The Variorum Yeats

REVIEWS 203 One hesitates to offer alternative formulations when confronted with these carefully wrought and richly suggestive discussions, but may not a distinction between art as a technique for solving a problem and art as an inclusive expression of human values be in order here? Of course art is always both, but the emphasis may be on one aspect or the other. Heavy emphasis on a special technique, though it may still be in some sort a realization of human value, may not be inclusive enough. Yet the development of technique, though only one phase of the influence of science on literature, is an important phase. Science has its part in the logical rigour of neoclassicism, in the ordering of the perspective of a descriptive-didactic poem (e.g., Lucretius and Thomson), in the novelist's authentication of a background, in his manipulation of point of view or his use of the stream of consciousness, and in many other procedures. Nevertheless, exclusive concern with these procedures imposes severe restrictions on art and makes it less than adequate to human needs. It is perhaps possible to see science in a double role, as enriching the procedures of art, and at the same time as stimulating the realization of ultimate values by offering a challenge or threat which must be overcome by a fruitful humanistic criticism. ALAN D. McKILLOP The Variorum Yeats The Variorum Edition of the Poems of W. B. Yeats, edited by Peter Alit and Russell K. Alspach (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1957, pp. xxxvi, 884, $18.50) fulfils an obvious wish on the part of any reader of Yeats, the wish that he could check the alterations by the author he has heard so much about and also read the very early poems not included by Yeats in later editions of his work. In the first case he can watch "full round moon" become "brilliant moon" and later in the same poem, "The Sorrow of Love," "crumbling" or "curd pale" (the latter adjective had quite a long regency) finally at the sixteenth printing or thereabouts succumb to the quieter "climbing," again with reference to the moon. It seems to me that Yeats's own account in Autobiographies of the particular adjectives employed in the above changes is corrected by the actual facts of textual variation so inexorably unearthed by the editors and this final accuracy is something a scholar tackling Yeats's verbal indecision really needs. Of the early poems hidden or forgotten by the author during his lifetime it is interesting to have "The Island of Statues" in its complete form, a dramatic poem exceedingly inaccessible !!!:!til the present editors did their work. This Spenserian pastiche allows one to identify an influence not usually associated with Yeats, but of course he had his roots deep in the English mythopreic tradition, as deep as Spenser at any rate. This fact with regard to the Elizabethan poet will evidently become even clearer when the poems still in manuscript form are published. "Reprisals," one of the poems written on the death of Robert Gregory, is a perfectly sound poem hitherto un- 204 REVIEWS collected and unprinted in Yeats's lifetime partly because Lady Gregory might not have enjoyed hearing that her son lay "among the other cheated dead." The uncollected epigram on George Moore which actually ends the poetry text of this volume is not what one wants to remember Yeats by, since it is not half nasty enough to achieve the level of memorable "savage indignation." A variorum edition, however, assumes that you really understand the greatness of its subject and then proceeds to perform a sort of autopsy; this process is bound to show a great many things which like digestive organs were certainly necessary to the development of an author's genius but were not necessarily kept on display for everyone to see. Since this edition takes the latest text of the poems and works back to the earliest versions with small print and brackets, it is virtually impossible to find out with any ease just what lovely things the early Celtic twilight poems were before Yeats decided that there was more enterprise in going naked. The...