The Last of the Minstrels: Yeats and the Revival of the Bardic Arts (review)

Errata

Seamus Heaney once remarked that W. B. Yeats’s essential gift was to ‘raise a temple in the ear’ and to ‘create a vaulted space in language’. This kind of observation gives due notice of the monumental quality of Yeats’s verse, together with its ceremonial assent to fixed forms and metres, notwithstanding his reputation as a poet of the heart as well as the mind. The lyrics and ballads of his early collections, however famous they have become, do not in fact connote the ‘equestrian authority’ (in Denis Donoghue’s memorable formulation) that many readers of Yeats’s later poetry easily discern. This is to say nothing of the strange admixture of occultism, Gaelic lore, and Asian mysticism with which so much of his work (in the theatre and elsewhere) is imbued. But above all else, perhaps, it is the auditory power of Yeats’s verse that commands attention, whether we attend to the intimacy of his lyric invention or the high ceremony of his more public deliberations.

As Ronald Schuchard’s The Last Minstrels so compellingly explains, it is possible to understand Yeats’s poetry as an act of reclamation in which the thing being reclaimed—or being arrogated unto itself—is nothing less than the expressive power of music. The engagement between poetry and music has a long and intriguing history (even if we confine ourselves to the Irish literary imagination), but no other poet, as far as I can see, raises his temple with such defiance in the shadow (as it were) of music. No other poet seeks to recover a mystical union between music and verse in which verse absorbs and eclipses that very intelligence inside sound that music claims as its pre-eminent mode of address. Yeats did not like music and vaunted his ignorance of it on those few occasions when he condescended to acknowledge its importance for people other than himself. This hostility would have been enough to alienate many musicians (and it often was), were it not for the fact that the formal jurisdictions to which Yeats submitted his greatest poems are strongly suggestive of musical jurisdictions, so that his metrical, formal, and syntactic considerations everywhere underpin the audacity of his thought and the instinctively symbolic inclinations of his imagination. The old adage about keeping your friends close and your enemies closer applies with particular force in respect of Yeats’s reliance upon rudimentary musical forms. It also applies in respect of his constant recourse to music, either as a dangerous rival to speech or as a symbol of the creative imagination itself. This polarized condition, in which music is either disdained or transcended, betrays, I think, Yeats’s fundamental insecurity in relation to music, just as it confirms his lifelong quest for a poetic diction that would recover (or simply realize) the ideal of unity (as between music and speech) that Yeats identified in bardic culture.

The Last Minstrels sets out to ‘present a biographical, historical and critical reconstruction of [Yeats’s] lifelong preoccupation with the music and magic of speech’. It also ‘chronicles his heroic attempt, as one of the last minstrels, to resurrect the ancient art of chanting and to restore a spiritual democracy of art in Ireland particularly and in the modern world generally’ (p. xx). In these enterprises, Schuchard closely recovers the sources of Yeats’s (at first instinctive) pursuit of a unity between poetry and music. He then identifies the poet’s cultural nationalism in a freshly considered reading of Yeats’s reception of English Romantic and early Victorian literature. This reception was to provide the aesthetic justification for Yeats’s oral conception of poetry. His reception of the early Wordsworth, Scott, and the early Tennyson (and later Blake, Swinburne, and William Morris) was conjoined with a no less determined ingathering of his response to Irish poetry in the nineteenth...