William Butler Yeats
A Brief Introduction
Biography
• [1865-1939] Poet, playwright, essayist, memoirist, correspondent, short fiction
writer, collector of folklore, occultist and magician… founder of groups and
organizations [“manager of men”]: The Abbey Theater, (leader of) Irish literary
revival, The Rhymers’ Club, Dublin branch of Order of Golden Dawn… Nobel
Laureate, Irish Senator, National Poet… He virtually invented Modern Irish
Literature, was crucial to building the Irish Nation, was one of the inventors of
High Modernism… as Derek Mahon says: “Among the countours of modern Irish
poetry the work of Yeats is Everest.” As a massive presence in world literature,
WBY is not an easy example.
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Yeats was born in Dublin to John Butler Yeats, a portrait painter whose own
father was a Church of Ireland clergyman. His mother, Susan Pollexfen, came
from a well-off family in Sligo, in the West of Ireland. His childhood was spent in
“genteel poverty” in London and Dublin, while he spent many summers with his
grandparents in Sligo.
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1867-72: the Yeats’s lived in London; 1872-1874 they were in Sligo; 1874-1881
they were in London; 1881 they were back in Dublin. Yeats went to high school
in Dublin from 1881-3. In 1884, he entered Art School in Dublin.
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Childhood and Adolescence: Yeats learned much about poetry and painting from
his father as well as encountering leading figures of the day like the old Fenian
leader John O’Leary, who introduced him to translations of Irish language poetry.
Reading translations of stories and myths and poems, Yeats decides as a young
man to give these legends and myths a new literary expression by writing poetry
about Irish places and prose stories based upon the tales and supernatural beliefs
of the people he encountered in Sligo. The aim was to recreate the largely
forgotten intellectual and cultural heritage of Ireland.
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STYLE / POLITICS: [circa 1885] Yeats described his early dream of a
nationalism that would bring together the political nerve and fervor of Catholic
Ireland with “the good taste, the household courtesy and decency” of AngloIreland, and his thought that “we might bring the halves together if we had a
national literature that made Ireland beautiful in the memory, and yet had been
freed from provincialism by an exacting criticism, an European pose.” He gave
much thought to a fit style for oratory, but also for prose and verse. He argued
with his father, who favored declamation and “drama”: “We should write out our
own thoughts in as nearly as possible the language we thought them in, as though
in a letter to an intimate friend.” He worked hard at this simplifying discipline but
found results slow to come, particularly in his poetry: “when I re-read those early
poems which gave me so much trouble, I find little but romantic convention,
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unconscious drama. It is so many years before one can believe enough in what
one feels even to know what the feeling is.”
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At the same time as he devoted himself to Irish mythology and supernatural folk
stories, he grew interested in Indian thought and mysticism and presided over the
first Theosophical Society in Dublin, the Dublin Hermetic Society. NB: Yeats
never attended University. The world of Theosophy was his university, thus
setting him at odds intellectually from the main currents of his day and ensuring
that his view of the world would be distinct.
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MYSTICISM: The mystical side of Yeats’s thought also took a new turn in 1886
when a friend in Dublin took him to his first spiritualist séance. He proved a
frighteningly apt subject: “my whole body moved like a suddenly unrolled watchspring, and I was thrown backward on the wall,” and his hand banged the table
with such violence that he broke the table. In his terror he tried to pray but could
think only of the first lines of Paradise Lost: “Of Man's first disobedience and the
fruit / Of that forbidden tree...” Did those spirits come from within or without? It
was years before he dared again to tempt them so directly, though when he
recovered his nerve he kept it till the end.
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1886 his first poems published.
1887 in London
1888 launched his first collections of Irish folk stories. This year he composed
“The Lake Isle of Innisfree”.
1889 published long poem “The Wanderings of Oisin” and met “the troubling of
his life,” Maud Gonne, a famously beautiful, young, independently wealthy,
revolutionary Irish nationalist. Yeats fell in love—hopelessly. She would be the
central inspiration and source of the greatest suffering in his life. Yeats would
propose marriage in 1891 and then again many times over the years being brutally
rebuffed each time—the final time in 1917. And yet they maintained a remarkable
friendship and correspondence across the years. Many love poems were written in
her honor—or shadow.
1890 Yeats joins the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, a Rosicrucian order.
He was interested in Buddhism, magic, spiritualism, astrology, Cabbala. He also
began an in-depth study of William Blake, editing his poems for a 3-volume
edition published in 1893.
1892 Yeats wrote The Countess Cathleen, a play about a woman who sells her
soul for gold so as to feed the starving during the Irish Famine. Her gesture of
self-sacrifice for her nation wins back her soul which is assumed into heaven. The
play sparked fierce nationalist criticism as it represented an Irish woman selling
her soul—a sin in the eyes of the Catholic Church.
1890’s: with the death of the Irish independence leader, Charles Stewart Parnell in
1891, Yeats saw the period as one of political rebuilding, and so he began
planning [1891] a new Irish Literary Society in London always looking for
openings to foment a new Irish Cultural Revival as well.
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1892 Yeats founded the National Literary Society in Dublin—a vital organization
that was as important for founding of an independent state as work of nationalist
politicians because not only did this society foster the Literary Revival, but it
also laid groundwork for the revival of the Irish language by leading to the
formation of the Gaelic League in 1893.
1893 Yeats publishes The Celtic Twilight, a book of accounts, stories, poems
taken from his studies of folklore. The title lent its name to the kind of poetry
being written already in imitation of Yeats: poetry whose tone was romantic,
misty, dreamy and melancholic.
1894 Yeats meets Lady Augusta Gregory in London and in 1896 visits her
country estate at Coole park in Co. Galway. She becomes one of his staunchest
patrons, friends, allies especially in the establishment of the Abbey Theater and
the promotion of an Irish Literary Revival.
1895 Yeats leaves home to live on his own in Dublin. Through Maud Gonne,
Yeats joins the Irish Republican Brotherhood, a secret revolutionary nationalist
organization, but he gradually grows disillusioned with their tactics though not
their aims. He withdraws in 1900.
