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The Influence and Poetic Development of W. B. Yeats

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SOURCE: "The Influence and Poetic Development of W. B. Yeats," in English Studies; Vol. 36, Nos. 1-6, 1955, pp. 246-53.

[In the following excerpt from an overview of Yeats's work, Wildi asserts that Yeats's poetic influence was reciprocal: even as he helped such writers as Arthur Symons, Thomas Sturge Moore, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, and W. H. Auden, he was himself helped by them.]

Any poet whose gift survives the first impulse of youth must not only learn to practise the craft of verse as a conscious discipline, he must also be capable of inward renewal. Among modern English writers both D. H. Lawrence and T. S. Eliot each in his own way show this power of transcending their earlier selves; neither of them, however, presents so astonishing an example of repeated rebirth as William Butler Yeats.

Yeats was early recognized as an original and influential poet. In the last ten years before his death younger poets looked up to him as the greatest master writing in the English language. His influence had by this time become far-reaching and unique. Like every other master, he had left his mark on the early tentative verses of many young poets, especially those of the Edwardian decade, the early verse of the Georgians and of some of the Imagists. Here, however, we are not so much concerned with this kind of influence as with a far more significant one, the influence which releases new forces, sets free and encourages contemporaries and younger writers to experiment and break loose from convention.

The most exciting thing about Yeats and this influence is, however, the fact that in many cases it is mutual, and is connected with crucial phases of his poetic development. In his contacts with other poets the dominating and lively personality of Yeats shows an unexpected plasticity and humility, as T. S. Eliot bore witness in his Yeats Lecture in the Abbey Theatre in 1940.

The story of the development and influence of W. B. Yeats opens with a seeming paradox: Yeats, who in his day came to influence three successive generations of poets, began by being himself deeply influenced to an extent that might at first sight appear like a total extinction of his own personality. Among these 'influences' the Pre-Raphaelites, who dominated his father's art, must be mentioned first, and of these chiefly William Morris, whom Yeats came to know personally, then all those whom the Pre-Raphaelites admired: Spenser, Shelley and Blake. There are moments when it seems as if there were nothing in the Romantic tradition from Malory and the ballads down to Swinburne and Whitman that could not influence Yeats and make him echo its tone, or colour, or emotion in his earliest verse. In this initial phase of his poetic development Yeats was mainly passive, yet even then his personality asserted itself, at least in the selection of the masters to whose influence he submitted. His gift of lyric utterance was there from the start and along with it went the power to heighten and purify the note of those he imitated. A poem like "The Everlasting Voices" is more hypnotic and sweet and at the same time more exciting in its nostalgic tone than anything in Morris or in the languid early verse of Blake. It is the intoxication of such chanting heady musicthat Yeats passed on to younger men like Joyce (see his poems in Chambermusic) and Ezra Pound, who echoes Yeats in early pieces…. In all this there is more of a kind of mediumistic transmission of what was in the thin air of late Romantic poetry than any dear influence. All is vague, solemn, shadowy and languorous.

The first clear case of mutual influence to be mentioned is that between Yeats and Arthur Symons. They had met in the early nineties at the Rhymers' Club, and for some time in 1895 shared rooms overlooking Fountain Court in the Temple. As a poet Symons was an impressionist, interested only in the visible scene of London's Bohemia. As an acute and penetrating critic he ranged over a far wider field. He very soon discovered that, among the members of the Rhymers' Club, Yeats was the undeniable genius. In deep admiration and friendship he joined the young Irish poet. The literary result in Symons' books of verse was echoes of his friend's richer and more powerful verse. Symons tried hard to dream. He tried to dream by taking opium or hashish and by drinking absinthe, but the dreams would not come. A few delicate impressionist miniatures, some clear and strangely cold verse and a number of very pure renderings of Verlaine and a passage or two of Mallarmé are all that survive of the poetical work of Arthur Symons. As a critic, however, he was to do incalculable service to his friend Yeats and to many other poets as well. Symons introduced the English-speaking literary world, and among it Yeats and Eliot, to the poetry of the French symbolistes, to Mallarmé and Maeterlinck, Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, Verlaine, Rimbaud and Laforgue. Symons took Yeats to the Rue de Rome, where Mallarmé held his famous 'mardis' and introduced him to the master. There is some doubt whether Yeats understood what Mallarmé said or wrote in French, but he had Arthur Symons' translations and The Symbolist Movement in Literature, which Symons had delicated to Yeats, to fall back on. There is no doubt whatever that Mallarmé's theory and practice made a very deep impression on Yeats. They confirmed him in his high, quasi-mystic notion of poetry as a supreme calling to which the whole man was to be dedicated as to an almost priestly function and ritual. This attitude, which he found embodied in Mallarmé's devotion to his art and expressed to the point of quixotry in Villiers de l'Isle-Adam's drama Axel (a book that Yeats praised and quoted again and again) implied a retirement to the tour d'ivoire, which appealed to one side of Yeats' nature. He came to abandon it by the turn of the century, when, in his own words "everybody got down off his stilts." What he never abandoned throughout his life was his high aspiration and unwavering belief in the mission of his art to create a higher reality to be imposed on the world of fleeting appearance and perverse, low desire by the power of words which "alone are certain good."

