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1 Yeats: Influence, Tradition and the Problematics of Reading Notes 1 Yeats: Influence, Tradition and the Problematics of Reading 1 In `The Epistemology of Metaphor', de Man argues that `Rhetoric . is not in itself a historical but an epistemological discipline. This may well account for the fact that patterns of historical periodization are at the same time so productive as heuristic devices yet so demonstrably aberrant.'( Aesthetic Ideol- ogy, edited with an introduction by Andrzei Warminski (Minneapolis: Uni- versity of Minnesota Press, 1996), p. 50. 2 Lady Gregory's Diaries 1892±1902, edited by James Pethica (Gerrard's Cross: Colin Smythe, 1996), p. 214. Pethica makes the same link to `Magic'I make below, but does not follow through the implications of Yeats's words for notions of literary influence. 3 Uncollected Prose by W.B. Yeats, Collected and Edited by John P. Frayne and Colton Johnson, Volume II (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1975), p. 56. In an earlier lecture, on `Nationality and Literature'of 1893, Yeats had seemed to imply that his Irishness might open his work to a body of epic tradition which would save him from the `subtlety and obscurity'of the modern English lyric, where it was only possible to `judge of ideas and feelings apart from action'. In a move which heralds much of his later thinking and sense of cultural unease, however, he argues in the end here for a different type of poetry which lies somewhere between the ancient and the modern, the native and the cosmopolitan, i.e. the dramatic (Uncollected Prose by W.B. Yeats, Collected and Edited by John P. Frayne, Volume I (London: Macmillan, 1970), pp. 267±75). 4 Yeats had discussed the religious potential of the arts once institutionalized religion had failed in his 1897 essay `William Blake and the Imagination'and in his 1898 `The Autumn of the Body': `The arts are, I believe, about to take upon their shoulders the burdens that have fallen from the shoulders of the priests, and to lead us back upon our journey by filling our thoughts with the essences of things, and not with things.'( E&I, p. 193). `Magic', too, recog- nizes the greater ability of `barbaric people'to receive influences from other minds (ibid., p. 41). 5 In his MeÂmoires for Paul de Man, Jacques Derrida argues that it is such ana- chronism which underlies all use of memory, or `traces of a past that has never been present': `Resurrection, which is always the formal element of `truth', a recurrent difference between a present and its presence, does not resuscitate a past which had been present; it engages the future.'(New York: Columbia University Press, 1986, p. 58). Such recognition makes us ironically or allegorically aware of our (lack of) presence in the present. 6 In the `Anima Hominis'part of Per Amica Silentia Lunae of 1917, Yeats takes a stronger view than this, suggesting that even the `modification'which an individual might make in tradition is an inevitable one: `It is not permitted to 185 186 Notes a man who takes up pen or chisel, to seek originality, for passion is his only business, and he cannot but mould or sing after a new fashion because no disaster is like another.'( M, p. 339). 7 Paul de Man has argued that such dilemmas are central to all post-Hegelian visions of art, which is necessarily `of the past'in that it `materially inscribes, and thus ever forgets, its ideal content'while at the same time, `since the synthesis of memory is the only activity of the intellect to occur as sensory manifestation of an idea, memory is a truth of which the aesthetic is the defensive, ideological, and censored translation'. As a result of this, in terms which might describe what I have been saying here about Yeats's relation to the past, `Memory effects remembrance (or recollection) just as the I effaces itself.'(`Sign and Symbol in Hegel's Aesthetics', Critical Inquiry Volume 8, No. 4, Summer 1982, pp. 773±4. The essay was subsequently collected in Aesthetic Ideology, pp. 91±104.) Yeats's misreading of Hegel as arguing that `the two ends of the see-saw are one another's negation' in contrast to the Blakean knowledge that `a negation is not a contrary'only serves to emphasize the importance to him of sustaining a continuity within and between seemingly opposed ideas (AV, pp. 72±3). 8 `Tradition and the Individual Talent', Selected Prose of T.S. Eliot edited with an Introduction by Frank Kermode (London: Faber 1975), p. 38. 