The Poetry of William Butler Yeats
Yeats, like Nietzsche, never wrote a creation myth. His attempt to put together a mythical system in his book called A Vision does not include an account of the creation. A Vision does take up the history of humanity. It correlates the rise and fall of civilizations with the phases of the moon and thus with cycles of growth and decay. Yeats derived his system in part from Blake. He was one of the first to take Blake seriously; he in fact worked on the first printed edition of Blake’s complete works. The obvious difference is that Blake’s cycles have a beginning and an end—a fall from and a return to eternity. There is no eternity in Yeats, no superior state from which man has fallen and to which he may return. There are only the endless cycles of human history—people creating civilizations and then watching them crumble and then creating them anew. “All things fall and are built again,” to quote Yeats’s “Lapis Lazuli.” We can actually watch Yeats renouncing eternity in his poem “A Dialogue of Self and Soul.” Soul stands for man’s yearning for eternity, for a state that transcends human life. Self stands for affirmation of the here and now. Yeats takes the side of the self against the soul, the side of human time against eternity. Yeats’s affirmation takes a familiar form. Yeats virtually proclaims Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence: “I am content to live it all again / And yet again” (132).
For all practical purposes, nothing occurs outside human time in Yeats, although there are periodically intrusions of the supernatural into the human world. Supernatural visions or revelations announce the ending of an old era or cycle and the beginning of a new one. But Yeats always emphasizes the utter bewilderment of mortals in contact with the divine. They never understand what is happening. They see only the destructive aspects of the new era, the fact that it displaces the old. They cannot see the creative aspects and are therefore terrorized by supernatural revelations. Yeats wrote 3 “annunciation” poems and they all deal with the arrival of a new cycle in history. “Leda and the Swan” begins the classical era. “The Mother of God” begins the Christian era. And “The Second Coming” deals with Yeats’s own time and heralds the beginning of a new era, as yet undefined. All 3 poems begin with birds and end with questions, to emphasize the uncomprehending way in which mortals receive revelations. Yeats also emphasizes the terror of the moment when the human encounters the divine. It’s pictured as a rape in “Leda and the Swan.” Even the prophecy of Jesus becomes something violent in “The Mother of God.” This is the Virgin Mary receiving the Annunciation:
The threefold terror of love; a fallen flame
Through the hollow of an ear;
Wings beating about the room;
The terror of all terrors that I bore
The Heavens in my womb.
Like Blake, Yeats works to build up a common mythic archetype. He assimilates Mary’s experience to Leda’s when Zeus raped her in the form of a swan. Here the dove of the Holy Spirit becomes a bird of power. Neither Leda nor Mary understands what is happening, that they are giving birth to a new era of history. All they see is the terror and violence of the moment. Yeats hopes to read a lesson for our time out of all this. We also can’t see where all the terror and violence in our world is leading, but, based on past history, it must mean that we’re once more at a turning point of history. Something good will come of all this, or at least the start of a new era. That is the meaning of “The Second Coming.”
For Yeats, the supernatural is always something frightening, something that intrudes upon human life, forces itself in, seizes hold of men and women. It’s like poetic inspiration. You can’t predict its coming, you can’t fight it when it arrives. You can’t even understand it. At most you can try to control it, make it serve you. It’s something like the arrival of Demogorgon in Percy Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound, a work which influenced Yeats greatly (he called it one of the sacred books of mankind). For Yeats the supernatural is not a state permanently and securely above human beings—that’s why he tends to picture it in vulgar terms—in the form of elves, fairies, and hobgoblins. Not as something elevated, not a state one might aspire to, or at least refer to in order to guide one’s life. In other words, in Yeats the supernatural is not eternity as you would find it in the Biblical or the classical traditions. One might even question if the supernatural in Yeats has any status genuinely independent of human life. When Yeats invokes the supernatural, he usually seems to be invoking irrational currents of feeling that suddenly spring up in human life, the “irrational streams of blood” he speaks of in a poem called “The Gyres.” This reflects Yeats’s belief that the irrational is necessary to give vitality to life. That is why civilizations begin with a violent eruption of the supernatural. We need a push to get things going—fresh blood. Civilizations run down when the blood goes cold and forms rigidify. They have to be shattered to make way for the flow of new life.
Hence the cycles in Yeats—there is no final resting place for humanity, no permanent achievement that would not mean the death of the human spirit. This explains why Yeats’s poetic vision is historical rather than mythic. To write myths about the gods might suggest an eternal state, as it does in Blake and Shelley. Myths are important for Yeats only insofar as they enter human history. That’s why his few mythic poems are about epiphanies—the appearance of gods to men, or, more often, women. Yeats’s symbolic system remains firmly anchored in human history; it doesn’t get above it or beyond it. That’s why Yeats can be viewed as a post-Nietzsche poet, much like Rainer Maria Rilke. Both are poets of a Nietzschean world, a world understood for the first time without reference to eternity. Another way of characterizing Yeats, indeed another way of saying the same thing, would be to say that Yeats is the first historicist poet, the poet of man in a strictly historical condition. Yeats portrays man as Nietzsche understands him—always living within horizons of his own creation. Human beings are time-bound—you live in a certain era of history, a certain phase. That limits your options; certain possibilities are opened up but others are cut off. The most that can happen is you’re out of phase (out of season in Nietzsche’s phrase)—behind or ahead of your time. But then you get warped, like a hunchback with the soul of Caesar, according to “The Saint and the Hunchback.”
