# YEATS'S LEGACIES

# Yeats Annual No. 21: A Special Issue

Edited by WARWICK GOULD

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In the same series

YEATS ANNUALS Nos. 1, 2 Edited by Richard J. Finneran

YEATS ANNUALS Nos. 3–8, 10–11, 13 Edited by Warwick Gould

YEATS AND WOMEN YEATS ANNUAL No. 9: A Special Number Edited by Deirdre Toomey

THAT ACCUSING EYE: YEATS AND HIS IRISH READERS YEATS ANNUAL No. 12: A Special Number Edited by Warwick Gould and Edna Longley

> YEATS AND THE NINETIES YEATS ANNUAL No. 14: A Special Number Edited by Warwick Gould

YEATS'S COLLABORATIONS YEATS ANNUAL No. 15: A Special Number Edited by Wayne K. Chapman and Warwick Gould

POEMS AND CONTEXTS YEATS ANNUAL No. 16: A Special Number Edited by Warwick Gould

INFLUENCE AND CONFLUENCE YEATS ANNUAL No. 17: A Special Number Edited by Warwick Gould

THE LIVING STREAM YEATS ANNUAL No. 18: A Special Issue Essays in Memory of A. Norman Jeffares Edited by Warwick Gould Freely available at http://www.openbookpublishers.com/product/194

YEATS'S MASK YEATS ANNUAL No. 19: A Special Issue Edited by Margaret Mills Harper and Warwick Gould Freely available at http://www.openbookpublishers.com/product/233

ESSAYS IN HONOUR OF EAMONN CANTWELL YEATS ANNUAL No. 20: A Special Number Edited by Warwick Gould Freely available at https://www.openbookpublishers.com/product/380 YEATS ANNUAL No. 21

W. B. Yeats in the *fin de siècle*. The Elliot & Fry image, purchased from an untraced picture archive. From pencilled notes on the verso, the image was copyrighted to Elliot & Fry, and each reproduction incurred a fee of 14/– to the London Electrotype Agency. A fee of that sum had been paid for Richardson, 'The World Writers', perhaps a series in an untraced periodical, and the image had been filed with 'English Portraits of Yeats'. © Private Collection, London, all rights reserved.

# YEATS'S LEGACIES

## YEATS ANNUAL No. 21 *A Special Issue*

Edited by Warwick Gould

in association with the Institute of English Studies School of Advanced Study, University of London

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© 2018 Warwick Gould.

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ISBN Paperback: 978-1-78374-454-1 ISBN Hardback: 978-1-78374-455-8 ISBN Digital (PDF): 978-1-78374-456-5 ISBN Digital ebook (epub): 978-1-78374-457-2 ISBN Digital ebook (mobi): 978-1-78374-458-9 DOI: 10.11647/OBP.0135

Cover image: *Yeats Annual* Fleuron (Front Cover, Spine, Dedication Page) Based upon Thomas Sturge Moore's rose design as used in his illustrations for H. P. R. Finberg's translation of Count Villiers de L'Isle Adam's *Axel* with Yeats's preface (London: Jarrolds Publishers Ltd., 1925), and elsewhere on cover designs for Yeats's books, most notably that for *Per Amica Silentia Lunae* (1918), this fleuron was created courtesy of the late Riette Sturge Moore.

Front Cover Vignette: The hawk is taken from the top-board of *Responsibilities and Other Poems*  (London: Macmillan, 1916), Private Coll., London, Image Warwick Gould. The design is by Thomas Sturge Moore, showing Yeats's change of livery when he moved his books to Macmillan as his principal trade publisher. The book was published on 10 October 1916, the same day as that firm issued his *Reveries over Childhood and Youth*, also with a Sturge Moore cover-design.

Cover design: Anna Gatti.

All paper used by Open Book Publishers is SFI (Sustainable Forestry Initiative), PEFC (Programme for the Endorsement of Forest Certification Schemes) and Forest Stewardship Council(r)(FSC(r) certified.

> Printed in the United Kingdom, United States and Australia by Lightning Source for Open Book Publishers (Cambridge, UK).

The Editor dedicates his work on this volume to

## WILLIAM H. O'DONNELL

in gratitude for his meticulous textual scholarship and restless curiosity in annotation

## Contents

*Publications Received* 599

## List of Illustrations

*Note:* All enquiries regarding copyrights in individual plates should be made c/o the editor at<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
*Yeats Annual Fleuron* (Front Cover, Spine, Dedication Page) Based upon Thomas Sturge Moore's rose design as used in his illustrations for H. P. R. Finberg's translation of Count Villiers de L'Isle Adam's *Axel* with Yeats's preface (London: Jarrolds Publishers Ltd., 1925), and elsewhere on cover designs for Yeats's books, most notably that for *Per Amica Silentia Lunae* (1918), this fleuron was created courtesy of the late Riette Sturge Moore.

*Front Cover Vignette*: The hawk is taken from the top-board of *Responsibilities and Other Poems* (London: Macmillan, 1916), Private Coll., London, Image Warwick Gould. The design is by Thomas Sturge Moore, showing Yeats's change of livery when he moved his books to Macmillan as his principal trade publisher. The book was published on 10 October 1916, the same day as that firm issued his *Reveries over Childhood and Youth*, also with a Sturge Moore cover-design.

*Frontispiece* W. B. Yeats in the *fin de siècle*. From pencilled notes on the verso, this hitherto unknown image had been copyrighted to Elliot & Fry, and each reproduction incurred a fee of 14/– to the London Electrotype Agency. A fee of that sum had been paid for Richardson, 'The World Writers', perhaps a series in an untraced periodical, and the image had been filed with 'English Portraits of Yeats' in some newspaper picture archive. © Private Collection, London, all rights reserved.

*Plates*

## Abbreviations

### xx Abbreviations

Stoops, Jr.

## Editorial Board

Richard Allen Cave Edna Longley Wayne K. Chapman Neil Mann Denis Donoghue Marjorie Perloff Jacqueline Genet James L. Pethica Margaret Mills Harper Ronald Schuchard K. P. S. Jochum Colin Smythe John Kelly C. K. Stead

Seamus Deane William H. O'Donnell John Harwood Michael J. Sidnell

> Series Editor: Warwick Gould Research Editor: Deirdre Toomey

## Notes on the Contributors

**Jad Adams** is a Research Fellow at the Institute of English Studies, University of London. He is an historian working as an author and an independent television producer. He specializes in radical characters from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and the Decadence of the 1890s. His literary work includes *Kipling* (2004), *Madder Music, Stronger Wine: The Life of Ernest Dowson* (2000) and *Hideous Absinthe: A History of the Devil in a Bottle* (2004). His most recent book is *Women and the Vote: A World History* (2014); other books include *Tony Benn: A Biography* (1992 and, updated, 2011) *Gandhi: Naked Ambition* (2009) *Pankhurst* (2003) and *The Dynasty: The Nehru-Gandhi Story*. His television work includes biographies of Kitchener, Bill and Hillary Clinton, and of historical characters from London's East End. See http://www.jadadams.co.uk/.

**Lauren Arrington** is a Senior Lecturer at the Institute of Irish Studies, University of Liverpool. She is the author of *Revolutionary Lives: Constance and Casimir Markievicz* (2016, reviewed in this volume) and *W. B. Yeats, the Abbey Theatre, Censorship, and the Irish State* (2010). In the autumn of 2017, she was Burns Distinguished Visiting Scholar in Irish Studies at Boston College, and she has held visiting fellowships at Trinity College Dublin, the University of Cambridge, and the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin. She is currently writing a book provisionally entitled *Rapallo: Yeats, Pound, and Late Modernism*.

**Richard Allen Cave** is Emeritus Professor of Drama and Theatre Arts at Royal Holloway, University of London. He has published extensively on aspects of Irish theatre, and edited the manuscripts of *The King of the Great Clock Tower* and *A Full Moon in March* (2007). His *Collaborations: Ninette de Valois and W. B. Yeats* appeared in 2008.

**Denis Donoghue** is University Professor Emeritus and formerly Henry James Professor of English and American Letters at New York University. Among his many books are *William Butler Yeats* (1971), his edition of W. B. Yeats, *Memoirs Autobiography: First Draft* (1971), *Thieves of Fire: The Promethean Imagination* (The T. S. Eliot Lectures at the University of Kent at Canterbury, 1974), *Ferocious Alphabets* (1981), *The Arts without Mystery* (The Reith Lectures, BBC, 1982; 1983), *We Irish: Essays on Irish Literature and Society* (1988), *Warrenpoint* (1994), *Being Modern Together* (1991), *Walter Pater: Lover of Strange Souls* (1995), *Adam's Curse: Reflections on Literature and Religion* (2001), *On Eloquence* (2010), and *Metaphor* (2014). He is currently writing a book on T. S. Eliot.

**Anita Feldman** is a writer, editor, and lecturer at New York University, where she taught writing and literature for twenty-six years. She has also been a guest lecturer on Noh drama at Fordham University. Before that, she was based in Tokyo for almost six years, as an editor for an English-language publisher, an art columnist for the English-language edition of the *Mainichi* newspaper, and a Tokyo correspondent for the American magazine *Art News*. She is currently working on a book of essays about Yeats's plays.

**R. A. Gilbert** is the author and editor of twelve books, and many contributions to books and periodicals, on the Golden Dawn and its members. Among the most recent of these are his edition of *The House of the Hidden Light*, by Arthur Machen & A. E. Waite (2003) and a new collection of papers by Westcott: *A Magus Among the Adepts. Essays and Addresses* by William Wynn Westcott (2012). One major earlier title, *The Golden Dawn Companion* (1986), is currently being revised for a new edition. Dr Gilbert is now the editor of *The*

*Christian Parapsychologist*, and has been a long-term contributor of scholarly articles on archives of occult materials to *Yeats Annuals.*

**Warwick Gould FRSL, FRSA, FEA** is Emeritus Professor of English Literature in the University of London, and Senior Research Fellow of the Institute of English Studies (in the School of Advanced Study), of which he was Founder-Director 1999– 2013. He is co-author of *Joachim of Fiore and the Myth of the Eternal Evangel in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries* (1988, rev. 2001), and co-editor of *The Secret Rose, Stories by W. B. Yeats: A Variorum Edition* (1981, rev. 1992), *The Collected Letters of W. B. Yeats, Volume II, 1896–1900* (1997), and *Mythologies* (2005). He has edited *Yeats Annual* for thirty years.

**John Kelly** is an Emeritus Research Fellow at St John's College, Oxford, and the Donald Keough Professor in Irish Studies at the University of Notre Dame. He taught English and Irish Literature at Oxford University from 1976 to 2009, and has written extensively on nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature. He is General Editor of *The Collected Letters of W. B. Yeats*, Vol. 4 to which was awarded the Cohen Prize by the Modern Languages Association. His co-edition, with Ronald Schuchard, of Vol. 5 will be out in 2018. He has also edited and introduced a 12-volume series of Irish fiction, poetry, and essays of the nineteenth century, under the title 'Hibernia: State and Nation'. His *W. B. Yeats Chronology* appeared in 2003.

**Grevel Lindop** was formerly Professor of Romantic and Early Victorian Studies at the University of Manchester, and is now an independent writer and researcher. He was General Editor of *The Works of Thomas De Quincey* (21 vols., 2000–2003), and author of *The Opium-Eater: A Life of Thomas De Quincey*; *A Literary Guide to the Lake District*; *Charles Williams: The Third Inkling*; and seven collections of poems, most recently *Luna Park*. He is a Fellow of the Wordsworth Trust, and Academic Director of the Temenos Academy, founded by Kathleen Raine.

**Stoddard Martin** is a writer, lecturer, and publisher. His books include *Wagner to the Waste Land*, *Orthodox Heresy* and *The Great Expatriate Writers*, published by Macmillan. He edited anthologies of Byron, Nietzsche, and D. H. Lawrence in the Duckworth 'Sayings of ' series, which he helped to devise, and has contributed chapters to many other anthologies, including on George Moore and Ezra Pound. He has taught at Harvard, Oxford, Łódź and Warsaw universities and was for many years an associate fellow of the Institute of English Studies, University of London. He writes short fiction under the name Chip Martin.

**Emilie Morin** is at the University of York, where she teaches modern British and Irish literature, theatre history, European modernism and the avant-garde. She has a particular interest in the history of radio broadcasting. Her books include *Beckett's Political Imagination* (2017) and *Samuel Beckett and the Problem of Irishness* (2009), and the edited collections *Theatre and Human Rights after 1945: Things Unspeakable* (2015) and *Theatre and Ghosts: Materiality, Performance and Modernity* (2014), co-edited with Mary Luckhurst.

**William O'Donnell** is Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Memphis. He edited Yeats's unfinished novel *The Speckled Bird*  (1974, 1977, and 2003), *Prefaces and Introductions* (1989), *Later Essays* (which included *On the Boiler*) (1994), *Autobiographies* (coeditor, 1999), and *Responsibilities: Manuscript Materials* (2003). He is author of *A Guide to the Prose Fiction to W. B. Yeats* (1983) and *The Poetry of William Butler Yeats: An Introduction* (1986). He has compiled a catalogue raisonné of the art that Yeats owned.

**Catherine E. Paul** is Professor Emerita at Clemson University. She is author of *Poetry in the Museums of Modernism: Yeats, Pound, Moore, Stein* (2002) and *Fascist Directive: Ezra Pound and Italian Cultural Nationalism* (2016). With Margaret Mills Harper, she edited W. B. Yeats's *A Vision: The Original 1925 Version* (2008) and *A Vision: The Revised 1937 Version* (2015), both for Scribner's Collected Works Series. She presently works as a textile artist at the Greenville Center for Creative Arts in South Carolina.

**James Pethica** teaches at Williams College, Massachusetts. He has published editions of *Lady Gregory's Diaries 1892*–*1902* (1996), and *Last Poems: Manuscript Materials* in the Cornell Yeats series (1997). His *Lady Gregory's Early Irish Writings, 1883–1893*, the 16th vol. in *The Collected Works of Lady Gregory* (gen. editor and publisher, Colin Smythe) including 'An Emigrant's Note Book', the Angus Grey Stories, and 'A Phantom's Pilgrimage', will be out this year. He is currently working on the authorized biography of Lady Gregory.

