Two on Yeats

31:3 Book Reviews TWO ON YEATS William H. O'Donnell. The Poetry of William Butler Yeats: An Introduction. New York: Ungar, 1986. $16.95 Harold Bloom, ed. William Butler Yeats. New York: Chelsea House, 1986. $24.50 Any attempt to provide an introduction to what is arguably the most complex body of verse in English of this century in 165 smallish pages is a formidable if not impossible task. Yet the need for such studies will always be with us. Although the dust-jacket ens in stating that O'Donnell's volume is the first of its kind "in more than two decades" (Richard Morton's An Outline of the Poetry of William Butler Yeats was published in 1971 [Toronto: Forum House]), one can still agree that another entry in the genre would have been appropriate even if it had not been mandated by the publisher's series on "Literature and Life: British Writers." O'Donnell, perhaps best known as editor of Yeats's unpublished and unfinished novel, The Speckled Bird, has made an honorable foray into the ranks; although an unqualified victory has eluded him, his volume remains a useful contribution. O'Donnell begins with a biographical sketch, arguing that "the single most important element in his life was his unwavering dedication to his career as a writer" (3). The second chapter, on "Backgrounds," is divided into five sections : "The Rhetoric of Opposites"; "Theories of History and Personality" (a summary of the main ideas of A Vision); "Anangement of Poems in a Volume"; "Verse Forms"; and "Revisions." Whether these are the five most crucial aspects of Yeats's poetry to be treated in an introductory study is an open question. In particular, some readers will find the attention given to versification excessive—as in the commentary on "The Second Coming," where more is said on rhythm than on meaning and one is left without a very clear sense of the poem as a whole. O'Donnell concludes with a brief chapter on "Yeats and Modem Poetry," offering a summary of the comments by Eliot, Auden, Spender, and others. But the heart of The Poetry of William Butler Yeats: An Introduction consists of the six central chapters which offer commentaries on thirtyfive selected poems. This selection comprises less than 10% of the canonical verse, and obviously O'Donnell's thirty-five will not be anyone else's. It is doubtless futile to object to inclusions or exclusions, but I would mention "The Three Hermits" and "John Kinsella's Lament for Mrs. Mary Moore" as among the former and "Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen" and "Meditations in Time of Civil War" as among the latter. Too, it is inevitable that the commentaries themselves employ a variety of critical approaches, even if at times one must question a particular choice—such as giving three pages to "Solomon to Sheba" without once mentioning George Yeats. But given the rigid restriction in length of O'Donnell's volume, one can rightly object to some of the material he has chosen to include. 320 31:3 Book Reviews In his four-page chapter on The Wind Among the Reeds, for example, O'Donnell limits himself to two lyrics. He begins with a single paragraph on "Into the Twilight," concentrating on rhythm and syntax; he then offers two paragraphs on "He wishes for the Cloths of Heaven," emphasizing rime and, again, rhythm. But he then devotes a rather long paragraph to the discarded names (Aedh, Michael Robartes, and Hanrahan) under which some of the poems first appeared, names which a beginning reader will neither find in his text nor, perhaps, have much interest in. The chapter concludes with two short paragraphs on "veiled references to occult lore" (47). It is doubtful whether this chapter offers a very cogent analysis of either the The Wind Among the Reeds as a volume or its place in Yeats's career. Some of O'Donnell's comments also seem out of place in an introductory study. In his account of "September 1913," for instance, he argues that "Some woman's yellow hair / Has maddened every mother's son" is a "probable allusion" to Yeats and Maud Gonne, this reference being...