This notion of man’s being bound to history is of course arrived at paradoxically for the sake of human freedom. Yeats’s great fear—like Nietzsche’s—is that human beings will settle down into a permanently contented final state, like cows. There is a strong anti-bourgeois streak in Yeats. He welcomed the violence he saw coming in the 20th century as a way of shaking liberal democratic society out of its complacency, although he did have second thoughts about this when he saw what form the violence took, for example in the Irish Civil War. Look at his poem “1919”—Yeats does not take up Nietzsche by name, but this poem offers an excellent critique of Nietzschean immoderation and imprudence. Still Yeats’s views demanded that he welcome destruction as the prelude to creation. That’s why Yeats—like Nietzsche—had a genuinely tragic view of human existence. Once more: “All things fall and are built again.” Man cannot even create himself once and for all in history. You can barely speak of Man in Yeats, only of men. Blake, Shelley, and other Romantics still have some sense that there is a universal human nature, or at least a universal human potentiality. In Yeats, as in Nietzsche, man becomes a radically historical phenomenon. You can speak of Babylonian man, Greek man, Christian man. An Athenian is almost a different species from a Byzantine. This view of man as able to create himself into many different forms gives him total freedom, freedom from the finality of his own creations, although from another perspective he’s completely subjected to necessity, historical necessity. The individual doesn’t seem to be free. He lives in a certain civilization, historical era. That sets limits to him. But man as a species is free because no one civilization will last forever. The human race will go on trying out new possibilities for humanity. This is what we saw in Nietzsche—you have to renounce eternity for the sake of human freedom and power. As weird as Yeats’s symbolic system may seem, it is an expression of the modern understanding of the world, not so much in what it includes but in what it omits, any notion of anything higher than man and therefore eternal.
That’s about as much as I can get out of the fact that Yeats didn’t write a creation myth. Though he doesn’t take up the subject of the creation, he does take up the subject of creativity, artistic creativity. This shift in attention from divine to human creativity is something we’ve seen growing. The Romantics at first use the form of the creation myth to establish the value of human creativity, but gradually this ideal is subjected to criticism. As we saw in Keats, artistic creativity is revealed as something unnatural, a disease. This is a logical development. In a sense, Romanticism began as a revolt against the natural, above all against human nature. Consider Percy Shelley’s desire to be free of the body and its limitations. Or Blake’s sense of how man stagnates when he tries to remain on the level of physical nature—the Book of Thel. Here is the Romantic desire is to create man better than nature did. That means that creativity has to become something unnatural. The ideal requires that man go against what seems to be his nature. This is what we saw in Frankenstein—the creator’s lack of sympathy for the creature in man. He’s willing to see man alone and miserable for the sake of a creative ideal. This is how the notion develops of the artist as a man unfit for ordinary life, sacrificing his life for the sake of his art. This is the issue that Yeats’s poetry revolves around, formulated succinctly in a poem called “The Choice”:
The intellect of man is forced to choose
Perfection of the life, or of the work.
Yeats was able to formulate this question clearly, but he never was able to come up with a clear answer to it. He sometimes takes the side of art against life, and sometimes the side of life against art. He vacillates as a poet, and indeed one of his major statements on the subject is a poem called “Vacillation.” One of his distinctive abilities as a poet was to be able to look at both sides of an issue—even the most heated political issues, as you’ll find in his poem “Easter 1916” about the Easter rebellion in Dublin. This is why he wrote so many dialogue poems; that gave him the chance to state the case for and against. This was true of him in all of his personal relationships, too. To the mystics he knew, he always seemed too rational and skeptical; to the rational people he knew, he always seemed too mystical. To the political people he knew, he seemed too detached from current affairs; to his apolitical friends, he seemed too directly involved in politics (he served, for example, in the Irish Senate after independence). He was always pulled in several directions at once. He could become passionately devoted to one course of action, and then react with just as much passion in the opposite direction. This was his strange form of moderation—the balance of immoderate urges.
This is basic to understanding his poetry. He was constantly moving back and forth between seeming opposites. He doesn’t try to reconcile them. Rather he maintains an awareness of the tension between the two. He won’t allow one side of the argument to annihilate the other. See his famous statement (echoing Macbeth) in “Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop”:
Fair and foul are near of kin,
And fair needs foul, I cried.
Then, echoing Blake:
But Love has pitched his mansion in
The place of excrement;
For nothing can be sole or whole
That has not been rent.
Here is the basic Romantic attitude toward wholeness and division. Yeats obviously gets his idea of opposites from Blake—“Without Contraries is no progression” (The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Plate 3). The difference is: Yeats never moves beyond the contraries; he does not seek to resolve them on a higher plane. In Yeats we get a Hegelian dialectic with theses and antitheses but no syntheses. This corresponds to the absence of eternity in his work. Yeats remains within the antagonisms of history. It’s what’s most frustrating about him as a poet, and no doubt was most frustrating about him as a person. He never seems to be able to make up his mind. In a sense, though, that’s also what’s greatest in Yeats. He never opts for easy answers, at least not for long. He won’t simplify his view of the world. He seeks totality, not by trying to elevate artificially and arbitrarily one part of life into the whole, but by trying to work his way through all the parts.
Early in Yeats’s poetic career, he takes up the theme of how art can unfit a man for life. His first volumes of poetry are characterized by a dreamy, late Romantic style and subject matter. He’s sometimes prone to sentimentality and posing. Yeats generally writes in the persona of an old man who has experienced everything in life. He’s burned out; he’s always looking back at the moment of passion, looking back at lost love. It’s a curious fact: when Yeats was relatively young, he wrote like an old man. When he grew old, he wrote like a young man. His late poems often focus on a moment of passion; they have more life in them than the early ones. See “The Wild, Old Wicked Man.” Many of these early poems involve the intrusion of the supernatural in human life. Yeats makes use of native Irish mythology. Stories of fairies trying to steal away a young child: “The Stolen Child.” Stories of goblins riding through the world and winning away men’s and women’s allegiance from their everyday life: “The Hosting of the Sidhe,” “The Unappeasable Host.” These poems present the same contrast again and again: the ordinary, peaceful, bourgeois world of animal contentment is disrupted by creatures of sinister beauty, somehow dangerous, but somehow they promise a new excitement, a new vision:
Empty your heart of its mortal dream.
