(1903–1950) and W. H. Auden (1907–1973). He was not a god for W. B. Yeats, as is
clear from Yeats’s Oxford Book of Modern English Verse of 1936. Meanwhile the old
man had become a living master for Eliot and for Auden.
Modernism was metropolitan, cosmopolitan, mobile, uprooted: most of the lead-
ing figures of English-language modernism were not English. Conrad was Polish;
James, Pound and Eliot, American; Wyndham Lewis Canadian and Joyce was Irish, as
was Yeats. In an Empire, talent seeks the centre. Many of the writers of imperial Rome
were not Romans: Seneca, Lucan, Quintilian and Martial came from Spain.
W. B. Yeats
W. B. Yeats
W(illiam) B(utler) Yeats(1865–1939) is introduced thus late, since it was after 1920
that he made his major impact on English poetry. Pound had liked the Pre-
Raphaelite Yeats of the 1910 Collected Poemsand ‘The Song of the Happy Shepherd’.
The woods of Arcady are dead,
And over is their antique joy;
Of old the world on dreaming fed;
Grey Truth is now her painted toy.The dreams which fed this short-sighted, vague-seeming man were of the wisdom of
the East, the heroes and heroines of Ireland’s past, and the peasants of the West. Early
poems such as ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’, ‘Down by the Salley Gardens’, ‘The Stolen
Child’, ‘The Song of Wandering Aengus’, ‘The Man Who Dreamed of Faeryland’,
though beautifully made, did not alter the impression of a dreamer; nor did love
poems interweaving ‘pale brows, still hands and dim hair’. Wilde and Shaw were not
taken ver y seriously, and Yeats’s pre-war concerns – folklore, the Abbey Theatre in
Dublin,Irish nationalism – cut little ice in London. After a transit of the metropol-
itan sky, his star was setting in the West.
But the dreamer had wor ked very hard, ‘All his twenties crammed with toil’. J. B.
Yeats,a fine painter, left his son a fine example of how not to conduct a career, and
also taught him to believe in art. Chesterton once said that ‘a man who doesn’t
believe in God,doesn’t believe in nothing: he believes in anything.’ A need to believe
and to worship fuelled Yeats’s devotions: to Blake, Irish mythology and folklore, the
theatre, national causes, the Rhymers’ Club, poetry readings, committee meetings,
public meetings, journalism, his own plays and poetry – and to a beautiful English
champion of Irish nationalism, Maud Gonne. He invested much time also in the
occult and the esoteric – seances, spirit-rappings, theosophy, reincarnation, auto-
matic writing.A Vision (1925) outlines an extraordinary system in which human
history follows a cycle linked to the phases of the moon. He half-believed in these
ideas,but needed them.
After working hard for an Irish literary revival and the Irish National Theatre, he
returned to London disgusted. In 1890 a marital scandal had brought down Parnell,
and in 1907 Dublin demonstrated against Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World
at Yeats’s Abbey Theatre, for showing Irish people as imperfect. Then in 1913
Dublin’s Municipal Gallery rejected Impressionist pictures left to it by Hugh Lane, a
nephew of Yeats’s ally Lady Gregory. In Sussex in 1914 and 1915, Yeats worked with
Ezra Pound on translating Japanese plays. Then in 1916 ‘a terrible beauty [was]
born’, as Yeats put it, at the Easter Rising, badly handled by a Britain at war with
Germany: executions, martyrs, struggles, and in 1921 the Irish Free State. Yeats
‘MODERNISM’: 1914–27 355W. B. Yeats (1865–1939), in
New York in 1932.