Preface Chapter 1 Yeats, Hardy, and Poetic Exchange
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Notes Preface 1. See Declan Kiberd, Inventing Ireland, Seamus Deane, Celtic Revivals and Strange Country, Edna Longley, Poetry in the Wars and The Living Stream, and Peter McDonald, Mistaken Identities. Shane Murphy’s survey in Graph of the last decade’s writing on Irish identity suggests that Kiberd, Deane, and Longley have not exhausted the subject. 2. Julia Kristeva, Étrangers à nous-même (Paris: Fayard, 1988), 26–7. Passage trans- lated by, and cited in, Cronin, 5. Chapter 1 Yeats, Hardy, and Poetic Exchange 1. Timothy Webb, ‘Yeats and the English,’ in The Internationalism of Irish Literature and Drama, ed. Joseph McMinn (Savage, MD: Barnes & Noble, 1992), 232–51, 249–50. See also The Letters of W. B. Yeats, ed. Allan Wade (New York: Mac- millan (now Palgrave), 1961) 542, 544, 550, 872. Hereafter, this book will be cited as YL with page numbers, whereas the Collected Letters of W. B. Yeats will be cited as YCL with page numbers. 2. In appealing for the Committee’s interference on behalf of Moore, Yeats wrote to Edmund Gosse: ‘Thomas Hardy has I hear offered help.’ The status of Hardy the novelist as a martyr to public prudery would have made him a particularly important ally in such disputes. See YCL, 556 and Bridge, 16–17. 3. Paul Turner in The Life of Thomas Hardy (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998) calls atten- tion to this echo (164). 4. Yeats’s first volume with Dun Emer sets itself apart as antique artifact by appearing in a Celtic typeface, later eschewed by Cuala Press for a more Euro- pean typeface. 5. In ‘the only book review Hardy ever wrote,’ according to R. L. Purdy, Hardy praised William Barnes’s dialect poetry, quoted from two poems, and cited these lines as ‘an almost perfect expression of the Arcadian lover’s ecstasy’: ‘O whistle, gäy birds, up bezide her,/In drong-way, an’ woodlands.’ Hardy later employed this review from the New Quarterly Magazine as preface to an edition of Barnes’s poem, which he also selected. The Poetry of William Barnes (Edinburgh: Tragara Press, 1979), 11. 6. I will return to the topic of museums in Chapter 3 for a discussion of ‘Musée des Beaux Arts.’ 7. From the seventeenth century, Celtic enthusiasts such as John Aubrey and John Toland falsely attributed every standing stone to the Druids. See MacKillop, 135, and L. E. Jones, 134. 8. To a more superficial culture of story, song, and folktale, Hardy may have been more indigenous than Yeats was to his Sligo and Galway sources, but that Dorset society was fading faster than its Irish counterpart, and Hardy 209 210 Notes was increasingly separated from the class that harbored these stories by his ascension to the upper middle class. 9. Quoted by Stallworthy (227) who, when he writes of Owen’s passionate indignation toward ‘the children’s poet who exhorted them to “play the Game”’, extends the group to Newbolt, the author of this phrase. 10. For example, in ‘Dead Man’s Dump,’ Isaac Rosenberg writes, ‘The quivering bellied mules, / And the rushing wheels all mixed / With his tortured upturned sight,’ and in ‘Mental Cases,’ Owen writes, ‘There still their eyeballs shrink torments / Back into their brains . .’ 11. See especially Seamus Deane, Celtic Revivals, Declan Kiberd, Inventing Ire- land, and David Lloyd, Anomalous States. 12. According to James W. McAuley, ‘Cuchulain has now been re-claimed by the “Red Hand” Loyalist paramilitaries who have cast him as defender of Ulster.’ See ‘Cuchullain and an RPG-7: the ideology and politics of the Ulster Defence Association,’ in Eamon Hughes (ed.), Culture and Politics in Northern Ireland 1960–1990 (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1991), 45–68, cited in Geraldine Higgins, ‘The quotable Yeats: modified in the guts of the living,’ South Carolina Review, Sept./Oct. 1999, 1–9. Chapter 2 The Cultural Value of Poetry 1. Williams, Culture & Society: 1780–1950. New York: Columbia University Press, 1958, 1983; Chris Baldick, The Social Mission of English Criticism: 1848–1932. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983, 1987. More recent comprehensive studies of culture, such as Terry Eagleton’s or Lloyd and Thomas’s, pay little or no attention to poetry’s special role within culture. 2. His position as inspector of schools undoubtedly led Arnold to associate culture and schools more closely than he might have if he were observing culture from, say, the directorship of a national theatre or gallery or of a major publishing firm. 3. In Culture and Anarchy, Arnold defines culture as the best that has been thought and said. 4. The OED reminds us that culture, a cognate of cult, meant worship, presum- ably from a cyclical sense of the rounds of responsibility which the practice of worship shares with other seasonal or cyclical responsibilities. 