature. Ultimately it
suffices to say that language is logical, that it is guaranteed a perfect regularity
either by the moral order of God or the mechanical order of the natural universe.
Herder’s intervention here faces two ways. In one direction, he argues that
although man possesses an animal nature and possesses language as a sensate
animal, it is a mistake to say that he derives his language from this nature. In
fact, language is what saves man from the logic of natural derivation. While other
animals operate perfectly according to their nature, it is the basis of man’s freedom
that he cannot:

There is no single work of man in which his actions are not improvable, but
he enjoys the freedom of exercise in many things and hence the freedom of
improving himself forever. A thought, any thought, is not a direct work of
nature, and for that very reason it can be a work of his own […] no longer an
infallible machine in the hands of nature, he himself becomes a purpose and an
objective of his efforts.49

What distinguishes man from other animals is his imperfection which is manifested
in language. But, looking in the other direction, we should not expect Herder to
provide a religious account of man’s ‘impoverishment’. It is certainly not the case
that the language of man is a poor copy of the Word of God for instance, but rather
that language is essentially and humanely imperfect – not only in its practice but
in its conception. Therefore any attempt at an analytic reduction of language to a
logic of divinity or natural origin misses this essence.
Herder’s distinctive characterisations of language consolidate this point. After
dispelling the divine grammar hypothesis once and for all, he turns his attention
to the primacy of sound in language. In the course of this excursus he corrects
Diderot’s famous presumption that people born blind are less receptive to life and
suffering than those with normal vision, arguing that it is keen hearing which most
binds man to the world and to nature.50 Herder redeems the obscurity of blindness
in the midst of the Enlightenment cult of sight, at the same time suggesting a

47
 Herder, ‘Essay on the Origin of Language’, 127.
48
 Herder, ‘Essay on the Origin of Language’, 127.
49
 Herder, ‘Essay on the Origin of Language’, 109.
50
 Herder, ‘Essay on the Origin of Language’, 96–7.
Folklore and the New World of Text 87

view of language which prefers a primitive aurality over the characteristics of


visual depiction. Later on in the essay, when describing how a human vocabulary
is synthesised ‘from the sounds of the world’, he links the apprehension of this
‘sounding’ to the very structure of language: things speak and people hear, and
therefore

from the verbs it was that the nouns grew and not from the nouns the verbs.
The child names the sheep, not as a sheep, but as a bleating creature, and hence
makes of the interjection a verb. In the gradual progress of human sensuousness,
this state of affairs is explicable; but not in the logic of a higher spirit.51

Language doesn’t belong to the ‘higher spirit’ but to the sphere of ‘human
sensuousness’; and as such rejects the non-sensuous sense of sight which proposes
objects that precede acts, and determines to count these objects’ properties rather
than be affected by their ‘shaping’ or their ‘colouring’. For Herder, language
privileges acts over objects, because language itself is an act – speaking, hearing
– and not an object. In the end, it is left to poetry, which is inextricably linked
in Herder’s mind to the Volk, to reflect this active and imperfect essence of
language. Poetry testifies to the failure of analysis when applied to language – the
impossibility of identifying its origin – even at a time in the eighteenth century
when language has become the vehicle for analysis in other new scientific fields
of knowledge.
The central point I want to extract from Herder’s work here concerns how this
view of language alters our understanding of the folk tradition. It is not that each
folk tradition identifies itself according to an original language. This is a common
political and epistemological oversimplification, for it objectifies language as
an authenticator of tradition, consigning its essence to the past, and suggests
that every ‘living’ folk tradition derives itself logically, divinely and, above all
grammatically, from a single source. Rather, following Herder, the essential
similarity of the folk to language resides in its construction of itself, act by act.
The folk tradition, despite the most scrupulously grammatical characterisations of
it by nineteenth-century folklorists, shares with language the peculiar quality of
being essentially improvisatory and ungrammatical.52
This idea, that the folk tradition is essentially ungrammatical, is quite
uninteresting however, if it simply means that we have presented a naïve, unlettered
object to those scientists and anthropologists who have the grammar to scrutinise
it. In that case, folk illiteracy is a natural phenomenon which can be articulated
perfectly. The power of Herder’s conception is based upon imperfection; and

51
 Herder, ‘Essay on the Origin of Language’, 132.
52
 Stith Thompson’s Motif Index of Folk Literature (1932–37) is perhaps the most
well-known folk grammar. Stith Thompson, Motif Index of Folk Literature: A classification
of narrative elements in folktales, ballads, myths, fables, mediaeval romances, exempla,
fabliaux, jest-books and local legends. Vols 1–5. Revised and extended edition (Copenhagen:
Rosenhilde and Bagger International Booksellers and publishers, 1955–58).
88 W.B. Yeats and World Literature

the extent of Herder’s influence demands that folk stupidities, illiteracies, even
crystalline ‘folk wisdoms’ (so called by the urbane collector) are understood as acts
to be performed – and here we are reminded of Synge’s photograph of the island
boy, or Yeats’s encounter with ‘a man with a Mohawk tattoo’. No folk tradition
is complete to itself but rather exists in combination with its other, usually the
folklorist or anthropologist; moreover, it is this imperfect relation which accounts
for a tradition of the verb, of call and response, over the noun.

The Texts of Yeats’s Folklore

Having already established the influence of readings of Yeats’s folklore as


ideological, it seems a necessary corrective to insist that Yeats had an obligation
to folkloric ‘inauthenticity’, the Celtic blemish, well beyond his predilection
for Burkean or Arnoldian politics, due to the poetic exhortation to synthesise an
active culture and act out a hybrid cultural role. We are able to follow how in the
1890s, besides negotiating the politics of the Gaelic Revival and the Irish Ireland
movement on the one hand, and late-Victorian patronage on the other, Yeats was
working towards an understanding of the comedy of modern cultural interaction,
where culture is always, indeed essentially, imperfect. In doing so, he was also
working back to the ‘dark’ origin of folklore, discernible in Herder’s theory of
poetic language.
By the time it came to publishing The Celtic Twilight in 1893 Yeats was
familiar with a wide range of the Irish materials available. As well as his 1888
anthology, Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry, he had also edited two
volumes of Irish stories, Stories from Carleton (1889) and Representative Irish
Tales (1891), and compiled a further folk anthology, Irish Fairy Tales (1892).
The serious-mindedness of Yeats’s early approach is evident in the introductory
essay to the first of these collections, which begins with a predictable point against
the spirit of modern science. After enumerating some of the beliefs of the Irish
peasantry, especially their belief in fairies and ghosts, he writes, ‘that now old
and much respected dogmatist, the spirit of the age, has in no manner made his
voice heard down there [the west of Ireland]’ (P&I 3). We have already considered
why this kind of rhetorical identification with the ‘non-modern’ peasant might be
problematic; by setting himself against the scientific folklorists, who conceive folk
beliefs to be primitive errors, and then re-characterising them as an ideal form of
the good, he reflects rather than subverts modern dogmatism. The classification
of fairy types and explanatory footnotes which appear at the end of the volume,
designed to naturalise the reader to the world of the Irish peasant, prove this point,
since they are in keeping with the dominant ‘spirit’ he claims to dispute. 53
The reader of these early anthologies is always assumed to be someone who
requires guidance in unfamiliar territory. Consequently, there is a special concern

53
 W.B. Yeats, Fairy and Folk Tales of Ireland (London: Bounty Books, 1995 [1889]),
401–6.
Folklore and the New World of Text 89

for what is representative. In Representative Irish Tales, where this concern


is manifest in the title, Yeats makes a self-conscious attempt to engage with
representativeness as a political problem. Although introducing the tales as an
example of ‘Ireland talking to herself’ – a truly optimistic statement considering
the ragtag of authors included54 – he goes on to distinguish the ‘true peasant’ from
‘the knave’ for the benefit of a vulnerable readership uninitiated into ‘true’ Irish
life:

The true peasant remained always in disfavour as ‘plotter’, ‘rebel’, or man in


some way unfaithful to his landlord. The knave type flourished till the decay of
the gentry themselves, and is now extant in the boatmen, guides, and mendicant
hordes that gather round tourists while they are careful to trouble at no time
anyone belonging to the neighbourhood with their century-old jokes. The tourist
has read of the Irish peasant in the only novels of Irish life he knows, those
written by and for an alien gentry.55

As Yug Mohit Chaudhry has pointed out, Yeats often expurgated his introductions
for journalistic publication.56 Even unexpurgated, however, though apparently
sincere in its attempt to confront the issue of stage Irish caricature and politically
charged by its labelling of an ‘alien gentry’, this paragraph reads as self-defeating.
Who seeks, after all, for authenticity in a peasant, except the bibliophile tourist
who wants to deny he is only on holiday?
In his 1888 introduction to Fairy and Folktales of the Irish Peasantry, Yeats
distinguishes three different approaches to collecting folklore and representing the
folk in Ireland: Crofton Croker and Samuel Lover’s, ‘who imagined the country
as a humorist’s Arcadia’; Lady Wilde’s, for whom ‘humour has given away to
pathos and tenderness’; and Douglas Hyde’s, whose work is ‘neither humorous
nor mournful; it is simply life’ (P&I 7–8). Hyde’s work is compared favourably
both to the exotic picturesque of Croker and Lover, in which the fairy tales are at a
fantastical removal from commonplace experience, and to the tragic anti-modern
identifications in Lady Wilde’s work. However, it is impossible to ignore the tenor
of authenticity politics in the statement ‘it is simply life’. It imputes a representative
accuracy to Hyde’s work and suggests it is to be preferred because it rescues Irish
folklore from the caricatured representations of Victorianism. There is little doubt
that Yeats’s editorial mind is making a strategic intervention on Hyde’s behalf;
yet if he wants to resolve issues of folkloric representation according to Hyde’s

54
 W.B. Yeats, Representative Irish Tales. Ed. Mary Helen Thuente (Gerrards Cross,
Bucks: Colin Smythe Ltd., 1979 [1891]), 25. The collection included tales from writers
with varying degrees of association or sympathy with Ireland, including William Carleton
(Yeats’s avowed favourite), Maria Edgeworth, Samuel Lover, T. Croften Croker, Charles
Lever and Charles Kickham.
55
 Yeats, Representative Irish Tales, 26.
56
 Yug Mohit Chaudhry, The Irish Literary Revival and the Politics of Print (Cork:
Cork University Press, 2001), 173–4.
90 W.B. Yeats and World Literature

linguistic and nationalistic objectivity (rather than his stereographic qualities), we


might wonder whether, as a consequence, he would excise the expressive freedom
he wants to privilege in the folk. This evaluation is fraught because it is in danger
of proscribing the freedom of literary representation per se. Reading through all
of the early folk anthologies, one is struck by the extravagant use of phonetically
transcribed speech and non-standard – ‘Hiberno-English’– syntax. This is found in
Croker and Lover, but also in William Carleton who was himself a ‘peasant’ from
County Tyrone. It is an old question, worth asking again, whether this Hiberno-
English mode reflects a superior verisimilitude or an inauthentic staginess? Sinéad
Garrigan Mattar reminds us that Yeats cut ‘the most literary passages’ from the
authors he compiled, but in the process failed to resolve the underlying questions
of authenticity.57 The formative difficulty here is that in trying to excise the
literary exaggeration, which he reads as an inflection of Victorian patronage of the
Irish, and instead to prescribe ‘simple’, so-called ‘realistic’ English, Yeats risks
standardising and institutionalising the language of folkloric representation, and
going against the literary ‘origin’ of the folk.
Hyde is Yeats’s test case for this dilemma, since it is Hyde’s mastery of the
Irish language, and the emerging politics of the Gaelic League, which provokes
it to the highest degree. In 1890, Yeats writes in admiration of Hyde’s Gaelic
authenticity: ‘[Hyde] is so completely a Gael, alike in thought and literary idiom,
that I do not think he could falsify a folk-tale if he tried’ (UP1 187).58 Five years
later, however, in a review of Hyde’s The Story of Gaelic Literature, Yeats writes
in less complimentary terms:

[Hyde] is so anxious to convince his little groups of enthusiasts of the historical


importance of the early Irish writings, of the value to modern learning of the
fragments of ancient custom which are mixed up with their romance, that he
occasionally seems to forget the noble phantasy and passionate drama which is
their crowning glory. (UP1 359)59

While in 1890 Hyde’s Irish-language skills grant him superior access to an Irish
tradition unavailable to Yeats, by 1895 these same linguistic talents may be
inhibiting his imaginative entry into any folk tradition: an authority which ‘could
not falsify a folk tale’ has become problematic because, in a sense, it lacks the
quality of falsification. Hyde has foregone ‘noble phantasy’ and ‘passionate
drama’ in favour of an idea of historical and political authenticity; for Yeats, this
means he has foregone folklore itself.
It is tempting to attribute Yeats’s apparent change of heart here to Hyde’s
1892 lecture ‘The Necessity for De-Anglicising Ireland’. Certainly the Fenian

57
 Sinéad Garrigan Mattar, Primitivism, Science, and the Irish Revival (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 2004), 50.
58
 Yeats, ‘Review of Beside the Fire: A Collection of Irish Gaelic Folk Stories by
Douglas Hyde’, 1890 (UP1 187).
59
 Yeats, ‘Review of Hyde’s The Story of Gaelic Literature’, Bookman 1895
(UP1 359).
Folklore and the New World of Text 91

character of Yeats’s nationalism derived from John O’Leary was not aligned with
Hyde’s radical de-anglicising vision. Yet we know that as early as 1886, when
both men were cutting their journalistic teeth with the Dublin University Review,
Hyde had marshalled many of the same arguments in an article entitled ‘A Plea
for the Irish Language’.60 It is also on record that subsequent to Hyde’s 1892
lecture, Yeats continued to lend public support to the Gaelic League.61 It would
seem mistaken, therefore, to view his critique of Hyde as a rift based upon his
rejection of the Irish language tout court. It is true that when he responded to
Hyde’s lecture in the United Ireland he memorably compared ‘the Gaelic tongue’
to ‘the snows of yesteryear’; it is less often remembered, however, what the terms
of his broader argument were (UP1 254–6). In fact, Yeats was very careful to
offer support to the language movement, even as he qualified its aims: ‘Let us
by all means prevent the decay of that tongue’ he wrote, ‘and preserve it always
among us as a learned language to be a fountain of nationality in our midst, but
do not let us base upon it our hopes of nationhood’ (UP1 255). If this is Yeats’s
strategic concession to a political constituency of Gaelic Leaguers who would
have made up a considerable portion of his readership, it is also the conclusion
to a larger thought about what constitutes ‘the continuity of the nation’s life
[its tradition]’. The Irish national tradition is not, avers Yeats, based upon the
recovery of a single language, but rather upon ‘translating or retelling in English,
which shall have an indefinable Irish quality of rhythm and style’ (UP1 255).
In other words, in order to invigorate the Irish tradition the idea of linguistic
origin must be carried over into the aesthetic realm of ‘indefinable’ quality.
Tellingly, Yeats’s principal model for this is America. By regarding the idiom of
‘Walt Whitman, Thoreau, Bret Harte, and Cable, to name no more’ as exemplary
of the national ‘quality’, he openly reflects on the paradoxical modernity of his
folkloric endeavour, since any such New World tradition is conspicuous for
its disconnection from a single origin – most starkly from the idea of a native
‘American’ population, but also from the idea of a native language. A tradition
based upon the qualities of ‘translating or retelling’ invariably mourns its lost
origin yet remains in its expressive life unauthenticated and uninhibited by the
idea of original perfection. Yeats rearticulates this point as a warning to Hyde and

60
 Chaudhry, The Irish Literary Revival and the Politics of Print, 60.
61
 As Timothy G. McMahon puts it: ‘When their respective movements gathered
momentum in the latter half of the 1890s, Hyde and Yeats diverged somewhat, but their
efforts continually reinforced each other’s. Even if one noted only those activities that are
recorded in Foster’s biography of Yeats, their record of mutual aid is impressive: Yeats
speaking at Gaelic League functions in 1897, 1899, 1900, 1902, and 1910; Hyde joining
in the luncheon that celebrated the launch of the Irish Literary Theatre in 1899; Hyde
intervening on Yeats’s behalf with Irish-Ireland newspaper editors in 1899 and 1901; Yeats,
Hyde and Lady Gregory collaborating on the controversial play Where There is Nothing in
1902; Yeats including review comments on Irish-language drama in issues of Samhain from
1902 to 1904; and Yeats speaking on behalf of the language revival while touring the United
States in 1903 and 1904.’ Timothy G. McMahon, Grand Opportunity: The Gaelic Revival
and Irish Society 1893–1910 (New York: Syracuse University Press, 2008), 31.
92 W.B. Yeats and World Literature

the Irish-language revivalists; the attempt to redeem the origin of a tradition, he


suggests, is always in danger of contradicting that tradition’s life.

The Celtic Twilight

The publication history of The Celtic Twilight (1893, 1902) reflects the deceptive
simplicity of its subject matter. In the late 1880s and early 1890s Yeats was
accepting commissions from both the Dublin-based United Ireland, a journal
which suggested censorship as the only solution to the problem of the caricature
of Irish peasants on the British stage, and the Scots Observer, a Unionist journal
which treated Irish cultural politics with extreme condescension.62 In 1891 the
United Ireland nominated Yeats to represent Ireland in the Folklore Congress. In
the same year the Scots Observer published an article ridiculing the very idea of
such a congress, leading with the sarcastic headline, ‘Fairies in Congress’.63 It is
surprising, then, to find it was the latter journal that first commissioned several
of the folkloric pieces which would go on to be collected in The Celtic Twilight.64
‘Scots and Irish Fairies’, ‘Village Ghosts’ and ‘Columkille and Rosses’ are three
of Yeats’s Scots Observer articles from 1889 which reappeared, though in slightly
altered form, in his 1893 edition, thus establishing a journalistic heritage that
ensured certain sections of the text had undertaken quite separate negotiations
with the perils of cultural cliché before being published in book form.
This goes some way to accounting for The Celtic Twilight’s published
unevenness. There are further reasons for this unevenness, however, as we shall
see, including the fact that there are several different published editions which
overwrite one another in sometimes contradictory ways. The 1902 edition
represents the most substantial alteration of the 1893 text, omitting one section and
adding another 18.65 Yeats credited Lady Gregory for helping him incorporate new
Irish mythological materials, as well as introducing a style of language (idiomatic
English) that came ‘closer to the life of the people’ (Myth 1). It seems he was

62
 Chaudhry, The Irish Literary Revival and the Politics of Print, 108.
63
 Chaudhry, The Irish Literary Revival and the Politics of Print, 147.
64
 Chaudhry, The Irish Literary Revival and the Politics of Print, 156.
65
 It is difficult for the modern reader to know which edition or amalgam of editions
she is reading. For example, the edition edited by Kathleen Raine (Gerrards Cross: Colin
Smythe, 1981) claims to be the 1902 edition, but in fact is an edited version of 1902,
closer to the 1925 edition found in Mythologies, with several of the sections having
been foreshortened and deprived of their more reflective and meta-textual moments. For
example, at the end of the section ‘The Golden Age’ after a reflection upon peasant beliefs,
both the 1893 and 1902 editions end with ‘We were now getting into the big glass-roofed
terminus, and the fiddler put away his old blacking box and held out his hat for a copper, and
then opened the door and was gone’ (CT 93 185; CT 02 175). This is missing from Raine’s
edition, which is a pity since it establishes the importance of the narrative frame, especially
the modern, urban image of the rail terminus intruding upon, but also encompassing, the
folkloric material.
Folklore and the New World of Text 93

working under the sign of this new closeness to the people when he decided to
edit out what he then, in 1902, considered an outmoded Celticist line from 1893,
praising certain lines of poetry written by an unnamed ‘friend’, presumed to be
George Russell: ‘They, with their wild music as of winds blowing in the reeds,
seemed to me the very inmost voice of Celtic sadness, and of Celtic longing for
infinite things the world has never seen’ (CT 93 17). Significantly, for the terms
of our reception of the book today, this line was re-inserted in subsequent editions
and accompanied by the following enigmatic footnote:

I wrote this sentence long ago. This sadness now seems to me a part of all
peoples who preserve the moods of the ancient peoples of the world. I am not
so preoccupied with the mystery of race as I used to be but leave this sentence
and other sentences like it unchanged. We once believed them, and have, it may
be, not grown wiser. 66

The policy here ‘to leave this sentence and other sentences like it unchanged’
is at once an assertion and an abdication of editorial authority. Although an
apparently banal, even superfluous, intervention, it is interesting how this kind of
overlay is hardly out of place within the medley of existing voices in The Celtic
Twilight, merely adding ‘Yeats the editor’ to the mix of ‘Yeats the narrator’ and
other unnamed narrators, folk informants and ‘friends’. Indeed, as a textual effect
– exuberant and anachronistic – it is in key with the text as a literary work of
folklore; the sense that the sentence can speak for itself and yet needs to be spoken
for captures quite felicitously the anthropological ironies with which the text is
engaged.
These ironies are further underlined in the opening section entitled ‘This
Book’, a textually reflexive legend composed around the same time as the line we
considered earlier in this chapter: ‘And nodding by the fire, take down this book’.
In this section the dilemmas of knowledge, representation and textual unity are
immediately conceded:

[I have] written down accurately and candidly much that I have heard and seen,
and, except by way of commentary, nothing that I have merely imagined. I
have, however, been at no pains to separate my own beliefs from those of the
peasantry, but have rather let my men and women, dhouls and faeries, go their
way unoffended and defended by any argument of mine. (CT 93 1; CT 02 1)

What, we may ask, differentiates the ‘commentary’ where Yeats has given himself
the unusual licence to add what he merely imagines from the primary text which is
supposedly ‘accurate’ and ‘candid’? We would be hard-pressed to find a dividing

66
 Mary Thuente suggests that this footnote appears in the 1902 edition (Mary
Thuente, W.B. Yeats and Irish Folklore (Dublin; Totowa, NJ: Gill and Macmillan, 1980),
141) but I can only find it in a later 1905 edition (Dublin: Maunsel and Co. Ltd.), 15, which
is in most other respects identical to 1902. In 1902 the line respecting Russell’s poetry is
simply omitted.
94 W.B. Yeats and World Literature

line in a book that seems to place commentary at the heart of what it records.
This much is admitted in the next sentence where he assures us he has not been at
pains to separate his beliefs from those of the peasantry. He describes ‘men and
women, dhouls and faeries’ going on their way unoffended by his anthropological
gaze, whilst, paradoxically, granting this ontologically indeterminate group the
rare privilege of belonging to him. The question of authenticity is both posed and
made inadmissible. As he puts it in a 1902 addition: ‘I have invented nothing but
my comments and one or two deceitful sentences that may keep some poor story-
teller’s commerce with the devil and his angels, or the like, from being known
among his neighbours’ (CT 02 3). In other words, in order to protect the origin of
his material, there must be at least some misrepresentation.
In what is a more developed version of a passage which first appeared in his
introduction to Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry (1888), Yeats continues
in the second section, ‘A Teller of Tales’, with a description of his chief folk
informant, ‘a little bright-eyed old man’ called Paddy Flynn:

He was indeed always cheerful, though I thought I could see in his eyes (swift
as the eyes of a rabbit, when they peer out of their wrinkled holes) a melancholy
which was well-nigh a portion of their joy; the visionary melancholy of purely
instinctive natures and of all animals. (CT 93 3–4; CT 02 4)

We are implicitly warned that we should not discount the personality of the teller in
our appreciation of the tale. The doubleness of the passage bears this out: although
Paddy is described as ‘always cheerful’, the narrator speculates that he can detect
an instinctive melancholy in his eyes. As the narrator idealises beyond the bounds
of his encounter into melancholy vision, he is forced to concede that he has but
grasped ‘a portion’ of what confronts him phenomenally: the more proximate, but
also more original, form of joy. So, even as Celticist assumptions are proposed
they are ironically modulated. This establishes a literary frame in which every
interpretation or moment of folkloric abstraction is set against the inscrutable
cheerfulness – is it frivolity, is it mockery? – of the folk informant. Paddy is a
seductive rather than convenient presence in the text. When the narrator asks him
‘had he ever seen the faeries?’ Paddy replies with a question of his own, ‘Am I not
annoyed with them?’ at once evading the straight interrogation and elaborating on
it (CT 93 5; CT 02 5). Whilst a strict ‘yes’ or ‘no’ would have confirmed his status
as a folk believer, it would have fallen well short of involving his interlocutor in
the attitude of belief. As it stands, his response quickens the question asked for the
purposes of analysis and data collection, and inducts the narrator into the mode of
conversation. Importantly, however, it is also a trace of the syntactical structure
of the Irish language, since in Irish affirmation or denial requires that a verb be
met with a verb (there is no simple equivalent to ‘yes’ or ‘no’). We can detect the
metastasis of the absent native language throughout the English text.
This first encounter sets the tone for the whole of The Celtic Twilight where
the narrator’s allegorical interpretations and summations of seemingly extraneous
details contribute to his imaginative entry into the tradition. The modes of discursive
Folklore and the New World of Text 95

authority vary in the text: there are sociological statements about the superiority
of the folk over modern society, ‘folk-art is indeed, the oldest of the aristocracies
of thought because it refuses what is passing and trivial’ (CT 02 232–3); moments
of anthropological exegesis, ‘I am not certain that he [the peasant] distinguishes
between the natural and supernatural very clearly’ (CT 02 102); and ‘romantic’
whimsy in which the peasant represents ‘the vast and vague extravagance of the
Celtic heart’ (CT 93 17). The book is divided, or fragmented, into short sections,
or what Mary Thuente terms ‘essays’:

Although the removal of an interlocutor from tales Yeats used in Fairy and
Folktales had improved the sense of immediacy in those selections, the presence
of Yeats’s personal voice in The Celtic Twilight increases rather than decreases
the immediacy of his materials. The difference is that the selections in Fairy and
Folktales were tales, whereas the selections in The Celtic Twilight are personal
essays.67

Although we cannot take it for granted that it is ‘Yeats’s personal voice’ which
mediates the folkloric material, as opposed, say, to the voice of a fictionalised
narrator, Thuente’s paradox that a mediating narrative presence creates an
improved sense of immediacy is important to note. This ‘immediacy’ is due in
part to the destabilising effect of the text which, by ceaselessly breaking up the
intention and summary point of each ‘personal’ intervention, creates a kind of
dramatic pandemonium. Indeed, even the term ‘essay’ seems authoritarian in the
context of these often exiguous and apparently fruitless interventions. Certainly,
the uneven breaks in the text destroy any sense of chronology and the narrator
does not seem to develop any overall understanding of the culture he surveys.
If anything, his capacity to narrate his anthropological story with distinction is
infiltrated and implicitly undermined by the fictional narratives he is supposed
to be collecting. In ‘A Voice’ he takes time to set the scene much as if he were
beginning to tell a folk story, ‘one day I was walking over a bit of rushy ground
close to the Inchy wood’; but then his academic preoccupation and the lack of
narrative eventuality obtrudes, reminding the reader of the section’s status as
meditation or memoir, ‘I had been preoccupied with Aengus and Edain, and with
Manannan, son of the sea’ (CT 02 115). Although at times the narrator plays the
role of an ‘honest’ ethnographer – accounting for his sources when he presents
Paddy Flynn, the woodcutter, or the Mayo Woman, for example – on other
occasions he unaccountably disappears from the text. Consequently, where there
is little reference to the inception of a tale or proverb, the reader has the distinct
sense that it is invented, or that its meaning is archly constructed by the ‘absent’
narrator who has been so loquacious elsewhere. It is difficult to read the section
‘Aristotle and the Books’ for instance, without seeing, clearly and pointedly, the
controlling presence behind it, and how Yeats is using it to allegorise the folkloric
endeavour. Here, a man, in order to know the secret of how bees ‘packed comb’,

67
 Thuente, W.B. Yeats and Irish Folklore, 124.
96 W.B. Yeats and World Literature

created an artificial hive with a glass covering, ‘but when he went and put his eyes
to the glass, they had it all covered with wax so that it was as black as that pot; and
he was as blind as before’ (CT 02 112). There is an echo of Herder in this parable.
For Herder, mankind, which possesses the imperfection of language, invariably
lacks the ‘artifactive capacities’ of bees whose powers of conception are confined
to the construction of a honey cell.68 The man who wants to know the secret of how
bees pack comb is a surrogate for the folklorist who wants to possess the secret
of the folk, and who, in the infallible industry of the bees, seeks his own infallible
knowledge. His failure, then, is consequent upon the imperfections of the folk who
fail to satisfy his definitions.
If we can permit that The Celtic Twilight possesses a super-plot, which loosely
connects its multiple sections, it is ironically picaresque. The narrator travels to
a community armed with an investigative, though poetical, mind determined to
uncover the truth: ‘I then asked whether she and her people were not dramatisations
of our mood’. But there he is met by secrecy and obscurity: ‘be careful she replied
and do not seek to know too much’ (CT 93 87; CT 02 94). Several examples of
this resistance to investigative clarity can be found: in ‘The Sorcerer’ for example,
which ends with ‘he would not tell me more, for he had, it appeared, taken a vow
of secrecy’ (CT 93 62; CT 02 67); and in ‘An Enduring Heart’, ‘there are things it
is well not to ponder over too much, things that bare words are best suited for’ (CT
02 60). Significantly, the narrator seems content with this inconclusiveness and
the text takes an almost Borgesian delight in secrecy – in both what is withheld
from the narrator and what is withheld by the narrator in his elliptical and stylistic
accounts of his thoughts and visions.
It is characteristic for Jorge Luis Borges, in well-known ‘postmodern’ stories
like ‘The Library of Babel’ and ‘The Book of Sand’, to conjure the spirit of vast
encyclopaedic projects whose indices continually defer the secret knowledge they
promise. Yeats, well in advance of such a postmodern ‘turn’, engages in something
similar when he characterises folk-lore as at once ‘the Bible, the Thirty-nine
Articles and the Book of Common Prayer’. ‘Well nigh all the great poets have
lived by its light’, he adds (UP1 284). But what is this light? As the protagonist
in Borges’s ‘The Ethnographer’ says, ‘Now that I possess the secret I could tell
it in a hundred different and contradictory ways’. Of course this makes it unclear
whether the narrator ever does tell it, or is done telling it, and whether as readers
we ever learn it. In Borges’s story we are told only one thing with finality: ‘[the
ethnographer] married, divorced, and is now one of the librarians at Yale.’69 Such
bathos returns the reader to the proliferations and the obscurity of the text – its
occult quality – at the moment he might expect transcendence. It is a quality of
occlusion born out of writing, editorial revision and the obtrusion of the frame into
the fiction, which anticipates Yeats’s hieratic texts such as A Vision, but which is

68
 Herder, ‘Essay on the Origin of Languages’, 109.
69
 Jorges L. Borges, Collected Fictions. Ed. Andrew Hurley (London: Allen Lane,
The Penguin Press, 1998), 334–5.
Folklore and the New World of Text 97

also a profoundly folkloric trait. The Celtic Twilight continually taunts the reader
with superficial renderings when we might expect final significance. The last
sentence of ‘Dreams that have no Moral’ follows the grand telling of a legend with
this sly, if conventional, bathos: ‘I was passing one time myself, and they called me
in and gave me a cup of tea’ (CT 02 230). Similarly bathetic is the 1902 footnote
added to the end of ‘The Thick Skull of the Fortunate’ which reads: ‘I wrote all
this years ago, out of what were even then old memories. I was in Roughley the
other day, and found it much like other desolate places. I may have been thinking
of Moughorow, a much wilder place, for the memories of one’s childhood are
brittle things to lean upon’ (CT 02 162). Here, the dissociation of memory makes
a mockery of encyclopaedic accuracy. The investigative quest to reveal the truth,
then, is sublimated by an idiosyncratic delight in existing distractedly within the
text without any factual discovery; and the uncertainty of the narrator’s status –
folklorist, poet, dilettante – reflects the uncertain status of the text: is it a source
book for Yeats’s poetry, a record of the Irish peasantry, an ethnography, a personal
memoir, a collection of essays, fictions or visions? In this way, by its dissimulation
of itself, it puts on trial the methodology for establishing a ‘serious subject matter’
or an entirely tragic view of an irretrievable folk.

Celtic Textuality

The excessive textuality of The Celtic Twilight, due to its failure to cohere either as
a sacred book or encyclopaedic totality, is an unfolding of its folkloric character.
From Herder’s original characterisation of the Bible, designating it a species
of Hebraic folk literature, to his insistence that language develops according to
imperfect worldly relations and not a divine grammar, a strain of profanity runs
through the theory of the folk, with the consequence that any genuine folk encounter
possesses a heteroglossic quality, rather than a single objective reference.
We have seen how Yeats initially resisted the comedy of the knave in the name
of the ‘true’ peasant; how then did he come to adopt and justify the general knavery
of The Celtic Twilight? In order to answer this question, I would like, finally, to
consider two of Yeats’s ‘knaves’ as they make their enigmatic appearances, each
carrying the contagion of the Victorian imagination of the Irish peasantry, yet also
supplanting it with a further theoretical reflection upon the textual qualities of a
living tradition.
The first of these figures is already familiar to us from earlier in the chapter. The
narrator begins the section ‘Belief and Unbelief’ by warning us that the peasants
are not simply credulous: although they believe in ‘faeries and little leprechauns,
and water-horses, and fallen angels’, they distrust priests and don’t believe in Hell.
We are introduced first of all to a woman from the western villages and then,
remarkably, to

a man with a Mohawk tattooed upon his arm, who held exactly similar beliefs
and unbeliefs [as the woman]. No matter what one doubts, one never doubts the
98 W.B. Yeats and World Literature

faeries, for, as the man with the Mohawk Indian on his arm said, they stand to
reason. (CT 93 11–12; CT 02 8)

It is clear that the critical perspective corrosive of religious and spiritual beliefs is
itself susceptible to being surpassed by a form of belief – the faeries here, according
to this surreal personage, stand to ‘reason’. More startling than this, however, is
the fact that the man has a tattoo of a Mohawk on his arm. Perhaps we could read
this as a clumsy attempt on the author’s behalf to identify a confederacy of natural
primitives – the Celt and the ‘Red Indian’ were considered to have a strange affinity
from at least the era of the Macpherson controversy. But the Mohawk’s almost
casual instantiation suggests a more mischievous function; an Irish peasant with a
Mohawk tattooed on his arm speaking about his belief in the faeries is, within the
context of nineteenth-century folklore and anthropology, an uncanny proposition.
Here is a man wearing the projections of an academic discipline on his body. That
he appears, not as a primitive believer, but as a convenient sign of primitivism
confronts the narrator with the limitations of his own interpretative apparatus: our
thought turns to the peasant’s awareness of his market value as an ‘Irish peasant’
during the time of the Irish Revival, and beyond that to the author’s reflection upon
the compromised modes of ‘scientific’ encounter. The peasant is advertising his
textuality and, by implication, the inter-textuality of The Celtic Twilight.
But why specifically a Mohawk? Certainly, it offers a reminder of Yeats’s
riposte to Hyde on the subject of the Irish language: that the essence of tradition
can be found in the idiomatic qualities of New World literature. It also makes sense
within the context of Yeats’s contemporary journalism for the American papers,
The Boston Pilot and The Providence Sunday Journal. We should not discount
either the relation between American modernism, dating back at least to Edgar
Allan Poe, and the invention of a new and often terrifying folklore of the Western
frontier. It does not seem far-fetched to suggest that being open to the currents of
American culture in the 1890s, both popular and literary, Yeats would have been
sensitive to the growing interest in the myths of the West: Wild West melodramas
were common from the 1870s and Buffalo Bill Cody’s infamous Wild West Show
was launched in 1883.70 Although there are clear thematic parallels between the
myths of the west of Ireland and those of the American West, each representing,
at different times, freedom, primitiveness and a frontier for emigration, it is the
formal apparatus, especially the folk-pantomime of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show,
which resonates most remarkably within The Celtic Twilight.

