The Politics of Yeats

...Thus...

...It is amusing to live in a country where men will always act...

...The editors seem acutely aware of the fact that Yeats has remained a live literary issue even as he has become a prime acquisition of the academy, and they have obviously tried to satisfy the diverse interests of the literary and academic worlds while paying proper homage to the man now generally regarded as the greatest poet of the present century...

...The worst about Yeats was, of course, his open and energetic loyalty to the Fascist ideal...

...There are ampler grounds than Lord Alfred Douglas' for finding the Oxford Book a rather bizarre patchwork of literary pieties and prejudices, and in tracing the course of Yeats' decisions in planning this anthology, Stallworthy's essay provides an incomparable glimpse into the poet's critical relation to the poetry of his own epoch-a poetry he dominated, to be sure, but without ever quite understanding...

...O'Brien is, moreover, an ideal guide to the intricacies of Yeats' literary-political machinations...

...The brilliant exception is the lengthy study, "Passion and Cunning: An Essay on the Politics of W. B. Yeats," by Conor Cruise O'Brien...

...After clerical pressures had made the Senate uncongenial to him and had extruded him from it, he withdrew again from active politics (1928-33), only returning when a situation propitious to Fascism seemed to present itself...

...It is immensely interesting, for example, to learn that Charles Williams, in his capacity as an editor in the London office of the Oxford University Press, proposed the name of Dylan Thomas-in 1934!-for the fairly lucrative task of assembling this anthology, a proposal rejected in favor of "a name well known to the reviewers...

...O'Brien destroys forever the notion that this loyalty was a vague and ironic mouthing of ideas the poet was unprepared to act upon...

...In this respect, as in others, O'Brien's essay is an exemplary performance that sets a standard for future inquiries-which are sure to come-into the ideological foundations of modern literature...

...The contents of this book vary greatly...

...Yeats' "hopelessly divided" attitude toward the Spanish Civil War was, in effect, a paradigm of the contradictions which ruled his hopes for a Fascist victory in Ireland: the authoritarian and Anglophobe in him desiring a Franco victory, the Irish anti-clerical dreading the results...

...I know half a dozen men anyone of whom may be Ceasar-or Catiline...

...Most of the contributions are, happily enough, readable essays in criticism, biography, or literary history, and at least one of the latter is not only enlightening but also highly amusing: Jon Stallworthy's detailed account of Yeats' work as editor of The Oxford Book of Modern Verse...

...In answering this question, O'Brien directs our attention to what he regards as the "fundamental force [of Yeats' vision], anterior to both politics and poetry...

...O'Brien's essay is therefore a salutary corrective to the prevailing view of Yeats as a writer whose exalted literary intelligence had only a vague and/or accidental connection with some of the nastier varieties of modern politics...

...But Stallworthy's essay is far from being a collection of mere curiosities...

...Yeats was nothing if not prepared to implement a full-fledged Fascist program in the Ireland of the '30s...

...Writing to Olivia Shakespear in July 1933, Yeats declared: "Politics are growing heroic...

...And then there is the marvelous telegram dispatched to Yeats-with copies going to the leading newspapers and literary figures of the day-from Lord Alfred Douglas once the book had been published: "Your omission of my work from the absurdly-named Oxford Book of Modern Verse is exactly typical of the attitude of the minor to the major poet...

...Added to this unusual combination of political knowledge and literary intelligence is a deep and sensitive attachment to Yeats' poetry...

...Patrick's cross on a blue ground...

...While the poet's aristocratic loyalties disposed him to favor the rising tide of Fascism in the '30s, his anti-clerical Protestant loyalties provided him with an abiding hatred of the only political force-the Catholic Church-in a position to insure a Fascist victory...

...That force was," according to O'Brien, Yeats' profound and tragic intuitive-and intelligent- awareness, in his maturity and old age, of what the First World War had set loose, of what was already moving towards Hitler and the Second World War...

...I find myself constantly urging the despotic rule of the educated classes...

...Confronting, then, the most repugnant of Yeats' political allegiances-and doing so with a greater degree of political sophistication and moral realism than has usually been the case with Yeats' admirers-O'Brien asks: "How can those of us who loathe such politics continue not merely to admire but to love the poetry, and perhaps most of all the poems with a political bearing...

...O'Brien writes as a liberal attempting to reconcile his profound admiration of Yeats' poetry with an equally profound distaste for the politics that were often inextricably bound up with its creation...

