Yeats's Celestial Patroness

ELT 41 : 3 1998 man history and mythology that seemed so obvious when first incorporated into Joyce's writing regain their force through Schork's detailed glossing. Schork's most notable quality throughout this study, and the one that caused repeated interruptions in my readings as I jotted marginal notes in my copies of Joyce's works, is his ability to discern buried Latin allusions within Joyce's discourse and to elaborate upon them in a detailed fashion that never overwhelms but that always provides sufficient connections to the work under consideration. Like the best scholars, Schork ably presents useful insights and interpretations based upon his vast knowledge of Latin culture. At the same time, he displays a wonderful sensitivity towards his readers, never over-analyzing or preventing prescriptive views that allow for no alternative interpretation. The greatest strength of the book remains its treatment of 'Finnegans Wake. Whenever Schork turns to that work, one has a clear sense of his profound understanding not only of its Classical allusions but of the broad process of composition that drew Joyce's final work together. While he can also illuminate key portions of Joyce's other writings, Schork rightly concentrates upon a book that both holds his attention and that has suffered greatly in the past from insufficient and inadequate scholarly scrutiny. Latin and Roman Culture in Joyce will prove a delight for those interested in any of Joyce's works, but it will be particularly rewarding to those immersed in the Sisyphean task of explicating Finnegans Wake. Michael Patrick Gillespie Marquette University Yeats's Celestial Patroness Janis Tedesco Haswell. Pressed Against Divinity: W. B. Yeats's Feminine Masks. DeKaIb: Northern Illinois Press, 1997. xi + 177 pp. $32.00 YEATS STUDIES TODAY recognize the great poet by consummate projects, Macmillan's The Collected Edition of the Works, Oxford's The Collected Letters and R. F. Foster's Life, The Cornell Yeats with the manuscripts. Coming are a new primary bibliography by Colin Smythe, a life of Mrs. Yeats by Ann Saddlemyer, and an electronic hypermedia edition of The Tower, edited by Richard J. Finneran and others. George M. Harper and friends have published A Critical Edition of Yeats's "A Vision " (1925) (Macmillan, 1978), The Making of Yeats's "A Vision" (2 vols., Southern Illinois, 1987), and Yeats's Vision Papers (3 vols., Iowa, 1992). 368 BOOK REVIEWS Impressionistic criticism of Yeats is at an end. One must do one's homework . This is what Haswell has done, carefully studying, in Yeats's Vision Papers, the automatic writing which Mrs. Yeats began on 27 October 1917, which continued until 20 March 1920, and which heralded Yeats's greatest period as a writer. Haswell shows how Yeats's theory of the mask changed from Per Arnica Silentia Lunae (dated 1917), through the automatic writing (1917-1920), toA Vision (1925, and 1937). It climaxed with his discovery of the gendered mask—that the anti-self or daimon is of the opposite sex. Once he discovered this, says Haswell, he was freed to give that woman's voice, doubled-voiced with his own, in increasingly eloquent roles—most truly as Crazy Jane. Yeats moved from referring to the daimon as he and from suspecting that there may be "some secret communion, some whispering in the dark between Daimon and sweetheart " (Mythologies, p. 336) to calling his daimon her and acknowledging that "This relation (the Daimon being of the opposite sex to that of man) may create a passion like that of sexual love" (A Vision, 1925, p. 27). Moreover, Yeats speaks of "conflict between himself and his daimon, but he also stresses completion and freedom through union with the daimon " (12). Critics err in applying the 1937 A Vision to poems nearer in date to the 1925. Haswell finds it more fruitful to work with the 1925, in which there is, as in the automatic script, a "sexual dynamic," an "explicit, deliberate , and literal connection between mystical reality and sexual love." Possibly "chagrined by the personal and sexual focus of the 1925 edition," says Haswell, "Yeats elected," in the 1937, "to mute the sexual dynamic in his mystical exposition." Also, whereas the automatic script reveals...