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Spatial Form in the Poetry of Yeats: The Two Lissadell Poems

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Marjorie Perloff
Marjorie Perloff*
Affiliation:
Catholic University, Washington, D. C
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Extract

In 1949, A. Norman Jeffares declared that, although Yeats's poetry “had reblossomed in The Wild Swans at Coole [1919] and Michael Robartes and the Dancer [1921], the flowering came with The Tower” [1928]. In 1954, Richard Ellmann called The Tower and The Winding Stair “the two finest volumes” of the period 1917–33. Today, this estimate is the generally accepted one: B. Rajan has recently written, “With The Tower and The Winding Stair, Yeats's writing comes fully into its strength and words respond completely to the poem's call to order. To say that Yeats was incapable of writing a bad poem during this phase is an exaggeration, but one within the limits of critical licence.”

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 82 , Issue 5 , October 1967 , pp. 444 - 454
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1967

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References

Note 1 in page 444 Jeffares, W. B. Yeats: Man and Poet (New Haven, Conn., 1949), p. 214; Ellmann, The Identity of Yeats (New York, 1954), p. 146; Rajan, W. B. Yeats: A Critical Introduction (London, 1965), p. 124.

Note 2 in page 444 Letters on Poetry from W. B. Yeats to Dorothy Wellesley (London, 1964), p. 58. Hereafter cited as Letters to DW.

Note 3 in page 444 Henn, The Lonely Tower, 2nd ed. (London, 1965), p. 125; Stock, W. B. Yeats: His Poetry and Thought (Cambridge, Eng., 1964), p. 200; Parkinson, W. B. Yeats: The Later Poetry (Berkeley, Calif., 1964), pp. 58, 173; Martin, “The Later Poetry of W. B. Yeats,” in The Pelican Guide to English Literature, Vol. vii: The Modern Age, ed. Boris Ford (London, 1963), p. 173.

Note 4 in page 444 “The Later Yeats,” The Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, ed. T. S. Eliot (London, 1954), p. 379.

Note 5 in page 444 The Letters of W. B. Yeats, ed. Allen Wade (New York, 1955), p. 710.

Note 6 in page 444 Holloway, “Style and World in The Tower,” in An Honored Guest, ed. Dennis Donoghue and J. R. Mulryne (New York, 1966), pp. 88–105; and Ch. vi of Ellmann's The Identity of Yeats, esp. pp. 133–145.

Note 7 in page 445 Amplifying Ellmann's analysis, Holloway cites such typically Yeatsian deviations from “the idiom of ordinary discourse,” as the transformation of a normally transitive verb into an intransitive one in a line like “I summon to the winding ancient stair” (“A Dialogue of Self and Soul”), or the consistent use of “but” where normal English or Anglo-Irish idiom would demand “only” as in “And there's but common greenness after that” (“Meditations in Time of Civil War,” iv). See pp. 91–92.

Note 8 in page 445 By Sarah Youngblood in her essay “The Structure of Yeats's Long Poems,” Criticism, v (1963), 321–335. The author argues that in his long poems “Yeats fuses two modes, the discursive and the imagistic. … The discursive mode in poetry depends upon the structural principle of syntax, a deploying of thought in logical, rational structures of statement; the imagistic mode depends upon the structural principle of the image, which replaces logical syntax with what Hart Crane calls ‘the logic of metaphor‘” (p. 321). A long poem like “Meditations in Time of Civil War” combines, according to Miss Youngblood, the discursive and imagistic modes. Although my terminology is very much like that used in this essay, I think that Miss Youngblood slights the chronological development from discursive to imagistic in Yeats's poetry. Again, “imagistic” does not seem to me to be the best adjective for the second of the two modes because it carries connotations of Imagism and Yeats was surely not an Imagist. The terminology of Joseph Frank and Cleanth Brooks (see below) seems more satisfactory in this respect.

Note 9 in page 445 “Spatial Form in Modern Literature,” in The Widening Gyre (New York, 1963), p. 12. In The Vast Design: Patterns in W. B. Yeats's Aesthetic (Toronto, 1964), Edward Engelberg writes, “Yeats, whom Frank does not include in his group of modern spatial poets, had indeed a spatial imagination” (p. 70).

Note 10 in page 445 Modern Poetry and the Tradition, rev. ed. (New York, 1965), pp. xvi–xvii.

Note 11 in page 446 Essays and Introductions (New York, 1961), p. 509.

Note 12 in page 446 Strictly speaking, “On a Political Prisoner” deals with the older sister, Constance, only.

Note 13 in page 446 It should be noted that “On a Political Prisoner” is divided into stanzas rhyming abacbc, while “Eva Gore-Booth” has a rhetorical division into two parts but no stanzaic division, the whole poem rhyming abba.

Note 14 in page 446 Cited by D. J. Gordon in W. B. Yeats: Images of a Poet, Catalogue of the Yeats exhibition held in Manchester in May 1961 (Manchester, Eng., 1961), p. 40. My account of Lissadell and the Gore-Booths is a summary of Gordon's description, pp. 40–43. Images of a Poet contains three photographs of the Gore-Booth sisters: see pls. 11, 12, and 13.

Note 15 in page 446 Cited by Jeffares, W. B. Yeats: Man and Poet, p. 100.

Note 16 in page 447 This and subsequent citations of Yeats's poems are from The Variorum Edition of the Poems of W. B. Yeats, ed. Peter Allt and Russell K. Alspach (New York, 1957).

Note 17 in page 447 Meyer Abrams, in A Glossary of Literary Terms (New York, 1957), writes, “It should be noted that a metaphor, like a simile, has two items or subjects: the 'principal subject,' to which the metaphoric word is applied … and the 'secondary subject,' or the standard literal meaning of the metaphoric word itself.” When a word is, on the other hand, a symbol, “it lacks the paired subject. … Blake's rose is a rose—yet it is also something more … the described object has a further range of significance which makes it a symbol” (pp. 36–37, 95–96).

Note 18 in page 448 Cf. l. 17 (“While that great Queen, that rose out of the spray”) of “A Prayer for my Daughter,” which was written the year before “On a Political Prisoner.”

Note 19 in page 448 See “A General Introduction for my Work,” Essays and Introductions, p. 522.

Note 20 in page 449 See Richard Ellmann, Identity of Yeats, pp. 140–141.

Note 21 in page 449 The basic argument is whether the poem should be read as an independent text, in which case its language suggests that the “rough beast” is bringing a new dispensation of nightmare and terror, or whether it should be read in the light of A Vision, in which case one may argue, as Helen Vendler does in Yeats's Vision and the Later Plays (Cambridge, Mass., 1963), that “Yeats approves intellectually, if not emotionally of the Second Coming. … The Beast is a world-restorer” (p. 99). For a good recent summary, see Donald Davie, “Michael Robartes and the Dancer,” in An Honored Guest, pp. 76–79.

Note 22 in page 450 See Between the Lines: Yeats's Poetry in the Making (Oxford, 1963), p. 168. All references to earlier drafts of the poem are to Stallworthy's book.

Note 23 in page 451 Cf. “No Second Troy”: Why should I blame her that she filled my days With misery, or that she would of late Have taught to ignorant men most violent ways, Or hurled the little streets upon the great, Had they but courage equal to desire?

Note 24 in page 452 A Reader's Guide to William Buller Yeats (New York, 1959), p. 203.

Note 25 in page 453 See Donald Davie, Articulate Energy (London, 1955), pp. 148–149.

Note 26 in page 453 The phrase is Peter Ure's in W. B. Yeats (New York: Evergreen Pilot Series, 1963), p. 67.