Ireland's Magician
PETTINGELL, PHOEBE
On Poetry Ireland's Magician By Phoebe Pettingell While the reputations of most 20thcentury bards wax and wane, William Butler Yeats continues to enthrall readers and biographers. We...
...He cast these events in terms of Greek mythology because he believed history was a series of recurring cycles or "gyres...
...he has been rebom as an idea, something intended, complete...
...Her remark proved prophetic...
...Eliot and W.H...
...your gift survived it all...
...Dante and Milton had mythologies, Shakespeare the characters of English history or of traditional romance...
...Despite old age and impotence (a problem he tried to cure with a vasectomy), he managed a series of affairs with much younger women...
...We do not need to read his prose or plays to be aware ofhis diversity, though, since his verse comments on every aspect of his fascinating career...
...Yeats, too, belongs in this company...
...From this point on, Yeats felt empowered to speak as his nation's prophet as well as its supreme poet...
...Fighting for the survival of her marriage, the young woman, who shared her husband's occult interests, tried automatic writing...
...We study and quote him—not only in poetic contexts but in political speeches, editorials, even sermons...
...Virtually fatherless—she had not known her biological father, and before she had time to know her stepfather well Gonne's marriage failed—Iseult craved the avuncular affection of the older man, yet did not really want to be Mrs...
...Foster's sense of history lends these familiar developments freshness...
...With old age, Foster tells us, "fear of a potential anarchy terrifyingly demonstrated during the events of the last few years, and an appreciation of grandeur not easily discernable from unashamed snobbery, reacted with each other to reinforce his natural elitism...
...Yeats wrote Gregory that he felt himself repeating a past mistake, in which his unconsummated love for Maud Gonne eroded his affair with Olivia Shakespear...
...Convinced they were at the center of everything, Yeats mythologized the members of his private coterie, ignoring everyone else...
...The birth of two children made these years among his most busy, and—combined with George's vigilant care for him—also his most contented and productive...
...Foster's initial volume is exceptional on several counts...
...real to him...
...There would be less to Ireland's story had his magic not conjured its ancient and modern myths so stunningly But Yeats cannot be reduced to a mere nationalist...
...Being a historian, he manages to capture the sweep of Irish political turmoil...
...Reading his account, we grasp the origin of many troubles still plaguing the Emerald Isle...
...On the other side John McBride, the estranged husband of the poet's former lover, Maud Gonne, was one of the revolutionaries subsequently executed...
...This harmony in private life arrived at an opportune moment...
...Even when the poet seems most himself, when he is Raleigh and gives potentates the lie, or Shelley 'a nerve o'er which do creep the else unfelt oppressions of this earth,' or Byron 'and the soul outwears the breast' as 'the sword outwears the sheath,' he is never the bundle of accident and incoherence that sits down to breakfast...
...Foster wryly observes that the poet, who in the past had fallen in love with contemporaries such as Gonne and Olivia Shakespear, suddenly began courting women young enough to be his daughters...
...How can those terrified vague fingers push The feathered glory from her loosening thighs...
...John Gogarty, the model for James Joyce's Buck Mulligan in Ulysses—who failed to fulfill his potential...
...One result of the equanimity Yeats now felt in marriage was the maturity of his gift...
...And, recognizing the true significance of his subject's obsession with the occult, he identifies what had been considered an eccentric interest as the template Yeats used to understand the people and events fueling his verse...
...He has the advantage of writing after the principal characters have died, enabling him to be more frank than earlier biographers...
...Larger-than-life imaginations, able to transcend the immediate concerns and literary preoccupations of their time, capture our lasting interest...
...The newlyweds got to know each other through their mutual engagement with what they referred to as "Instructors" from the other side...
...Virginia Woolf observed that Yeats could contemplate an entire forest and find "every twig...
...His sensitivity made him prone to physical collapse when under too much pressure...
...Listen to him in "The Municipal Gallery Revisited": John Synge, I and Augusta Gregory thought All that we did, all that we said or sang Must come from contact with the soil, from that Contact all things Antaeus-like grew strong...
...But his wife's manipulation transmuted their dangerous absorption of Yeats' energies...
...Blind to their artistic shortcomings, he puffed his mistresses up, demanding they star in his plays, or including generous selections of their pallid lyrics in his edition of the Oxford Book of Modern Verse (while omitting Wilfred Owen altogether and shortchanging T.S...
