W.B. Yeats: Endings and Beginnings: A Review Essay

W.B. YEATS: ENDINGS AND BEGINNINGS: A REVIEW ESSAY DECLAN KIBERD Seamus Deane, Strange Country: Modernity and Nationhood in Irish Writing since 1790, OUP, 1997. R.F. Foster, W.B. Yeats: A Life, Volume I, The Apprentice Mage 1865–1914, OUP, 1997. W.B. Yeats, The Collected Letters of W.B. Yeats: Volume II 1896–1900, Ed. Warwick Gould, John Kelly, and Deirdre Toomey, OUP, 1997. “We were the last romantics—chose for theme Traditional sanctity and loveliness . . .” a poet’s beautiful lines may echo in the minds of his readers, rewriting themselves into the tradition of their very interpretation. Liberal analysts, beginning with Louis MacNeice (123–25), have often worried that Yeats’s poems seem to assert rather than to earn their chosen terms, and thus to invite disciples or detractors but few real critics. Criticism may properly allow us to admire this element, to reject that, and nevertheless arrive at a generally positive view of a great poet; but Yeats writes every other poem as if the only conditions for acknowledging its power are absolute (even prior) agreement with the sentiments it is about to deliver. If it is easy, it is not necessarily wise to take Yeats’s words for the true state of things. Despite the seductiveness of his view that we should believe any proposition until it has been categorically disproved, his is a program for the long-time postponement rather than the suspension of disbelief. The problem is this: The philosophers of the enlightenment had claimed that what cannot be proved doesn’t exist. And since a prejudice cannot be proven, the enlightenment liquidated all that did not have a strictly rational basis. W.B. YEATS: ENDINGS AND BEGINNINGS: A REVIEW ESSAY 183 It is now more than a quarter-century since Donald Davie—hardly the most politicized of critics—invited us to imagine how we should feel if, instead of “We Irish . . . thrown upon this filthy modern tide,” the poet had actually written “We Nazis”?1 The textual scruples to which this rather melodramatic moment gave rise in the critical literature of the subsequent decade were considerable. It was not long before Seamus Deane was pointing out that Yeats’s ideas of wisdom were established only in the texts, yet these ideas were the very precondition of our ability to decode the texts or make sense of them at all (“Heroic Styles” 45–60). “Pythagoras planned it”—but what? “I have met them at close of day”—who are “them”? In an utterly romantic solution to the problem of prejudice and tolerance, intimacy is assumed rather than being earned. The Yeatsian aesthetic is based on the proposition that to understand a text we must first align our readerly horizons with those of the author. Yet not even the most ardent admirer has ever managed to achieve an absolute overlap. Every reader, as much as every writer, is the product of a singular history and conscious of it as a subject. The reading of a text thus involves some sort of interpretation, for there can be no such thing as an unmediated experience. Each interpreter comes with a pre-understanding of the text, constituted of personal horizons that will be at variance with those of the greatest poet. The understanding of the text then becomes an event: Hans Georg Gadamer argues that we use a poem to test those preunderstandings while allowing it to evoke questions to which we do not as yet have answers (417 ff). In the best sense, the encounter may be dialogic , calling upon readers to examine their own prejudices and tolerances even as they interrogate the poet’s. Yeats’s poetry remains a fascinating test-case because of its power to insinuate its accompanying argument into the mind of the most resisting sort of reader. No critique of Yeats written in the past generation has been as subtle or ferocious as that of Seamus Deane, yet even he ends up recycling the “last romantics” thesis in his most compelling essay. In “Yeats and the Idea of Revolution,” Deane remarks that “Yeats had no idea or attitude which was not part of the late-Romantic stock-in-trade” (Celtic Revivals...