6 - Afterword: The Influence of Yeats

Summary

In the introduction to my Oxford World's Classics edition of his Major Works, I noted that Yeats was ‘still the subject of a vast and, indeed, growing academic industry’; and that he was held in the very highest regard by readers of poetry. Nothing has changed since I wrote these uncontroversial remarks. I also noted the strength of his influence on generations of poets, at least until the 1970s. That influence started early, and that early stage was the subject of a ground-breaking study by Richard Ellmann, Eminent Domain: Yeats Among Wilde, Joyce, Pound, Eliot and Auden (1967). Its title, however, reveals the way it eschews the potential vagueness of ‘influence’, the term ‘eminent domain’ referring to the right of governments to expropriate: ‘The best writers expropriate best, they disdain petty debts in favor of grand, authoritative larcenies.’ The preposition ‘among’ refers to the way in which the book focuses on interactions, rather than a one-sided model of influence descending from Yeats to the other writers. Steven Matthews, in his Yeats as Precursor (2000) extends the scope of enquiry from Yeats's lifetime to the late twentieth century. He notes that, since Yeats mediates between Romantic and modern styles and preoccupations, he has bequeathed a wide range of possibilities to his successors. Matthews, who looks at British, Irish and American poetry, is also sensitive to the different historical and cultural frameworks into which the work of Yeats was accepted. Interestingly, he is also alive to Yeats's influence on literary criticism and theory, both as practising critic and as one who thought about the problems of poetry within his poems. Edna Longley is at least as wide-ranging in her Yeats and Modern Poetry (2013). As one might expect from this critic, she is good on the influence of Yeats's poetry about war and conflict. She also manages to support the claim that his influence is to be found in some unexpected places, for instance in the best-known work of Philip Larkin. Perhaps the most refreshing aspect of this book is the way in which it registers the power of Yeats's model of composition for successor poets, particularly in his handling of stanzas and the way in which he makes them work with his exposition.