70
 Sandra K. Sagala, Buffalo Bill on Stage (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico
Press, 2008). There has been some attempt to discuss the specifically Irish co-ordinates in
the myths of the American West. Marguerite Quintelli-Neary, for example, points to the Irish
heritage of Mary Jane Cannary (otherwise known as Calamity Jane) and speculates as to
significant affinities between Billy the Kid and the mythic Fionn MacCumhaill. Marguerite
Quintelli-Neary, The Irish American Myth of the Frontier West (Dublin: Academia Press,
2008). We know that Yeats was an avid reader of Western fictions later in his life and the
echo of this can certainly be found in his Crazy Jane poems.
Folklore and the New World of Text 99

Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show is by now a well-known and much revisited
travesty: every time Buffalo Bill Cody got up on stage to fulfil the role of the new
folkloric hero – the cowboy – he also continually re-inscribed the near extinction
of the native American population. The Indian who shot him and the Indian he
killed – represented again and again on stage – helped to establish and consolidate
the over-familiar paradigms of the ‘good’ Indian, the ‘bad’ Indian, and above all
else the anti-modern Indian. In a not dissimilar fashion, the peasants in The Celtic
Twilight perform the fate of the nearly extinct Irish language. We may well imagine
the man with a Mohawk tattoo located unexpectedly in the west of Ireland to be
no more than a felicitous crossover between these two cultures; and yet placed
within the synthetic endeavour of the text he comes to epitomise the tradition of
‘translating or retelling’.71 Not only does this figure provide the trace of extinction –
the last of the Mohicans72 – upon which the quality of Yeats’s New World tradition
is founded; but, significantly for the aesthetic of The Celtic Twilight, he passes
over from being a ‘true’ or ‘real’ presence – another genuine folk informant to be
recorded – to attaining the status of ‘pure’ text – an informant who has translated or
recorded himself in advance of meeting the folklorist. There is an astute reflection
hidden within the fact that this character husbands himself for the benefit of the
folkloric text – presents himself, in effect, as the fiction of tradition; and it is
important to realise that the text is not simply redundant as folklore as a result. On
the contrary, this folkloric sign, pointing to its own artificiality and exuberance,
enacts the moment of recognition when the tragic yearning for the un-translated,
untranslatable noun gives way to the culture of the verb. In poetic terms, reaching
back to Herder’s theory of language, this performative sign suggests language
‘doing’ and ‘acting’, rather than simply denoting an object beyond itself. We can
further detect how Yeats performs traditional language, and at the same time makes
it traditional in the example of his Thoreau-inspired New World lyric ‘The Lake
Isle of Innisfree’ (1888). Here, as Stephen Regan has pointed out, Yeats makes
poetic capital out of a phonetic coincidence: the Irish name ‘Inis Fraoigh’ rendered
not according to its semantic content ‘Heather Island’, but rather its anglicised
form ‘Innisfree’ which has the handy English connotation of ‘freedom’.73 Yeats’s
free-dom here is doubly significant, however, since it translates not only the
specific meaning of an Irish noun into a potential verb – the island is a place of
limitless potential for Yeats, a place to act freely – but also the general meaning of
the Irish language, qua original speech, into a form of writing and textual effect.

71
 Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show makes an appearance in Ulysses in ‘Eumaeus’ when
the sailor encountered by Bloom and Stephen utters the immortal refrain: ‘Buffalo Bill
shoots to kill, / never missed nor he ever will’. Joyce, Ulysses, 718.
72
 The Last of the Mohicans: A Narrative of 1757, by James Fenimore Cooper was
published in 1826.
73
 Stephen Regan, ‘W.B. Yeats and Irish Cultural Politics in the 1890s’, Cultural
Politics at the Fin de Siècle. Ed. Sally Ledger and Scott McCracken (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1995), 66–84: 76.
100 W.B. Yeats and World Literature

The ‘free’ in Innisfree does not mean free exactly, neither does it mean heather; it
lives textually – stereographically – between the two.
The 1890s cast lists for Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show record that despite the
recruitment of actors to play some roles – those of ‘Calamity Jane’ and ‘Wild Bill
Hickok’, for example – ‘Buffalo Bill Cody’ continued to be played by Buffalo
Bill Cody; a fact which suggests that as well as marking the extinction of the
Native Americans, the hero was inadvertently marking his own extinction. On
stage he became, in the form of the mythological cowboy, the trace of a person
who no longer truly existed. The character I nominate as Yeats’s second ‘knave’,
the balladeer, ragamuffin and genius, Michael Moran, also known, significantly, as
the ‘Last Gleeman’, suffers from a similar fate: his own extinction on stage. It is
worth pointing out that Moran is city-born and a habitué of the Dublin Liberties.
This is not so unusual in The Celtic Twilight which presents several instances of
border crossing from city to country and vice versa.74 Indeed, the possibility of an
urban folk is essential for Yeats, to the extent that the acts of performing-as-folk
and writing folklore necessitate this characteristically ‘modern’ back and forth.
Moran is introduced to the reader as blind – i.e. ‘dark’ – and satiric in character.
One day he travels to his ‘usual station at Essex Bridge’ and finds himself usurped
by an impersonator. ‘Is it possible that none of yez can know me? Don’t yez see
it’s myself; and that’s someone else?’ he asks the crowd who have gathered to
listen. But ‘the pretender’ proceeds with his act and the crowd take Moran for an
imposter instead. Indeed, they are about to ‘belabour him’ with a stick when they
fall back ‘bewildered anew by his close resemblance to himself’ (CT 93 67–82;
CT 02 79–90). At this moment Moran is granted the ultimate folkloric role: the
role of having to play himself at the expense of his simple originality. At the same
time, the unnamed impersonator, instead of being exposed as an imposter and a
poor copy of the original Moran as might have been the case had Yeats still been
focussed on issues of authenticity, is permitted his performative accomplishment.
The undecidability which results from his performance depicted by the crowd’s
bewilderment – which man is the genuine Moran? – is a radical admission of
textual effect and the comedy of gesture. It is also, I suggest, besides being a further
moment of the textuality which distinguishes the representational apparatus of The
Celtic Twilight, an important historical reflection on the so-called inauthenticity
of other Celticist books, part-books, or anthology books, such as Macpherson’s
Ossian poems or Herder’s Volkslieder. When Yeats tempered the literary caricature
of the Victorian writers from his 1888 anthology, he did so on the basis that he was
navigating himself closer to an authentic origin – the simple life of the folk; but
in The Celtic Twilight the precariousness of this editorial position is continually
exposed. As he employs literary caricature to reveal this origin’s absence, so Yeats
moves folklorically into the future.

74
 See note 65 above for an example of this crossing from country to city.
Chapter 3
‘Put into English’:
The Monoglot Translator
and World Literature

Englishmen and Scotsmen forget how much they owe to mature traditions of all
kinds – traditions of feeling, traditions of thought, traditions of expression – for
they have never dreamed of life without these things. They write or paint or think
or feel, and believe they do so to please no taste but their own, while in reality
they obey rules and instincts which have been accumulating for centuries; their
wine of life has been mellowed in ancient cellars, and they see but the ruby light
in the glass. In a new country like Ireland – and English-speaking Ireland is very
new – we are continually reminded of this long ripening by the immaturity of the
traditions about us; if we are writers, for instance, we find it takes longer to learn
to write than it takes an Englishman, and the more resolute we are to express the
national character, and the more we understand the impossibility of putting our new
wine in old bottles, the longer is our struggle with the trivial, the incoherent, the
uncomely.
(UP1 361–2)

For a monoglot Yeats notched-up a surprising number of important translation


credits. As well as the Irish folklore considered in the last chapter, and two
late translations (of translations) of the Oedipus plays, he worked to improve
Rabindranath Tagore’s translation of Gitanjali (1912), offered advice to Ezra
Pound on the Ernest Fenollosa manuscript for the twin 1916 publications Certain
Noble Plays of Japan and Noh or Accomplishment: A Study of the Classical Stage
of Japan, and ‘[p]ut into English’ a new abridged version of the Upanishads
with Shri Purohit Swãmi (1937).1 Since these were all works of adaptation or
collaboration, we may be inclined to dismiss out of hand the notion that the
English-fixated Yeats was a translator at all. However, it will be my argument
in this chapter that the work of translation haunts the poet, not only as a self-

1
 Rabindranath Tagore, Gitanjali – Song offerings: A collection of prose translations
made by the author from the original Bengali, with an introduction by W.B. Yeats (London:
Royal India and Pakistan Society, 1912); Ernest Fenollosa and Ezra Pound (trans.), Certain
Noble Plays of Japan (Churchtown, Ireland: Cuala Press, 1916); Ernest Fenollosa and
Ezra Pound (trans.), Noh or Accomplishment: A Study of the Classical Stage of Japan
(London: Macmillan 1916); Shri Purohit Swãmi and W.B. Yeats (trans.), The Ten Principal
Upanishads, put into English by Shri Purohit Swãmi and W.B. Yeats (London: Faber and
Faber, 1937).
102 W.B. Yeats and World Literature

professed Irish writer writing in English, but also as a writer cast upon the swelling
tide of world English in the early twentieth century.
I argue that in Yeats’s Irish brand of English, intended for world consumption,
we can hear a strange echo of Goethe’s formative ambition for a World Literature.
Goethe famously wrote to Thomas Carlyle of translators that they were engaged
in a ‘universal spiritual commerce’. Translation, he wrote, ‘[w]hatever one may
say of [its] inadequacy […] nonetheless remains one of the most essential tasks
and one of the worthiest of esteem in the universal market of world trade’.2
For Goethe, an address from one linguistic culture to another, though liable to
distortion, expressed a conventionally Kantian version of frictional sociability
between subject nations. In Yeats’s case, however, writing from the perspective of
Irishness in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it is a significantly
different predicament: the perils of transmission do not lie between different
languages, but within one hegemonic language containing multiple and mutually
interfering cultural registers. When the impoverishment of not having a language
of one’s own to exchange becomes the condition of literary productivity, then we
might say, with the modernists, that the world has changed. This change has been
described by Franco Moretti as the transition from a situation where there are
multiple world literatures, ‘a mosaic of local cultures’ which create new forms
of writing by divergence, to the singular state of Weltliteratur (the world literary
system) ‘unified by the international literary market’. This market is characterised
according to Moretti by ‘a stunning amount of sameness’, and ‘its main mechanism
of change is convergence’.3 Convergence as a ‘mechanism of change’ will be seen
in this chapter to be an adroit description of the modernist paradox that finds an
early form in Yeats’s ideas of ancient non-English traditions which come to depend
on translation into English for their life.
In Yeats’s view, the English language, though born of the grandeur of Spenser,
Shakespeare and Blake,4 is inclined to desiccation in accordance with the rule of
its imperial and administrative instrumentality, and requires poetic revivification
from elsewhere – from Gaelic Ireland, but also from Ancient Greece, India and
Bengal, China and Japan. This modern revivification of language has an important
consequence: namely that what is considered ancient and traditional comes to be
defined by its distance and the means of its transmission as much as by its spiritual
content; and the inevitable language of its communication – English – comes to
represent, through its contemporary fabrications, the explicit world of modern
travel and trade. In this regard, Yeats’s insatiable move towards the ancient cultures
of the East must also be read as a simultaneous move West into the pristine New
World of money and commodification, the dystopian end of which, for Yeats, was

2
 Quoted in Casanova, The World Republic of Letters, 14.
3
 Moretti, ‘Evolution, World-Systems, Weltliteratur’, 134.
4
 ‘I owe my soul to Shakespeare, to Spenser, and to Blake, perhaps to William Morris,
and to the English language in which I think, speak and write […]; my hatred tortures me
with love, my love with hate’ (E&I 519).
‘Put into English’ 103

linguistic vitality without the poetic principle of form – exemplified in the perils
of free verse, and its symptomatic ‘egotism and indiscretion’ (E&I 522). There is a
corresponding irony to be detected in the poet’s longstanding resistance to writing
free verse. When Yeats declared his faith in the more ‘primitive’ and poetic Asiatic
traditions as they continued to live in the global ‘present’ of translated textuality
– translations which most often appeared to have abandoned native prosody –
he was contributing to the dethroning of his own attempts at poetic formalism.
The argument here is that the modern economic structure which underlay Yeats’s
general linguistic predicament as an English-language poet in a global age
consistently determined the contradictions of his poetic style.

Glossing the World: The Impossibility of Local English

In Against World Literature Emily Apter reminds us, via Giorgio Agamben’s
critical theology, that ‘to gloss’, from glossolalia, means to speak in tongues, as
the Christian Apostles were said to have done. More precisely, and peculiarly, it
means to communicate in languages other than one’s own without understanding
the words one is speaking. Whereas, ordinarily understood, the act of translation
assumes exchange and correspondence between particular references from different
languages, the Pentecostal logic inherent in glossolalia replaces such particulars
with a single universalising gesture. When the Apostles were granted linguistic
mobility they effectively made all languages convergent upon one universal Word;
though capable of inspired speech across all linguistic boundaries, they were at the
same time incapable of meaning anything in particular.5
The assumption of a continuous global space to be traversed without friction
by those in possession of a Pentecostal passport is a helpful way to start to
think about the ascendancy of world English as the universalising medium
of the twentieth century. We are no doubt mindful, thanks to the work of post-
colonial critique, that the general meaning of the English language resides in its
movement and circulation, and in the fact that it enacts a systematic convergence
of other languages into English. Once we have acknowledged how the systematic
privileging of English is inextricable from global economics, we can only regard
an equitable exchange model of translation to be fatally idealistic – which of
course has consequences for modern Anglophone poetry. Yeats’s expressions
of cultural difference are enduringly compromised by the formal universalism
of his language. It will also be necessary to consider, however, how this is also
a longstanding and constitutional problematic within the discipline of English
Literature itself.

5
 Emily Apter, Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability (London;
New York: Verso, 2013), 10.
104 W.B. Yeats and World Literature

Look under ‘English literature’ in the encyclopaedia of the world, suggests


Robert Crawford, and there you should find the word ‘Scotland’.6 Crawford argues
that English literature was a disciplinary invention of the Scottish university
system in the eighteenth century; specifically, he contends that the discipline
emerged as an attempt to facilitate the entry of the Scottish middle classes into
London society through the formalised study of modern English, a facilitation
considered to be a particularly urgent task due to the ambiguity of Scotland’s
linguistic and cultural identity in the wake of the Highland clearances. Crawford
caps his argument by identifying this cultural pathology within the great texts
of the Scottish Enlightenment: the middle classes’ fear of being prejudged as
‘primitive’ – as belonging to a non-English linguistic culture – productively
transformed itself into a philosophy arguing against the validity of all prejudice.
This transformation occurred in part through the anthropological inflections of
writers such as Adam Smith, Dr John Moore and Tobias Smollett who assessed
the manners of so-called primitive peoples (potentially the Scottish themselves)
as at least worthy of translation and study; but also through the spirit of modern
economics, the major premise of which was free exchange between economic
partners unfettered by prejudice.7
By invoking its sister disciplines, anthropology and modern economics,
Crawford’s story of the development of English literature prepares the ground for
the study of a global style. The anthropological subject of English literature was
confronted ab-originally with the task of cultural translation: most commonly with
the task of translating the experience of the primitive Celt and the (even more)
primitive American Indian. In this construction of a convergent world whereby
diverse materials from various foreign cultures received their articulation through
the combined disciplinary regime of English, Anthropology, and Economics, a
reflexive question emerged concerning the possibility of an ‘outside’. To what
extent could meaningful cultural difference be apprehended without succumbing
to the representational strategies of what became ‘official’ English literature?
In Crawford’s account, the response to this problem was vernacular literature,
the further dialectical turn through which Scotland gained a measure of revenge
against the discipline it created. Negotiating the task of cultural translation from
within the discipline of English literature, vernacular literature attempts to marry
verisimilitude – language as it is spoken by a minority culture – with the disciplinary
conventions of an editorial gloss. Crawford notes how this bind is reflected in
Walter Scott’s Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border whose seuils and paratextes
demonstrate how dialect is forever shadowed and determined by anthropological
explanation.8 As with Macpherson’s Celtic style – his ‘translatorese’ – so it was
with Walter Scott’s Scottish songs and fictions: they were treated with a mix of

6
 Robert Crawford, ‘The Scottish Invention of English Literature’, Devolving English
Literature (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 16–44.
7
 Crawford, ‘Anthropology and Dialect’, Devolving English Literature, 111–75.
8
 Crawford, Devolving English Literature, 118.
‘Put into English’ 105

cultural pride and political suspicion. Though vernacular literature might have
been understood to expand the terms of English, ultimately it could only ever
stage, rather than resolve, the problem of inter-linguistic reference.
And so vernacular literature remains today a fundamentally two-faced
phenomenon, and in need of careful evaluation. Is it the expression of a local
form of English claiming to be more ‘natural’ than ‘official’ English literature,
or is it a gesture straining at the boundary of English expression towards other
non-English languages which have been suppressed, forgotten and over-written?
In other words, does vernacular claim to be a naturalisation of ‘English’ at a local
level, or its denaturalisation as a global phenomenon? This is the interminable
predicament which confronted Yeats in the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries. Despite his folkloric themes, occasional echoing of Irish syntax, and
longstanding interest in representing the speech of ‘the people themselves’, Yeats
can hardly be called a vernacular poet. His stated appreciation for other writers’
use of vernacular, including that of Robbie Burns, his own collaborators Gregory
and Synge, and the Scottish modernist Hugh MacDiarmuid, registers his interest
in vernacular English, but also, inevitably, points up the limitations of his own
practice. This may be put down to his talents lying elsewhere – perhaps Yeats
just didn’t have the ear for local speech patterns or the ability to draw these out
synthetically. But equally it suggests his formative resistance to the naturalistic
assumptions which so often accompany vernacular writing.9
This is not to say that vernacular literature simply is naturalistic. Matthew
Hart’s reading of the ‘synthetic vernacular’ which in the context of the early
twentieth century signalled ‘a poet’s attempt to sublate the tension between
local languages and […] modernism’s late imperial engagement with the non-
Occidental world’ seems entirely correct; and, to be sure, there are plentiful
examples of Irish, Scottish, Welsh, American and indeed English poems where
non-standard grammars and dialect words are combined with arcane, antique or
foreign language vocabularies to uncanny effect.10 Yet, even if we admit that this
accumulation of vernacular modernisms suggests a general erosion of imperial
sovereignty whose imagined articulation is through an official literary language
of Englishness, there is no guarantee that any particular example of vernacular
literature escapes the predictability of regional cliché. Stylistic innovation
will not be easily parsed from mimicking a regional accent or relying on faux
antiquarianism; nor will anthropological comparison remain entirely distinct from

9
 George Moore accounts for Yeats’s lack of vernacular writing in the following
passage: ‘Yeats answered that even in Shakespeare’s time people were beginning to talk
of the decline of language. No language, he said, was ever so grammatical as Latin, yet
the language died; perhaps from excess of grammar. It is with idiom and not with grammar
that the literary artist should concern himself; and, stroking his thin yellow hands slowly,
he looked into the midnight fire, regretting he had no gift to learn living speech from those
who knew it – the peasants.’ Moore, ‘Ave’, 84.
10
 Matthew Hart, Nations of Nothing But Poetry: Modernism, Transnationalism, and
Synthetic Vernacular Writing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 9.
106 W.B. Yeats and World Literature

global commodification or kitsch. With this difficulty in mind, Yeats’s caution


with respect to the vernacular may prove salutary: it is not only the means by
which the discipline of English literature fractures – localised speech challenging
a centralised literary style – but also the means by which that discipline puts
itself back together again by organising differences according to a familiar set
of metaphysical values: ‘the ordinary’, ‘nature’, ‘tradition’ and ‘common sense’.
Yeats marks this suspicion of vernacular through his repeated criticisms of
Wordsworth which, though surely unfair to the reflective complexities and
tensions of Wordsworth’s poetry, return consistently to the question of poetic
style. Wordsworth is ‘flat and heavy’ because ‘his moral sense has no theatrical
element, it is an obedience, a discipline which he has not created’ (M 151); and
he is ‘a descendent of Rousseau’ who makes ‘a constant resolution to dwell upon
good only’ (Ex 275). In summary, Wordsworth lacks style because through his
Platonic recollections of childhood and excursions into ‘nature’ he elides due
consideration of the estranging art of his constructions. In ‘A General Introduction
for my Work’ under the section entitled ‘Style and Attitude’, Yeats returns to
Wordsworth once more: ‘It was a long time before I had made a language to my
liking’, he writes. ‘I began to make it when I discovered some twenty years ago
that I must seek, not as Wordsworth thought, words in common use, but a powerful
and passionate syntax, and a complete coincidence between period and stanza’
(E&I 521–2). This refers less to Wordsworth’s poetry than to his preface to Lyrical
Ballads in which the poet claims to find in ‘humble and rustic life’ a ‘plainer
and more emphatic’, even a more ‘philosophical’, language.11 Yeats’s contrasting
emphasis on the contortions of a poetic language (a ‘passionate syntax’) restores
the process of artful mediation to the discovery of nature. It is a point he rehearsed
from Coleridge whose Biographia Literaria devotes whole sections to recovering
Wordsworth’s art from amidst his metaphysical sentiment. The problem, as
Coleridge defined it, was that Wordsworth’s claim to have copied ordinary speech
did not distinguish between the naturalness of ‘reality’ and the apparent naturalness
of poetic representations of reality.12 It is only by recognising this difference, the
non-identity of the subject’s picture of nature with nature itself, that the process of
poetic idealisation is restored to the words on the page, and the poetic task rightly
distinguished from that of recording objective commonplaces. By secreting his
idealism within his naturalistic presentation of rustic life, Wordsworth omits to
reflect upon the artificial dimension of his poetry. It is this omission which renders
him a problematic presence for Yeats: Wordsworth the ‘nature poet’ of common
language is inferentially the poet of the English state from whom the Irish poet
must distinguish his vitality; in the same way as from state-bound morality he must
distinguish a ‘national’ style, and from a commonplace word a dramatic utterance.

11
 William Wordsworth, Selected Prose. Ed. J. Hayden (London: Penguin Classics,
1988), 281–2.
12
 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria; or Biographical Sketches of My
Literary Life and Opinions. (London: Elibron Classics Series, 2004), 163.
‘Put into English’ 107

Going forward, then, we should be clear that Yeats’s is not an outright rejection
of vernacular literature, but rather an emphatic corroboration of its literary
provenance. When advising prospective Abbey playwrights in 1909, he was
adamant that they should not be ‘too anxious to write in an Irish way’ and that
they should consider the formal exigencies of plot over the naturalism of dialogue.
Goethe’s maxim that ‘a work of art, though it must have the effect of nature, is art
because it is not nature’ helped him consolidate this perspective, even on the most
ancient matter of ‘living speach [sic]’ – the performance of which he deemed a
difficult feat of artifice (CL Intelex 1101, 1909). Yeats’s intellectual preference for
the ‘world’ of Goethe over the England of Wordsworth was consolidated through
his relation with his father’s friend, the chair of English Literature at Trinity College
Dublin, Ernest Dowden, who had written on Goethe and worked on a translation
of the German poet’s East-West Divan. According to Yeats it was Dowden’s
abandonment of his study of Goethe in favour of Wordsworth when confronted
with the displeasure of an archbishop which had damned him to provincialism:
the same provincialism, indeed, which led Dowden to cast aspersions on the Irish
Revival.13 In this light, and by reference to the order and theatricality of Goethe’s
personality, Yeats was determined to make Irish literature a world matter.
The critic Michael Golston is right to point out in Yeats’s consistent disavowals
of poetic technique in favour of a naturalised conception of ‘rhythm’ – and in
particular rhythm affiliated to the vital life of the Irish people – the implication of
a profound bodily, even racial, unconscious resistant to the mechanical muse of
modernity. But such rhetoric does not obviate entirely the process of self-conscious
construction.14 It was Goethe’s lesson of ‘construction’ which led Yeats to declare
that he had abandoned modern subjectivity for ‘contemporary words and syntax’
(L 892).15 Yeats was adamant that artful construction and contemporary rhythm
belong together. And he gives a precise example of how this works in practice
when conceiving of a modern ‘passionate prose’ which crosses and disrupts, but
also ironically preserves for use the traditional pentameter line. No longer can one
speak the first line of Milton’s Paradise Lost, emphasise each of the five iambic
feet, and remain unselfconscious, he explains; but one can propose a modern
rhythmic adaptation of the same line in which there are four as opposed to five
stresses. In ‘blank verse’ the line scans as follows: ‘Of mán’s first dísobédience
ánd the frúit’. But in modern recitation (‘passionate prose’) it is this: ‘Of mán’s
fírst disobédience and the frúit’ or ‘Of mán’s fírst dísobedience and the frúit’

13
 Marjorie Perloff, ‘Yeats and Goethe’, Comparative Literature 23.2 (1971),
125–40: 128.
14
 Michael Golston, Rhythm and Race in Modernist Poetry and Science (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2008), 92.
15
 In a late letter to the designer Edmund Dulac, Yeats declared that all his life he had
been following Goethe, the guiding star of Weltliteratur, in trying ‘to get rid of modern
subjectivity by insisting on construction and contemporary words and syntax’ (L 892). The
vital question of where in the world ‘contemporary’ English words and syntax come from
remains hanging in the air.
108 W.B. Yeats and World Literature

(E&I 524). The intricacy of this position demands attention since it requires a
simultaneous invocation and abrogation of prosody. The line is measured as it is
no longer naturally spoken – indeed measured by Yeats who claimed of prosody
that it was ‘the subject of which [he was] most ignorant’ (L 896). At the same time,
it is spoken anew in contravention of the accepted prosodic rule. The apparent
naturalism which underlies the poet’s contemporary ‘passionate prose’ depends
on the transformation of an unselfconscious traditional measure into an estranging
art of counting and adapting the stress pattern so that a five-stress line is and is no
longer a five-stress line: the pentameter line is a haunted structure, sustaining within
the mouths of self-consciously modern poets the ‘ghostly voice’ of the traditional
past: ‘vivid speech’ (E&I 524). The particular ghost of the poet Gerard Manley
Hopkins informs this insight, with Robert Bridges, whom Yeats credits with the
term ‘contrapuntal structure’, responsible for introducing Hopkins’s theories of
sprung rhythm and counterpoint to the literary world in 1918.16 Crucially, for the
terms of our present discussion, in his reading of the Milton line Yeats is using one
kind of poetic naturalism to qualify another: the traditional line is qualified by the
spirit of free verse (‘passionate prose’) and vice versa, with the resulting effect of
modern poetic ‘rhythm’ or ‘passion’ requiring always an act of subterfuge – an act
of concealing one poetic voice inside another.
Edward Said has spoken of understanding various writers and works of world
literature contrapuntally: ‘that is, as figures whose writing travels across temporal,
cultural and ideological boundaries in unforeseen ways to emerge as part of a
new ensemble along with later history and subsequent art’.17 Yeats admits such
complex procedures of circulation and reception into the artistic process itself: not
only does the act of reading Milton’s line against the grain of its naturalised stress
pattern become an ironic way of preserving its relevance, but it also suggests the
possibility of new poetic compositions in which a traditional line or stanza becomes
a theatre of political difference and conflict. The traditional line houses the modern
poetic spirit but cannot constitute its home. The refugee quality of Yeats’s ‘vivid
speech’, changing what yet ‘seems’ traditional, reflects back upon the qualities of
vernacular literature where the rhythms of living speech imply a heterogeneity
smuggled within an apparently homogeneous expression of local culture. We
saw in the last chapter how foreign elements deposited within ostensibly native
material gave Yeats’s folklore its essential textual qualities, alerting us to the
procedures of displacement by which the Irish peasant was produced. In a similar
fashion, the question of the Hiberno-English vernacular always already contained
within it the question of translation: it was never a simple matter of copying local
Irish speech in English but of detecting within such reported speech a potential

16
 In his now famous ‘Author’s Preface’ Hopkins wrote specifically of Milton as the
great master of ‘counterpoint rhythm’ which is the reversal of the expected stress pattern in
a conventional foot written in ‘common English rhythm’. Gerard Manley Hopkins, Poems
of Gerard Manley Hopkins. Ed. Robert Bridges (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1918), 3.
17
 Edward Said, Freud and the Non-European (London; New York: Verso, 2014), 24.
‘Put into English’ 109

non-relation between the form its expression took and the content it was supposed
to represent (i.e. a non-English language). The image and sound of Yeats’s Ireland
was menaced as well as produced by the exoticism within it.

The Eastern Commodity

When Yeats advised the Cuala Press to publish both Tagore’s The Post Office
(1914) and Fenollosa and Pound’s Certain Noble Plays of Japan (1916) as part
of its national catalogue, it was as if to test the hypothesis that Asia was Irish. No
doubt an example of the commodification of ‘the East’, this publication strategy
nonetheless established an important alliance between distinctly non-English
English literatures. With Irish literature in English explicitly linked to English
translations of Bengali and Japanese texts, we have at once the evidence for a
burgeoning canon of world literature in English and the prospect of a renewed
self-consciousness with respect to World English’s glossarial practices – the
ways in which English metabolises foreign material within its own universalising
economy.
In our preceding discussion of vernacular literatures in English, we noted the
tendency towards naturalising the ‘local’ and overlooking its ‘exotic’ provenance.
By their strategic and inevitably political marriage of characteristically vernacular
and ‘local’ Irish literature in English to literature that is undeniably global and
‘exotic’ these Cuala publications draw our attention to an important continuity
regarding the persistent question of translation. Irish literature written in English
implies the act of translation which Tagore’s Gitanjali or Fenollosa’s manuscripts
exemplify. Whilst it is fair to say that Yeats did not consistently articulate this
connection, the process of absorbing other cultures into English and rendering
particular cultural references as gestures within the theatre of English-language
universalism is one that Yeats was reflexively implicated in – especially through
his many and renowned turns towards the East. It seems to me that conventional
attempts to detect the influence of ‘eastern thought’ on his poetry are liable to misread
the historical complexity and profound superficiality of this theatre of the poet’s
cultural engagements with a commodified and translated Asian imaginary. Bluntly
put, the project of discerning the influence of the philosophy of the Upanishads
in Yeats’s Byzantium poems, say, or of Zen Buddhism in his ‘A Dialogue of Self
and Soul’ or ‘Long-legged Fly’, cannot do justice to the relation of a western
author to eastern traditions within the context of colonial exploitation. And even
where the case is made that Yeats uses his Irishness to cultivate a complex of
non-exploitative cultural relations within the global semi-periphery – with ancient
Indian religions, or Japanese drama – the historical meaning attributable to this
relation derives as much from the creation of a global literary space in English, as
it does from the reception of poetic ‘wisdom’ from a foreign culture.
Yeats ventured imaginatively to Asia often throughout his career, going so far
as to claim that ‘until the battle of the Boyne, Ireland belonged to Asia’. And
110 W.B. Yeats and World Literature

its modern political malformations notwithstanding, Ireland remained in the


poet’s eyes sympathetic with the ‘ancient’ cultures of India, Japan, China and
Persia.18 Of these cultures, India was perhaps the most longstanding of Yeats’s
anthropological reference points, its various religions and literatures facilitating
several iterations of his orientalist desire. Originally influenced by the Theosophy
movement, and in particular by the visit of comparative mythographer and
‘expert’ in Indian religions Mohini Chatterjee to Dublin, Yeats wrote a series of
Indian poems as early as 1885: ‘Anashuya and Vijaya’, ‘The Indian upon God’ and
‘The Indian to His Love’. These lyrics might fairly be characterised as juvenilia,
at best minor contributions to a romantic poetic tradition, and a dilute of the
spirit exemplified by Percy Bysshe Shelley’s ‘poet’ in Alastor whose venture to
India and return to the Caucasus modelled the romantic movements of cultural
projection and appropriation. And yet we can say that ‘The Indian to His Love’
retains the reader’s interest for its reflections upon the narcissism of adventure:
‘A parrot sways upon a tree, / Raging at his own image in the enamelled sea’ (VP
77–8). Significantly, Yeats’s first Indian, and notional representative of the East, is
unwittingly combined with Robinson Crusoe, ensign of the Utopian West: we find
him on a desert island, marooned ‘under quiet bows apart’, ‘his vapoury footsole
by the water’s drowsy blaze’. The new and the ancient coincide in the double-bind
of the poet’s worldly predicament.
Yeats’s later claim in ‘Ireland and the Arts’ (1903) ‘that he had rid himself
of “Shelley’s Italian light”’ in order to find his own Irish style was only ever a
complicated half-truth, since so often he continued to find Ireland outside of itself
and in climates more unfamiliar than the Italian. In the same essay he writes: ‘I
would have Ireland re-create the ancient arts, the arts as they were understood in
Judea, in India, in Scandinavia, in Greece and Rome, in every ancient land; as they
were understood when they moved a whole people and not a few people who have
grown up in a leisured class and made this understanding their business’ (E&I
206). If Yeats did supplant Shelley’s influence it wasn’t by eschewing exoticism,
though it may have been by changing its complexion. He met the Bengali poet
Rabindranath Tagore for the first time in William Rothenstein’s house in London
in June 1912, a poetic encounter I shall return to in more detail later in this chapter.
Suffice it to say for now that no matter how he preferred to cast Tagore’s work
as representative of Bengal’s ‘supreme culture’, or an ‘unbroken’ tradition (E&I
390), Yeats’s collaboration with Tagore necessitated a more historically situated
conception of the East. Yeats became subject to India through Tagore, and
appropriately sensitive to its political and literary affinities with a semi-peripheral
vision of Ireland. The spiritual power of Tagore’s work, in particular its self-
confident Indian-ness, offered him, he wrote, ‘a moral that would be valuable […]
in Ireland’.19

18
 Maud Gonne and W.B. Yeats, The Gonne-Yeats Letters 1893–1938. Ed. A.N.
Jeffares and A. MacBride (London: Hutchinson, 1992), 293–4.
19
 Quoted in Roy Foster, The Apprentice Mage, 470.
‘Put into English’ 111

The third major iteration of Yeats’s Indian interest, beyond Chaterjee and
Tagore, came about through his collaborative translation of the Upanishads
with Shri Purohit Swãmi published in 1937. Once more, while promising ‘vast
sentiments and generalisations’ in line with the deep religious sensibilities of the
East, familiar to both romantic and modernist anthropological traditions, Yeats
found the work’s most characteristic note in the idea of Ireland as Asiatic:

It pleases me to fancy that when we turn towards the East, in or out of church,
we are turning not less to the ancient West and North; the one fragment of pagan
Irish philosophy come down, ‘the Song of Amergin’ seems Asiatic; that a system
of thought like that in these books, though perhaps less perfectly organised,
once overspread the world, as ours today; that our genuflections discover in that
East something ancestral in ourselves, something we must bring into the light
before we can appease a religious instinct that for the first time in our civilization
demands the satisfaction of the whole man. (‘Introduction’ to The Ten Principal
Upanishads)20

The primitivism advocated in this passage permits two significantly different


interpretations. The first we might characterise as broadly fascist since by
discovering in the East something ancestral in ‘ourselves’ Yeats allows, in a
stately Hegelian tradition, that it is only ‘we’ occidentals of the west and north
who are able to take an active part in history. In this case, the ‘supreme culture’
of Tagore’s Bengal is distinguished for historical use by Europeans in the service
of constructing a modern national identity. In like fashion, when Yeats finds in
the adventure plots of the Japanese Noh the same ‘sense of awe that our Gaelic-
speaking country people will sometimes show when you speak to them of castle
Hackett or of some holy well’ (E&I 232), and in ‘Sato’s sword’ a changeless
heritage which can lend moral strength to a 1920s Ireland fallen into disarray
(VP 421), he defines a religious and martial unconscious, which although it
doesn’t simply belong to Ireland, can be powerfully acknowledged from the Irish
perspective. The peculiar virtue of an ancient tradition which ostensibly resides
outside of history is that it can be appropriated and then rediscovered within
history, promising a profoundly modern sense of authenticity. The paradoxically
nationalist internationalism which came to typify European fascism in the 1920s
and 30s relied upon such strategies of cultural appropriation and forced similitude,
so that under a cover of ‘ancientness’ an authoritative political sovereignty could
be devised. Yeats’s identifications with eastern cultures have often been read in
this light as a means for granting Ireland’s initially minoritarian political identity a
racially supremacist character; indeed, as evidence of this ideological inclination
it has become conventional to cite Yeats’s unhappily remembered phrase ‘Still the
indomitable Irishry’ which he intended to describe those who would not forget the
formal lessons of ancient traditions as might be exemplified equally by Japanese
prints or Chinese poetry (VP 640).

