THE TERRIBLE BEAUTY OF W. B. YEATS

The late critic Richard Ellmann thought William Butler Yeats the most important poet to have written in English since Wordsworth. Ellmann also admitted that, had Yeats died in 1917 and not in 1939, “he would have been remembered as a remarkable minor poet who achieved a diction more powerful than that of his contemporaries but who, except in a handful of poems, did not have much to say with it.” So Oxford historian R. F. Foster has quite a task to fulfill in the first of a planned two-volume biography of Yeats, because Volume One only takes us up through 1914, before Yeats really hit his stride.

Foster would agree that Yeats’s major poems were still to come — but Yeats was more than a poet. He was the most ambitious and active member of modern Ireland’s first generation, and his role in founding Ireland’s cultural institutions arguably had consequences as profound as did his poetry. “Most biographic studies of WBY are principally about what he wrote,” Foster admits. “This one is principally about what he did.” It is a wholly defensible endeavor — and one that Foster pulls off with depth and panache.

At the heart of Foster’s biography is Yeats’s lifelong involvement with the occult. It gives shape to the whole narrative and has implications for Yeats’s politics and character. From his early enthusiasm for Irish folklore to the bizarre “system” of cycles he would write about in A Vision in 1925, Yeats was consumed with the idea that powerful forces beyond our comprehension were controlling the course of history. He went from talking about leprechauns and banshees in the period covered by this volume to the idea of a “rough beast” out of his own mystical imagining that was about to take over Western civilization.

Foster sees Yeats’s obsession with the occult as largely a source of metaphors for his poetry. If so, then this volume gives one a sense of the price that Yeats paid in a wanton search for poetic inspiration.

Born outside Dublin in 1865, a poor student who lacked the classics or math to get into Dublin’s Trinity College, Yeats arrived in London in the late 1880s and immediately sought out Madame Blavatsky, Europe’s leading clairvoyant, whose “theosophist” empire had been exposed as a fraud by a freelance investigator only months before. Yeats also joined a more radical supernaturalist group called the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and researched in cabalism, black magic, Rosicrucianism, and a variety of Eastern religions he only vaguely understood. Even in 1912, at 47, Yeats was consulting with Etta Wriedt, an American medium who introduced him to “Leo Africanus,” the shade of a 16th-century Spanish Arab explorer Yeats would come to see as his alter ego.

We are thus almost immediately at a central issue of Yeats’s poetry: Did he actually believe any of this nonsense? Yeats was asked the question constantly, of course, and succeeded in evading it by citing Socrates’ words in Plato’s Phaedrus: “I want to know not about this but about myself.” Why, then, was the system he wrote about in A Vision based on images his wife saw during bouts of automatic writing? What are we to think of a poet who loudly proclaims his disaffection with established religion and instead bases his metaphysics on quite literally the first thing that comes into his, or his wife’s, head?

That question is best answered by examining Yeats’s youthful subject matter: Ireland itself. “Mad Ireland hurt [him] into poetry,” Auden said, but in truth, the vein of poetry into which Ireland “hurt” Yeats was not a particularly rich one. His first major dramatic poem, The Wanderings of Oisin (1889), was “an azure-and-gold tonal arrangement of islands, caverns, basaltic castles, painted birds, milky smoke and grass-blades hung with dewdrops,” as Foster describes it. Yeats was clearly keen to write in the folkloric mode. He took an early interest in Irish tales during his childhood summers in County Sligo, but according to his sister Lily there was something bogus, too, in his notion that Sligo people believed in fairies and talked about them all the time. (“So they did, of course. To children.“)

Yeats assembled the Irish elements in his poems as if he were a professional folklorist, and exploited them as expertly as a mau-mauing modernday ethnic novelist. There was a ferocious canniness in his business practices at odds with the disarming rusticity of his poems. He was ruthless in dunning subscribers to his poems. And, in setting up a favorable review of his early novel John Sherman, Yeats wrote his confidante Katharine Tynan, “You might perhaps, if you think it is so, say that Sherman is an Irish type. I have an ambition to be taken as an Irish novelist not as an English or cosmopolitan one choosing Ireland as a background.”

Foster even sees “something curiously self-conscious in his immediate idealization of” Maud Gonne, the English political agitator who came to visit Yeats in 1889. Although Yeats would not have his first love affair until age 29, and would not marry until age 52, the “fin-de-siecle beauty,” as Foster calls Gonne, was the love of Yeats’s life. (Until about twenty years ago, this love was thought to have been unrequited, but Foster adds his voice to the growing consensus that the two slept together sometime in late 1908.) Yeat’s delicate and allusive love poems to Gonne are the writings of the period that stand up best against his later work, indeed against any love lyrics in the language. The emotions of love were something not even Yeats could completely smother under a contrived value system — although he tried.

