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CONFLICT, MORE CONFLICT!' Three of the books considered here deal with Yeats's achievement in terms of the clash between polarities. Engelberg examines Yeats's aesthetics as the balance, or reconciliation, established between opposite and discordant ele· ments. Zwerdling, in an overall interpretation directed primarily at the poetry, looks at the encounter between swordsman and saint, absorbs the latter in the former and, asserting that the visionary is for Yeats a mode of the heroic, proceeds to consider his poetry as dominated and shaped by the heroic ideal. Nathan sees the development of Yeats's drama as the progressive embodi· ment of an inescapable war, waged between the natural and supernatural. The result is not balance (as with Engelberg), or assimilation (as with Zwerdling). It is rather the defeat of the human by virtue of its being human, and it is the dear-eyed recognition of this fact which proclaims the dimensions of Yeatsian tragedy. The handsome centenary volume edited by Saddlemyer and Skelton stands apart from these three studies but provides a milieu for them. Together, the four books point to nothing so intimidating as a fltrend" in Yeatsian criticism but they do bring to different areas of that achievement a common awareness of creative collisions. That critics should collide in describing the nature of those collisions is not unnatural and may in its own way, be fruitful. The literature on Yeats as a critic is not quite as scanty as Engelberg's bibliography suggests. There are two unpublished doctoral dissertations and an article on Yeats and the "Unity of Being," published in 1949, of which Engelberg may not be aware. (Oddly, "Unity of Being," which is a central concept in Yeats's aesthetic and is treated as such in the book, is not mentioned in the Index). C. K. Stead's The New Poetic was published too jate for consideration by Engelberg. These additions do not affect the conclusion that Engelberg is venturing into unexplored territory, that his exploration is conducted with perspicacity and that his vast design, though sometimes blurred at the edges, is capacious enough to accommodate other discoveries. The quotation from Coleridge which introduced Engelberg's book 'in this review is a suggestion that Chapter XIV of the Biographia should be re-read. Whether Yeats ever read it is another matter. The point is that, as Coleridge'S description of the imagination develops, the recognition grows that opposites are not merely reconciled in the creative process but strengthen each other by the energy of their presence. "A more than usual state of emotion with more than usual order" suggests not co·existence but co·intensification. Coleridge's thinking thus opens the way not simply to a philosophy of aesthe· tic moderation (as the words "balance" and "reconciliation" might suggest), ""Edward Engelberg, The Vast Design (University of Toronto Press, 1964); Alex Zwerdling, Yeats am! the Heroic Ideal (New York University Press, 1965); Leonard E. Nathan, The Tragic Drama of William Butler Yeats (Columbia University Press, 1965); Robin Skelton and Ann Saddlemyer (Eds.), The World of W. B. Yeats (Adelphi Book'hop Ltd., Victoria, 1965). but to a philosophy of aesthetic extremism in which the intensity of combat becomes the well-spring of creative identity. Yeats's oppositions are not quite those of Coleridge. The differences and the reasons for them might have been worth exploring; they are both the statement of a different critical climate and of the individuality of Yeats's own aesthetic. Indeed Engelberg's book might have benefited if he had linked Yeats's ideas more speCifically to the main movements of critical thought in our time. Yeats's many anticipations of Eliot Cas well as his significant disagreements ) are only lightly touched on and a book still deserves to be written on Yeats's importance in formulating this century's recognitions. Isolated presentation also tends to exaggerate the novelty of Yeats's understanding. Spenser too dealt with problems of aesthetic distance, and the movement of expansion to infinity and convergence to a centre Cwhich Engelberg finds crucial in the "design") is perhaps exemplified more fully in Paradise Los! than in any poem that Yeats wrote. Drawing up tables of opposites can become...

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