20
 Shri Purohit Swãmi and W.B. Yeats (trans.), The Ten Principal Upanishads, 11.
112 W.B. Yeats and World Literature

It is indisputable that Yeats borrows both from romantic orientalist traditions


and from proto-fascist occultist traditions of representation, yet the idea that his
transnationalism is one-note fascism remains too simplistic. In fact, I would like
to argue that the second characterisation of Yeats’s global primitivism is disruptive
rather than fortifying to such a modern ideology. As much as Yeats relies upon the
historically transient idea of ancientness in order to support an Irish subjectivity
capable of withstanding the modern world, he also makes conspicuous the modern
processes with which this subjectivity is fabricated. ‘Ancientness’, though
ostensibly signalling a narrow temporal channel from the present to the past,
also opens a network of geographic transmissions and translations which disrupt
and dislocate singular expressions of culture. For instance, it is far from being
the case that Yeats’s appropriation of the Japanese Noh was a bringing home of
foreign materials to Ireland. On the contrary, introducing his Noh plays in 1916,
he prompts the reader to consider the necessary cultural dislocations upon which
the contemporary production of ancientness rests:

I have been elaborating my play in London where alone I can find the help I
need, Mr. Dulac’s mastery of design and Mr. Ito’s genius of movement; yet it
pleases me to think I am working for my own country [Ireland]. Perhaps some
day a play in the form I am adapting for European purposes may excite once
more, whether in Gaelic or in English, under the slope of Slieve-na-mon or
Croagh Patrick, ancient memories; for this form has no need of scenery that runs
away with money nor of a theatre building. (E&I 236)

Although it pleases the poet to think ‘he is working for his own country’, London
provides the scene for Yeats’s eastern encounter. But it is not only the displacement
of the Irish national imaginary within the English metropolis which disrupts the
fantasy of directly expressing an ancient tradition; it is also the celebration of
‘Mr. Dulac’s mastery of design’ and ‘Mr. Ito’s genius of movement’. Dulac was a
renowned illustrator of the Arabian Nights as well as a theatre, costume and stamp
designer, whose mastery here is credited with organising the Japanese materials for
the modern stage – especially by rejuvenating the ‘beauty of the mask’. ‘Mastery
of design’ as a means of linking ‘European purposes’ to ‘ancient memories’
tellingly recalls that overdetermined crux between the Apollonian structure and
the Dionysian primitive from the Birth of Tragedy, in the cradle of which lay the
terms of European art’s decadence and potential rehabilitation.
The enigma provided by the dancer Micho Ito consists in the fact that although
he was Japanese, he had not performed the Noh except in Europe where he was
forging a career as an experimental, modernist dancer – in fact, he was said to
find ‘nothing more boring than the Noh’.21 This non-native choreography is of
a piece with the demonstrative folding and unfolding of the cloth which became
such a distinctive feature of Yeats’s ceremonial theatre, but was entirely foreign to

21
 Yoko Chiba, ‘Ezra Pound’s Versions of Fenollosa’s Noh Manuscripts and Yeats’s
Unpublished “Suggestions and Corrections”’, Yeats Annual 4 (1986), 121–45: 125.
‘Put into English’ 113

Noh as it had been performed in Japan.22 The equivocation with which Yeats goes
on to imagine revitalising European culture is the result of his having exposed
ancientness to the structural means of its production in the present: his radicalised
theatre – radicalised as a consequence of modern economic exigencies – will be
performed in Gaelic or in English and under the slope of Slieve-na-mon or Croagh
Patrick. As well as conforming to Yeats’s habitual concession to Douglas Hyde
and the Gaelic League, such undecidability of language and location performs a
modern imperative: the local must fissure to communicate with the world. Yeats
continues accordingly: ‘my writings if they be seaworthy will be put to sea, and I
cannot tell where they may be carried by the wind. Are not faery-stories of Oscar
Wilde, which were written for Mr. Ricketts and Mr. Shannon and for a few ladies,
very popular in Arabia?’ (E&I 237). The freedom of writing is associated with
the mobility of travel and the unpredictability of its address. At both the stage of
production and of distribution and consumption, writing is defined by its global
circulation. This corresponds with a point made by Michael Hamburger that
modernist poetry was peculiarly concerned with the afterlife of the literary object
– questions of audience, critical reception and market sales become explicit themes
within modernist poetry. Taking for his primary example Ezra Pound’s lines from
Lustra (1916), ‘I beg you my friendly critics, / Do not set about to procure me an
audience’, Hamburger writes: ‘The convention of the envoi, the poet’s valediction
to his poem is modernised in a way that reveals not only Pound’s preoccupation with
the poet-critic-reader relationship but a self-consciousness scarcely precedented
in poetry of any period. The effect is the opposite of that attained by writers of
“pure” or “absolute” poetry.’23 In Yeats’s corpus, as well as ‘A Fisherman’ which
considers the needful invention of a modern audience, we might consider ‘A Coat’
where the poet rails against the fools who wore his song ‘in the world’s eyes / As
though they’d wrought it’, or even ‘Easter 1916’ which concerns itself with the
challenges of cultural reception (VP 320). This phenomenon is due, we are bound
to think, to an increasing convergence between the modes of artistic production
and the artwork’s reception in global terms: the artist, no less than the critic, is
projected into heterogeneous world-space which demands reference to displaced
material, always originating in some reputed elsewhere.
The seminal expression of this modernist phenomenon, connecting linguistic
expression to the fate of transferred global material, lies not with Pound, but with
Charles Baudelaire who articulates the link between poetics and global commodity
circulation in his essay on the Exposition Universelle of 1855.24 Consider a modern
Winckelmann, Baudelaire suggests, nominating the exemplary adjudicator of

22
 Masaru Sekine and Christopher Murray, Yeats and the Noh: A Comparative Study
(Gerrards Cross: Colin Smyth, 1990), xiv.
23
 Michael Hamburger, The Truth of Poetry: Tensions in Modernist Poetry since
Baudelaire (London: Anvil Press Poetry, 1996 [1968]), 115.
24
 Charles Baudelaire, ‘The Exposition Universelle’, Art in Paris 1845 – 1862: Salons
and Other Exhibitions Reviewed by Charles Baudelaire. Trans. J. Mayne (Oxford: Phaidon
Press, 1981), 124.
114 W.B. Yeats and World Literature

classical European beauty, Johann Joachim Winckelmann, the German art critic
and aesthetician of the eighteenth century most associated with Hellenism and
the study of the forms of Greek Art: ‘what would he say, if faced with a product
of China – something weird, strange, distorted in form, intense in colour, and
sometimes delicate to the point of evanescence?’25 The implied answer is that
the canonically-minded Winckelmann, unable to perceive its aesthetic qualities,
would likely say nothing kind. A foreign object lacking the solidity and line of
Greek statuary presents a fundamental challenge to the conventions of European
aesthetics: a challenge, suggests Baudelaire, which can only be met through a
transformation of subjectivity:

In order for [the Chinese object] to be understood it is necessary for the critic, for
the spectator, to work a transformation in himself which partakes the nature of a
mystery – it is necessary for him, by means of a phenomenon of the will acting
upon the imagination, to learn of himself to participate in the surroundings
which have given birth to this singular flowering. Few men have the divine grace
of cosmopolitanism in its entirety; but all can acquire it in different degrees.26

The Kantian understanding of cosmopolitanism – one sovereign subject entering


into a sociable antagonism with another sovereign subject – remains as the
backdrop to Baudelaire’s essay, formalised through the Exposition’s status as an
artistic competition between European nations. Yet there is an important sense
in which Baudelaire’s vision stands also as a riposte to Kant. For the poet the
encounter with the non-European object demands of the cosmopolitan a perverse
will to surrender his sovereignty so that he might escape the ‘aesthetic punditry’
of the nationalist, as well as the overbearing pedagogy of the systemiser. Such
divine grace is difficult to secure, however, and no matter how admirable this
non-systematic openness to what is strange may seem to be, we should not
lose sight of the fact that it is determined by – is a response to – an expanding
global market (which has its own systemising logic). Standing in the vanguard
of economic modernity, Baudelaire effectively substitutes the relation between
sovereign states with the commodity relation. ‘No scholastic veil. No university
paradox, no academic utopia has intervened between [the cosmopolitan] and the
complex truth’, he writes, implying, alongside the suspension of rationalised self-
interest, the suspension of knowledge and of the philosophy of ‘progress’.27 The
product of China is not to be judiciously interpreted or extensively studied, but
rather theatrically encountered, aesthetically experienced, and ultimately, in one
way or another, consumed. It is noteworthy indeed that Baudelaire has conjured
the East in the form of a consumable object – ‘delicate’ and ‘evanescent’ – rather
than as an eternal otherness out there beyond the boundary of Europe. As a
foreign and fugitive object which transgresses sovereign national borders, whose

25
 Baudelaire, ‘The Exposition Universelle’, 121.
26
 Baudelaire, ‘The Exposition Universelle’, 122.
27
 Baudelaire, ‘The Exposition Universelle’, 122.
‘Put into English’ 115

historical origins remain obscure, and whose form and colour is not accounted for
by European good taste, it both invites scrutiny and resists understanding; ‘[w]
eird, strange and distorted’, there is something inassimilable about the product of
China, which, for Baudelaire, in a twist of conventional aesthetic judgement, is
what guarantees its beauty.
In his late poem ‘Lapis Lazuli’ (1938), Yeats reprises the role of Baudelaire’s
alternative cosmopolitan through his poetic encounter with a small table-set-sized
ornament from the East. Given that the poem begins in the mire of European
politics, with the threat of war and the equally pernicious demand for poets to
abandon their ‘gaiety’ in order to become morally appropriate, the intrusion of a
Chinese artefact is particularly striking. The associated shift in the poem’s register
signals both a reduction of scale – from the theatre of war to the poet’s writing
desk where the Lapis Lazuli ornament sits – and a more expansive gesture, an
opening onto a non-European world.

Two Chinamen, behind them a third,


Are carved in lapis lazuli,
Over them flies a long-legged bird,
A symbol of longevity;
The third, doubtless a serving-man
Carries a musical instrument.

Although Yeats ventures a symbolic interpretation of the ornament, most fittingly


associating the long-legged bird to longevity, which reflects the object’s ancient
provenance in the East, this scholarly knowledge is soon overwritten as the
encounter requires of the poet that he give up trying to fix its meaning. So it is
in the final stanza of the poem that Yeats wills himself imaginatively into the
depicted scene:

[…] I
Delight to imagine them [the Chinamen] seated there;
There, on the mountain and the sky,
On all the tragic scene they stare.
One asks for mournful melodies;
Accomplished fingers begin to play. (VP 566–7)

This poem’s philosophical debt to Nietzsche is manifest: not only in its


recapitulation of tragic gaiety in four out of five stanzas, but through the specific
connection it makes between the theatrical mask and the non-European. In The
Birth of Tragedy ‘Greek cheerfulness’ derives from the expressive dramaturgy
of East meets West. Nietzsche’s determination to resist a conception of the
Dionysian (Asiatic) spirit as a metaphysical consolation – that of a primitive
naturalism – while yet permitting a reordering of the aesthetic realm according
to the principle of Dionysian vitality, meant there was a need for the mask – a
translation device – which allowed the Apollonian artist (the European subject)
to perform his reunification with the primitive ectoplasm of culture. ‘The mask’
116 W.B. Yeats and World Literature

wrote Nietzsche, is ‘a necessary effect of a glance into the inside and terrors of
nature’.28 This is to say, the mask brings the tragic actor face to face, not with an
original unity, but with a strangeness within himself. The Dionysian aspect is not
the spirit of homecoming, but of self-estrangement; and in this fashion the tragic
actor is akin to Baudelaire’s cosmopolitan poet, able to will his own surrender to
a foreign object which lacks the necessary context to be apprehended as beautiful
or historically meaningful. Indeed, will in the midst of surrender is the primer
for Nietzsche’s most well-known philosophical doctrines: ‘the will to power’, the
eternal return, and amor fati. It is also implicit in Yeats’s refrain for gaiety. Poets
who are gay in the face of ‘Aeroplane and Zeppelin’ and the sinister realpolitik
of 1930s Europe are deserving of praise in the poem, as are the tragic actors
who do not ‘break their lines to weep’, and the hand workers of civilization who
build monuments though they know they are bound to fall (‘and they that build
them again are gay’ (VP 566)). Gaiety here is more than resilience in the face of
hardship; rather, it is analogous with reckless creativity, a life principle at work in
the face of politics, specifically European politics, which comes in this instance to
be focalised through the artefact from the East.
Crucially, however, this ontological priority of life over politics is reaffirmed
through an after-image of global trade. What is effectively Yeats’s most primitive
value – gaiety as poetic affirmation – is rediscovered through his encounter with
the ghost of Baudelaire’s commodity. The final stanza takes cognisance of this
double aspect of the life of the object by foregrounding its contingency: it is a
mere something on the poet’s desk, even as it is framed as an ancient ideal.

Every discolouration of the stone,


Every accidental crack or dent,
Seems a water-course or avalanche,
Or lofty slope where it still snows […] (VP 567)

What might be thought non-essential to the ornament’s original identity, namely


those features it accrues to itself by the act of transmission – ‘discolouration’,
‘crack or dent’ – becomes a critical part of its meaning. A theatre of semblance –
what the object seems to be in the present time of its reception – hermeneutically
connects the object’s presumed origin to the form of its displacement such that
there is an ironic continuity between what is ancient and ideal and what is new and
accidental, between the scene beheld by the Chinamen’s ‘glittering eyes’ and the
modern heterogeneity implied by this strange distressed object situated without a
proper historical context.
We can surely conclude that by his imaginative identification with his foreign
ornament Yeats would satisfy Baudelaire’s definition of the aesthetic cosmopolitan.
But, as suggested above, the poetic disposition capable of discerning beauty in
strange objects depends for its virtues on the circulation of the global commodity.

28
 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy (1872), Basic Writings of Nietzsche. Ed.
and trans. Walter Kaufman (New York: Modern Library, Random House, 2000), 17–144: 67.
‘Put into English’ 117

Most obviously, if there were no global trade the poet would not have the
opportunity to fall in love with his Chinese curiosity. More problematically, we
might say that the qualities of strangeness which constitute the attractiveness of
the object, and which seem particular to it, are in fact produced systematically by
its displacement. It is a globalising system of asymmetric exchange that grants
the poet access to the eastern commodity. Indeed the commodity relation, which
Baudelaire discerned as the condition of modern poetry in the great world archives
of the mid-nineteenth-century Exhibitions, is developed here, by Yeats, into
poetry’s internal reference.
The moment of aesthetic reception of global material, as well as providing ‘Lapis
Lazuli’s’ economic context, provides its subject matter. This begins to reflect the
glossarial self-consciousness we find in Yeatsian poetics more generally: the ways
in which his poems allude to and associate between multiple and diverse materials
without providing much or any explanation of their provenance or historical
context. His poem ‘The Statues’ is another standout example in this respect: a
poem, as Michael North wittily remarks, which ‘requires more commentary than
it repays’.29 Generously we might suggest that ‘The Statues’ reconstructs the
classical European space by retracing how Pythagorean geometry and Phidias’s
statuary ‘put down all vague Asiatic immensities’ and created a European type of
beauty. This genealogy, however, is only one strand of the poem’s densely allusive
fabric which pitches Alexander the Great’s venture into India alongside an empty
statue of the Buddha, the occult cat Grimalkin, Shakespeare’s Hamlet – ‘a fat /
Dreamer from the Middle Ages’ – and the Irish patriot Patrick Pearse. The result
is a disorienting and generally superficial feeling for historical images deprived
of their particular and differentiating contexts. Indeed, it is a poem which reduces
historical particulars to the single movement of modernity which, in disaffected
mood, the poet calls ‘the filthy modern tide’ (VP 610–11). The strong irony of
Yeats’s disaffection here is evidenced by the fact that his poem exemplifies the
wave of commodification it ends by lamenting. We read a poem which projects
different world materials into circulation within a single economy and permits a
reflection, however abstract, about the hegemony of European aesthetic space and
the subversive potential of eastern materials within it. Ultimately though, it reveals
this subversive potential as reliant upon global commodification. We may develop
North’s observation that to pay attention to the poem’s particular references is
unrewarding with the realisation that a detailed exegesis of these particulars
is beside the point. What the poem typifies, and what needs to be read, is the
universalising gesture of the modern glossary. This glossarial aspect of modernity
which Yeats has made an explicit theme of his poetry is furthermore intrinsic to
its poetic medium, namely its language. Indeed, we must say that by staging the
circulation of the eastern commodity ‘Lapis Lazuli’ and ‘The Statues’ can be taken
as allegories of modern translation; and in this way they offer us a reflection on the
disciplinary bind of English-language literature as it produces global space.

29
 North, The Political Aesthetic, 69.
118 W.B. Yeats and World Literature

The Monoglot as Translator

We have seen that Yeats did not consider himself a vernacular poet, though his
advocacy of the living voice and a ‘passionate syntax’, often in opposition to the
bookish culture of official English literature, made it seem as if he were. Yeats’s
‘translations’ have a similar as if quality because they only ever commune with the
original through the already translated copy: the living voice of tradition was often
also, whether through Irish, Bengali or Sanskrit, the living voice in translation.
We can find in Yeats’s occult and para-psychological investigations an
instructive model for his practice of translation. Indeed, it is hardly surprising that
‘controls’ – spirits who choose to communicate with the living through a medium
– originate in different parts of the world and speak in different tongues. Perhaps
it is even less surprising that they usually speak in those tongues understood
by the participants in the séance. Accordingly, Yeats was unperturbed when at
a séance in London a control spoke Norwegian because, thankfully, there were
Norwegian speakers present in the room. Language became a more problematic
issue, however, on the occasion when Renaissance writer and traveller Leo
Africanus admonished Yeats (through the mediumship of renowned spiritualist
Etta Wriedt) for his ignorance of the German language.30 This was in 1912 when
anti-German sentiment was on the rise in England and Africanus spoke from the
fifteenth century to encourage Yeats to buck this unfortunate trend. Not simply
Germano-phile, the bizarre Africanus also spoke English with an Irish accent – on
others’ accounts, an accent not dissimilar to Yeats’s own. Wriedt was American,
which added to the mystery of this strange communication. For the sceptic, such a
mystery, if it can ever be said to exist, quickly dissolves: it is no miracle to speak
German in someone else’s name if you already know the language (as Wriedt
certainly did); nor is it unexpected that you might mimic the brogue of your most
prestigious guest as a form of flattery. Certainly we cannot rule out the prospect
that Wriedt may have sought to beguile the poet; as Yeats himself was wont to
admit, mediums sometimes lie.31 But Yeats’s recorded first impression that ‘Leo
spoke like a stage Irishman’ suggests his encounter with the medium, and through
her with Africanus, retains a significant poetic, if not purely mystical, interest.32
Functioning effectively as a transmission technology, the spirit medium gives
to the material she ‘receives’ its compressed rhetorical form, and in the process
renders her own voice formally redundant. In the case of Wriedt’s channelling
of Africanus, the living voice of a dead Moor whose first language would have
been a dialect of Arabic, is transmitted in the form of an Irish-English vernacular.
This emphasises not only the distance of the citation from its source, and the

30
 Steve Adams and George Mills Harper (eds.), ‘The Manuscript of “Leo Africanus”’,
Yeats Annual 1 (1982), 1–47: 10.
31
 ‘Because mediumship is dramatisation, even honest mediums cheat at times either
deliberately or because some part of the body has freed itself from the control of the waking
will, and almost always truth and lies are mixed together’ (Ex 365).
32
 Adams and Harper (eds.), ‘The Manuscript of “Leo Africanus”’, 6.
‘Put into English’ 119

act of translation implicit in the process, but also the power of the medium to
overwrite the source altogether: stage Irishness after all, Yeats’s own included, is
a theatrical invention which points to its own lack of a stable referent. There is,
then, a historical dimension discernable inside the séance room which relates to
the broader task of translation. Here translation is a form of communing with the
dead which nonetheless, through false notes and odd displacements, continually
recognises the impossibility of a full communication across the metaphysical
boundary between life and death. That this metaphysical boundary might have
geopolitical resonance, marked in particular by the boundaries between different
languages, is suggested from the innuendo of a missing, presumed dead, fifteenth-
century Arabic language inscribed in a non-standard modern English. An intra-
linguistic shift within English – from Wriedt’s American English to Irish English
– with the accompanying sense of its rhetorical hollowness or theatricality is made
to stand in for an inarticulable act of historical assimilation. As no one present
knows Arabic, so Africanus cannot even utter his own name except in English, and
then only in a plastic Irish voice that belongs nowhere.
The idea that an Irish accent might stand in for a more exotic foreignness makes
sense within a tradition of representation where the English-speaking Irishman is
the enduring borderline case: the familiar stranger. The opposite idea is equally
plausible, however, especially once Revivalist strategies of asserting Ireland’s
cultural distinctiveness came to prominence in the late nineteenth century: Ireland
is too distinctively Irish, in tone as well as in politics, to be anything except for
itself. While the English cosmopolitan can speak from the anonymity of the centre,
and administratively connect vastly different cultural peripheries, the Irish national
is forever fated to collapse into self-identity. He wears his accent as the brand of
his particularity. It is precisely this latter prejudice which informs the following
review from the Times of Tagore’s The Post Office (Dak Ghar) when performed by
Yeats’s Abbey Players at the Royal Court Theatre in London in July 1913:

Such expressions as ‘awfully’, ‘jolly good’, and ‘shut up’ contrast strangely with
the beauty of most of Tagore’s language without really seeming out of place. The
part of the boy was played with much delicacy and pathos by Miss Lillian Jagoe.
The other actors, though they did their best to represent Indian natives, remained
always Irishmen. (11 July 1913, PP 167n)

The review concerns the play’s second run, Yeats having given it its first English-
language production in Dublin for the benefit of the masters and boys of the Irish-
language school of St Enda’s, then headed by Irish patriot and soon-to-be General
Post Office martyr Patrick Pearse. The reviewer’s conviction that conversational
Englishisms did not seem out of place in an Indian play, whereas characteristic
Irishness did, endorses the colonial fantasy: the Englishman belongs everywhere.
On the contrary, the Irishman and the Indian have to be kept apart, lest they
recognise their shared predicament. The fear that specific (semi-peripheral/
peripheral) nationalisms might combine as a global anti-colonial strategy is
implicit in such an attempt to reduce non-English national identities to a single
120 W.B. Yeats and World Literature

untranslatable idiom. Tellingly, Yeats himself succumbed to this logic, promising


Tagore in a letter that he would seek to remove those Irish accents that ‘proved
too strong’. As well he knew, international art was replete with such treacheries.
As Roy Foster has pointed out, in the wake of their first meeting in 1912 Yeats
began using Tagore’s Indianness – and the phenomenon of Tagore-enthusiasm
which was just then flourishing in London – to escape a suffocating Irish
nationalism. Writing to Lady Gregory shortly after the Dublin performance of
The Post Office, he admitted that a lecture he was delivering on Tagore’s poetry
was intended specifically to liberate him from ‘the need of religious diplomacy’.
He was referencing his series of disillusionments with Catholic Ireland, including
those over the Playboy riots of 1907, the arguments about funding the National
Gallery of Ireland, and the ongoing controversy of the Playboy tour in the United
States. Diaspora audiences had greeted Synge’s play with jeers and vociferous
criticisms, reactivating Yeats’s resolve against what he saw as nationalist piety
linked to a sectional religious identity.33 Using an Indian writer for Irish purposes
to sublimate a North American fracas gives us a good idea of the extent of Yeats’s
internationalism.
What’s more, it was an internationalism he shared with Tagore. The Bengali
poet’s campaign against the modern principle of ‘organisation’, exemplified
by the egoic politics of nationalism, would lead him into public dispute with
Ghandi’s policy of economic non-co-operation in 1921. For Tagore, the idea that
India might turn inwards and reject the seductions of the global economy ignored
historical precedent: ‘Sparta tried to gain strength by narrowing herself down to
a particular purpose, but she did not win. Athens sought to attain perfection by
opening herself out in all her fullness – and she did win.’34 According to Tagore,
this Athenian prowess augured the necessity of India’s future openness to the
West, and to America in particular – a country whose economic power was as yet
unencumbered by the moral legacy of colonialism. Delivering a lecture on Indian
nationalism in the USA in 1916, he praised America’s ‘nomadic restlessness’ and
her ‘freedom of detachment’ from Europe: ‘America’ he announced, ‘is destined
to justify western civilization to the East’.35 In his attempt to chart a middle way
between the ‘colourless vagueness of cosmopolitanism’ and ‘the fierce self-idolatry
of nation-worship’, Tagore depicted the hybrid religious sensibility of an ideal
India within the spirit of the New World. Correspondingly, when Yeats detected
in the Indian poet an ancient religious spirit uncluttered by modern dogmas and
sectarian identities, he was implicitly endorsing the economic principle of global
circulation.
This principle of circulation can be seen in The Post Office itself, a play which
tells the story of Amal, an adopted orphan who has been placed in quarantine. We

33
 Foster, The Apprentice Mage, 483.
34
 Quoted in Dutta and Robinson, Rabindranath Tagore: The Myriad-Minded Man,
240–41.
35
 Rabindranath Tagore, Nationalism (London: Macmillan, 1917), 104.
‘Put into English’ 121

find him isolated in his home, though talking all the while with those who pass
his window and precociously imagining the many places they had travelled. Like
Paul Ruttledge in Yeats’s Where There is Nothing, Amal invests the road with the
magical property of being able to carry men beyond the visible horizon. As soon
as he learns of the King’s Post Office, however, the letter usurps the road as the
symbol of his presiding obsession: ‘Since the King’s Post Office was put there
I like more and more being indoors, and as I think I shall get a letter one day, I
feel quite happy and then I don’t mind being quiet and alone.’36 Encouraged by
a wandering fakir, Amal is convinced that one day he will receive his own letter
addressed to him from the King. The play ends in deathly satisfaction: first the
awaited letter arrives, though it is blank, a cruel joke from a local dignitary called
Headman; then the King himself arrives at Amal’s sickbed; before, finally, Amal
goes on to die.
In his written introduction to the play, Yeats warns against reading it as a
political allegory (P&I 144). But it is never clear which politics it might be said
to allegorically describe, since the administrative structure of the Post Office
marking an absent sovereign bears an uncomfortable resemblance to the British
Empire. How in this case might we account for Amal’s identification with the
administration, his fidelity to the King, and that King’s God-like visitation at the
end of the play? Tagore was no apologist for British rule as his early involvement
in the Swadeshi (‘Our Country’) movement would attest: Swadeshi was a Bengali
Sinn Féin, according to Tagore’s biographers.37 But he was enduringly fascinated
– and here through a child’s eyes – with modern modes of global transmission.
‘Modernism’ he wrote in his lectures on nationalism, is ‘freedom of the mind’,
‘independence of thought and action’, and ‘science’ as they could be found in the
West, but without the straitjackets of European taste, education or architecture.
Accordingly, Tagore emphasised Amal’s openness to the world in his own readings
of The Post Office.38 On this account, the deferral of the King’s arrival is the most
important aspect of the play: during the time it takes Amal’s spiritual hunger for
the world to grow, a territorial conception of sovereignty is suspended. The naivety
and religious simplicity which Yeats was wont to encourage others to discern in
Tagore’s work is allied to this Indian-Athenian ‘openness’ which Tagore discerned
in Amal. Tagore, the emissary of ancient wisdom, was himself an intrepid and
worldly post office agent as much as a specifically Indian subject. And although
this transmittable character left Tagore’s eastern-ness, as it had Yeats’s Irishness,
vulnerable to accusations of inauthenticity, it yet provided an important model of
literary capital which gestured an escape from the influence of the colonial centre
through mobility of reference.

36
 Rabindranath Tagore, The Post Office. Trans. Devebrata Mukerjea Madras
(Bombay; Calcutta: Macmillan India, 1968 [1914]), 59.
37
 Dutta and Robinson, Rabindranath Tagore: The Myriad-Minded Man, 141.
38
 Dutta and Robinson, Rabindranath Tagore: The Myriad-Minded Man, 159.
122 W.B. Yeats and World Literature

It is a matter of record that Tagore’s original translation of his own verse


collection Gitanjali, from Bengali into English, was to some degree revised by
Yeats for publication in 1912. Tagore admitted the debt in a letter to Rothenstein in
1915, allowing that ‘Yeats’s touches [had] made it possible for Gitanjali to occupy
the place it does [in English literature]’.39 However, the manuscript which Yeats
had ‘touched’ was soon lost by Tagore, and to posterity: a possible indication of
Tagore’s desire to wrest back some of the credit he felt he might have given away.
Since Yeats’s declarations on the matter were only ever vague, the spirit of his
intervention is more easily discerned than its detail. In the following 1913 letter to
Tagore, Yeats offers an untypically particular remark on Gitanjali which flowers
into a more general thought on translation:

The other day I started to read out no.52 [of Gitanjali] to a friend. When I came
to the last paragraph I was most sorrowful to find that magnificent ‘no more
coyness and sweetness of demeanour’ was changed and the whole poem half-
ruined. I fell on Rothenstein at once and accused that Fox Strangeways of it. He
defends Fox Strangeways but I do not believe him. The Amateur is never to be
trusted. My father struck up a friendship with an Italian artist who had only one
sentence of English (my father knew no Italian) ‘O the Amateurs aren’t they
nasty’. My father and the Italian coaxed one another for a week and saw one
another daily in each other’s studios on the foundation of this sentence. They
used to point to their pictures, I believe, when that one profound thought was not
enough. (PP 146–7)

In the first flush of his acquaintance with Tagore’s work, Yeats would often
publicly recite in various London drawing rooms translated fragments from
Gitanjali, finding within them the living voice of an ancient tradition. It was
therefore apt that it was while engaged in reading the published text aloud to a
friend that he discovered the lamentable lapse – a sudden death – in the poem’s
language. The impression Yeats gives here is that ‘the amateurs’ – and he fingers
part-time translator Fox Strangeways for the role – had further revised his revision
of Tagore’s original manuscript. Indeed the ‘magnificent’ line he quotes, ‘no more
coyness and sweetness of demeanour’, reads as ‘no more shy and soft demeanour’
in the Indian Society edition he had happened to pick up and read. It is testament
to Yeats’s influence – or at the very least to Tagore and Rothenstein’s willingness
to appease the Irish poet’s vanity – that in the later 1913 Macmillan edition the line
is changed back to accord with Yeats’s taste. Does Yeats’s specific preference here
tell us anything more general about the nature of his interventions? We might say
that Yeats’s line by choosing ‘coy’ instead of ‘shy’ has a harder tone: the speaker is
calling out a lover’s stratagem (stop being coy!) rather than issuing encouragement
(don’t be shy). But surely it is only the narcissism of small differences which has

39
 Tagore to Rothenstein, 4 Sept. 1915, Imperfect Encounters: Letters of William
Rothenstein and Rabindranath Tagore 1911–1941. Ed. M.M. Lago (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard, 1972), 195. Quoted in Foster, The Apprentice Mage, 473.
‘Put into English’ 123

Yeats so exerted on behalf of one of these phrasings over another. More fruitfully
we might consider the anecdote with which Yeats continues his letter to Tagore.
The ‘spiritual commerce’ between his father and the Italian painter has two basic
conditions: an agreed dislike of amateurism, and an ability to gesture towards
one’s own creation. In fact, the gestural language of pointing to accomplished
artworks derives from the consensus on amateurism since we are allowed to
imagine the ‘nasty’ amateur as someone for whom pedantry inhibits a finished
style. Whereas the two artists coax each other productively in their ignorance,
the amateur, whose knowledge might even extend to linguistic proficiency, is
certainly incapable of artistic production. The instruction implicit in Yeats’s letter,
then, is that translations are to be justified according to their style, rather than
their accuracy. What’s more, in the case of Gitanjali, it is Yeats himself, entirely
ignorant of Bengali, who is capable both of recognising its style and, somewhat
paradoxically, of ensuring that it has ‘style’. To put it another way, it is he who
ensures that its ancient living voice is still living in modern English.
Over the two years of 1912 and 1913 Yeats and Tagore consistently celebrated
each other’s work: Yeats wrote introductions for both Gitanjali (1912) and The
Post Office (1913), while Tagore published a laudatory essay on Yeats (translated
in The American Review of Reviews in 1914) and dedicated his volume The
Gardener (1913) to the Irish poet. Tagore also wrote from Urbana, Illinois, of
being ‘haunted’ by a performance he had seen of Cathleen Ni Houlihan (PP
163n). However, on being asked to contribute a foreword to a new scholarly study
of Tagore in 1924, Yeats refused (PP 174–5n). Although there is no recorded
animosity between the two poets, and they continued a sporadic correspondence
into the 1930s, it is fair to say that their relationship cooled. Yeats lamented that
Tagore had ‘spoilt his own market in England’: ‘He should have published no
more verses in translation after the first three volumes which were revised’ (PP
174–5n). Yeats’s ‘coaxings’ or interventions which had exercised a vital check
on Tagore’s expressive faculty are upheld as essential: without expert ‘revision’
Tagore’s prolific output in English had become too open and undisciplined, which,
for Yeats, contravened the demands of style. At his worst, according to Yeats,
Tagore had become guilty of producing ‘sentimental rubbish’ derived from his
insistence that he ‘knew’ English. ‘Tagore does not know English, no Indian knows
English’ he asseverated to Rothenstein, as late as 1935 (L 835). ‘Knowing’ English
in this sense, for Yeats, meant having a capacity for creating an English style.
Doubtless Tagore had mastered English grammar but, in those many non-revised
translations which succeeded Gitanjali and The Gardener, he had not managed to
accomplish ‘great poetry’ in English.
There is a knot at the heart of Yeats’s position here concerning an English style
which conducts a language other than English: namely that the discrimination of
poetic value – a discrimination Tagore’s work is said to have lost – is conditional
upon a formal indiscrimination inherent in the act of translation. In other words,
the accomplishment of a translated style in English derives from a prior distortion
of non-English style. Yeats in his introduction to Gitanjali admits as much: ‘These
124 W.B. Yeats and World Literature

lyrics – which are in the original, my Indians tell me, full of subtlety of rhythm, of
untranslatable delicacies of colour, of metrical invention – display in their thought
a world I have dreamed of all my life long’ (E&I 390). Presumably because he is
himself a poet with accomplished artworks of his own to which he can gesture,
Yeats does not worry as an amateur might about what is ‘untranslatable’ –
perhaps, indeed, it is intrinsic to the poetic spirit to notate such untranslatability.
Gitanjali’s poetic thought is present to Yeats in its dream-like simplicity, even as
he recognises that beyond such simplicity a more primitive complexity has been
abandoned. This drift from traditional prosody in a non-English language to a
poetic prose in English (the English version of Gitanjali is written as a series of
‘prose poems’) has consequences for how we understand what Yeats calls ‘good
taste’. ‘Four-fifths of our energy is spent in the quarrel with bad taste’ he tells us in
his introduction, connecting Nietzschean aristocratism to the values he has found
in Tagore’s work (E&I 389). And yet his discrimination of good taste in Gitanjali
celebrates the common English edition of the poems which he himself, in absolute
ignorance of their original Bengali rhythms and sounds, has helped to prepare.
Predictably enough, a relevant precedent for Yeats’s judgement on what
constitutes ‘great poetry’ can be found within the discourse of Celticism, most
specifically in Matthew Arnold’s significant dismissal of Celtic prosody in favour
of the Celtic ‘note’:

the architectonicé which shapes great works, such as Agamemnon or the Divine
Comedy, comes only after a steady, deep-searching survey, a firm conception of
the facts of human life, which the Celt has not patience for. So he runs off into
technic, where he employs the utmost elaboration, and attains astonishing skill;
but in the contents of his poetry you have only so much interpretation of the
world as the first dash of a quick, strong perception, and then sentiment, infinite
sentiment, can bring you.40