The winds awaken, the leaves whirl round,
Our cheeks are pale, our hair is unbound,
Our breasts are heaving, our eyes are agleam,
Our arms are waving, our lips are apart;
And if any gaze on our rushing band,
We come between him and the deed of his hand,
We come between him and the hope of his heart. (“The Hosting of the Sidhe,” 20)
In these early poems, Yeats’s image for the relation of the artist to society is an elf or hobgoblin trying to steal away human children from their safe, warm houses. This is also his image for the way inspiration steals upon the artist himself. It’s hard to tell where Yeats’s sympathies lie in these early poems. A typical one is “The Man Who Dreamed of Faeryland.” Whenever the man is about to achieve something in life—experience love, be a success in business, wreak vengeance on those who mock him—he’s suddenly interrupted by a strange vision—in one case a pile of silver fish—and the vision makes it impossible for him to achieve his goals in life. Yeats conveys a sense of both the emptiness of those ordinary goals and the dubious value of the dreams that distract away from them. The love is described: “His heart hung all upon a silken dress,” as if his love were for something external. On the other hand, the last line is: “The man has found no comfort in the grave,” as if his dreams have poisoned not only his whole life but his death as well. In these early poems, Yeats seems content with setting up both sides of the issue of art vs. life. He makes little or no effort to resolve the question on one side or the other.
Some of his later poems fearlessly plump down on one side, and then he reverses himself in other poems. Perhaps his most famous poem, “Sailing to Byzantium,” stalwartly argues the case for art over life. It’s often compared to Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn”—in both poems the work of art achieves a perfection that all life lacks. Life involves the flesh and the flesh involves the inevitability of decay. Yeats refers to “those dying generations” in the first stanza. He symbolizes the world of the flesh concretely in terms of “salmon-falls, mackerel-crowded seas.” Salmon spawn and then die—and then rot. This is what human life is like. Yeats wants to flee this to get to Byzantium. It represents the most abstract, patterned art—abstracted from life. Think of the golden, geometric mosaics in Byzantine churches. This is a form of eternity—“the artifice of eternity.” The work of art lives forever, while men die. Art offers immortality. This is explicitly contrasted with anything natural. Yeats’s wish is to enter the mosaics:
Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing.
Yeats wants to become a golden bird, a work of art himself. Man’s handiwork is superior to him; it reproaches him for being changeable and mortal.
We get the same idea in the later poem “Byzantium,” where we see another golden bird that can:
scorn aloud
In glory of changeless metal
Common bird or petal
And all the complexities of mire or blood.
But we begin to wonder about these arrogant works of art. They are eternal only because they are lifeless. And they seem fairly brittle. They could easily be smashed. “The artifice of eternity”—is this the eternal artifice or the artificial eternity? Is art superior to life after all? And so “Byzantium” ends quite differently from “Sailing to Byzantium.” In the earlier poem, Yeats flees from the fleshy world of life to the artificial world of art. But at the end of “Byzantium,” the “mackerel-crowded seas”—or at least the dolphin-crowded seas--come smashing into Byzantium:
Astraddle on the dolphin’s mire and blood,
Spirit after spirit! The smithies break the flood,
The golden smithies of the Emperor!
Marbles of the dancing floor
Break bitter furies of complexity,
Those images that yet
Fresh images beget,
That dolphin-torn, that gong-tormented sea.
The opposition between art and life that Yeats sets up in “Sailing to Byzantium” breaks down in “Byzantium.” For once, Yeats suggests that a synthesis of the opposites might be possible. The artistic images that seemed so abstract in the earlier poem here take a living form; they beget other images as if they were living flesh themselves, so that Yeats returns to the “dolphin-torn, that gong-tormented sea.” By the end of the poem, art and life have fused in an image of fertile images.
That takes us to “The Dolls.” This is a remarkable poem, all the moreso because of its brevity:
A doll in the doll-maker’s house
Looks at the cradle and bawls:
‘That is an insult to us.’
But the oldest of all the dolls,
Who had seen, being kept for show,
Generations of his sort,
Out-screams the whole shelf: ‘Although
There’s not a man can report
Evil of this place,
The man and woman bring
Hither, to our disgrace,
A noisy and filthy thing.’
Hearing him groan and stretch
The doll-maker’s wife is aware
Her husband has heard the wretch,
And crouched by the arm of his chair,
She murmurs into his ear,
Head upon shoulder leant:
‘My dear, my dear, O dear,
It was an accident.”
This is perhaps the closest Yeats comes to the typical Romantic creation myth, but he handles it with characteristic irony. The whole of Frankenstein is reduced to a puppet show, a kind of “Pinocchio Unbound.” The poem is incredibly compressed and requires some opening up to be appreciated. We first have to reconstruct the situation. We have a dollmaker and his wife and we can imagine that they have put all their energy into making dolls, instead of having children of their own. It’s easy to see why: dolls are easier to take care of. They’re not messy, they don’t make a lot of noise, they don’t even have to be changed. And now suddenly an accident has happened. Somehow the couple have had a real baby, and all hell has broken loose in the toy shop. The dolls are insulted and their leader feels disgraced by the presence of this “noisy and filthy thing.” The story is interesting enough in itself—perhaps “macabre” is the better word—but it obviously points to something beyond. It’s an allegory of art vs. life. The dollmakers are like artists, fleeing the messiness of life into the perfection of art—a rather low-key and somewhat grotesque Sailing to Byzantium. The dollmakers are even ashamed of any humanness in them, any generation in a normal human manner. It’s like the curious behavior of Victor Frankenstein—all the time he’s worried about creating a human life, but all the time he’s shying away from doing it in the most ordinary and straightforward manner with his love Elizabeth. Frankenstein wants an artificial rather than a natural creation—something that will be more perfect. He wants to have greater control over the product, not share the process with a woman. And the dollmakers end up with the same problem as Victor Frankenstein. Their creations now come back to haunt them. They proclaim their superiority to their creators. The dolls are perfect; their beauty endures; they’re “kept around for show.” But the dolls are quite frankly obnoxious, especially the impossibly moralistic eldest of the crew. The artifacts man himself creates have the gall to tell him he’s inferior because he’s alive. We feel like telling the dolls: “Where the hell would you be if it weren’t for the noisy and filthy things that made you?” Isn’t life superior to art after all?
