Young Yeats

...Magic was for Yeats a revolt against all of the 19th-century "isms" he despised and associated with the Saxon rulers of Ireland: rationalism, materialism, Philistinism, skepticism, moralism, progressivism...

...Johnson and Dowson were dead of alcoholism...

...He drew the line, though, at a return to Celtic language...

...Yeats, Volume I, 1865-1895, edited by John Kelly and Eric Domville (Oxford, 589 pp., $29.95), demonstrates that this poet mostly wrote to people because he wanted something: to enlist the person addressed in one of his many patriotic or occult projects, to solicitapieceforsomepublication, to protest someone's views, to get opinions on his latest poems, to use a friend as a sounding board for his elaborate theories about art or mysticism...

...His early verse, drenched in fairies and mystic roses, frequently seems more escapist than revolutionary...

...He did—by intensifying his supernatural preoccupations...

...He knew that he did not possess the sophistication of Oscar Wilde, the prodigious learning of Lionel Johnson, the innate lyric gifts of Ernest Dowson—all fellow members of the Rhymer' s Club...

...One aspect of the poet that greatly confused his contemporaries—and continues to puzzle some commentators—was his fascination with the supernatural...

...But he saw himself, truly, as a servant with a mission: Caught up in the struggle to help Ireland shake off British rule and develop a sense of independence, he was determined to prove that his country was distinctively a land of bards and mystics...

...One of Yeats' self-images was "the isolated artist in the the lonely tower...

...The letters show him working much harder than his friends, almost fanatically dedicated to his literary-destiny...

...I have seen others enjoying while I stood alone with myself—commenting, commenting—a mere dead mirror on which things reflect themselves...

...Yeats was one of the first to appreciate the prophetic books of Blake (and he coedited the first complete edition of Blake's poetry in the 1890s, a task documented at some length in these letters...

...This initial installment begins in 1876 (not 1865, the year of Yeats' birth), with a letter from the 11-year-old schoolboy to his sister describing some pet newts...

...Yeats' Irish patriotism was strengthened by his living in London during the 1890s...

...It holds to my work the same relation that the philosophy of Godwin held to the work of Shelley & I have all-ways [s/c] considered myself a voice of what I beleive M to be a greater renaissance —the revolt of the soul against the intellect—now beginning in the world...

...This may sound more like Stephen Dedalus or his creator than the compiler of The Celtic Twilight...

...He felt keenly his lack of education and experience...

...The adult, it seems, spelled as badly as the boy...

...I hope some day to alter that...

...The editors observe that he "believed what was certainly true in his case, that a 'poet writes always of his personal life,' yet to express this...

...They also help us appreciate why editors have sometimes slightly tampered with the poems in an attempt to eradicate idiosyncratic punctuation and outlandish words...

...But mysticism was most important to the poet because it offered a key to the universal symbolism of the unconscious— rather in the way Jungian psychology did for a later generation...

...very well, he would gather stories about "the wee folk" fromlrish peasants and show the world that there was a reality beyond industrial progress...

...Nevertheless, homesickness could not blind him to the fact that London was then the center of the literary world...

...readers looking for gossipy insights into the literati of the 1880s and '90s will be disappointed: Friends and associates remain shadowy figures in Yeats' letters...

...At the conclusion of this volume, we see him comforting Wilde during the lat-ter's trial, despairing of Johnson's inebriate stupors, and establishing himself as a leading poet...

...Pointing out that America, "a mere parvenu among the nations," had developed a unique literary tradition not to be confused with the English one, he insisted "it should be more easy for us, who have that wild Celtic blood, the most un-English of all things under heaven...

...His energy seems phenomenal, especially in the face of his extreme poverty (one letter must be hurriedly concluded before his only candle burns out) and frequent illnesses— often caused by overwork...

...Between 1885-95, he wrote or edited nine books...

...His writings both romanticized and mourned them to the end...

...What Yeats' letters are missing in elegance they more than make up for in vitality...

...The result is a port rait that adds a fresh facet to the young Yeats...

...It concludes 19 years later with a scribble to Edmund Gosse's wife saying Yeats will be glad to come to her New Year's Eve party...

...The youthful poet, bursting with ideas and ideals, was desperately on the lookout for any sympathetic listener...

