BOOKS Cast a Cold Eye
By ANTHONY BURGESS rTHREE days before this year's Joyce junket- ' ings at Sandycove, ritual Steinach opera-
tions ought to be performed in Sligo, Howth, Bedford Park and Byzantium. On June 13, 1865, William Butler Yeats was born. Per- haps none of the books I have before me* may be called celebratory, but they seem to pre- suppose the public statue, the plaque, and the corporation drinking-fountain. With the general acceptance of Yeats's greatness a lot of life has gone out of Yeats criticism: the last really stimulating book about him was, 1 think, Profes- sor Kermode's Romantic Image. Professor Engel- berg has turned Yeats into a Goethe and, with a thoroughness appropriately Teutonic, picks away at a poet's untrustworthy aesthetic philo- sophy. Professor Jeffares gives us a selection of Yeats's criticism, so that we can read about the 'coarse' language of Lady Chatterley's Lover being 'ancient, humble and terrible' and renew our referred shame at the Introduction to the Oxford Book of Modern Verse. Professor Ure's little handbook is merely useful and sensible, which is saying a lot, and, after the Engelbergian tortuosities, it is rather reassuring. Talking about the 'Byzantium' poems, he says: 'The Yeatsian esthetic, like the Yeatsian eschatology, resolves into a final metaphor that reconciles all metaphors: I hail the superhuman;
I call it death-in-life and life-in-death.' This, I think, absolves us from worrying too
much about Yeats's system of thought. His doc- trines, when expressed in metaphysical or theosophical terms, look profound enough1 especi- ally when they end up, as they always do, in mystical paradoxes. Professor Ure is, rightly I think, more concerned with an ceuvre than a system. If, like his, our interest is in the poems and the plays, we shall find that Yeats's content resolves into the common stock of all poets—the opposition of the moving river to the static stone, the agony of transience, the need to build some- thing on Which to rejoice.
Joyce was luckier than Yeats. He had been
taught Aquinas and Aristotle (two allomorphs of the rock in the 'Scylla and Charybdis' of Ulysses) and was able to forge a sufficient esthetic out of them. Yeats, like AE, though not so fatuously, stood for the whirlpool, Madame Blavatsky and the yogibogeybox. The misty mysticism was not Yeats's fault. An Anglo-Irish agnostic, he was aware of Ireland's destiny and the poet's part in persuading the poor old woman to see herself as a radiant young bride. But he had been caught up in English fin de sickle romanticism, which was more about death than re-birth. The language of the Cheshire Cheese poets was apt for the expression of vague desires and vaguer regrets, and it was, at first, the only language that Yeats had. Myth and image were another matter. The English poets * THE VAST DESIGN—PATTERNS IN W. B. YEATS'S /Ent-It:Tic. By Edward Engelberg. (University of Toronto and O.U.P., 48s.) W. B. YEATS--SELECTED CRITICISM. Edited with introduction and notes by A. Norman Jcffares. 8s. 6d.)
YEATS. By Peter Ure. (Oliver and Boyd, 5s.)
had no myths, except those of Pre-Raphaelite tapestry, and their imagery was more decorative than functional. Ireland had plenty of myths, so that was all right. But to create a positive life- enhancing poetry out of the materials of roman- ticism, Yeats had to make his imagery mean something. This meant going in for symbolism, a symbol being a meaningful image, but—as with William Blake—symbols ought to derive from a philosophical system, psychological archetypes not yet being in fashion. Yeats joined the Order of the Golden Dawn in the Nineties, and he found his symbols in Theosophy and Rosicrucian- ism (Maud Gonne as mystical rose; Mrs. Yeats being dictated to by the 'Unknown Instructors').
Yeats was not long in founding his own system, in which history and human personality conform to the twenty-eight phases of the moon, and gyres or spirals represent the self-destroying and self-renewing processes of civilisation. The Un- known Instructors said: 'We have come to give you metaphors for poetry'—the true object of the astral exercise. What makes Yeats a greater poet than Blake is the fact that his metaphors, though derived from a system, make powerful poetic sense even when we know nothing about that system. Last-night Prom audiences aspire to building Jerusalem in England's green and pleasant land, but they miss the Blakian inten- tion if they don't know that Jerusalem means the liberation of the senses and the imagination or that the dark Satanic mills are not factories but churches. But do we really need educating about 'turning and turning in the widening gyre' or 'Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre' or 'a vast image out of Aninza Mundi' before \we can get the authentic poetic shudder? Yeats's achievement was not a system but an astonish- ing rhetoric or grandiloquence. To try to work out the secrets ,of his verbal magic (impossible, of course) should be the true task of the Yeats scholars.
