Yeats and the Visual Arts by Elizabeth Bergmann Loizeaux (review)

88Rocky Mountain Review ELIZABETH BERGMANN LOIZEAUX. Yeats and the Visual Arts. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1986. 238 p. There is a longstanding debate among critics as to whether comparisons between literature and the other arts are anything more than indulgent fancy. The general problems disappear, however, before the evidence of the life and work of individual writers who immerse themselves in the study of music or painting and who use the other arts as a means for thinking about their own work. Elizabeth Bergmann Loizeaux's Yeats and the Visual Arts shows that Yeats was one such writer. There have been other book-length treatments which have dealt largely or entirely with Yeats' interest in the visual arts. Henn's The Lonely Tower, MeIchiori 's The Whole Mystery of Art, Engelberg's The Vast Design, and Gordon and Fletcher's Images ofa Poet all have helped to create a picture of Yeats as a writer whose individual works and general aesthetic bore the mark of steady concern with the visual arts. Loizeaux's book distinguishes itself from previous works by its comprehensive historical and biographic structure. It traces Yeats' interest in the arts from his early poetic experiments as an art student to the later phase where he developed a sophisticated knowledge of art history to provide images for the philosophy of his A Vision. Though she discusses the place of Greek, Byzantine, and Renaissance art in Yeats' development, Loizeaux has chosen, wisely, to emphasize the relation between Yeats' poetry and the visual art of his contemporaries, documenting his early obsession with Pre-Raphaelitism and his later interest in such work as the sculpture of Epstein and Gaudier-Brzeska, and the illustrations of Edmund Dulac. Loizeaux has made the welcome achievement of documenting Yeats' debt to Pre-Raphaelitism while maintaining a steady sense for his misreadings of the movement. Yeats' own frequent diatribes against Victorianism in its various forms have tended to divert critical attention from his deep respect for Rossetti , Morris, and what Loizeaux calls "his father's earlier Pre-Raphaelite self" (11). Alan Pistorius' 1973 dissertation documented the weighty influence Dante Gabriel Rossetti bore over the early Yeats, and argued, as Loizeaux does, that the early plays were, for Yeats, an attempt to create his own PreRaphaelite images and texts. Loizeaux goes so far as to argue that often text and acting were secondary to image and staging in Yeats' Abbey Theatre productions . "He sacrificed," she writes, "the poetic for the sculptural" (109). She also shows that the paradigm of art which Yeats had found in PreRaphaelitism was exhausted for him by the end of the first decade of this century : that partly by his own initiative, partly under the influence of Pound, he moved on to the "more profound" but less direct "Pre-Raphaelitism" of the later works. Loizeaux's work has been carefully documented, and provides a helpful number of illustrations covering a heterodox range of art. Some of the discussion , about Yeats' early experiments in poems about pictures, for example, provides new material to Yeats scholarship. The book shows that major phases of Yeats' career were reinforced by attention to the visual arts, as when, for example, the aging poet turned to graphic language and carnal subjects even as he developed a strong taste for the paintings and statues of Michelangelo. Finding a critical language to discuss influences from one art to another is a difficult enterprise. Loizeaux's study does not completely overcome this obstacle. The work is slightly less convincing when it moves away from Book Reviews89 biography and history to theoretical argument and analogy. It would take more explanation than Loizeaux provides to see how the aesthetic of a Rossetti or Dulac picture was a "non-mimetic" one. Loizeaux's extended analogy to the "sculptural" quality of the later poems relies on questionable (though fascinating) assumptions about the experience of viewing sculpture; because of this the last chapter grows strained as it moves away from Yeats' own fairly general pronouncements about sculptural art. William Butler Yeats came from a family of artists and craftspersons. Though Yeats gave up art early in his life, Yeats and the Visual Arts shows that there...