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YEATS AND ENGLISH RENAISSANCE LITERATURE lward Gordon Craig, mask of the Fool in The Hour-Glass; woodcut, from The Mask, April1911. Yeats and English Renaissance Literature Wayne K. Chapman Palgrave Macmillan ISBN 978-1-349-21404-4 ISBN 978-1-349-21402-0 ( eBook) DOl 10.1007/978-1-349-21402-0 ©Wayne K. Chapman 1991 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1991 978-0-333-52177-9 All rights reserved. For information, write: Scholarly and Reference Division, St. Martin's Press, Inc., 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 First published in the United States of America in 1991 ISBN 978-0-312-06017-6 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Chapman, Wayne K. Yeats and English Renaissance literature I Wayne K. Chapman p. ern. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-312-06017-6 1. Yeats, W. B. (William Butler), 1865-1939-Knowledge­ Literature. 2. English literature-Early modern, 1500-1700- History and criticism-Theory, etc. 3. Influence (Literary, artistic, etc.) I. Title. PR5908.LSC4 1991 821'.8-dc20 90-22923 CIP To Marilyn, Charis, and Willy Contents Preface xi Acknowledgements xv List of Abbreviations xvii 1 Tradition, 'Imitation', and the Synthesis of Content and Form 1 2 Proto-Modem Poet, 1885--1910: Summoning the Renaissance Spirit with Arnold, Pater, and John Butler Yeats 31 3 Yeats and Spenser: Form, Philosophy, and Pictorialism, 1881-1902 68 4 Yeats and the School of Jonson: Books, Masques, Epigrams, and Elegies, 1902-19 102 5 Yeats, Donne, and the Metaphysicals: Polemics and Lyrics, 1896--1929 142 6 Conclusion: The Rapprochement with Milton and Spenser, 1918--39 185 Notes 219 Select Bibliography 269 Index 274 vii List of Plates Frontispiece Edward Gordon Craig, mask of the Fool in The Hour­ Glass. Woodcut, from The Mask, April1911 la W. T. Horton, Rosa Mystica, in A Book of Images, intro. W. B. Yeats (London: Unicorn, 1898) p. 57. Courtesy of the National Library of Ireland lb W. T. Horton, Be Strong (A Book of Images, p. 61). Courtesy of the National Library of Ireland 2a W. T. Horton, Sancta Dei Genitrix (A Book of Images, p. 51). Courtesy of the National Library of Ireland 2b Jessie M. King, 'And, thinking of those braunches greene to frame', in Poems of Spenser, intro. and sel. W. B. Yeats (Edinburgh: Jack, 1906) facing p. 30. Courtesy of the National Library of Ireland and Thomas Nelson and Sons Ltd, London 3a Jessie M. King, 'AJJd in the midst thereof a pillar placed' (Poems of Spenser, facing p. 126). Courtesy of the National Library of Ireland and Thomas Nelson and Sons Ltd, London 3b Jessie M. King, 'And therein sate a Lady fresh and fayre' (Poems of Spenser, facing p. 186). Courtesy of the National Library of Ireland and Thomas Nelson and Sons Ltd, London 4. Claude Lorrain, Landscape: The Marriage of Isaac and Rebekah (or The Mill). Courtesy of the National Gallery, London 5 Engraving by John Pye (1828) after J. M. W. Turner's painting The Temple of Jupiter Panellenius Restored. Courtesy of Mr Evelyn Joll, Thomas Agnew and Sons Ltd, London 6 Cabbalistic Tree of Life (simplified) 7 Althea Gyles, front cover of The Secret Rose (London: Lawrence and Bullen, 1897). Courtesy of Miss Anne B. Yeats 8a Edward Gordon Craig, Scene for The Hour-Glass, in Plays for an Irish Theatre (London: Bullen, 1911). Courtesy of the Leonard and Virginia Woolf Library, Washington State Uni­ versity 8b Layout from Yeats's sketch of the scene depicted in plate 8a 9 Samuel Palmer's engraving The Lonely Tower, in Shorter Poems of John Milton (London: Seeley, 1889) facing p. 30, with Palmer's inscription and commentary from p. 30. Photograph courtesy of the British Library, London viii List of Plates ix 10 Verso inscription by Yeats on Thoor Ballylee photograph (plate 11) 11 Thoor Ballylee, from a photograph used as the basis for T. Sturge Moore's cover design for The Tower, 1928. Courtesy of the University of London Library and the Yeats Estate 12 W. B. Yeats, two versions of the House of Alma, marginalia from The Works of Edmund Spenser, ed. J. Payne Collier (London: Bell and Daldy, 1862) 11, 255. Courtesy of Miss Anne B. Yeats and the Yeats Estate Preface This book is largely a study of adaptation and development in the craft of poetry. It considers other genres, especially drama and criticism; but it is at heart a book about poetry viewed from various perspectives in order to understand lines and instances of conscious influence. It is therefore a 'study of influence'- though a singularly inductive one, based on rough and polished materials cast and recast into art. It is also a book about W. B. Yeats's response to English Renaissance literature. The primary aim and the secondary disseveration of literature into a manageable focus imply no special claim for the latter in spite of moments when the impression might