The Prophetic Yeats
PETTINGELL, PHOEBE
Writers & Writing THE PROPHETIC YEATS BY PHOEBE PETTINGELL As a young man, William Butler Yeats burned with grandiose ambitions. He would love "the most beautiful woman in the world" and...
...a senatorial seat in the first Parliament of the Irish Republic...
...In his 70s he imitated Ruskin's cranky cultural commentary, Fors Clavigera, with his own On theBoiler(1939...
...The poet's frequent trips to the United States kept its enormous Hibernian population, including Yeats' artist father, in touch with the changes taking place in their homeland...
...His "Rhymers Club" in London was so successful that it won sympathy for Celtic poetry among the British intelligentsia, even starting a fad...
...whatever most can bless The mind of man or elevate a rhyme...
...Yeats greeted each tribute with a slightly cynical amusement, for he was beginning to cultivate the last of his personas—the "wild old wicked man...
...Whathemadeof himself and his poems continues to loom so large that as the present century ends, young poets still struggle to emerge from his shadow...
...But his fascination with his first love remained undimmed...
...Yeats well, relates that she deliberately contrived this activity to shake her husband out of his unhappiness...
...He yearned to develop a persuasive philosophy that "would find its manuals of devotion in all imaginative literature...
...Although Jeffares offers tantalizing snatches of conversations he had with Maud Gonne and George Yeats, this is not an intimate portrait...
...Jeffares, who knew Mrs...
...His book convinces me that Yeats is a Colossus like Homer or Shakespeare, whose creations help us to define ourselves...
...Since he saw himself as exercising prophetic duties, the opinion of others meant little to him...
...and in 1923, the Nobel Prize for Literature...
...The abstract is not life...
...A political as well as literary figure, he was surrounded throughout his career by fascinating women and men, and his public and private life teemed with incident...
...Whatever's written in what poet's name The book of the people...
...While he brooded, his bride made the fortunate discovery that she possessed the gift of automatic writing and could channel messages from the spirit world...
...Yeats: A New Biography (Farrar Straus Giroux, 374 pp., $30.00) is a welcome addition to the distinguished company of Yeatsian studies...
...Shaw...
...But all is changed, that high horse riderless The sympathetic power of his imagination never deserted Yeats...
...Ruskin's dream ?f a harmonious society of artisans, striving to serve humankind through their devotion to beauty, captured Yeats' teenage heart and held him all his life...
...But for him, Maud Gonne, the society beauty turned revolutionary, would be remembered as a minor footnote to the Irish rebellion...
...What it lacks in convivial anecdote, it makes up for in the grand sweep of its scope...
...Still obsessed with the Gonnes, he spent his honeymoon brooding over the suspicion that he had committed a terrible error...
...Jeff ares reprints a charming sketch by brother Jack of the young WB on one of his several visits to the United States...
...At first, the results were more precious than convincing, and sounded like bad Oscar Wilde...
...He told Lady Gregory that, for the first time, he understood human life, and went on to develop elaborate theories of historical cycles and personality types (published as A Vision, they sound neither better nor worse than similar systems...
...He would unlock occult mysteries and use them to exalt the imaginative life...
...In 1902 he wrote his patron, Lady Gregory, "My work has got far more masculine...
...Yeats' one-act drama, Cathleen Ni Houlihan (starring Maud Gonne) became a symbol of nationalist hopes...
...The intrigues of the Abbey Theater and the occult sect The Order of the Golden Dawn also are more amusingly detailed by Frank Tuohy than in the present volume...
...Indeed, believing that Ruskin had gone mad from sexual desire too long suppressed, the aging Yeats had the Steinach "monkey gland" operation performed on him to boost his waning sexual prowess...
...He had already given up his long-preserved virginity to Olivia Shakespear (future mother-in-law of Ezra Pound), having grown tired of waiting for Maud Gonne, who had married another man...
...When Lady Gregory died in 1932, he mourned: We were the last romantics—chose for theme Traditional sanctity and loveliness...
...Nevertheless, Jeffares has plenty of fresh things to say...
...It is a long fight but that is the sport of it...
...Like Ruskin and the Pre-Raphaelites, he came to believe in art as the ultimate expression of spirituality...