This lofty, idealistic conviction formed the basis of the friendship that united Yeats with the English poet, Thomas Sturge Moore, for more than 40 years. Both derived a central part of their poetic inspiration from the Pre-Raphaelites, whose visual and literary art they developed into a symbolism of their own, with the significant difference that whereas Yeats had turned to Blake and Irish folklore, Sturge Moore had started out from Matthew Arnold and retained his master's didactic note to the end. The delight both poets took in ancient myths, in speculation and imagery, and the happy balance achieved by the union between Sturge Moore's quiet, serene and independent nature and the impetuous theorizing and activity of W. B. Yeats, linked them in a lifelong friendship.

The influence Yeats exercised on his friend is best seen in Sturge Moore's lyrical dramas, some of which were suggested by Yeats. But whereas with Yeats the figures are human beings striving for purification and eternity, the dramatis personae of Sturge Moore's plays are shadowy, legendary ghosts, striving to become but never succeeding in being, human.

The correspondence between the two poets, which was published in 1953, shows, amongst many other things, how often Yeats generously gave help and as freely accepted it, in the form of precise workmanlike criticism of his verse, advice on stage decoration for his dramas and those noble book covers, all designed by Sturge Moore, that are found on the later volumes of Yeats' verse. Thanks to his frank acknowledgment we know that Yeats borrowed a short passage from Sturge Moore's "Dying Swan" and used it in "The Tower"; the published correspondence makes it clear that he owed Sturge Moore another debt, since one of Yeats' finest poems, "Byzantium," was written as a result of Sturge Moore's criticism of the last verse of "Sailing to Byzantium" (Letter of April 16, 1930).

When all is said, it will, however, be found, that in the give-and-take of this long friendship, though hundreds of services were rendered on both sides, there was no such fundamental stimulus as that which Yeats owed to Mallarmé and, indirectly, to Symons, or as the decisive shock treatment that was meted out to him by a much younger man: Ezra Pound.

Pound entered Yeats' life in 1909, under a constellation radically different from that which presided over earlier friendships. A deep estrangement had come to separate Yeats from the Ireland of his youth. The patriots who had once seemed the friends of Ireland's literary Renascence had hooted The Playboy of the Western World. Synge, whom Yeats had worshipped and who had cured him of his dandified astheticism and helped him to create the new Irish poetic drama, was dead. Yeats was approaching middle age. He had left behind him whatever had made him popular among Victorian poetry-lovers, the nostalgic sweetness of "The Lake Isle of Innisfree" and the overelaborate love-poetry of "The Rose." Yeats had started out on his long pilgrimage towards his own innermost self, towards unity of being and complete sincerity. One phase of his development, the phase of mainly passive reception was over. Yeats now found himself in the midst of the second phase, that of aggressive assertion, and the creation of a conscious "mask" for the active half of his being. Ezra Pound's first influence belongs to this phase. It was not till the end of the war that Yeats was to find an integral expression of his genius in the poems of The Wild Swans at Coole (1919) and Michael Robartes and the Dancer (1921).

When Yeats met Pound, some time in 1909, the latter had three slender books of verse to his name. In these the influence of Yeats (as well as that of Browning, Whitman and the poets of the Nineties) is clearly visible in many passages, showing that Pound was predisposed for the contact that followed. Both Yeats and Pound shared a proud, impatient temper with a feeling for nobility, a generous passion for the art and artifice of verse and a desire to "make it new." Yeats was beset by what Pound called "a rabble of forty-five imitators"; Pound was as yet unknown. Thus it is all the more astonishing to see the master go to school to his one-time pupil, and in consequence of this pupil's criticism remodel his style. This surprising example of humility that enabled the forty-five year old Yeats to listen to an eccentric twenty-five year old hothead and to allow Pound to bluepencil his, the acknowledged master's, verse, is unique. To understand the full significance of Pound's influence it must be remembered that those were the days that saw the birth of futurism, cubism and abstract art in general all over Europe. A revolt against passive, descriptive art had set in. The desire for more concentrated, vital and expressive art, for strict and controlled form, was felt in manyplaces. Some such desire had been at the root of the deep dissatisfaction Yeats had come to feel for his own early verse. Now he learned through Pound that poets and sculptors and painters both in England and France were trying to break away from the idyllic, the loosely romantic and rhetorical the vague and dreamy. Instantaneous vivid effects of high concentration were to be aimed at, through the creation of images in dry, clear language after the manner of the Japanese and Chinese poets. Yeats, in whom the strongly visual impulses of the English painter-poets from Blake to Morris and his own father had never died out, was keenly interested in "Imagism" and the kindred art of Wyndham Lewis. He never became one of the Imagists himself, for the programme implied in that name was too literal and narrow for him, yet verses like "A Thought from Propertius" show how far he could go in what Pound calls "that sort of poetry which seems as if sculpture or painting were just forced or forcing itself into words" (from Pound's review entitled "The Later Yeats" in Poetry, IV, May, 1914).