1898 Yeats and Gonne form a “spiritual marriage” which involved shared
visionary experiences.
1899 The Wind Among the Reeds was published. This is the high point of Yeats’s
early esoteric, symbolic poetry.
1902 Cathleen Ni Houlihan is produced with Maud Gonne in the lead: this is a
story of the 1798 rebellion and a woman who, as an embodiment of Ireland, calls
on young men to leave their families and wives to follow her into battle.
1903 Maud Gonne marries a soldier John MacBride, wounding Yeats deeply,
though the actual marriage breaks up in 1904.
The first decade of the century finds Yeats largely consumed with play-writing
and producing as the Director of the Abbey Theater.
His poems in The Green Helmet [1910] and Responsibilities [1914] express
increasing disillusion and bitterness regarding public affairs, the political
infighting amongst political nationalists, the anti-Protestant rhetoric of Catholic
Nationalists, and members of Gaelic League. Yeats also further increases his
involvement with Spiritualism and seances and automatic writing. He is also
immersed in essay writing and deep reading.
1907 Yeats goes to Italy with Lady Gregory and begins to consider how
aristocratic patronage has been vital to the arts.
1913 Ezra Pound becomes Yeats’s secretary, further introducing Yeats to as
younger generation of writers and the immediate currents of modernist thought.
Pound introduced him to Japanese Noh drama and this led to Yeats’s own
imitations of Noh plays in At the Hawk’s Well (1917).
The 1916 Easter Rising: 1800 members of Irish Volunteers and other nationalist
groups occupy the General Post Office [GPO] and other buildings. Patrick Pearse
reads a proclamation establishing the Provisional Government of the Irish
Republic. The hope was that the Irish people would rise up in support of the
rebels. This didn’t happen and the British Army after different skirmishes brings a
gunboat up the river Liffey and fires on the GPO and surrounding buildings. The
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rebel leaders surrender after 500 people are killed and 2500 are wounded, mostly
civilians. 90 prisoners were sentenced to death in secret court martials, but only
15 were actually executed by firing squad between May 3 and May 12.
Executions were supposed to be a war-time punishment and so were drawn out to
humiliate and castigate. This only enraged the populace and sowed seeds for the
1919 rebellion. The leaders were subsequently viewed as having been Sacrificed /
having Sacrificed themselves for the Irish Nation…
Yeats’s responses are poetic chiefly: contained in the image of “terrible beauty is
born,” which honors / elegizes the martyred leaders.
Of the executed were John McBride, former husband of Maud Gonne. Yeats goes
to Gonne in Normandy in spring of 1916 to comfort her—and to propose to her!
She turns him down. He then proposed to her daughter Iseult [b. 1894]. Iseult’s
father was a French journalist Gonne had an affair with. Gonne, at this time, is
supporting the British war effort by volunteering in a medical capacity behind the
lines. And yet, very little of World War I enters Yeats’s writing or overt thought.
1917 Yeats buys a Norman Tower in Galway and names it Thoor Ballylee. Yeats
returns to Normandy and delivers an ultimatum to Gonne regarding marriage and
is refused. He returns to Ireland and proposes to Georgie Hyde Lees, who he had
met in 1911. She was 26; he was 52. They married on October 20, 1917. Key
Date.
During the honeymoon, Georgie begins automatic writing and this leads Yeats to
a new sense of human history and personality and reawakens his poetry to a new
energy.
Had Yeats died before this marriage, his poetry would be recognized as beautiful
if minor.
Marriage catapults Yeats into his major and lasting achievements.
The Wild Swans at Coole is published in 1917.
1918 Per Amica Silentia Lunae is published.
1919 Daughter Anne is born.
1921 Son Michael is born; Michael Robartes and the Dancer is published.
1922 Yeats becomes Senator of the new Irish Free State.
1923 Yeats is awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.
1925 A Vision is published.
1928 The Tower is published.
1933 The Winding Stair is published.
1936 The Oxford Book of Modern Verse is published.
1938 New Poems is published.
1939 Yeats dies on January 29. Last Poems is published posthumously.
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GENERAL
• In the history of Irish writing in English, Yeats is a culmination and origin.
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He is a founder of modern Irish literature. Under his creative authority and
shadow, a poetic tradition has established itself and thrived.
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As an inheritor, Yeats synthesized the work and aspiration of various Irish 19th
century writers. Yeats sought to redress the problem of a lack of native literary
tradition.
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As site of the crystalization of a poetic tradition, he drew from a deep past as well
as the 19th century. Consider how writers need to have a tradition both to write
within and against. Because of history, Ireland’s literary tradition was
discontinuous, full of ruptures, clouded by absences.
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Yeats’s singular determination across his career involved a “service to a new,
imagined Ireland” in spite of the demeaned realities. He sought to transform a
“mob” to a “people” (Heaney 784).
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Seamus Heaney says: “Yeats’s radical devotion to the potential and otherness of a
specifically Irish reality should never be underestimated… Yeats intended to open
and complicate the meaning of Irishness” by almost any means necessary [poetic,
political, theatrical, mystical]. Thus, “his imagined Ireland represented not only a
regenerative breakaway from the imperium of Britain but also from the hegemony
of Christianity” (785). Like Joyce, Yeats sought his own form of “spiritual
liberation of [his] country.” Thus, “the search for a style that would have
universal command,” and the aim to achieve a note or sound as true, native, real
“as the myths and symbols of traditional systems of belief” (786).
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Yeats was a singular, solitary, combative poet and personality, who sought and
often achieved a kind of stylistic perfection, demonstrating a remarkable
“command of the strategies of English verse” coupled with “the off-center
viewpoint he deliberately maintained” through his esoteric involvements.
