Yeats: Poetic Expression, Money, Trade & Globalization

BARRY SHEILS’S BOOK is a theoretically sophisticated and elegantly argued exploration of the tensions in the work of W. B. Yeats between a poetry focused on the nation and reliant on romanticism, and an embrace of modernity. In particular, he scrutinizes “the relation between the order of poetic expression and the effects of money, trade and globalization.” Though expressive of cultural nationalism, Sheils argues that Yeats’s writing discovers modernity by acknowledging its worldly relations.

Sheils takes his argument forward through five substantial chapters. The first, “Yeatsian Transmissions: Between Kiltartan and the Sky,” draws attention to the ways in which Yeats vacillates between the national and the international. Sheils believes that “through this movement we can discern the formal dilemma of a global poetics, [and] we can also witness in it the basis of Yeats’s claim for Ireland’s national vitality: a nation that is at once less and more than itself.” He locates Yeats’s Irish writing in various international contexts. The first is that of Celticism, on which so much argument had been spent throughout the nineteenth century and, indeed, back to the days of Ossian in the eighteenth: “one can say that Ossianic Celticism provided Yeats with his first model for defining the national space according to multiple references outside of, and at a distance from, itself.” Secondly, Yeats found Irish cultural experience—particularly that of forklore—reflected in that of other small European nations. Finally, Sheils writes of the importance of America, the New World, as a balance to the power of London, “Yeats’s most lucrative literary marketplace.” Yeats was influenced by American literature, wrote for American journals and, of course, engaged in lucrative reading tours of America. For Sheils all of these factors confirm the conclusion that for Yeats “accompanying his understanding of Ireland as exceptional and non-modern, is a continual inference of the compressed scene of global modernity.”

In the second chapter, “Folklore and the New World of Text,” Sheils looks to the past for cognate international influences. He argues that the Celticist and Irish nationalist elements of Yeats’s early interest in folklore should be understood in relation to eighteenth-century European folklore representation and to the New World aesthetic of synthesis and combination, concluding that “the folklore anthology contains the germ of the world literature archive.” Sheils focuses particularly on Yeats’s anthology of folkloric material, The Celtic Twilight (1893, 1902). He sees Yeats as blurring distinctions between anthologist and material in a work in which “the narrator’s allegorical interpretations and summations of seemingly extraneous details contribute to his imaginative entry into the tradition.” Equally, the discovery of meaning, which one might consider central to such an earnest undertaking as an anthology, is deferred:

The investigative quest to reveal the truth, then, is sublimated by an idiosyncratic delight in existing distractedly within the text without any factual discovery; and the uncertainty of the narrator’s status—folklorist, poet, dilettante—reflects the uncertain status of the text: is it a source book for Yeats’s poetry, a record of the Irish peasantry, an ethnography, a personal memoir, a collection of essays, fictions or visions?

The third chapter, “‘Put into English’: The Monoglot Translator and World Literature,” moves away from European and American perspectives to examine Yeats’s relationship with the East, particularly through Tagore, Shri Purohit Swami and Ernest Fenollosa’s Japanaese Noh Manuscripts. Once more Yeats seems to have succeeded in having the cultural advantage of all sides of the equation: “Yeats constructs an aesthetic of world folk, claiming both the privilege of a common or vernacular English and the perspective of cultural and linguistic displacement.” Yeats believed that English was in danger of desiccation unless it received “poetic revivification from elsewhere—from Gaelic Ireland, but also from Ancient Greece, India and Bengal, China and Japan.” Paradoxically, then, “Yeats’s insatiable move toward the ancient cultures of the East must also be read as a simultaneous move West into the pristine New...