YEATS AND AFTERWORDS ed. by Joseph Valente and Marjorie Howes (review)

In Yeats and Afterwords, editors Marjorie Howes and Joseph Valente have collected a compelling selection of essays by twelve of the leading scholars in Irish studies around the concept of “belatedness” in the work of W. B. Yeats (1). For Howes and Valente, belatedness is a “part of [Yeats’s] complex literary method” that “comprises a dialectical logic of temporality” while registering the poet’s unique ability to perch at the tail-end of literary movements and historical periods, gazing backward while somehow still producing “modern” poetry (1, 3). The introduction addresses the paradox of the archaic-modern poet (an ambivalence that is so often the conclusion of, rather than the impetus for, Yeats criticism) from a variety of perspectives, theorizing “belatedness” in terms of the Irish Literary Revival, Yeats’s own historical gyres, and the complex temporality of his revisions and self-citations. In doing so, Howes and Valente articulate both the range of the volume (essay topics span from Yeats’s earliest poems to his influence on contemporary poets) and its thorough coherence. Although “afterwords” and “belatedness” may seem like conveniently vague rubrics to connect dissimilar essays, Yeats’s “intricate nexus of temporal vectors” is consistently and impressively central to each piece (4).

While the complex temporality of “belatedness” provides internal coherence to the volume, the insistence on “belatedness” as a literary method makes the text somewhat difficult to place within extant criticism. The introduction concludes: “What we hope distinguishes this volume from previous work is that it illuminates belatedness, not as a period in Yeats’s career (like the Irish Literary Revival) or a theme (like death), but as a central, underlying logic that structures his poetics from beginning to end” (11). The editors recognize the recent formalist divergence from the New Historicist methods that have characterized Yeats criticism for some time and claim that their volume “aims to extend this formal line of analysis—without forfeiting the abundant insights historicism has to offer” (3).¹ This straddling seems necessary given the strong historicist bent possessed by many of the scholars featured in the volume, but the individual essays are not so self-conscious in their methodological goals, and they do not admit many of the active debates around the integration of formalist and historicist methods. The text certainly intersects with and speaks to New Formalist and Historical Poetics concerns, but not overtly.² Instead, “belatedness” remains a logic unique to Yeats’s poetics.

The volume is divided into three parts; the first, “The Last Romantics,” deals with a variety of Yeats’s cultural and literary inheritances. The section begins with Renée Fox’s utterly convincing essay in which she reads Yeats’s The Wanderings of Oisin as an allegory for the collection and transformation of folk material into the aesthetic object of modern poetry.³ Fox argues that Oisin’s realization of the isolation inherent in the allegorical afterwards of poetic production serves as a warning “against the immersive lure of Celticism” (35). James Murphy also traces Yeats’s relationship with folk influences in his assessment of the poet’s critical engagement with the work of the “so-called peasant novelist” William Carleton (82-83). Murphy demonstrates how Yeats’s deployment of Carleton’s peasant “authenticity” in the debates around Irish literature in English in the 1890s reveals how Yeats and Carleton were not so much inheritors as canny and “deliberate inventors of traditions” that furthered their own literary agenda (97). Valente also treats Yeats’s shifting relationship with literary movements by unpacking his “dialectical identification with the dialectical form of aestheticism itself” (107). Valente argues that Yeats did not, in fact, repudiate his early engagement with aestheticism in favor of Irish Revivalism but, rather, integrated the two, holding his aesthetic commitment to singular personality in tension with the community ethic of the Revival. Finally, the heretofore implicit futural bias of Yeats’s engagement with tradition is questioned by Elizabeth Cullingford; she...