**Hannah Sullivan** is an Associate Professor of English at New College, Oxford. Her first book, *The Work of Revision* (2013), was a comparative study of modernist writers' practices of writing and redrafting, with a particular focus on the use of typescript. She was awarded a Leverhulme Prize in 2013 to write a book on the theory, polemic, and practice of free verse from Wordsworth to the present. In fact, as this article on Yeats (written at the beginning of research for the book) begins to suggest, the equation between freedom and prosodic irregularity is not always as simple as it may seem. Her debut poetry collection, *Three Poems*, will be published by Faber & Faber in 2018.

**Deirdre Toomey** is editor of *Yeats and Women: Yeats Annual No. 9*  (1991), revised and augmented as *Yeats and Women* (1997). She is co-editor of *The Collected Letters of W. B. Yeats, Volume II, 1896–1900*  (1997) and *Mythologies* (2005). She is working with Warwick Gould on a complete revision of A. Norman Jeffares's *A New Commentary on the Poems of Yeats* and is Research Editor of *Yeats Annual.*

**Stanley van der Ziel** lectures in British and Irish literature at Maynooth University. His work on modern and contemporary Irish literature has been published in various books and journals. He is the author of *John McGahern and the Imagination of Tradition* (2016), and the editor of two of McGahern's works—*Love of the World: Essays* (2009) and *The Rockingham Shoot and Other Dramatic Writings* (2018), both published by Faber & Faber.

## Introduction

## 'THE POETRY OF THE THING OUTLIVED'1

There were two 'Yeats events' of 2017. The first took place on 27th September at Sotheby's, London, where the sale of *Yeats: The Family Collection* offered the relics of three generations of artistic lives, and represented the Aesthetic equivalent of an Irish countryhouse sale. This then was followed—a surprise to some—by the auction of a further 253 items at Fonsie Mealy's in Castlecomer, Co. Kilkenny, on 14 November 2017.2 These sales were a moment in the history of Yeats as defining in its way as his 150th anniversary in 2015. Involved as I was in the preparation of the first sale, I offer some thoughts arising from these events before a brief resumé of the principal essays in this volume.

An ordinary family snapshot of Thoor Ballylee, showing the tower as viewed from the cabbage patch over the road, offers a small example of the kinds of research possibilities opened by the objects released in the Yeats Family Sales.

1 I am grateful to Dr Joe Hassett for reminding me of this Introduction to *The Aspern Papers*, written by Henry James's for the *New York Edition of Novels and Tales* (New York: Scribner, 1907–1909), 12, x. See also http://www.henryjames. org.uk/prefaces/home.htm

2 See *Yeats: The Family Collection*, with an Introduction by Warwick Gould (London: Sotheby's, 2017), *The Chatsworth Fine Art Sale: Including the Final Chapter of the Yeats Family Collection* (Castlecomer, co. Killkenny: Fonsie Mealy, 2017).

Plate 1. Yeats family snapshot c. 1927, of Thoor Ballylee and its cottages, taken from the 'acre of stony ground' or cabbage patch over the road. Image courtesy Private Collection London.

Thoor Ballylee, a monumental sixteenth-century fortified towerhouse, was finally purchased, as James Pethica details in his essay in this volume (see below, 213-68), in May 1916. It had been coveted by Yeats since the 1890s and probably since 1896, and it became a public monument from 14 February 1928, the publication day for *The Tower*, with Yeats's new personal seal upon its top board*.* 'Blood and the Moon', written in August 1927 and 'declar[ing] this tower … my symbol' (*VP* 480) was then published in *The Exile* in the spring of 1928.

Thomas Sturge Moore's famous cover design was drawn not from the snapshot sent by Yeats which survives in the Sturge Moore collection at the Senate House Library, but from this family snapshot offered at the Sotheby's sale as part of lot 82, a dealer's lot with an estimate of £200–300 which fetched £550.3 Sturge Moore's imposed

3 See Plates 1 and 2. For the photograph which survives in the Sturge Moore collection at the Senate House Library, see *YA17* Plate 7 (facing 255).

Plates 2–3. Plate 2 is a cropped detail of Plate 1 approximating the 'view' of the tower and cottages depicted in Plate 3, a detail of Thomas Sturge Moore's top board design for *The Tower* (1928). Images courtesy Private Collection London.

view puts the arches of the bridge below of the tower and cottages, almost as if the tower and cottages had been built upon it: he 'needed to "move" the bridge (substituting it for the garden wall) in order to have the tower reflected on the surface of the flowing river'.4 Impossible view as it is, it stamped Yeats's symbol into the public mind and quite displaced all previous rose symbols, including those Sturge Moore's own designs for Yeats's books.

But back in the 1920s, Thoor Ballylee had rather quickly lost its markedly compromised charms for the Yeats family as a summer home and writing retreat, and for various practical reasons. Its abandonment had been foreseen as early as 22 December 1921:

I am in deep gloom about Ireland … I see no hope of escape from bitterness …. When men are very bitter, death & ruin draw them on as a rabit is supposed to be drawn on by the dancing of the fox …. all may be blood & misery. If that comes we may abandon Ballylee to the owls and the rats & England too (where passion will rise & I shall find myself with no answer), & live in some far land. Should England & Ireland be divided beyond all hope of remedy, what else could one do for the childrens sake, or ones own work (*CL InteLex* 4039).

Oliver St. John Gogarty warned him that

To stones trust not your monument To make a living fame endure. Who built Dun Aengus Battlement? O'Flaherty is forgotten in Auchnanure.5

And he who told how Troy was sacked And what men clipt the lovely Burd, Had seven Mayors to swear, in fact, Their towns first heard his babbling word.6

4 As aptly put in a confirmatory email to me by Dr Declan Kiely, the Yeats and Sturge Moore scholar (6 January 2018).

5 Unlike Dún Aonghasa the Bronze Age hill fort on Inishmore, Aughnanure is another sixteenth-century tower house, in Oughterard, Co. Galway built by the O'Flaherty's, and one of more than 200 such tower-houses in the county, constructed mainly by Gaelic and Anglo-Norman land-owning families. It thus offers a direct comparison with the Norman De Burca family's Ballylee. 6

See *The Poems and Plays of Oliver St. John Gogarty*, collected, ed. and intr. by A. Norman Jeffares (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 2001), 49.

By 26 August 1927 Yeats had left Ballylee for the last time, before going to Algeciras in November to recover from pneumonia. A year later, the workload in the Seanad and in Dublin public life had become crushing and Yeats's health was failing.

Although written in 1918, 'To be carved on a Stone at Thoor Ballylee', was not erected as a tablet until 1948. Its 'powerful rhyme' looked set to outlive the monument itself as the tower, vandalised, again fell into ruin.7 Some few moveable items of furniture had found their way back to Dublin, and, by the time they appeared in *Yeats: The Family Collection* sale at Sotheby's, London, on 27 September 2017, they had acquired relic status.8

Very few 'dear perpetual' places can be securely endowed against time and taxes. While Henry James's Spencer Brydon still finds 'ineffaceable life' when he revisits his family's home on 'The Jolly Corner' in New York after thirty-three years abroad,9 it is a truism of the sale rooms that there eventually comes a time when a family outlives the *Lares et Penates* of its forebears. Inevitably, disencumberment ensues.

*Yeats: The Family Collection'* was a sale carefully planned by the Yeats family over a long period with the auction house, the National Library and other state depositories in Ireland. In that preparation, as became publicly apparent both before and after the sale, lay in fact the culmination of nearly 80 years of extraordinary generosity by Mrs Yeats and her descendants. Jack B. and Cottie Yeats remained childless, so too did the 'weird sisters' of the Dun Emer and Cuala Presses Susan Mary (Lily) and Elizabeth Corbet (Lollie) Yeats. So, too, was W. B. Yeats's daughter, Anne. The inherited, the created, the

7 Shakespeare, Sonnet 55. Michael Yeats did not have the money to restore and use it, but it was eventually restored and reopened in the 1960s, inspired by the enthusiasm of the Kiltartan Society and Mrs Mary Hanley. It was badly damaged again by floods, restored again, and re-opened in 2015. It is now administered by the Yeats Thoor Ballylee Society.

8 *Yeats: The Family Collection*, with an Introduction by Warwick Gould (London: Sotheby's, 2017), 176 pp.

9 See *the New York Edition of Novels and Tales* (New York: Scribner, 1907–9), Vol. 7, *The Altar of the Dead, The Beast in the Jungle, The Birthplace, and Other Tales*, 447.

acquired—some of it with W. B. Yeats's Nobel Prize money—all that had not already gone to archives and galleries all around the world, came to rest in Cliff House, Dalkey, the family home of Michael and Gráinne Yeats and their children.

That family's generosity to the State has been profound: its proud record is summarized in the series of press releases from the National Library of Ireland, not only announcing the acquisition by the Library of the Yeats-Joyce and Yeats-George Yeats correspondences, but also reviewing the history of some €8.5 million worth of gifts from the family since 1939 to that institution alone.10

When I first visited Cliff House and Anne Yeats's nearby house 'Avalon' as a postgraduate in 1970, I did not know that I sat on one of Yeats's dining chairs, lunching *en famille* at 'Yeats's dining table', purchased with his Nobel Prize money (Lots 102, 103, estimates and hammer prices below). Sunk into a too comfortable chair in the living room, I found my eyes continually drawn from my study of Yeats's manuscripts and marked proofs by the paintings, drawings, even the furniture. I think particularly of the John Butler Yeats self-portrait, unfinished, relayered and encrusted with impasto over 11 years as he sought to prolong his life in New York to avoid returning to his family in Dublin (Lot 64, est. £30,000-£50,000; fetched £70,000). Or of a portrait of William Butler Yeats at 22 by his father (not in this sale) of the poet in his own poem, as his own mad 'King Goll',

10 See the press releases from the Department of Arts, Heritage, Regional, Rural and Gaeltacht Affairs on 16 February 2017 ('Letters between WB Yeats and James Joyce feature in new acquisition by the National Library—Minister Humphreys', available at https://www.nli.ie/getattachment.aspx?id=ef2635b8-81bf-4047- 971b-8247862a792d) and 'National Library announces major acquisitions of remarkable Yeats treasures' (available at https://www.nli.ie/GetAttachment. aspx?id=151f10ec-fbc0-4ae5-8262-66f03326ca34) which details the pre-sale purchase of over 500 letters between W. B. Yeats and his wife, George Yeats. These press releases did much to dampen, though they could not entirely forestall, various expressions of begrudgery in the Irish media by those not privy to pre-sale negotiations (notably in the *The Irish Times*, 27 September 2017, 9)*.*  For further information, contact Sebastian Enke (to whom I am grateful) at DHR Communications, Dublin, http://www.dhr.ie/, Tel: 01–4200580 / 087–3239496 / 087–2309835.

hitherto known to me only as a steel engraving in *The Leisure Hour* of September 1887, in which he is depicted 'tearing the strings out [of ] a harp, being insane with youth, but looking very desirable—alas no woman noticed it at the time—with dreamy eyes & a great mass of black hair. It hangs in our drawing room now a pathetic memory of a really dreadful time': so Yeats recalled for Olivia Shakespear in 1924. 'I write for boys & girls of twenty for I am always thinking of myself at that age' (*CL InteLex* 4556). Working among Yeats's own books at Anne Yeats's nearby 'Avalon', my eyes were drawn to Yeats's gilded Moorish (actually a Burmese chest, now in the National Gallery of Ireland) wedding-chest in which, as he had written, he had kept his 'barbarous words' (*Myth* 366; *CW5* 32).

What George, Michael, Anne Yeats and Michael's children gave to Irish state institutions over the years were objects easily identifies as research materials—books, manuscripts, letters, sketches, and paintings. What had hitherto been perhaps unforeseen is the new research interests in domestic interiors, and of the relic-making processes of writing and artistic creation. Sotheby's exploited the potential of this in their Dublin and London displays of what was to be offered, and the web advertising for the sale as well as the catalogue captured well their co-location of objects around Yeats' desk and writing chair—desk candlesticks, letters, a large silver inkwell, the black-japanned deed box with his name upon it.

The deed box is instructive for historians of price. On 23 July 1987, Sotheby's sold a vast collection of such writers' deed boxes from A. P. Watt & Co., advertising them at prices of little more than £100 each (lots 202–224 in that sale). Yeats's was not among them, presumably having been returned to the family at some point. It turned up as lot 983 in the current sale, with an ambitious estimate of £2,000–3,000. It fetched £12,000.

To judge only by observation of paddle numbers as announced by the auctioneer at the sale, three separate buyers divided between them a multitude of lots. The prodigious first single buyer appears to have purchased—in the case of the first two items below against a determined and well-publicized attempt by Poetry Ireland—

Plate 4. Yeats family heirlooms as clustered by Sotheby's, London, for the frontispiece of their *Yeats: The Family Collection*, the catalogue accompanying the sale of that name on 27 September 2017. Image courtesy Philip Errington, and © Sotheby's, New Bond St., London, all rights reserved.

## xliv Introduction

These hammer figures add up to £262,150, and while a number of these purchases were within range of the estimates, the buyer's total investment would have been in the region of £314,580 excluding VAT if an overseas buyer. It was rumoured at the sale that the purchaser is to put them on public exhibition, but nothing has yet been confirmed. Another multiple-lot buyer appears to have purchased

The total hammer price here is £28,550. The candlesticks here listed as lot 95 had been the pair chosen by Sotheby's to sit on Yeats's desk for the Dublin and London exhibitions: the added *mana-*byassociation may be gauged by the price of the next item (Lot 96, two brass desk candlesticks, also in the manner of Benham and Froud, also Aesthetic style, est. £200-£300, hammer price £480). I believe similarly enhanced prices were achieved by the display of lot 29, 'Lolla' Pollexfen's inkwell (see above), also placed on W. B. Yeats's bureau desk in these exhibitions.