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The occult was as formative for Yeats as the whole system of Christian belief,
culture, and education was for Joyce. “Once this recognition is made, the courage
of Yeats’s creative undertaking and the far-fetched elaboration of this oeuvre
stand forth in all their self-born splendor. His endeavor was not only to create an
Irish literature cognate with other movements of withdrawal from the imperial,
empirical sway of Britain; it was also an attempt to launch upon the world a
vision of reality that possessed no surer basis than the ground of his own
imagining” (emphasis added, 787).
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On his responses to history, his living through change, Heaney writes: “to all
these crises Yeats responded within his own idiom, at his own pace. He did record
direct responses to some events in Ireland, most notably in his poem ‘Easter
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1916’, but generally the poems did not arise from the immediate stimulus of
happenings or form a desire to set down the story. They arose, rather, from the
resonance that the happenings produced within his consciousness and from the
mediated meanings they engendered there… his imagination did not function like
an obedient seismograph. Indeed, the whole force of his thought worked against
those philosophies which regarded the mind’s activity as something determined
by circumstance and which consequently limited its possibilities to empirical
discovery” (emphasis added, 787).
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On self-examination and analysis of the development of his own thought: Heaney
observes that “brought him more and more to the conclusion that conflict was the
inescapable condition of being human” (788). His, are poems of conflict grounded
in antitheses: sublimity and rag and bone shop of heart!
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YEATS AND EASTER 1916
Historical Context
1913-1914
• Dublin Lockout: 20,000 laborers are on strike or locked out in Dublin. James
Connolly helped organize the various Dublin Trade unions involved in the strike.
Largest labor strike in Ireland up to this point. Sign of unrest.
1914
• Home Rule bill passes in British Parliament after many failed attempts across 19th
and 20th Centuries. Home Rule suspended as soon as approved because of WWI.
Home Rule means in essence a return to status quo Prior to Act of Union in 1800:
the establishment of an Irish Parliament to govern the island, with final decisions
made in London.
The Easter Rising of 1916
• Planned by members of the secret militant society, The Irish Republican
Brotherhood, precursor to the Irish Republican Army.
• The plan: a general uprising throughout Dublin and the major population centers
in the rest of the country.
• Militarily this was NOT a well organized operation.
• Days before the Easter 1916, a German boat loaded with guns for the rebels was
taken by the English and the rising in countryside was called off. Dublin leaders
disagreed and kept to the original plan. AIM: Inspire Future Republican
Militancy.
• April 24 (Easter Monday) 1200 men and women storm the General Post Office
and other notable points around Dublin.
• Padraic Pearse (poet/writer) composed and read the Proclamation of the New
Republic. Invoking Irish mythology and history (confused the two) in the
language of religious martyrdom and political sacrifice (like English press), he
opens: “In the name of God and the dead generations from which she receives her
old tradition of nationhood, Ireland, through us, summons her children to her flag
and strikes for her freedom.”
• Fighting continues from April 24-29. Gunboat Helga brought in to level much of
central Dublin to get a clear shot at the GPO. Dead: 64 insurgents, 132 British
soldiers, 230 civilians.
• British Response: 2000 detainees, 90 sentenced to death, 15 executed from May 3
to May 12. The aim was to teach the Irish a lesson in wartime.
Today
• Statue of Cuchulain stands in GPO. [See Yeats’s “The Statues”]
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W. B. Yeats
On “Easter 1916”
from “7, Middagh Street”
by Paul Muldoon
And were Yeats living at this hour
it should be in some ruined tower
not malachited Ballylee
where he paid out to those below
one gilt-edged scroll from his pencil
as though he were part-Rapunzel
and partly Delphic oracle.
As for his crass, rhetorical
posturing, ‘Did that play of mine
send out certain men (certain men?)
the English shot. . . ?’
the answer is ‘Certainly not’.
If Yeats had saved his pencil-lead
would certain men have stayed in bed?
For history’s a twisted root
with art its small translucent fruit
and never the other way round.
The roots by which we were once bound
are severed here, in any case,
and we are all now dispossessed;
prince, poet, construction worker,
salesman, soda fountain jerker—
all equally isolated.
Each loads flour, sugar and salted
beef into a covered wagon
and strikes out for his Oregon,
each straining for the ghostly axe
of a huge, blond-haired lumberjack.
“The Mother”
by Padraic Pearse
I do not grudge them: Lord, I do not grudge
My two strong sons that I have seen go out
To break their strength and die, they and a few,
In bloody protest for a glorious thing,
They shall be spoken of among their people,
The generations shall remember them,
And call them blessed;
But I will speak their names to my own heart
In the long nights;
The little names that were familiar once
Round my dead hearth.
Lord, thou art hard on mothers:
We suffer in their coming and their going;
And tho’ I grudge them not, I weary, weary
Of the long sorrow—And yet I have my joy:
My sons were faithful, and they fought.
Other Easter Rising references in Yeats:
“Sixteen Dead Men”
“The Rose Tree”
“On a Political Prisoner”
“The Statues”
“Man and the Echo”
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Yeats to Lady Gregory on his encounter with
Pearse at a speaking engagement at the Trinity
College Gaelic Society, November 17, 1914:
He writes: “I got in a great many home truths
not in the final draft of my speech and amused
myself by making them cheer for Nietsche [sic].
They applauded wildly when the chairman said
(he was thinking of Pearse) a lot of Irishmen
seemed to be possessed with the idea of dying
for their country (he meant it was an hysterical
emotion). I got him to ask all those who wanted
to die for their country to hold their hands up.
One man did amidst laughter, Pearse made a
long monotonous speech about Emmett and
Wolfe Tone. I hear that he once said to his
school ‘I dreamed last night that I saw one of my
boys going to be hanged. he looked very happy”
(525).