seem otherwise. Selected both for convenience and to tum old dust from an interesting bit of entablature beneath the Yeats imago ficta, the English Renaissance offers salience and stability to the critic who would approach the problem of influence from the side of the process of composition. The approach is rigorous and, in its way, Platonic: the figure of Yeats emerges from an assembly of viewpoints arranged in the six chapters of the work, assuming contour and colour as projections of his response to numerous 'old masters' and usually more recent mediators. My assumption is that influence can be measured as a function of adaptation (or imitation as it was understood in the Renaissance) and mediation, which now dominates our impression of the way all types of literary influence operate, owing to the popularity of the anxiety theories, 'misprision' and 'eminent domain'. Certainly, Yeats advised younger writers to imitate his distant peers - Milton, Donne, Jonson and others - because he thought their distance assured that the exercise would be therapeutic. Consonant with Yeats's view, the manuscript exhibits in this study are selective, applying only to those instances in which adaptation issues from the example of some Renaissance craftsman. To the exclusion of others, perhaps, the necessity of selecting may exaggerate the relative strength of an influence, yet the fault may be tolerated in the animation of one's subject. In all cases, reconstruction from unpublished work by Yeats is technically diplomatic and meticulous. The methodology is an innovation, a development in response to the eclectic bent of Yeats himself. I acknowledge, too, the filial xi xii Preface relationship between my work and certain precursors. Of course, these include Richard EHmann (emphatically) and Harold Bloom­ but most especially those genetic scholars of 'the Yeats industry', beginning with Curtis Bradford, Jon Stallworthy, and Thomas Parkinson, followed by David Clark, Michael Sidnell, Phillip Marcus, Richard Finneran and others now at work on the Cornell Yeats edition of the manuscripts. While most of the edition is yet in planning, one is fortunate in having the manuscripts themselves to turn to, most of which are available in the large collections cited in the Acknowledgements. Such resources have allowed several remarkable books on Yeats's poetry in the making and have become essential to scholarship which intends not to be undermined by its subject. Bradford's Yeats at Work, Stallworthy's Between the Lines and Vision and Revision, Parkinson's W. B. Yeats: Self-Critic and the Later Poetry, and Clark's Yeats at Songs and Choruses are convenient examples. Moreover, Parkinson's work, which is interested mainly in Yeats's sense of poetics as revealed in the printed variants of the early poems and in the manuscripts of the post-1917 period, provides a model for the kind of observation pursuant to this study. He suggests how the transitory 'vestiges of creation' are even yet witnessed in the manuscripts, which survive in abundance. No one suggests, however, that Yeats's sense of poetics and his poetic practice might be studied with respect to the issue of influence or adaptation. Certainly, no one before has proposed to do so by means of a selection of manuscript materials which testify to his interest in English Renaissance literature and to its impact on his stylistic development. This remains the most challenging objective of this project. Probably in the attempt to be accurate, I have sacrificed the virtue of simplicity. Interwoven by association and perpetuated by mental habits which alter over time, lines of influence converge in individual works, cluster at various stages of Yeats's career, and run their course in the canon. The English Renaissance exerted a powerful influence on him, yet its authors were often interpreted in relation to the great Romantics (and vice versa). I see no reason to overlook the poets of one age or promote those of another when they converge in the same texts. The 'adaptive complex' and the 'dyad' within it are two of several terms introduced in this study as inductive generalizations - that is, as attempts to describe what one finds in glimpsing Yeats's mind at moments of creation and to understand his complicated, Anglo­ Irish intellectual response to the English Renaissance. Preface xiii The strategy is a deliberate one. I establish on Yeats's terms this study's approach to influence by documenting 'imitation' before I examine his view of the Renaissance in light of several elder 'mediators', principally Arnold, Pater, and J. B. Yeats. After a brief demonstration of Milton's unsuspected presence in one of Yeats's first published poems, the study focuses on the juvenilia and on the progress Yeats made in his early adaptations of Spenser.

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