One Yeats strength seems to derive, by a suit- ably poetic paradox, from that very pre- occupation with symbols. The symbols would shoot away from the poem back to their extra- poetic references if they were not hammered into the verse with powerful muscles. This meant working away at syntax, something on which the fin de siecle men were weak. Eventually the muffling of rhymes was to indicate the true provenance of the poetic structure—in the syntax, not in an imposed verse-form. This, of course, is only a part of it. Professor Engelberg reminds us of the 'resolution of antinomies,' the attempt to achieve a moment of equipoise between oppos- ing forces—the expansive epic and the lyric con- traction, the stony solidity of art and the river- flux of life itself. Yeats's highly personal rhetoric can move, without a single bar of modulation, from ordinary flux-stuff like 'fish, flesh and fowl' or 'lock, stock and barrel' or what the nuns teach the schoolchildren to the big Byzantine ' sublimities.
I suppose ultimately the authority derives from the rhythm, which means the syntax—not the accumulation of lines to fill a stanza, but the sense of a thought-out statement. There is no reasoned rhetoric left in England, neither ser-
mons nor anything political that is not demagogic, but the tone of Yeats in his greatest period fits well into the oratorical needs of a word-conscious emergent nation. One may add that the range of Yeats's imagery and vocabulary alike is appro- priate to a society not yet fully industrialised. The flux of life has little to do with the damp souls of housemaids or the smell of steaks in passageways, but it has everything to do with the pastoral, with pigs and scarecrows and fiddlers —symbols of vague nostalgia only in the English poets of the same period. soon entirely inad- missible in 'serious' verse.
Yeats schooled himself out of books, but he is not a 'literary' poet like T. S. Eliot. When Swift and Burke and Goldsmith are mentioned, it is as great Irish figures to be remembered and revered. Yeats may translate Swift's epitaph into English or write a fine play about invoking the spirit of Swift, but his work owes nothing to Swift, or to anyone else.. When Yeats's images are 'literary' they draw, conventionally but wonderfully, on such classical props as Leda and the Seven Sleepers; they do not, like those of Eliot, invoke other writers whom the poet has made part of himself. Eliot is a great critic, but his achievement in criticism is not merely parallel to his achievement in verse—one is an aspect of the other. Eliot thus belongs to a literary tradi- tion, while Yeats is just himself. Despite his propaganda on behalf of the Irish novelists and playwrights, Yeats does not really encourage the world to read any work but his own.
Lonely, idiosyncratic, fantastically eclectic, any esthetic he propounds makes sense only in rela- tion to his own practice. He cannot be trusted when he delivers judgment on other writers, and one of the most horrible mistakes of the age was to place the compilation of the Oxford Book of Modern Verse in his hands. '1 have re- jected these poems for the same reason cleat made Arnold withdraw his Empedocles on Etna from circulation; passive suffering is not a theme for poetry. In all the great tragedies, tragedy is a joy to the man who dies; in Greece the tragic chorus danced.' Thus Yeats justifies his omission of the poets of the Great War, including Wilfred Owen. Eliot is 'a satirist rather than poet.' Among the really big names are W. J. Turner and Dorothy Wellesley. Robert Bridges is capable of mag- nificence. William Watson is, at his best, nobly eloquent. It is only fair to state that Yeats did his anthologising two years after undergoing the Steinach rejuvenation operation. It was at this time that I first heard him, almost every week, it seemed, on the radio, harsh and enthusiastic about the reciting of poetry to music, music being—to him who had no ear—a fife and a drum. In those last years he seemed to have all his own way.
We ought not to let him have all his own way now, even in this year of his centenary. The greatest poet since Hopkins, a very considerable playwright, he is dangerous when he writes prose and even more dangerous when scholars start to take his proSe too seriously. But, in 1965, we would do well to take his verse very seriously indeed, which means not poring over it in the study, but declaiming it to the waves and over pints of draught Guinness: When Pearse summoned Cuchulain to his side, What stalked through the Post Office? What in- tellect, What calculation, number, measurement, replied? We Irish, born into that ancient sect But thrown upon the filthy modern tide And by its formless spawning fury wrecked, Climb to our proper dark, that we may trace The lineaments of a plummet-measured face.
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