A third collector appears to have acquired

## xlvi Introduction

• Collection of 6 photographic portraits of John Butler Yeats, 1860s to 1900s (Lot 54, est. £1,500-£2,000, hammer price £1,500).

These total £82,400 in hammer prices. Between them, these three buyers paid c. £448,000 (including buyer's commission but excluding VAT).

An atmosphere of doubt pervaded the saleroom when lot 37, a John Butler Yeats oil 'thought to be [of ] William Morris with a pencil sketch also said' was offered (Lot 37, est. £4,000-£6,000, hammer price £3,800), but a determined purchaser bought the companion to the oil portrait of Lolly Yeats, that of Susan Mary ('Lily') Yeats, 1899 (Lot 137, est. £20,000–£30,000, hammer price £50,000); while notable prices were also paid for:

Overall, exceptional prices for a number of compelling paintings such as these helped to compensate for those highest-estimated lots in the sale which ultimately failed to find buyers. Not only were a number of Jack B. Yeats pieces unsold, but the painting which, in many ways had been judged the star item of the sale, a late explosive oil entitled 'The Runaway Horse' (Lot 181, est. £150,000–250,000) was unsold

11 Stop Press 24 February 2017: Lots 73 and 64 (the large oil John Butler Yeats self-portrait) and other portraits of the Yeats family are now on long-term loan to the Model arts centre in Sligo, from an anonymous buyer who has also donated the nine Jack B. Yeats model ships and their decorated box (lots 167–168) as an outright gift. See https://www.irishtimes.com/life-and-style/homes-andproperty/fine-art-antiques/mystery-donor-gives-valuable-yeats-art-to-sligoarts-centre-1.3367320

at a bid of just £95,000, whereas 'The Sunset belongs to You' (lot 205, est. £100,000–£150,000) went for a hammer price of £170,000. The highest estimate of the entire sale was for lot 86 (£250,000-£350,000), 133 autograph letters from W. B. Yeats to Olivia Shakespear, with 37 letters from Shakespear to Yeats, and two letters to her forwarded on to Yeats. That the whole of this correspondence is available in the *InteLex* online edition and the Shakespear side was edited by John Harwood for *Yeats Annual No. 6* may account for the lack of interest from research libraries, and the lot was bought in at £200,000.

*Yeats: The Family Sale* had been estimated as likely to total c. £2 million, a figure pretty much reached despite the fact that only 87% of lots were sold.

It will be seen that relics of what Seamus Heaney called 'the place of writing' bringing writing agency to life were appropriately valued. Yeats's card index file box, used in the preparation of *A Vision*, Jack B. Yeats's palette, and his pencil box, with designs on five surfaces (Lot 166, £3,000-£5,000) went at the high end of the estimate, at £4,800. (By contrast, Lily Yeats's charming little walnut and maple Davenport (Lot 141, est. £500-£700) was knocked down for only £600.)

Now that the materiality of writing and even of drawing is vanishing, museums of writing seek to preserve not merely Sumerian tablets, ancient manuscripts, and calligraphic tools, but also typewriters and word processors. The objects in this sale preserve something not always found in such museums: particularity of ownership, the perpetually vital ingredient of human agency. A known and valued creator, we say, lived, and worked using or surrounded by these objects. This *mana* has market value, and is not always effaced when transferred as 'relic value' into new ownership. All those years ago in a house full of teenage children I had found myself continually distracted by objects of recognizable associations: now it seems as if once a connexion is recognized between the here and now and the past lives and works of artists and poet, nearly every object becomes charged with potential significance. W. B. Yeats's two monogrammed brushes (listed above) bring to mind the words 'Always particular about my clothes' in a passage of memorably reflective self-criticism in his *Pages from a Diary Written in Nineteen Hundred and Thirty* (*Ex* 308)*.*

Plate 5. Antonio Mancini's 1908 pastel portrait of W. B. Yeats used as the basis for the frontispiece to Vol. V of *The Collected Works in Verse and Prose* (1908). Image courtesy Philip Errington, and Sotheby's, New Bond St., London.

Plate 6. John Butler Yeats oil portrait of W. B. Yeats in a basket chair, reading in the overgrown garden at 3 Blenheim Rd., Bedford Park, London, c. 1888–1889. Image courtesy Philip Errington, and Sotheby's, New Bond St., London.

### l Introduction

The mystique of memorabilia, however, transcends an editors' occupational hazard, Total Awareness Syndrome. Unlike most family clearance sales, this one released to the market items each seemingly stamped with an aura of unshakeable associations, the bases of new collections or treasured additions to existing collections, public and private. Viewed in such a light, it somehow seems logical that even Conan Doyle's undershirts, D. H. Lawrence's beaded moccasins and Evelyn Waugh's ash-trays did not elude the Texas archives formed by Harry Huntt Ransom as what he called his 'counter-frontier' for what he saw as a frontier society. Some of the heroic sums paid, e.g., for Yeats's bureau and desk chair, bring to mind the sums paid for Ian Fleming's typewriter (£56,250 (\$90,309) at Christie's, London, on 5 May 1995); or the prominence given to Conan Doyle's writing chair in the reading room at the Ransom Center and the same library's former recreated writers' rooms, now dismantled but available on line. The American Writers Museum, Chicago is based on the Dublin Writers Museum, which holds a wide exhibit of pens, papers, typewriters, and pipes—but Samuel Beckett's telephone, Austin Clarke's desk and Handel's chair are also held in the Dublin museum.

Perhaps the scruffiest item in the sale—ignored by scholarship, seemingly just negligible clutter—is a sketchbook at first thought at Sotheby's (and no doubt previously) to have been discarded by John Butler Yeats (Lot 70, est. £6,000-£8,000, hammer price £28,000), but in fact first belonging to W. B. Yeats. It best reveals the agency of family dynamics, tensions, and competing ambitions. John Butler Yeats moved his family to 10 Ashfield Terrace from a cottage in Howth because of dire penury early in 1884. A sketchbook which includes on an early page the pencilled 'W B Yeats— | 10 Ashfield Terrace | Rathmines' in Yeats's early hand dates the sketchbook, and it was used from at least May of that year, when W. B. Yeats enrolled as an art student in the Metropolitan School of Art in Kildare Street. The pencilled academic studies it contains show how little aptitude he had had for following his father as an artist. However, within the sketchbook, Yeats turns to writing. A page of confused pencilled drafts hitherto unrecorded and untranscribed but evidently from Act II Scene 3 of *The Island of Statues* suddenly emerges into a new, relatively clear inked transcription

Plates 7–8. Two images of pages from Yeats's '10 Ashfield Terrace' sketchbook, lot 70 in the Sotheby's sale. Image courtesy Philip Errington, and Sotheby's, New Bond St., London.

This whole drafting may be compared with Act II: 3 lines 216–26 of *The Island f Statues* published as

Ah, woe is me! I go from sun and shade, And the joy of the streams where long-limbed herons wade; And never any more the wide-eyed bands Of the pie'd panther-kittens from my hands Shall feed. I shall not in the evenings hear Again the woodland laughter, and the clear Wild cries, grown sweet with lulls and lingerings long. I fade, and shall not see the mornings wake, A-fluttering the painted populace of lake And sedgy stream, and in each babbling brake And hollow lulling the young winds with song. (*VP* 674–75, ll. 216–26)

On the page facing Plate 7 is a draft of another poem which stumbles towards what I offer in fair copy form beneath it:

> Truth is bold. but falsehood fears Question of the lie of years But when time her fickle pages Has been turning endless ages Then some Pilgrim when he searches For the sight of fallen churches Slowly rising to depart He shall mutter to his heart He shall see the [? heron] pass over ruins green with grass And shall mutter to his heart Slo sadly slowly rising to depart He shall mutter [?passing] by 'Fair the ruin of a lie'

The book title jotted down beneath this draft is but one jotting of Yeats's actual or potential reading at the time, including short titles of new books in 1884 Yeats's awareness of the following titles

Plate 9. Image of page facing Plate 7 in Yeats's '10 Ashfield Terrace' sketchbook, lot 70 in the Sotheby's sale. Image courtesy Philip Errington, and Sotheby's, New Bond St., London.

Plate 10. Image of page from Yeats's '10 Ashfield Terrace' sketchbook, lot 70 in the Sotheby's sale. Image courtesy Philip Errington, and Sotheby's, New Bond St., London.

Yeats's bibliographical knowledge in relation to the first of these as found on Plate 9 is expansive (the volume's title-page offering only 'H. J. B.'), as if he had noted the details at a punctilious lecture: indeed, the first three titles above are perhaps noted at some meeting of the Dublin Hermetic Society. There also seem to be lecture notes from some talk on 'Pankelticism' on another page, the theme of which is that the 'Keltic legend goes everywhere', from 'Ossian downwards' | 'Geothe and Napoleon' | Byron [illeg., one word] | Tenysons Religion | Swinburne | Vagner' etc.

Elsewhere, there are scattered 'to do' shopping and address lists, while a further fragment of verse

> And Helen's eyes beneath their moveless lids The bold firm glance of godhead in their gaze

suggests that this divinity was potent for Yeats five years before Maud Gonne came along to incarnate it for him.12

Plate 11. Image of fragment of verse in Yeats's '10 Ashfield Terrace' sketchbook, lot 70 in the Sotheby's sale. Image courtesy Philip Errington, and Sotheby's, New Bond St., London.

12 It would appear that no passages from the sketchbook are represented in *The Early Poetry, Vol. 1* Mosada *and* The Island of Statues: *Manuscript Materials* by W. B. Yeats, ed. by George Bornstein (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1987).

### lvi Introduction

That this sketch-book disappeared from the record is simply explained: it was taken over by his paper-hungry father for sketches of his own and remained in family hands as an object seemingly of little significance even for John Butler Yeats in whose collection of sketch-books it was found. It is hoped to provide a detailed study of this document, which was bought by a private collector, in a future *Yeats Annual.*

W. B. Yeats was endlessly on the move, and lived at some thirty domestic addresses in his lifetime. Many of his longest-held domestic interiors leave few traces in the poems. At least one of the Dante engravings (Lot 116, est. £7,000-£10,000, hammer price £12,000) acquired from the Linnell Brothers when Yeats was working on his co-edition of *The Works of William Blake*, or, a little later, when writing his three essays on 'Blake's Illustrations to Dante' for *The Savoy* in 1896 can be seen on the walls of his shabby rooms at 18 Woburn Buildings. He was photographed in front of it for *The Tatler*'s series of 'Writers in Their Rooms' (29 June 1904), along with his Dante death mask, his shrine, his cane chair, his shabby rug and his books (see frontispiece, *YA5*)—none of these items is in the sale). There are, however, in this sale earlier records of W. B. Yeats seated at a desk, writing (e.g., the photos and studies by John Butler Yeats in lots 68–69), but *The Tatler's* image was the first public record of Yeats in domestic surroundings he had arranged to suit himself. 18 Woburn Buildings leaves few traces in his poems beyond the ghostly 'Presences' of women on the stairs. 4 Broad Street Oxford, brought to life in the memoirs of numerous undergraduates who visited the Yeats menage, leaves only 'two long glasses brimmed with muscatel' to attract ghosts to their 'wine-breath' in 'All Soul's Night'. Yeats was at Coole nearly every summer from 1896-the mid-1920s, and, while all his lines about the seven woods, the lake, the swans are well known, it seems in other media he left only two pastels, one of the lake reproduced in *The Green Sheaf*, and the one in this sale, the rather poor image of the frontage of the house (Lot 76, est. £7,000-£10,000, hammer price £35,000). Coole had been so filled with paintings and bric-a-brac that the novelist George Moore had said 'Balzac would have given twenty pages to the stairs', as Yeats recalled in *Dramatis Personae*, but these interiors inspire few lines of poems beyond

Beloved books that famous hands have bound, Old marble heads, old pictures everywhere; Great rooms where travelled men and children found Content or joy (*VP* 491)

As well as one pastel by WBY of the library at Coole (lot 85, est. £8,000-£12,000, hammer price £40,000; both pastels went to the same buyer).

Yeats's poem-making from home-making largely anticipates the not yet inhabited Thoor Ballylee in Co. Galway, not purchased until July 1917 and later declared as 'my symbol' and 'decked and altered … for a girl's love' (*VP* 423). But the tower was inhabited in Yeats's mind and poems from 'Ego Dominus Tuus' (December 1915) onwards, as a result of an ambition unfulfilled since 1899, and no doubt reinforced by what George apparently confided to her cousin Grace Spurway in or after mid-November 1915, their secret engagement (*BG* 80). 'Now that we are almost settled in our house' Yeats writes, in 'In Memory of Major Robert Gregory' (1918). By 'Meditations in Time of Civil War' (1922–1923) Yeats zooms in from 'My House' to 'My Table', with Sato's Sword, the focus ultimately closing on

> A winding stair, a chamber arched with stone, A grey stone fireplace with an open hearth, A candle and written page. (*VP* 419)

Yeats wrote by candle-light. 'Benighted travellers | From markets and from fairs | Ha[d] seen his midnight candle glimmering' (*VP* 419–20). The great spiral twist altar candlesticks visible by the fireside in photographs of the sitting room in the tower (Lot 83, est. £800-£1,200) were sold for £3,500): it is understood that these were purchased by benefactors who wish to restore them to the tower. Even from 1932 in Riversdale, the Yeatses' last house at Rathfarnham

> Midnight, an old house Where nothing stirs but a mouse (*VP* 575).

there was no electricity. There, as he wrote at the end of his life, 'Picture and book remain'. *'Daybreak and a candle-end'* marks a refrain on a lifetime's writing. In such domestic contexts, the Yeats family collection of candlesticks itself begins to glimmer.

