Essays on Yeats

ELT 37:1 1994 provides the French text of the letter, as well as the translation). EquaUy interesting is that Jean Cocteau adapted The Devil's Disciple—what did the surrealist find attractive enough in the play to make him want to adapt it? was it the theme of the Double? the exchange of identities? Unfortunately, Amalric provides only the bare fact, none of the circumstances that prompted the adaptation. (Is this adaptation avaUable? I find no mention of it in Steegmuller's biography of Cocteau.) Amalric also mentions new versions of Saint Joan by George Neveux (another surrealist, author of Juliet or the Key to Dreams) and of Don Juan in Hell by Andre Maurois. But, alas, no further information is given. About stage and television productions, Amalric notes that since 1960, at the rate of once every two or three years, a major Shaw play has received an important production or been televised. A more detailed account of these would be most valuable to students of Shaw, and I hope Professor Amalric wiU go on to expand these articles into a full history of Shaw's plays as the French have received them. John A. Bertolini ------------------- Middlebury College Essays on Yeats Paul Kirschner and Alexander Stülmark, eds. Between Time and Eternity : Nine Essays on W. B. Yeats and His Contemporaries. Atlanta: Editions RodopiB.V., 1992. 170 pp. $50.00 THIS HIGHLY INTERESTING coUection of essays is the result of a symposium held in London at the 1989 Institute of Germanic Studies, representing papers by writers from several different countries and academic specialties. As the editors explain in their preface, the choice to compare Hugo von Hofmannsthal (1874-1929) and Aleksandr Blok (1880-1921) with Yeats was a "natural" one, given the two writers' "stature, the numerous interests they shared with Yeats (magic, dreams, symbolism, music, myth), and by the shattering historical events to which they, like Yeats, had to respond as citizens yet keep in perspective as poets." The events referred to are, for Hofmannsthal, the collapse of the Hapsburg Empire and World War I; for Blok, the 1905 October Revolution in Russia; and for Yeats, of course, the 1916 Easter Rising. The reaction by these writers to these national cataclysms inspired the symposium theme and the title of this collection, especially the tension felt between the "opposed imperatives" governing citizenship and poetics, in essence, between the historically timely and the "aes96 BOOK REVIEWS thetically timeless." The stated and overarching intention of the collection is to allow students and scholars to acquaint themselves with three influential poetic figures of the twentieth century, here "brought together ... in the critical perspective of their common predicament: to find themselves deeply involved in, whUe poeticaUy at odds with, their unprecedented times." Paul Kirschner's opening essay, "Yeats and Time," serves weU as an introduction to the coUection's theme, anticipating subsequent essays in its analysis of the poet's relationship with time-bound history and eternal art. Yet it is a discerning study in its own right, outlining through analysis of several key poems Yeats's life-long struggle with, and shifting attitudes toward, time itself—on the one hand, in poems such as "SaUing to Byzantium," seeming to desire escape from time; and on the other hand, as in The WUd Swans at Coole," appearing to be fascinated by the time-honored occurrence of timeless, and ageless, passion symbolized by the vigorous swans. According to Kirschner, a love of time and a revolt against it exists side by side in many of Yeats's poems, suggesting an ambivalence that especially demonstrates itself, he notes, in the revision of The Old Pensioner," the last line of which ends with a sense both of defiance and exaltation: "I spit into the face of Time/That has transfigured me." So the poetry "consists precisely in the ambivalence about time's effect on the speaker, who both hates and feels elevated—even purified—by it." Kirschner goes on to explain how the poet's relationship with time was measuredly shaped by the historical period he occupied, a period marked by revolution and change in Ireland as well as across Europe. Wanting to experience at...