9 Ruin the Sacred Truths: Poetry and Belief from the Bible to the Present (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989), pp. 7±8. In Kabbalah and Criticism, Bloom has described the Freudian notion of tradition as `repressed material in the mind of the individual'as proving that tradition has no referential aspect, `like the Romantic imagination or like God'(New York: The Seabury Press, 1975, p. 97). Bloom's more recent attention to `facticity' and those transferences, often without a conscious origin, which occur through a history of reading, returns to a preoccupation he had at the beginning of his discussions of literary influence. In The Anxiety of Influence: a Theory of Poetry of 16 years earlier, Bloom had established literary meaning as only operative through literary history. `The meaning of a poem can only be a poem', he claimed, and not, as the New Critics had argued, `itself': `And not a poem chosen with total arbitrariness, but any central poem by an indubitable precursor, even if the ephebe never read that poem . We are dealing with primal words, but antithetical meanings, and an ephebe's best misinterpretation may well be of poems he has never read'(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973, p. 70). Earlier in the book, though, Bloom had argued that the initial swerve away in the belated poem from the precursor text `must be considered as though it were simultaneously intentional and involuntary. '(pp. 44±5). Peter de Bolla has argued that around such central assertions, Bloom slightly confuses his own case (as he does here) by using terms such as `ephebe, precursor, anxiety and influence', all of which imply that literary history is `a psychic drama between individuals and not a textual production which results from the interaction of poet, precursor, poem and the act of misreading.'( Harold Bloom: Towards Historical Rhetorics, London: Routledge, 1988, p. 22). While it is true, however, that Bloom has frequently asserted that, as he puts it in A Map of Misreading, `Influence, as I conceive it, means that there are no texts, but only relationships between texts'(New York: Notes 187 Oxford University Press, 1975, p. 3), Bloom's own practice has consistently defined the relationships between ephebe and `indubitable precursors': Wordsworth and Milton or Whitman and Emerson, for example. This sug- gests that the critical acts of interpretation, misreading and misprision which Bloom argues make up literary history do (pace de Bolla, p. 35), have `origins as such': in Yeats, for example, Bloom claims that `It is perhaps inevitable that Yeats, the conscious heir of the Romantics, compels us to a new kind of critical study of Romantic influence.'(New York: Oxford University Press, 1970, p. 7). This kind of `origination'will feature strongly in my own selec- tion of poets to be discussed within the shadow of Yeatsian influence. 10 A Map of Misreading, pp. 3, 77; cp. Kabbalah and Criticism's `How does one accommodate a fresh and vital new religious impulse . when one inherits a religious tradition already so rich and coherent that it allows very little room for fresh revelations or even speculations?'(p. 33). Bloom'snotion of belated- ness here is close to that developed by Walter Jackson Bate in his The Burden of the Past and the English Poet, a belatedness or `burden'which Bate agrees has `become far more pressing in the modern world'( Influx: Essays on Literary Influence, edited by Ronald Primeau, New York: Kennikat Press, 1977), p. 100). 11 Op. cit., p. 4. 12 Graham Allen has argued that `Bloom's refusal to historicize the history of transumptive allusion leads him into an interpretative impasse. Not only do his various theories appear to predetermine the entropic history of language and meaning . without an ability to historicize such a process . Bloom is forced back upon a certain literalization of his terms.'( Harold Bloom: A Poetics of Conflict, Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf 1994, p. 116). Bloom is himself dismissive of movements in criticism towards social history and `neo- Marxism', telling Imre Salusinszky that `the experience of literature is the experience of isolate and solipsizing glory'( Criticism in Society, London: Methuen, 1987, p. 65). 13 In Part Two of his book, de Bolla seems to be partly responding to the dilemmas caused by Bloom's repeated use of slightly confusing key terms by making stronger a Bloomian definition of the diachronic movement of history as both productive of and responsive to rhetorical tropes: `For the tropes that determine [for example] Coleridge's verse are not uniquely the pure product of Coleridge's `genius'; they are also culturally, politically, and ideologically determined . they are, to some extent, productive of history itself.'(p. 125). 14 Marjorie Howes provides an illuminating discussion of this dilemma in her Yeats's Nations: Gender, Class, and Irishness (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), especially Chapters 1±3. 15 Uncollected Prose, Volume I, p. 162. 16 `Ulysses, Order and Myth', Selected Prose of T.S. Eliot, p. 177. 17 The Collected Letters of W.B. Yeats, Volume I, 1865±1895, edited by John Kelly and Eric Domville (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), p.
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