...At the same time, they have him pugnaciously arguing about every issue of the day, attending every party he thinks will be useful for contacts, persuading his more reclusive friends to get involved in one of his organizations, picking the brain of each person he meets...

...Kelly and Domville have apparently decided to supersede the very selective collection of the letters Allan Wade edited (1955) by printing every scrap of the more than 7,000 pieces of Yeats' mail extant—including post cards, notes responding to invitations, even the envelopes when the enclosed letter has been lost...

...The mature Yeats would characterize them as " The Tragic Generation," and claim that they had preserved their integrity in a philistine world through dissipation and self-destruction...

...If Yeats were simply another ambitious young man, he might have turned out an overwhelming bore and pest...

...He thinks all the rest of the world created to minister to him," wrote Katharine Tynan—a frequent recipient of his bombardments—"and there is no rebuffing of him possible...

...satisfactorily he must create out of' the bundle of accident and i ncohcrence that sits down to breakfast' a secondary 'artistic' personality...

...The Order of the Golden Dawn, a secret society that practiced "ancient" rites and trained its adepts in magic spells, must have had many moments of high glamour: Several actresses who subsequently thrilled audiences at Dublin's Abbey Theater played prominent roles in the Golden Dawn Temple...

...By the turn of the century Wilde was in prison...

...My life has been in my poems," Yeats told Katharine Tynan in his 20s...

...theonly character plumbed is his own...

...In 1886, he had met Maud Gonne, "themost beautiful woman in the world," and though she did not love him, he kept himself chaste for her until his early 30s...

...Besides, the color and pageantry of occult gatherings appealed to his artistic sense...

...His Irish contemporaries Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw made their epistles sparkle with the same polish and wit that enlivened their plays...

...In the 1920s, he used an elaborate system of metaphor drawn from the occult to express the sickness of the 20th century in such powerful poems as "The Second Coming," "Ledaand the Swan" and "Sailing to Byzantium...

...Not surprisingly, the complete edition will run to 12 volumes...

...One may scoff at his belief that his inspiration came from voices of the invisible world...

...Yet one notices that while they were retreating into sexual escapades or drink, Yeats—the survivor— learned from his setbacks and persevered...

...We see him exhorting in the pages of United Ireland that "When we remember the majesty of Cuchullin and the beauty of sorrowing Dierdre we should not forget that it is that majesty and that beauty which are immortal, and not the perishing tongue that first told of them...

...The people of Ireland respect letters and read nothing...

...He hated the city's impersonality, linking it with the British "scientific mentality," and longed intensely for his native Sligo...

...These letters, however, reveal a much more hard-boiled young Yeats than his carefully worked three-volume autobiography would suggest...

...But The Collected Letters of W.B...

...They hold the words 'poet' and' thinker' honorable, yet buy no books...

...Kelly and Domville, in their excellent notes, giveviv-id descriptions of some of the dominant personalities of the organization, including its "chiefs," Macgregor Mathers and Aleister Crowley, who had a penchant for strolling around London "in full highland rig"—to the delight of the Celt in Yeats...

...He accurately appraised it to Katharine Tynan in 1882 as "notthe poetry of insight and knowledge but of longing and complaint—the cry of the heart against necessity...

...the fact remains that among the solipsistic poets of our age none has seemed so transported beyond his own consciousness as Yeats...

...the editors preserve his "peculearities," some of them "unintelligoble," others merely hard to " beleive.'' When the critic Edward Dowden retired from the English chair at Trinity College, Dublin, Yeats requested that he be appointed to the "proffership...

...Here, too, the letters cast a new light...

...Such lapses tend to confirm previous speculation that the poet was dyslexic...

...In 1892, he fervidly defended his esoteric interests to a disapproving friend: "The mystical life is the center of all that I do & all that I think & all that I write...

...Folklore was very muchinvogueattheendofthel9th century...

...In addition, he was active in a variety of organizations (some of which he founded), tirelessly promoting aims ranging from esthetic poetry to Irish nationalism to the practice of magic...

...They are proud of being a more imaginative people than the English, and yet compel their own imaginative writers to seek an audience across the sea...

...Few of his letters to her exist, unfortunately, but his misery comes through in communications to more sympathetic correspondents...