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Book Reviews, Volume 32:1, 1988 YEATS AND IRELAND Peter Alderson Smith. W. B. Yeats and the Tribes of Danu: Three Views of Ireland's Fairies. Irish Literary Studies, 27. Gerrard's Cross, Buckinghamshire: CoHn Smythe; Totowa, NJ: Barnes and Noble, 1987. $28.95 In W. B. Yeats and the Tribes of Danu, Peter Alderson Smith offers some useful exposition on Ireland's history, some interesting but irrelevant exposition on Ireland's folklore, a critical thesis that is valid but obvious, some very mistaken explications of Yeats's works, some inconsistent statements, and a methodology that is often irritating. Unfortunately, he provides little valid criticism about W. B. Yeats. The study is divided into three sections. In the first section, Smith traces the tangled history of the Formorians, Nemedians, Fir BoIg, Tuatha De Danann, and Milesians. In other words, he examines the Lebor Gabala (Book of Invasions) and other sources to speculate on the origin of fairy faith belief as it is represented in early Irish literature. In the second section of the study, Smith discusses the fairy faith of folklore, as distinguished from the fairy faith of literature. The differences he finds between the two are that folklore's population is more diverse and has a more squalid stature. While Smith's census of the various types of folklore figures and animal shapes is interesting, the discussion of folklore has little application to fairies as Yeats uses them. Yeats's fairies may be dangerous, but they are never squalid. In the third section, Smith seeks to survey Yeats's relationship with fairyland as it is portrayed in Yeats's works over a twenty-two year period beginning with the play The Countess Cathleen (1892) and ending with the poems of Responsibilities (1914). His critical thesis is that fairyland represents "an escape from the fallen world" (19), that this escape involves "complete alienation from the quotidian world" (19), and that because the price of escape into perfection is so high, Yeats vacillates in his response to fairyland. Smith's thesis in this third section is valid as a generalization, but it is not new. I also question his omission from consideration of "the rather immature Wanderings of Oisin and 'Crossways'" poems (19). Even if these poems are immature, they can show the growth of Yeats's relationship with fairyland, and they are the obvious place to begin such a discussion. Similarly, I disagree with Smith's argument that Yeats "grows tired of these longings" for what fairyland represents and "gives them up" after Responsibilities (277). A closer look at Yeats's later poems should convince us that while Yeats gave up fairies as a symbol for his longing for perfection, he never gave up the longing 108 Book Reviews, Volume 32:1, 1988 itself. He merely changed its clothes and called it, among other things, Byzantium. Furthermore, Smith often strains to connect the fairies with his explications, particularly with Yeats's poems. For example, the Rose is hardly a specifically Irish symbol. Smith connects it to the fairies by arguing that the fairies appear in the Rose poems sometimes as "simply an alternative expression of the Rose" or as "creatures subordinate to the Rose" or as "companions to man in the struggle for truth" or as "having either gained or abandoned the quest, and as having found peace by doing so" (175). Smith is even less successful in connecting the fairies with his explications of the poems in The Wind Among the Reeds. Despite saying that "Love functions chiefly as an atmospheric counterpoint to the theme of fairyland" (218), Smith interprets the poems apropos of a sexual narrative cycle. He says, "This climax arrives, fades, and approaches again, in a pattern of tumescence and repose" (219). He regards the theme of apocalypse in The Wind Among the Reeds as "frankly orgasmic" (219). Yeats's desire for apocalypse in these poems may be evidence of imperfectly sublimated sexual frustration, but it is hardly orgasmic. Rather, it is the desire to destroy a world in which such unsatisfied longing exists. Besides his misreading of Yeats's works, Smith is also prone to making inconsistent statements, depending upon what point he is arguing...

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