Timm is so little good criticism of Yeats and his
poetry that a special number of Irish Writing, devoted to him is a worthy enterprise. tlf course, the essays it contains are a little uneven. Donald Davie's article on Yeats and Berkeley is interesting, showing, as it does, how far ahead he was of the philosophical inter- pretations of his day, and also how the study of Berkeley might have reinforced his anti- Romanticism. Around the middle poems Hugh Kenner produces a complex and infuriatingly obscurely written piece of interpretation, while for text there is a bit of an unpublished and unfinished novel, The Speckled Bird. which Yeats was writing between 1896 and 1900. On the other hand, it is a pity that Valentine Iremonger should merely have been weakly paradoxical about the plays. There are many things still to say about Yeats and the drama, and when Mr. Iremonger claims that Yeats had no 'interest whatsoever at any time in the theatre as we know it,' he is avoiding so many issues that it would be a waste of space to list them. This gap in the symposium is the more noticeable in view of the level of com- petence of the other articles.
ANTHONY HARTLEY
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