Elsewhere in this volume of poetry—aptly named Responsibilities—Yeats extends the meaning of “The Dolls” and also brings the message home to himself. In the prefatory poem to the volume, he asks pardon from his ancestors for the fact that at age 49 he’s still unmarried and hasn’t founded a family: “I have no child, I have nothing but a book.” He has sacrificed life to art. Yeats clearly aligns himself with the dollmakers—his passion is barren because it’s all been poured into his art. The meaning of “The Dolls” is extended further in its companion piece, “The Magi,” a poem so compressed as to be almost unintelligible:
Now as at all times I can see in the mind’s eye,
In their stiff, painted clothes, the pale unsatisfied ones
Appear and disappear in the blue depth of the sky
With all their ancient faces like rain-beaten stones,
And all their helms of silver hovering side by side,
And all their eyes still fixed, hoping to find once more,
Being by Calvary’s turbulence unsatisfied,
The uncontrollable mystery on the bestial floor.
Fortunately there’s a note on these two poems from Yeats (p. 452 of the complete edition). Yeats calls the magi “complementary forms of those enraged dolls.” He gives a significant statement of the theme: “I had noticed once again how all thought among us is frozen into ‘something other than human life.’” This is what makes the artist a tragic figure. He has visions that are alive but he has to embody them in fixed forms. In those rigid molds, the inspiration can go dead. Yeats is the heir to Percy Shelley—his belief that the composition of art is never equal to the inspiration. But Yeats sees this as more than just a problem with art. Yeats sees whole civilizations as following this pattern. They start with a great inspiration, symbolized by an infusion of the supernatural, but gradually their forms become more and more rigid, ready to be displaced. This seems to be what is happening in “The Magi”—life being crucified on the altar of rigid moral forms. The Magi are the myths that man’s own mind projects onto the heavens. I believe they are connected to the forms of morality. There is a connection between art and morality in Yeats, between his aesthetics and his ethics. Man’s morals are like his works of art. They arise out of life but then they come back to haunt it, to demand the sacrifice of life to an inflexible code. As you read “The Dolls” or “The Magi,” you might recall what Blake said of the gods of myth: “These Gods are visions of the eternal attributes, or divine names, which, when erected into gods, become destructive of humanity. They ought to be the servants, and not the masters of man, or of society. They ought to be made to sacrifice to Man, and not man compelled to sacrifice to them” (Descriptive Catalogue, p. 536). Yeats makes a similar point. Morality arises out of perfectly human needs but it has a way of becoming inhuman because inflexible. The Magi are as artificial as the Dolls in their “stiff, pointed clothes”—they’re almost like vampires—“pale unsatisfied ones”—living off the blood of their victims, in this case, Christ. One can see opening up in this poem the great gap in Yeats—the gulf between all the rational forces of human civilization—art, morality, philosophy—and “the uncontrollable mystery on the bestial floor”—the irrational currents of life beneath civilization.
The implications of Yeats’s view of the potential artificiality of poetry in “The Dolls” are immediately developed in the poem that follows it: “A Coat”:
I made my song a coat
Covered with embroideries
Out of old mythologies
From heel to throat;
But the fools caught it,
Wore it in the world’s eyes
As though they’d wrought it.
Song, let them take it,
For there’s more enterprise
In walking naked.
This is a refreshing little lyric, refreshing because of Yeats’s healthy sense of self-criticism. He’s acutely aware of his limitations as an artist. He’s willing to question the very basis of his art. Here he makes fun of his use of Irish mythology in his poetry. He sees it as something artificial and external, like a coat, something you just put on, a form of decoration. To quote Nietzsche: “The poet presents his thoughts festively, on the carriage of rhythm: usually because they could not walk” (Human, All Too Human, # 189, Kaufmann PN 54).
Yeats was concerned because all that people see in his poetry are the external trappings. This is what critics do—they talk about metaphors and similes in Yeats, about rhythm and rhyme; they lose sight of what he is trying to say. (For Yeats’s opinion of critics, see his poem “The Scholars.”) In “A Coat,” Yeats resolves to walk naked, to express himself directly. One would therefore expect a kind of confessional poetry from Yeats after this volume of poetry, but we don’t get it. If anything, his poetry gets more and more complicated, more and more oblique. He develops his elaborate symbolic system in A Vision, and he sometimes writes with incredible obscurity. He hesitates to reveal himself directly because he’s not sure what his real self is. In his view, men, and women too, are constantly projecting images of themselves. Yeats speaks of a “mask,” and perhaps an image successfully projected is the only “true” human reality for Yeats. See the poem called “The Mask”:
‘Put off that mask of burning gold
With emerald eyes.’
“O no, my dear, you make so bold
To find if hearts be wild and wise,
And yet not cold.’
‘I would but find what’s there to find,
Love or deceit.’
‘It was the mask engaged your mind,
And after set your heart to beat,
Not what’s behind.’
‘But lest you are my enemy,
I must enquire.’
‘O no, my dear, let all that be;
What matter, so there is but fire
In you, in me?’
In human life, especially in love, illusion is often the only reality. We should not try to probe beneath surfaces to find the true reality (this is all related to Nietzsche’s thought in “How the True World Became a Fable” in Twilight of the Idols). What we fall in love with is an image and that should suffice us in life. Yeats develops this theme more fully in the play from which this lyric comes, The Player Queen. Yeats finds this just as true in art as in life. Poets also create images of themselves in their poetry and that image may be their only reality.
II
We saw last time that in a poem like “The Dolls,” Yeats was afraid that the works an artist creates can get out of control, and take over his life, as the Frankenstein monster did to his creator. Art can usurp the power of life. This led to Yeats’s wish in “A Coat” to do away with his artificial images and speak directly of his self. But this is to accept the self as a given. But perhaps the self too is constructed, an artificial human creation. Men and women make themselves because they live in masks, images of themselves they project. Perhaps poets do nor more nor less in their art than human beings normally do in their lives. Yeats develops these ideas at length in a poem—it’s more like a critical treatise—called “Ego Dominus Tuus” (as is typical in Yeats, the poem consists of a dialogue between two antithetical voices). Yeats has one voice express the idea that a poet should seek direct access to a self that exists prior to his poetry: “I would find myself and not an image.” In opposition to this idea, Yeats offers the notion of the anti-self. The poet presents an image of himself that is the exact opposite of his human reality. For example, in his Divina Commedia Dante seems to us to be a great religious figure. We have impressed on our minds the image of his gaunt face—he was an ascetic. Yeats says he must have been an incredible lecher to want to project so pure an image of himself in his poetry. There is something similar in Yeats’s own poetry—an antithetical character. As we’ve seen, when young, he wrote in the persona of an old man, and then when old, he wrote in the persona of a young man. Yeats wants to be able to find his antithesis in his poetry, his double, his Doppelgänger:
I call to the mysterious one who yet
Shall walk the wet sands by the edge of the stream
And look most like me, being indeed my double,
And prove of all imaginable things
The most unlike, being my anti-self.