The Symbolist Movement: To Make the Invisible Visible
Symbolism is always confusing because we use the word to refer to the study of symbols or iconography in art works, but it also refers to a specific movement. Usually
grouped with the other post-impressionist movements, symbolism emerged at just about the same time as impressionism, so it is not entirely accurate to call it "post"
impressionist. Nonetheless, much of the symbolist movement (at least in the visual arts) does take shape as a response to impressionism. In particular, symbolism
includes the following:
a rejection of positivism and materialism as ways of knowing the world;
a rejection of impressionism as an art which makes the objective world subjective;
a rejection of bourgeois moral decadence
The last one is not directly a rejection of impressionism as a style, but recall that the impressionists (Renoir, in particular) made the bourgeois life style central to their
art. But the most crucial difference between impressionism and symbolism lies in where the artist finds the origin of the work of art. The starting point of both realism
and impressionism was nature or the real world (contemporary life); the starting point of symbolism is the inner vision of the artist. But consider the fact that this inner
vision might come from literature and mythology. Symbolism was also a literary movement and many of the artists associated with symbolism used literature as their
starting point, without making break-throughs in style. This is problematic for the study of art history -- although it is a modern movement, many historians ignore
symbolism when they discuss modernism precisely because the formal qualitites of the style do not seem to be modern.
To illustrate the different starting points, we might use the following comparison. Manet's painting of the Bar at the Folies-Bergere (an impressionist painting) begins
with a clear visual reference to a place that was familiar to many Parisians. The painting is not simply a description or record of that setting because Manet uses the
image to make a statement about modern life, about the world of spectacle and consumerism, and about the alienation of the human being in this modern world of
spectacle. In contrast, Jacek Malczewski's painting, Vicious Cycle, does not appear to originate in an image of the real world so much as an internal, emotional response
to feelings of being powerless. Manet's style is certainly the more radical of the two. Malczewski's painting of an internal experience immediately seems to be the more
unusual subject matter, yet we can identify baroque and late Renaissance stylistic precedents for Malczewski and we also know that Manet's painting is not just an
attempt to describe or represent a restaurant. Manet strives to unite painting technique with the subject; Malczewski does not. But the contribution of artists like
Malczewski to modernism is important since it points to an expanding base of sources for the artistic vision.
Manet: Bar at the Folies-Bergere, 1881-2
Jacek Malczewski: Vicious Cycle, 1895-7
To repeat: symbolism began as a literary movement, and for some of the symbolist painters, the "interior" source of the artist's vision was often found in mythology and
literature. Nonetheless, the artist rarely "illustrated" the literary source. Instead, he (or she -- although there are very few symbolist artists who were female) used the
myth or poem in much the same way that a dream might be the inspiration for a painting. Chapter one includes a chart which begins to describe a distinction between
transparent and mediated realism. In symbolism, the paintings which appear to be little more than illustrations of a myth are transparent: the artist's emphasis is on the
content and not the technique. These paintings and art works relate to a form of modernism which is modern because of the image. Gustave Moreau, an older artist with
connections to the Romantic movement, almost always chose mythological subject matter for his paintings. He consistently models this more transparent style of
symbolism and makes wide-ranging use of image sources. In constrast, The Gates of Hell, Rodin's bronze doors, is based on a literary source but does not illustrate that
subject. Rodin not only breaks with the academic tradition in sculpture; his use of Dante is highly personalized and almost evades the narrative of the book. His
symbolism is therefore mediated: using technique to express the subject.
Rodin: Gates of Hell (close up of part of
the top half), 1880-1917
Gustave Moreau: Galatea, 1880-1
Although symbolist art is not united by a common visual style, because most of the symbolists were active in the last quarter of the 19th century, the movement does
share certain social and political critiques and centralizes certain images as part of this critique. Symbolism was a response to a belief in 3 profound losses or
�humiliations� as Freud eventually put it:
a cosmological humiliation: science had demonstrated that the earth (and therefore man) is no longer the center of the universe
a biological humiliation: evolution theory disrupted the belief that man was created in the image of god
a psychological humiliation: the unconscious contained the ego; therefore, the psychology of the human being was largely an unknown quantity.
The symbolists proposed art as the means for healing these humiliations, and to a great degree, their "solutions" were based on a belief that ancient myths offered
alternative beliefs to these "humiliations." The symbolists, much as the surrealists do in the twentieth century, turned to mythology in part because they believed that
ancient myths were still alive in primitive cultures. Turning to mythology was therefore a way to reconnect with the lost innocence of culture before the advent of
bourgeois civilization and the age of rationalism.
The overriding social goal of the symbolists was the replacement of the corrupt and decadent bourgeois life style at the end of the century with a more spiritual, mystical
and universal idealism. Because this goal was linked with spirituality (in the minds of the symbolists), the symbolist iconography contained various images of the artist
as a visionary -- someone who could look inside himself in order to see the world of ideas. We find numerous self-portraits, often giving special emphasis to the eyes
although this was certainly not the only way of communicating the idea of a visionary. Gauguin's approach, for example, was somewhat different. In "Les Miserables,"
he offers himself (in his own words) �as a portrait of all the victims of society.� His vision of the artist as an outcast who must suffer and exist free of the shackles of
society contrasts with Van Gogh's vision of the artist as a zen-like monk with an aura of spirituality emanating from his head and expressed in the radiating lines of the
brush work.
Images of the Artist as Visionary, Genius, and Madman
Gauguin: "Les Miserables" (1888)
Van Gogh: Self-Portrait dedicated to Paul
Gauguin, 1888
Arnold Böcklin: Self-Portrait with Death Playing the
Violin, 1872
Symbolism and the "woman question"
One of the things we associate with the symbolist movement is the creation of new iconic images. Women were an important part of the symbolist iconography although
the female image, not surprisingly, was not easy to decipher. Was she a threat or the object of desire? This question was largely the result of another "question" -- the
issue of women or the "new woman." Conservative and radical women�s movements were in place by the 1880s, and women were making inroads into labor markets
and the attainment of greater rights in marriage and divorce. There was a "new woman" in France, in England, in the U.S., and probably elsewhere at this time, and the
problem with the new woman was that she didn't want to stay home.
