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Yeats as Precursor Readings in Irish, British and American Poetry Steven Matthews Yeats as Precursor Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18 - PalgraveConnect Tromso i - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket www.palgraveconnect.com material from Copyright 10.1057/9780230599482 - Yeats as Precursor, Steven Matthews Also by Steven Matthews IRISH POETRY: Politics, History, Negotiation LES MURRAY (forthcoming) REWRITING THE THIRTIES: Modernism and After (co-editor with Keith Williams) Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18 - PalgraveConnect Tromso i - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket www.palgraveconnect.com material from Copyright 10.1057/9780230599482 - Yeats as Precursor, Steven Matthews Yeats as Precursor Readings in Irish, British and American Poetry Steven Matthews Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18 - PalgraveConnect Tromso i - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket www.palgraveconnect.com material from Copyright 10.1057/9780230599482 - Yeats as Precursor, Steven Matthews First published in Great Britain 2000 by MACMILLAN PRESS LTD Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and London Companies and representatives throughout the world A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN 0–333–71147–5 First published in the United States of America 2000 by ST. MARTIN’S PRESS, INC., Scholarly and Reference Division, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 ISBN 0–312–22930–5 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Matthews, Steven, 1961– Yeats as precursor : readings in Irish, British, and American poetry / Steven Matthews. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0–312–22930–5 1. English poetry—Irish authors—History and criticism. 2. Yeats, W. B. (William Butler), 1865–1939—Influence. 3. American poetry—20th century— History and criticism. 4. English poetry—20th century—History and criticism. 5. Ireland—Intellectual life—20th century. 6. Influence (Literature, artistic, etc.) 7. American poetry—Irish influences. 8. English poetry—Irish influences. I. Title. PR8771.M38 1999 821'.8 21—dc21 99–043510 © Steven Matthews 2000 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1P 0LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18 - PalgraveConnect Tromso i - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket www.palgraveconnect.com material from Copyright This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. 109 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 09 08 07 06 05 04 03 02 01 00 Printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham, Wiltshire 10.1057/9780230599482 - Yeats as Precursor, Steven Matthews Contents Acknowledgements vi List of Abbreviations vii 1 Yeats: Influence, Tradition and the Problematics of Reading 1 2 `The Terror of his Vision': Yeats and Irish Poetry 40 Louis MacNeice, Austin Clarke, Patrick Kavanagh, Brian Coffey, Padraic Fallon, Thomas Kinsella, Seamus Heaney, Derek Mahon, Eavan Boland, Paul Muldoon 3 Inevitable Abstractions: Yeats and British Poetry 96 W.H. Auden, Donald Davie, Thom Gunn, Ted Hughes, Geoffrey Hill 4 Possession and Dispossession: Yeats and American Poetry 146 John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, John Berryman, Robert Lowell, James Merrill, Adrienne Rich, Sylvia Plath, Jorie Graham Notes 185 Select Bibliography 227 Index 236 Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18 - PalgraveConnect Tromso i - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket www.palgraveconnect.com material from Copyright v 10.1057/9780230599482 - Yeats as Precursor, Steven Matthews Acknowledgements My greatest debt is to Elleke Boehmer, for her constant wonderful support, her enlightening reading, and, most, for all the time she has given me. Time in which this book, and much else, could happen. I would also like to thank my mum, dad and sister; Vicki Bertram, Terence Cave, Ian Fairley, Hugh Haughton, Charmian Hearne, David Mehnert, Nigel Messenger, John Perkins, Ashley Taggart and John Whale. I have especially enjoyed, and benefited from, my conversations with John Campbell about various aspects of the argument. Completion of the book was made possible by an award made by the Humanities Research Board of the British Academy, under the Research Leave Scheme. I am grateful to the Academy for their support. The book is dedicated to the memory of Violet Tuckwell, and for Thomas. Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18 - PalgraveConnect Tromso i - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket www.palgraveconnect.com material from Copyright vi 10.1057/9780230599482 - Yeats as Precursor, Steven Matthews List of Abbreviations Books by Yeats A Autobiographies (London: Macmillan, 1980 Edition) AV A Vision (London: Macmillan, 1981 Edition) CP The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats A New Edition, edited by Richard J. Finneran (London: Macmillan, 1991, Second Edition) E Explorations, selected by Mrs. W.B. Yeats (London: Macmillan, 1962) E&I Essays and Introductions (London: Macmillan, 1989 Edition) M Mythologies (London: Macmillan, 1989 Edition) Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18 - PalgraveConnect Tromso i - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket www.palgraveconnect.com material from Copyright vii 10.1057/9780230599482 - Yeats as Precursor, Steven Matthews 1 Yeats: Influence, Tradition and the Problematics of Reading W.B. Yeats has proved to be one of the most influential writers of the twentieth century, even perhaps more so than his modernist heirs Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot. Conflicting perceptions of him as poetic revolu- tionary and as traditionalist, as belated mediator of romanticism and as promoter of emergent modernity, have offered a rich and divergent range of possibility for writers coming after him. His work shadows, and is mourned within, much major poetry written immediately after his death and subsequently. This book sets out to think through the implications of Yeats's posi- tion as originating presence within both twentieth-century poetry and also within the century's major movements of poetry criticism, from formalism and New Criticism to (more latterly) the textual deconstruc- tion of the Yale-based theorists Harold Bloom and Paul de Man in their negotiations with the work of Jacques Derrida. Ideas of formal integrity and completion; tropes of presence and absence; ideas of the text as the site of family quarrel; aporia and undecidability; poetry as the place of both haunting and mourning: each of these conceptions in both areas of writing has something to say about reading Yeats himself and about the nature of work written consciously or unconsciously in his shadow. These conceptions also trouble convenient literary-critical labellings of the twentieth century as essentially modernist, then post- modernist. The haunting echoes of Yeats in subsequent poetries locates modern reading ± both theoretically and practically ± within essentially Romantic indeterminacies and their aftermath, indeterminacies which - 2011-03-18 - PalgraveConnect Tromso i - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket www.palgraveconnect.com material from Copyright call into question the whole process of labelling and categorization itself.1 Yeats's own notion of influence as `magical' transference and vision- ary reanimation, implicated as it is with his ideas of cultural and 1 10.1057/9780230599482 - Yeats as Precursor, Steven Matthews 2 Yeats as Precursor national founding, and itself animated by his sense that personality and style are formed in the face of death ± all have had a radical impact upon ideas of poetic rhetoric, reading, and their relation to historical event across the century. His position `in-between'in relation to so many of the essential discourses and problematics within and surrounding poetry has led to a variety of responses which, in its turn, says much about the nature and function of poetry across this time, and across a breadth of cultural spaces. In this opening chapter, I will consider the bases of these qualities within Yeats's own work, and their relation to key ideas which will be considered in later chapters. I ± I asked if Blake had influenced him & he says no, he knew nothing of him, but that minds act on each other ± `If you shut yourself up in this room and think with sufficient vigour, you will impress your thought on others'± Lady Gregory's Diary record of an after-dinner conversation with W.B. Yeats on 5th March