Poet in a Tower

Itis part ofthe largeness of Yeats’s thought that critics of quite different calibre and outlook can quarry there without competition or contradiction. His poems had a scaffolding: more than any other poet of our time he constructed and gave a semi-religious assent to a complex and definite philosophy – but never, I think, without reserve, without some indication that all philosophies are provisional in the face of the mysteries of life and death. Thus the critic who turns his attention to the philosophy as an ‘explanation’ of the poetry will run aground. I suspect that Mr Henn and Mr Rajan have both run this risk. Mr Henn, an Irish scholar, is much drawn to the scholar and the Irishman in Yeats (certainly no modern poet made more use of what he found in books and no patriot loved Ireland more strongly and bitterly than he) – and he writes accordingly:

Yeats’s poetry reflects at every turn his esoteric studies, his gatherings of folklore, his occultism; the background of his Sligo boyhood; the patronage and protection of Lady Gregory; his concern with Indian philosophy and myth; his readings of Plotinus, Henry Moore, Cudworth, Swedenborg; the mosaics which he saw in Sicily and at Ravenna; his studies of Blake and Calvert; his obsession, at a certain stage, with Greek and Roman sculpture; his readings of Castiglione, Boehme and Spengler; his many friendships, and that passionate hatred through which, as I believe, he grew . . . All that he saw and read and thought must one day be examined . . .

Mr Henn, not lacking a real appreciation of the poems, has produced a lively compendium of the heterogeneous material to which Yeats turned for intellectual stimulation. His examination of Yeats’s view of myth and magic is particularly penetrating. One is grateful also for the access he gives to previously unpublished work. Mr Rajan, on the other hand, finds Yeats’s heterodox philosophy congenial because it can be in some measure equated with the intuitions of Hindu mysticism – unity behind the appearance of duality; reincarnation; and a cyclic pattern of events in history. I find Mr Rajan’s book less illuminating, perhaps because it relies more closely on philosophical argument and less on illustration.

1966 (391)