...It is the thought of this force coming into the world that he is expressing in his Leda poem, not yet quite complete...
...Unmarried, he felt ready to settle down and start a family...
...The first, subtitled The Apprentice Mage (1997)—based on research begun by the scholar Leland Lyons, to whom the poet's children, Anne and Michael, had made available all the family papers—ends shortly before Yeats turns 50...
...Supernatural activities forged an exciting erotic bond and allowed George to "elucidate the patterns in WBY's life...
...Otherwise, Foster shows, public tumult might easily have swallowed the poet...
...But as contemporaries noted, he had married George for her intelligence, not her beauty, so she was more than aware of her husband's perilous state of mind...
...So much for all the politicians...
...Like her mother, she knew how to keep a middle-aged admirer dangling for several years...
...His genius was to illuminate the meaning of contemporary affairs in metaphor, but he often reconstructed "history in terms of its meaning for himself," placing "his work, and his circle, at the center...
...The tortuous romance of his youth came to inspire his verse...
...He is already a groundbreaking cultural figure, but has yet to produce the work he is principally remembered for...
...The hasty switch from one woman to the other shocked Lady Gregory...
...Brutal retaliation against the participants drew sympathy from those who had disapproved of their actions, setting in motion a chain of events that led in 1921 to the founding of the Irish Free State...
...Had he died in 1914, he would probably be classified as a colorful, innovative period poet— like his longtime friend Oliver St...
...Hedging his bets, he was simultaneously wooing a young Englishwoman, Geòrgie Hyde-Lees, the daughter of Shakespeare sister-in-law...
...Yeats had in mind both the violence done to Western civilization by the Great War and the bloody birth of the modern Irish nation...
...Literary contemporaries watched in helpless frustration as his frequently inaccurate anecdotes about them stood in for what had actually happened...
...Soon she made herself indispensable to his magical pursuits, his otherworldly communications, and his psychological well-being...
...Prominent in occult circles, he wrote extensively about mysticism at a time when the paranormal attracted popular attention...
...His personal life was in similar upheaval...
...But seeds were sown that would yield further bloodshed and hatred...
...The poems of this period use the Queen of Sheba as a symbol for the intelligent and cunning George ("Solomon to Sheba," "Solomon and the Witch" with its powerful suggestion of sexual magic...
...Nor was he invariably loyal...
...IOSTER DOES NOT neglect the dark side of his subject— the self-centered Yeats who makes us feel uneasy...
...The Republic did not come into being until 1946, seven years after Yeats' death...
...After another refusal from Iseult in 1917, he married the 24-year-old Hyde-Lees, whom Ezra Pound rechristened George...
...Visitors groaned at his "over-rehearsed storytelling...
...In 1923, Lady Gregory recorded in her journal that "Yeats talked of his long belief that the reign of democracy is over for the present, and in reaction there will be violent government from above, as now in Russia, and is beginning here...
...Auden was right—the talent far outshines the flaws...
...Foster believes she may have collaborated on some of the plays he wrote in their early years together...
...The poet's talented sisters, Lolly and Lily, endured the frustration of family members who find themselves sidelined by a more aggressive, self-promoting relative...
...In his preoccupation with himself, Yeats often ignored the sensibilities of others...
...Yeats grew to resent the qualities for which he had chosen his wife: her shrewdness about him and her ability to protect his health, giving him the time and stability to write...
...Yeats: A Life by R.F...
...In 1924, with uncharacteristic prescience the Nobel Committee awarded Yeats the literature prize at precisely the moment he proved himself a worthy recipient...
...In short order he produced some of his greatest poems, including the oft-quoted "The Second Coming...
...Foster, who has just published his second and concluding volume, subtitled The Arch-Poet (Oxford, 791 pp., $45.00...
...Not all Yeats' disquiet sprung from politics...
...By the next April, Ireland's Easter Uprising brought the first indication of a long-expected revolution...
...A shudder in the loins engenders there The broken wall, the burning roof and tower And Agamemnon dead...
...He founded literary movements and published influential reminiscences about the birth of modern Ireland, which he served as a senator...
...As Auden put it in a wry tribute, "You were silly like us...