(Yeats has in mind Act I, ll. 191-202 of Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound, where Zoroaster meets his double).
Here we see Yeats’s awareness of the multiplicity of selves. All men are to some extent like Robert Browning: coming up with dramatic monologues, projecting various images of themselves, adopting different personas. Perhaps the gap between art and life is not so great after all—if men have to create their selves just as they create art. You can see how Yeats is related to the dramatic monologue tradition of Browning and Tennyson. The poet must use his poetry, not to express himself, but to get out of himself. As Yeats writes in “Ego Dominus Tuus”:
By help of an image
I call to my own opposite, summon all
That I have handled least, least looked upon.
At first all this may sound absurd to us, filled as we are with the injunction of high school creative writing teachers: “write about what you know.” But pause for a moment. Did Shakespeare really write about what he knew? He seems to project himself into the most alien beings possible and suggests that an artist is at his fullest when he reaches for what he is not, and thereby extends and fulfills himself in his art. Yeats’s theory of the artist is tied up with what we’ve seen in the Romantic creator gods. They create their opposites, their anti-selves, their alter egos. We’ve seen that in Frankenstein, in Wagner’s Ring Cycle, in Browning’s “Caliban Upon Setebos” (which itself takes off from an alien character Shakespeare created).
Men create images in both their art and their lives. The image is then the link between art and life. The image can span these great opposites. That’s why the image is the focus of Yeats’s theory of art, “those images that yet fresh images beget.” The image is art and yet it grows up out of life—like a tree, to use one of Yeats’s favorite images for the artistic image. The image is life transmuted into art, but it can work back to affect life. The image communicates. It can recreate the feelings of the poet in the reader. The image is something both created and creative. It comes out of life and can go back into life. In speaking of images in “Among School Children,” Yeats says they “keep a marble or a bronze repose / And yet they too break hearts.” The image is something both dead and alive. It has a kind of permanence because it takes a fixed material form, but because it exists in the spiritual realm and can affect the spirit in man, it stays alive. Another of Yeats’s favorite images for the image is dancing. What is dancing: art or life? The dancer is a live human being, but she shapes herself into a work of art. As Yeats asks in “Among School Children,” “How can we know the dancer from the dance?” Here is how creature and creator come together and become one. The dancer is both the creator of an image and the image itself.
The dancer is the central image for the artistic image in one of Yeats’s most obscure poems, “The Double Vision of Michael Robartes”—also one of the poems in which Yeats comes close to the mode of Romantic theogony and a major statement on the theme of freedom and necessity or, as Yeats says, Choice and Chance. As the title suggests, the poem consists of two visions. In the first section, Robartes has a vision of man insofar as he is tied to his body. That is the realm of necessity or chance, where man is completely subject to something outside or beyond his will. This is a vision of man as a created, not a creating being. This is Phase 1 in Yeats’s mythical system in A Vision, what he calls the dark of the moon. In the second section, Robartes has a vision of the power of the artistic image. That is the realm of freedom or choice, where man is able to express himself, free to create himself. This is Phase 15 in Yeats’s mythical system, the full of the moon. In the third section, Robartes reflects on his double vision.
In the first section, we seem to be back in the world of Blake’s Book of Urizen—spirits being forced into bodies by a relentless demiurge. The poem emphasizes the blindness of the creators—their “black eyes and fingers.” Of course there is no benevolent providence. Human beings are pounded into flesh; they have no will of his own. The body sets limits on human beings. You can’t will what you look like. It would be tough to be a great basketball player in a dwarf’s body. Or as Yeats puts it somewhat more poetically in “The Saint and the Hunchback”:
Stand up and lift your head and bless
A man that finds great bitterness
In thinking of his lost renown.
A Roman Caesar is held down
Under this hump.
“Double Vision” offers a very gnostic description of what it is to be in a body: “Constrained, arraigned, baffled, bent and unbent / By these wire-joined jaws and limbs of wood.” Notice that here men are like dolls—and the puppet-makers are themselves manipulated by strings: “Themselves obedient.” And they are “knowing not evil and good.” This is what is traditionally said of Adam and Eve. What is usually said of the creature to show his moral innocence is said here of the creator to show his moral indifference. The whole process is unconscious and without freedom. The creators can’t even rejoice that they control man. These gods are inhuman: “They do not even feel, so abstract are they, / So dead beyond our death, / Triumph that we obey.” Yeats offers a frightening vision of pure necessity—the creator gods aren’t free; man needless to say is not free either.
Section II offers a weird vision—a Sphinx, a Buddha, and a dancer. What makes it even weirder for Yeats’s fans is that he doesn’t use the Sphinx and the Buddha as symbols in the way he generally does in other poems. That set my reading of the poem back about five years. Usually the Sphinx and the Buddha stand for the same thing in Yeats-- Phase 1 in his system—but here they stand for opposites and together they make up Phase 15. The Sphinx stands for intellect without emotion, the Buddha for love without knowledge. The dancer then stands for the artistic image, which spans the opposites. It has both an intellectual and an emotional side. The image is the realm of perfect freedom because the artist is free to shape his material however he wants. The body becomes the perfect expression of thought in art. A sculptor can make a perfect, beautiful human body; he doesn’t have to feel constrained by physical limits. What Yeats sees in the dancer is instinctive beauty; she doesn’t have to think about it; she’s graced with nature’s grace. There is no gap between body and soul anymore. The body is shaped in harmony with the soul. The poem emphasizes how the image bridges opposites. The dancer moves but seems stationary, like a spinning top. The image has a marble or a bronze repose and yet can move hearts.