5. In continuing to describe ‘the little shrivelled, meagre, hopping, though loud and troublesome insects of the hour,’ Burke aligns the English Jacobins with the hapless Tithonus, who cannot rise effectively to the recurrent dawns of revolution. Whereas the much greater number of non-revolutionary citizens are ‘great cattle,’ somewhat mysterious in their silence, they are neverthe- less, in Burke’s analogy, cast as cows, subclassed synecdochically by their stomachs, ruminating, one presumes, over the cud of memory. 6. Perhaps Arnold’s most interesting horticultural image appears in ‘Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse’ in which the speaker visits the Alpine monas- tery where Carthusian monks, recluses from the world’s conflicts, nurture herbs for the making of liqueur: ‘The garden, overgrown yet mild, / See, fra- grant herbs are flowering there! / Strong children of the Alpine wild’ (lines 55–7). Encumbered with world-weariness, the speaker begs, ‘Take me, Notes 211 cowl’d forms, and fence me round’ (93), presumably like the other subjects of the herbalists’ culture. The horticultural metaphor persists but, apparently, just below the level of authorial consciousness: whereas the ending – ‘We are like children rear’d in shade / Beneath some old-world abbey wall’ – maintains consistency with earlier references to these herbal children, appeals from men of the world to ‘follow too!’ (192) and the response that our ‘bent was taken long ago. // Long since we pace this shadow’d nave,’ interchange the herbs and the monks in such a confusing way that I can only suppose that culture and horticulture hung side by side in the dark closet of Arnold’s mind from which they were donned by feeling in the dark. 7. The Burkean poetic phrases are from ‘Prayer for My Daughter’ and ‘The Tower.’ 8. Thomas Weiskel succinctly summarizes the effect of Enlightenment secu- larism on the creation of the Sublime: ‘The emotions traditionally religious were displaced from the Deity and became associated first with the immensity of space and secondarily with the natural phenomena (oceans, mountains) which seemed to approach that immensity’ (14). 9. John Baillie remarked (1747) that ‘it is the Reflections arising from Sensations only which makes her [the Soul] acquainted with Herself’; quoted by Samuel Monk in Weiskel (14). 10. Alasdair MacIntyre, perhaps because he stresses Burke’s English allegiances, cannot specify what this ‘other than and more than’ become. 11. Yeats does not comment on the visionary source of this historical tree, that after the wholesale felling of oaks in the eighteenth century for British ship- building and smelting, images in the mind’s eye of great oaks, like aislings, may have arisen from the peasant’s deprivation. 12. In characterizing national types in terms of gender, Arnold invokes the ancient Greek distinction between the masculine principle that gives form to matter and the feminine material or mater that needs to be formed and governed. 13. Arnold’s contemporary at Oxford, Strangford, became a viscount in 1857. Although, according to the Cambridge Biographical Dictionary he ‘wrote little more than a few brilliant Saturday, Pall Mall and Quarterly articles’ before posthumous publications edited by his widow, The Times obituary of 12 January 1869 recorded that ‘Lord Strangford was probably the best philolo- gist and most varied linguist this country has ever produced’ and that he was ‘completely at home’ in all of the languages and dialects of the East, obviously an exaggeration which may arise from the same class deference that seems to move Arnold (Magnusson, White). 14. In the poem ‘Rugby Chapel,’ Matthew represents his father as both Moses and the Holy Ghost who will revisit and inspire ‘the host of mankind’ on their exodus: ‘Years they have been in the wild!’ 15. Arnold does not specifically equate Hellenism and Celticism. However, Arnold argues that ‘the children of Taliesin and Ossian have now an oppor- tunity for renewing the famous feat of the Greeks, and conquering their conquerors’ (390). Even allowing for a convention of gracious rhetoric, we can still recognize the suggestion that Celticism will become ascendant enough at least to lighten Saxon stolidity, a role later assigned to Hellenism. 212 Notes 16. See Guinn Batten’s ‘Where All the Ladders Start: Identity, Ideology, and the Ghosts of the Romantic Subject in Yeats and Muldoon,’ Romantic Generations: Essays in Honor of Robert F. Gleckner. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2001. 17. More complexly, this passage may also reflect Wilde’s troping in ‘The Por- trait of Mr. W. H.’ of Arnold’s terms ‘Hebraisim’ and ‘Hellenism’ which Wilde interprets, respectively, as ‘fear of the Lord’ and ‘Love’ as love is developed in Plato’s ‘Symposium.’ The ‘strange influence over men’ of this dialogue, Wilde writes, derives from its suggestion of ‘sex in soul’ and of the relation of ‘intellectual enthusiasm and . physical passion’ (183–4). Although Buck, most ostensibly, would draw on the fluent bumpers of Greek hedon- ism, his homophobia and frequent mixing of erotic references with talk of friendship suggest that his interest in ‘Hellenism’ extends beyond the Hippocrene and the blushful hippocras.