Foster gives us a considerably more nuanced view of what it means to be a mystic, a holy man, a seer in modern times than Yeats biographers before him. He Shows that Yeats was as much a striver as a seeker — that the poet cannot be understood except as a man on the make, in pursuit of fame, love, and revelation. This is where Foster’s focus on “what he did” rather than “what he wrote” is most appropriate, for it is to that very side of his personality that 20th-century Ireland owes most of its literary institutions.

Yeats launched both the Irish Literary Society of London and the National Literary Society in Dublin, spending a good deal more time tending to the former than to the latter. But it was in 1904, when he established the Abbey Theatre, that Yeats not only changed the cultural face of the country but transformed himself into a genuine national leader.

In 1907 the Abbey produced John Millington Synge’s masterpiece The Playboy of the Western World. It caused a sensation, in part because of descriptions of women that were considered pornographic. Riots broke out on opening night. Yeats returned from a lecture tour to announce that “so far as he could see the people who formed the opposition had no books in their houses.”

The rioters were Catholic; Yeats was a Protestant. What Catholic nationalists saw as a striving for common values and a fear of the wages of immorality, the Protestant Yeats saw as mob psychology and rank philistinism. The Playboy conflict drew Yeats into real politics and away from the romantic pose of his early folkloric nationalism. The spiritual raison d’etre of the modern Irish state — Irish Catholic fears both of persecution and the condescension to which Yeats was given — left him in the uncomfortable position of professing Irish nationalism while being wholly out of sympathy with the myths that gave rise to it. “This endless war with Irish stupidity,” he wrote to Tynan, “gets on my nerves.” In essence, Yeats was seeking to carve out a place for himself and other Protestants in a country that no longer particularly wanted them.

What is romantic when applied to leprechauns is dangerous when applied to religious and ethnic strife, and Yeats’s mystical flights led him to a view of history that didn’t correspond to anything he thought he was writing about, and which was racist to the extent that it did. Yeats supported Ireland’s abortive “Blue Shirt” movement of 1933, and critics have long believed that his mystical nationalism drew him close to fascism. As Conor Cruise O’Brien has put it, “Yeats the man was as near to being a Fascist as his situation and the conditions of his own country permitted.” Exhibit A for this claim is Yeats’s poem of the early 1930s “Blood and the Moon”:
 
Blessed be this place,
More blessed still the tower;
A bloody, arrogant power
Rose out of the race . . .

But the sentiment was already present even in such poems as his 1922 “The Fisherman”:
 
All day I’d looked in the face
What I had hoped ‘twould be
To write for my own race
And the reality . . .

Had this been written by a German, it would make us shudder. But “The Fisherman” doesn’t because it is such a strange kind of poem: racial bragging that relies on the continued subjection and fecklessness of the race in question. Yeats chose to identify himself with the Irish peasantry in order to hold a moral high ground — the supposed high ground of the Irish nationalist victim — that would otherwise be indefensible. Which is merely another way of saying that Yeats was the first poet of identity politics.

Three years after Yeats’s death, the critic Randall Jarrell wrote: “When people who admire Yeats’s poetry ridicule or deplore his ‘crazy system,’ they do not realize that it was the system which enabled him to produce the poetry. . . . However wrong that system is for you and me, it was magnificently right for Yeats: it made his last poetry the fulfillment of his whole life, it made him write about our times as no other poet has.”

Jarrell is right that Yeats’s “crazy” system was “magnificently right” for him, and this is as true of Yeats’s political poems as it is of his mystical ones. He turned out poetry of a raw, new beauty, and Ellmann’s estimation of Yeats as the most important poet since Wordsworth is a fair one. But does it matter whether the systems that spawned Yeats’s poetry were violent or dishonest, or whether he believed in any of them at all?

Yeats used to say that a poet should be able “to say he believes in marriage in the morning, and that he does not in the evening.” To the extent that he is merely guarding himself against those who would read a poem as if it were a political manifesto, that view deserves to be defended. But it can’t be ignored that Yeats’s poetic vision was dangerously nihilistic in some respects, leading him into a cul-de-sac of fascism and paganism. He was one of many poets of the time — Pound, Rilke, and Eliot among them — who wound up fashioning beautiful poetry at the expense of poetry itself.

Sometimes he made his poetry dependent on an ideology that would make it too hot for future generations of poets to handle; sometimes he contrived a poetic voice that (as in much of the work Foster focuses on in this first volume) seems almost willfully fraudulent. Either way, poetry, always a fragile art, was unlikely to long survive having such additional burdens placed on it.

As, indeed, it has not.

Christopher Caldwell is senior writer at THE WEEKLY STANDARD.