...far from diminishing Yeats' standing as a poet, O'Brien's detailed and dispassionate inquiry ends by illuminating both the nature of his genius and the nature of poetry itself...

...Writer & Writing The Politics of Yeats By Hilton Kramer Among the books, articles, and commemorations brought forth by the centenary of William Butler Yeats during the past year, the most interesting volume I have seen is the omnibus entitled In Excited Reverie: A Centenary Tribute, edited by A. Norman Jeffares and K. G. W. Cross (Macmillan, 354 pp., $10.00...

...In the last two years of his life politics flared up again...

...As O'Brien sums up Yeats' long political history: "The long phase of nationalist commitment (18871903) was followed by a long phase (1903-16) of detachment from almost all practical politics (except those to which the theatre exposed him), by a critique of Irish nationalist politics, and by the formation of an aristocratic attitude which did not find practical political expression until after 1916 when-after a new flare-up of nationalist feeling-he re-entered Irish politics on the right, in the Free State Senate...

...As an Irish literary figure and political ideologue himself, O'Brien still swims in the stream of feeling that was Yeats' life-long cultural habitat, and he is thus able to bring to bear on his analysis of Yeats' political life a knowledge of the sometimes specialized emotions which often guided it...

...The purity and integrity [of Yeats' life]-including the truth about politics as Yeats apprehended it-are in the poetry concentrated in metaphors of such power that they thrust aside all calculated intent...

...For the most part, however, the contributors to the Jeffares-Cross book enhance one's understanding of Yeats without really changing it...

...I know of no comparable history of the making of such an anthology...

...There is so little in our stocking that we are ready at any moment to turn it inside out and how can we not feel emulous when we see Hitler juggling with his sausage of stocking...

...Our chosen color is blue, and blue shirts are marching about all over the country and their organizer tells me that it was my suggestion-a suggestion I have entirely forgotten -that made them select for their flag a red St...

...Unlike most of us who have experienced a certain dismay at finding many of the great modem writers votaries of ideologies we detest, O'Brien shows himself willing to face the worst about Yeats, and to sustain his love for the poet's artistic genius in the face of it...

...But his essay as a whole is quite the reverse of being a specialized study...

...It was Yeats' misfortune as a politician, and his good fortune as a poet," O'Brien writes, "that his political opportunities or temptations were few and far between.' But-as O'Brien also makes clear-the mixed fortunes of the poet and the politician were also traceable to a fundamental split between the "Protestant/aristocrat" and the "Irish nationalist" elements in his personality...

...A Fascist opposition is forming behind the scenes to be ready should some tragic situation develop...

...Where nobody is satisfied with thought...

...Yeats is thus vindicated as a prophet whose metaphors grasped a complexity greater than that of his own political ideology...

...However shrill he may sometimes be on other political questions, the author of Parnell and His Party is a brilliant expositor of modern Irish politics and-what is rarer -a political writer who is at the same time, as he made clear in Maria Cross, an astute literary critic...

...Thus, several poems are included-by Hugh MacDiarmid and A. D. Hope, among others-together with samplings of the pedantry to which Yeats' work is now regularly subjected the world over...

...When O'Duffy's Irish Fascists failed ignominiously he turned away from politics again, though not forever...

...This extraordinary critical inquiry into the vicissitudes of Yeats' political alliances and beliefs, into the whole question of the poet's often bewildering conduct as a public figure directly involved in struggles for power, and into the relation-usually close, and often crucial-between those struggles and the poetry itself, places the poet in a clearer historical light than a decade's worth of the kind of small-minded explicative analysis which has been so much lavished upon the body of Yeats' work...

...As long ago as Axel's Castle, Edmund Wilson had warned that "There has always been more of the public figure and more of the pugnacious Irishman about [Yeats] than his philosophy invites us to believe," but Yeats' admirers have generally preferred to follow that philosophy along a path that leads away from "the baptism of the gutter," as Yeats himself called it in a letter to Lady Gregory, and into the ever so much pleasanter realm of symbolic utterance...

...The chance of being shot is raising everybody's spirits enormously...

...Behind this passionate commitment to a Fascist dream of recovered glory-a commitment which led Yeats, in 1938, to propose a kind of Petainesquepro-gram for Ireland-lay half a century of canny and often contradictory political maneuvering, for the poet was, where politics was concerned, a shrewd opportunist who weighed carefully the possible success of each of his political attachments...