In the last stanza, the image overthrows time. It’s something like Blake’s notion of finding eternity in the moment. And finally the images are “dead yet flesh and bone”—they bridge the gap between life and death. The image is a mediator. Above all, art mediates between poet and reader. If you merely look at the artist and his creation, then the creation just sits there—dead and a disappointment (like Frankenstein’s monster, or Percy Shelley’s poems in his own eyes). The work of art seems to its creator to be inferior to what he originally dreamed of. He has failed to embody his inspiration fully. But that is to omit one term of the equation. There is not just the artist and his creation, but also the audience—whoever perceives the work of art. That’s when it comes back to life again. To the perceiver the great work of art always opens up possibilities, rather than, as Percy Shelley feared, closing them down. We aren’t aware of all that Shakespeare failed to embody in King Lear. We’re too busy being overwhelmed by how much he did succeed in expressing in the work. The image is alive, even though fixed in permanent form, because its existence is not limited to that form; rather it exists in the mind of the perceiver of the from. The work of art is like a catalyst; it bridges the gap between two minds; it allows a spark to jump between them.
The artist is the free creator because he has control of his medium; that gives him the freedom to shape the image. But man can have an analogous freedom in his life if he shapes the image others have of him. That’s the ideality of the human condition for Yeats. We exist in other people’s minds. In that sense, we create ourselves. Yeats particularly has in mind what women are able to do. They make themselves beautiful. Women are like artists for Yeats and their own bodies are their medium. Look at a fairly early poem: “Adam’s Curse” draws parallels between an artist and a woman. Both must work hard to give the impression of natural beauty. The poet:
A line will take us hours maybe,
Yet if it does not seem a moment’s thought,
Our stitching and unstitching has been naught.
The woman:
To be born woman is to know—
Although they do not talk of it in school—
That we must labour to be beautiful.
(See also “Michael Robartes and the Dancer” on this point.) In some ways Yeats is the culmination of the Romantic tradition. He elevates aesthetics into an ethical principle. Creativity ultimately demands the notion of a multiplicity of selves, so man is not tied down to one nature. Man willfully adopts different roles. He places limits on himself—that’s the only way to feel above the limits.
So it seems as if Yeats has found a resolution to the dichotomies he sees in the world. Not so. I’ve given a false impression by ordering his works in a neat, logical progression. That may be the only way of getting a grasp of the whole of Yeats, but it risks disguising his uncertainty and vacillation as a poet. The image seems to be the solution for Yeats, but in one of his last poems, he questions even the power of the image: “The Circus Animals’ Desertion.” Here Yeats returns to the view of “A Coat,” but in a much less flippant mood. He wonders if he’s not now forced to fall back upon his heart, and do away with his elaborate metaphors and symbols. Yeats begins with an experience of artistic frustration. He just can’t write. He thinks of his images as circus animals. That’s a brilliant image for images. They’re paraded out on show, decked out for the benefit of the audience. They’re exotic beasts; they awaken the interest of the audience. But does the audience like them only because they’ve been tamed? The wildness has been taken out of them to make them acceptable to an audience. That’s what a poet has to do to his experiences to make them palatable to the public.
Yeats goes on to review his career as a poet. He displays a chilling degree of detachment in his ability to criticize himself. He feels trapped in his “old themes.” He reviews first one of his early works, “The Wanderings of Oisin.” He stresses the artificiality of his symbolic patterns. He realizes that the poem somehow expressed his own longings. It was substitute gratification, as psychiatrists would say. But how gratified was he? The poem couldn’t satisfy his longings. Then he goes on to a play he wrote, The Countess Cathleen. Here he had a very specific personal motive in writing; he wanted to teach a woman he loved—Maud Gonne—a lesson about how fanaticism can warp a soul. But the work of art, once it gets produced, becomes independent of the producer. It develops a life of its own. We’re back to “The Dolls.” All Yeats’s passion goes into art instead of life.
Finally, Yeats surveys some of the symbolic plays he wrote later in life, such as “On Baille’s Strand.” They were “heart mysteries”—he was trying to express what he felt most deeply, and yet the very metaphors he created to express his sense of reality got in between him and reality. He has repeatedly gotten sidetracked from life into art. In the last stanza he returns to his position in the present as a near-exhausted creator. His images had power because they were perfect, but they were perfect only because they grew in pure mind. That’s the ideality of art. But the images still grew out of life. But Yeats no longer pictures art as a majestic tree growing up out of life:
Those masterful images because complete
Grew in pure mind but out of what began?
A mound of refuse or the sweepings of a street,
Old kettles, old bottles, and a broken can,
Old iron, old bones, old rags, that raving slut
Who keeps the till. Now that my ladder’s gone
I must lie down where all the ladders start
In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.
Instead of a blossoming tree, Yeats focuses on the garbage heap the artist selects his images from—the dump of life. Art is like a ladder, not a tree---not something organic, but something artificial. A ladder never really gets you out of life, only a bit above it for awhile. Once the creativity is gone, you’re forced to return to where you started. The creator is forced to admit to his creatureliness again. This is a remarkable poem—to see an artist come to an awareness of the limitations of his own medium, to question the power of his images. Do they express the truth about life or tell a lie? The transformation here is quite radical: from garbage to beauty. It’s as if all art does is to give us pleasing illusions. The poem is not, as some insist, an affirmation of the heart. Yeats does not deny that garbage is garbage. And if art is a transmutation of garbage into pleasing illusions, then all life must be so for Yeats. Men create illusory images of themselves—the masks Yeats speaks of—because they are dissatisfied with what they are. They create the illusions, but then they cannot be satisfied with them. They feel compelled to get back to reality, to unmask themselves—just the impulse Yeats portrayed in the original poem “A Mask.”
In “The Circus Animals’ Desertion,” Yeats does to his own poetry what he says all men do to their creations in “Meru,” to whole civilizations:
Civilization is hooped together, brought
Under a rule, under the semblance of peace
By manifold illusion; but man’s life is thought,
And he, despite his terrors, cannot cease
Ravening through century after century,
Ravening, raging, and uprooting that he may come
Into the desolation of reality.