...Many old Ascendancy families, like Yeats' and that ofhis close friend Lady Gregory, deplored what they viewed as wanton destruction—they wanted home rule, but distrusted violence...
...We three alone in modern times had brought All things down to that common test again, Dream of the noble and the beggarman...
...She wrote him that she felt certain the marriage would provide "a rebirth," but that "pain and travail" might be part of the package...
...However, unlike his former protégé, Ezra Pound, he did not blame Jews for the decline of Western civilization...
...When Yeats turned 50 on June 13,1915, his life was largely in transition...
...In part, interest in him may endure because his oeuvre includes much more than poems...
...From this conjunction will be born Helen, the cause of the Trojan War, and her sister Clytemnestra, who after the war murders her royal husband, the King of Mycenae and leader of the Greek Army: A sudden blow: the great wings beating still Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed By the darkwebs, her nape caught in his bill, He holds her helpless breast upon his breast...
...He was never 'educated,' and this has some disadvantages...
...Exhausted by her husband's demands and neglected emotionally, George Yeats turned into an alcoholic...
...The night before the wedding, the bridegroom had a mild breakdown, forcing him to postpone his honeymoon for a few days...
...Yeats did not quite overcome his obsession with the Gonnes...
...Eventually that led to an interest in eugenics and a flirtation with fascism...
...A novelist might describe his accidence, his incoherence...
...The poets who leave the most profound impact are not necessarily the perfectionists who manage every detail of their output...
...the poet] must not...
...And how can body, laid in that white rush, But feel the strange heart beating where it lies...
...An autodidact, his thinking was a jumble of startlingly original insights mixed with equally surprising ignorance and misunderstandings...
...Messages ostensibly from the spirit world enabled her to relieve his anxiety, assuring him he had done the right thing...
...Recently, such poets have tended to be associated with the cultural formation or rebirth of nations: Pablo Neruda and Anna Akhmatova come immediately to mind...
...Foster makes the best case yet for the seriousness of Yeats' involvement with magic, but he does not hesitate to point out how credulous the poet could be with obvious charlatans, nor how many foolish ideas he held on a number of subjects...
...His friend Gogarty commented with asperity, "Where philosophy is concerned, Yeats is as bad as a lady Theosophist or Christian Scientist, and like them he expects 'something to happen.' When he finds nothing occurred, he will be quite disappointed...
...Auden...
...As Gonne's beauty faded and her political shrillness increased, he transferred his attentions to her eldest child, Iseult...
...The Arch-Poet is no less outstanding...
...The events of the Great War (which killed Lady Gregory's only son), difficulties at the Abbey Theater, and the political unrest of the founding of the Irish Free State all affected him deeply...
...In his quirky way, Yeats justified turning his friends into epic characters in his own story and argued that his imperfections as a person were irrelevant to his art: "A poet writes always of his personal life: in his first work out of its tragedy, whatever it be, remorse, lost love, or mere loneliness: he never speaks directly as to someone at the breakfast table...
...His poems of love and political tumult, occult knowledge and human frivolity, sexual madness and restorative friendship still explain us to ourselves...
...For many years his writings turned repeatedly to the image of a man responsible for both a tame cat (George) and a wild hare (Iseult), and Maud's beauty and implacable spirit haunted his lyrics to the end...
...For one, it is apt to mislead those who take all this for granted and do not realize that he is finding out in his old age what we never cared for in our youth...
...His plays helped to establish the Abbey Theater's renown, and one of them, At the Hawk's Well, actually sparked a political uprising...
...She is referring, of course, to the famous sonnet "Leda and the Swan," with its shocking image of a young woman's rape by Zeus in the form of a giant bird...
...So does the monumental biography W.B...
...But once he made up his mind about something, Yeats could be ruthlessly practical...
...Now, involved with the daughter of one and married to the surrogate daughter of the other, he was stricken with guilt, fearing he had "betrayed three people"—Iseult, George and himself Like most self-absorbed people, Yeats believed his inner conflict was not apparent to others, especially his bride...
...He was henceforth hailed, in Gogarty's perceptive phrase, as "the ArchPoet"—symbol of the early 20th century and of Ireland, a magician with powers to see into the future and interpret the patterns of the present...
Vol. 86 • September 2003 • No. 5