Celtic art is notable for its skill and the elaboration of its technique, suggests
Arnold, yet the Celt has not produced great works of art except where his genius
has contributed to works written in English. In other words, specific non-English
prosodic traditions must be abandoned in order that poetry in English can interpret
‘the world’. Following on from this it will be important not to confuse two
thoughts. Arnold’s conviction is that poetic technique as the natural complement
to Celtic sentiment inhibits the realism necessary for ‘great works’. From this
perspective, technique is a problem within the Celtic character which can only be
resolved by externalising it in its relation to other racial and linguistic characters,
namely the Saxon and English. It is only once the compulsions of technique in
the Welsh or Irish languages have been transformed into a partial note within a
greater English-language composite that great ‘Celtic’ works of art such as those
of Shakespeare or Keats are possible. The second, related, but distinct thought is
that works written in Celtic languages lack access to the modern world because

40
 Arnold, On the Study of Celtic Literature, 345.
‘Put into English’ 125

they are not modern world languages, and therefore cannot be ‘great’ in stature.
The English language is a medium of global modernity but also one of its
primary objects; therefore to write in English is to possess the advantage of a
world-historical subject matter. This second position lacks the moralistic pulse
of Arnold’s argument in which the Celtic subject should politically evolve into
the world. Rather, from this perspective, it is historical and political contingency
which creates an unequal relation between English and other languages. It seems
to me that while Yeats eschews the implicit moralism of Arnold’s position, he
endorses the view that ‘great poetry’ in modern English derives from its world-
historical advantage over other non-English-language cultures. Irish, Welsh or
Bengali poetry might be great in their own ‘untranslatable’ terms, but in terms
of modern world literature it is how their differences are inscribed within English
that matters. Historical collisions between cultures require a modern poetic form,
even as it is a form which necessarily entails the usurpation of established formal
and prosodic strictures.
This abandonment of traditional prosodic forms touches upon Moretti’s
problematic of ‘a world literary system […] whose main mechanism of change
is convergence’. Indeed, any suspicion that the major studies of world literature
focus on the novel at the expense of poetry might well be explained by the fact
that the role of translation within modern English literature necessitates a turn
towards prose: if the history of the nation was poetic, then the history of the world
is prosaic. Yeats’s consideration of Milton’s prosody discussed above corresponds
with this inclination insofar as it separates the speaking of ‘vivid’ English from
what Yeats considered to be the traditional English prosody. Modern English in
this instance for Yeats is a ‘passionate prose’ which cuts across the traditional line.
Not only does this re-habitation of English poetic forms estrange English literature
from itself, but it marks an important relation between English literature shedding
its formal ‘Englishness’ and the possibility of modern poetry. The implicit question
of how poetic value might be sustained in conditions of transnational commerce
leads to a further, more definitively modernist query: how can literature translated
into English become original English literature?
Tagore’s Gitanjali was published in English several times in the years that
followed the first edition which Yeats introduced, making it an exemplar of
modern world literature in English. So much so, in fact, that Tagore was the first
non-European winner of the Nobel Prize in 1913. If this offered proof to Yeats
of the living spirit of an ancient tradition, then its mobility also presented a crisis
of literary style. The very same openness that allowed Yeats to adopt for his
own ends Gitanjali’s traditional imagery and eastern simplicity was, as Tagore’s
subsequent career would bear out, in danger of producing a total indifference to
form and just the kind of modern anomie Yeats associated with free verse. The
task which remained implicit for Yeats, from his earliest folklore to his last cultural
pamphlets, was that of asserting a topography of meaningful differences within
English literature as a way to inscribe linguistic differences which had already been
obscured, such as those between Irish and English, Bengali and English, and so on.
126 W.B. Yeats and World Literature

We can turn now to Yeats’s engagement with the Japanese Noh theatre to
explore this same problematic as it emerged from a different perspective. By
stating with confidence that Ernest Fenollosa’s translations from Japanese would
help him ‘to explain a certain possibility of the Irish dramatic movement’, the poet
raises once more the question concerning what form exotic languages might take
in modern English.41 Our reference here should be not only to the dramaturgical
innovations of Yeats’s Irish Noh plays, At The Hawk’s Well, The Only Jealousy
Of Emer and The Dreaming of the Bones collected in Four Plays for Dancers
(1921), but also to his ‘Suggestions and Corrections’ to Ezra Pound’s version of
Fenollosa’s Noh manuscripts.42 Yoko Chiba has pointed out the extent of Yeats’s
influence on Pound’s revisions of the Fenollosa manuscript, evidenced both in its
terminology and in passages of ‘pseudo-Irish or Syngean speech’.43 Not only can
we find in Pound’s work such Yeatsian words as ‘séance’, ‘magic’, ‘ritual’ and
‘Sidhe’ (the Irish word for fairies), all of which emphasised the cultural parallelism
which Yeats was invested in exploiting, but also distinctively Irish speech patterns,
as evident from the following extract from the play Kayoi Komachi:

And there’s an odd little woman comes here every day with fruit and fuel
That’s queer. I asked her her name […] then she’s gone like a mist.
There’s a heap of good in your prayers.
I had my own rain of tears; that was the dark night, surely.
This night is the longing fulfilled. (Chiba’s emphases)44

The Hiberno-English notes are unmistakeable even if, as Chiba suggests, Pound
further overlaid this idiom with a confected Japanese English and a new montage
style which leaves intact certain onomatopoeic effects from the Japanese: ‘Kiri,
hatari, cho, cho, / Kiri, hatari, cho, cho, / The cricket sews on at his own rags, /
With all the new grass in the field; sho / Churr, isho, like the whirr of a loom;
churr.’45 By compressing Fenollosa’s original translation, which had included
more extended explanations of meaning, Pound gives the lie to the idea of a
correspondence between two complete languages: an original Japanese text and
an appropriate English translation. Rather, the English is never simply English
and the Japanese consistently manipulated according to the principles of Pound’s
poetic style. We know that Pound would go on to flaunt these glossarial poetics
in The Cantos, both by including bibliographic detail within his poetry (most

41
 W.B. Yeats, ‘Introduction’ to Fenollosa and Pound (trans.), Certain Noble Plays of
Japan.
42
 W.B. Yeats, Four Plays for Dancers (London: Macmillan, 1921).
43
 Chiba, ‘Ezra Pound’s Versions of Fenollosa’s Noh Manuscripts and Yeats’s
Unpublished “Suggestions and Corrections”’, 127.
44
 Quoted in Chiba, ‘Ezra Pound’s Versions of Fenollosa’s Noh Manuscripts and
Yeats’s Unpublished “Suggestions and Corrections”’, 128.
45
 Quoted in Chiba, ‘Ezra Pound’s Versions of Fenollosa’s Noh Manuscripts and
Yeats’s Unpublished “Suggestions and Corrections”’, 132.
‘Put into English’ 127

famously in the first Canto (‘Andrea Divus, In officina Wecheli, 1538, out of
Homer’)46 and by retaining in their untranslated forms Chinese characters or
ideograms. Our particular interest here is in the role Yeats’s Irish-English plays
in preparing the way for this degree of experimentation. Once more the intra-
linguistic difference from English-English to Irish-English implies the greater
work of translation from Japanese to English that has already been accomplished.
In this way the Irish accent might be considered the sign for linguistic mobility
itself. It is also, however, a sticking point: too resolutely situated within the
political landscape of the United Kingdom to suggest true freedom of movement.
Accordingly, T.S. Eliot when reviewing Pound’s Noh wrote that the Irishisms in
the text constituted ‘lapses’: ‘One feels that the original is not rendered because
the translation is not English.’47 Expressing a similar sentiment to that recorded
by the Times reporter reviewing The Post Office noted above, Eliot betrays his
scholarly Anglophilia, but also a degree of cosmopolitan complacency. What is
‘English’ in the context of its rendering of another language? Suggested by Eliot’s
critique is the idea of an official literary English – definitely not Irish-English –
with the ability to canonise particular translations such that we can say of them
the original has been properly ‘rendered’. However, this co-dependency of official
literary English and the Japanese original is largely absent from Pound’s attempts
to adapt Fenollosa’s project, as well as from Yeats’s experiments with the Noh
form where the imperative is not to get Japanese originals into English, but to use
Japanese forms as a way to translate aspects of Irish experience into the English
language. Such a triangulation of cultural imaginaries prohibits a simple relation
between the linguistic and formal authority of English and the fixed content of
Japanese tradition.
As suggested earlier in this chapter, Yeats’s adaptations of Noh theatre were
inventive: he appropriated from Japan both the theatrical convention of the mask,
and the device of the Shite (the human figure who reappears as a ghost); but
in scenery, structure and language his Four Plays for Dancers (1921) are self-
consciously impure. At The Hawk’s Well, set in ‘The Irish Heroic Age’, opens
with a stage direction that strikes a note of provisionality and experimentation:
‘Indeed, I think, so far as my present experience goes, that the most effective
lighting is the lighting we are accustomed to in our rooms. These masked players
seem stranger when there is no mechanical means of separating them from us’
(VPl 398–9). The strange is stranger still, the author advises, when we see it
closely without any special effects. Then, at the other side of an opening chorus
the same stage direction continues, now anthropological in tone, by explaining a
non-standard language usage: ‘The words “a speckled shin” are familiar to readers
of Irish legendary stories in descriptions of old men bent double over the fire’
(VPl 400). Thus, within two pages of the first of Yeats’s Noh plays, we have been

46
 Pound, The Cantos, 5.
47
 Chiba, ‘Ezra Pound’s Versions of Fenollosa’s Noh Manuscripts and Yeats’s
Unpublished “Suggestions and Corrections”’, 127–8.
128 W.B. Yeats and World Literature

given an overarching sense of the cultural overdetermination at work. The same


overdetermination is condensed into a single line in The Dreaming of the Bones:
we are told that ‘A Young Man enters, praying in Irish’ (VPl 763). The apparent
specificity of a man praying in Irish in 1916 (the stated circumstance of the play
being the aftermath of the Dublin Rising) is particularly arresting as it seems to
interrupt, with reference to national politics, an exemplary exercise of spiritual
internationalism, namely, the capture of Japanese culture by English literature.
In truth, however, the incongruity of hearing Irish spoken in a piece of English-
language Noh theatre remains an exaggerated gesture: it cannot help but become
a performative metonym for the more general drift of estrangement at work in the
play’s aesthetic: neither Irish, nor Japanese, nor truly English. Yeats’s apparently
conservative choice to use English blank verse to voice his major characters’ speech
operates in a similar fashion: although an enduring form of English prosody, the
pentameter line is nonetheless contextually estranged from itself, especially from
those English poetic traditions with which it is historically associated – and, hence,
from the corresponding idea of a ‘natural’ English voice. A traditional English
form expressing Irish characters within a Japanese dramaturgical structure lends
credence to the poet’s later claim that even what he alters ‘must seem traditional’
(E&I 522): what at first seems reducible to a single tradition has to be read for the
heterogeneity it disguises.
This same drift of estrangement also manifests itself at the level of plot. The
Only Jealousy of Emer dramatises the protagonist’s reckoning with Cuchulain’s
adulteries: not only must Emer accept her husband’s sexual adventurism but she
must, in order to preserve his life, renounce her hope that his true love remains at
home with her. In The Dreaming of the Bones it is the adulterous love of Diarmuid
and Dervorgilla which the protagonist, a young patriot on the run in the wake of the
Rising, is asked to forgive. Diarmuid Mac Murchadha is the infamous trespasser
whose illicit affair with Dervorgilla forced him into an alliance with Henry II and
indirectly sanctioned the first English invasions of Ireland in the twelfth century.
‘I had almost yielded and forgiven it all’ the young man muses to himself at the
end of the play, after encountering Diarmuid and Dervorgilla’s ghosts who have
endured the punishment of not being able to touch for 700 years (VPl 775). Both
of these plays present a scene of fundamental ambivalence as the claims of love
are deemed inextricable from those of betrayal and pollution, and exile from nation
and spouse becomes an indicator of delight as well as of remorse. In this regard,
they dramatically bear out their linguistic and compositional histories.
A final example of Yeats’s place in the development of a world English style
can be found in his 1937 ‘translation’ of The Ten Principal Upanishads. Yeats
admits his debt to his co-author Shri Purohit Swãmi in the introduction. ‘This
book’, he says, is ‘twice as much his as mine, for he knows Sanskrit and English, I
but English’.48 The poet claims his share, however, and does not allow remorse to

48
 Shri Purohit Swãmi and W.B. Yeats (trans.), The Ten Principal Upanishads, 7.
‘Put into English’ 129

swallow his delight in representing the task of translating one of the masterpieces
of world literature:

More than once I asked him [Shri Purohit Swãmi] the name of some translator
and even bought the book, but the most eminent scholars left me incredulous.
Could Latinised words, hyphenated words; could polyglot phrases, sedentary
distortions of unnatural English – ‘However many Gods in Thee, All-knower,
adversely slay desires of a person’ – could middles muddied by ‘Lo! Verily’
and ‘Forsooth’, represent what grass farmers say thousands of years ago, what
their descendants sing today? So when I met Shri Purohit Swãmi I proposed that
we go to India and make a translation that would reward as though the English
had been written in common English: ‘To write well’, said Aristotle, ‘express
yourself like the common people, but think like a wise man’.49

Yeats, then in his 70s, didn’t go to India. What’s more, his thought here regarding
‘common English’ and the relation between commonality and wisdom is
distinctively Wordsworthian, to the extent we might imagine he had forgotten his
censure upon Wordsworth’s lack of theatricality and style. Importantly, however,
this ‘common’ English, set to replace the Victorian English represented by ‘Lo
Verily!’ and ‘Forsooth’, will comprise an idiom self-consciously translated from
Sanskrit. In other words, the plan is to invent a ‘common’ English applicable to
no particular locale – and spoken by no particular person. The paradox of Yeats’s
endeavour here derives both from an historical association of Celtic literature and
translatorese (for example, the invented English idiom of Macpherson’s Ossian
poems) and an imagined English-language audience extending well beyond
England and into the economies of the New World.
The following two translations of the same textual moment from the Upanishads
– the first from noted philologist F. Max Müller, the second from Yeats and Shri
Purohit – suggest how Yeats imagined his ‘common’ and international English
evolving:

Katha-upanishad

First Adhyâya

First Vallî

1. Vâgasravasa, desirous (of heavenly rewards), surrendered (at a sacrifice) all


that he possessed. He had a son of the name of Nakiketas.

2. When the (promised) presents were being given (to the priests), faith entered
into the heart of Nakiketas, who was still a boy, and he thought: unblessed
surely, are the words to which a man goes by giving (as his promised present at
a sacrifice) cows which have drunk water, eaten hay, given their milk and are
barren.

49
 Shri Purohit Swãmi and W.B. Yeats (trans.), The Ten Principal Upanishads, 7–8.
130 W.B. Yeats and World Literature

3. He (knowing that his father has promised to give up all that he possessed, and
therefore his sons also) said to his father: ‘Dear father, to whom wilt thou give
me? He said it a second and a third time. Then the father replied (angrily): ‘I
shall give thee onto Death’. (F. Max Müller)50

From the Kathak Branch of the Wedas (Katha-Upanishad)

Wâjashrawas, wanting heaven, gave away all his property.

He had a son by name Nachiketas. While the gifts were passing, Nachiketas,
though but a boy, thought to himself:

‘He has not earned much of heaven; his cows can neither eat, drink, calve
nor give milk’. He went to his father and said: ‘Father, have you given me to
somebody? He repeated the question a second and a third time; at last his father
said: ‘I give you to Death’. (Yeats and Shri Purohit Swãmi)51

What distinguishes the Yeats and Shri Purohit version from Müller’s is its
presumptuousness. Showing no need for parenthetical explanation and with a clear
emphasis on brevity and simplicity, their edition compresses the scholarly apparatus
which we might expect to accompany such a technical feat of translation. Theirs is
not a translation into English from another language, but an original production of
world English. As we saw Yeats both avail himself of and erase the Irish language
scholarship of Mangan and Hyde in the last chapter, so here the stereographical
qualities remain implicit in a composite text of beguiling simplicity. Although it
is not written in verse, its gnomic qualities are yet designed to rescue it from
scholarly prose. Significantly, there is little or no trace of an Irish vernacular. We
have seen from Eliot’s review of Pound’s Noh and the Times journalist’s review
of Tagore’s The Post Office how the Irish voice had been considered aesthetically
constraining because of its political identifications – and this surely played its part
in Yeats’s evolving style. But we might say that a Celtic note persists nonetheless
in the poet’s ‘common’ World English: if not its cadence then its innuendo. What
resonates in this non-particular English, emptied of its philological exactitude, is
a gestural theatre of difference familiar from the politics of Celticism, but now
further displaced and mobilised for the greater and popular world economy.

50
 F. Max Müller (trans.), The Upanishads (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1884), 1.
51
 Shri Purohit Swãmi and W.B. Yeats (trans.), The Ten Principal Upanishads, 25.
Chapter 4
‘Woman’ and the Poetics of Destitution

Nor was he Bishop when his ban


Banished Jack the Journeyman,
(All find safety in the tomb.)
Nor so much as parish priest,
Yet he, an old book in his fist,
Cried that we lived like beast and beast:
The solid man and the coxcomb.
(‘Crazy Jane and the Bishop’)

Although this book is not the place to develop and interrogate the larger claims
of contemporary post-histoire philosophy, in the next two chapters I want to
pay attention to Yeats’s Irish national imaginary as an example of what Michel
Foucault calls a ‘counter-conduct’ within the broader explication of the modern
state (la raison d’état).1 If Irish national life was locally positioned by Yeats in
opposition to the bourgeois states of Europe, it is nonetheless inseparable from
the history of ‘the governmental ratio’ as it develops extra-territorially on a
global level. We have already considered this complicity in the guise of Yeats’s
development of a living poetic style in modern English, which, though always
indexed to Ireland, utilises universalising procedures of translation, combination
and commodification. In this chapter, we will detect a similar dynamic at work in
Yeats’s aesthetic philosophy, and in particular in the sexual politics underlying it.
One of the enduring enigmas in Yeats’s work concerns his difficulty with
the category of ‘woman’. This difficulty, I argue, proves entirely relevant to the
conceptual fate of life in global space. In light of our preceding discussions, we
can anticipate that for Yeats the principle of vitality which distinguishes his poetic
traditionalism remains geopolitically complex. Life, as a resource of the nation,
is contained and qualified by the aesthetic practices of a feminised and decorous
subjectivity; but it is also disseminated beyond the exceptional nation as that
which opens the nation to the global space of unabashed New World freedoms.
Such is the fugue of Yeatsian woman: she who protects the life within herself

1
 ‘[W]hether one opposes civil society to the state, the population to the state, or the
nation to the state, it was in any case these elements that were in fact put to work within
this genesis of the state, and of the modern state. It is therefore these elements that will be
at issue and serve as the stake for both the state and for what is opposed to it. To that extent,
the history of raison d’Etat, the history of the governmental ratio, and the history of the
counter-conducts opposed to it, are inseparable from each other.’ Michel Foucault, Security,
Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collѐge de France 1977–1978. Ed. M. Sebellart,
trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Picador, 2007), 357.
132 W.B. Yeats and World Literature

and whose veils of sensuous beauty cohere the national space, comes to live
unprotected and potentially destitute beyond the terms of the national imaginary.
We shall use this dialectical movement to understand an importantly modernist
facet of Yeats’s poetics, namely the shift from a bourgeois aesthetics of national
self-determination to the aesthetics of civil war.

Man or Animal?

The dead Charles Stuart Parnell is a key figure for Yeats when dramatising the
crisis of national subjectivity in the modern age. Exemplary parliamentarian,
infamous adulterer and fallen leader of the Irish Home Rule Movement in the
1880s, Parnell stands as a representative of the poet’s attempt to retrieve an
authoritative historical subjectivity – the subjectivity of the Anglo-Irish bourgeois
class. But he is also the super-historical personage par excellence through whose
Nietzschean formalism Yeats grasps the dramatic passing of all such historical
subjectivities, and the new, troubling dispensation of democratic populism. We
can see this double identity – at once backward looking and modernist – in the
poem ‘Parnell’s Funeral’ (1932) where an unnamed Daniel O’Connell (popular
Catholic leader of the mid-nineteenth century known as Ireland’s ‘Emancipator’)
is decodable as a vulgar nineteenth-century Hegelian, a populist-as-comedian who
is put into a formative relation with Parnell’s more Nietzschean aristocrat. The first
line runs: ‘Under the Great Comedian’s tomb the crowd.’ It is abruptly end-stopped
as if to contain the historical impact of O’Connell’s populism. What follows is a
procedure of juxtaposition: the solitude of ‘a brighter star’, ‘a pierced boy’, and ‘a
quarry’ (all suggestive of Parnell), finally ‘dragged down’ by ‘the contagion of the
throng’ (VP 541). It seems in the end that neither O’Connell, nor the legacy of his
populism, can be contained, and that this is to the detriment of Parnellite values.
But the poem holds out another possibility: that Parnell’s demise was a ritual
sacrifice. In this case, if anyone can be shown to have eaten Parnell’s heart – and
the poet ‘thirsts’ for accusation – then Parnell’s death may be redeemed. Other
critics have written well on the anthropological co-ordinates of this poem, but it
will do to ask again why a poem about modern Irish politics so quickly becomes a
poem about ‘animal blood’?2 If the poem expresses regret at Parnell’s demise and
suggests that Ireland’s imagination has not been satisfied by the post-Independence
figures of de Valera and Cosgrave (in their different ways inheritors of O’Connell’s
comedic realism), then equally it suggests the opposite: that Parnell’s demise was
precisely what satisfied the ritual imaginary of Ireland. The question arises: was
Parnell’s death a wasted opportunity for Ireland’s self-realisation, or was it the
impetus behind it? The poem is by no means conclusive, indeed the whole of the
second part is written as a conditional clause:

2
 See for example John B. Vickery, The Literary Impact of The Golden Bough
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973), 179–232.
‘Woman’ and the Poetics of Destitution 133

‘Had de Valera eaten Parnell’s heart


[…]
Had Cosgrave eaten Parnell’s heart, the land’s
Imagination had been satisfied,
Or lacking that, government in such hands
O’Higgens its sole statesman had not died. (VP 542–3)

Kevin O’Higgens was a prominent and controversial statesman in the Irish


Free State government who was assassinated by the anti-treaty IRA in 1927; an
assassination which, for Yeats, served to underline Ireland’s enduring state of
‘civil rancour’ and conditionality, originally attributable to the legacy of Parnell’s
death. This predicament is defined and set up by the lines which end the first part
of the poem, lines which seem almost impertinent in their ontological starkness:

All that was said in Ireland is a lie


Bred out of the contagion of the throng
Saving the rhyme rats hear before they die.
Leave nothing but the nothings that belong
To this bare soul, let all men judge that can
Whether it be an animal or a man. (VP 542)

Whose bare soul is offered up for judgement here: that of the poet himself (whose
soul he elsewhere describes as ‘fastened to a dying animal’ (VP 410)), that of the
crowd who have dragged down Parnell, or that of Parnell himself as the ‘quarry’
who is to be hunted and killed? The irresolution of reference makes judgement
difficult. Culminating in the question, is ‘it’ an animal or a man, the stanza
alerts us to the extent to which ontological uncertainty is embedded within the
‘satisfied’ national imagination. It may be, for example, that Parnell’s humanity
stands above the animality of the mob; or conversely that his animality exposes
other humane values as being ‘all too human’ in the Nietzschean sense – which
is to say, conformist and unreflective in their morality. It is far from unexpected
to find such ontological desolation at the heart of Yeats’s poetry; it is familiar
from the enterprise of walking naked in ‘A Coat’ (1914), for example, and from
‘the foul rag and bone shop of the heart’ which concludes ‘The Circus Animals’
Desertion’ (1939) (VP 320, 629). But the ambiguous phrasing here expresses a
telling complexity concerning the concept of life. As animal vitality and animal
stupidity reside together in a single sentiment, so the failure to distinguish animal
or man addresses an important question to Ireland as a modern nation-state.
When the philosopher Giorgio Agamben asks what remains at the end of
history, he answers in the following terms: ‘Not man, properly speaking who acts
in the strong sense […] [the end of history] re-opens the question of the animal.’3
We might add, in deference to Yeats’s vocabulary for describing the end of the
European nineteenth century, and the supersession of European space by global

3
 Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal. Trans. K. Attell (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 2004), 12, 75–9.
134 W.B. Yeats and World Literature

space, that the end of history also re-opens the question of ‘the savage god’.
Agamben, working in the philosophical tradition of Nietzsche and Foucault, has
written influentially on the politics of life, developing a classical but historically
obscured distinction between ‘bare life’ (zoē) and ‘qualified life’ or ‘life as ethical
practice’ (bios), and applying it to the question of modern sovereignty.4 There are
two important aspects to his argument. First of all, he explains the intrinsic paradox
of sovereignty itself, namely the uncanny alliance between the sovereign power
and the destitute population excluded from the polis. This alliance resides within
the rituals of politics where in order that legitimacy be renewed it is imperative
that the sovereign become intermittently destitute, surviving beyond the law as an
at once sacred and killable animal. The sovereign marks the bare life implicit in the
forms of life of the polis he rules over. In this view, Ireland’s fallen King, Parnell,
and the ‘contagious throng’ excluded from meaningful politics can be said to share
an inextricable anthropological bond. Agamben’s second step concerns the modern
explication of this paradox of sovereignty to the point of its interminable crisis. It
is no longer the case in the age of late capitalism that sovereignty is meaningfully
renewed through rituals of sacrifice (political elections); instead, those occasions
of ‘exception’ when politics is suspended for the purposes of symbolic renewal
have become the unexceptional practice of government: modern elections, rather
than effectuating political renewal, refer to the indefinite suspension of politics.5
Accordingly, modernist sovereignty by instigating a zone of suspension, and a
paradoxically endless intermittence, exercises its power without embedding its
legitimacy in the qualified life of the polis. And in the process it manages a gradual
transformation of the ‘qualified life’ of citizens into the ‘bare life’ of destitute
populations: ‘naked [bare] life, which was the hidden foundation of sovereignty,
has […] become the dominant form of life everywhere.’6
Although the starkness of Agamben’s imagery belongs with a specific
consideration of the Second World War – he nominates the camp rather than the
polis the nomos of modernity – his argument coheres with a more general account
of sovereignty in a de-territorialised global state. The state of indecision performed
in Yeats’s poem – ‘let all men judge that can / Whether it be an animal or a man’
(my emphasis) – is connected to the erosion of political borders, the usurpation
of the classical terms of civic inclusion and exclusion, and the very possibility
of poetic dwelling. Even though Irish independence is nominally a project for

4
 Agamben’s fullest articulation of this classical distinction and its modernist effects
can be found in Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998).
5
 Walter Benjamin’s ‘Thesis VIII’ that ‘[t]he tradition of the oppressed teaches us
that the state of emergency in which we live is not the exception but the rule’ prompts
Agamben’s thought here on the fate of sovereignty in the modern world. Walter Benjamin,
‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, 248.
6
 Giorgio Agamben, ‘Form-of-Life’, Means Without End: Notes on Politics. Trans.
Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Casarino (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
2000), 6.
‘Woman’ and the Poetics of Destitution 135

territorial sovereignty, it leads ineluctably, for Yeats, towards partition and civil
war, inevitably supplemented by forms of exile and migration. These phenomena
describe the pulsations of a world economy which raise a corresponding crisis in
the conception of life: is ‘life’ bounded and qualified, indicating certain valued
practices, or is it open, boundless and fundamentally ‘bare’?
Any reader who knows of the case Yeats made for eugenics in the 1930s will
be on familiar ground already because the eugenicist debate, especially the idea
that breeding technologies should be introduced to preserve the quality of life,
signals the extent of science fiction in all of the poet’s arguments for a distinctive
national tradition.7 Yeats’s membership of the Eugenics Society in 1936 has been
commented on extensively, and in various critical moods from the condemnatory
(McCormack) to the largely exculpatory (Elizabeth Cullingford).8 I would suggest
that it is hubristic to pronounce conclusively on the moral significance of Yeats’s
fascism, and, likewise, that any tendency to localise its historical co-ordinates and
view it as an aberration whether in Yeats’s life, in Irish culture or in the broad arc
of European civilization, is enduringly vulnerable to accusations of complacency.
It is certainly not difficult from today’s perspective to point to the intellectual
incoherence of Yeats’s position: in order to protect and preserve the qualified life
of the nation, he recommended its objectification in the form of intelligence tests
and selective breeding policies which included the possibility of sterilising the
poor and disabled. Writing as an Irish poet conscious of the history of Victorian
representations of the Irish as degenerates, Yeats’s is an especially confusing,
and perhaps poignant case. But, as Donald Childs has rightly pointed out, by
pathologising eugenic beliefs we run the risk of removing them from the cunning and
contradictoriness of discourses which continue to produce our social and cultural
norms. The journey from the science of eugenics to the gas chambers at Dachau
was a short and terrifying one, and the historical image it supplies so shocking that
we are liable to forget that the controversy of eugenics neither began with Francis
Galton’s coinage in the 1880s, nor ended with the genocides of World War Two.
Using Agamben’s perspective as a counterbalance, then, we might suggest that
‘life’ as a conceptual field has an enduring and unparalleled importance for the
history of European politics and aesthetics. Childs acknowledges as much in his
study on modernist eugenics, using Foucault’s work in The History of Sexuality to
point out that from the seventeenth century the sexual conduct of couples became
a matter of concern for the state, and the question of sexual hygiene increasingly
tied to economic and political behaviours: this was the regulation of pleasure
in accordance with the productivity of life. Although it was not ‘actualised’ as

7
 Daniel Albright is the best writer on the Faustian aspect of Yeats’s work: see,
especially, Quantum Poetics: Yeats, Pound, Eliot, and the Science of Modernism
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
8
 W.J. McCormack, Blood Kindred: W.B. Yeats: The Life, the Death, the Politics
(London: Pimlico, 2005); Elizabeth Cullingford, Yeats, Ireland and Fascism (New York:
New York University Press, 1998).
136 W.B. Yeats and World Literature

a discourse, eugenics was implicit in the development of the modern European


subject and the range of human rights he could come to expect.9 Correspondingly,
both Cullingford and Michael Golston have made significant connections between
eugenics and the practice of poetry in Yeats’s work. For Cullingford it is Yeats’s
love poetry which demonstrates an excessive self-consciousness concerning its
own prescriptions of ideal beauty.10 For Golston it is the link between poetic
rhythm and race with confirms that aesthetic forms of life are not entirely distinct
from scientific discourses concerning the categorisation of living material.11 While
it would be a simplification to say that the vitality of poetic form is a function of
biopolitical power, the realisation that modern poetics are elaborated within such
broad discursive structures continues to demand historical articulation.
As suggested in the last chapter, Yeats’s commitment to what ‘seems’
traditional as a check against the unqualified freedoms of the global marketplace
is inherently compromised by his own strategies of translation and adaptation.
In this chapter, we shall view the same reflexive dynamic through a different
lens by considering how life, which is the value situated at the heart of Yeats’s
national traditionalism, becomes the supplemental excess which carries the poet
beyond established forms to the question of constitutional violence. Perhaps the
most melodramatic expression of this violence in Yeats’s work is to be found in
‘The Second Coming’ where it is clear that a mythic metamorphosis reflects a
modern political dispensation where what is at stake are the terms of inclusion
within the civilised order: who or what can be considered an agent of history?
The exaggerated style of this poem has lent itself to easy appropriation, especially
the notion that ‘the best’ humane values are about to be replaced by something
altogether more savage, and that it is the poet’s duty to follow the question of
life into its new hybrid revelation. Importantly, however, the menace of the
‘rough beast’, announcing, among other things, the end of bourgeois history and
disturbing the terms of European citizenship in a post-European age, cannot be
captured through images of animals alone. Indeed, many of the animals in Yeats’s
bestiary – including hounds with red ears, noble hawks and squirrels – appear
wedded to their demesne, and unlikely to transgress against the human imagination
that designated their symbolic function. The same is not true of Yeats’s women
however: the cat, Maud Gonne, who ‘crawls towards the Buddha’s emptiness’, or
‘the gazelle’, Constance Markievicz, who ‘withered old’ in pursuit of ‘some vague
Utopia’ (VP 610, 475). Owing to her totemic guardianship over life in Yeats’s
work, this hybrid figure of woman is best placed to register, through the crisis of
sovereignty in the modern world, the (re)emergence of the question of the animal.
We can be certain that Yeats inherited a profoundly gendered worldview,
ordinarily associating femininity with the tradition, vitality and aesthetic rituals

9
 Childs, Modernism and Eugenics, 13, 15, 16.
10
 Elizabeth Butler Cullingford, ‘Live Lips upon a Plummet Measured Face’, The
Harp 9 (1994): 9–27.
11
 Golston, Rhythm and Race in Modernist Poetry and Science, 164–8.
‘Woman’ and the Poetics of Destitution 137

of national life. In order to interrogate this inheritance, I shall take my lead from
Friedrich Schiller’s discussion of the term ‘grace’ [Anmut] – a mobile and living
form of feminised beauty – and the corresponding difficulty of its relation to the
modern philosophy of political self-assertion – associated with the male quality
of ‘dignity’ [Würde]. Written in the wake of the French Revolution and the
Terror, Schiller’s work will be offered as a precedent for Yeats’s aesthetic self-
consciousness formulated at key moments during Ireland’s violent struggle for
independence, especially the Dublin Rising of 1916. ‘Grace’, doubling as the virtue
of civility, defines the terms for the reception of political idealism into the world,
and, in this way, corresponds to what Agamben has termed ‘qualified life’, or life
as ethical practice. Crucially, however, within this aesthetic qualification of the
political resides the germ for the abrogation of a certain kind of political thinking.
For Schiller it suffices to point out that because grace is essentially unassertive
and categorically mobile, it is vulnerable to moral degeneration; but Yeats’s
modernism performs repeatedly this trespass from grace to disgrace, from civility
to destitution. Life considered graceful within an established political territory
quickly takes on a disreputable complexion on the occasion of its migration, and,
accordingly, the attractive vitality of grace is soon transformed into heartless
abandon and promiscuity.
My argument in this chapter is that there is a significant overlap between
questions of Ireland’s constitutional independence, the conceptual field of life as
associated with the history of European aesthetics, and the fate of the nation in the
de-territorialised world economy. If ‘man or animal’ is the open question which
accompanies the notional ‘citizen’ of globalisation, whose rights can never be
assured and whose state is a state of perennial indecision, then in Yeats’s work, I
argue, it is a conundrum best approached through the figure of ‘woman’.