What is most philosophical about Yeats as a poet is his ability to question whether poetry is all a pack of lies. “The desolation of reality” may be the deepest premise of Yeats’s poetry. As in Nietzsche, nihilism is the premise of man’s ability to create his own values. If there are no values in nature and no divine order, then man is able to posit values for himself, to create illusions, or, to put it somewhat more nicely, to create horizons.
Indeed, Nietzsche provides the closest analogue to “The Circus Animals’ Desertion” in his poem “Only Fool, Only Poet” in the fourth part of Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Here Nietzsche is wondering whether he has been carried away by his own poetic brilliance:
“Suitor of truth?” they mocked me: “you?
No! Only poet!
An animal, cunning, preying, prowling,
That must lie,
That must knowingly, willingly lie:
Lusting for prey,
Colorfully masked,
A mask for itself,
Prey for itself—
This, the suitor of truth?
No! Only fool! Only poet!
Only speaking colorfully,
Only screaming colorfully out of fools’ masks,
Climbing around on mendacious word bridges. . . .
This—the suitor of truth?
Not still, stiff, smooth, cold
Become a statue,
A pillar of God.” (PN, 410)
Here already is Yeats’s concern for masks. Nietzsche’s Zarathustra is worried about becoming stiff—he doesn’t want people to take his words as gospel. Yeats has a similar concern. A man’s followers always take him more seriously than he takes himself. Nietzsche even uses imagery of colorful wild beasts. This poem probably influenced “Circus Animals’ Desertion.”
Nietzsche expressed similar thoughts in the last section of Beyond Good and Evil (#296); he laments the taming of his wild thoughts: “Alas, what are you after all, my written and painted thoughts! It was not long ago that you were still so colorful, young, and malicious, full of thorns and secret spices—you made me sneeze and laugh—and now? You have already taken off your novelty and some of you are ready, I fear, to become truths: they already look so immortal, so pathetically decent, so dull! . . . What are the only things we are able to paint? Alas, always only what is on the verge of withering and losing its fragrance! Alas, always only storms that are passing, exhausted, and feelings that are autumnal and yellow! Alas, always only birds that grew weary of flying and flew astray and now can be caught by hand. . . . We immortalize what cannot live and fly much longer—only weary and mellow things! And it is only your afternoon, you, my written and painted thoughts, for which I alone have colors, many colors perhaps, many motley caresses and fifty yellows and browns and greens and reds: but nobody will guess from that how you looked in your morning, you sudden sparks and wonders of my solitude, you my old beloved wicked thoughts!” (Kaufmann 236-37). Like Yeats, Nietzsche hates to see his thoughts get tamed—again we are reminded of Percy Shelley’s contrast between inspiration and composition (“when composition begins, inspiration is already on the decline,” Defence of Poetry). The artist fears that in creating he is really destroying—the attempt to give form to his vision destroys it. As Wordsworth writes, “We murder to dissect” (“The Tables Turned”). The attempt to give form to poetic vision is the murder of vision.
Here is the central paradox of “The Circus Animals’ Desertion”—Yeats has found a powerful image for the impotence of his images. Furthermore, he’s turned his inability to write poems anymore into a brilliant poem. This points to an important trend in 20th century literature—what John Barth calls “The Literature of Exhaustion”—the ability to create art out of the inability to create art. This idea is presented in an essay published in the Atlantic in August, 1967 (republished in his The Friday Book). Barth cites as his two examples Jorge Luis Borges and Samuel Beckett. The idea is illustrated in Barth’s own work Lost in the Funhouse (which we’ll be looking at soon). The idea comes up in the story with the self-reflexive title of “Title”: “The final possibility is to turn ultimacy, exhaustion, paralyzing self-consciousness and the adjective weight of accumulated history. . . . To turn ultimacy against itself to make something new and valid, the essence whereof would be the impossibility of making something new” (109). This phenomenon is not confined to literature. Today we find it throughout the arts. We have movies about making movies, and then movies about not making movies. We can see the trend in Federico Fellini’s career—the increasing self-consciousness in his films. He makes films about film-makers, and deals with characters whose vision fails them. Finally, in The Clowns, he made a film about his inability to make a film about clowns. Just like Yeats in “Circus Animals’ Desertion,” Fellini is searching for a theme in vain. This is the culmination of the self-consciousness we have seen in Romantic art—what happens when the artist becomes his own main theme. In Harold Bloom’s formulation in his book on Yeats: “To be satisfied with one’s heart as poetic theme is to acknowledge what it pained Yeats to recognize, that his concern was not with the content of the poetic vision, as Blake’s was, but with his relation as poet to his own vision, as Wordsworth’s was, and Shelley’s and Keats’s also” (Bloom, 457)
We saw this in Keats’s “Fall of Hyperion”: the poet’s theme becomes his inability to bear the weight of his own vision. In Yeats and many other 20th century artists the theme becomes the utter failure of their vision. This thought is at the heart of Yeats’s understanding of the history of literature. First in his poem “The Nineteenth Century and After”:
Though the great song return no more
There’s keen delight in what we have:
The rattle of pebbles on the shore
Under the receding wave.
Here poetically expressed is Yeats’s worry that Romantic, Victorian, and modern literature have lost the great themes of Renaissance literature, and settled for something domestic and trivial. Yeats is even more specific about this in his poem “Three Movements”:
Shakespearean fish swam the sea, far away from land;
Romantic fish swam in nets coming to the hand;
What are all those fish that lie gasping on the strand?
Here is Yeats’ image for what Barth calls the literature of exhaustion. Like the great ancient poets from Homer on, Shakespeare sought out exotic subject matter in the stories of heroes. The Romantic poets chose to turn from epic to autobiography in their poetry, dealing with the much more accessible subject of themselves. The result for Yeats was the exhaustion of modern poetry as it ran out of subject matter and got bogged down in empty self-referentiality, imaged brilliantly here as fish “gasping on the strand.”