At the heart of *Yeats: The Family Collection* were numerous of Jack B. Yeats's paintings, drawings, cartoons, and sketches which reinforce his brother's view that Jack's 'memory seems as accurate as the sight of the eye'. In his boyhood in Sligo, Jack had 'spent his free hours going here and there with crowds of little boys, sons of pilots and sailors, as their well-liked leader, arranging donkey races or driving donkeys tandem … he had begun to amuse everybody with his drawings; and in half the pictures he paints to-day I recognize faces that I have met at Rosses or the Sligo quays' said W. B. Yeats (*Au* 68; *CW3* 83). Jack B. Yeats's early scribbling diaries (1887–1889, lot 161, est. £8,000-£12,000, hammer price £11,000; lot 162, same est., hammer price £14,000), his designs for *A Broadsheet* (lots 182– 83, est. £800-£1,200, price £1,300; est. £1,000–1,500, hammer price £4,200) and *Broadsides* (e.g., lot 189, est. £15,000–20,000, hammer price £21,000), and numerous pen and ink drawings and sketches for Cuala Press prints—all mainly sold well. His personal obsessions were strongly in evidence, with pirate themes dominating even the designs with which he decorated his pencil box (lot 162, prices above), as well as the storage chest in which he kept his collection of model ships (lot 167, est. £7,000-£9,000, hammer price £12,000). This boyish obsession was shared with John Masefield, whose model ship, named *George and Willy* (lot 121, est. £700-£900, hammer price £1,100) was also in the sale. Perhaps with Masefield's ship in mind, Yeats, when he collected *The Cat and the Moon*, the play dedicated to Masefield '*who made me a ship*', into *Wheels and Butterflies* (1934) added as a tailpiece, seemingly to the whole book:

> *The bravest from the gods but ask: A house, a sword, a ship, a mask.*13

The sale might well have taken its title from one of Jack B. Yeats's best-loved early paintings of Rosses Point Co. Sligo, 'Memory

13 W. B. Yeats, *Wheels and Butterflies* (London: Macmillan, 1934), 133 (dedication), [157] tailpiece.

Harbour', so powerful is the sense of crowded family activity running through all these works and well beyond the works of the principal creators. That title was borrowed by the journalist Filson Young for a book of essays in 1909, an appropriation which irked W. B. Yeats and not merely because he was thereby effectively dissuaded from using it as the title of what became *Reveries over Childhood and Youth.*14 A reproduction of 'Memory Harbour' stands as its frontispiece. In the distant background is the shipping channel marker, the 'Metal Man' who turns up not only in Lily Yeats's bookplate but also as the matrix of her desk seal stamp (lot 143, est. £3,000–5,000, surprisingly bought in at £2,800).

This sale, then, seemed a last chance. Or so I thought when I wrote the introduction to the sale. But as dealers will tell you, there is always more, and so the Fonsie Mealy sale of 14 November 2017, including 253 lots billed as 'The Final Chapter of The Yeats Family Collection' (http://fonsiemealy.ie/catalogues/14112017/) is unlikely to be so. The Irish sale acknowledges the assistance of the Dublin dealer, Cian O'hHigeartaigh, a relation of the Yeats Family, in identifying and cataloguing the Paintings, Watercolours, Albums, Artefacts etc. included in this sale'. Reviewing the catalogue, one can see that the heavier items of furniture were omitted from the London sale, as swell as many lots of seemingly lesser value. And yet, it is also apparent that Sotheby's missed a great number of items which perhaps emerged after Sotheby's had made their selection. Happily, one can report that the following items were secured by the National Library of Ireland.

14 See Warwick Gould, 'Singular Pluralities: Titles of Yeats's *Autobiographies'*, *YA11* 205–18.

This item had been bruited by Fonsie Mealy as 'A Major Discovery', and the catalogue offers six thumb-prints which suggest its close likeness to lot 70 in the London sale, although, at 50 pages, its seems either a larger or more complete sketchbook. Fonsie Mealy offers thumb-nails of a couple of pages of verse and drawings from which I offer the following necessarily tentative transcriptions:

The Field Mouse—

The field mouse running yonder has reared up No pyramid of laws customs or of laws To break her heat heart No. she is angry sometimes and she loves The history The shadow of the wheat sheaves, that is all The history of her life

This mouse is perhaps a harbinger of that '*running by me in the grass*' of 'To the Rose upon the Rood of Time' or of those avoiding the reaping-hook in the 'last ridge of barley' in '[I walked among the Seven Woods of Coole]', the proem to *The Shadowy Waters* (*VP*  101, 218). But it seems as though this is one of the fragmentary 'aphorisms' inscribed on the facing page. Again, I decipher from one of the thumb-nails

aphorisms

—When thy heart wishes evil It is a foolis useless slavery to not to do right for riteousness and rong are housed alone among the wishes—

—And do you prey to him Who crushed a world that he might scrawl upon the front of time

An Epigram—

Together, these lines might indicate a start being made on the project first externalised in the *Dublin University Review* (January, February 1886) as 'In a Drawing Room' and 'Life', before being extended under the title 'Quatrains and Aphorisms' in *The Wanderings of Oisin*  and thereafter suppressed (*VP* 734–35). If so, lot 630 might be a later sketchbook than the one sold as lot 70 in Sotheby's sale.15

Another item recovered at last in the Fonsie Mealy auction is the original John Butler Yeats drawing of his son which was used as frontispiece to his first book, *Mosada* (also 1886). Sold as lot 631 (est. €4,000-€6,000) its hammer price was €21,000 (Maggs Bros., London). A fine photograph of Maud Gonne as a young woman wearing a Tara brooch (lot 638, est. €300-€500, fetched €1,300 (Maggs Bros.), while lot 642, the Yeats family tarot cards (the Pamela Colman Smith set) est. €450-€650, brought a hammer price €4,800. A fine drawing of Pamela Colman Smith by John Butler Yeats (lot 643, est. €400-€600 brought down the hammer at ten times that upper estimate at €6,000).

The respective buyers of the Lolla Yeats inkwell (Sotheby's lot 29, hammer price £650; see above Plate 4) and that claimed by Fonsie Mealy to be 'W. B. Yeats's' Edwardian silver desk inkwell (lot 633, est. €600-€800, hammer price €2,900) can now fight it out as which of the 'many wonderful compositions flowed' (Fonsie Mealy's catalogue) from their respective purchasers. Yeats's leather briefcase, later used by his son with an 'M.' added to its initialling) inspired the cataloguers to wonder 'who can say what poems and papers it once carried' (lot 634, est. €600-€800, hammer price €3,400). Yeats's pince-nez (est. €500-€600 fetched €10,000, a figure which contrasts with the mere £6,000 paid at an English provincial auction last autumn for another Nobel Literature Laureate's glasses, Winston Churchill's. To see the world as painters with visual defects saw it can be revealing—is the same true not for writers? The Ashmolean Museum holds two pairs of glasses which belonged to J. M. W. Turner, and a third is in the hands of the dealer, Philip Mould, while William Blake's spectacles are held in Cambridge at the Fitzwilliam, while those of Sir Joshua Reynolds are also important for ophthalmic

15 It would appear that none of these lines has been included in *The Early Poetry, Vol. II 'The Wanderings of Oisin' and Other Early Poems to 1895 Manuscript Materials* by W. B. Yeats, ed. by George Bornstein (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1994).

historians.16 While it is perhaps more obvious that for a painter facing old age 'the Eye altering alters all', Yeats's pince-nez are not just a property in his best-known self-icons. He too suffered from serious optical problems, including keratoconus, or conical cornea, and 'my eyes are bad' is a constant complaint in his letters. There is a study to be done of the texts he had read to him, by Lady Gregory, Ezra Pound, and others.

Writers' and artists' *mana* when thus redistributed is, I think, to be distinguished from the aura of merely celebrity possessions (e.g., Paul Newman's Rolex watch, sold a couple of weeks before the Fonsie Mealy sale, fetched \$17.8m.), but it is not an argument I'd care to have to make. 'What is aught, but as 'tis valued?' remarks Shakespeare's Troilus.

## THE SENSE OF THE PAST

I delight in a palpable imaginable visitable past—in the nearer distances and the clearer mysteries, the marks and signs of a world we may reach over to as by making a long arm we grasp an object at the other end of our own table. The table is the one, the common expanse, and where we lean, so stretching, we find it firm and continuous. That, to my imagination, is the past fragrant of all, or of almost all, the poetry of the thing outlived and lost and gone, and yet in which the precious element of closeness, telling so of connexions but tasting so of differences, remains appreciable. With more moves back the element of the appreciable shrinks—just as the charm of looking over a garden-wall into another garden breaks down when successions of walls appear. … The one partition makes the place we have wondered about other, both richly and recognizably so. … We are divided of course between liking to feel the past strange and liking to feel it familiar; the difficulty is, for intensity, to catch it at the moment when the scales of the balance hang with the right evenness.17

Extravagance of price represents a huge investment of the emotion of 'relic value' in objects from that 'visitable past' no longer held by descendants themselves. Relic value might not always be transferable. Sales of effects from writers and artists can be considerably more

16 See e.g., https://www.college-optometrists.org/the-college/museum/museumservices/education-and-outreach/tyranny-of-treatment.html

17 Henry James's preface to *The Aspern Papers*. See above n.XXX [1].

chaotic than these two proved to be—one thinks, of course, of the Oscar Wilde bankruptcy sale of 24 April 1895, where, among trophies dispersed and lost sight of was lot 125, 'An old oil painting of Will Hewes, framed' which was in fact the 'Portrait of Mr W. H.' in the style of Clouet by Charles Ricketts, done to Wilde's commission and intended to illustrate an edition of the story which never appeared. Although a subsequent thumbnail sketch of the portrait, also by Ricketts, survives in the William Andrews Clark library, the portrait itself, purchased by one Edwin Parsons, who later disposed of it, had disappeared by 1914.

Even as one wonders if the heaped-up possessions of forebears do not weigh the more oppressively on successive generations of a distinguished creative family, one can be assured that, when dispersed, their *mana* is at least temporarily enhanced by the price paid, which is not always the case when they remain co-located in a writer's residence turned into a museum. Such places seem to me sometimes slightly spectral, haunted by the very absence they try to preserve. Artists and writers routinely trade in their own *mana* when they sell their manuscripts and preliminary sketches, as every male member of the Yeats family did in their lifetimes to collectors and patrons such as John Quinn. 'MAKE PROVISION FOR YOUR OLD AGE!!!', urges the caption of a self-portrait drawing Jack B. Yeats sent in a letter to Lady Gregory,

> WHY INSURE LIFE WHAT IS LIFE WITHOUT HIS PICTURES WHY TAKE SHARES IN A COMPANY EVERY PICTURE A SHARE OF THE WORLD.18

Buyers would do well to record the provenance of their trophies from *Yeats: The Family Collection*.

18 Undated, but quoted in Figgis Rare Books Bulletin 71, item 416, from which this drawing is reproduced in Plate 12. Mr Figgis, who kindly gave his permission for it thus to be reproduced, kindly tells me that these letters, having been bought by him at the great Christie's Lady Gregory sale of 1979, then went to Mr Aidan Heavey, but this one is not in the Heavey Collection, Westmeath Co. Library, Athlone, and its whereabouts is unknown.

## lxiv Introduction

Plate 12. (as a tailpiece) Jack B. Yeats's drawing 'MAKE PROVISION FOR YOUR OLD AGE!!!!' from an undated letter to Lady Gregory as illustrated for lot 416, Figgis Rare Books catalogue, c. 1982–1996 (Private Collection, London). Image courtesy Mr. Neville Figgis, House of Figgis Rare Books, Letterfrack, Co. Galway.

### THE ESSAYS IN THIS BOOK

This volume acquired its theme—and so its title—almost by serendipity. I had been hoping that essays might address the 'vain battles' in Yeats's lifetime (a volume I still envisage) but as the essays came in and I read them, the title *Yeats's Legacies* framed itself. These two great sales and the legacy of the Yeats family's 80-year tradition of generosity to Ireland's great cultural institutions provide the kaleidoscope through which the advanced research essays find their theme in this volume. Hannah Sullivan's brilliant history of Yeats's verse craft challenges Poundian definitions of Modernism; Denis Donoghue offers unique family memories of 1916 whilst tracing the political significance of the Easter Rising; Anita Feldman addresses Yeats's responses to the Rising's appropriation of his symbols and myths, the daring artistry of his ritual drama developed from the Noh, his poetry of personal utterance, and his vision of art as a body reborn rather than a treasure preserved amid the testing of the illusions that hold civilizations together in ensuing wars. Warwick Gould looks at Yeats as founding Senator in the new Free State, and his valiant struggle against the literary Censorship law of 1929 (with its present-day legacy of Irish anti-Blasphemy law still presenting a Constitutional challenge). Yeats's enduring resistance to the reactionary censorship which became inevitable in the free state, offer an object lesson to all who seek to keep their heads when manufactured outrage multiplies into moral panic in outrageous times. The essay is followed by reprinted interviews Yeats gave to the international press as the Irish Censorship Bill became inevitable in 1928. The effects of that Act are internationally not without significance today, when Irish Law retains unrepealed, and arguably unconstitutional anti-blasphemy provisions, even today.

Drawing on Gregory Estate documents, James Pethica looks at the evictions which preceded Yeats's purchase of Thoor Ballylee in Galway, Lauren Arrington looks back at Yeats, Ezra Pound, and the ghosts of *The Winding Stair* (1929) in Rapallo. Having co-edited both versions of *A Vision*, Catherine Paul offers some profound reflections on 'Yeats and Belief '. Grevel Lindop provides a pioneering view of Yeats's impact on English mystical verse, and on Charles Williams who, while at Oxford University Press, helped publish the *Oxford Book of Modern Verse*. Stanley van der Ziel looks at the presence of Shakespeare in Yeats's *Purgatory*. William H. O'Donnell examines the vexed textual legacy of his late work, *On the Boiler.* If 1916–1929 provides the focus for several of the essays in this volume; so, too do the years of *A Vision* (1937), *Purgatory* and *On the Boiler.*

In our Research Updates, John Kelly recovers a startling autobiographical short story by Maud Gonne, which provides a useful background to the divided views of two readers of Adrian Frazier's recent *The Adulterous Muse Maud Gonne, Lucien Millevoye and W. B. Yeats.* Warwick Gould considers the challenge which Yeats's intentionalism posed for the editors of his *Collected Edition of the Works*, in the 1980s and after, when post-structuralist editorial theory became fashionable. Nine works of current biographical, textual and literary scholarship are reviewed, Maud Gonne is the focus of debate for two reviewers, as Eva Gore-Booth, Constance and Casimir Markievicz, Kipling, David Jones, T. S. Eliot and his presence on the radio. In the 'Publications Received' we also list the texts of Yeats's poems which Douglas Saum of Reno, Nevada has set to music, recorded and published in CD format over a twenty-two year project.