Yeats himself explained the change that had come over his art at a celebration in honour of Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, in Februari 1914, saying "If I take up to-day some of the things that interested me in the past I find that I can no longer use them. They bore me. Every year some part of my poetical machinery suddenly becomes of no use. As the tide of romance recedes I am driven back simply on myself and my thoughts in actual life" (The Egoist, Vol. I, 57). It is significant that Yeats, at a moment when the impersonal and objective in art was on everybody's lips, should speak of being driven back on his personal experience.

One may ask here if Yeats in his turn left any deeper mark on Pound's later verse. Juvenile imitation, as we find it in his early poems, does not count for much. The answer is: no. Pound and Yeats went different ways as poets. The important moment was, for both of them, the moment when their ways crossed in those years immediately before the first world war, when in 1913 and 1914 Yeats lived for some time with Ezra Pound and his wife in a cottage in Sussex. It was in these years and those immediately preceding that the creative and critical stimulus of their meeting enriched both. It set them free for independent development. Yeats, the richer and more complex of the two, derived from Pound's theory and practical criticism an impulse towards greater austerity on the one hand and greater human outspokenness on the other. Years were to pass before these impulses bore their full fruit in The Wild Swans at Coole while some of the immediate impressions went into Responsibilities (1914).

The last important phase in which influence and development combine is the period of the poet's old age, which saw the production of The Tower (1928), of The Winding Stair and other Poems (1923), and of the posthumous Last Poems of 1939.

Yeats had all his life been in search of an all-embracing unity of being. He sought it among poets and theosophists, magicians and philosophers, mystics and simple country people. In late middle age he had tried to build up a rational-irrational "Vision" of the world on the foundation of his wife's intuitions, dreams and revelations, as well as his own speculations and his reading. It served as a kind of scaffolding by the help of which some of his greatest poetry was made possible. The result of all his efforts at re-making himself, ever since the moment when he had come out of the dream of youth, had been an approach to an ever deeper and more intense reality by breaking through the screens and mists of words and illusions and through the mirrors of self-deception. When, in old age, he faced reality once more, it appeared to him full of tragic and insoluble opposites, possessing that "terrible beauty" which is both heroic and tragic, of which Yeats speaks in "Easter 1916". The effect of this lifelong search on his verse was to make it more direct than ever, achieving in places the boldness of great rhetoric, in others the magnificence of the grand style and, more surely in this last stage, the lyric note.

We have it on the testimony of T. S. Eliot that the poetry of the later Yeats caused a shock of surprise and made a very deep impression on the poets of Eliot's and W. H. Auden's generation, who had been unaffected by the dreamy, Victorian verse of the early Yeats. What did this later Yeats mean to the poets who might have been his sons or even grandsons? As T. S. Eliot in his Yeats Lecture remarks, their ideas and ideals were radically opposed to his. Nearly all the poets of the Thirties had been Marxists at one time of their career. The Yeats of On the Boiler and of the later poems must to them have appeared a fascist. A beggar was to Yeats a figure symbolizing human dignity and freedom, to Auden and his friends he was a plague spot of society.

Yet there was the essential Yeats, Yeats the poet, who transcended the politician, he who had helped to lead English poetry out of the house of bondage, out of naturalism, description, minor sentiment and reasoning into the large freedom of his art and taught them to use symbols and images boldly for the evocation of the passions and powers of the soul. However much they might admire Hopkins, Owen, Hardy or Eliot, it was to Yeats that they owed the example of a free use of classical mythology, of the renewal of alexandrine and refrain, which he had delivered from tame usage, and the example of his magnificent outspokenness as a free man.

W. H. Auden recently declared in the course of a wireless talk that Yeats' poem "The Circus Animals' Desertion" was the best statement of the modern poet's predicament. The circus animals in this poem are his symbols, to which Yeats half-humorously alludes by pretending to be a kind of travelling circus director with a band of trained performing beasts, the lions, eagles, swans, dolphins, hawks and their companions in his verses. The predicament of which W. H. Auden spoke, which is one of the themes of the poem, lies in the fact that symbols and words may suddenly fail the poet. The glory of poetry lies in image or dream fulfilled in words, but it ultimately starts in the chaos of the restless heart, in "mire and blood," the pitiful raw-material, to which the poet is reduced.