Certain qualities associated with the feminine were seen as desirable qualities by some male artists: intuition, spirituality, extreme sensitivity and subjectivity, selfsacrifice for the greater good. Yet the feminine was also associated with undesirable qualities: she was too emotional, she was seductive and like Delilah, she could rob
the male of his potency and destroy society. Images of women might depicting the female as a dangerous person who would destroy the male artist and society or show
her as an innocent, pre-sexual source of hope and compassion. The pure female body, emptied of desire, was a safe image which could prevent the threat of sexuality,
but it was not as safe or desirable as the androgyne which united the purity and asexuality of the virgin with the intelligence and reason of the man.
Gustave Moreau: Orpheus, 1865
Moreau: Jason and Medea, 1865
Lucien Levy-Dhurmer: Eve, 1896 (pastel and
gouache)
Edvard Munch: Puberty, 1894-5
Woman as nature was both good and bad: nature could represent creativity and the generative qualities but nature could also be cannibalistic and untamed and
responsible for a multitude of horrors that do not exist in the cultured world. The femme fatale, then, represented the horrific side of nature: uncontrolled desires and
passions with lethal potentials and the power to castrate the unsuspecting male victim with her eyes alone. In paintings she might be represented as half-woman, halfanimal, as a sphinx, or as Eve, as in the pastel and gouache by Lucien Levy-Dhurmer, 1896, where her innocent but seductive face and hair stare intently at the snake
who presumably just tempted her to take the forbidden apple; she in turn becomes the snake which will tempt the male through forbidden sex. Munch described his
painting Puberty as a break-through, the first time he felt he had conquered his impressionist tendencies. The painting captures the ambivalence of the icon of prepubsecent sexuality, uniting it in this case with death in the form of the lurking, hovering shadow. Although it is meant to be his dying sister, the fixed stare of her eyes
creates the sense that the artist sees himself in this image.
Theosophy, the apocalypse, alchemy and abstraction
A large part of symbolism's contribution to modernism comes from its understanding of art as a language which communicates through color, lines and forms. Much of
this belief comes from the interest of symbolists in theosophy, alchemy, other alternative systems of spirituality, and the fourth dimension. Theosophy was an alternative
way of thinking about spirituality and art. According to theosophical principles, the universe originally contained atoms and a vacuum. The vacuum was a latent force or
deity, which could become organized into a willful force. Out of nothingness, eventually the will would emerge. Duality became a positive concept for theosophy
because it represented the union of the latent, which could not be known, and a living force or spirit, which could be known. The connection to art was made in at least
two ways: one was through the belief that color had a vibrating spiritual property which would awaken the dormant spirituality within a person. Another was the belief
that art should begin in nature and that the apocalypse would lead to the future new world.
The two examples below, from Vassily Kandinsky and Franz Kupka, are works made after the symbolist movement ended, but they demonstrate the continued interest in
many of the ideas first practiced by the symbolists. The symbolists themselves never reached the level of abstraction which Kandinsky and Kupka reached, but in both
cases, the symbolist belief in the synesthetic properties of color and in the role of color as a means of reaching a more spiritual plane contributed to their development of
an abstract language.
Kandinsky: Composition VII, 1913
Franz Kupka: Cosmic Spring, 1911-20
I will say more about theosophy and alchemy, along with the role of the fourth dimension, when we discuss the abstraction of artists like Kandinsky and Mondrian in the
20th century. For now and with respect to the symbolists, their turn to these belief systems was based on the idea that alchemy, in particular, could serve as a metaphor
for the role of the art work and the artist. If alchemical science purified the world, then the influence of alchemy in an art work would also lead to the purification of the
world. And the artist would be a person capable of bringing these transformative processes to the world.
The goal of symbolism was to present an idea through forms and colors, through signs which are universally comprehensible but second to the idea; and following from
this, to "objectify the subjective" -- or, in the words of the artist Odilon Redon, to make the invisible world visible. It might be said that the impressionists, who were
nearly contemporary with the symbolists, did the opposite of this -- that they made the objective world subjective, using the depiction of the changing effects of light as a
metaphor of subjectivity.
Symbolism is an art of the dream, with the idea of the dream referring to alternative visions of reality. Just as the dream does not represent something else but is an
alternative vision, the symbolist painting is not thought of as a representation but as an embodiment of an alternative reality. Not all the symbolists achieved this
although they all seem to strive to do this; Gauguin would appear to be the model of an artist who did achieve this goal and did so through his style. In fact, because
Gauguin's symbolism seemed so different from that of an artist like Moreau, many historians have differentiated between two forms of symbolism: the more literary
type, associated with Moreau and a few other artists, and the more "modern" or abstract style, associated with Gauguin, his friend Emile Bernard, Ernst Hodler, and a
few other artists.
To summarize:
The rise of symbolism coincided with a period when some intellectuals were beginning to question positivism. Writers, in particular, reacted against positivist and
materialist theories because they centralized science as the key way of knowing the world and essentially did not allow for the existence of art as a unique form of
knowledge and human activity. The motivational drive behind the symbolist aesthetic was the goal of establishing art as an independent or autonomous field of activity.
Following from that goal and its opposition to positivism, symbolism focused on subjective knowledge as a source of truth. More specifically, the symbolists argued that
truth could be found in either a spiritual or mystical realm, and that it was the result of personal experience, rather than observation of the physical world. Ultimately,
this is a concern with art as a type of knowledge or way of knowing the world, and this, in turn, is a concern with the language of art.