We mark the death on 18 April 2017, of Aleck Crichton, grandson of Andrew Jameson, head of John Jameson & Son, Irish whiskey distillers of Smithfield, Dublin. The family farm is in Sligo, and he always thought of himself as a Sligo man. After Cambridge and wartime service with the Irish Guards at the Normandy landings and after (for which he was appointed Chevalier of the Légion d'Honneur), he served in the family firm and as European director of Irish Distillers, founded the Irish Mountaineering Club Crichton went on to become European Director of Irish Distillers after Ireland joined the European Community (as it then was).

His parents, Dr Brian Crichton and the former Violet Jameson had entertained Yeats to tea in Fitzwilliam Square, and had played with the Yeats children, and Crichton had played with Yeats's children. It was Dr Crichton who had sent Michael Yeats to see a London specialist who confirmed the tubercular gland which consigned Michael Yeats to a school in Switzerland about the time Yeats and George Yeats went to Cannes in January 1928.19 After his retirement to Sligo as 'the last of the Dublin merchant princes' he took a close interest in the Yeats Society of Sligo (becoming its president) and was a familiar figure at the Summer School lectures, always seeking ideas for the consolidation of this Sligo institution. His obituary from which much of the above was drawn, was published in *The Times* on 9 May 2017 (54), on what would have been his 99th birthday.

The 2018 Yeats International Summer School, the 59th to be held in Sligo, will be held between 19–27 July 2018. It is directed by Professor Matthew Campbell and Dr Lauren Arrington, and it has for a theme 'The Greening of Yeats'. For bookings and programme information, see http://www.yeatssociety.com/.

> Warwick Gould London, December 2017

*Note*, 5 January 2018. We deeply regret the early death on 4 January 2018 of the noted Irish Art Historian, Nicola Gordon Bowe, the leading expert on the Arts and Crafts Movement in Dublin and Edinburgh. She was celebrated for such books as *Harry Clarke: the life & work* (Dublin: History Press, 2012), *Wilhemina Geddes: Life and Work* (Dublin: Four Courts, 2015); *Gazetteer of Irish Stained Glass: The Works of Harry Clarke and the A*rtists of An Túr Gloine (The Tower of Glass) 1903–1963, eds. Nicola Gordon Bowe, David Caron and Michael Wynne; with an introduction and biographies by Nicola Gordon Bowe (Dublin: Irish Academic, 1988).

19 *CL InteLex*, 5068, to Lady Gregory, 18 January 1928.

## Acknowledgements and Editorial Information

Our chief debt of gratitude is to the Yeats Estate over many years for granting permission (through A. P. Watt Ltd., now part of United Agents Partnership, Ltd.) to use published and unpublished materials by W. B. Yeats. Stewardship of the Yeats Estate is now in the hands of Kat Aitken<EMAIL_ADDRESS>+44 (0)2032140931). Many of our contributors have been further indebted to the Yeats family and Estate for making unpublished materials available for study and for many other kindnesses, as is the Editor. Dr Declan Kiely now of the New York Public Library (NYPL), Dr Steve Ennis (Director), the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, Austin, and Mr Gearoid O Luing at the National Library of Ireland continue to provide us with research materials and research assistance. Dr Isaac Gewirtz and Lyndsi Barnes at the Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection (Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations) of the NYPL, as well as research librarians at the Stuart A Rose Rare Books Library, Emory University (particularly E. Kathleen Shoemaker and Elizabeth Shoemaker), and at the John J. Burns Library, Boston College (Christian Dupont, Katherine Fox and Andrew Isidoro) have all been generous and prompt in recovering specialist materials. Karen Johnson, Archivist, Christian Brothers Province Centre, Dublin, Mr Neville Figgis of House of Figgis Rare Books, Letterfrack; the Director, National Archives of Ireland, Dublin, the Digital Library at Villanova University; Private Collectors in London and in Ireland, Barry Houlihan, James Hardiman Library, NUI, Galway. Wikimedia Commons and Dr Colin Smythe of Colin Smythe Ltd., Gerrards Cross Bucks have all been similarly helpful.

A research-level journal is always hungry for new bibliographical detail and recently discovered copies of rare books and manuscripts, contacts among collectors. *Yeats Annual* is deeply indebted to various specialists in the London Rare Book trade, including Dr Peter Errington and Mr Charlie Minter at Sotheby's, New Bond St., Ed. Maggs, Ben Maggs and Joe McCann at Maggs Bros., 48 Bedford Square, Sammy Jay at Peter Harrington, Dover Street, and Jamie Fergusson of James Fergusson Books and Manuscripts, London.

Martin Enright, President of the Yeats Society, Sligo, also alerted us to the existence of rare archival materials. Dr Karen Attar in Special Collections at the Senate House Library, University of London has been unfailingly helpful, especially in respect of the Thomas Sturge Moore Collection. Riette Sturge Moore (who died in 1995) allowed us to use in the livery of the *Yeats Annuals* the rose symbol adapted from Thomas Sturge Moore's designs for the H. P. R. Finberg translation of *Axël* (1925).

Professors Roy Foster, FBA and John Kelly on behalf of Oxford University Press, are generous with permissions. Individuals, institutions private collectors and estates which gave permission for the reproductions of images are profoundly to be thanked for helping us to take advantage of the digital publishing. Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders, and while some images are by unknown photographers, the editor would be grateful to acknowledge any omissions in the next issue.

At Open Book Publishers, William St. Clair FBA, Dr Rupert Gatti and Dr Alessandra Tosi provided patient assistance and invaluable advice to facilitate our transfer to open access publishing. Members of the Advisory Board continue to read a large number of submissions and we are grateful to them, and also to Mr R. A. Gilbert and other specialist readers who offered valuable assistance. Deirdre Toomey as Research Editor of this journal continues to take up the challenges which routinely defeat contributors, finding innumerable ways to make good articles better by means of her restless curiosity and indefatigable reading. All associated with the volume (as well as its readers) continue to be grateful for her persistence with intractabilities. The editor's deepest personal thanks are extended also to the dedicatee of this volume.

Contributions for *Yeats Annual* No. 22 and later issues should reach me, preferably by email as soon as possible after publication of this volume at<EMAIL_ADDRESS>or at The Institute of English Studies, University of London, Senate House, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HU.

A style sheet, instructions for the submission of articles to the Editorial Board and consequent editorial procedures will be found at our website, https://www.ies.sas.ac.uk/publications/yeats-annual where it is also possible to find full information about, and to purchase, in-print numbers from the *Yeats Annual* backlist. The website is being further developed to complement the online and print availability of the current issues through the publisher at https://www.openbookpublishers.com/section/39/1.

Professor John Kelly of St. John's College, Oxford is General Editor of *The Collected Letters of W. B. Yeats*. Later years of the letters are now available in the InteLex electronic edition, which is now online at http://www.nlx.com/collections/130 but which presently includes only the first three fully annotated volumes as well as the 'B' text of all subsequent letters which have come to light. Priority in the publication of newly discovered letters remains, however, with the print-based volumes, the fifth of which is shortly to be published by the Clarendon Press.

Colin Smythe (PO Box 6, Gerrards Cross, Bucks, SL9 8XA, UK<EMAIL_ADDRESS>is completing his revision of the Wade-Alspach *Bibliography* for Colin Smythe Ltd., while an authorised edition of *Yeats's Occult Diaries, 1898–1901* is being prepared by Deirdre Toomey and myself. We continue to revise A. Norman Jeffares' *New Commentary on the Poems of W. B. Yeats.* All the above would be very grateful to hear of new letters, and to receive new information from readers.

We are grateful to receive offprints and review copies and other bibliographical information (acknowledged at the end of each volume).

> Warwick Gould, Institute of English Studies, London, 31 December 2017.

## ESSAYS

## How Yeats Learned to Scan1

## **Hannah Sullivan**

According to one familiar, much reiterated version of literary history, free verse was invented in pre-war London by Ezra Pound. It then quickly and decisively triumphed over poetry in traditional metres to become a new stylistic orthodoxy.2 In fact, English poets had been writing in versions of free verse for many centuries; by the end of the nineteenth century metrical discomfort and some degree of resistance to inherited iambic forms had become practically the norm. As Joseph Phelan puts it, in one of several recent revisionist accounts of late nineteenth-century metrical practice, the movement towards free verse was 'halting and interrupted' rather than teleologically

1 *Note—*Further information may have been gathered since this article was prepared for publication. If you would like to find out if any further information has been discovered that may help your own research, why not write to the author at<EMAIL_ADDRESS>Quite apart from anything else, feedback is always welcomed.

2 Charles O. Hartman's *Free Verse: An Essay on Prosody* (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980) gives an extended and thoughtful version of this story, which grows out of modernist polemic. Robert Bernard Hass describes free verse as the prosodic change accompanying modernism's other disjunctions of content and structure in '(Re)Reading Bergson: Frost, Pound, and the Legacy of Modern Poetry', *Journal of Modern Literature* 29. 1 (2005), 55–75 (67).

straightforward.3 But the old-fashioned story of stylistic 'rupture' is not entirely unfounded, because it was only in the twentieth century that the 'free verse' picked up its full range of polemical and ideological associations. Now 'free' became prescriptive rather than descriptive. Instead of referring to a phonologically arbitrary principle of lineation, 'free' began to denote a particular kind of poetry—flexible, organic, democratic, and hospitable to the rhythms of ordinary speech.4

It is hard to believe that Google's N-Gram viewer can be accurate in its determination that *no* book in English published in 1900 or 1901 contained the term 'free verse'. But the statistical story that it tells of the term's rapid upswing in popularity, and eventual cannibalization of the French 'vers libre', is remarkable. By 1910, the year nominated by T. S. Eliot as the 'point de repère' of modern poetry, the term was in modest use.5 Over the next decade, however, it exploded in popularity, occurring *forty times* more frequently in books published in 1920 than 1910.6 The French term 'vers libre' enjoyed a similarly meteoric explosion in popularity from 1910 until 1918, at which point it seems to decline in favour of the anglicised version. In fact,

by 1920, 'free verse' was a more commonly used phrase than 'iambic pentameter'.

Given that Yeats is the only major poet in whose career 1910 or 1914 could be seen as a midway point, we might expect the freeverse explosion to have affected him more than anyone else. By 1912, Tennyson, Swinburne and Hopkins were dead. Thomas Hardy was seventy-two. On the other hand, Eliot and Stevens were still some years away from publishing a book, and Pound only in the infancy of his career. So what if anything happened to Yeats's metrical practice in the twentieth century? Did he learn to scan differently, or even to stop scanning at all? Yeats certainly wasn't unaware of the practice or polemic of the free versifiers; during the teens he was a close friend, almost a collaborator, of Pound's. He was repeatedly exposed to Pound's tripartite goals for modern poetry: precisely observed images, musical free verse, and natural syntax, 'nothing that you couldn't, in some circumstance … actually say'.7 By 1937, when he crafted 'A General Introduction to My Work', he even proposed that naturalness of language had been his own contribution to modern English poetry:

Then, and in this English poetry has followed my lead, I tried to make the language of poetry coincide with that of passionate, normal speech. I wanted to write in whatever language comes most naturally when we soliloquise, as I do all day long, upon the events of our own lives or of any life where we can see ourselves for the moment. I sometimes compare myself with the mad old slum women I hear denouncing and remembering; 'how dare you', I heard one say of some imaginary suitor, 'and you without health or a home'. If I spoke my thoughts aloud they might be as angry and as wild. It was a long time before I had made a language to my liking; I began to make it when I discovered some twenty years ago that I must seek, not as Wordsworth thought words in common use, but a powerful and passionate syntax, and a complete coincidence between period and stanza. Because I need a passionate syntax for passionate subject-matter I compel myself to accept those traditional metres that have developed with the language. Ezra Pound, Turner, Lawrence, wrote admirable free verse, I could not. I would

7 Ezra Pound, letter to Harriet Monroe, Jan. 1915, in D. D. Paige ed., *Selected Letters of Ezra Pound: 1907–1941* (New York: New Directions, 1950), 49.

lose myself, become joyless like those mad old women. The translators of the Bible, Sir Thomas Browne, certain translators from the Greek when translators still bothered about rhythm, created a form midway between prose and verse that seems natural to impersonal meditation; but all that is personal soon rots; it must be packed in ice or salt. (*E&I* 521; cf., *CW5* 212–13)

In fact, the early Yeats used a great deal of blurry and imprecise language. A. Walton Litz has suggested that Pound's 1913 precepts for Imagism, which advise 'Don't use such an abstraction as "dim lands *of peace*". It dulls the image' were written in direct chastisement of Yeats, who had used the word 'dim' twenty-six times in *The Wanderings of Oisin.*8 The actual story of Yeats's engagement with free verse needs to be untangled from his clear-eyed and self-promoting retrospectives in the 1930s.9 As an endemic sufferer of what Warwick Gould has called 'textual restlessness', we should also ask whether he metrically updated his work in post-publication revision.10 One hypothesis might be that Yeats's poetry became metrically freer—if not entirely free—as his career progressed, and that he used revision to loosen up or make more natural phrasing that strict form had necessitated in his books from the 1890s and 1900s.

