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31:4 Book Reviews And it is that playfulness of Yeats that is brought home by the annual as a whole. One learns about the young man's love of enchantment, the older man's gaiety and humour, the poet's lasting vitality. Kenner writes that Yeats was always playing "the hedgehog's one trick against the fox's many, the trick, in extremis, of a cunningly managed death" (86), but, fortunately, the scholars who contributed to this annual have not been taken in by that trick. Sheila Deane Toronto, Ontario YEATS AND TRADITION Patrick J. Keane. Yeats's Interactions with Tradition. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1987. $32.00 Patrick Keane hears echoes. Why he should do so is a question for psychologists , who would need to analyze Keane's prose, set resonating with allusions from Shakespeare to Alan Seeger, from Mark Twain to John Foster Dulles, some relevant, some inelevant to the topic of Yeats's poetry. Why we should hear the echoes that Keane hears in Yeats's poetry is another question. One of the considerable merits of Keane's book is that it treats that question openly, presenting a series of studies, each centered on a specific poem, that test the value of what Keane calls "genetic" criticism. That enterprise includes the uncovering of documentary evidence as well as the more subjective business of detecting verbal echoes, and Keane's research in the Yeats Archives at the State University of New York at Stony Brook increases the stock of usefully available information, particularly in regard to "The Second Coming" and "A Dialogue of Self and Soul." But the echoes that Keane detects, and the readings he builds upon them, constitute the most substantial portion as well as the most controversial feature of his book. As Keane presents it, controversy is inherent in the manner of Yeats's interaction with tradition, and finally in the tradition itself. On several occasions , Keane distinguishes three traditions, Romantic, occult, and Anglo-Irish, which Yeats admits into his poetry only to play them off against each other, thereby establishing "the unique individual," in this case, Yeats, "as the ultimate 'source' of value" (173). However, Keane agrees with most critics, as well as with Yeats himself, in regarding the Romantic tradition as Yeats's primary inheritance, and Blake and Shelley as the poets chiefly responsible for its transmission. The other two traditions that Keane acknowledges are subsumed , in the course of his analysis, in the influence of two other Romantics, William Wordsworth and Friedrich Nietzsche. To my mind, Keane's most valuable contribution to Yeats criticism is his argument for the importance of Wordsworth 's validation, within the revolutionary Romantic tradition, of an antiUtopian , hence anti-revolutionary, attitude, which Yeats identified more explicitly with his Anglo-Irish predecessors, particularly Edmund Burke. Nietzsche also would have reinforced that attitude, as Keane notes, but the overrid510 31:4 Book Reviews ing importance of Nietzsche for Yeats, according to Keane, lay in his celebration of "the unique individual" as the source of the spiritual light that Yeats valued in the occult tradition. More specifically, Keane contends that it is principally Nietzsche's influence that permits Self, at the close of "A Dialogue of Self and Soul," to declare his sins forgiven, thus taking the place of the God whose death Nietzsche declared. Keane's study of Yeats and Nietzsche, which began with his 1971 dissertation, usefully complements the recent book by Frances Nesbitt Oppel, Mask and Tragedy : Yeats and Nietzsche, 1902-10 (University Press of Virginia, 1987). Where Oppel closely examines Yeats's initial reading of Nietzsche, and its immediate impact on the essays and plays that were Yeats's main creative outlet in the first decade of this century, Keane considers the ultimate consequences of Nietzsche's influence for Yeats's poetry. The greater scope of Keane's project necessarily entails greater difficulty, for it requires that Keane take up a position on the treacherous soil with which contemporary critical theory has attempted to fill in the Nietzschean abyss. On the one hand, Keane must respond to Harold Bloom's charge, in Yeats (Oxford University Press, 1970), that acceptance of Nietzsche's doctrine of...

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