The Feminine Nation

Much has been made of how wilfully Yeats adopted and developed an established
tradition of connecting gender stereotypes to the cause of Irish nationalism. The
figures of the Countess Cathleen and Cathleen Ni Houlihan, as well as Maud
Gonne, who ‘brought forth’ Yeats’s ‘dream’ (VP 630), all conform, in part, to this
well-known imaginary, the problems of which are equally well known. Feminising
the political nation as mother or bride whilst simultaneously demanding that
women refrain from political agitation seems a low trick in the repertoire of the
misogynist poet. The most often cited example of this in Yeats’s work is that of his
‘friend’ and social revolutionary Constance Markievicz, who is depicted variously
as ‘shrill’ and ‘old and Skeleton-gaunt, / An image of such politics’ (VP 475).
The commonplace reading proposes that Yeats views political demagoguery as
deforming the feminine because it transgresses the culturally femininised virtues
of social tact, coquetry and sprezzatura – a concept Yeats borrowed from the
Renaissance writer Castiglione for describing the careful training undergone at
138 W.B. Yeats and World Literature

the court to achieve the effect of naturalness.12 In other words, the political woman
occasions the failure of the poet’s desire because she speaks, openly and obviously,
just like a man speaks.
However, this reading does not reflect fully the psychology expressed by
Yeats in poems such as ‘No Second Troy’ (1910), ‘Easter 1916’ and ‘The Circus
Animals’ Desertion’. In these poems, where Yeats describes, and even critiques
the monstrosity of a politicised woman, he is nonetheless forced to concede and
confront the persistence of his desire for her. Indeed, instead of describing an
attenuation of desire, or its backwards displacement onto a tradition which had
not suffered this vulgarisation of the feminine, his poems perform an exaggerated
ambivalence. The mystique of Maud Gonne is not dispelled by her modern
political expressiveness; quite the contrary, it is enhanced. ‘No Second Troy’
develops the tortuousness of this attraction. Gonne’s nobleness ‘simple as a fire’
and beauty ‘like a tightened bow’, her ‘high and solitary’ nature, all deemed by the
poet ‘not natural in an age like this’, suggest that she be exempted from the politics
of the modern age. That she chooses not to exempt herself – she has ‘taught to
ignorant men most violent ways’ – should therefore be an occasion for the poet’s
disappointment. But instead we find him unable to blame her: why should he blame
her, he asks, what could she have done ‘being what she is?’ (VP 256–7). This is a
remarkable admission since it allows that the modern political will and feminine
grace, usually thought of as kept decisively apart in Yeats’s lexicon, become
indistinguishable in the form of Maud Gonne. That she is politically exposed and
naturally composed at the same time, both assertive and graceful, means she out-
stares, makes timid and further fascinates the poet-suitor who thought to court
her. Appropriately enough, the poem is reduced to a series of rhetorical questions.
This relates to our understanding of the national subject, specifically because of
the certain link between sexual consummation and the satisfaction of the national
imaginary, where the subject is apotheosised through attaining his desired object.
While we might expect the idea of consummation to entail the long story of
seductive withholding and eventual possession, in the shape of Maud Gonne we
are confronted instead with the alternative enigma of openness. It is true that in the
mythic narrative of Yeats’s life he does not get to marry Gonne – she is not open
to him absolutely – but nonetheless she is consistently characterised by her sexual
honesty, political fervour and general wilfulness. Her mystique for Yeats does not
derive simply from what she withholds – she is not a typical withholder – but from
what she openly admits, from what is brazen and obvious and disreputable about
her politics.
If there was a privileged occasion which revealed the fault lines in Yeats’s
conception of ‘woman’, we might say it was in 1902 when Gonne performed the
eponymous role in Cathleen Ni Houlihan (a play he collaborated on with Lady
Gregory). Embodying an eternally feminised nation and the metaphysical alliance

12
 Corinna Salvadori, Yeats and Castiglione: Poet and Courtier (Dublin: Allen Figgis,
1965).
‘Woman’ and the Poetics of Destitution 139

between the Irish peasant and a spiritual aristocracy, the figure of Cathleen (the
poor old woman) would become the classic symbolic expression of modern Irish
nationalism. Cathleen is an expert seductress who incites and contains the desires
of the modern political subject with promises of unhistorical transcendence. When
played by Gonne, however, we can detect the germ of another, more disreputable
femininity hidden within the symbolic figure of Ireland as mother and bride. As
a firebrand republican, Gonne clearly identified with the legitimate desires of an
awakened Irish national subjectivity playing on the cultural memory of the United
Irishmen in 1798; she did not, to be sure, share the poet’s regret over the official
political legacy of the play (‘did that play of mine send out certain men the English
shot?’).13 And yet, for Yeats, Gonne’s political character inspired a perverse and
illegitimate desire which exceeded the traditional narrative of nationalist sexuality.
By consistently reading Gonne against her own declared conviction in this fashion
– as possessing a vitality which exceeds and therefore disrupts the order of the
national imaginary – Yeats managed to capture in a single figure discrepant
understandings of life: one emphasising life’s moral quality, embedded in an
imagined national space, the other focussing on life’s unprotected and excited
facticity in the modern world.
Let us consider first of all, then, the official cunning of the myth of national
life as depicted in Cathleen Ni Houlihan. The peasant Michael Gillane, on the eve
of his wedding, discards his bride-to-be, Delia, in order to follow the enticements
of an old woman who has visited the home with a sorrowful story of having lost
her ‘four beautiful green fields’. The woman sings of bygone days and cryptically
promises a reward of posterity in return for ‘help’: ‘They shall be speaking for
ever, / The people will hear them for ever’ (VPl 229). The scene in which Michael
breaks away from Delia to follow the old woman’s voice describes the archetypal
birth of the political subject who forsakes consummation on the familial or
domestic level for the national cause. The old woman is the mask of Ireland
who contains the sovereign promise of her transformation, as well as Michael’s
satisfaction in posterity. This prospect of national satisfaction is made explicit in
the final conversation of the play between Michael’s father and brother apropos of
the woman who has recently departed their house:

Peter [to Patrick, laying a hand on his arm]: Did you see an old woman going
down the path?

Patrick: I did not, but I saw a young girl, and she had the walk of a queen. (VPl
231)

This suggests a significantly comic resolution to the play. Michael the


disenfranchised peasant is ennobled by his willingness to ‘help’ the old woman,
and, by implication, is given the opportunity to upscale his betrothal: the young
girl with the walk of a queen replaces Delia as his bride-to-be. There is a further

13
 Foster, The Apprentice Mage, 262.
140 W.B. Yeats and World Literature

orthodox revision to this comic structure as it stands, however, which suggests


that since Ireland’s is a tragic sensibility, it ultimately depends upon the sustained
unavailability of its object of desire; likewise Ireland’s cultural superiority over
England depends upon its lack of political realisation and economic backwardness.
Michael’s tragic dignity consists in setting out in expectation of a heroic
consummation which can never in itself be more than anticipated; the young girl
exists in the play only as an excited rumour.
It would be difficult to argue that Yeats rejected out-of-hand this national quest
motif. Indeed, the consolations of the quest – the move from a subjective lack to
the imagined plenitude of a heroic afterlife – frame our most familiar opinions
of Yeats’s idealised national subjects. In terms of Yeats’s representations of the
feminine, then, this is the alluring, and ultimately unavailable mother (and bride)
to whom one remains most faithful through death. But what of the kind of woman
about which we might say that the demands of fidelity are less exacting? I have
already pointed to Maud Gonne’s enigmatic ‘openness’. ‘Easter 1916’ and the
Crazy Jane poems will help me describe this enigma further. The sexual and
cultural availability of Crazy Jane – ‘Though like a road / That men pass over / My
body makes no moan / But sings on’ – might yet be read as an obstinate expression
of Irish nationhood. But this can no longer be said to depict the tragedy of
underachievement, of the Irish subject forever striving to achieve the object of full
sovereignty; on the contrary, it is the paradoxical tragedy of multiple, profane and
non-transcendent ‘satisfactions’. In order to prepare the ground for this paradox,
I would like to consider two rather distinct examples from Yeats’s career where a
gendered conception of life as feminine exists to significantly complicate the quest
logic employed by the subject of nationalism: one from an early collaborative
study on the work of William Blake, the other from his famously disrupted sonnet
‘Leda and the Swan’.

‘Spectre’ and ‘Emanation’

In their collaborative work William Blake (1893), Yeats and Edwin John Ellis
explicate the gender affiliations of Blake’s symbolic system, to the extent of
listing in columns the respective analogues of male and female. Under ‘Male’
we find such expected terms as ‘God’, ‘imagination’, ‘sublimity’ and ‘eternity’,
whilst those which correspond under ‘Female’ are ‘Satan’, ‘experience’, ‘pathos’
and ‘nature’. The ‘Male’ is ruled by time, the ‘Female’ by space. In one respect
this exegesis is Yeats’s initiation into a certain romantic orthodoxy in which the
spectral and transcendent imagination seeks its emanation in some natural image.
Spectre (male) and emanation (female) are likewise gendered terms in Blake’s
lexicon (WB 323). The authors surmise Blake’s myth of the Zoas as the story
of Man casting out his feminine nature only to seek thereafter to be reunited.
Significantly, such reunion is inherently revolutionary:
‘Woman’ and the Poetics of Destitution 141

When the masculine combines with the feminine, revolution takes place. For
height and depth then combine with length and breadth. The womb ‘heaves
in circles’ when ‘the Fires return’ upon it. The serpent coils round limbs, the
horizontal around the perpendicular. (WB 402)

There is little sense here of femininity as a model for revolutionary action: the
feminine is merely inhabited by the spectre of the masculine as the active spirit
descends upon the receptive body. As it is put elsewhere in the same text:

The female or Maternal Humanity, being the lower or material, personally


emotional, instinctive, and when moral, restrictive side, is always ready to
become evil. It is an enemy of imagination the moment it ceases to be servant.
(WB 321)

And it is not difficult to find the masculinist complement to this subservient


version of femininity:

Imagination, the greatest force that surrounds us all within and without, coming
to us in the form of inspiration, has power to perform what are miracles in
comparison with our own strength, and to make of the most egotistic sensation
of all in the world of Time, that of the sexual organ whose symbol is the plough,
into an expansive emotion leading to the true centre, the great mental opening
which leads to the world of Eternity. (WB 407)

It is clear from the latter quotation that we are in the territory of tumescent male
subjectivity, even to a parodic extent. If feminine nature, as space and emanation,
requires masculine temporality and world-history to fulfil it – to lead it back to the
Divine – it depicts an all too obvious hierarchy. The affiliated geopolitical relation
between European history and Oriental nature is equally obvious.
However, we should not imagine that Blake, or indeed Yeats as Blake’s
exegete, rests purely and simply at this level of phallocentric hierarchism. Crudely
speaking, the revolutionary act occurs when the masculine spirit occupies the
feminine body, but it is the conditions under which this act takes place that should
concern us most. We must allow, according to the terms established by Blake and
interpreted by Yeats, that not every descent of the masculine spirit into feminine
matter produces an event of divine significance. Indeed, the point of most interest
concerns those moments when the expression of masculine desire – spectral
descent – fails. Blake discusses the important discrepancy between the temporality
of the masculine spirit – its punctual interventions into feminine matter – and
the temporality of the truly divine and revolutionary event under the sign of the
‘Covering Cherub’.
The ‘Covering Cherub’ describes those non-revolutionary moments when man
is deprived of justice and when the errors or deceits of the mediate world intervene
between man and God. This unreliability of transmission introduces a greater
complexity to the conception of the feminine as that which mediates between the
masculine spirit and divine union. Yeats and Ellis write:
142 W.B. Yeats and World Literature

Blake praises or denounces [the] Covering Cherub according to whether things,


too far above us to be seen as they are, can be made visible in symbol and
representative form or as a satanic hindrance keeping our eager wills away from
the freedom and truth of the divine world. It has both aspects for every man.
(WB 288)

In this way, the ‘Covering Cherub’, as an operation of semblance which can be


either good or bad, extends the unreliability of the feminine which ‘is always
ready to become evil’. What is particularly important is not the diabolising of the
feminine, which by itself consolidates a predictable binary opposition, but the
Cherub as the necessary structure of mediation which means that the Divine is not
available to the male at any moment of willed manipulation. Although the idea that
the female is simply the material through which male desire fulfils itself does not
vanish completely, the imputation that the Divine only grants itself intermittently
raises the prospect of a more volatile mediation: i.e. a mediation which operates,
not simply by degrees of passive compliance (the female as easy or difficult
material) but according to a countervailing, though inscrutable force.
Yeats and Ellis write: ‘In the Cherub, spectre [male] and emanation [female]
are both contained […] though not united into one, for when united they make
up the divine humanity’ (WB 294). Such a simple formulation must be qualified,
however, by the necessary threat of parodic union when the sexual act does not
accomplish divinity. The questionableness of a union’s authenticity is linked to
that check upon the ever-punctual interventions of the male will provided by the
distinguished order of divine temporality. No longer can we say that historical
time works productively through space until it achieves ‘the world of eternity’;
rather, masculine time is occupied in space, the perpendicular in the horizontal,
and is compelled to forego its regular intent until it encounters that ‘other’ order of
time – the time of divinity. Only then, after delay, frustration and re-direction can
there be a revolutionary event occasional and more extraordinary than anything
produced simply by force of will.
Of course, this schema remains perilously close to the Aristophanic parody
in which two alienated halves find in each other a perfect whole; and likewise
its suggestion that the historical power of the male subject can find his perfect
aesthetic complement in the right female – or in any given female at the right
time – is simplistic, to say the least. Notwithstanding these important reservations,
Blake’s vision stands as one influential version of romantic thinking around the
inextricability of politics and gender at the moment of ‘revolutionary’ congress;
and, furthermore, it entails the suggestion that through the obscure qualities of
mediation, femininity has the power to disrupt the imaginary identifications of the
spectral male. As we shall see, it is through the uncertainties of feminine mediation
– which in Yeats’s world suggests an overlap of the occult, the technological and
the geopolitical – that the question of ‘woman’ rebounds as a hard-hitting doubt
with respect to the possibility of the male subject’s transcendence.
This is a consistent concern for the poet. Yeats addresses himself to the link
between sexual difference and constitutional violence once more in his 1924 poem
‘Woman’ and the Poetics of Destitution 143

‘Leda and the Swan’ which reflects upon the means by which his prized ‘unity of
culture’ (Au 295) might be accomplished. The reader will hardly need reminding
that Helen of Troy and her sister Clytemnestra – and hence the original subject
matter of European literature – were conceived from the brutal coupling of Zeus
and Leda. The opening tableau of this poem performs the suffocating thought that
power and knowledge and cultural form itself are identical within the rapacious
will of Zeus, the male swan:

[…] the great wings beating still


Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed
By the dark webs, her nape caught in his bill,
He holds her helpless breast upon his breast. (VP 441)

There is no court but Zeus’s court; and no appeal to another order of knowledge,
justice or even sexuality that can escape the completeness of the power relation
between Zeus and his victim. If knowledge is power in the divine form of the
swan, then we are forced to admit: power is right.
This apparent perfection, encapsulated by the sonnet form itself, is why the
poem’s final question, especially its rhetorical indecision, remains so important:
‘Did she put on his knowledge with his power / Before the indifferent beak could
let her drop?’ (VP 441). Let us, first of all, reduce this irresolvable question to
two independent conjectures: one, Leda did not put on Zeus’s knowledge with his
power, in which case she represents the exemplary victim of history, both ignorant
and disempowered; two, Leda did put on his knowledge with his power, in which
case, because it remains wedded to his power, her acquisition of knowledge still
depends upon her status as victim (here, though, we have the possibility of a victim
who borrows prestige from the fact of having been violated by a god). Side by side
like this, these positions present an ethically bleak either/or. Although on one side
Leda is ignorant and on the other she is ‘knowing’, on both accounts she succumbs
equally to the totalising indifference of the swan’s power.
Cullingford has pointed to the ‘danger’ of suggesting that Leda is open or
even attracted to the swan’s violent aggression because it ‘embodies a number of
classic male assumptions about female sexuality: women love a bit of force; or
when a woman says no she means yes; or women like to degrade themselves with
animals’.14 Doubtless she is right, insofar as bad readers will ignore the poem’s
mythopoeic frame and relish whatever licence they can take from high art for their
own unremarkable fantasies. However, an equal if not greater danger, it seems to
me, lies in ignoring the poem’s aesthetic manifestation (it is a representation of a
representation, after all),15 and likewise ignoring its implicit invitation to think of
sexuality inappropriately, which is to say as a metaphor for other things. Rather

14
 Elizabeth Cullingford, Gender and History in Yeats’s Love Poetry (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1993), 57.
15
 It was inspired by a Hellenistic bas-relief reproduced in Elie Faure’s History of Art
(London: Harper and Brothers Pub., 1921).
144 W.B. Yeats and World Literature

than asking so directly whether or not we could morally sanction the particular
interpretation that in some sense Leda invited or accepted the violence, we might
focus more fruitfully on the importance of maintaining the possibility of different,
non-characterological interpretations, apart from those which emphasise the moral
content of perpetrator and victim. The strength of the poem lies in its demand that
we read it more than once: we are directed to do so by its final question. If we do
not do this, but insist that the poem is a simple apology for the artistic coercion
of ‘form’ – the indifference of the swan a stand-in for the impersonality of the
artist – or that the poem depicts, and implicitly supports, an intolerable cruelty and
colonisation, then we are failing to recognise any other model of unity than that
of forceful coercion. The question whether Leda put on the swan’s knowledge is
ambivalent not about the morality of rape per se, but about what this representation
of rape says about force, power and the formal constitutions of history. This
ambivalence is in the interest not of defending the swan (the androcentric artist,
the colonial master) but of freeing Leda’s life from being conceived, in a totalising
way, as that of a victim whose moral restitution is envisaged according to the same
linear temporality as that established by the perpetrator’s dream of transcendent
satisfaction.
Given that we have seen how the feminine has been conventionalised as that
worldly space which is supposed to receive male historical violence – analogous
to the aesthetic practices which (re)establish civility in the wake of political
revolution – we might read the indeterminacy at the end of ‘Leda and the Swan’
as a question addressed to the terms of this reception. The subjective demand
for historical recognition is transformed by the uncertainty of the poem’s final
lines into the tacit acceptance of misrecognition. Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalytic
provocation that ‘there is no such thing as woman / Il n’y a pas La femme’,
suggesting that the category ‘woman’ is a symptom of the male subject’s desire,
traces the same enigma as posed by Leda’s inscrutability: in what sense is Leda
there to receive the male god’s political will? Is she there enough to recognise and
affirm Zeus’s being? Is that even possible given that Zeus’s implicit demand for a
perfect identification of knowledge of, and power over, Leda – his fantasy object –
entails his sacrifice of his meaningful difference from her which would make such
recognition at all possible?
We predicted such a structural paradox of consummation from our reading of
Cathleen Ni Houlihan where the aroused male subject, Michael, is protected from
the consequences of his awakened desire: the young girl with the walk of a queen
is an essentially promissory figure without any particular substance; she is Woman,
in Lacan’s sense, who does not exist. The tragic gap between Michael’s desires
and the world he goes to find functions as a safeguard against indignity. ‘Leda and
the Swan’ offers a stark contrast to this: whereas Michael’s subjectivity is secured
by his questing desire, the object of which is dramaturgically out of reach, in the
late sonnet we are confronted with the on-stage spectacle of forced consummation,
Zeus’s detumescence, and the indignity of a readerly query. The poem entitles us
to ask: what does this consummation mean? This rebounds on to the question of
‘Woman’ and the Poetics of Destitution 145

the nation, specifically of national life at the moment of political self-assertion: the
life focalised in Cathleen Ni Houlihan as the promise of satisfaction is dispersed
by the irresolution of ‘Leda and the Swan’.
Reception determines the meaning of the act. Cathleen Ni Houlihan’s patriotic
enticement was enfolded within her readiness to receive Michael’s sacrifice, and
it is this same readiness and assured timeliness that ‘Leda and the Swan’ calls into
doubt. I want to turn now to ‘Easter 1916’ because it occupies a unique position
in Yeats’s oeuvre, making explicit the connection between modern aesthetics and
Ireland’s national politics on the grounds that both offer a reflection on their terms
of address and reception. The guiding questions of ‘Easter 1916’ are: to whom are
the actions of the national revolutionaries addressed? Who is, or will be, of the
nation? And, how will national life be qualified? Given that the poem provides a
complicated script for Ireland’s declaration of national independence, and that it
interrogates the legacy of Cathleen Ni Houlihan, it will allow us to remain with the
question or symptom of ‘woman’ as that which connects the national imaginary
at the point of its questionable satisfaction to the global and more philosophical
problem concerning life itself.

Rereading ‘Easter 1916’

Writing to Lady Gregory on 11 May 1916, in the immediate aftermath of the


Dublin Rising, Yeats occupied himself with the matter of literature: ‘At the
moment I feel that all the work of years has been overturned, all the bringing
together of classes, all the freeing of Irish literature and criticism from politics’
(L 613). Whilst the note of despondency is unmistakeable, it is hardly decisive. In
almost the same breath, Yeats admitted that he was already ‘trying to write a poem
on the men executed’, conceding that those literary and critical freedoms he valued
might productively interbreed with political exigency after all. The poem which
resulted, by demonstrating Yeats’s ambivalent acceptance of the new republican
dispensation in the wake of the Rising, is probably his most complete political
poem. Yet, ironically perhaps, it is also one of his most self-consciously aesthetic
poems. I shall attempt to account specifically for this coincidence of political
and aesthetic development by considering ‘Easter 1916’ as the occasion when
Yeats translated his concern for literary freedom from its defensive formulation
as freedom ‘from politics’ to its more radical and modernist emanation as the
aesthetic ground of politics.
Yeats’s letter to Lady Gregory provides a key co-ordinate in supporting this
reading. It is where he admits his desire to write poetically of a political event
and first commits to paper a version of what would become his aesthetic refrain:
‘A terrible beauty is born.’ More significantly, however, the letter illuminates
the pedigree of this refrain. Writing of Maud Gonne, Yeats draws attention to
her remark that, along with the Rising, ‘tragic dignity has returned to Ireland’
(L 613). The proximity of these phrases is worthy of note. Why did Yeats, so
146 W.B. Yeats and World Literature

obviously impressed by Gonne’s formulation, ‘tragic dignity’, transform it into ‘a


terrible beauty’? Whilst he may have had different pragmatic or prosodic reasons
for making this change, it is the discourse of aesthetic philosophy which most
coherently justifies it. We know that Yeats had read Coleridge and Carlyle, both
eminent mediators of the German aesthetic and folkloric traditions, at least name-
checked Schiller and Goethe, immersed himself in Nietzsche, and explored the
aesthetic philosophy of Edmund Burke. Therefore, it is not fanciful to imagine
that his modification of Gonne’s sentiment was philosophically astute. Whereas
‘dignity’, using Schiller’s classic definition, insists on the subordination of
sensuous nature to moral reason, fitting with Gonne’s conceptual understanding
of political right and her unwavering employment of a republican ideal, ‘beauty’
remains a sensuous category.16 By emphasising the ‘beauty’ of the rebels’ sacrifice,
Yeats effectively deprives it of a fixed conceptual meaning: sacrifice, denied moral
self-evidence, must attain its authenticity not in the reason which gives rise to it,
but in the volatile event of its reception.

The Economy of Sacrifice

In other words, the theme of ‘Easter 1916’ (VP 392–4) is less the substantive
issue of Irish independence than the economy of its transmission and exchange.
By interrogating the circulation of the rebels’ sacrifice and the sentiment which
informs it, Yeats considers how the objective of national freedom is embroiled
in the opportunism of nationalist dogma. The lines which open the final stanza
indicate this significant concern with economy: ‘Too long a sacrifice / Can make
a stone of the heart. / O when may it suffice?’ At issue is not the value of sacrifice
per se, but the potential for immoderate sacrifice. At first the poet appears to be
making a case for conservative measure against the profligacy of political violence;
but then seven lines further on he stops himself with the question: ‘Was it needless
death after all?’ Looking at the ledger for a second time, he reconsiders: perhaps
the Rising was not so profligate ‘after all’, for put in the balance with heaven,
and what heaven might repay, the sacrifice could yet prove to be an excellent
investment. Having duly calculated where the smart money is, we can follow the
poet to the end of his poem as he supports the rebels’ cause through the famous
roll call of names.
Put like this, the economics of the stanza are quite conventional and Yeats is
showing himself adept at calculating symbolic capital and establishing the rule of
economic good sense. We could imagine a reading of the whole poem in which
the poet retrospectively rationalises and incorporates into a political and symbolic
economy that which he initially regarded as an extreme and excessive case of
political violence. However, this would be an incomplete interpretation. That the

16
 Friedrich Schiller, ‘On Grace and Dignity’, Schiller’s ‘On Grace and Dignity’ in
Its Cultural Context: Essays and a New Translation. Ed. Jane V. Curren and Christophe
Fricker and trans. Jane V. Curren (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2005), 123–70.
‘Woman’ and the Poetics of Destitution 147

final stanza develops according to a series of analogies of exchange, moderation


and restitution is not without its ironic edge. From ‘Too long a sacrifice’, to
‘Heaven’s part’ and ‘our part’ (which designates the apportioning of shares), to
‘needless death’, to knowing when it is ‘enough / To know’, to the potential for
‘excess of love’, we are guided conspicuously through a process of economic
rationalisation (VP 394). But even more significant than Yeats’s final sum is how
he signposts the economy of a political event such that something so apparently
otherworldly as self-sacrifice can be said to be circulating in an unstable market
of values.
By considering sacrifice as an economic problem we are entering the territory
uncovered by Nietzsche in On The Genealogy of Morals.17 Here Nietzsche
characterises sacrifice, particularly the Christian God’s sacrifice of himself, as
establishing a kind of arche-economy that serves as the foundation for modern
economies of investment and redemption. The Christian God sacrifices himself
in human form, thus cancelling the sins of the world: i.e. cancelling mankind’s
debt to God. The ancient covenant, in which mankind had to pay for his prior
transgressions, is ostensibly abrogated because Christ’s death represents the
creditor killing himself, thus effectively absenting himself from the economy of
exchange. Henceforth no man should worship simply out of obligation or fear.
Yet, so Nietzsche argues, in a grand historical and metaphysical irony, instead
of dissolving the cynical economy of exchange, Christ’s death compounds it,
universalises it, and infiltrates it into the fabric of the inner mind of man. What was
a structure of obligation, when we expected to pay for our transgressions, becomes
a hopeless feeling of guilt now we are not able to pay even though we want to.
An external register of indebtedness is replaced by an internal feeling of bad
conscience. This has the knock-on effect of accentuating the creditor’s prestige
and his place in the symbolic economy: since we cannot pay God back in this life,
he must exist so we can pay him back in the afterlife. This is the basis, as Nietzsche
sees it, for Christian martyrology and its weak imitation in the frugal lives of the
Christian merchants, saving, praying and investing in an afterlife where God can
be met again and all debts finally settled.
We should be clear that this is not Nietzsche’s final word on self-sacrifice. The
deed of Christ’s sacrifice is yet a noble act for Nietzsche. The problem concerns
mankind’s reception of the deed, which demands the restitution of the benefactor
within the fixed economy of exchange at all costs. We have a secular equivalent to
this theological conceit in the form of the nation state, where those who sacrifice
themselves for the state are granted their posterity by the marketplace: they survive
the breach of their own deaths by their symbolic instantiation as reproducible
homunculi. The 1916 martyrs ‘MacDonagh and MacBride / And Connolly and
Pearse’ are each susceptible to this reproduction, where death means ideological

17
 Friedrich Nietzsche, On The Genealogy of Morals: A Polemic (1887), Basic
Writings of Nietzsche. Ed. and trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: The Modern Library,
2000), 450–607.
148 W.B. Yeats and World Literature

reification. My point here is that ‘Easter 1916’ does not, as the majority of the
critical literature suggests, simply call into question the efficacy of the Rising (was
it justifiable according to its objective?), but queries the calculated investment in
the rebels’ heroic afterlife.18 The supreme irony, to which the poem tends, is that
the real danger of political dogmatism lies in the process of economic moderation
which secures the violent deed as an exchangeable symbol. Because the 1916
Proclamation of Irish Independence, along with the tradition it invokes, is
ineluctably embroiled in the economics of property exchange (who owns Ireland?),
the very notion of the aesthetic is put under pressure. Yet, this is precisely what
Yeats seeks to recover by usurping ‘dignity’ with ‘beauty’. By mobilising the term
‘beauty’ to characterise the Rising as phenomenal, in a sense without purpose,
Yeats qualifies the accounting which takes place when a deed is measured for its
symbolic viability.

The Gift of Sacrifice

The difficulty of receiving the Rising as freely given, rather than as already
accounted for, is analogous to the difficulty of aesthetic appreciation. The burden
lies with the poet as surrogate reader, historian and audience member: can he
free himself from indebtedness (the moral interpretation, the salutary lesson), in
order to permit the freedom of the sensuous particularity of beauty? Or is beauty
enduringly indebted to the operation of its political horizon? As well as taking for
its subject the difficulty of receiving the rebels’ sacrifice as a kind of gift, both the
gift and the difficulty of gift-giving organise the form of Yeats’s poem. Therefore, I
would like to explore how the paradoxical status of the gift, as an economic figure
that resists the strict rationalisation of investment and symbolic reconciliation,
ultimately describes this poem’s locution and contributes to its aesthetic self-
reflection.19
The progress of the poem follows the poet’s acknowledgment of the Rising
as a gift. In the first stanza we encounter the poet going about his daily business
exchanging ‘polite meaningless words’ with others among the untransformed of
Dublin society. Ostensibly, it is a record of his complacency as a Dublin clubman:
‘Being certain that they and I / But lived where motley is worn’. Although we
anticipate that this is about to be exploded by revolutionary events, ‘All changed,

18
 The criticism which best develops the aesthetic aspect of ‘Easter 1916’ in tandem
with the political includes the following: Declan Kiberd, Inventing Ireland: The Literature
of the Nation (London: Jonathan Cape, 1995), 213–17; Jefferson Holdridge, Those Mingled
Seas: The Poetry of W.B. Yeats, the Beautiful and the Sublime (Dublin: UCD Press, 2000);
and Edward Larrissy, Yeats The Poet: The Measures of Difference (London: Harvester
Wheatsheaf, 1994), 132–7.
19
 Underlying my understanding of this paradoxical characterisation of the gift is
Jacques Derrida’s engagement with the anthropology of Marcel Mauss. Jacques Derrida,
Given Time: 1. Counterfeit Money. Trans. P. Kamuf (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1992).
‘Woman’ and the Poetics of Destitution 149

changed utterly’ etc., we should not adhere to the before and after trajectory without
further consideration. It is worth remembering that far from simply recording the
way things were before the Rising, Yeats is poetically organising the conditions
for his own reception of it. The refrain is a case in point here because, whilst it
tells us that everything has ‘changed’, its function in the poem qua refrain is to
circulate as repetition. Therefore, through the process of transmission, an ongoing
compositional logic is undermining the idea of a purely redemptive event.
By self-consciously marginalising himself within the scene of political
expectancy, Yeats points to the axiomatic irony of the gift; namely, that once
it is directly appropriated it ceases to operate as a gift and becomes instead a
return on an investment. In this way the first stanza, so often read as a depiction
of contemporary life awaiting its redemption, can be reread as the recognition and
operation of the tact required for receiving a gift. Potentially we have two positions
here: that of the ideologues (those expectant recipients of the Rising), for whom
the rebels’ sacrifice takes place on a timeline of punctual investments and returns,
and that of the poet, for whom such teleology undermines the Rising’s authentic
freedom and originality. In other words, it is by not expecting the Rising that Yeats
is in a position to receive it in a way which those who do expect it cannot.
This difference in modes of reception has further metaphysical implications
for an understanding of time. The political economy established by the logic of
investment and return (where the investment of martyrdom secures the return of
national independence) instantiates a stable and linear temporal axis along which
the movement from Ireland as potentiality to Ireland as actuality is realised. On
my reading, however, in which the Rising is analogous to a gift, the Rising’s non-
returnable and irresolvable qualities destabilise the axis upon which a central
historical narrative unfolds. What we might call the untimeliness of the gift (the
fact that a gift resists full appropriation at any given moment, if it is to remain a
gift) focusses our attention on the significant relation between the composition
of the poem and the composition of the revolutionary event. We have argued that
the poem makes a kind of virtue of the poet’s separation from the main narrative
of Irish independence. So too is the poem separated from the event it ostensibly
memorialises. ‘Easter 1916’, although it was completed a mere five months after
the Rising, was initially circulated in a limited edition among Yeats’s friends and
acquaintances. It was only with its general circulation in 1920 (coinciding with the
hunger strike of the republican mayor of Cork City, Terence MacSwiney) that the
poem, in an ironically untimely fashion, achieved its timely public profile.20 This
contingency of reception in turn echoes a broader historical enigma: the Rising
didn’t begin until Easter Monday, effectively a day late since it was planned for
Easter Sunday, and Ireland itself was a belated – untimely – nation among the
nations of Europe. This affinity between the unpunctual transmission of the poem
and the unpunctual transmission of the Rising is prefigured within ‘Easter 1916’

20
 Tom Paulin, ‘Yeats’s Hunger-Strike Poem’, Minotaur: Poetry and the Nation State
(London: Faber and Faber, 1992), 133–50.
150 W.B. Yeats and World Literature

by Yeats’s reflection on the poet’s own untimeliness. Thus, the political and the
aesthetic converge through the shared problematic of their disjointed transmission
and reception.
Having read the first stanza as establishing the conditions under which a
gift might be acknowledged, the second stanza proceeds to describe the act of
reception itself. Here begins the delicate process of cataloguing the contents of
what has been given. Yeats runs through the participants of the Rising, picking out
Constance Markievicz, Patrick Pearse, Thomas MacDonagh and John MacBride.
The inclusion of MacBride and Markievicz is especially pertinent since, unlike
the other two, they are not counted among the official seven signatories of the
Proclamation of Irish Independence. As acquaintances of Yeats, their names
remind us that the poem is part of the poet’s personal story as well as being an
unofficial, and potentially illegitimate, transcription of the revolutionary event.
This rumour of illegitimacy, associated with possible sexual infidelity, resonates
through the characters of Markievicz and MacBride, and within the poet’s act
of representing the birth of a nation. We are prompted to ask: what possible and
undeclared infidelities contribute to the safe traditional scene arising in the last
stanza of a mother naming her child; and how might this image of the traditional
feminine world welcoming ‘home’ the male revolutionary spirit have been
compromised in advance by the open possibility of different ‘fathers’ – different
revolutionary names?
Markievicz is important because she brings an alternative, more volatile
vision of femininity to the poem, but one which nonetheless contributes to the
mothering image. She is drawn as a typical figure of grace who carries within
herself the degenerations of ‘ignorant good-will’ and ‘shrill’ political opinion.
Her ‘sweet’ voice is not ideally secured. MacBride, on the face of it, is the more
surprising inclusion, being Yeats’s avowed enemy. It is this same inclusion, which
we imagine to be under duress, which transforms the rhetoric of the poem most
completely: ‘He had done most bitter wrong / To some who are near my heart
/ Yet I number him in the song’. Primarily, these lines establish a sympathetic
identification with the female who has been betrayed by the arrogant male
spirit – MacBride was reported to have had adulterous (and incestuous) affairs
whilst married to Maud Gonne. However, considering the biographical context,
which here becomes a prejudicial but necessary part of the description of the
revolutionary event, we know that Yeats is not only identifying with the injury to
Gonne but also with the injury to himself as one whose ardour was consistently
encouraged and insulted by Gonne: repeatedly, and in spite of the man’s brute
uncaring manner, Gonne preferred the bed of MacBride. In this light, the figure
of the hen calling to the moor-cocks in the poem’s third stanza makes sense as
an image of feminine seduction which inevitably opens onto the possibility of
infidelity and misconception. MacBride and Gonne stand in their different ways
as adulterers, and the poet as a quasi-cuckold. But through the event of revolution,
and of writing, in which to put forward one’s name is also to resign it – to give
it up to the vicissitudes of reception (‘He, too, has resigned his part’) – innuendo
concerning infidelity is transformed into a kind of poetic virtue.
‘Woman’ and the Poetics of Destitution 151

MacBride’s inclusion is the most effective turn in the poem, not simply
because it indicates Yeats’s personal magnanimity but because it changes the
poem’s structural question. The standard question of whether the masculine ideal
can be received by its medium (the world of chaste femininity), is usurped once
the authentic event is separated from pure idealism and a more volatile conception
of feminine difference is permitted. The new question asks, not who will mother
the child of revolutionary idealism, but who will act as father to the child? Pearse’s
patrimony, and by extension the whole Fenian patrimony of Yeats’s ‘Romantic
Ireland’ (Edward Fitzgerald, Robert Emmet and Wolfe Tone), is called into doubt
insofar as he is only named in the poem – his patronymic only established – after
the mother has already been found with child. Lest we mistake the roll call of (only
male) names which ends the poem for an ideal and finally transcendent solution
to the dilemma of worldly mediation, we should recognise that it operates only
in conjunction with the image of a mother naming her child established in the
same stanza, which follows in turn the seductive call of the ‘hen’ to the ‘moor-
cock’. The implication of this order – from seduction, to mother with child, and
only then to the revolutionary fathers – suggests that the question of woman,
which we have seen to be the question of political and aesthetic reception, is that
which (over)determines the revolutionary event: how many fathers can one nation
have? Indeed, we may ask of Yeats’s roll-call whether it seeks to immortalise a
confederacy of revolutionaries, or to post a list of uncertain candidates awaiting
the results of a paternity test.