...As for the fascination with magic, it provided Yeats with symbols to express his profound insights into modern life...
...Thus, A. Norman Jeffares' W.B...
...The fledgling poet in London wore Pre-Raphaelite flowing ties and velvet coats—hilariously lampooned in Max Beerbohm cartoons...
...the center cannot hold...
...Yeats' efforts to revive the Gaelic language and traditions were just as ardent...
...Headded, "all who love work better than idle talk will support me...
...If you want the full force ofpersonality, go to Ellmann, or better yet, to the poet's own wonderful A utobiographies, and the more private Memoirs (published after Mrs...
...It is myself that I remake," he wrote...
...When, in 1905, George Russell told him that he had alienated his literary contemporaries, Yeats replied that being too close to them would be "a bond and an intrusion...
...But he persevered, discarding failed attempts like a snake shedding its skin...
...It worked...
...ld age brought honors galore: a degree from Oxford University for a man whose dyslexia had prevented him from obtaining much formal education...
...Thanks to Yeats' poetry, her power to madden and inspire puts her in the company of Petrarch's Laura and Dante's Beatrice—while her lovely face in books about her admirer proves the sharpness of his eye...
...Ruskin had regarded himself as a preacher and Yeats adopted that role, too, propounding his ideas in poetry and prose criticism...
...Jeff ares observes that occultism gave Yeats the confidence to abandon his allegories about Irish heroes when referring to current events...
...We are still apt to use his visionary words to characterize the conflicts of our age: Things fall apart...
...I must embody it in the completion...
...In 1917, at 52, Yeats finally married Bertha Georgie Hyde Lees (called George), a young woman he had known only a short time...
...His formation of the Abbey Theater established a showcase for such luminaries as J.M...
...and turn our places of beauty or legendary association into holy symbols...
...Synge, SeanO'CaseyandG.B...
...By the turn of the century, though, as Yeats remarked, "Everyone got down off their stilts...
...His poems reflected her growing political involvements...
...The visionary began, of course, as a dandy...
...Attempting to integrate Ruskin's estheticism into his verse, Yeats combined mysticism, ancient ritual and folktale...
...He would form a band of writers to restore Ireland's lost literary tradition, and inspire his fellow countrymen to shake off English rule and customs...
...In old age, the poet ruefully wondered, Did that play of mine send out Certain men the English shot...
...In his 50s he proposed to her one last time, then, a week later, to her 22-yearold daughter...
...Now everything from Parnell to the poet's latest mistress, from natural uprisings to the Yeatses' changing houses became images for the unfolding of the present era...
...You can refute Hegel but not the Saint or the Song of Sixpence...
...Each of these dramas he refined into poetry, sometimes couching them in mystical terms, sometimes incorporating them into a Greek or Celtic myth...
...From the observation platform of a train somewhere "in the wild and wooly West," he is "lecturing on Speaking to the Psaltery" to an assemblage of cowboys, Indians and Mexicans, all bemused by the weird mannerisms of an 1890s esthete...
...Jeffares especially stresses the formative influence John Ruskin's esthetic theories had on the poet...
...Prudently, the spirits announced that they came to bring "metaphors for poetry...
...He soon underwent another transformation...
...The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity...
...Yeats makes an ideal subject...
...Jeffares, however, gives us a full sense of Yeats' accomplishments, of the steady self-disciplining into greatness...
...He felt outrage at a civilization whose movement toward narrow fields of specialization ran counter to his lifelong dream of agrand synthesis...
...The stage, in particular, proved an effective cultural and political tool, at home and abroad...
...Nevertheless, he missed the graciousness of Edwardian society...
...In common with the biography he published in 1949, this completely new work concentrates on Yeats' actions rather than speculating on his possible motives...
...Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned...
...A few days before his death in 1939, at theage of 73, he explained to a friend, "Man can embody truth, but he cannot know it...
...Yeats' death, in 1972...
...It is true that for gossip (especially the late love affairs) no one can top Richard Ellmann...
...His interests covered so broad a range that no single book could adequately encompass them...
...He would love "the most beautiful woman in the world" and immortalize her in verse...
...Gargantuan as such aspirations might have seemed to others, the unfazed and self-reliant poet spent his life doggedly achieving them...
Vol. 73 • January 1990 • No. 2