Since symbolism began as a literary movement, the initial concern with methods took the form of an interest in the role of language and the ways in which language
could convey ideas about a subject or impede the communication of those ideas. Eventually the interest in the role of language would be translated into an interest in the
communicative properties of color and form, but the analogy to language lingered for a long time as a characteristic of symbolist theory and modernism. For symbolism,
language provided a metaphor for the relationship between the real or objective world and the ideal or absolute world (hence, the interest in alternative spiritual
systems). Rejecting materialism, the symbolists believed that nature and the immediate world had no inherent value other than its role in revealing the spiritual or the
absolute. If an object�s only value lies in its function or ability to reveal the absolute, then everything in the real world, the material or concrete world, is little more
than a hieroglyphic or sign of some transcendent idea. In this respect, objects�or more specifically, their colors and shapes � were thought of as being similar to the
letters of an alphabet. The artist�s role, metaphorically speaking, was to combine these letters into words. But part of the artist�s task was being able to choose which
lines, forms and colors were necessary to establish the significance of the idea he wished to communicate. Too many lines, colors and forms would hinder
communication; the artist had to be able to select only the most necessary and distinctive, only those which were essential for the suggestion of the idea. For the
symbolists, the goal was not a complete or even accurate description of visual reality or an idea but the evocation or suggestion of the idea. This emphasis on suggestion
meant that mysticism and hypnotism become important models for symbolists, while science did not. Finally, symbolist theory was based on a belief in the subjective or
personal experience of the world as the basis for art (what Gauguin described as "dreaming in front of nature"), and on a rejection of the modern world as a subject for
art. Although this rejection does set symbolism apart from other forms of modernism, in other respects it is a pivotal moment in the definition of modernism. In
particular, its contributions will come from the centralization of the inner vision, the belief in art as a language which transcribes some higher experience, and a belief
that art is a multisensory (or synesthetic) experience. Because this art was to express an idea in terms of color, lines, and forms, it would be, in the best sense, a
decorative art; it would depart from naturalism in its color and forms, and it would be closer to the state of a dream in its ability to communicate an idea through this
condensed and restricted vocabulary. The idea of a dream to the symbolists is important in part because it was vague and became a type of shorthand for the belief that
all versions of reality were alternative dreams and fictions. The dream, in this understanding, was another way of speaking of the artistic vision, a vision in which the
reality of the world stood alongside the reality of the dream.
Note: The artstor image group for this chapter has some of the images you see on this page (in better reproductions). It also includes some additional images which relate
to the themes on this page. I have not included examples of Gauguin's work (other than the self-portrait) since he is the subject of the next chapter and the image unit you
have created from your slide list.
You can connect to the ARtstor chapter 2 image group from here.
SEAMUS HEANEY, Editor
')
(
William Butler Yeats
(1865-1939)
Within the history of Irish writing in English, the
achievement of W. B. Yeats represents a point of
both culmination and origin. He has been rightly
named a founder, for it was under the aegis of his
creative authority that a modern, self-critical and
more or less coherent poetic aCtion established itself
in Ireland during the last hundred years. But Yeats
em also be thought of as an inheritor, because in
him the enterprise of several nineteenth-century
writers found its purpose redefined and its
aspiration fulfilled. These writers included the
poets James Clarence Mangan, Thomas Davis and
Samuel ferguson, names invoked by Yeats in his
early poem, 'To Ireland in the Coming Times', as 'a
companylThat sang, to sweeten Ireland's wrong,1
Ballad and story, rann and song'. With these fore·
bears Yeats consciously identified himself, yet the
company of his literary 3l1cestors might also in
clude all those writers who shared the common
nineteenth-century plight which James Joyce
diagnosed in his essay on James Clarence Mangan:
Mangan, in Joyce's bare statement of the case,
'wrote with no native literary tradition to guide
him.'
This lack was one that W. B. Yeats deliberately
sought to redress. Before Yeats, the Irish poet with
most canonical presence at home and abroad had
been Thomas Moore (1779-1852), cherished as the
author of the exquisite and pathetic Irish Melodies.
These songs maintained' a sentiment of national
identity during the nineteenth century, but even
though they evoked the martial splendours of the
Gael, their effect was palliative rather than
inflammatory. Moore, however, was treated by
Joyce with less indulgence (han the disconsolate
Mangan. In A Porlrait ofthe Artist as a Young Man,
as Stephen Dedalus proceeds under the memorial
statue of Moore, which still stands in College
Green, Joyce has him observe the statue's 'servile
head'; and Stephen goes on to conceive of this
representation of Ireland's 'national poet' in terms
of its 'indignity', 'a Firbolg in the borrowed cloak
of a Milesian'. There may have been a personal
Joycean mordancy in this presentation, but fifty
years after the death of Moore it was inevitable that
he should have become an emblem of nineteenth
century Ireland's cultural and political debilitation.
Fifty years after the death of Yeats, on the other
hand, it would be both stupid and insensitive to
think of him or his art or the figure he cuts as being {
anything less than dignified, heroic and epoch- .!
making. The abstract, uningratiating lines of the I
Henry Moore memorial sculpture in St Stephen's
Green proclaim a very different message from the
one picked up by Stephen Dedalus on College
Green: Yeats, whether we think of him as a national
bard or as a world poet, has been translated into a
universal symbolic force, an energy released and a
destiny discharged.
If Yeats's greatness as a writer has grown indis
putable, the ~ p l e has not. Much
opposition' has been engendered by his ultimate
embrace of the high aesthetic mode as the basis not
only of a ~tic but of an ethic as well. At its most
extreme, this opposition WOuld impugn Yeats's
espousal of an essentially feudal vision in the realm
of politics and culture, and disqualify him as a
writer because of his momentary attraction to
I talian fascism in the 193Os: it might regard his
idealization of Major Robert Gregory ('Our Sidney
and our perfect man') as an admissible foible, but
discover in his sympathy for the hard-line political
antics of General Eoin O'Duffy and his Blueshirrs
an evil symptom. At its least accusatory, the
783
]1'1'
784
T
FIELD DAY ANTHOLOGY OF IRISH WRITING
opposition would question the good of being
preferred by the Ireland in which he was living. It
influenced by a poetry so unready to engage
all contributed to the emergence of a new poetic
\ sympathetically with the circumstances of life in a
voice, intellectually capable, emotionally renovated
and rhetorically well-girded.
