W.B. Yeats: The Man and the Milieu. - book reviews

Contemporary Review, Dec, 1997 by Geoffrey Heptonstall

Like his enemy, Eamon de Valera, William Butler Yeats casts a long shadow. He set out to re-create a national culture, and in doing so become its supreme exemplar across a century. There seems a Yeats for each generation. The poetry invites its music, and so from Count MacCormac to Bono the lyric moves from the examination hall into general culture. Yeats learned much from folk traditions on the lips of tinkers and farm-girls. He would surely approve of his place in living ways of expressing all the things he held dear: love, mystery and the imaginative potential of life.

Everything and everyone he held dear were bound into elaborate codes. Life couldn't be taken as it was, but had to be seen through metaphor. Reality was the palimpset of a higher truth. Early in his manhood Yeats, who came from a family of distinguished artists, saw that the higher truth was in unity. He saw his own way to the truth was through poetic myth. He was taken by its beauty, its symbolic power, its rhythms, and its sonorous glimpse of the hitherto unarticulated.

Yeats' reputation as a poet was established at once. Taken up by the late Romantics of the Irish School - especially Katherine Tynan - he spoke with his own voice, though the transition of the modernist poetry of his greater achievements took time and mortifyingly hard work. Somehow Yeats became more than his promise suggested. He began to speak not as one merely ambitious but as one possessed - and I use the word for its ambiguity - by genius.

Though we know the mechanics of this transition, its nature remains elusive. We know of the traumatic effects of disappointed love, and of Ireland's political 'Troubles' which moved and worried Yeats at the same moment. In the love poetry there is an underlying rage. And in the poetry of the Irish straggle there is an ironic ambivalence which renders other readings than the more obvious affirmations.

Of course his situation made him, but it was in large measure Yeats who came to express those situations as we know them. Every well-read person in the English-speaking world knows the phrase, 'a terrible beauty'. How often unconsciously does it return to us when we hear of, or confront for ourselves, the unresolved conflicts of the Irish nation? It is well to remember that as Yeats published his great poem on the Rising, Easter 1916, he privately feared that the new Ireland would be what would soon come to be known as Fascist. The smiling public man was indeed, in Thomas Kinsella's phrase, a wounded poet. The wound was Cuchulainn's too. Yeats belonged to an old tradition indeed.

Yeats was a prophetic poet, something of a seer. His prediction that the world would divide between the cynical and the fanatic remains as apposite now as it was then. 'Mere anarchy' may wear many guises. It was the poet's duty to recognise each one, and so oppose them by something more faithful, more beautiful, more enduring. The poetry hardened. Yeats made as great demands on his art as on his life. He understood the meaning of sacrifice and its place in both love and duty. About poetry and politics especially, Yeats was difficult, for he loathed pettiness. Grandeur came naturally. There was nothing cheap about him. Had he failed we might yet think him magnificent.

The paradox of Yeats is that he testified against his times, yet came to influence them. He was troubled by both the testimony and the influence. He didn't feel misunderstood: he felt grieved by the perversity of the human mind, including his own. Like Shaw, Yeats lived to see too much that he had hoped for or feared to come about. Both men set their biographers formidable tasks of encompassing the truth without debasing it. I feel it would take something similar to Lyndall Gordon's study of Eliot, with its reasoned intuitions, to do Yeats justice. Women knew W. B. Yeats well. His response to them, and not only in sexual terms, is the key. He was never a man's man, though there was no doubt of his virility. So far the biographies have been from men, and they tell only half the story. So far we have seen the how and not the why.

That said, both volumes under consideration here show industry and insight that writers of brief reviews shouldn't dismiss lightly. R. F. Foster, like Yeats an Irishman in Oxford, presents us with the public man, the creator of history. Keith Alldritt, who is less sure of his history, offers us the Yeats who fashioned art out of experience. A high critical tolerance marks both these biographies. They tell a story which is never quite the same twice. Whoever comes to write the definitive life will stand on some sturdy volumes.

GEOFFREY HEPTONSTALL