I write it out in a verse –


MacDonagh and MacBride
And Connolly and Pearse
Now and in time to be,
Wherever green is worn,
Are changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born. (VP 394)

If the poet makes the art of his composition conspicuous – ‘I write it out’ – it is
because he wants his reader to see the rhetorical form of the claim he is making.
Far from proving his simple fidelity to the paternalistic investments of Irish
republicanism, he ensures that the uncertainty of infidelity is preserved within
the symbolic forms of political faith; just as the contingent act of writing is made
visible at the very moment we might expect the politically appropriate sentence
to efface it.

Grace or Dignity

My suggestion is that in ‘Easter 1916’ Yeats not only framed a political event of
national self-assertion in aesthetic terms, but marked the political event as significant
for how it transformed the field of aesthetics itself, and with it the conceptual field
of life. The query of ‘woman’ is key to this transformation. Because Friedrich
152 W.B. Yeats and World Literature

Schiller’s aesthetics were written in the context of the French Revolution and its
violent aftermath they provide an instructive precedent for Yeats’s definitions. I
would now like to consider Yeats’s conceptual debt to Schillerian aesthetics, while
also detecting the point at which the aesthetic field is radicalised in Yeats’s work
beyond Schiller’s seminal distinctions.
Contesting the idea that to invoke aesthetics in the wake of revolutionary events
is necessarily reactionary, the scholar Fredrick Beiser has written of Schiller’s
commitment to beauty that it functioned as a living register of his ambivalence. A
philosophy of beauty was not a sign of reactionary traditionalism in other words,
but an open question concerning the reception of political ideas. In fact, suggests
Beiser, despite his concerns over a sublime politics of abstract terror, Schiller
was sympathetic to French republicanism. In this regard, the move from fixed
beauty to mobile ‘grace’ in his essay ‘On Grace and Dignity’ (1793) is crucial for
perceiving how, in his famous letters On the Aesthetic Education of Man (1794),
beauty becomes a living cultural principle: it is not a defined object (of pathos) but
‘a state of our personality’ (ethos).21 Beiser argues that in Schiller’s works it is only
beauty that gives a human being a social character, pointing specifically to Letter
XVII in which, ‘[man] begins to choose others according to their appearance
rather than according to his needs. This pleasure in appearance […] marks the
very beginning of polite society. What happens between sexual partners becomes
the model for all society’.22 The courtly sensibility which Yeats so often espouses,
especially the enigma of sprezzatura, pursues this same erotic principle, whereby
living beauty (grace), by withdrawing itself in the midst of its presentation, both
inviting and checking the desire of the male subject, organises the composition of
society. In Letter XVII, after stating that beauty will ‘everywhere appear only as
a particular and limited species, never as pure genus’, Schiller charges feminine
beauty with a twofold task: to soften the natural man and to energise the artificial
man.23 Beauty incites a desire for nature in the artificial man and introduces the
natural man to theatrical sociability.
I can only offer here a brief consideration of a complex thought. What is
most crucial to note is that as a means of defending the field of aesthetics against
those who would deem it a luxurious form of irrationalism, Schiller suggests we
impute reason to the sensuous realm. His counsel, that one should suspend one’s
instrumental reason in order to clarify the reason of one’s natural inclination,
dispenses with an overly simplistic opposition between the rational and irrational
realms, of the mind and the body, of the moral intelligence and nature. There is
more than one possible form of reason, in other words: the feminised reason of
graceful association or civility based on sexual inclinations (sympathy) acts as a

21
 Frederick Beiser, Schiller as Philosopher: A Re-examination (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 2005), 122.
22
 Beiser, Schiller as Philosopher, 160.
23
 Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man. Trans. Reginald Snell (New
York: Dover Publications, 2004), 85–7.
‘Woman’ and the Poetics of Destitution 153

counterforce to the moral reason of male self-assertion (intention). However, if


this means that one form of reason can challenge another, then it also describes
a precarious situation. Schiller notes the corresponding danger of aesthetic
relativism writing of grace that it requires an established moral horizon within
which to remain graceful, otherwise it will degenerate. On the one hand, such
degeneration will take place as the amorality of sensuous attraction:

If […] one could completely forget what a human countenance expressed, could
attribute the raw instinct of a tiger to it, without changing its appearance, then
the eyes would assess it in exactly the same way and the senses would declare
the tiger to be the Creator’s finest achievement. 24

And on the other, as the artificiality of appearances:

the melodious inflections of the voice, an irresistible attraction from candid lips,
are only a vain cadence, a tremulousness which savours of study: in a word,
all the harmonious charms of woman become only deception, an artifice of the
toilet. 25

Although dignity too has its potential degenerations – ‘fear’ and ‘inflation’ – in
this essay at least, Schiller resolves the question of hierarchy by insisting that
dignity must come first. Even as he recommends that we suspend our moral reason
to consider the reason of the sensuous realm – allowing that ostensibly passive
nature has an active and free faculty, and a specific importance for qualifying an
instrumental view of the world – he insists that we learn to subordinate sensuous
nature at the point of moral crisis.26
In Yeats’s ‘Easter 1916’, however, the matter is less resolutely hierarchical.
Here we encounter the shadow of those degenerations of grace – those disgraces
– proscribed by Schiller: the tiger breath of Pearse’s fanaticism, the toilet of the
Dublin clubs, culminating in the disrespectful insinuation of a mother’s infidelity.
And it is not at all clear that this structured volatility can be subordinated to a single
transcendent legitimacy. Dignity or grace? This is the question which follows from
Yeats’s adaptation of Gonne’s ‘tragic dignity’ into ‘terrible beauty’. The answer
hinges on temporality: does the state of grace simply succeed dignified self-
assertion, and civil society receive the act of revolution as a normalising process
embedding the revolutionaries’ esteem in the world; or does it harbour its own
volatile temporality through acts of reception, originating its own politics beyond

24
 Schiller, ‘On Grace and Dignity’, 129.
25
 Schiller, ‘On Grace and Dignity’, 138–9.
26
 ‘In Dignity we are presented with an example of the subjugation of the sensuous to
the ethical, and although the rule demands that we imitate this, at the same time it exceeds
our physical capacities. The opposition between the needs of nature and the demands of the
law, whose validity [legitimacy] we do admit, puts strain on the senses, and gives rise to
the feeling that is called respect and that is inseparable from dignity.’ Schiller, ‘On Grace
and Dignity’, 165.
154 W.B. Yeats and World Literature

the law laid down at the moment of historical self-assertion? This confusion is
embodied by Maud Gonne to whom Yeats imputes the best virtues of feminine
grace even as she herself enacts the ‘male’ politics of self-assertion and dignity.
Gonne’s structural androgyny – at once dignified exponent of the moral law and
seductive embodiment of social and courtly virtues ‘not natural in an age like this’
– is not adventitious within Yeats’s poetic universe. Rather it announces the force
of a trans-horizonal aesthetics, a sensibility operating beyond the fixed borders
which usually give life its qualified historical meaning. A grace whose mobility is
not confined to an already established political space, and which does not simply
follow in the wake of dignified self-assertion, overdetermines the political act
and adulterates it by multiplicity. Indeed it is, by implication, placed before the
political act, like the mother before the Fenian patrimony, and has the potential to
render the act and its agency ridiculous. What is ‘terrible’ about the Easter Rising
is the volatility of its historical meaning. Not only does a ‘terrible beauty’ issue
a challenge to conventional temporal and spatial models of national politics, but
through its implicit de-territorialisation – sensuousness on the move beyond its
horizon of meaning – it imposes a new aesthetics of destitution.

Crazy Jane and the Poetics of Destitution

Perhaps the most predictable thing to say about the Yeatsian persona Crazy
Jane is that she is a post-Independence Cathleen Ni Houlihan, resolutely, even
delightedly, failing to live up to expectations. Whereas Cathleen’s seductive
disappearing act was a way to contain and territorialise nationalist desire, Crazy
Jane’s brazen openness lives under the sign of banishment from the official nation.
Cullingford has argued compellingly that the sexual politics of these later poems
(collected in Words for Music Perhaps and Other Poems (1932)) was strategically
intended by Yeats to scandalise the Catholic State of Ireland by voicing opposition
both to anti-divorce laws and the Censorship of Publications Bill (1928).27 There
is no doubt that the ribaldry of ‘Crazy Jane and the Bishop’ can be read in this
fashion as a kind of liberal satire of modern Irish piety. Jane derides the Bishop
as having a ‘skin […] wrinkled like the foot of a goose’, which in a poem riffing
on a ‘blasted oak’ and ‘solid men and coxcombs’ is tantamount to an accusation
of impotence (VP 507–8). The Bishop is depicted as weak: he speaks beyond
his natural authority – he wasn’t a bishop when he placed his ban on Jack the
journey man – and is physically crippled with ‘the heron’s hunch on his back’.
Accordingly, the tactic of turning him into a flaccid penis is an especially apt
moment of liberal mockery. And yet can we really say that Jane’s profanity is
consistent enough in its pointedness to function as liberal critique? It may be
that the Bishop’s condemnatory cry that Jane and her lover Jack the Journeyman
live beyond the life of the polis ‘like beast and beast’ is designed to incite the

27
 Elizabeth Cullingford, Gender and History in Yeats’s Love Poetry (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1993), 186, 227.
‘Woman’ and the Poetics of Destitution 155

reader’s reproof. But at same time a reader response that presumed that Jack and
Jane, their living arrangements and sexual practices notwithstanding, are just like
‘me’ and ‘you’ would sound a falsely humanist note, neglecting both the poems’
formal commitment to profanity and the extent of Jane’s delight in her own
destitute animality. Jane does not, in my view, simply carry out an attack upon
the provincialism of the Irish-Catholic psyche in the late 1920s. Rather, I want to
suggest that she embodies the predicament of the openness of global modernity,
and in particular of unqualified life which exists beyond the sovereign territory of
the nation.
Cullingford’s analysis attributes a moral and social content to the Crazy Jane
poems, but also points to the challenge their brazen corporeality poses to our
understanding of Yeats’s aestheticism. It is here that an important clarification
must be made: Crazy Jane does not represent the closure of Yeats’s aestheticism,
nor does she stand for life more empirically real or morally chastening than that
beautified in the realm of art; rather, she represents the radicalisation of aesthetics
in the period of modernism. Jane is essentially gratuitous. In Jane’s uncivil body,
feminine grace, traditionally tasked with creating non-instrumental modes of
civil association based on the protocols of courtship, is freed from its implied
political horizon. She represents an explication of what had remained implicit in
this aesthetic vision of sociability by offering her own abject and non-procreative
femininity as the ground of the non-instrumental relation. When in ‘Crazy Jane
Talks with the Bishop’, the Bishop indecorously points out that her breasts are ‘flat
and fallen now’ and her ‘veins must soon be dry’, she is quick to reclaim his insult
as a boast. She will not allow her body to be pitied and thereby redeemed within
a Christianising economy. ‘Fair and Foul are near of kin’ she tells him, a Freudian
sounding truth ‘she learned in bodily lowness; / and in the heart’s pride’.28 She
concludes her riposte with the following famous lines:

A woman can be proud and stiff


When on love intent;
But love has pitched his mansion in
The place of excrement;
For nothing can be sole or whole
That has not been rent. (VP 513)

The phallic woman ‘proud and stiff’, anticipating the ‘great-bladdered Emer’ in the
later poem ‘Crazy Jane on the Mountain’ (VP 628), corresponds neatly with Yeats’s
frequent identifications late in his career with ‘mad old slum women’. At the very
least this correspondence queries Jahan Ramazani’s contention that ‘development

28
 ‘The highest and the lowest are always closest to each other in the sphere of
sexuality.’ Sigmund Freud, ‘Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality’, The Standard
Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume 7. Gen ed. and
trans. J. Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1953), 161–2.
156 W.B. Yeats and World Literature

as a poet is for Yeats partly a movement from the feminine to the masculine’.29
Jane’s ranting, spitting and singing are hyperbolically masculine projections issued
from the mouth of a woman, while her claim that love is housed in ‘the place of
excrement’ ties together with the aesthetic her own non-procreative femininity
and the innuendo of homosexuality. The excremental is doubly gratuitous here:
at once a material deemed unrecoverable within the instrumental economy of
civil exchange, and a marker for the site of non-normative sexual practices which
release the erotic from the instrumentality of marriage and children. Crazy Jane
in this sense is queer. And she certainly queries gender as a sensible category for
organising political thought.
We considered earlier in this chapter how feminine sexuality was depicted
in symbolic terms as charged with accepting the masculine will into the
sensuous world, and so implicitly legitimating the experience of revolutionary
transcendence. Jane’s sexuality, in contrast to this convention, is resolutely
immanent, characteristically non-passive and openly promiscuous. However,
no matter how free it seems from the interdictions of chaste mother Ireland, we
should be careful not to idealise Jane’s cultivated gaiety here: ‘My body makes
no moan / But sings on’ (VP 512). True enough, there is a Whitmanesque quality
to her sexual promiscuity, a New World association further encouraged by her
resemblance to a folkloric hero of the American West, Calamity Jane. But she is
not only carefree; being a ‘road that men pass over’ she also indicates a significant
and troubling complication of Yeats’s understanding of worldliness. In Chapter 1,
we saw how the protagonist Paul Ruttlege, in Where there is Nothing, considered
roads to possess mystical virtues: ‘They are the serpent of eternity […] The roads
are the only thing that are infinite.’30 For Ruttlege roads mediate the world beyond
the visible horizon; Jane, by contrast, is the road and in this way represents the
finite materiality which Ruttlege’s mystical demand for transcendence overlooks.
Although Jane lives beyond the fixed horizon, perhaps in the fashion of those
tinkers who so attracted Ruttlege, her bodily finitude embodies a riposte to
Ruttlege’s imagination. Ruttlege is a self-declared adventurer, but Jane, for all
her enviable freedoms and affirmations, stands as an outcast and refugee. In sum,
she is altogether the more ambiguous figure, and her mobility is altogether less
of a subjective aspiration. Her ‘naked’ lying upon the grass, though at one level
representative of a certain New World innocence, is also an example of ‘bare’ life.
Cullingford remarks usefully on the excremental folklore of the Crazy Jane
poems, connecting them up with Bakhtin’s work on Rabelais and the carnivalesque.
Most ingeniously she associates from Yeats’s repeated use of the word ‘mire’,
which can be shown to connote ‘dung’ or ‘swine’, to infer a more general cloacal
mode in his late writings.31 I have already suggested that I think she moves too

29
 Jahan Ramazani, Yeats and the Poetry of Death: Elegy, Self-elegy, and the Sublime
(New Haven; London: Yale University Press, 1990), 145.
30
 W.B. Yeats, Where There is Nothing, 22–3.
31
 Cullingford, Gender and History in Yeats’s Love Poetry, 242–3.
‘Woman’ and the Poetics of Destitution 157

quickly towards assigning this a political meaning within the national context.
Is it entirely insignificant that in ‘Byzantium’, where ‘all complexities of mire
or blood’ emerge out of ‘all that man is / all mere complexities’, the poet places
himself in imaginative exile? Not only does he depict the city where Asia meets
Europe but he marks it as the point of fundamental indecision. ‘Byzantium’ (1929)
is Yeats’s greatest poem of equivocation: ‘A starlit or a moonlit dome disdains’;
‘Before me floats an image, man, or shade’, ‘I call it death-in-life and life-in-
death’; ‘Miracle, bird or golden handiwork’; ‘Can like the cocks of Hades crow /
Or, by the moon embittered scorn aloud’; ‘common bird or petal’ and so on
(VP 497–8). As a dreamlike meditation this leads to the question, nature or art,
original or representation, which had been opened in its prequel poem ‘Sailing
to Byzantium’ (1927), and which now refuses to resolve itself. Is ‘this country’
Byzantium or an image of Byzantium? Is there anything beyond images which
‘beget’ images? This ontological openness is dangerous as well as exciting and
it reflects the predicament of Crazy Jane and the values the reader may impute to
her ‘nature’. Jane, whose expressive bodily vocabulary so delights Cullingford’s
sense of a transgressive and regenerative femininity – one capable of satirising
the phallocentric nation state – can also be seen, according to the same virtue
of vitality – freed of instrumental purpose and of human progeny – as a killable
animal.
Yeats’s primary poetic strategy for representing the precariousness of this
life is his use of refrain to disrupt and make volatile Jane’s speaking voice.
Conventionally, we think of poetic refrain as a folkloric device designed to give
the speaker’s words the impersonal authority of a traditional ballad. But instead of
embedding the first-person voice within the chorus of a community, Yeats’s refrains
intrude awkwardly here, and even provocatively upon the material of the verses.
The editorialising, and what in Chapter 2 we termed the stereographic qualities of
the folkloric text, overspill the presumed integrity of the traditional form. Jane’s
textual instability presents a challenge to the structures of the Bishop’s ‘old book’.
In ‘Crazy Jane and the Bishop’ there are two competing refrains: one parenthetical
‘(All find safety in the tomb)’, the other italicised ‘The solid man and the coxcomb’.
In ‘Crazy Jane Reproved’ there is a purely musical line – ‘fol de rol, fol de rol’ –
which sounds a traditional note amidst the discord of Jane’s sexual complaint and
reference to the myth of Europa being raped by Zeus. Jane seems suspicious of
the mythopoeic frame, however, omitting its divine content, and suggesting that in
the sexual congress it was only Europa’s bestiality at play: ‘Great Europa played
the fool / That changed a lover for a bull. / Fol de rol, fol de rol.’ In ‘Crazy Jane
on God’ the refrain serves an ironic purpose as themes of promiscuous sex and
war ridicule the iterative solemnity of ‘All things remain in god’. But in ‘Crazy
Jane Grows Old Looking at the Dancers’ such dissonance is much less pointed;
although ‘Love is like a lion’s tooth’ possibly refers to ‘that ivory image there’ –
we imagine some Yeatsian curio depicting ancient eastern dancers – it refuses to
resolve its meaning and instead circulates as an impressive-sounding absurdity.
The refrain effect in ‘Crazy Jane on the Day of Judgement’ is different again; here
158 W.B. Yeats and World Literature

a double refrain seems to transform the first-person voice into what appears to be
a conversation between two characters nominated as ‘he’ and ‘Jane’: ‘And that
is what Jane said’ alternates with ‘“That is certainly the case” said he’. Because
there is no obvious distinction in the voice of the poem as it moves from stanza
to stanza, the refrain may be read in counter-distinction to its choric pretensions
as an example of Jane’s schizoid personality. The first-person Jane who speaks is
also ‘Jane’ the third person who has said something in the reported past, as well as
being a further third, her own interlocutor – ‘he’. We can say nothing conclusive
about Jane’s multiplicity here, except that through brazenly affirming life beyond
the borders of national sovereignty she is formally denied direct self-expression
through overdetermination (VP 507–8, 509, 512, 514, 510).
In this chapter, I’ve suggested that the Yeatsian figure of ‘woman’ who represents
an aesthetic and national counter-conduct to the philistinism of bourgeois modernity
is also the figure capable of registering the post-bourgeois crisis of sovereignty
characteristic of the deterritorialising flow of twentieth-century capitalism. We
observed in ‘Easter 1916’ how, at the moment at which Ireland’s independence
was declared, woman’s split designation between the chaste and the unfaithful (m)
other troubled the act of national self-determination, and re-opened for negotiation
the terms of its symbolic investments. We can give philosophical expression to
this split by considering once more the Kantian subject of cosmopolitanism. The
Kantian assumption that the subject and his other share conditions of possibility
is called into question by the ontological instability of a gendered other; in other
words, woman’s desire, though it may appear to offer a receptive correspondence
to the spirit of male action, potentially operates in a radically different temporal
and spatial horizon. Homi Bhabha’s important argument that post-colonial nations
split at the point of their enunciation compounds these reflections on gender with a
consideration of the emergent geopolitical situation in the early twentieth century.32
The post-colonial nation state will seem to be like an official European nation
in its government and administrative apparatuses, as much as in its discursive
practices around national life. And yet the conditions of its constitution are entirely
different. It is this apparent similitude, encouraging the assumption of shared
conditions of possibility, which accounts for the persistence of a Kantian model of
cosmopolitan politics where difference (between nations) is organised according
to the principle of martial honour among competitive subjects. Conversely, it is the
reality of global unevenness and constitutional asymmetry which accounts for the
violence and the savagery of modernist aesthetics.
It has often been said, especially with respect to his writing of the post-Irish
Independence (and post-Irish partition) era, that Yeats’s is a poetics of violence.
The poet’s investments in the social movement for eugenics are an obvious way
in which this violence is marked. This must include an acknowledgement that
eugenics entails the political expropriation of the generative capacity of woman,
and hence an attempt to safeguard generation itself from ontological volatility.

32
 Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994), 36.
‘Woman’ and the Poetics of Destitution 159

If modernist life is that which cannot be protected within one coherent political
horizon, then its freedoms are also destitutions, and its vitalities subject to a
pernicious logic of increasingly global governance. We have seen this registered
with Crazy Jane who lives (unfaithfully) beyond the time-space of the political
nation, whose freedom is a form of banishment, and whose admirable brazenness
marks a precarious and unprotected form of life. Yeats also registers such violence
through the powerful trope of civil war. There is no whole or consummated nation
in Yeats’s late work, only incongruous halves, reflecting the incongruous halves of
Ireland’s unsatisfied and non-legitimated imagination in the wake of partition: ‘A
brown Lieutenant and his men, / Half dressed in national uniform’; ‘The abstract
joy, / The half-read wisdom of daemonic images’; ‘The half-imagined, the half-
written page’; ‘I grow half contented to be blind!’; ‘No living man can drink
from the whole wine’; ‘And half is half and yet is all the scene; / And half and
half consume what they renew’ (VP 424, 427, 431, 473, 473, 500; my emphasis).
The political philosopher Carl Schmitt, predicting the ‘irregular’, unofficial and
undeclared nature of modern warfare, wrote that all modern wars would become
civil wars, and ‘foreign’ invasions would become a matter of internal jurisdiction.33
We might add that they would also become post-Kantian wars once the martial
ideal of mutually antagonistic wholes is overtaken by a global logic of the
overdetermined part.

33
 Cited from Agamben, Means Without End: Notes on Politics, 86.
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Chapter 5
Fanatic Subjectivity in the Modern State

‘A dialectician, I muttered, of the very first rank; one of a different kind from any
I have met before’.
(George Moore on Yeats)

How can I, that girl standing there,


My attention fix
On Roman or on Russian
Or on Spanish politics?
(‘Politics’)

Yeats’s famous rejection – the last in a long line of rejections – of Roman or Russian
or Spanish politics in his deathbed poem ‘Politics’ (1939), is, as Conor Cruise
O’Brien sharply reminded Yeatsians in the 1960s, inherently political.1 In fact, it is
because of the patent falseness of its opposition between personal spiritedness and
European ideological struggle that the poem can be said to describe the modern
political situation so well. The turn away from what we are invited to imagine as
the cynicism of politicians, who have ‘travelled’ and ‘read and thought’, meets
not the comparative naivety of a localised human love but the asymmetry of an
old man’s desire for a young girl: ‘O that I were young again / And held her in
my arms’ (VP 631). As so often, from at least the time of his 1928 collection The
Tower, Yeats summons age as more than a natural condition. It is a poetic device.
As an ‘old’ man the poet knows he has no natural right to ‘that girl standing there’,
but he makes the claim in any case, fully conscious of its excessiveness. ‘You
think it horrible that lust and rage / should dance attention upon my old age’ he
challenges the reader in an only slightly earlier lyric, ‘The Spur’ (1938), once
again making a comparison with his youth: ‘They were not such a plague when I
was young’ (VP 591). But it is left uncertain whether his satisfied youth is actually
to be preferred to the excessive desire of old age. Undoubtedly, were he young,
Yeats might get the girl, but the question remains whether the girl would be worth
getting were she available within a younger man’s economy. It is the redundancy
of Yeats’s longing, its political and economic obsolescence, both out of temper
and out of time, which is key to the anti-political politics of the poem, indeed the

1
 ‘Throughout his life as a writer Yeats had abiding, and intensifying, political
interests and passions. It is misleading to make him an essentially non-political, on the
strength of certain disclaimers, refusals and ironies. The fact that General Ludendorff
carried out a number of tactical withdrawals did not necessarily make him a pacifist.’ Conor
Cruise O’Brien, ‘Passion and Cunning: An Essay on the Politics of W.B. Yeats’, In Excited
Reverie. Ed. A.N. Jeffares and K.G. Cross (London: Macmillan, 1965), 207–78: 209–10.
162 W.B. Yeats and World Literature

leveraging of a political ontology which we will come to understand in this chapter


as fanatical.2
In the final chapter of this book we shall continue to use the example of Yeats’s
modernist poetics to think about the place of poetry in a destitute age. What kind
of poetic subject, we will ask, survives into the age of late capitalist modernity,
and what kind of mood instantiates the poetic spirit once it is exiled from the
conceptual territories that gave it historical meaning? In particular we shall discern
the ways in which Yeats’s self-conscious embodiment of old age becomes a formal
and excessive gesture of complaint against modernity. Furthermore, there is an
affinity to be detected between Yeats’s intemperate senescence and the old age of
poetry itself. We will find in the term ‘fanaticism’ unexpected complexities which
will help us explore this affinity, and describe the often violent poetic moment
where the backward-looking and the contemporary collide.
The philosopher Luc Ferry, describing the aesthetic tradition which emerged
from the historical consciousness of nineteenth-century Europe, most specifically
from Hegel, points to the essential non-synchronicity of modern poetry:

Poetry is the art that leaves art behind to which aesthetics had aspired since its
beginnings; it is the art within which – at least in Hegel’s vision – sensibility has
erased itself to the point that it gives way to spirituality represented in subjective
consciousness.3

For Hegel, the moment of art’s apotheosis, when spirit was represented adequately
in sensuous forms, occurred in the classical Greek world. The inward, reflective
and more highly developed spirit of modernity, by contrast, calls for philosophy,
not art.4 Poetry, then, as the ‘art that leaves art behind’, is constitutionally late in
two senses: it is be-‘lated’ vis à vis other art forms as it persists unpunctually into
the non-artistic age of philosophical prose; and it belongs, in part, to the era of
‘late’ modernity. Poetry is modern insofar as it can accommodate the reflective
consciousness and aspire to philosophical thought, but poetry is also inveterately
old through its commitments to surface effects such as shape and sound, which

2
 Both Oedipus at Colonus and King Lear provided models for Yeats’s old age. In
1927 he produced a version of Sophocles’ play, an extract from which he then used to
conclude his poem ‘A Man Young and Old’ which includes the phlegmatic lines, ‘Endure
what life God gives and ask no longer span; / Cease to remember the delights of youth,
travel-wearied aged man’ (VP 459). In contrast, Lear’s ‘O How this mother swells up toward
my heart / Hysterica passio, down, thou climbing sorrow’ (2.2.246–7) reverberates in his
later poem ‘A Bronze Head’, as well as elsewhere, to indicate the possible birth (natio) that
comes with staring terrible ‘empty’ death in the face (VP 618). Lear is the prototype of what
we will come to call in this chapter, after Edward Said, ‘late style’. William Shakespeare,
King Lear. Ed. R.A. Foakes (London: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 1997), 241.
3
 Luc Ferry, Homo Aestheticus. Trans. Robert de Loaiza (Chicago; London: University
of Chicago Press, 1993), 141.
4
 Georg W.F. Hegel, Introductory Lectures on Aesthetics. Trans. Bernard Bosanquet
(London: Penguin Books, 1993), 76–97.
Fanatic Subjectivity in the Modern State 163

inevitably recall the sensuous in the midst of modern intellection. Although Hegel’s
genealogy of art relies on a classical conception of European space – his is perhaps
the paradigmatic example of a ‘world’ history of Europe – the anachronistic terms
in which he understands poetry remain strikingly analogous to the combined
ancientness and contemporaneity of non-European material circulating in the
modern world system. When life drawn from the deep well of a non-European
civilization is transfused into Europe by the world market, as per those projects
of modernist translation we considered in Chapter 3, then the structure of non-
synchronicity becomes apparent. This accords with my suggestion throughout
this book that modernism indicates an important re-encounter with the poetic due
to the disruption of European world history and the prose of its philosophical
epistemological accomplishments.
Though it was late in Yeats’s own life when he read Hegel, and his engagement
with the philosopher when it arrived often seemed cursory, there is an important
sense in which many of his major formal preoccupations demonstrated a perverse
accommodation of Hegel’s thought.5 After all, Yeats, as a poet, is constitutionally
‘late’. He is one of the self-designating ‘last romantics’, the perennial old man
who unlike other romantics preferred not to dwell on his childhood; he is also,
as we have seen, the conspicuously belated legacy-bearer of the Dublin Rising in
1916: lateness, being late, being an old man persisting into a new age are the major
devices of the Yeatsian poetic.6 And, moreover, it is within Yeats’s primary image
of late decline – ‘this caricature, / Decrepit age […]’ – that we find, unexpectedly,
his most vigorous and modernist tropes (VP 409). I would like to re-examine
this dialectical enigma where the old and the new coincide in order to establish a
nomenclature for describing the historical and geopolitical reflection it implies.
For the terms of this chapter there is a further important relation to be discerned
between Hegel and Yeats. As we shall see, Yeats used the terms ‘fanatic’ and
‘fanaticism’ in a variety of contexts. ‘Think what the people have made of the
political thought of the eighteenth century, and now we must offer them a new
fanaticism’ he wrote in his Autobiographies, highlighting the ultra modernity of
his ‘new’ vision at the same time as its obdurately anti-modern perspective: the
politics of the modern state were dismal as far as Yeats was concerned (Au 542).
What is most striking though, is how the terminology of ‘new fanaticism’ connects

5
 See, for example, David Dwan, ‘That Ancient Sect: Yeats, Hegel, and the Possibility
of Epic in Ireland’, Irish Studies Review 12.2 (2004): 201–10. Dwan identifies Hegelian co-
ordinates within Yeats’s 1893 lecture, ‘Nationality and Literature’ which was delivered well
before the poet demonstrated any conscious knowledge of Hegel’s work.
6
 In ‘Coole Park and Ballylee, 1931’ Yeats famously writes, ‘We were the last romantics
– chose for theme / Traditional sanctity and loveliness’ (V 491). In his Autobiographies he
gives himself, and his reader, the following advice: ‘“When you grow up, never talk as
grown-up people do of the happiness of childhood.”’ Yeats, Autobiographies. Ed. William
H. O’Donnell and Douglas N. Archibald (New York: Scribner, 1999), 42. ‘Easter 1916’ is
a poem which dramatises the poet making sense of an event which had already, without his
knowledge, taken place (V 391–4).
164 W.B. Yeats and World Literature

to the predicament of modern poetry by being both new and old at the same time.
For Hegel the fanatic embodies a dereliction of modernity. In his Lectures on the
Philosophy of World History, he defines the fanatic as a subject who is passionately
exhausted by his identification with religious content beyond the dialectical
mediations of world history.7 And in the Phenomenology of Spirit the satisfactions
of fanaticism are described as equivalent to full but meaningless sensations, and
a work of terror as having ‘no more significance than cutting off the head of a
cabbage or swallowing a mouth full of water’.8 But for Yeats this exemption of the
fanatic subject from meaningful history must prove unsatisfactory, both because
the fanatic’s non-modern subjectivity shadows the modern poet’s recollection of
pre-modern art and because the imposition of a ‘new fanaticism’ expresses in an
impersonal, historical register those traditional poetic virtues of enthusiasm or
inspiration which in the modern globalised state are too easily condescended to.
This is to say, for Yeats, the very word ‘fanatic’ rearms the poet by re-theorising
his anachronistic being which Hegel’s philosophical state is wont to overlook.
In one of Yeats’s most direct commentaries on Hegel he offers the following
comment, though confining it to a footnote:

Hegel’s dialectic is, I am persuaded, false, and its falsehood has led to the rancid
ill-temper of the typical Communist and his incitements or condonations of
murder. When the spring vegetables are over they have not been refuted, nor
have they suffered in honour or reputation. Hegel in his more popular writings
seems to misrepresent his own thought. Mind cannot be the ultimate reality,
seeing that in his Logic both mind and matter have their ground in spirit. (Ex
429–30)9

At the very least this reveals an interesting ambivalence towards Hegelian


dialectic, in which Yeats is at once sympathetic to Hegel’s historical project yet
keen to save the anachronistic matter of history – ‘the spring vegetables’ – from
the logic of Hegelian teleology. Doubtless, ‘the spring vegetables’ are the stuff of
poetic elegy; yet their future potential should not be discarded: after all, although
they are ‘over’ they have not been refuted. The old, that which is over, and which
yet persists imaginatively alongside the logical progression of (European) world

7
 Fanaticism, for Hegel, amounts to a religious passion which refuses to apprehend
itself as an ‘immanent principle [which] determines and activates itself within the state’.
It is a passion unchecked by the objective spirit of world-history. Against the fanatic,
whose passion is subjective and particular, Hegel posits the hero; the hero is also a violent,
passionate man, but one who contributes to the inner development of the world-spirit:
‘The great individuals of world history […] know what is necessary and timely, and have
an inner vision of what it is.’ Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of World History. Ed.
Johannes Hoffmeister, trans. H.B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984),
108, 82–3.
8
 Georg W.F. Hegel, Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. Trans. A.V. Miller (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1979), 360.
9
 W.B. Yeats, On the Boiler (Dublin: The Cuala Press, 1939), 22n.
Fanatic Subjectivity in the Modern State 165

history, is also capable of intervening poetically in the fabric of the modern world.
We shall see how the fanatic and the poet share, for Yeats, this combined quality
of persistence and possibility. If, in Hegel’s view, the fanatic is rightfully displaced
by the world historical hero (Alexander the Great, Caesar, Napoleon) who lives
and dies on the historical state’s time, which is to say at ‘the right time’; in Yeats’s,
it is ultimately the fanatic’s un-timeliness which makes him heroic. Napoleon, he
writes, ‘was never of his own time, as the naturalistic writers and painters bid all
may be, but had some Roman emperor’s image in his head and some Condottiere’s
blood in his heart’ (Au 152).
In order to read the function of poetry’s formal anachronism in Yeats’s work, its
combined ancientness and newness, I propose to connect Yeats’s ‘new fanaticism’
and his ‘late style’ – the second term, one I have borrowed from Edward Said to
describe the preposterous self-consciousness of the poet’s old age.10 There are two
major aspects to this argument: first, that Yeats’s repeated use of violence as a
poetic device, be that inter-generational murder, hunger strike, political protest or
forms of severe critique, is not simply the cathartic exaggeration of a malcontent,
but the basis of a dialectical imagination indicating a movement of heightened
historical self-consciousness. Second, that this ‘new fanaticism’ expresses the
predicament of modern poetry as it finds itself, according to Hegel’s influential
genealogy of the modern, stranded in the discrepant time/space between art and
philosophy, between the ancient world of sensuous forms and the transmissions
of the modern world state. I argue that poetic non-synchronicity or disjointedness
as it occurs in Yeats’s work, itself situated between the modes of Victorian neo-
romanticism and twentieth-century modernism, frames an exemplary mode of
historical thinking in and of the modern world.