At stake in the question 'did Yeats use or disavow free verse?' is the more general question of his relationship to modernism. If it is true that 'Yeats never could absorb the rhythms of Pound's poetry, and his later poetry shows only a slight growth away from his customary iambic patterns', then he can't be easily folded into a modernism

8 He also cites Yeats's troubled, but self-critical, remark to Lady Gregory, 'Ezra … helps me to get back to the definite and concrete and away from modern abstractions. To talk over a poem with him is like getting you to put a sentence into dialect. All becomes clear and natural'. A. Walton Litz, 'Pound and Yeats: The Road to Stone Cottage', in George Bornstein ed., *Ezra Pound Among the Poets* (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 128–48 (138–39).

9 These include the 1937 'General Introduction', the 1936 *Oxford Book of Modern Verse*, and the poems themselves *in their final form*. Having published a *Collected Poems* in 1933, Yeats was, in 1937, anticipating an expansion of the edition 'in about two years time'. Richard J. Finneran, 'Preface', *The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats*, *Vol. 1: The Poems* (New York: Scribner, 1996), 2nd ed., xxiii.

10 Warwick Gould, 'Writing the Life of the Text: The Case of W. B. Yeats', *Miscelánea: A Journal of English and American Studies* 30 (2004), 9–34 (9).

whose main *technique* was *vers libre*. 11 But here we become involved in a vexing hermeneutic circle; it is hard to imagine defining modernism in poetry without talking about Yeats, and it is hard to talk about Yeats in any historical or intellectual context without referring to modernism. The process of clear metrical description ought to be easier, requiring only a weighing of the poems that Yeats wrote (perhaps in their various forms, as evidenced by the *Variorum*) against the criteria for free verse. In that case, how do we explain the relative lack of critical consensus on Yeats's use of metre? Many critics write as if he occupied some nebulous middle ground between traditional form and free verse, and remained in the same metrical limbo for his entire career. Martin Duffell's generally excellent history of English metre says not much more than that Yeats wrote in 'loose iambics';12 Laura O' Connor finds that Yeats 'does not wish to "break the pentameter", but to shake it up';13 but Peter Howarth tells us that Yeats 'disliked' Pound's free verse, and Donald Davie that he 'abjured free verse' in general.14 Thomas Parkinson suggests that Yeats counted the number of stresses in a line, but not the number of feet, and so never wrote traditional accentual-syllabic verse.15 Other critics seem to avoid making any general pronouncement on Yeats's use of metre. Helen Vendler doesn't use the word *at all* in *Our Secret Discipline*, although she does talk of a poem's 'outer form' as 'metrical and stanzaic shape'.16 In 1970, Marjorie Perloff began her book on Yeats and rhyme by regretting that the sound features of the lyric

11 Thomas Rees, 'Ezra Pound and the Modernization of W. B. Yeats', *Journal of Modern Literature* 4.3 (February 1975), 574–92 (580).

12 Martin J. Duffell, *A New History of English Metre* (London: Legenda, 2008), 189.

13 Laura O'Connor, *Haunted English: The Celtic Fringe, the British Empire, and De-Anglicanization* (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), 84.

14 Peter Howarth, *British Poetry in the Age of Modernism* (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 9. Donald Davie, *Articulate Energy: An Inquiry into the Syntax of English Poetry* (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1976), 125.

15 Thomas Parkinson, *W. B. Yeats: The Later Poetry* (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1966), 187–89. Despite the diachronic coverage of his work, Parkinson also tends to write as if Yeats worked in the same way for his whole career: see the description of his general practice of composition, 182–83.

16 Helen Vendler, *Our Secret Discipline: Yeats and Lyric Form* (Cambridge, MA: Harvard, 2007). The plural 'metres' is used, but both when quoting Yeats, not in analysis: 16, 145; 'free verse' once, 347.

poems remain largely unexplored'.17 Because Yeats's development runs counter to a meliorist history in which freedom always triumphs over form, it has sometimes been difficult for critics to see that there *is* a development.

Curiously, this development ran counter to the general trajectory of English versifying; Yeats's poems became more metrically constrained and traditional in the period when free verse flourished. This is true both when we compare revised to original versions, and when we compare the new poems from *The Tower*, say, or *Last Poems*  to the shiftier, more metrically uneasy early work. His very last poems inscribe themselves clearly within an English tradition of accentualsyllabic poetry, where both stresses and syllable numbers are counted. In 'Under Ben Bulben', promoting the 'well made' over the shapeless, the artisanally crafted over organic form, he employs the trochaic tetrameter catalectic of Renaissance song.

> Irish poets, learn your trade, Sing whatever is well made, Scorn the sort now growing up All out of shape from toe to top … (*VP* 639)18

This essay contends that this gradual process of self-chastisement into form was a conscious decision, motivated first by Yeats's sense of the interrelation of prosody and syntax and, second, by a growing ideological distaste for free verse, 'the American vice' (*CL InteLex*  6072).19

Yeats's early poems are formally heterogeneous, taken as a group, but there is also a degree of formal unease or shiftiness within individual poems. Rather than being free in Pound's sense, as an act

17 Marjorie Perloff, *Rhyme and Meaning in the Poetry of Yeats* (The Hague: Mouton, 1970), 13. 18 W. B. Yeats, 'Under Ben Bulben', in Peter Allt and Russell K. Alspach eds., *The*

*Variorum Edition of the Poems of W. B. Yeats* (New York: Macmillan, 1957), 639. Unless otherwise stated, future references to poems are to this edition.

19 Yeats uses the term to describe Adah Menken's writing in a letter to Olivia Shakespear, 24 July, 1934, in John Kelly, Eric Domville, Warwick Gould, and Ronald Schuchard eds., *The Collected Letters of W. B. Yeats: Electronic Edition, Unpublished Letters* (Charlottesville: InteLex, 2002).

of willful choice, they can seem merely or casually free by the strictest standards of English versification. At other times, the metrical grid is followed to the point of woodenness. The dedicatory verse to *Poems* (1895), *To Some I Have Talked with by the Fire*, begins rather metronomically, because of the almost complete coincidence of word boundary and metrical foot:20

> While I wrought out these fitful Danaan rhymes My heart would brim with dreams about the times When we bent down above the fading coals; And talked of the dark folk, who live in souls Of passionate men … (*VP* 136)

But within a few lines the poem has swung to the other end of the pendulum, from woodenly over-metrical to unmetrical. 'Talked' is still the governing verb:

> And of the embattled flaming multitude Who rise, wing above wing, flame above flame, And, like a storm, cry the Ineffable Name …

It is almost impossible to assimilate 'wing above wing' and 'flame above flame' to the stress pattern of the metre; by including both a third foot *and* a fifth foot trochee, Yeats has effectively broken his pentameter. The next line then contains an extrametrical syllable and another reversed foot. The same pattern, when a fixed metre is set up only to dissolve without obvious reason, happens in many of these early poems. It is even more noticeable when Yeats writes in the less capacious tetrameter. He is prone to filling out the lines with monosyllables, giving a harsh, jerky effect, and to inserting a caesura exactly halfway. But, a few lines later, he will break the pattern entirely.

> I must be gone: there is a grave Where daffodil and lily wave And I would please the hapless faun, Buried under the sleepy ground. (*VP* 67)

20 W. B. Yeats, *Poems* (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1895), vii.

According to the traditional rules of English prosody, which look for artful variation within a fixed pattern, particularly a varied use of pauses, this is not a very elegant use of iambic tetrameter.21

Pound's manifesto for Imagism was a manifesto for freedom in poetry, but it also plays great attention to the 'craft' that a poet must acquire before freedom is possible:

Let the neophyte know assonance and alliteration, rhyme immediate and delayed, simple and polyphonic, as a musician would expect to know harmony and counterpoint and all the minutiae of his craft. No time is too great to give to these matters or to any one of them, even if the artist seldom have need of them.22

In fact, across the arts, this narrative of craft before innovation, mastery before freedom, is sometimes used to counter the argument that abstract painting, modern music, or free verse are *art-less*, child's play. An exhibition of Picasso's drawings explains that he was, first, an 'old master manqué', a master of 'the conventions of classical representation'.23 Arnold Schoenberg was a famously strict teacher who insisted that musical education '*must* be based on an acquaintance with the works of the masters', and that the classical tradition should be mastered before beginning to write atonal verse.24 Pound, Eliot, and Joyce all wrote early poems that show much more rigid adherence to traditional versification than their mature works. Yeats is not really in this category. He did not learn how to scan as an unformed, even juvenile poet, and then slowly relax constraint to produce his greatest works: his development runs the opposite

way. Even at the end of his life, he called prosody (which he had earlier been prone to misspell as 'prosedy') the 'subject of which I am most ignorant' if the 'most certain of my instincts' (*CL InteLex*  7037).25 Earlier in his career he had been less confident in his own capacities to manipulate metre without a scholarly understanding of its exigencies, writing in on 10 January 1897 to Robert Bridges:

I too would much like to discuss with you questions of rhythm, for though I work very hard at my rhythm I have but little science on the matter and as a result probably offend often. Without a consistent science it is difficult to distinguish between license and freedom. (*CL InteLex* 23)

This anxiety was perhaps fuelled partly by J. B. Yeats's criticism of his son for writing in 'bad metres', a habit which he attributes in an 1884 letter to faulty and self-indulgent declamation: 'His bad metres arise very much from his composing in a loud voice manipulating of course the quantities to his taste'.26 Roy Foster claims that it was only in 1906 that Yeats felt his lyric capacities 'were now accomplished enough for his recent poetry to need no alteration'.27 And it is certainly true that he tended to revise *out* some of the gratuitously unmetrical lines in poems otherwise in fixed metres. For the 1895 *Poems*, for example, he got rid of the seven-syllable 'They were of no wordy mood', and the trochaic 'In the verse of Attic story' in 'The Song of the Happy Shepherd'.

The majority of Yeats's early work is not, however, in an entirely familiar traditional form; poems like 'The Lake Isle of Innisfree', 'The White Birds', or 'The Meditation of the Old Fisherman' employ long lines and ternary rhythms, playing with the bounds of the line in English. *The Wanderings of Oisin* is even more obviously experimental. Between the poem's first appearance in 1889 and its second appearance in 1895, Yeats also made it *more* metrically

25 Letter to Edith Shackleton Heald, 10 August 1937. For 'prosedy', see *CL InteLex*  2995, 2998.

26 In a letter to Edward Dowden, cited by Ronald Schuchard, *The Last Minstrels: Yeats and the Revival of the Bardic Arts* (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 1.

27 R. F. Foster, *The Apprentice Mage, 1865–1939* (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 336.

free, sometimes turning lines of 'well-formed' iambic tetrameter into halting and bizarrely unmetrical new versions. How can we account for this? The three books are in distinct, and not entirely traditional, metrical styles. One early and complementary review described these as being fitted to three different kinds of subject matter, and as respectively 'free octosyllabics', 'Keatsian decasyllabic couplets', and 'quatrains of long-lined dactylic and anapaestic verse'.28 But this is perhaps being over-precise—Matthew Campbell is more accurate when he describes the third part as 'an accentual verse which challenges the bounds of metre in English'.29 I would go further and say that this sprawling poem, stuffed full of discordant things, is also a good, if accidental, showcase of some of the metrical tendencies or limit point of Victorian versification; iambic accentual-syllabic verse, both tetrameter and pentameter, is on the verge of being washed away into the dolnik, the ballad, and accentual long lines, amplified by some of the alliteration typical of the Old English stress line. Taken as a whole, it indicates that Yeats began as a more experimental prosodist than he ended up.

*The Wanderings of Oisin* begins, in the 1895 text, with a thumping, monosyllabic tetrameter, 'You who are bent, and bald, and blind', before loosening itself up:

> With a heavy heart and a wandering mind, Have known three centuries, poets sing, Of dalliance with a demon thing. (*VP* 2)

Here, as throughout the poem, we see total line lengths of more than eight syllables, and extra skipping beats inserted between stresses. (It wouldn't have been impossible for Yeats to write 'With heavy heart and wandering mind'.) Yeats's free use of these extra beats is what leads Parkinson to conclude that he *never* employed accentualsyllabic verse: 'it seems to me unlikely, however, that he used a foot

28 John Todhunter, review of *The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems*, *The Academy*, January–June 1889.

29 Matthew Campbell, 'Poetry in the Four Nations', in Richard Cronin, Alison Chapman, and Antony W. Harrison eds., *A Companion to Victorian Poetry*  (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), 438–56 (447).

prosody in view of the fact that his manuscripts give *no* example of scanning by feet'.30 But it is not the case that all English poetry in traditional forms has a perfect binary oscillation between unstressed and stressed syllables. Nor, I think, is Parkinson's genetic claim robust: accentual-syllabic poetry is perfectly possible, as oral traditions show, without a lexical practice of marking out and scanning the feet. What is unusual about Yeats's practice in the poem is not the pattern of any individual line taken by itself, but the lack of formal consistency, the running together of line *types* that, historically, belonged to different genres.

Marina Tarlinskaja argued some decades ago that 'transitional forms' ('between syllabotonic and syllabic, between syllabic and accentual, or between accentual and free verse') exist in every literature, and that, in certain periods, even established forms may 'lean towards typologically adjacent meters'.31 In English, she finds that all verse forms contain at least some 'extra' syllables (traditionally we might called these 'anapaestic substitutions'), but the frequency with which these occur depends very strongly on the verse genre. Her statistical analysis accordingly describes verse forms as bands within a continuous space, rather than the discrete labels of prosody textbooks. In strict, classical English verse, she finds that fewer than 3% of intervals between stresses are occupied by two syllables. She then identifies two other, major kinds of English verse writing: 'loose' or transitional iambics, and a form that is more balanced between ternary and binary beats. Borrowing from Russian terminology she calls this last form the 'dolnik'. The dolnik is a poem that traditional metrical analysis described as anapaestic or in a 'ternary' metre; Yeats's escapist, flyaway fantasy 'The White Birds' would be an example. (Arguably it is a 3-ictic dolnik written out with two lines compressed into one.)