Ilbourgeois democracy, so resolutely opposed to the
scientific spirit and so dangerously susceptible to
Moore and Joyce were not, of course, the only
being interpreted as a licence for actions at once
objectors to the Yeatsian programme. As the pre
Iviolent, romantic and nationalist.
eminent theorist, visionary and exemplar of a
As a figure who exerted considerable pressure
literature based on the category of nationality, Yeats
and influence, and identified himself with various
has always been exposed to questioning. Different
anti-populist causes over a long lifetime, Yeats was
Irish objectors have voiced different resistances.
Quite recently, for example, Seamus Deane (in his
never without his detractors. Yet, from the begin
ning, those most intent on debunking the man or
Celtic Revivals, 1985) has insisted that there
demythologizing the poet were conscious of the
is a di&mrity between the social, political and
gratifying fact that . .
d
intellectual realities of the eighteenth-century
Anglo-Irish world and the mythic version of them
~d. Thomas Flanagan has noted that neither
that Yeats's poems both derive from and project.
George Moore (yeats's senior) nor Ja~ce
(his junior) ever doubted that the phenomenon
And yet Deane would be the first to acknowledge
the unique necessity of Yeats's work in the
known as the Irish Literary Revival represented the
execution of high creative purpose, even though
evolution of the consciousness that would criticize
they could find fault with Yeats's way of dis
it. When he speaks of Ireland in Yeats's conception
charging that purpose on a scale ranging from the
'as if it were a vestigial Greece in a sternly Roman
world', or when he links Yeats's vision with 'the old
ridiculous to the reprehensible. Moore, as a fellow
middle-class Dubliner, mocked him for getting
Romantic premise that the world can be seen
carried away by fantasies of aristocratic splendour
falsely, in a bleak Newtonian light, or, truly, in a
and Renaissance hauteur. Joyce, more indigent and
pre-Newtonian aura', he does indeed expose the
recalcitrance of Yeats's mind. Yet, equally, he
less socially advantaged, was oddly enough enraged
by what he perceived as the poet's downward
displays a relish and a gratitude for the integrity
of the recalcitrance itself. His richly suggestive
mobility and castigated him in his pamphlet, The
comments flourish in the expanding imaginative
Day of the Rabblement (1901), for his association
universe of Yeats's whole oeuvre in poetry, drama
with 'a platform from which even self-respect
should have urged him to refrain.' .
and prose.
It was Yeats's ambition that his work should have
Joyce was here referring to Yeats's association,
just such a fortifying effect upon his subsequent
from the late 1890s onwards, with the cultural
readership. The creation of an Irish audience with
ambitions of the Irish Literary Theatre, soon to
become the Abbey Theatre. Yeats was thereby
international standards, the transformation of
~le', was an aim he cherished from the
Jlending his gift to the nationalist political lobby and,
start. He never saw his art functioning solely as an
in joyce's view, abdicating from the artist's proper
aspect of his own individuation, never limited its
stance as vigilant solitary, neither susceptible nor
attentive to 'the emotion of the multitude.' What
scope to the execution of its own formal and
Joyce could not know, of course, was that a degJ
technical possibilities..This is not to say that he was
con"y'!!lsive ~gy was building in the poet as the
not intensely inspired by the purely writerly
eo
.
'se
~se
exactions of composing and revising, line by line,
'Theatre business, management of men' - collided
stanza by stanza, or to deny that he partly resolved
the complications of his personal life by confronting
with his antithetical and more powerful drive to
assert the claims of individual personality over
and quelling them in his poems. That he did so is
self-evident and many of his poems require some
every eonformity. A decade later, in Responsibilities
(1914) and The Wild Swans at Coole (1919), a poetry
knowledge of the broad outline of his life in order
of singular clarity and detachment would· spring
to yield up their richest significations. Yet this
from the tension generated in him between his ideal
pr~~t1;er was not in itself
sufficient to make art; that whole effort also
of service. to a new, imagined Ireland and his
recognition of the demeaned standards actually \ required the energies of the impersonal drive,
1
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WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
785
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always necessary for the transformation of auto
data into objective image. It is an
i~ command t!:lat is obeyed when a poet
seeks to make the poem a thing, thrown free of
inchoate inwardness. It is an impersonal law that
enforces itself when the ear recognizes a rhythm as
inevitable. But in the case ofYeats, this impersonal
mmmand began very early to insist that the poetry
manifest a definite metaphysical disposition and
diffuse .J~atmosphere of certain co~al
landscapes.
This may seem a laboured and roundabout way
of saying that the young Yeats wanted to attach
himself to Irish subject-matter and settings, and to
express the lineaments of an occult doctrine which
he found corroborated in the supernatural beliefs
and superstitions of the country people of thewest
of Ireland. These statements are, of course, true,
yet it is essential to remember that they refer to
the ambitions of a poet, not to the operations of
a promoter. T
e
c
d a
pro
'st d
tl
si to im - 'Red
Hanrahan's Song about Ireland,' for example, is in
the tradition of the aisling, a stealthy genre of
political poetry in Irish - and he was indeed fired
to commit his imagination to Irish themes by
meeting the old Fenian, John O'Leary, and by
falling in love with the young and beautiful
revolutionary, Maud Gonne, who took the title role
in Yeats's subversive play, Cathleen ni Houlihan
(1902). Yet it is easy to be fanliliar with all these
aspects of the case and not recognize that they
irepresent~d an artistic problem as well as an artistic ~
~pporturnty .