‘Late Style’

In his final book, On Late Style: Music and Literature Against the Grain, Edward
Said resurrects a neat phrase of Thomas Hardy’s, ‘age masquerading as juvenility’,
to describe the paradox of modernism: ‘not so much a movement of the new as
a movement of age and ending’.11 ‘Late style’, for Said, is a particular quality of
lateness which ‘involves a nonharmonious, nonserene tension and above all, a sort
of deliberately unproductive productiveness, going against’.12 It is odd that Said
does not mention Yeats. Not only does much of Yeats’s work conform to Said’s
description of what late style is – unreconciled; refusing to abdicate its rights as
art in favour of reality – it also seems able to reflect on its problematic modernity.
Underlying Said’s conjugation of senility and critical negativity is Theodor

10
 Edward W. Said, On Late Style: Music and Literature Against the Grain (London:
Bloomsbury, 2006).
11
 Said, On Late Style, 135.
12
 Said, On Late Style, 6.
166 W.B. Yeats and World Literature

Adorno’s critique of the totally administered society.13 Perhaps it is because


Adorno and Yeats were thought unlikely bedfellows that Yeats is disregarded. And
yet, if Adorno and Yeats were ever to be read together it is on the question of style
that it makes most sense to do so, and in particular on the style of their disdain for
the administration of modern politics. This is from Yeats’s journal in 1908:

Last night there was a debate on a political question at the Arts Club. I was for
a moment inclined to use arguments merely to answer something said by one
speaker or the other. In pursuit of the mask I resolved to say only fanciful and
personal things, and so to escape out of mere combat. I did so, and I noticed that
all the arguments which had occurred to me earlier were said by somebody or
other. Logic is a machine; one can leave it to itself, and unhelped it will force
those present to exhaust the subject. The fool is as likely as the sage to speak
the appropriate answer to any assertion. If an argument is forgotten, somebody
will go home miserable. You throw your money on the table, and you receive so
much change. Style, personality, (deliberately adopted and therefore a mask), is
the only escape from all the heat of the bargaining, from all but the sight of the
money changers. (M 138–9)

Yeats detects the economy which allows liberal political debate to take place in the
form of exchanging ‘appropriate’ questions and answers. Arguments are forms of
capital and people who invest them are money changers. This is close to the kind
of economic rubric Ezra Pound would go on to use in the 1930s, but it also coheres
with Adorno’s critiques of the state of late capitalism. If logic is an automatic and
self-valorising machine – a machine that claims it is more natural than a machine
– then it requires a species of what Adorno and Said term catastrophic thinking to
reveal itself to itself. This is the function of the unreconciled poet who by reflecting
on his redundancy within the system suggests the redundancy of the system itself.
We are speaking, however, not of catastrophe tout court, but of a catastrophic
style. Yeats’s commitment to the ‘personal and fanciful’ becomes a means of
deliberating impersonally against, but also within, the dominant logical paradigm.
Style is dialectical insofar as it works from within extant forms of exchange, rather
than by simply transcending them. Significantly, Yeats highlights the aspect of
amusement and even formal delight this requires. Each time the artist expresses
his dissatisfaction with the political and economic administrations of modern life,
as well as being a substantive criticism it is a formal accomplishment. Indeed, it
has to be in order to overcome the inevitable moment of incorporation when the
criticism is engaged within the political economy it hopes to escape or destroy.
It is at this moment that the formal duplicity of style is most powerful: when the
jaded, backward-looking, curmudgeonly artist, who might be said to hate modern

13
 Theodor Adorno, Essays on Music. Ed. Richard Leppert with new trans. by Susan
H. Gillespie (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). Said makes extensive use
of Adorno’s discussions of dissociation and fracture in Essays on Music, particularly the
legacy of the ‘old’ Beethoven in the ‘new’ works of Alban Berg and Arthur Schoenberg. ‘In
the history of art, late works are the catastrophes’ (567).
Fanatic Subjectivity in the Modern State 167

life, combines with his aspect of formal vitality – his projection of personality, his
adoption of the mask – in order to contest the terms of contradiction between the
old and the new. If this moment is to be truly dialectical, rather than simply logical,
then it must not present its contradiction as that between two substantive positions
taken up with regard to the same object, but rather as a contradiction between the
substance of a position and the form of its enunciation. In this light, the dialectical
moment is also always a poetic movement insofar as it is a formal re-articulation
of a substantive theme.
But why then should we describe this dialectical moment – which is also an
escape from the heat of bargaining in political opinions – as fanatical? When Yeats
writes ‘Think what the people have made of the political thought of the eighteenth
century, and now we must offer them a new fanaticism’ he is, as usual, scathing
against the bourgeois contractarian philosophies of the Enlightenment, especially
Locke’s, which in his view bequeathed the anomie of the modern political state (Au
542). But as early as 1913, the year of the Dublin Lockout and of Yeats’s rancorous
elegy ‘September 1913’, he was accepting the power and the paradoxical right to
be fanatical:

I do not complain of Dublin’s capacity for fanaticism whether in priest or layman,


for you cannot have strong feeling without that capacity, but neither those who
directed the police nor the editors of our newspapers can plea fanaticism. They
are supposed to watch over our civil liberties. (UP1 406)

Yeats’s sanctioning of the fanaticism of the priest or layman, in what is effectively


a labour dispute, significantly complicates any notion we may have that Yeatsian
fanaticism could only ever signal the hieratic intervention of saving the aristocratic
subject from modern history. Here modernity is split between the fanatical mob
and the police and newspaper editors. It is these latter, supposed to watch over our
civil liberties, who are hopeless in Yeats’s view for being constitutionally exiled
from strong feeling, as well, it seems, as from a true capacity to understand the
force or movement of history. In his 1931 poem ‘Remorse for Intemperate Speech’
the Yeatsian persona admits his own native fanaticism, aligning it to Ireland, the
ancient nation standing against the modern liberal state: ‘Out of Ireland have we
come. / Great hatred, little room, / Maimed us at the start. / I carry from my mother’s
womb / A fanatic heart’, adding the note that he pronounced the word fanatic ‘in
the older and more Irish way so the last line of each stanza contains but two beats’
(VP 506). Here the Irish accent is doubly aligned, with prosody and historical
force. And in his great retrospective poem ‘The Circus Animals’ Desertion’, it
is his lover Maud Gonne’s fanaticism which both disturbs him and brings forth
an intoxicating dream: ‘I thought my dear must her own soul destroy, / So did
fanaticism and hate enslave it, / And this brought forth a dream and soon enough /
This dream itself had all my thought and love’ (VP 630). Although there seem to
be logical contradictions here in the different ways Yeats is using his root term
‘fanatic’, there is, I argue, a consistency of purpose with respect to his signalling
of the movement from modern politics to poetry. Although fanaticism is a term
168 W.B. Yeats and World Literature

we usually associate with politics, it is also in Yeats’s work always a reference to


how the poetic values of passion, inspiration, enthusiasm, and especially madness,
continue to reconfigure the political.

A Genealogy of Fanaticism

Alberto Toscano’s instructive study of ‘fanaticism’ reminds us just how dialectical


the term is. Doubtless in recent times there has been a pronounced tendency in
western societies to reduce fanaticism to a terroristic method of warfare practiced
by religious factions from ‘outside’ the secular polis, whose theological beliefs
permit, or even encourage, a form of human sacrifice. But this conveniently
ignores the role fanaticism has had to play within the society that is now sometimes
caricatured as being ‘under attack’ from extremists, and the importance of religious
anti-humanism (or non-humanism) to modern secular political formations. In an
attempt to connect this historical complexity to the complexity of Yeats’s ‘fanatic
heart’ I shall briefly résumé three significant moments emerging from Toscano’s
intellectual history of fanaticism.
The first is the classical heritage of Platonic thymos or spiritedness, an
ambivalent form of non-rational, quasi-religious motivation which indicates self-
sacrifice, idealism and courage, but also, unavoidably according to Plato, rage,
indignation and self-regard.14 Plato, we recall, exiled the poet from the city state
not for his rages but for the untrustworthiness of his representations. Thymos has
remained a necessary, if difficult, virtue of civility ever since, identified under
the rubric of passion or enthusiasm. As Toscano puts it: ‘there is the widespread
conviction, voiced by Rousseau, Kant and Emerson among others, that any true
human achievement, any historical act, requires, if not fanaticism proper, then at
least its nobler cousin, enthusiasm.’15
The historical possibilities for distinguishing ‘fanaticism proper’ from mere
‘enthusiasm’ become more remote, however, when we consider the second
significant moment in our genealogy: namely, that moment after the French
Revolution (in the wake of Robespierre and the Terror) when fanaticism begins
to be identified not only with non-rational agency but with the agency of reason
itself. Toscano defines the difference between the pre- and post-revolutionary
Enlightenment thus: ‘While the former treats philosophy as the nemesis of
fanaticism [as ordinarily understood this brand of fanaticism was associated
with a religious worldview], the latter views fanaticism as a potentiality inherent
to reason, and even regards political enthusiasm as inextricable from a rational
or universalising politics.’16 Of course one of Yeats’s most significant tutelary
presences, the ‘Irishman’ Edmund Burke, is at the forefront of this modern

14
 Alberto Toscano, Fanaticism (London: Verso, 2010), 32.
15
 Toscano, Fanaticism, xx.
16
 Toscano, Fanaticism, xviii.
Fanatic Subjectivity in the Modern State 169

identification of fanaticism within the fabric of philosophical rationality and the


rationalised state. In one of his post-Revolution letters Burke writes:

These philosophers are fanaticks; independent of any interest, which if it


operated alone would make them much more tractable, they are carried with
such an headlong rage towards ever desperate trial that they would sacrifice
the whole human race to the slightest of their experiments […] nothing can be
conceived more hard than the heart of a thorough-bred metaphysician.17

The historical importance of Burke’s Reflections resides in how very general his
critique becomes. He cannot simply belittle the Revolution or show that it was
aberrant; so instead he essentialises it by attributing its excesses to a menacing
theoretical strain in modern life. The French Revolution was a result of a fanatical
humanism: a humanism become anti-human.
The third – and we might say dialectical – moment in this history of fanaticism
concerns the non-synchronicity of modernity in the wake of the Enlightenment.
Once the philosophical rationality of the Enlightenment is seen to safeguard its
own economic and political interests (Enlightenment reason became instrumental
reason or ideology) then fanaticism becomes defined as that which does not fit
– is non-synchronous to – the ideals of secular progress. On the one hand this
consolidation of Enlightenment-as-ideology assuages the Burkean fear that theory
might fanatically outstrip human interests, since all knowledge has been returned
to the measurable politics of a particular faction. However, on the other, Burke has
taught us to be distrustful of this modern state on the grounds that its constitution
is fanatic; and no matter how it may seem to organise or merely referee different
economic and political interests its utopian neutrality must always henceforth be
suspect.
Therefore, although national identification may be deemed fanatical from the
perspective of the modern state, as may be an ancient religion from the perspective
of secular liberalism, the enthusiasms of pre-state nationalism (as in early
twentieth-century Ireland) cannot remain negatively defined as non-modern or
purely exterior to modernity. The intervention of anachronistic worldviews within
the modern world economy (worldviews which have a different temporal register
to that of the development of the modern state) introduces a dialectic movement
which is, in effect, a dialectic between two fanatical formations: that of tribalism
or religion (beyond bourgeois humanism) and that of modern secular politics (the
theoretical state). Toscano suggests that this structure offers a new reflection upon
the fundamental linkage between the chiliastic or utopian thinking of religion
and the systemic utopian origins of modern politics which are covered over by
liberal and pragmatic ideologies. Here, he owes a significant debt to Ernst Bloch’s

17
 Edmund Burke, ‘A Letter to a Noble Lord’, Further Reflections on the Revolution in
France. Ed. Daniel E. Ritchie (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1992), 314. Quoted in Toscano,
Fanaticism, xiv.
170 W.B. Yeats and World Literature

seminal essay ‘Nonsynchronism and the obligation to its Dialectics’.18 In this


essay, first published in 1932, Bloch argues that in order for dialectic materialism
to truly distinguish itself from the Hegelian dialectic it must resist the temptation
to sublate religions and traditions within the state of universal theory. Indeed,
if Hegel’s project was to make religion (Christianity) theoretical in the spirit of
the modern state, then the Marxist imperative to return theory to praxis might
well demand a renewed appreciation for the non-rationalised and theoretically
un-legitimated social practices of religion. According to Bloch, the religious, the
traditional, and the non-rational cannot be opposed to revolutionary modernity,
nor merely indexed as socially and economically immature, but must be explored
for their revolutionary potential. His, and Toscano’s, historical example is the
peasant war in sixteenth-century Germany. The theological impetus behind this
revolution is not to be discarded by the modern historian, rather it is to be read by
the strength of its practice and its utopian imaginary, as a ‘potentially revolutionary
anachronism’.19 In this way fanaticism from outside the modern polis (the nation
against the state; religion against the secular, the economically underdeveloped
against the economically developed) can be endowed with a reflective character
operating within the polis, where peripheral or non-synchronous practices operate
to uncover the obscured origins of the modern state (whose modernity has been
secured by the tenets of liberal economics). In other words, as a force of non-
synchronism, fanaticism has the power to reawaken the modern state to the
availability of utopian ideas which exceed the mere calculation of economic self-
interest, as well as the power to bring the state into a conscious relation with its
own constituting violence.
I have set out these co-ordinates in order to distinguish this latter quality of
non-synchronicity in Yeats’s poetry. Usually, the poet’s talent for conjuring the
attractions of un-legitimated violence in his work has been read as an outgrowth
of his subjective politics – a reactionary position taken up in confrontation with
the modern state. But I would like to consider how Yeats’s political self-interest
transforms itself into a fanatic indifference to the terms of political debate.
Specifically, we shall follow how the demands of poetic style and historical dialectic,
which are always in excess of the demands of the present political economy, are
met only when formalism and materialism coincide: in other words, when the
obstinacy of anachronistic material, most controversially Yeats’s identification
with a feudal land-owning class but also with geographically displaced ancient
traditions, provokes a new appreciation for general historical forms in the present.
This understanding of fanaticism defines the poetic movement when the backward-
looking and the contemporary collide.

18
 Ernst Bloch, ‘Nonsynchronism and the Obligation to its Dialectics’ (trans. M. Ritter
from Erbschaft dieser Zeit (1932)), New German Criticism 11 (1977): 22–38.
19
 Writing in the 1930s, Bloch is wary of Hitler’s reactionary use of ‘anachronisms’
yet still holds out for the possibility that Germany’s historical belatedness as a European
nation state vis à vis England and France contains genuine revolutionary potential. Bloch,
‘Nonsynchronism’, 31.
Fanatic Subjectivity in the Modern State 171

‘To-morrow’s Revolution’

The supernatural forces derived from the worlds of the occult and the Irish folk,
the political sacraments of Irish nationalism, and the theological perspective on
history offered in ‘Per Amica Silentia Lunae’ and A Vision are all immediately
suggestive of how the dilemmas of fanaticism might infiltrate Yeats’s poetry.
However, in order to discern the peculiar quality of ‘Yeats the fanatic’, in line with
Toscano’s dialectical reading outlined above and the demands of ‘late style’, it is
perhaps most useful to examine an enigmatic reflection from his late pamphlet, On
the Boiler (1939). This is probably the most controversial text in the oeuvre and the
one most often characterised by critics as the container for the worst of the poet’s
eugenicist and anti-democratic effluvia. Yet, for all of its fascistic resonances,
critical censure is hardly adequate for reflecting upon what was, and continues
to be, at stake in its provocations, namely the relation between biological health,
politics and poetry in the construction of the modern cultural subject. Nor, I think,
should we choose to ignore the self-consciousness of its style.
In the opening section Yeats tells us that as a child wandering the Sligo quays
he had always wanted to hear ‘a mad ship’s carpenter […] read the Scriptures
and denounce his neighbours’ from atop an old red boiler. ‘I wanted to go and
hear him for the boiler’s sake, but nobody encouraged me’ (Ex 407, emphasis
mine). Yeats’s attraction is not for the sacred content of the religious fanatic’s
scripture but for the performance of his distemper. The boiler is described as a
compelling device of exaggeration; of late style we might say: it was ‘very big,
very high, the top far out of reach and all red rust’. Only as an old man can Yeats
finally do without the encouragement he previously lacked and take his place upon
the boiler’s platform. ‘Why should not old men be mad?’ he asks, in the poem
which ends this introductory section, before listing objects apparently worthy of
his wrath: ‘a drunken journalist; / A girl that knew all Dante once / live to bear
children to a dunce; / A Helen of social welfare dream / Climb on a wagonette
to scream’ (Ex 407–8). We could interpret this torrent as a sincere and insulting
political gripe against social welfare and the modern values of the young, but to
do so would ignore the exaggerated performance of Yeats’s complaint and the
delight he takes in making it. As becomes even clearer later on in the pamphlet,
generational conflict cannot do without the obliquity of the mask.
In the third section of On the Boiler, entitled ‘To-morrow’s Revolution’, Yeats
recounts another inter-generational dispute, this time with his father. The topic
concerns the poet’s preference for the social economics of John Ruskin’s Unto
This Last over the liberal utilitarianism of John Stuart Mill. He writes:

But it was not only with my father that I quarrelled, nor were economics the
only theme. There was no dominant opinion I could accept. Then finding out
that I (having no clear case – my opponent’s case had been clarifying itself for
centuries) had become both boor and bore I invented a patter allowing myself an
easy man’s insincerity, and for honesty’s sake a little malice, and now it seems
that I can talk nothing else. But I think I have succeeded, and that none of my
friends know that I am a fanatic. (Ex 417)
172 W.B. Yeats and World Literature

There is a subtlety here worth pondering, not least because it is the peculiar subtlety
of a self-styled fanatic. What are we to make of a fanatic who by measuring out
his malice and granting himself an easy insincerity manages to achieve a degree of
conviviality with his enemy? Does the fact that he is in touch with his enemy (that
he is a fanatic exercising tact) temper his fanaticism or only add to its menace? In
any case, a commonplace perception is being revised, for if we have imagined that
fanaticism signals a commitment to a sacred content over and above any particular
social form – an in-itself lying beneath the phenomenal world – Yeats spends the
first two and a half sentences here contradicting us. We are told that his fanaticism
engages more than one topic, that it exercises itself against every dominant opinion,
and, finally, that it articulates ‘no clear case’. So, instead of defining the content
of his fanatical passion, Yeats has preferred to describe it formally. Clearly, in the
first place, this is a form of dissent, from his father and from dominant opinion;
but its most significant accomplishment is its self-concealment. In other words it
is a form of dissent hidden within a form of consent. We are confronted with the
possibility that these friends of Yeats’s, who do not know he is a fanatic, are also
secretly his enemies. This is indeed perplexing, because although we might be
tempted to interpret this passage as a brief exposé of these friendships – they were
only ever apparent friendships which did not penetrate deeply enough to reveal
Yeats’s true fanatical nature – we are also invited to think that Yeats is defining the
very nature of friendship and true sociability according to the degree of ignorance
that preserves a fundamental enmity or fanatical dissent from the other.
John Stuart Mill was an appropriate touch paper for Yeats’s reflection here on
the politics of dissent – and friendship – since his On Liberty is a text which places
a firm emphasis on the value of contention. As Homi K. Bhabha has developed the
point in The Location of Culture, Mill’s vision of dissent becomes a valid means of
articulating the political evolution of the human mind, and therefore of stabilising
public space. If all dissension is usefully incorporated by the ‘organic’ political
body then we have ‘the ethic of tolerance in liberal ideology which has to imagine
opposition in order to contain it and demonstrate its enlightened relativism or
humanism’.20 Bhabha recommends therefore that we read Mill ‘against the grain’,
arguing that ‘politics can only become representative, a truly public discourse,
through a splitting in the signification of the subject of representation; through an
ambivalence at the point of the enunciation of a politics’.21
This ambivalence at the point of enunciation, connected to the birth and
partition of a ‘new’ post-colonial nation, helps us keep in mind Yeats’s sociable
fanaticism because it suggests that conventional politics has to undermine itself to
become truly effectual. The problem, theoretically for Bhabha as it was poetically
for Yeats, is that the liberal economy will ‘tolerate’ the political subject who has
an articulated position, no matter how oppositional or extreme that position is; his

20
 Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 35. It is, of course, significant that
Bhabha begins this seminal study by emphasising his own biographical belatedness.
21
 Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 36.
Fanatic Subjectivity in the Modern State 173

very articulation rendering him acceptable as a partner in the act of exchange. For
Yeats this problem was best exemplified through the economy of ‘opinion’:

Opinion […] is the enemy of the artist because it arms his uninspired moment
against his inspiration. What was once inspiration is systemised and is used by
the heavier part of the mind to strengthen itself against the finer […] may it not
be so with nations? (M 170)

The apparently open and available exchange of standard opinion conceals a


powerful suppressive agency which manifests itself in the form of ‘reasonable’
generalisation. Within this economy the perceived irrationality of the extremist
or ‘inspired’ political subject will be viewed as a problem of proportionality – the
extremist asks too much for his money – and therefore remain defined within
the field of the inter-subjective contract. It follows that violence too will be
accounted for, through an economic lens, as an issue of property: the subject who
commits violence is creating a deficit, his im-propriety simplistically translated
as a debt to society. Yeats’s resistance to the currency of political opinion and
dissent, including permitting himself counterfeit agreements (friends) and parodic
disagreements (enemies), introduces an important and subversive sub-clause to
this economic logic, however: the possibility of a form that cannot be rationalised
or measured by degree.
The complicated politesse at work in Yeats’s claim that none of his friends
know that he is a fanatic has two distinctive characteristics. First of all, Yeats, so
often read as an inheritor of Burke’s anti-revolutionary traditionalism, is offering
himself as an essentially non-Burkean subject. This should hardly surprise us,
especially in a pamphlet concerned with the technologies of breeding or eugenics.
Where the Burkean cultivation of tradition is concerned to downplay and conceal
the violence intrinsic to any organic community or consensus, Yeats continually
makes this violence conspicuous. We see this in a later section of On the Boiler
where with Platonic admonishment he claims that ‘Armament comes next to
education’: ‘If human violence is not embodied in our institutions the young will
not give them their affection, nor the young and old their loyalty’ (Ex 441). The
proximity of armament and education, along with the implicit belligerence which
runs through much of Yeats’s late work, serves as a reminder to the reader that the
formation of a collective subjectivity (here a national aristocracy) relies upon a
violent assertion of identity and therefore contains a volatility even in relation to
its most cohesive expressions of value such as education and friendship.
The second characteristic of Yeats’s sociable fanaticism is that it is not enough
to be a dissenting subject. The dissenting subject, who does not accept dominant
opinion, is, for Yeats, ineffectual. This is also to say that Yeats’s fanaticism is more
than a violent expression of his subjectivity. He explores this idea further in the
sentence which follows on from the passage already quoted:

My reader may say that it was all natural, that every generation is against its
predecessor, but that conflict is superficial, an exaltation of the individual life
174 W.B. Yeats and World Literature

that had little importance before modern journalism; that other war, where
opposites die each other’s life, live each other’s death, is a slow moving thing.
(Ex 417)

Once again we are confronted with an enigmatic phrase; but it is clear at least
that the ‘superficial’ conflict between generations – between Yeats and the young
girl who bore ‘children to a dunce’ or between Yeats and his father – does not
adequately capture the poet’s fanaticism. Yeats is keen to point out, as well as
to move beyond, the politics of ressentiment. Ressentiment is the familiar knot
of Nietzschean critique, exposed by Zarathustra and formulated most exactly in
the first essay of On The Genealogy of Morals, in which religious (Christian) and
philosophical (Platonic) values are read according to a history of ascetic living or
heroic poverty, and implicated in an unacknowledged desire for revenge against
the world.22 The critic of modern nihilism is exemplarily nihilistic, Nietzsche
suggests, if only because he complacently demands to be recognised by those
he condemns. His assertion of value, in a world which supposedly lacks value
but contains plenty of clamouring and competing subjects, fails to attain any new
perspective because he accepts without question the economy of exchange with his
competitors – his very isolation being nothing other than an investment which he
envisages being profitably redeemed in the form of heroic apotheosis. This point is
conceded by Yeats when he regrets that the assertion of his will against his father,
and against the economic liberalism of Mill, only conforms to the journalistic
idea of individualism he despairs of and accuses Mill of promulgating. To let go
of ressentiment he must forego the pleasures of asserting himself as a critical and
competitive subject.
On the one side, then, Yeats is too conspicuous as a modern subject –
technological, militant and egotistical – to remain captivated in the myth of a pre-
modern organic tradition. On the other side his critical distemper belies a desire to
move beyond the subjectivity of modern ressentiment. These two points together
describe a kind of pincer movement. At the centre, waiting to be picked up, is the
nature of his fanaticism. Such is Yeats’s fanaticism in abstract; but we can further
discern how it emerges within his poetic practice by turning to the example of the
refrain from ‘Three Songs to the Same Tune’ (1933). These songs were originally
written in the autumn of 1933 for the Blueshirts movement in Ireland, a para-
fascist National Guard. If this should be considered in line with the gravest charge
against Yeats’s political subjectivity – namely, that he was a fascist – it is also
worth recalling that he soon disavowed the songs’ political content, preferring

22
 Ressentiment is linked in this essay to the priestly idea and a species of strategic
cleverness, echoing Hegel’s philosophical organisation of history, especially ‘the cunning
of reason’ which is able to distinguish the timely hero from the untimely fanatic. Friedrich
Nietzsche, ‘“Good and Evil”, “Good and Bad”’, On The Genealogy of Morals, 460–92: 475.
Nietzsche’s untimely rehabilitation of the noble, aristocratic, spontaneous and ‘the good’
within the dominant political culture of ressentiment is reprised in Yeats’s rehabilitation of
the fanatic.
Fanatic Subjectivity in the Modern State 175

them to be read as formal exercises instead.23 Here Yeats assigns the term ‘fanatic’
to a non-specific mob who would choose to revenge themselves against the
‘Grandfather’, a character endowed with the grandeur of the fallen Irish leader,
Charles Stuart Parnell.

Those fanatics all that we do would undo;


Down the fanatic, down the clown;
Down, down, hammer them down,
Down to the tune of O’Donnell Abu. (VP 545)

Doubtless this represents a late example of Yeats’s impatience with the nihilism
of modern society, in particular the degeneration, as he sees it, of modern Ireland
in the wake of Parnell’s death; yet there is something intriguing and contradictory
in the fact of denouncing the fanaticism of the mob in the demotic style of a
drinking song (notwithstanding the additional fact that the theme of the song is the
aristocratic heroism of the old Irish Chieftains). We can say with some confidence
that the line ‘Down, down, hammer them down’ does not assert any liberal or
pacific value as a contrast to the mob’s fanatical violence: formally at least, Yeats
is meeting fanaticism with his own fanaticism. What’s more, this aspect of formal
complicity with ‘the enemy’ is not adventitious. It oversees the development
of Yeats’s lyrical style from at least the time of his 1910 collection The Green
Helmet when his moods of poetic and political disillusionment with modern life
become more pronounced. Repeatedly, the fault which he finds with the rabble and
merchant class, mainly their ‘obscure spite’ and philistinism, is fully met by his
own spiteful rejoinders, such that we can say he shares his register and mediation
with the object of his disdain.24 Instead of attempting to elide contemporary
degeneration by writing pastoral verse or straightforward elegies, by which he
might indicate inward reconciliation and effortless (aristocratic) superiority over
modern life, Yeats chooses mimicry as his preferred mode, writing in an agitated,
journalistic and often political manner, which frequently condescends to the level
of doggerel and attaches clumsy mythic figures to everyday complaints.
We can see a similar productive failure to achieve poetic distinction from
the crude material of everyday life in his 1910 poem ‘The Fascination of What’s
Difficult’. Here the poet ostensibly resents being distracted from the elevated
pursuit of verse by ‘Theatre business, management of men’ and the debased
comedy of ‘knaves and dolts’. But if these inhibiting conditions are the objects of
the poet’s contempt, they also become a fit subject for poetry. The mythic ‘colt’
Pegasus, symbol of poetic immortality, ‘ails’ because of worldly entanglements;
yet when the poet resolves to let him go free (‘I’ll find the stable and pull out

23
 Foster, The Arch-Poet, 477–8.
24
 I have in mind such lyrics as ‘To a wealthy man who promised a second
subscription to the Dublin municipal gallery if it were proved the people wanted pictures’
and ‘Paudeen’, both originally published in pamphlet form, under the title Poems Written in
Discouragement (Dublin: Cuala Press, 1913).
176 W.B. Yeats and World Literature

the bolt’) his verse remains disappointingly restricted. Indeed, we might surmise
the idiomatic wisdom that the horse has already bolted when the poet decides to
free him, since the heroic declaration only serves to consolidate the obtuse rhyme
scheme – ‘colt’, ‘jolt’, ‘dolt’, ‘bolt’ – and further imprison the poetic spirit by the
labour of squaring-off lines. As a poem essentially about the absence of poetry –
about writer’s block – it offers a reflection upon the poet’s own writing practice
and more generally upon the ‘difficulty’ of accomplishing poetic freedom. In
line with his consistent preoccupation with the ‘toil’ of artistic production, Yeats
permits his reader to imagine how poetic accomplishment can never be extracted
from the antagonisms of the ‘day’s war’ (VP 260).
We can discern in this lyric, and in others of a similar style, that by introducing
social criticism into his verse the poet also compromises lyrical autonomy, and,
in so doing, underscores the fanatic’s inevitable complicity with those he would
denounce. Indeed, Yeats makes a series of stylistic choices, from his middle
period on, which run contrary to Adorno’s well-known claim that the perfection
of lyric poetry ‘eschews the relation of self to society as an explicit theme’ but
‘allows this relation to crystallize involuntarily from within the poem’.25 Many of
Yeats’s lyrics come to seem voluntarily compromised, or deliberately written out
as adulterated failures. His funeral poem ‘September 1913’, for example, another
lyric explicitly concerned with the philistine materialism of modern Dublin, is
well described as a disfigured elegy insofar as it spells out the conditions of its
own impossibility. We cannot mourn the old romantic hero John O’Leary because
there is no-one left capable of mourning him: ‘Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone /
It’s with O’Leary in the grave’ (VP 289). In a later poem, ‘Nineteen Hundred
and Nineteen’, this same self-defeating logic is openly displayed. Michael Wood
describes this as a poem suffused with the philosophy of violence; indeed it is.26
It also represents, however, the formal paradox of being a critic of modern life:
‘Mock mockers after that / That would not lift a hand maybe / To help good, wise
or great / To bar that foul storm out, for we / Traffic in mockery’ (VP 432). The
message here seems to be that although we might like to defend the ‘good, wise
or great’ from the mockery of philistines, inevitably, in the course of our defence,
we resort to mockery ourselves: therefore, we ‘[t]raffic in mockery’. This is Yeats
reflecting that any subjective critique of modernity must enter modernity and
therefore become complicit with its general agitations. The totalising cynicism of
the marketplace cannot be opposed effectively by a belief in the unhistorical value
of the lyric; and the naïve lyric, which ‘eschews the relation of self to society’, is
always in any case a commodity ripe for market exchange.
Is the fact that Yeats so often formally contradicts his repudiation of degenerate
modern subjectivity due to the incontrovertible evidence that he is indeed a modern
subject? This is partially true of course, but there is also another, dialectical reason
which depends on the paradox that as his struggle for poetic value and aristocratic

25
 Theodore Adorno, ‘Lyric Poetry and Society’, The Adorno Reader. Ed. and trans.
Brian O’Connor (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2000), 211–29.
26
 Michael Wood, Yeats and Violence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).
Fanatic Subjectivity in the Modern State 177

distinction becomes conspicuous through its expression in treacherous forms


(journalistic fragments, individualist sentiments, vulgar refrain), he moves beyond
subjectivity, simplistically defined. Yeats’s formal alliances with his nihilistic
enemies indicate the fact that he is not actually in possession of the aristocratic
and poetic value he defends; and it is this lack (of possession) which liberates him
to pass into a state of fanatical subterfuge.
We can return to the same passage from ‘To-morrow’s Revolution’ in which
Yeats recounts his dispute with his father: ‘We who are opposites of our times’
writes Yeats, ‘should for the most part work at our art and for good manners’ sake
be silent’ (Ex 417). We might want to dispute his notion of ‘silence’ here, since
the poet was a notorious bavard, and still concede its implication. His fanaticism
is a strategy of fundamental silence, or at least of concealment amidst the diverse
forms of his expression. It is clearly also a renunciation of politics, where politics
is decisively bound to ressentiment as the identification of forms of expression
with the content of subjective demands. This renunciation enables us, finally, to
define the character of ‘Yeats the fanatic’ and discern the full heft of his politesse:
Yeats is not the subject who wants to win the argument against other subjects, but
rather the subject who is willing to repeal his very subjectivity and withdraw the
grounds for argumentation.