I would that we were, my beloved, white birds on the foam of the sea! We tire of the flame of the meteor, before it can fade and flee … (*VP* 121–22)

30 Thomas Parkinson, *W. B. Yeats: The Later Poetry*, 188–89.

31 Marina Tarlinskaja, 'Beyond "Loose Iamb": The Forms and Themes of the English "Dolnik"', *Poetics Today* 16. 3 (Autumn 1995), 493–522 (496).

This may seem an unnecessarily cumbersome additional term, but Derek Attridge has argued robustly that: 'a name that distinguishes this verse form more clearly from accentual-syllabic verse is desirable, in order to signal clearly its identity as a recognizable metrical genre in its own right and one that does not produce uncertainties about whether to divide up the line into iambic or trochaic feet'.32 Tarlinskaja's own analysis suggests that in 'loose' or transitional iambics, of the kind that Yeats is often alleged to have written, the percentage of disyllabic intervals is about 3–12% (her examples are primarily from nineteenth-century poets—Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Tennyson and Browning), but in the dolnik the percentage is much higher again, from, roughly, 20% to 80%. Between these bounds, however, she finds a 'frequency gap': besides a few 'older folk ballads' very few poems in English have more than 10% but fewer than 20% of their interictic intervals filled with two syllables. In other words, the apparent freedom enjoyed by poets writing loose iambics and poets writing in dolniks is something of an illusion; either they use about one disyllabic interval every two lines (loose iambics), as a relatively pointed variation from the norm, *or* they use multiple disyllabic intervals in every line, so that the ear never settles comfortably into an anticipation of two or three.

Curiously, the first part of *The Wanderings of Oisin* falls into this frequency gap and, in his process of revising the text in 1895, Yeats made its metrical aberrance stronger. The poem is too anapaestic (in the old terminology) to be 'still iambic', but not anapaestic enough to be definitely anything else.33 In the 1889 text, by my analysis, some 10% of the stress (interictic) intervals in its 506 lines are occupied by two syllables: this is about the same proportion as in Coleridge's 'Christabel'. But, in the slightly shorter 1895 first part (almost identical, apart from some name differences, to the next revise), over 14% of the intervals in 414 lines are disyllabic. So, by Tarlinskaja's taxonomy, this new version is neither strictly iambic, nor even on the

32 Derek Attridge, 'The Case for the English Dolnik; or, How Not to Introduce Prosody', *Poetics Today* 33.1 (2012), 1–26 (8).

33 On the frequency gap between 'still iambic' and 'something else', see Marina Tarlinskaja, 'Beyond "Loose Iamb"', 504–6.

outer reaches of 'loosely iambic', as the first version was, but falls into a 'gray zone instinctively avoided by literary authors' (505–6).

The fact that Yeats changed his versification in revision suggests that the turn away from an iambic pattern without embracing the deliberate dolnik of 'The White Birds' is a considered and deliberate aesthetic choice. But what kind of choice is it? One possibility is that the poem's unusual metrics have some thematic or generic resonance, and are, if unconsciously, a deliberate way of declaring kinship with the poem's diverse source materials. In a letter to the *Spectator* of 29 July 1889, Yeats said that the first few pages were 'developed' an interesting word, like a film script from a novel—from 'a most beautiful old poem written by one of the numerous half-forgotten Gaelic poets who lived in Ireland in the last century'. He added that 'in the quarrels between the saint and the blind warrior, I have used suggestions from various ballad dialogues between Oisin and Patrick, published by the Ossianic society'. (*CL1* 176–77; unnumbered in *CL Intelex*). In other words, given that he knew no Gaelic, he was reliant on a series of verse translations published in the 1850s. And these translations, precisely because they aimed at fidelity to the original Gaelic text (which was published on the facing page), tended to be, prosodically at least, quite unlike late-nineteenth-century English language poetry. Russell Alspach gives some examples of the rather literal, prosaic verse that the Ossianic Transactions contained.34 Returning to the original volume shows, in addition, that readers were presented with little introductory or paratextual material to explain the method of translation, or the relationship between the facing-page English and Gaelic texts. O'Daly's introduction is devoted mostly to explaining the complex genealogy of various Irish kings and militias, and some summary of the scribal manuscripts from which the text derives (xxxi); one paragraph at the end asks the English reader 'to excuse the style, consequent upon our being obliged to adhere as closely as the idioms of the English language would

34 Russell K. Alspach, 'Some Sources of Yeats's *The Wanderings of Oisin*', *PMLA* 58.3 (Sept. 1943), 849–66.

admit to our originals'.35 But, according to Alspach, an even more important source than these antique, original materials was Michael Comyn's much more recent poem, *The Land of Youth*, which was also published in the Ossianic Society's Transactions, in a translation by Bryan O'Looney.36 As Warwick Gould explains, this was also an extremely faithful translation, with hanging indents allowing the English quatrains to mirror the original Irish.37 It is perhaps the rigidity of this typesetting that makes the prosodic irregularity of the quatrains more startling, if we read O'Looney's text as an English poem. Individual lines tend to come as semantically complete units but they have no rhythmic integrity or principle of repetition. Might Yeats's own, strangely halting prosody be declaring some affinity with the haiku-like, proto-Imagist simplicity of its source? By source, of course, we mean the literal English translation (which sacrifices prosodic regularity for semantic accuracy) rather than the original, syllabic Irish verse form.38

> A royal crown was on her head; And a brown mantle of precious silk spangled with stars of red gold Covering her shoes down to the grass.39

In fact, in later editions like Alfred Graves's 1909 *The Irish Fairy Book*, O'Looney's translation was reset *as* prose, as if it has never been a genuine verse translation in the first place.40 In Yeats's own *Oisin* poem, the lingering presence of these prosaic materials may be entirely accidental, a mild stylistic overlay that resulted from

35 John O'Daly, 'Introduction', *Transactions of the Ossianic Society for the Year 1856*, Vol. 4 (Dublin, 1859), xxi–xxxii (xxxii).

36 And which he acknowledges only obliquely in the 1895 glossary to the poem. Russell K. Alspach, 'Some Sources of Yeats's *The Wanderings of Oisin*', 849–50.

37 Warwick Gould, 'Lips and Ships, Peers and Tears: *Lacrimae Rerum* and Tragic Joy', *YA18* (2013), 15–56 (32).

38 Muiris O Rochain claims that the form of the poem is 'in a form described as rannaíocht mhór', 64, which is a syllabic metre.

39 'The Land of Youth', ed. by Bryan O'Looney, *Transactions of the Ossianic Society for the Year 1856* (Dublin, 1859), 227–80 (237).

40 'The Lay of Oisin on the Land of Youth' is set as prose in Alfred Graves, *The Irish Fairy Book* (London: T. F. Unwin, 1909), 71–84.

his having to work with translations. But the consequence was the production of a poem that is, by the standards of the 1890s, metrically innovative and which, in a longer literary history, we might see as looking *forward* to some of the free verse experiments of the 1910s (also heavily influenced by translation).

The first book of *The Wanderings of Oisin* occupies a novel 'gray zone' in its use of disyllabic intervals, while retaining lines of conventional length, but in the second, and especially the third, books, Yeats's lines expand and, in doing so, become freer still. In the second part, a four-beat line turns into a five-beat line, which is sometimes a well-formed iambic pentameter but equally often a 'near miss', a line that comes close enough to pentameter that its unmetricality is painfully marked.

> Now, man of croziers, shadows called our names And then away, away, like whirling flames; And now fled by, mist-covered, without sound, The youth and lady and the deer and hound; 'Gaze no more on the phantoms', Niamh said, And kissed my eyes …. (*VP* 29)

Here we have three lines of relatively regular pentameter washing up in line four. 'The youth and lady and the deer and hound' only evokes the metre if the first and third 'and' are unstressed, but the second is stressed, a flouting of a self-instituted pattern that is bound to be awkward on the ear. Niamh's first words, 'Gaze no more on the phantoms', also present aural problems. In traditional English poetry, 'no more' is invariably stressed on the *second* of the two syllables, as shown by such diverse examples as the falling trochaics of *Cymbeline*, 'Fear no more the heat o'the sun'; Shelley's breathless lament in 'Adonais', 'He will awake no more, oh, never more!', and Tennyson's 'So sad, so strange, the days that are no more'. Here, we can only 'right' the verse to its iambic pattern by saying 'Gaze NO more on the phantoms' a strained and unnatural emphasis that the reading voice does not expect to make.

If we were unaware that these lines were the consequence of deliberate post-publication revision, we would be tempted to assume that Yeats had difficulty meeting the requirement of iambic pentameter. But knowledge of the extensive post-publication revision contributes to a sense that the metre is *deliberately* being forced to breaking point. Pound's precepts for free verse never suggest writing in a way that is deliberately unmetrical, but Yeats's disregard here for the normal constraints of iambic pentameter is so flagrant as to seem aggressively rebellious. What is gained in doing so, in changing a line like the regular 'In triumph with her arms around me' to the unmetrical 'With her triumphing arms around me'? The answer, I think, is that breaking the pentameter was the only solution Yeats found for making the syntax more natural. This is the first version.

> Now, man of crosiers, phantoms drew around Once more—the youth and lady, deer and hound; Half lost in vapour, shadows called our names, And then away, away like spiral flames. 'These forms?' 'Vex not with speech the phantoms dread'. And now sang Niam, swaying her bright head And her bright body … (*VP* 29)41

The earlier version is metrically more traditional by virtue of being, by the standards of the late nineteenth century, syntactically rather archaic; to fit the metre, in other words, Yeats is having to make use of inversions like 'vex not' (for 'do not vex') and 'phantoms dread' (for 'dread phantoms'). In the later version, the archaic 'sang Niam' is resolved into the more normal 'Niamh said', while appearing to retain the incorrect pronunciation of 'Niamh' that John Butler Yeats had queried. In his marginal comments on the first edition, he asked 'but is not Niam (Niambh) pronounced as Neev'? as one syllable? Not "Nee-am?"'42 Strangely, in the manuscript revise preceding the 1895 publication, Yeats changed 'Niam' to 'Neeve' and he printed 'Neave' in at least one 1895 edition.43

41 This text published by Yeats as *The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems* (London: Kegan Paul, 1889), 21.

42 Michael J. Sidnell, 'J. B. Yeats's Marginalia in *The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems*', *YA13* 265–91 (269).

43 See George Bornstein's transcription (page not reproduced in facsimile) in Bornstein ed., *The Early Poetry, Vol. 2,* '*The Wanderings of Oisin' and Other Early Poems to 1895: Manuscript Materials* (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), 141; W. B. Yeats, *Poems* (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1895), 27. Why this text

The second book is freer than the first, and the third is more metrically inventive again. Here are its first and third stanzas:

Fled foam underneath us, and round us, a wandering and milky smoke, High as the saddle-girth, covering away from our glances the tide; And those that fled, and that followed, from the foam-pale distance broke; The immortal desire of immortals we saw in their faces and sighed ….

Were we days long or hours long in riding, when rolled in a grisly peace, An isle lay level before us, with dripping [1889: dripping with] hazel and oak? And we stood on a sea's edge we saw not; for whiter than new-washed fleece Fled foam underneath us, and round us, a wandering and milky smoke. (*VP* 47)

One danger of writing long, end-stopped, lines in English is that stresses pile up at the right edge of the page, with the nuclear stress of each sentence or clause coinciding with the special metrical stress or pause that the 'passion of metre', in Wordsworth's phrase, inevitably demands.44 Yeats avoids this by heavy use of noun-compounds ('saddle-girth', 'foam-pale', 'new-washed') where stress is carried on the leftmost item, as well as by forms of syntactic inversion and displacement. The word-order rearrangement also produces clusters of alliterated consonants, both within and across lines. For example, the normal, unmarked order in English would be '[foam fled underneath us] [whiter than new-washed fleece]', with subject preceding verb, and the adjunct clause following the argument. But we have instead 'whiter than new-washed fleece/ Fled foam underneath us', with the most strongly stressed words in each phrase ('fleece' and 'fled', by the nuclear stress rule) placed abutting each other across the line break. The metrical effect is both very old, in evoking of some features of the Old English verse line, and very new for 1889 or, more precisely, it is novel by virtue of its instinct for renovation. Pound's 'The Seafarer' (1911) and Auden's 'The Wanderer' are later, more self-conscious experiments with some of the same techniques. For

is different from that listed in the Variorum as '9' (1895 British and American printing) is unclear to me.

44 William Wordsworth, letter to John Thelwall, 1804, quoted by Peter McDonald in *Sounds Intentions: The Workings of Rhyme in Nineteenth-Century Poetry* (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 78.

Robert Bridges, who was something of a metre-nerd, the long lines in this third part of *The Wanderings of Oisin* certainly seemed highly original. When he read the poem in the 1895 *Collected*, he picked out the line 'Fled foam underneath us, and round us, a wandering and milky smoke', as a beautiful and also ingenious rhythm. 'That', he said, 'is a new thing in English poetry—Yeats made it—it was not there before'.45 And we should take this judgment seriously: Bridges was a trained, analytical metrician, who had already published a book on Milton's metre, and whose letters to Gerard Manley Hopkins have a kind of trainspotter's fascination with prosodic irregularities and gems. Bridges in fact liked Yeats's line so much that he was still quoting it four years later, now as a kind of in-joke. Inviting Yeats to visit him, he explains the trains: 'There is a very first class train from Paddington to Pangbourne of an evening. It leaves Paddington at 6.10 and its wandering and milky smoke does not stop at Reading'.46

The very fact that Bridges was able to quote Yeats's phrase in a letter shows that it works in a natural prose sentence; there is nothing baroque or strained about it. Might this help to explain why Bridges was so favourable about Yeats's line while so condemnatory about his friend Hopkins's rhythmically very *similar* poem, 'The Wreck of the Deutschland'? In a poem written ten years before Yeats began *The Wanderings of Oisin*, but published almost thirty years after it, Hopkins had described a shipwreck like this:

One stirred from the rigging to save The wild woman-kind below, With a rope's end round the man, handy and brave— He was pitched to his death at a blow, For all his dreadnought breast and braids of thew: They could tell him for hours, dandled the to and fro Through the cobbled foam-fleece, what could he do With the burl of the fountains of air, buck and the flood of the wave?47

45 In John Henry Newbolt, *My World as in My Time: Memoirs of Sir Henry Newbolt* (London: Faber & Faber, 1932), 194.

46 Letter, June 8, 1901, in Donald E. Stafford ed., *The Selected Letters of Robert Bridges*, Vol. 1 (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1983), 382.