This is why much of 20th-century art has seemed ultimately sterile. All it can do is to proclaim its own impotence (we’ll see this soon in Beckett and Barth). That explains the retreat many artists make into sterile formalism—abstract art that deliberately does not say anything and in fact prides itself, not on what it does, but on what it does not do (“my music has no harmony,” “my music has no melody,” “my painting has no color,” “my painting is not representational,” etc.). This explains the proliferation of movements like Dadaism and Pop Art, and other assorted forms of anti-art. A pervasive feeling has developed that all traditional techniques of art have been played out and used up. Hence the frantic search for new means of expression, new media, all the way from electronic music to sculpture in bread. All this is accompanied by a rethinking of the role of the artist, an attempt to do away with the idea of the lonely genius. Above all there is the general sense that artistic themes have been played out, everything has been said that can be said—this is a grave problem for an art world that prides itself on its creativity and originality.
This is particularly true of myths, the idea that everything has been done with the traditional myths that can be done. We see this, for example, in Franz Kafka’s haunting mythic parables, like this one on “Prometheus”: “There are four legends concerning Prometheus: According to the first he was clamped to a rock in the Caucasus for betraying the secrets of the gods to men and the gods sent eagles to feed on his liver, which was perpetually renewed. According to the second Prometheus, goaded by the pain of the tearing beaks, pressed himself deeper and deeper into the rock until he became one with it. According to the third his treachery was forgotten in the course of thousands of years, forgotten by the gods, the eagles, forgotten by himself. According to the fourth everyone grew weary of the meaningless affair. The gods grew weary, the eagles grew weary, the wound closed wearily. There remained the inexplicable mass of rock. The legend tried to explain the inexplicable. As it came out of a substratum of truth it had in turn to end in the inexplicable” (432). Here is the sense of exhaustion again, this time built right into the myth itself. Kafka captures the sense of the exhaustion of myth and of mythic power in the modern world. Myths can no longer serve their function in the 20th century. They cannot explain the inexplicable (on this subject, see Kafka’s perplexing and self-reflexive parable “On Parables”).
All that is left for Kafka is to treat myths ironically, to recreate them in modern dress. He thereby narrows the gap between the mythic and the prosaic, assimilating the grand myths of the past to ordinary life today. This is what he does so memorably in his parable of the god Poseidon: “Poseidon sat at his desk, going over the accounts. The administration of all the waters gave him endless work. He could have had as many assistants as he wanted, and indeed he had quite a number, but since he took his job very seriously he insisted on going through all the accounts again himself, and so his assistants were of little help to him. It cannot be said that he enjoyed the work; he carried it out simply because it was assigned to him. . . . Needless to say, it was very difficult to find him another job. After all, he could not possibly be put in charge of one particular ocean. Quite apart from the fact that in this case the work involved would not be less, only more petty, the great Poseidon could hold only a superior position. . . . No one ever really considered relieving Poseidon of his position; he had been destined to be God of the Seas since time immemorial, and that was how it had to remain. What annoyed him most. . . was to learn of the rumors that were circulating about him; for instance, that he was constantly cruising through the waves with his trident. Instead of which here he was sitting in the depths of the world’s ocean endlessly going over the accounts. . . . As a result he had hardly seen the oceans, save fleetingly during his hasty ascent to Olympus, and never really sailed upon them. He used to say that he was postponing this until the end of the world, for then there might come a quiet moment when, just before the end and having gone through the last account, he could still make a quick little tour” (434-35). This is what the end of the world, the grand Romantic apocalypse, is reduced to in the vision of a 20th-century author. It doesn’t transfigure anything. Poseidon becomes a tired old bureaucrat, too busy checking the figures on ocean administration even to get out to see the seas of which he is divinely in charge. His divine role is hardly godlike—it is merely a burden to him, and he himself is pained by the gap between what people think of him—the myths circulating about him—and what he really is. Poseidon is exhausted himself and bored with the sea. Once again, the artist finds an image for himself in the gods, but in Kafka’s case it is an image of impotence, not creativity. As we have seen, Yeats’s complex journey as a poet, from Romanticism to Modernism, helps us understand the way that the apocalyptic hopes raised by Romantic creation myths eventually led to the nihilism and despair of 20th-century authors.
ADDITIONAL MATERIAL
Compare Yeats’s theory of history with Nietzsche’s. Yeats, too, was looking forward to the overturning of the Christian era of man and its ideals. He had a similar dialectical idea: we are perhaps moving toward a stage at which a synthesis of the ancients and the moderns, of the classical and the Christian, will be possible. Yeats speaks of Primary and Antithetical phases. See especially “The Statues.”
The origin of nihilism in Yeats—it’s the same as in Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. Waiting endlessly for the apocalypse leads to despair and nihilism. See Yeats’s “The Black Tower”—about noble men waiting for their lord to return. It turns out that they’re dead and just don’t know it.
Yeats doesn’t himself present a mythology. He presents the situation of a poet waiting for the advent of a new mythology. Yeats is twice a latecomer on the poetic scene. That leads to a colossal egocentricity. The whole of civilization must go under so that poets will have new opportunities to create—new myths. Poets always need a chaos to shape up (much like God). Hence the need for destruction. In late stages of civilization, things just get too well organized. Poets have nothing left to give shape to. These ideas are rooted in Percy Shelley; the need to smash idols (“Ozymandias”).
[In my understanding of Yeats’s historical system in A Vision, I relied heavily on Helen Vendler’s book on the subject.]
BIBLIOGRAPHY
John Barth. “The Literature of Exhaustion.” The Friday Book: Essays and Other Nonfiction. New York: Putnam, Perigee Books, 1984
Harold Bloom. Yeats. London: Oxford University Press, 1970
David V. Erdman, ed. The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. Newly Revised Edition. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982
Franz Kafka. The Complete Stories. New York: Schocken, 1971
Walter Kaufmann, ed. and trans. The Portable Nietzsche. New York: Viking Press, 1968
Helen Vendler. Yeats’s Vision and the Later Plays. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1963
William Butler Yeats.The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats. New York: Macmillan, 1956.
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