Passionate Reverie: W. B. Yeats’s Tragic Correlative
- Passionate ReverieW. B. Yeats’s Tragic Correlative
Assistant Professor of English, University of Michigan
notes
1. To mention only a few instances: F. A. C. Wilson’s two books, W. B. Yeats and Tradition (London, 1918), with its valuable discussion of Yeats’s Noh theory, and Yeats’s Iconography (London, 1960); Henry Popkin, “Yeats as a Dramacist,” TDR, III (1959), 73–82; Morton Irving Seiden, “W, B. Yeats as a Playwright,” WHR, XIII (1959), 83–98; Denis Donoghue, The Third Voice (Princeton, 1959). There have been several specific treatments of Yeats as a tragedian: T. R. Henn, The Harvest of Tragedy (London, 1956); B. L. Reid’s provocative “Yeats and Tragedy,” HR, XI (1938) 391–410; Irving Suss, “Yearsian Drama and the Dying Hero,” SAQ, LIV (1955). 369–80. Also relevant is Walter E. Houghton, “Yeats and Crazy Jane: The Hero in Old Age,” MP, XL (1943), 310–29.
2. W. B. Yeats, Essays (London, 1924), 221–2.
3. W. B. Yeats, et al., Literary Ideals in Irelind (London, 1899), 35.
4. The Letters of W. B. Yeats, ed. Allan Wade (London, 1954), 776.
5. W. B. Yeats, On the Boiler (Dublin, 1938), 33–4.
6. J. B. Yeats, Letter to his Son W. B. Yeats and Others, 1869–1922 (London, 1944), 128. The Character-Personality distinction discussed in the following paragraphs has been rendered by several critics. It is to put Yeats’s remarks into my own context that I repeat them here. Yeats’s interest in Personality owes something, of course, to the ritualistic reverence which some chief figures in the nineties bestowed upon it (e.g., Wilde and Johnson).
7. Essays, 296–7.
8. The Autobiography of William Butler Yeats (New York, 1953), 286; Letters. 548. All quotations from the Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats, Definitive Edition, © The Macmillan Company, 1956; The Autobiography of William Butler Yeats, © The Macmillan Company, 1953; and The Variorum Edition of the Poems of W. B. Yeats, © The Macmillan Company, 1957, are used by permission of the publisher.
9. Autobiography, 304–5.
10. Ibid., 286. Yeats here appears to be denying tragedy the scope of “action” but the word in this context carries a special meaning. In an introduction to his work published for the first time in Essays and Introductions (London, 1961) Yeats writes: “I had begun to get rid of everything that is not…in some sense character in action; a pause [reverie] in the midst of action perhaps, but action always its end and theme” (530).
11. Essays, 298–9.
12. The Literary Works of Sir Joshua Reynolds, ed. Henry William Beechy (London, 1855), 11, 132, 322.
13. It should be remembered that many writers in the nineties, whom Yeats knew, were at war with realism. Compare Yeats’s remarks above with this from Wilde (The Decay of Lying); “The whole history [of the decorative arts] in Europe is the record of the struggle between Orientalism, with its frank rejection of imitation…and our imitative spirit. Wherever the former has been paramount, as in Byzantium…we have had beautiful and imaginative work.…But wherever we have returned to Life and Nature, our work has always become vulgar, common, uninteresting”; “one touch of Nature may make the whole world kin, but two touches of Nature will destroy any work of Art.” Also relevant to Yeats’s position on “real” and “ideal” art is Hazard Adams, “Yeatsian Art and Mathematic Form,” The Centennial Review, IV (1960), 70–88.
14. Reynolds, Works., 11, 300.
15. Essays, 300–3.
16. The Variorum Edition of the Poems of W. B. Yeats, ed. Peter Allt and Russell K. Alspach (New York, 1957), 824.
17. W. B. Yeats, Wheels and Butterflies (London, 1934), 93. But The Player Queen proved useful in suggesting how the assumption of an absurd mask might lead to a kind of tragi-comedy congenial to Yeats. For a defence and interpretation of the play, see William Becker, “The Mask Mocked; or, Farce and the Dialectic of Self,” SR, LXI (1953), 82–108.
18. Essays, 294–6.
19. Ibid., 369–424. Selections come from the three key essays on Synge in Essays.
20. Ibid., 129.
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