Yeats Annual

30:2, Reviews YEATS ANNUAL Yeats Annual No. 4. Ed. Warwick Gould. London: Macmillan, 1986. $50.00 Annual may be even more difficult to review than Festschriften, but both handicap the reviewer: there is bound to be little cohesion in a collection of items by many hands. In the case of most annuals—including the Yeats Annual No. 4 under review here—the contents include, in addition to essays, reviews, an update on dissertations, a bibliography, and, in Yeats Annual No. 4, Significant Research Collections, a Forum, an Editorial Miscellany, Bibliographical and Research Materials, and sixteen black and white glossy photographs (some more relevant than others). This constitutes a good deal of material in one volume, something that in now way need diminish its value (it certainly is not the case here); but it creates difficulties for the reviewer nevertheless: not everything can be scrutinized with the same attention, and some items will need to be ignored. Before attempting to assess this volume, I believe a little history may be informative. Yeats Annual Nos. 1 and 2 were edited by Richard J. Finneran and published by Macmillan, London. When Finneran brought the Annual to the States (first Cornell and as of now at TJMI Research Press), Warwick Gould (University of London) stepped in to keep the Annual with Macmillan (volumes 3 and 4 are under his editorship). In effect, then, we now have two Yeats Annuals, Finneran having changed the title of his to Yeats: An Annual of Critical and Textual Studies. AU Yeatsians should welcome these additions to the extraordinary ordering process of Yeats's work now underway, including a new edition of the Poems, edited by Finneran (published), an authorized biography, a new edition of the conespondence to supersede Wade's one-volume Letters, and the Cornell Yeats, a projected multi-volume edition of Yeats's extant manuscripts. One volume, Purgatory (edited by Sandra F. Siegel), has been published (1986); another, TAe Island of Statues and Mosada (edited by George Bomstein), is scheduled for publication in winter, 1986-1987. Yeats, then, has generally been fortunate in moblizing able scholars and critics, and these two Annuals continue the high standards of Yeats criticism and scholarship. Yeats Annual No. 4 is generously stocked with "Yeats and . . ." essays: "Yeats and Croce" (Torchiana), "Yeats and Women" (Culingford), "Olivia Shakespear and Yeats—an Afterword" (Gould), "Ezra Pound's Versions of Fenollosa's Noh Manuscripts and Yeats's Unpublished 'Suggestions and Conections'" (Yoko Chiba). I point to this because it has become a pattern in cunent Yeats studies—and perhaps a very valuable one. Of course, analysis and interpretation of Yeats's creative work need to continue, and one need harbor no anxiety: it will. But the "Yeats and . . ." essay isolates Yeats—often one on one with some particular person who had an impact, made an impression, left his or her mark on the poet's life or, often enough, on his work. 249 30:2, Reviews The first two essays (perhaps deliberately ananged in sequence) continue to present Yeats and the question of the West/East "influence." Torchiana's "Yeats and Croce" is a welcome piece, a tightly written essay that demonstrates, with sufficient evidence, the "presence" of Croce in some of Yeats's poems, along with the usual names—"Plato, Plotinus, Berkeley, Blake, or Nietzsche. . . ." Yeats read and annotated Croce, and as was his habit he appropriated what was suitable and left the rest. Croce's Vico "made a solid impact on Yeats's theory of history," especially as positioned in A Vision. Croce's Aesthetic (we may sometimes forget) was a major European work, and it became an important book for Yeats's omnivorous appetite. Torchiana is rather short on explaining the impact, or significance, of Croce in the final accounting of Yeats's work per se, except to suggest that Yeats's idealism found a certain validation in Croce's. Still the essay paves the way for further work, which alone makes it worthwhile. "Yeats Passage to India" by Ruth Nevo is in the main an attempt to shed new light on that most curious of Yeats's plays, TAe Heme's Egg. Most of that light comes from the...