47 G. M. Hopkins, 'The Wreck of the Deutschland', in Robert Bridges ed., *Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins*, 2nd ed. (London: Humphrey Milford, 1930), 11–23 (16).

Both Yeats's and Hopkins' descriptions contain a metaphoric alignment between white foam on the sea and a sheep's fleece, and both are attempting to capture some of the erratic movement and noise of the sea. In doing so, they recruit a pattern of metrical arrangement that is decidedly different from the accentual-syllabic 'norm' of English poetry. Both poets are writing in long lines that unlike the lines in, say, 'The White Birds' are not resolvable into two shorter lines. Moreover, these lines contain an unusual mixture of interictic intervals: sometimes there is one syllable between stresses, sometimes two, sometimes three, and sometimes none. 'For all his dreadnought breast and braids of thew' is actually an iambic pentameter; so too, there is only one syllable between each stress in Yeats's 'for those that fled', 'new-washed fleece' and 'milky smoke'. In Yeats's lines there is a particularly high proportion of disyllabic stresses, 'were we days long or hours long in riding'. But we find this in Hopkins too: 'stirred from the rigging to save'. In some places three light syllables intervene between stresses: this, in fact, is what gives the unusual effect to 'wandering and milky smoke', and in Hopkins 'with a rope end round the man'. In some places stressed syllables jam up against stressed syllable with no relief: this produces one of Hopkins' signature tricks, a kind of eerie, even panicked, upswell of emotion, where one syllable cracks into the next. In the terrible sonnets, it tunes us in to despair's magnitude, its inevitability: 'pitched past pitch of grief '. Here it is effective mimetically to suggest the ferocity of the ship-wrecking storm: 'through the cobbled foamfleece' and then instead of a light syllable, an exclamatory 'WHAT could he do'?

Robert Bridges was probably the only person before 1918 who read both of these poems. He approved of Yeats's work as something entirely new but, as is well known, pronounced himself shocked by Hopkins' 'presumptuous jugglery', and added that he wouldn't for any money read the poem again.48 How do we make sense of this? Some of his objections must, of course, have been to the peculiarly

48 Letter 38, August 21, 1877, in C. C. Abbott ed., *The Letters of Gerard Manley Hopkins to Robert Bridges* (London: Oxford University Press, 1935), 46.

maudlin and erotic subject matter of Hopkins' poem, handled with a degree of fussiness in strophe structures. But why did he find Hopkins presumptuous, while approving Yeats's similar-sounding lines so fulsomely? One answer is that Yeats has a better sense of syntactic decorum. Yeats's lines contain some metrically reinforcing but uncolloquial inversions of word order (verb-subject instead of subject-verb, for example) but are otherwise fairly simple; Hopkins is pushing the limits of language in all places at the same time: the drowning sailor's chest, by a queer and slightly grim punning metaphor, is like a 'dreadnought'; and instead of saying that his knotted muscles look like braids, the epithet is transferred, 'braids of thew'. Where Yeats spells out the metaphor, and uses only easily legible noun compounds, 'whiter than new-washed fleece | Fled foam underneath us', Hopkins compresses everything, so that the adjective 'cobbled' modifies an already compact 'foam-fleece'. Joseph Feeney, in his 2013 study, says this is: 'An incongruous, brilliant, terse bisociation of cobblestones (hard, cold, and grey), foam (liquid and white), and lamb's wool (soft and warming)'.49 But metaphors work by mapping one semantic field on to another, not by linking three separate things. Here the problem is driven primarily by the ambiguity of 'foam-fleece' which, in the context, has to be read as 'fleece-like foam', with 'foam' working as the compound's head. But this is abnormal, because in English noun compounds the second word is usually the head (so a 'foamflower' is a kind of flower, but a 'flowerpot' is a kind of pot). According to some linguists, it is in fact *because* the second word is grammatically more important that it is less stressed.50 Here the logical conclusion is that 'cobbled' is a property of the foam (also seen as fleece-like), but the structure and stress-patterning of the phrase points to the possibility that 'cobbled' in fact modifies 'fleece' (after the pattern of 'cobbled riding-boots').

49 Joseph J. Feeney, *The Playfulness of Gerard Manley Hopkins* (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), 74.

50 The rule is usually stated the other way round, so Guglielmo Cinque argues 'stress prominence in a phrase is a mere reflection of the depth of embedding', 'A Null Theory of Phrase and Compound Stress', *Linguistic Inquiry* 24.2 (Spring 1993), 239–97 (245).

In the first case, the double metaphor leads to ambiguity; in the second, there is a degree of redundancy.

When Yeats edited the *Oxford Book of Modern Verse* in 1936, he strategically relegated Hopkins to the start, to his moment of composition and not publication: he described this as 'putting him among the Victorians' (*CL InteLex* 6289).51 And the introduction manages an anxiety of contagion, if not quite of influence, by insisting on an enormous gulf between Hopkins' generation and Yeats's own.

I read Gerard Hopkins with great difficulty, I cannot keep my attention fixed for more than a few minutes; I suspect a bias born when I began to think. He is typical of his generation where most opposed to mine. His meaning is like some faint sound that strains the ear, comes out of words, passes to and fro between them, goes back into words, his manner a last development of poetical diction. My generation began that search for hard positive subject matter, still a predominant purpose. (*OBMV* xxxix)

This, of course, is a bravura rewriting of literary history. When Yeats began to think and write, he sounded quite a lot like Hopkins, and his early poetry shares much of the slackness of both subject-matter and syllable count that he decries. It was Pound's generation, not Yeats's, who fetishized 'hard positive subject matter'. In fact, even Yeats's rhetorical method here seems somewhat derivative of earlier modernist attacks on 'messy' or blurry Victorian writing. He attacks Hopkins for being a poet of blurry surfaces, inadequately referential, untethered in things. This is the complaint that Whitman brings against Tennyson for his 'finest verbalism'.52 And, at more length, it is the substance of Eliot's argument with Swinburne's 'diffuseness', a poetry that is 'merely the hallucination of meaning', where sound, image, and idea are blurred together into one thing.53 We see the same kind of strategic distancing in a letter from three years earlier.

51 Hopkins' seven-page selection is sandwiched between Robert Bridges and William Ernest Henley (*OBMV* 17–23).

52 Walt Whitman, *November Boughs* (Philadelphia: David McKay, 1888), 65.

53 T. S. Eliot, 'Swinburne as Poet', *The Sacred Wood* (London: Methuen, 1920), 131– 36.

My generation revolted against 'poetical diction' & Hopkins was of the generation that elaborated it. He had it in one form Swinburne in another. His whole life was a form of 'poetic diction'. He brought his faint theatrical Catholicism to Ireland where it was mocked by the sons of peasants & perhaps died of the shock. (*CL InteLex* 5623)

What Yeats does here is to align the Victorian period with failures of both style and observation—an unnatural, 'poetic' diction slipping and sliding over its weakly observed visual content, in an ugly metre that suggests 'hurried conversation'—and his own poetry with the modernist revolution that overturned them. It is an ingenious and persuasive bit of rhetorical rewriting, despite its heavy reliance on supposition ('Hopkins would have disliked increase of realism').

*The Oxford Book of Modern Verse* gives us a modernizing Yeats, but it also gives us a modernism without free verse.  Imagism's semantic clarity and visual objectivity are separated from its prosodic solution, which Yeats had never liked. In 1914 Pound had claimed Yeats as a slightly prickly associate for the Imagists: 'Mr. Yeats is a symbolist, but he has written *des Images*  as have a good many poets before him; so that is nothing against him, and he has nothing against them, at least so far as I know except what he calls their "devil's metres"'.54 The year before, Yeats had been even more direct in a letter to Harriet Monroe, praising Pound's vigorous creativity 'although I do not really like with my whole soul the metrical experiments he had made for you' (*CL InteLex* 2284). The mild modifier 'really' does little to qualify Yeats's confident and instinctive preference for metrical over free verse; as Warwick Gould puts it, in these encounters with Pound, we see 'the underlying robustness of Yeats's own artistic self-assurance'.55 But it was to be another twenty years before he found the discursive rhetoric to propose his own brand of modern poetry, retaining the bits of Poundian modernism that he liked, while getting rid of the parts he

54 Ezra Pound, review of *Responsibilities*, *Poetry* 2.4 (May 1914), 64–69 (65).

55 Warwick Gould, 'The Unknown Masterpiece', in Andrew Gibson ed., *Pound in Multiple Perspectives* (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1993), 40–92 (45).

didn't. Once again, he does this by alignment and association—and some rhetorical subterfuge. If the problem with Hopkins is that his poetry in the end is evanescent and meaningless, the problem with free verse, the anthology argues, is that it is prose.

When the editor at Oxford University Press saw Yeats's provisional list of selections, he was 'perplexed' by the free verse poem intended to sit at the anthology's front, like a kind of advertisement: 'One entry perplexed me, and no-one here can help. "Pater: The Mona Lisa" *was* there such a poem?'56 Critics have tended to take Yeats's resetting of Pater into free verse at face value: Robert Rubin, for example, argues that 'in presenting the selection as rhythmic *vers libre*, Yeats defamiliarizes Pater's words and challenges readers to re-examine them'.57 And almost everyone who has written about Yeats's free verse poem agrees that it is, in fact, *in* free verse: a 'rearrangement'58 or 'recasting'59 or 'reformat[ting] of Pater's lush prose as a free verse poem'.60 In fact, Yeats's poem is not very like most free verse poems. It begins:

> She is older than the rocks among which she sits; Like the Vampire, She has been dead many times, And learned the secrets of the grave; And has been a diver in deep seas, And keeps their fallen day about her … (*OBMV* 1)

56 Charles Williams to W. B. Yeats, 11 October 1935, quoted in John Stallworthy, 'Yeats as Anthologist', in A. Norman Jeffares and K. G. W. Cross eds., *In Excited Reverie: A Centenary Tribute to William Butler Yeats, 1865–1939* (London: Macmillan, 1965), 171–92 (180–81). On Charles Williams work for Oxford University Press on this anthology, see below, 327-35.

57 Robert Alden Rubin, 'Some Heroic Discipline: William Butler Yeats and the *Oxford Book of Modern Verse*', unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2011, 65.

58 Daniel Albright's word in *Quantum Poetics: Yeats, Pound, Eliot, and the Science of Modernism* (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 64.

59 Roy Foster, *W. B. Yeats: A Life II, The Arch Poet, 1935–1939* (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 556.

60 Jerome McGann, *Black Riders: The Visible Language of Modernism* (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 81.

Some of its lines, such as 'And learned the secrets of the grave', and 'And tinged the eyelids and the hands', are perfectly wellformed lines of iambic tetrameter, and the relentless anaphora and grammatical parallelism are highly rhetorical. If Poundian free verse shrugs off all forms of decorative and ornamental 'poeticism', to become *more* economical and sparing even than prose, Pater's prose is aspiring to the condition of musical verse. Most tellingly of all, Yeats's line endings do little more than mark out the boundaries between intonational phrases or syntactic units. Rather than being used to create *additional* and unexpected breaks in sense or sound this form of counterpoint being free verse's most important semantic tool—the line breaks are more or less redundant, flaccid echoes of an underlying structure. But this, undoubtedly, is Yeats's polemical purpose. If free verse is something that can be effected after the fact, by a mechanical process of relineation, then it really *is* no more than the 'chopped-up prose' its common-sense detractors claim. And by rendering a famous bit of Victorian purple prose into Poundian free verse, Yeats counters two important tenets of modernism in poetry. The first is the historical claim that modernism begin in (and not before) 1910, after Pound had arrived in London; the idea, in Eliot's words, that 'the *point de repère* of modern poetry … is the group denominated "imagists" in London about 1910'.61 The second is the connection forged by Pound between plain style and 'direct focus on the thing' and a break with traditional metres. (That there is no necessary connection between these two principles is illustrated by Wordsworth's Preface to *Lyrical Ballads*, which calls for 'the language of prose' to be allied to metrical regularity.)62 Instead, Yeats takes a sardonic tone towards *both* Paterian aestheticism and free verse. His introduction describes aestheticism flippantly as the moment when poets 'said to one another over their black coffee—a recently

62 In the 1800 version of a heavily reworked passage, Wordsworth argues that 'not only the language of a large portion of every good poem, even of the most elevated character, must necessarily, except with reference to the metre, in no respect differ from that of good prose', in Stephen Gill ed., *William Wordsworth: 21st Century Oxford Authors* (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 63.

61 T. S. Eliot, 'American Literature and the American Language', 58.

imported fashion—"We must purify poetry of all that is not poetry"' (*OBMV* ix).  Rather than being an attempt to rescue Pater for modernism, then, I would suggest that this relineation was a clever attempt to make 'vers libre' seem an embarrassing French affectation, as dated and adolescent as absinthe and black coffee.

Yeats's 1936 introduction to the Oxford anthology, presenting a decidedly slanted and polemical vision of modern poetry as a whole, needs to be read alongside the 1937 'General Introduction to my Work', which performs the same summary job on the poet's *own*  work. The two prose essays are companion pieces. But where the anthology is playful or elliptical in its dismissal of free verse, the 'General Introduction' comes out straightforwardly in favour of traditional metres. In this famous passage, Yeats shows an acute awareness of what modern linguistics calls the syntax-prosody interface.

It was a long time before I had made a language to my liking; I began to make it when I discovered some twenty years ago that I must seek, not as Wordsworth thought, words in common use, but a powerful and passionate syntax, and a complete coincidence between period and stanza. Because I need a passionate syntax for passionate subject-matter I compel myself to accept those traditional metres that have developed with the language. Ezra Pound, Turner, Lawrence wrote admirable free verse, I could not. (*E&I*  521–22)