Poems, after all, are not bulletins or editorials,
and it was precisely the editorial nature of work
done by his nineteenth-century company who 'sang,
to Sweeten Ireland's wrong' that Yeats was intent
on correcting. He wanted to verify their generaIl
sentiment - chthonic, national, Celtic - by
compounding it with the workings of his own I
Psyche and the drama of his own spiritual questJ
Typically, he attributed the inspiration for Cathleen
ni Houlihan to a dream, a circumstance he could
hold in reserve to outflank (if necessary) the cause
that the play happened to serve. ~e
wo d
to
s
ole
~. It was not sufficient that it be the artful
expression of daylight opinion and conviction; it
ha~ to emerge from a deep~r consciousness of
thmgs and, in the words of his friend Arthur
Ibiographical
i
Ie,
1
SYmons, be the voice of 'the mystery which lies
about us, out ofwhich we have come and into which
we shall return.' 1
The cadence and melancholy of these words
recall the 'red-rose-bordered hem' of mystical
thought in Yeats's early poetry, a kind of thought
that he was deternlined to unite with more expected
thoughts of Irish cultural and political regenera
tion. Yet that ~ n was also of
original and vital importance to him. Even though
subsequent efforts to enshrine the dream in a con
stituted state nlight outrage him - his famous
Senate speech of 1925 when he deplored the im
position of a ban on divorce upon the Irish protest
ant m~ity is one instance of this - and even
though\t~e violent impact of the War of Independ~
ence and the Civil War would help to rob him 0
trust in any historically ratified order, Yeats's JJ
radical devotion to the potential and otherness of a
specifically Irish reality should never be under
estimated. This reality would be neither pre
scriptive nor coercive. In his early conjunction of
Neo-Platonic tradition with the deposits of Irish
folklore, and in the mature symbolism of his dwell
ing in a Norman tower conjoined with a thatched
cabin, Yeats' t de 0 e
d
r te the
m~ess. In fact, his imagined Ireland
represented not only a regenerative breakaway
from the imperium of Britain but also from
the hegemony of orthodox Christianity:
Nor may I less be counted one
With Davis, Mangan, Ferguson,
Because, to him who ponders well,
My rhymes more than their rhyming tell
Of things discovered in the deep,
Where only body's laid asleep.
For the elemental creatures go
About my table to and fro,
That hurry from unmeasured rm'nd
To rant and rage in flood and wind;
Yet he who treads in measured ways
May surely barter gaze for gaze.
('To Ireland in the Comi,ng Times')
This poetry adnlittedly strikes a more cajoling note
than Stephen Dedalus's celebrated line about
forging in the snlithy of his soul the uncreated
conscience of his race; but still, by affirming his
I. In The Symbolist Mooement in Literature (1899).
786
r
FIELD DAY ANTIIOLOGY OF IRISH WRITING
poetic entitlement - he treads in 'measured ways'
and by claiming the prerogative to 'barter gaze
for gaze' with a pristine source of authority, Yeats
here inaugurates his own campaign for '~al
! li~ntry.' Hence the search for a
. style that would have universal command, and the
ambition to establish a poetic note that would sound
ev~~n, self-born and unquestionable as
the myths and symbols of traditional systems of
belief.
.
His success in the pursuit of these aims becomes
clear when we open the Collected Poems and sense
how resourcefully, vigorously and coherently each
poem dwells within ~ther
sPidd, at a certain intact ~ce from the reader.
The reader, indeed, is constantly made to share the
eerie viewpoint that Yeats created for himself in
'The Collar-Bone of a Hare'. There he imagines
finding a hare's collar-bone in a region far beyond
the world of everyday occurrence, and employing it
as a kind of bushman's lorgnette through which
that world can be distanced and made strange:
'A Dialogue of Self and Soul'. Even a poem as
apparently candid and technically uncalculating as
'To Ireland in the Coming Times' harks back to the
measure of Milton's 'Il Penseroso', and displays an
incipient ability - as Yeatsian as it was Miltonic_
to string the sentence out with reinf~ SXn
tactical effect over a sequence of rhymes andline
II~n fact,· its very ~ion
ice. The poem is a
written melody as much as it is the formulation
of aims and hopes; its formality operates as
transparently between itself and its subjects as the
eye-piece made of hare-bone operated between the
enchanted poet and the quotidian world.
Yeats's singularity as a writer depended upon
this uniquely elaborate~ies
~se; but it derived also from t~
~oint he deliberately maintained as a
member of occult societies, a student of mystical
thought and a practitioner of magic. Even an in
telligence as strong and ant"agoiirstic as James
Joyce's functioned within a set of cultural and in
tellectual forms that generally were shared and
I would find by the edge of that water
assented to. Homer and classical learning, Roman
The collar-bone of a hare
catholic liturgy and dogma, the medieval corpus of
Worn thin by the lapping of water,
knowledge as represented by Dante and Aquinas:
And pierce it through with a gimlet, and stare
when Joyce began to write, such a keyboard of
At the old bitter world where they marry in 01
reference looked as solidly established as the
churches,
~,
contours of nature. The weapons in his lifelong
And laugh over the untroubled water
campaign of detachment and affirmation were at
At all who marry in churches,
.
least agreed weapons; calling his protagonist
Through the white thin bone of a hare.
Dedalus, for example, meant that he harnessed a
This is the typical angle of the late nineteenth
whole system to his own ends. But when Yeats
century artist and reminds one in particular of
called a character Red Hanrahan or Michael
Matthew Arnold's plaintively forsaken merman. It
Robartes, no matter how deliberately he might
also links with the enterprise of the Frel}ch
furnish a background in his fiction or in notes to the
Symbolists, with whom Yeats felt an immediate
poems, he still could not endow the new-minted
sympathy when Arthur Symons introduced him to
name with such immediate canonical authority.
them in the 1890s. B~-air
There might well be a reservoir of doctrine and
fr~~ss, which dis
belief which sanctioned the imaginative archetype
tinguishes it from the literature of metropolitan
behind the character, but it had sunk underground.
coteries. It is the culmination of Yeats's early
So while Joyce could disdain 'the monkish
manner, evidence of how successfully he fulfilled
philosophy' that was his birthright and apparatus, it
\his ambition to combine the inner weather of
was, qua apparatus, far more immediately efficient
sensibility with the inheritance of an Irish
than the 'fardel of stories, and of personages, and of
landscape and mythology.
emotions' that Yeats had gathered from sources
Reading Yeats, we are under the sway of a voice
variouslY.PQe!icJo~~ic.
that offers both the expansiveness of self-absorbed
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