Literary Couplings: Writing Couples, Collaborators, and the Construction of Authorship

Courting the Muse: Dorothy Wellesley and W. B. Yeats

The First Gift: Despair and Discovery It has sometimes seemed of late years, though not in the poems that I have selected for this book, as if the poet could at any moment write a poem by recording the fortuitous scene or thought, perhaps it might be enough to put into some fashionable rhythm—“I am sitting in a chair, there are three dead flies on a corner of the ceiling.” W. B. Yeats, The Oxford Book of Modern Verse William Butler Yeats discovered Dorothy Wellesley’s poetry in 1935 while compiling The Oxford Book of Modern Verse, 1892–1935. His “eyes filled with tears” because a living poet had finally succeeded in restoring his faith in modern poetry and in his own ability to recognize good verse.1 Before finding Wellesley’s work, the poetry that Yeats read seemed to him “clay-cold, clay-heavy” (introd., Selections, vii), and in “his worst moments ” he believed he could “no longer understand the poetry of other men” (viii). Yeats read Wellesley’s poems “in excitement that was the more delightful because it showed I had not lost my understanding of 211 Courting the Muse Dorothy Wellesley and W. B. Yeats   poetry” (vii). Moreover, after reading her poem “Matrix,” which Yeats called “perhaps the most moving philosophic poem of our time,” he had “a moment’s jealousy,” believing he was “too old” to spend his last years writing philosophic verse as he had hoped he might (xii). Wellesley’s poems came to Yeats as a kind of serendipitous gift that, like all gifts, was received with pleasure and gratitude combined with anxiety regarding his ability to reciprocate. Paradoxically, her poems restored his confidence in his critical acumen yet provoked doubt about his poetic ability. Not surprisingly, their first meeting in June 1935 was a watershed. Wellesley wrote to Yeats that her creative powers were rejuvenated by her contact with him: “I have been writing ever since you were here.”2 Likewise, Yeats noted that “a ferment has come upon my imagination. If I write more poetry it will be unlike anything I have done” (Letters, 6). Their effect on one another was profound. This first contact initiated a friendship that would be characterized by a complicated system of literary and erotic exchanges. The relationship culminated in 1937 with the publication of their ballads, Yeats’s “The Ballad of the Three Bushes” and Wellesley’s “The Lady, The Squire, and The Serving-Maid,” in the March and September editions of the Cuala Press’s Broadsides, which they coedited. In both ballads a Lady sends her servant to the unsuspecting Lover to act as her sexual surrogate. The ballad’s narrative framework offers a model of poetic inspiration that is complicated by gender identity and erotic desire, mirroring the personal and artistic commerce between Yeats and Wellesley. Like the erotic triangle represented in the ballads, the Yeats-Wellesley friendship was mutually beneficial, yet it also gave rise to significant anxieties for both poets.3 For Yeats in particular, the relationship raised problematic issues of sexual and artistic identity. Indeed, while Yeats had often been attracted to “collective” forms of authorship (his collaboration with Lady Gregory being only the most famous), his literary liaison with Wellesley may have been intensified by a sense of his own belatedness among literary modernists. Much more was at stake than a simple attraction to the ballad form, a collaborative genre that had intrigued Yeats throughout his life. Recuperating Wellesley’s influence on Yeats raises interesting questions concerning collaboration, appropriation, and authorship that extend beyond the ballads to Yeats’s editorship of the Oxford Book of Modern Verse and to some of his last great works. Reading their relationship through the framework of gift theory, as articulated by Marcel Mauss, 212   reveals a highly productive yet difficult “scribbling sibling rivalry”4 characterized by an ongoing competitive reciprocity. Indeed, if the Yeats/Wellesley relationship repeats the dynamic of male appropriation of female wisdom present throughout much of Yeats’s work, it also underscores the price paid by the male artist for gaining access to such wisdom through the woman. Characterized by a competitive reciprocity , the Yeats/Wellesley friendship offers a model of collaborative authorship that simultaneously reveals and conceals the multifaceted nature of inspiration and even authorship. No Free Poems: The Story of the Ballads Wellesley’s ballad “The Lady, The Squire, and The Serving-Maid” tells the story...