Hanging-on-to-Death

We are paradoxically accustomed to the outstanding spectacle of fanaticism, the


attack on the World Trade Centre in New York on September 11th, 2001 (‘9/11’)
being a recent example where the fanatical interpreted as entering the modern
state from the outside is given its punctual apotheosis. However, in this chapter
it has been my contention that we can find in Yeats’s late poetics a fanaticism
of non-synchronicity operating from within the modern state. I made the claim
above that fanaticism defines the poetic and dialectical movement when the
backward-looking and the contemporary collide. This definition can be added to
by considering the shards which emerge from this collision: the feeling of a past
tradition along with retrospective construction and manipulation of ‘tradition’
in the present; contemporary immediacy along with the loss of immediacy in
a bureaucratically administered and globalised society. Patrician old age is the
ultimate vessel for these contradictions in Yeats’s work and the means of their
formal articulation. Age is the state when the physical body becomes conspicuous,
and the sensuousness of childhood is regained – but now it is sensuousness at the
wrong or inappropriate time. In his collection The Tower, age has revealed the poet
to be an animal, both tragically (he is a ‘dying animal’) and comically (he has been
transformed Bottom-like into a figure of ridicule and shame): ‘This caricature, /
Decrepit age that has been tied to me / as to a dog’s tail’. Age renders the poet
variously ‘a tattered coat upon a stick’ or a ‘kind of old scarecrow’. It is also an
apparatus of formal exaggeration: the poet who ‘paces upon the battlements’ and
stares ‘upon foundations’ with patriarchal impersonality and ‘Excited, passionate,
178 W.B. Yeats and World Literature

fantastical / Imagination’ is yet a body of contracting significance – he is a knot of


anachronistic material persisting beyond his right time (VP 407, 409, 443).
I would like to conclude this chapter by considering Yeats’s attempt to dramatise
the non-synchronous and fanatical space of poetry between art and philosophy,
sensuous life and the modern state, in a play he revisited and revised several times
throughout his life, The King’s Threshold (1903–04, 1920–22, 1934). The play
opens with the ancient Irish poet Seanchan on hunger strike, lying on the steps
before King Guaire’s palace, his immobile form creating the physical horizon
within which all of the play’s subsequent debates will take place. The occasion for
Seanchan’s protest is the withdrawal of his ancient right to sit at the high table of
political power. The King excludes the poet on the grounds that a ‘mere man of
words’ lacks the ‘dignity’ of ‘Bishops, Soldiers, and makers of the Law’ (KT 531).
Significantly, in the earliest 1903 version of the play Yeats had allowed that
Seanchan’s protest – a hunger strike motif he borrowed from ancient bardic
literature – met with eventual success; in other words, Seanchan’s demand to
have the rights of poets recognised was granted, and the play concluded in comic
reconciliation (KT xxv–lv). As such the poet was deprived of his fanaticism.
However, revisiting the play in 1920 Yeats decided to let Seanchan die. His
revision was influenced no doubt by the contemporary death by hunger strike of
the republican Mayor of Cork City Terence MacSwiney, but it was also indicative
of a corresponding change in his poetic thinking. The reconciliation between poet
and King which had prevailed in earlier versions, although keeping faith with the
narrative conventions of Irish prehistory, simply did not work in the context of the
modern state. By implying that the King could eventually understand the poet,
such an ending underplayed the fanatical reticence of the poet’s physical protest.27
The revised 1920 version emphasised how the obstinacy of the poet persists
as fundamentally irreconcilable within the state of modern political opinions; and
in much the same way the poet’s language cannot be simply exchanged with the
language and legitimacies of state power. This discrepancy finds further expression
through the several administrators of the King’s sovereignty, principally the Lord
Chamberlain and the Mayor, whom we witness pathetically rehearsing a speech
in which he attempts to persuade Seanchan to abandon his protest (KT 536). The
poet remains unmoved, and prideful that his language, in contrast to that of the
administrators, is never reducible to a single message:

SEANCHAN. Well, if you are a poet,


Cry out that the King’s money would not buy,
Nor the high circle consecrate his head,
If poets had never christened gold. (KT 548)

27
 D.A. Binchey describes Druidic fasting in Medieval Ireland. Indeed the practice of
fasting or going on hunger strike on the doorstep of an enemy was long part of the tradition
of arbitration in Ireland, which Yeats would have been aware of. D.A. Binchey, ‘A Pre-
Christian Survival in Mediaeval Irish Hagiography’, Ireland in Early Mediaeval Europe.
Ed. D. Whitelock, R. McKitterick and D.N. Dumville (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1982), 165–78.
Fanatic Subjectivity in the Modern State 179

Words for the poet have a pre-semantic and flexible quality which the Chamberlain’s
or the Mayor’s legitimating speech cannot emulate, and Seanchan’s physical
protest expresses this same quality on stage. The irony seems exact: whilst the
poet, rooted to the spot and constrained by his finitude, experiences the full
flexibility of language as form, the Chamberlain and the Mayor – and by proxy
the King – though granted movement around the stage and the incorruptible body
of the state, are tied to fixed meanings and foreclosed ideas of reality. But it is
also more complicated than this oppositional model, considering that the poet’s
vitality which allows him to transcend the confines of political sovereignty
also underwrites that same politics: the gold which crowns and consecrates the
sovereign is economically available only according to the primitive élan of the
poet’s vocabulary.
Seanchan’s boast that poetry is not merely a negative freedom from politics
but the actual freedom to create a living politics allows us to interpret his fanatic
protest as a reflection of the excessive and utopic demand of modern politics itself.
Accordingly, there is a fatal contradiction at the heart of the King’s negotiating
position whereby the poet can be included within the political body only so long
as he renounces his demand to determine it. Underlying this contradiction is an
intuition, akin to Michel Foucault’s, that modernity is defined by a shift in the
formulation of the political state. For Foucault there is a structural move from
the classical territorial conception of sovereignty, which entails the power ‘to
take life or to let live’, to a modern, de-territorialised and biopolitical conception,
which entails the power ‘to make live and to let die’.28 With this second organising
principle, ‘to make live and to let die’, we are reminded of Seanchan’s claim
that poetry’s traditional powers were those of naming things (of making live)
and memorialising things (so they do not die). It follows from this that once the
modern state seeks to extend its object of governance to the very conditions of life,
it trespasses upon the work of the poet by expropriating for itself the generative
and memno-technic functions of poetry. Seanchan’s poetic powers are not only
suppressed by the state but also reused by the state against him.
We can see the structural complicity between Seanchan’s poetic vocation and
the modern operations of state power most starkly when the poet encounters two
‘cripples’ on the palace steps. He goads them in the following terms: ‘But why
were you born crooked? What bad poet did your mothers listen to / That you were
born so crooked?’ (KT 553). This is a familiar evocation of the poet’s shamanistic
powers over life: good poetry guarantees good birth. But the contemporary reader
will be sensitive at this point to the eugenicist implication of Seanchan’s conviction
that aesthetics and breeding are inextricable. Such sensitivity is instructive for
how it directs us to the broader inextricability between the poet and the state from
which he is outcast. Once generalised at the level of modern politics, poetic value
cast as guardianship over life is enfolded within eugenicist theories of governance
– the intervention of state power in matters of life and breeding. Hence, when

28
 Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 241.
180 W.B. Yeats and World Literature

Seanchan makes the case for the ancient rights of the poets we now inevitably
hear the overtones of modern state poetics; his shamanistic pronouncements are
out of synch with the reality of his destitution. That Seanchan fails to identify his
own unredeemable out-of-placeness with that of the cripples is in keeping with his
commitment to the poetic distinction he is no longer in possession of.
The most significant question arising from The King’s Threshold becomes:
when there is no exceptional place set aside for poetry in the modern state, and
no possibility of restitution or poetic justice, what then? Yeats’s answer is death.
When Seanchan finally dies, the exclamation of his ‘Youngest Pupil’ could be read
as a herald for twentieth-century existentialism:

Dead faces laugh!


The ancient right is gone, the new remains,
And that is death. (KT 562)

The right to die has replaced the right to live as the only remaining subversion of
modern state power. In this commitment to poetic finitude we have a distant relation
of Heidegger’s preferential reading of Hölderlin’s ‘standing firm’ over and against
Rilke’s ‘venturing forth’ into the boundless ‘open’. However, now, imagined in
the aftermath of modernism and in full cognizance of the state’s totalitarian hold
on life, poetic dwelling can only take the form of a fanatical protest. Seanchan’s
death cannot be conceived as conventionally tragic, in the sense of being the
result of a failed political reconciliation. There was never any possibility of
reconciliation once the modern state had rendered the poetic caste obsolete. I have
suggested that, through Seanchan, Yeats intended to depict MacSwiney’s death
in an English prison; but he did not do so without fundamentally transforming
the terms of its political expression. The claim against the state which contains
the demand for political restitution – of Seanchan against King Guaire, and
analogously of MacSwiney against England – becomes through its embodiment
on stage a discovery of poetic and existential style: ‘Dead faces laugh.’ Laughter
is the dramatic integrity of Seanchan’s protest, marking its opaque physicality
and gestural formalism on stage, and always in excess of any particular claim that
Seanchan makes. It is this persistent formalism in the wake of poetry’s impossible
demand for restitution or renewal within the modern state that registers the heroic
power of a late style.
What, finally, are we to make of the fanaticism of the hunger strike device
which so delighted Yeats in which theatrical formalism and the sensuous body
combine in the figure of an Irish poet hanging-on-to-death once his decision to die
has been made? If the hunger striker died straight away he would, one supposes,
be little more than a suicide, and would forfeit the power which resides in the
redundancy of his body once his mind has made its pact. Such power-through-
redundancy has an important structural affinity to old age which is also, in many
respects, a hanging-on-to-death. Indeed, it makes sense to ask the following
question in the context of our consideration of ‘late style’: when did Yeats decide
to become an old man? When did his old age begin? Was it as early as 1913 during
Fanatic Subjectivity in the Modern State 181

the lockout when he first accepted the fanaticism of the Dublin strikers? He would
only have been 48 years of age. Or perhaps it was earlier still in The Wanderings
of Oisin written in 1889 when the Fenian hero was toppled from his horse onto
the Christianised earth: ‘And my years three hundred fell on me, and I rose, and
walked on the earth, / A creeping old man, full of sleep, with the spittle on his
beard never dry’ (VP 60).
Yeats’s self-conscious old age is the time after the decision – now I am old
– which creates a fundamentally unpunctual state of being. Just as Seanchan’s
body becomes powerful by virtue of its powerlessness throughout the fanatic
persistence of the hunger strike, so it is with the physical distemper of old age
– the persistent lusts of an old man being its most striking emblem in Yeats’s
work. This zone of suspension between decision and death, the wasted body as
it persists, is both a determined consequence of the political subject’s will and an
exorbitant phenomenon. It is a prolonged act and a renewed act, in which the mind
from day to day reasserts its decision against the body, while paradoxically giving
the body its own articulation against the mind. In the course of a hunger strike the
body inevitably develops a formal and spectacular detachment from the political
content of the protest. Likewise, an old man’s physical decrepitude provides a
satiric frame for his political opinions on the decline of culture in the age of global
capitalism. It is this supplementation which signals the dialectical movement from
substance to form and carries with it a grotesque delight in the undetermined and
always wrong moment of presence. Like the laughter of the starving Seanchan,
old age is the theatrically inappropriate polyphony of petulance and experience,
sensuousness and desiccation, endlessly out of temper with the political tragedy
of modernity it is supposed to be enacting. Old age constitutes Yeats’s second
childhood: ‘that I may seem, though I die old, / a foolish passionate man’ (VP
553). But old age also projects an historical image, both abject and laughing, of
the anachronistic state of poetry in the modern world.
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Index

‘1900’ 1, 3−5, 7−9, 41; see also modernism Auden, W.H. 3−4, 7
authenticity 46−8, 50−52, 65, 78, 80n30, 83,
Act(s) of Union 45, 47, 79−80 88–90, 94, 100, 111, 121, 142, 146
metaphysical and poetic 141−2
Adorno, Theodor 166, 176 the ballad tradition 37−8, 46n39, 50, 71,
the aeroplane 28, 31, 116 81, 87n52, 100, 106, 157
the aesthetics of flight 27−33, 60−63 Barthes, Roland 68, 73
Agamben, Giorgio 9n15, 29, 103, 133−7, Baudelaire, Charles 35, 63, 113−17
159n33 Beckett, Samuel 2, 9, 34
aisling 37 Beiser, Fredrick 152
Albright, Daniel 135n7 ‘belatedness’ 170n18, 172n20; see also
American lecture tours 2–3, 53 Bloch, Ernst; untimeliness
Americanisation 9, 13−15, 54; see also Benjamin, Walter 70n11, 71, 134n5
‘de-territorialisation’ Bhabha, Homi K. 15, 158, 172
ancient tradition 6, 18, 45−51, 62, 69, 73, ‘bibliographic encoding’ 71−3; see also the
82, 90, 93, 102, 110−16, 120−25, book as material object
163, 165, 167, 169−70, 180 biopolitics 9; see also Agamben, Giorgio;
Anderson, Benedict 19, 51, 60 eugenics; Foucault, Michel
Anglo-Saxon 45, 61−2, 78, 124 Blake, William 32, 36, 78n27, 102, 140–42
the animal and animality 24, 42, 94, blank verse 107, 128
132−7, 143, 155−7, 177 Bloch, Ernst 169−70
and language 85−6 the Boer War 1−2
‘Anthologia Celtica’ 66−73 the book as material object 6, 20−23, 51,
the anthology as a question of modernist 56−7, 65−73, 75, 85, 92−7, 100;
form 19−20, 22, 24, 55−6, 65, see also anthology; textuality
70−72, 77, 88, 100; see also The Borges, Jorges Luis 96
Norton Anthology Bornstein, George 59, 70−2
anthropology, the authority of 38, 65, 75, The Boston Pilot 53, 98
98, 104 Bourgeois 5, 11, 13−14, 40, 49, 71,
Apter, Emily 103 131−2, 136, 158, 167−9; see also
Arabic 118−19 cosmopolitanism; (non-)European
the archive as poetic device 6, 10, 24, space
38−9, 51, 56, 75−7, 117 Bourse 4, 7
Armstrong, Tim 59, 77n24 bricolage 20, 68
Arnold, Matthew 62−3, 69, 78, 88, 124−5 Bridges, Robert 38n20, 108
On the Study of Celtic Literature 45, the British Empire 1, 2, 10, 30, 53, 55−6,
61, 124n40 121; see also colonialism
asymmetry, of global economic and Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show 98−100
political relations 15−16, 22, 25, Burke, Edmund 17, 69, 78−80, 88, 146,
30, 39, 158, 161 168–70, 173
194 W.B. Yeats and World Literature

capital markets 5–6, 13, 42, 57 ‘De-Anglicisation’ 10, 90−91; see also
Carlyle, Thomas 80n31, 102, 146 Hyde, Douglas
Casanova, Pascale 9, 16, 19, 33–6, 40, de-territorialisation 7, 24, 134, 137, 154, 179
49n44, 102n2 Deane, Seamus 69, 78−80, 82−3
the Celt and Celticism 20, 24, 37, 39, 45−9, death
53−4, 60−61, 65−80, 88−100, 104, and language 28, 119, 121−2
124−5, 129−30; see also Arnold, and politics 132−3, 140−51, 177–81
Matthew; Deane, Seamus degeneration 7–8, 137, 150, 153, 175; see
Chakrabarty, Dipesh 6 also eugenics
Chatterjee, Mohini 110 destitution 11−12, 24−5, 63, 131−7, 154−9,
Chaudhry, Yug Mohit 89 162, 180; see also Crazy Jane;
Chiba, Yoko 112n21, 126−7 Heidegger
Childs, Donald 8n14, 135−6 ‘distant reading’ 22−3; see also Moretti,
the Chinese commodity 113−17; see also Franco; reading
Exposition Universelle, 1855 Dowden, Ernest 107
cinema 5, 52−3 Dublin 1, 7, 43, 50, 54−5, 59, 62, 92, 100,
Civil War 110, 119−20, 148, 153, 167, 176,
aesthetics of 8, 15, 132, 159 181
Irish 8, 32, 41, 135 the Dublin Lockout, 1913 59, 167, 176, 181
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 78n27, 106, 146 the 1916 Dublin Rising 30, 128, 137,
colonialism 5−7, 10, 13, 15, 17, 24, 43, 53−6, 145−54, 163; see also Yeats,
103, 109, 119−21, 144, 158, 172 William Butler; rereading ‘Easter
combination, the aesthetics of 13, 24, 36, 1916’
39, 83, 131 Dun Emer Press 2, 6, 57, 70
the commodity 6, 7, 10, 24, 57, 63, 71,
109, 113−17, 176 Eglinton, John 50−51, 56
the compression of geopolitical space 13, Egypt 7, 10, 159−60
29, 60, 63 Eliot, T.S. 127, 130
the convergence of forms (‘as a mechanism The Waste Land 22, 39, 68
of change’) 19−20, 51, 60, 102−3, Elizabethan England 35, 68; see also
113, 125 Shakespeare, William
copyright 58 Ellis, Edwin John 140−42
‘the core’ 22−3, 54−5; see also encyclopaedic modernism 20, 21, 31, 38,
colonialism; the ‘Modern World 55, 71, 77, 81, 96−7, 104; see
System’ also the archive as poetic device;
cosmopolitanism 9, 12−15, 21, 33, 36, 43, glossary; textuality
50, 81, 114−20, 127, 158; see also English materialism 2−3
Kant, Immanuel English-speaking Ireland 3, 10, 69, 101,
Crawford, Robert 104 119; see also language; translation
Crazy Jane 25, 98n70, 131, 140, 154−9 Enlightenment thought 14, 20−23, 65, 71,
Croker, Crofton 89−90 77n25, 81−7, 104, 167−9
Cuala Industries 2, 57, 70, 109 eugenics 7−8, 19, 135−7, 158, 173
Cullingford, Elizabeth 135−6, 143n14, (non-)European space 5−10, 13, 17, 23,
154−7 24, 43−4, 47−50, 55, 71−3, 77−85,
‘curtal’ sonnets 38 108, 111−17, 120, 131, 133−7,
162−4
Damrosch, David 19, 22 Exposition Universelle, 1855 113−17; see
Davis, Thomas 16−17 also Baudelaire, Charles
Index 195

fanaticism 19, 25, 153, 162−5, 167, glossolalia 103


168−81 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von 10, 55, 80,
Fenianism 1, 30, 49, 53n50, 66, 90, 150, 107, 146
154, 181 and translation 47, 102, 107
Fenollosa, Ernest 24, 101, 108−9, 126 and Weltliteratur 18–20, 71, 102, 107,
Ferguson, Samuel 16−17, 67 107n15
Ferry, Luc 162 The Sorrows of Young Werther 48
feudalism 23, 170 Golston, Michael 37, 107, 136
fin de siècle culture 23, 170 Gonne, Maud 1, 70, 110n18, 136−40,
the First World War 28−33, 62 145−50, 153−4
folk traditions Gregory, Lady Augusta 1−2, 10n17, 27,
German Volk 78−88 43, 72, 76, 91n61, 92, 105, 120,
Irish folk 9, 19−20, 24, 39, 54, 65−77 138, 145
folkloric representation 37, 46n39, 49, 51, Gregory, Robert 27−33
65−77, 88−100
Foster, Roy 1n1, 3n5, 15n32, 27n1, 38n21, Hamburger, Michael 113
43n30, 49n43, 57n57, 91n61, Hamlet 117
110n19, 120, 122n39, 139n13, Hardiman, James 66
175n23 Hart, Matthew 105
Foucault, Michel 9n15, 131, 134−5, 179 Hegel, Georg W.F. 11, 55, 111, 132, 162−5,
France 15, 36, 48−9, 170n19 170, 174n22
Frazer, James 39, 69, 75 Heidegger, Martin 10−13, 180
free verse 103, 108, 125; see also prosody Herder, J.G. 47, 71, 77, 80–88, 96−7
the French Revolution 79, 81, 137, 152, ‘Essay on the Origin of Language’
168−9 85−8, 96, 99
French Symbolism 34−8 ‘Excerpt from a Correspondence on
Ossian and the Songs of Ancient
Gadamer, Georg 82−3 Peoples’ 80n32, 83
the Gaelic League 50−51, 90−91, 113; see Volkslieder 80−81, 100
also Hyde, Douglas Hiberno-English 65, 73, 90, 108, 126; see
Gaelic manuscripts 39, 46n39 also vernacular literature
Gaskill, Howard 46n38, 48n42, 79n30 Hölderlin, Friedrich 11–13, 180
Gender 24, 25, 68, 136−7, 137−45; see Hopkins, Gerard Manley 38n20, 108
also ‘Woman’; destitution Hungarian nationalism 48, 50, 54
geographic displacement 6, 7, 18, 19, 22, hunger strike 149, 165, 174−81
42−3, 112, 170 Hyde, Douglas 10, 89−91, 98, 113, 130
Germany 10, 55, 80, 170 Beside the Fire 74
Gitanjali see Tagore Love Songs of Connacht 58, 66−7, 72
globalisation 2−3, 6−7, 9−13, 16−24, 31,
45, 54−60, 61−3, 103, 109, 112−14, Ibsen, Henrik 11, 43, 49
133–7, 145, 155, 158, 164, 181 India
global exemplarity 17, 19; see also ‘the Gandhi-Tagore debate 120−21; see
Irish Paradigm’ also Tagore, Rabindranath
global literature 23, 24, 33−4, 39, 45, Indian nationalism 10, 110, 119, 120
103−6, 109−30; see also World Indian spiritualism 6, 17, 56, 61−2, 82,
Literature and Weltliteratur as 101n1, 102, 109
concept International literary space 9, 33−9, 40,
glossary 38−9, 97, 103, 117, 126 110, 117, 123, 129; see also World
196 W.B. Yeats and World Literature

Literature and Weltliteratur as London 1, 6, 10, 17, 33−4, 43, 48−9, 53−5,
concept 56, 58−9, 104, 110, 112, 118−19,
Intertextuality 74 120, 122
Irish Diaspora 54, 120 ‘long-distance’ nationalism 19; see also
Irish Revival 6, 48, 50, 65, 66, 69, 72−5, transmissions
78, 80, 83, 88, 91n61, 92, 98, Lover, Samuel 89−90
107, 119; see also Hyde, Douglas;
Moran, D.P. MacBride John 147, 150−51
Irish Home Rule Bill 1912 30, 132 McCormack, W.J. 60, 61n62, 135
Irish Independence 25, 134, 146, 148−50, McGann, Jerome 69−71
158; see also partition of Ireland MacNeice, Louis 33, 40
Irish language 3, 10, 24, 37, 39, 50, 65−6, Macpherson, James and the Ossian
69, 72−3, 76, 90−92, 94, 98−9, controversy 39, 45−8, 55, 79, 80,
124, 130 83, 98, 100, 104, 129
Irish Literary Theatre 48, 91n61 MacSwiney, Terence 149, 178, 180
‘the Irish Paradigm’ 9, 33−4 Malinowski, Bronislaw 75
the Irish tradition 17, 40, 43, 65, 68, 78−9, Mallarmé, Stéphane 4, 29, 34
82, 90−91 Mangan, James Clarence 16, 17, 66−7, 72,
130
Jameson, Fredric 16, 22, 24, 52 Markievicz, Constance 136−7, 150
Japanese Noh 24, 56, 102, 111−13, 126−8, Marx, Karl 3, 18, 170
130 Mill, John Stuart 30, 172−4
Japanese prints 6, 111 Milton, John 49, 107−8, 125; see also
Johnson, Lionel 5, 33, 46 prosody
Joyce, James 9, 18, 34, 54−5 ‘minor literature’ 16−17
Ulysses 68, 72, 99n71 the ‘Modern World System’ 22, 163; see
Jubainville, Marie Henri d’Arbois de 76 also Moretti, Franco; Wallerstein,
Immanuel
Kant, Immanuel 14−16, 21, 43, 102, Modernism; see also encylopaedic
114, 158−9, 168; see also modernism
cosmopolitanism Irish 4−10, 34, 54, 137, 155
King Lear 52, 162 the politics of 16−17, 52, 54, 105, 163,
Kittler, Friedrich 5, 40−42 165, 180
the Mohawk Indian 76, 77, 88, 97−9
Lacan, Jacques 5, 144 Moore, George 2, 5, 16, 57−8, 105n9
Language; see also ‘translation’ Moran, D.P. 10
on the origin of 85−8 The Philosophy of Irish Ireland 47
vernacular 24, 43, 51, 72, 104−8, 118, Moretti, Franco 23, 37, 54, 102, 125; see
130 also the ‘Modern World System’;
late capitalism 19, 24, 42, 134, 166 World Literature and Weltliteratur
‘late style’ 162n2, 165−8, 171, 180 as concept
laughter 180−81 The Bourgeois: Between History and
and Voltaire’s self-parody 20−21 Literature 11
Levi-Strauss, Claude 68 ‘Conjectures on World Literature’ 37,
liminal space 16; see also Bhabha, Homi K. 42, 43
‘the living tradition’ 6, 68−9; see also Modern Epic: The World System from
authenticity Goethe to García Márquez 55
Lloyd, David 16−17, 65 Morris, William 6, 69, 78, 80, 102n4
Index 197

Müller, F. Max 129−30 Pound, Ezra 22, 28, 68, 166


Murphy, William 1n2, 6 Certain Noble Plays of Japan / Noh
museums, the logic of 53, 55−6, 71 or Accomplishment: A Study of the
Classical Stage of Japan 101, 109,
nationalism 3, 5, 10n17, 12−15, 19, 30, 33, 112n21, 112, 126−7, 130
34, 43, 48, 50−51, 61−2, 79n30, prosody 37, 58, 67, 102, 108, 124−5, 128,
91, 119–21, 137, 139−40, 169, 171 167
natural science 20, 77, 83 Providence Sunday Journal 53, 98
the ‘New World’ 2, 3, 8, 10, 13, 24, 45,
48, 53−60, 65, 91, 98−9, 102, 120, Quinn, John 2
129, 131, 156
Nietzsche, Friedrich 12, 28, 43, 115, 124, race and racism 7, 9−10, 16−17, 60−61,
132−3, 174 80, 107, 111, 124, 136
The Birth of Tragedy 115−16 Ramazani, Jahan 17, 30, 155
On the Genealogy of Morals 146−8 reading
nineteenth-century Irishness 17, 65, 119 the limits of readership 20−22
the Nobel Prize 2, 62, 125 Revivalist strategies of; see
North, Michael 37n18, 117 ‘stereography’
The Norton Anthology 70−71; see also ‘Red Indian’ 98, 99, 104; see also the
the anthology as a question of Mohawk Indian
modernist form; the book as Regan, Stephen 99
material object Renan, Ernest 60−62
Norway 49 representation
the difficulty of 8, 15, 24, 48, 52, 76,
O’Brien, Conor Cruise 161 80, 82, 89, 90, 93−4, 100, 104−6,
O’Daly, John (Seán Ó Dálaigh) 39, 66 140, 143−4, 157, 168, 172
O’Grady, Standish 76 geopolitical 7, 16−18, 81, 89, 90, 104,
O’Leary, John 49, 53n50, 91, 176 119, 135
the occult and spiritualism 10n17, 31, 39, the question of ‘representativeness’ 20,
68, 73, 77n24, 98, 112, 117−18, 89, 110, 156
143, 171 technological 5, 40, 52−3
Oedipus 101, 162 rereading ‘Easter 1916’ 145−53
old age 25, 161−2, 165, 177, 180−81 ressentiment 174, 177; see also Nietzsche,
the Ossian controversy; see Macpherson, Friedrich
James Rhys, John 39
Rilke, Rainer Maria 11−13, 180
Paris 4−6, 9, 10, 16−20, 33−6, 53, 76, 105 Rimbaud, Arthur 44
‘Give up Paris’ 10, 36, 76 Romantic historiography 77−85
Parnell, Charles Stuart 132−4, 175 ‘Romantic Ireland’ 151, 176
partition, of Ireland 10, 14, 25, 35, 158−9, Rothenstein, William 110, 122−3
172 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 106, 168
Pearse, Patrick 117, 119, 147, 150−53 Ruskin, John 80, 171
Plato 31, 52, 106, 168, 173−4
poetic dwelling 11−13, 25, 61, 134, 180 sacrifice (self-) 15, 30, 129, 132, 134,
Pollexfen, George 1 144−9, 168−9
post-colonialism 10, 13, 15, 17, 43, 158, Sagala, Sandra K. 99n70
172 Said, Edward 17, 108, 162n2, 165, 166n13
The Post Office; see Tagore, Rabindranath Schiller, Friedrich 137, 146, 151−3
198 W.B. Yeats and World Literature

Scotland 45−6, 79, 104 translation 3, 11, 22, 24, 38, 46n39, 48,
Scots Observer 92 50, 56, 66, 71−2, 77, 80−81, 83,
the ‘semi-periphery’ 22, 24, 54−5, 57 101−3, 11−12, 115−16, 131, 136,
Ireland as semi-peripheral 16, 23, 55, 163
109−10, 119 from Bengali 101, 109, 123−4
sexual politics 131, 154; see also ‘Woman’ from Irish 37−9, 58, 65−9, 108, 124;
Shakespeare, William 47n40, 102n4, see also Hyde, Douglas
105n9, 117, 124, 162n2 Yeats’s monoglot translation 101,
Shakespeare’s England, compared with 103−4, 118−30
modern Ireland 10, 35, 52−3 transmissions 20, 23−4, 30, 32, 40−43, 48,
Shelley, Percey Bysshe 110 50−52, 55−6, 60, 62, 102, 112, 116,
Sinn Féin 3, 121 118, 121, 141, 146, 149−50, 165;
Sligo 1, 171 see also technology
Sloterdijk, Peter 29 metaphors for
small European nations 24, 49−53, 54 roads 44, 57, 156; see also Yeats,
the sonnet 7, 38, 140, 143−4 W.B., Where there is Nothing
sovereignty, the crisis of 8−10, 13, trees 40−43
30−33, 43, 48, 105, 111, 114, 121, waves 23, 30, 40−45, 49, 60, 117,
134−6, 140, 158, 178−9; see also 146
Agamben, Giorgio; Foucault, ‘transnational poetics’ 17, 31, 47, 112, 125
Michel Trotter, David 40
Spengler, Oswald 31
spirit mediums 42, 118 the United Irishman 3, 57n57
‘stereography’ 68−73, 80, 90, 100, 130, the United Kingdom (UK) 17, 18, 23, 45,
157; see also Barthes, Roland 48, 53, 58, 127
Swãmi, Shri Purohit 10n17, 24, 101, 111, universalism 66, 103, 109; see also Kant,
128−30 Immanuel; Voltaire
Symons, Arthur 33, 76 ‘untimeliness’ 149−50
Synge, John Millington 5, 36, 72, 76, 105,
126 variorum poems 67, 70, 72; see also
The Aran Islands 73−5, 88 anthology as a question of
Playboy riots and legacy 120 modernist form
Vendler, Helen 38
Tagore, Rabindranath 10n17, 24, 56−7, Verlaine, Paul 4, 34−6, 38
61−2, 110−11, 120−21, 123−4 vernacular literature 24, 43, 51, 72, 104−8,
The Gardener 123 109, 118, 130
Gitanjali 56, 101, 122−3, 125 Victorianism 4, 30, 35, 36, 43, 88−9, 97,
on nationalism 61, 121 100, 129, 135, 165
The Post Office 109, 119−20, 121−2, 130 Voltaire 20−23
technology 5−6, 28, 41−2, 49, 52, 70, 118
telegraphy 42−3; see also Wagner, Richard 51
transmissions Wales 45
Tennyson, Alfred 30, 34, 36 Wallerstein, Immanuel 22
Thoreau, Henry David 54, 58, 91 Whitman, Walt 54, 91, 156
Thuente, Mary Helen 89n54, 66, 95 Wilde, Lady Jane 89
Toscano, Alberto 168−71 Wilde, Oscar 5, 38, 41, 43, 113
Transactions of the Ossianic Society 39, ‘Woman’ 137−45, 150−59
47, 66 Wordsworth, William 36, 71, 106−7, 129
Index 199

World English 102−3, 109, 128, 130 ‘Lapis Lazuli’ 115−17


World Literature and Weltliteratur as ‘Leda and the Swan’ 140−45
concept 10, 12, 14, 16, 18−23, 33, ‘Meditations in Time of Civil War’
77, 103−3, 108, 125, 129; see also 41
globalisation; language; translation ‘Meru’ 7
‘world picture’ 13, 17, 22 ‘Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen’
the World Trade Centre, New York 177 32−3, 176
‘Parnell’s Funeral’ 132−4
Yeats, William Butler ‘Paudeen’175n24
plays ‘The Phases of the Moon’ 31
At the Hawk’s Well 126, 127 ‘Politics’ 161
The Countess Kathleen 70 ‘A Prayer for My Daughter’ 42
The Dreaming of the Bones 126, 128 ‘Remorse for Intemperate Speech’
The King’s Threshold 178−81 167
The Only Jealousy of Emer 126, ‘Reprisals’ 27, 28
128 ‘The Sad Shepherd’ 41
The Resurrection 59, 60 ‘The Second Coming’ 6, 15
Where There is Nothing 43, 44, 54, ‘September 1913’ 59, 167, 176
57, 91, 121, 156 ‘Shepherd and Goatherd’ 27, 28
poetry ‘The Song of the Happy Shepherd’
‘Anashuya and Vijaya’ 110 41
‘A Bronze Head’ 162n2 ‘The Song of Wandering Aengus’
the Byzantium poems 40, 109, 157 37
‘The Circus Animals’ Desertion’ ‘The Spur’ 161
133, 138, 167 ‘The Statues’ 117
‘A Coat’ 113, 133 ‘Three Songs to the Same Tune’ 174
‘The Collar-Bone of a Hare’ 40 ‘To a Wealthy Man Who Promised
‘Coole Park and Ballylee’ 163n6 a Second Subscription to the
Crazy Jane poems 25, 98n70, 131, Dublin Municipal Gallery’
140, 154−9 175n24
‘Easter 1916’ 15, 24, 113, 138, 140, The Tower 161, 177
145−54, 158, 163n6 ‘Under Ben Bulben’ 111
‘The Fascination of What’s The Wanderings of Oisin 38−40,
Difficult’ 175 47, 181
‘A Fisherman’ 113 ‘When You Are Old’ 70−71
The Green Helmet (1910) 175 The Wind Among the Reeds 22,
‘He Bids His Beloved Be At Peace’ 34−9, 55, 69−70
36, 38 prose
‘The Horses of Disaster’ 36 ‘The Celtic Theatre’ 47−8
‘How Ferencz Renyi Kept Silent’ The Celtic Twilight 47, 69, 72, 73,
49−50 76n23, 88−100
‘In Memory of Major Robert Dramatis Personae 1
Gregory’ 27, 28 Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry
‘The Indian to His Love’ 110 69, 88−9, 94
‘An Irish Airman Foresees His ‘A General Introduction to My
Death’ 27−32 Work’ 58
‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’ 1, ‘Ireland and the Arts’ 110
37−8, 99 Irish Fairy Tales 88
200 W.B. Yeats and World Literature

On the Boiler 8, 164n9, 171−3, 176 The Trembling of the Veil 4


‘Per Amica Silentia Lunae’ 171 A Vision 31−2, 42, 54, 76−7, 96,
‘Poetry and Science in Folklore’ 65 163n6, 171
Representative Irish Tales 69, 88, 89 ‘What is Popular Poetry?’ 51, 73
Stories from Carleton 88 William Blake 140−43
The Ten Principal Upanishads
101n1, 111, 128−30

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