Yeats's Politics

YEATS'S POLmcs 303 echo of Keats is not just felicitous recollection of asimilar literary reflection but an extension of the meaning made by allusion to apoetreflectingonlove and death in circumstances more alike than the allusion first suggests. Later we are told that 'if Lee's morbidity ran to violence and madness, Congreve's in this play [The Mourning Bride] runs to a melancholy that creeps around his structures like Sandburg's and ElloYs fog. In this play he was, like Webster, "much possessed by death I And saw the skull beneath the skin".' Nothing is said about Prufrock directly, nor about the context of the Webster, but both, pursued, illuminate the world of The Mourning Bride, establish a critical relation from the seventeenth to the twentieth century, and locate the relation in gothic metaphor. Sex and Sensibility is written throughout in this style, as much a testimony to Jean Hagstrum's response to literature as his learnedly detailed knowledge of literary, artistic and musical texts. In addition to the absence of a fashionable superstructure, there is also no apologia for the eighteenth century in this work of sense and sensibility. Rather his study manifests, in every way, the warmth of the Enlightenment. That is revaluation. Yeats's Politics BRIAN JOHN Elizabeth Cullingford. Yeats, Ireland and Fascism New York: New York University Press 1981. viii, 251. $25.00 Forty years or so after his death W.B. Yeats the poet needs no defence: his achievement is universally acknowledged; he has been widely acclaimed as the finest poet writing in English in this century; and his lasting contribution to literature seems unshakeable. Even the esoteric mythological system he developed , brought to fruition by his wife's automatic writing and formulated in A Vision, together with his long-standing membership in the Order of the Golden Dawn, his persistent occultism and contact with the spiritual world, are no longer dismissed as merely cranky and have been magisterially laid out by scholars like George Mills Harper. What continues to trouble many Yeats readers has less to do with interpenetrating gyres, the Mask, Husk, Celestial and Passionate Bodies, than with his political beliefs. Louis MacNeice's study of Yeats's poetry, published shortly after Yeats's death, and two years later George Orwell's essay both raised the issue of fascism and, despite constant reassurances that Yeats's poetry is in the last resort of prime literary concern, the issue has not yet been satisfactorily settled. Indeed, in 1965 Conor Cruise O'Brien, in 'Passion and Cunning: An Essay on the Politics of W.B. Yeats,' met the issue head on, describing the poet's politics as considerably less foolish and inconsistent, more practical and relevant to the poetry, than had been previously argued. O'Brien wrote with an insider's knowledge of the intricacies of twentieth-century Irish UNrvERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, VOLUME 51, NUMBER 3, SPRING 1982 0042-0247/8:z105oo-o303-0306$oo.ooIo C UNIVERSITI OF TORONTO PRESS 304 BRIAN JOHN politics, belonging by birth in the first place to a distinguished Irish political family, and later going on to participate himself in Irish government. His conclusion, however, firmly identified what he called Yeats's 'devious and sometimes sinister political theories and activities.' Elizabeth Cullingford's book, described as 'the first fujI-length study ofYeats's politics: takes a very different stand. She defends Yeats against the familiar charges - that he was anti-democratic, authoritarian, elitist, a snob, a worshipper of war and violence; above all, a Fascist whose good fortune was to die before he could be embarrassed by Naziatrocities and the Second World War. Moreover, despite occasional sallies against MacNeice, Orwelt and subsequent Yeats critics troubled by his political beliefs and allegiances, CuUingford's main antagonist remains O'Brien, with whom she constantly disagrees. It may be thought that CuUingford, whose study is based on her Oxford DPHlL thesis, has the advantage over a 71-page essay - but, despite that apparent advantage, at least one Yeats reader remains not wholly convinced that the former Minister of Posts and Telegraphs and editor of the Observer will need to rethink his position. CuUingford argues, strenuously but not necessarily accurately, that...