A Recent Bio-Critical Study of Yeats

176 work, which is to say that it is a pleasure to read and rewarding in its presentation of ideas. L. D. Clark University of Arizona 9. A RECENT ΒΙΟ-CRITICAL STUDY OF YEATS Douglas Archibald. Yeats. Syracuse: Syracuse Univ. Press, 1983. $25.00 An initial encounter with a book called simply Yeats is likely to occasion both relief and anxiety. The relief, I suppose, comes from not having to deal with the obligatory subtitle; the anxiety from wondering how anyone— even Harold Bloom—can wrap up Yeats in a single volume. For some time I have thought (and written) that studies which pay particular attention to certain aspects of Yeats, or even to certain volumes, should be top priority on the agenda of Yeats criticism. There is simply too much that remains unexplored in detail. (A good example of the sort of study I have in mind is a recent analysis of Per Arnica Silenia Lunae by Herbert Levine.) Still, though Archibald 's Yeats is, indeed, an attempt at a comprehensive narrative, encompassing both life and work, it is reassuring to be able to note that it is both eminently readable and contributes to our sense of Yeats's rich and often troubled life as man and as poet. There is, without a doubt, some familiar ground covered: Yeats's relationship with his father and his friends; Yeats's involvement in Anglo-Irish and Celtic affairs, cultural and political; the "public" life, the occult, and several other areas, none a surprise. Yet in fairness Archibald's purpose is not to surprise but to elucidate, to link the life and the work wherever the facts warrant, and to stay clear as much as possible from merely inferential and speculative interpretation. This may make the reading a bit bland at times, but the sacrifice of controversy is compensated for by preciseness and common sense. Given his aim, the author succeeds in giving shape to Yeats's life: his crises, his forays into politics (and their silliness at times), his anxieties and despair, his poetic triumphs over self-doubt and a fragile health, especially from 1926-27 onwards. The opening chapter, which compares "A Prayer for my Daughter" with Coleridge 's "Frost at Midnight," follows, in Bloom's tradition, an exploration of "Yeats's interaction with the romantic and modernist traditions in literature " (xiv), but its promise is not entirely fulfilled in subsequent chapters as much as one might hope, even though this problem is only one of several which the book sets out to explore. If Yeats was both the last Romantic and (perhaps) the first Modern, it would have been worthwhile to focus more on that still unresolved linkage. A poet of stature who embraces two centuries with almost equal comfort presents us with a unique challenge and opportunity . Archibald rides no particular critical hobbyhorse, which is refreshing. He does use the word "conflation" several times, and it perhaps best describes his method: an attempt to draw out on various levels the merging parallels of Yeats's career. The chapter on "Politics and Public Life" is thorough and fair, and the implications of Yeats's making "'break' his 177 particular word" (p. 118)—the specific discussion is "Nineteen-hundred-and Nineteen"—Is an astute observation with significant resonances, for "break," in all its meanings, would indeed become one of the active metaphors for the next two decades, in the lyrics, in the plays, and even in the prose. In the same chapter there are some stimulating pages which review Kermode's assertion that Yeats, in the mid-Thirties, becomes "'our first example of that correlation between early modernist literature and authoritarian politics . . .'" (p. 163). And the chapter on "The Antinomies" contains some insightful remarks on "Among School Children" with a timely cross-reference to Keats's "Ode to a Nightingale." What finally makes this volume more than a mere summary are the tact, the insights, the order, and the clarity of prose and thought which Archibald brings to his task. Ellmann's The Man and the Masks and the earlier books by Hone and T. R. Henn remain our "biographies" until such times as the authorized version is published. In the...