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. The later chapters on Jonson and Donne dwell mainly on the developments of Yeats's middle period, during which he read an impressive number of works by English Renaissance writers. The books his daughter inherited from him and the endorsements he made in his lifetime about the vitality of those authors document his reading. The study concludes by examining Yeats's relatively late rapprochment with Milton and Spenser-a development which began, by coincidence, during the modem Irish rebellion and civil war. Manuscripts can disclose unknown influences; they may also divulge unsuspected sources by which a known influence (say, 'Milton's Platonist' in 'The Phases of the Moon') came to stimulate the imagination of the poet. Perhaps the only thing I regret is that I could not do more with the Renaissance occult writers who helped Yeats with some extravagantly philosophical works. Being an extensive subject in its own right and outside the book's focus, the matter is largely excluded.
Finally, I own that the study has prospered due to the assistance of persons to whom I am very grateful. My thanks to the scholars who extended to me valuable advice and information: Professors Parkinson, Finneran, Clark and Stallworthy (all cited above), George Bomstein, Ronald Schuchard, Roy Foster, Christina Hunt Mahony, James Lovic Allen, Robert Spoo, John Kelly, Elizabeth Loizeaux, Deirdre Toomey and Evelyn Joll. Above all, thanks to my friends at Washington State University, Stanton Linden, Diane Gillespie, John Ehrstine and Virginia Hyde (indefatigable mentor). Thanks to the librarians: Catherine Fahy, Leila Luedeking, Sidney Huttner, Cathy Henderson, Lola Szladits and Linda Matthews. Special thanks to Robert Grindell for the favour of an address (Kansas State University) during several months of revision; and to the English Department, Graduate School and Graduate Studies xiv Preface
Committee of Washington State University for funding my travels and research. I am much obliged to Michael Yeats for his thoughts on several occasions and to Anne Yeats for her hospitality and aid in assaying select particulars of theW. B. Yeats library in Ireland. I thank Richard Fallis and Warwick Gould for their service as incisive readers, and Warwick, especially, for the introduction of countless improvements and for making possible one of the larger cuts. To Sarah Roberts-West, Margaret Cannon and the staff of the Macmillan Press I owe thanks for efficiency and care with the manuscript, illustrative materials and advice on permissions. And to my wife, Marilyn Manson, thanks for abetting me during the difficult labour of the production when there was reason for distraction in the delivery of her own first book. Our children will remember, I hope, mainly the buoyancy of these times.
London w. K. c. Acknowledgements
Formal acknowledgement is made to the following:
A. P. Watt Ltd, on behalf of Anne Yeats and Michael B. Yeats, for permission to quote unpublished materials by W. B. Yeats, and on behalf of Michael Yeats and Macmillan London Ltd, for permission to quote from the printed works; also, in the United States, the Macmillan Publishing Company for sanction to reprint passages from The Autobiography (copyright 1916, 1936 by Macmillan Publish• ing Company, renewed 1944, 1964 by Bertha Georgie Yeats), A Vision (copyright 1937 by W. B. Yeats, renewed 1965 by Bertha Georgie Yeats and Anne Butler Yeats), Essays and Introductions (copyright 1961 by Mrs W. B. Yeats), Explorations (copyright 1962 by Mrs W. B. Yeats), Mythologies (copyright 1959 by Mrs W. B. Yeats), Letters ofW. B. Yeats (ed. Allan Wade, copyright 1953, 1954, and renewed 1982 by Anne Butler Yeats), and The Variorum Edition of the Poems ofW. B. Yeats (ed. Peter Alit and Russell K. Alspach, from 1916 copyright, renewed 1944 by Bertha Georgie Yeats); also Oxford University Press for permission to quote from letters destined for or published in The Collected Letters of W. B. Yeats (copyright 1985); and John P. Frayne (ed.), for permission to quote from The Uncollected Prose of W. B. Yeats, vol. n (copyright 1975). For permission to use manuscript materials: Council of Trustees of the National Library of Ireland; the Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection, New York Public Library (Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations); the Richard Ellmann Collection, Department of Special Collections, McFarlin Library, University of Tulsa; the Department of Manuscripts, British Library; theW. B. Yeats Collec• tion, Special Collections, Woodruff Library, Emory University; the Ezra Pound Literary Property Trust; and the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas, Austin. For permission to reproduce pictures and other materials as illustrations: A. P. Watt Ltd, on behalf of Anne Yeats; the University of London Library; the National Gallery, London; Mr Evelyn Joll; Thomas Nelson and Sons Ltd; the National Library of Ireland; and the Leonard and Virginia Woolf Library, Washington State University.