This poem astonishes by its range, its combination of pride and humility, by the paradox of glory and mire and the insistence on the primitive and chaotic nature of reality. In some of his later verse Yeats had achieved a hardness and outspokenness that delighted the generation that was born into the bitter winds of the political Thirties. "Hardness and dryness" are words Louis Macneice used in his fine study of The Poetry of W. B. Yeats. They are perhaps more representative of what the younger generation looked for than of what is actually there. Hardness there certainly is, but dryness: no. Was it not rather the fanaticism, the frenzy and zest of the later Yeats that appealed to those who went to fight in Spain? Yeats had been, amongst many other things, a fierce partisan, who had shown his manhood in fighting for his friends and for the cause of symbolist art. That is probably why poets like Auden, Day Lewis and Macneice felt themselves more drawn to Yeats than to Eliot, a more bookish, more complex, withdrawn figure, whose immense influence was in the field of diction, imagery and critical doctrine, whereas Yeats influence was a personal one. "He had upheld," in the words of a young poet of our days, Christopher Middleton, "the force and wisdom of poetry in a tatterdemalion and mechanical age."

Yeats himself had begun to read the work of the youngest generation of poets shortly before he was seventy. The immediate occasion was the selection of verse for his Oxford Book of Modern Verse, which ranged from 1892 to 1935. As a representative selection of modern verse it proved a tantalizing book, since it freely reflected all the likes and dislikes of its compiler. Since its publication new generations and schools of poets have arisen and new anthologies have been made, which have largely superseded it. Yet it remains a precious and memorable book. With its brilliantly personal introduction it presents a mirror of its author's taste in contemporary poetry and it is a monument of his friendships. In its pages we find represented all the poets Yeats had known so well, from whom he had learned and whom he had helped: Lionel Johnson and Arthur Symons W. S. Blunt, T. Sturge Moore and Ezra Pound. Along with these goes the rich array of his Irish contemporaries, from his great friends Lady Gregory, Æ and Synge to Joyce and the living L. A. G. Strong, F. R. Higgins and Frank O'Connor, together with Tagore and Shri Purohit Swami from India. It is an overwhelming list showing the genius for friendship which this essentially shy poet possessed. Our list gives but a faint idea of their full number and their importance in his life. We have seen how deeply some of those here mentioned influenced the development of his poetry. Finally, this poetry itself is full of the glorified images of men and women Yeats had known, loved and admired: Maud Gonne, Lady Gregory, Mabel Beardsley, O'Leary and the Irish patriots. Synge and Lionel Johnson and many others.

It is dangerous to dogmatize, but the conclusion to which all this points is that personality was the forma formans of Yeats' world. Whatever we may think of his bookish studies and abstract theories, it is heightened human personality, human nobility, as example and ideal, as medi um and form that shaped the poetry and personality of W. B. Yeats. Through the mediation of friends Yeats probably learned far more than through books. His influence was in its turn the influence, not of his ideas or ideologies or his semi-mystical systems, but that of a man and a living poetical voice.

Even in his last years he made new friends among the younger poets, two of which he singled out for special praise in his anthology: W. J. Turner and Dorothy Wellesley. The latter, the present Duchess of Wellington, was his friend from 1935 to his death. His letters to her, published in 1940, show him at work on his anthology. Now, in his old age, with his style triumphantly individual, Yeats naturally turned to those among the younger writers who wrote his kind of poetry, using symbols much as he used them. Turner and Dorothy Wellesley did so, and for this very reason they were the least representative of all the younger poets. Yeats, however, tried hard to be fair to the men of the Thirties and included examples of their work.

The younger poets in their turn have amply repaid his courtesy. Louis Macneice devoted a fine and full study to his poetry and, more recently, a short assessment has appeared by a Scottish poet and critic of the youngest generation: G. S. Fraser. Sidney Keyes and Kenneth Allott have made Yeats the subject of poems of their own.

The greatest tribute, however, was paid by W. H. Auden, who wrote one of his finest poems under the impact of the news of Yeats' death in January 1939. The last three stanzas of this poem "In Memory of W. B. Yeats" express better than any other words what Yeats meant to one of the finest of the poets who came after him. In accents that echo the famous lines of Yeats' own poetical testament "Under Ben Bulben" W. H. Auden, while speaking to all poets, speaks magnificently of Yeats:

Follow, poet, follow right
To the bottom of the night,
With your unconstraining voice
Still persuade us to rejoice;

With the farming of a verse
Make a vineyard of the curse,
Sing of human unsuccess
In a rapture of distress;

In the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountain start,
In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise.

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