IRELAND'S POET : 'Such Friends: The Work of W.B. Yeats' - New York, New York - review of exhibition

Commonweal, August 13, 1999 by Elizabeth Kirkland Cahill

As it progresses, the exhibition traces the increasing vigor and directness of Yeats's poetry as he doffs the mask of attenuated Irish romanticism, in volumes such as Responsibilities and The Wild Swans at Coole, well represented here by manuscripts. The wall panels offer especially helpful background information and explication of the many manuscripts and galleys. "Upheavals," the next-to-last section, neatly captures the relatedness of Yeats's life and work, including under that rubric both his marriage, at the age of fifty-two, to Bertha Georgie Hyde-Lees, and the Easter Rising of 1916. His marriage to the much younger "George," as she preferred, is rightly credited for its immense importance: It gave him a sense of security and abundance, and supplied him with a witty, shrewd, and energetic companion who tended to much of the business side of his life. Nowhere was her shrewdness more apparent than on her honeymoon, when she first "discovered" that she possessed the gift of automatic writing-this access to the spirit world immediately calmed her husband's troubled state of mind about his marriage. The first preserved page of her conversation with the Beyond is on display, round illegible scrawl slanting up the page.

Yeats's poetry improved with the years, and thus a visitor may be inclined to linger over the materials in the exhibition's last section, "Final Works." Along with some wonderful documents relating to The Oxford Book of Modern Verse, which Yeats (infamously) edited, and a moving letter describing the death of Lady Gregory, there is a fascinating group of manuscripts demonstrating the poet's struggle with one of his last poems, "The Circus Animals' Desertion." The collection of heavily marked manuscripts here shows vividly how Yeats worked and reworked the poem's famous final section, deleting lines, shuffling word order, replacing words, setting the poem aside for months, gradually drawing closer to the final version, which concludes:

Now that my ladder's gone,

I must lie down where all the ladders start,

In the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart.

Yeats died in 1939 in the south of France. Because of the wartime blockade, it was not until 1948 that his body was returned to Ireland, where, in a neat twist of circumstance, it was received by government official Sean MacBride-the son of Maud Gonne. The exhibition is ornamented throughout with just such little tidbits, sparks of humor, and small flashes of information that shed light on the complexities of Yeats and his poetry. While it may lack the comprehensiveness to convert nonbelievers, those of us who consider Yeats among the greatest poets of the twentieth century would do well to visit the "municipal gallery" in which "Such Friends" is housed.

Elizabeth Kirkland Cahill is co-author, with Joseph Papp, of Shakespeare Alive!