XV xvi Acknowledgements
The University of Michigan Press, Warwick Gould and Macmillan London Ltd for permission to reprint my own work and - in permitting quotation from additional texts - the following: Oxford University Press for Ben Jonson (ed. C. H. Herford, Percy and Evelyn Simpson, copyright 1954), Poems of John Donne (ed. Herbert J. C. Grierson, copyright 1912) and Poets and Poetry by John Bailey (copyright 1911); the Macmillan Publishing Company for John Milton: Complete Poems and Major Prose (ed. Merritt Hughes, copy• right 1957); the University of Michigan Press for The Complete Works of Matthew Arnold, vol. v (ed. R. H. Super, copyright 1965); Yale University Press for Complete Prose Works of John Milton, vol. II (ed. Ernest Sirluck, copyright 1953); the University of Missouri Press for Yeats's Interactions with Tradition by Patrick Keane (copyright 1987); J. M. Dent and Sons Ltd for The Faerie Queene (ed. J. W. Hales, copyright 1910 and 1974); and the University of California Press for The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry- The 1893 Text by Walter Pater (ed. Donald L. Hill, copyright 1980). Every effort has been made to trace all the copyright-holders but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publishers will be pleased to make the necessary arrangement at the first opportunity. List of Abbreviations
PRIMARY SOURCES AND BIBLIOGRAPHIC WORKS
Au Autobiographies (London: Macmillan, 1955). AVA A Critical Edition ofYeats's 'A Vision' (1925), ed. George M. Harper and Walter K. Hood (London: Macmillan, 1978). AVB A Vision (New York: Macmillan, 1961; London: Macmil• lan, 1962). CL1 The Collected Letters ofW. B. Yeats, vol. 1: 1865-1892, ed. John Kelly and Eric Domville (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985). E&I Essays and Introductions (London and New York: Macmil• lan, 1961). Ex Explorations (London: Macmillan, 1962; New York: Mac• millan, 1963). GH The Green Helmet and Other Poems (Dundrum: Cuala Press, 1910). L The Letters of W. B. Yeats, ed. Allan Wade (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1954; New York: Macmillan, 1955). LDW Letters on Poetry from W. B. Yeats to Dorothy Wellesley, intro. Kathleen Raine (London and New York: Oxford University Press, 1964). LJBY J. B. Yeats: Letters to his Son W. B. Yeats, ed. Joseph Hone (New York: Dutton, 1946). LNI Letters to the New Island, ed. Horace Reynolds (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1934). L1WBY Letters toW. B. Yeats, ed. Richard J. Finneran, George Mills Harper, and William M. Murphy (London: Mac• millan, 1977; New York: Columbia University Press, 1977). Mem Memoirs, ed. Denis Donoghue (London: Macmillan, 1972; New York: Macmillan, 1973). Myth Mythologies (London and New York: Macmillan, 1959). NLI National Library of Ireland (followed by manuscript number). OBMV The Oxford Book of Modern Verse, 1892-1935, chosen by W. B. Yeats (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1936).
xvii xviii List of Abbreviations
P(1895) Poems (London: Unwin, 1895). PNE The Poems: A New Edition, ed. Richard J. Finneran (New York: Macmillan, 1983; London: Macmillan, 1984). RPP Responsibilities: Poems and a Play (Dundrum: Cuala Press, 1914). ss The Senate Speeches ofW. B. Yeats, ed. Donald R. Pearce (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1960). TB Theatre Business. The Correspondence of the First Abbey Theatre Directors: William Butler Yeats, Lady Gregory and J. M. Synge, ed. Ann Saddlemyer (University Park and London: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1982). UPl Uncollected Prose by W. B. Yeats, vol. 1, ed. John P. Frayne (London: Macmillan; New York: Columbia University Press, 1970). UP2 Uncollected Prose by W. B. Yeats, vol. n, ed. John P. Frayne and Colton Johnson (London: Macmillan, 1975; New York; Columbia University Press, 1976). Visions (Lady) I. A. Gregory, Visions and Beliefs in the West of Ireland, with two essays and notes by W. B. Yeats (1920; Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1979). VP The Variorum Edition of the Poems ofW. B. Yeats, ed. Peter Allt and Russell K. Alspach (New York and London: Macinillan, 1957). VPl The Variorum Edition of the Plays of W. B. Yeats, ed. Russell K. Alspach (London and New York: Macmillan, 1966). VSR The Secret Rose: Stories by W. B. Yeats: A Variorum Edition, ed. Phillip L. Marcus, Warwick Gould, and Michael J. Sidnell (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981). WR The Wind Among the Reeds (London: Elkin Mathews, 1899). Wade Allan Wade, A Bibliography of the Writings ofW. B. Yeats, 3rd edn, rev. Russell K. Alspach (London: Rupert Hart• Davis, 1968). YL Edward O'Shea, A Descriptive Catalog of W. B. Yeats's Library (New York and London: Garland, 1985). References by catalogue number: YL1920 Edward O'Shea, 'The 1920s Catalogue of W. B. Yeats's Library', Y A 4 (1985) 279-90. YL Notes Wayne K. Chapman, 'A Descriptive Catalog of W. B. List of Abbreviations xix
Yeats's Library: Notes Supplementary', YA 6 (1987) 234- 45. References by YL catalogue number. YT Yeats and the Theatre, ed. Robert O'Driscoll and Lorna Reynolds (Toronto and London: Macmillan, 1975).
FREQUENTLY CITED SECONDARY SOURCES
ED Richard Ellmann, Eminent Domain: Yeats among Wilde, Joyce, Pound, Eliot and Auden (New York: Oxford Univer• sity Press, 1967). HonGuest Denis Donoghue and J. R. Mulryne (eds), An Honoured Guest: New Essays on W. B. Yeats (London: Edward Arnold, 1965). Identity Richard EHmann, The Identity ofYeats (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964). LT T. R. Henn, The Lonely Tower: Studies in the Poetry of Yeats (New York and London: Methuen, 1979). Making George Harper, The Making of Yeats's 'A Vision': A Study AV of the Automatic Script, 2 vols (London: Macmillan; Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois Univer• sity Press, 1987). NCom A. Norman Jeffares, A New Commentary on the Collected Poems ofW. B. Yeats (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford Univer• sity Press, 1984). RI Frank Kermode, The Romantic Image (New York: Macmil• lan, 1957). SMD Ronald Bushrui (ed.), 'Sunshine and the Moon's Delight': A Centenary Tribute to John Millington Synge, 1871-1909 (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1972). WBY Joseph Hone, W. B. Yeats, 1865-1939 (New York: St Martin's Press, 1943). Y&GI Donald T. Torchiana, W. B. Yeats and Georgian Ireland, Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1966). Y&Shel George Bornstein, Yeats and Shelley (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1970). YA Yeats Annual (followed by number and date). YAACTS Yeats: An Annual of Critical and Textual Studies (followed by number and date). YCP&B Daniel A. Harris, Yeats: Coole Park and Bally lee (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974). xx List of Abbreviations
YM&M Richard Ellmann, Yeats: The Man and the Masks (New York: Dutton, 1948). YM&P A. Norman Jeffares, Yeats: Man and Poet (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962). YS&I A. Norman Jeffares (ed.), Yeats, Sligo and Ireland, Irish Literary Studies 6 (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1980). YSC&LP Thomas Parkinson, W. B. Yeats: Self-Critic (A Study of his Early Verse) and The Later Poetry, 2 vols in one (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971. YShak Rupin Desai, Yeats's Shakespeare (Evanston: Northwest• ern University Press, 1971). YW Curtis Bradford, Yeats at Work (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1965).