Peter Vassallo

W.B. Yeats, and the Cultural Appropriation of Renaissance Italy

This paper will focus on the impact of Italy and ‘learned Italian things’ on Yeats’s poetry after his visit to Italy in 1907 in the company of Lady Gregory, his friend and patron. The medieval cities of Tuscany made him aware of the power of ducal patronage in the Renaissance which mutatis mutandis could be appropriated as a model for his dream of an Irish renaissance and the transformation of Dublin into a city of culture patronized by generous aristocrats. It will also focus on Yeats’s obsessive concern with aristocratic ceremony and the virtues of nonchalance (sprezzatura), extolled in Castiglione’s The Book of the Courtier (‘the grammar school of courtesies’), and which he celebrates in some of his finest poems. Such refined grace and elegance which characterized the early Renaissance could, in his view, be harnessed to the cause of liberating his fellow Irishmen from the snare of philistinism and cultural indifference. Images of the Renaissance continued to haunt him in his later poetry mainly because they were related to the poet’s achievement of ‘artistic perfection’.

This paper will focus on Yeats’s Italian journey in 1907 in the company of Lady Gregory, and the impact of this encounter with Renaissance Italy on his ‘political’ poetry and the poet’s realization that Italy’s cultural apogee had been achieved with sustained ducal patronage. His Italian journey made him realize that, on a smaller scale, an Irish cultural renaissance could be achieved by a revival of ancient and myth in conjunction with the patronage of the Anglo-Irish elite, epitomized by Lady Augusta Gregory. Lady Augusta Gregory, as Yeats’s biographers have pointed out, exerted a profound influence on Yeats’s poetic development.1 Her friendship with Yeats and her generous patronage (he was a frequent guest at her manor house , Co. ) encouraged Yeats to explore the resources of Celtic folklore and to be involved in the setting up of an Irish national theatre, for she was determined to show that Ireland was not ‘the home of buffoonery and easy sentiment’ but the ‘home of an ancient idealism’.2 She was a natural folklorist, and Yeats accompanied her occasionally when she went to collect stories in Galway and Clare. He later came to regard her as a  1 See A. Norman Jeffares, W.B. Yeats: A New Biography (London: Hutchinson, 1988) and Roy Foster, W.B. Yeats, A Life: I The Apprentice Mage (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). 2 Lady Gregory: Selected Writings, eds L. McDiarmid and M. Waters (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1995), p. xvi. 220 Vassallo member of his family and in his 1909 diary ‘Estrangement’ famously paid tribute to her as ‘mother, friend, sister, and brother’. For the poet she was a muse figure, who represented the virtues of the Anglo-Irish aristocracy, which, in his view, were essential to the formation of a modern Irish consciousness. Aristocrats like Lady Augusta Gregory, he was convinced, had a role to play in the creation of an Irish cultural revival based on patronage. Yeats’s reading of Edmund Gardner’s study of the Dukes and Poets of Ferrara (1904), which Herbert Grierson had recommended, inspired him to visit Italy with Lady Gregory who at the time was making arrangements to travel to Venice, a city she visited every year. His Italian visit in 1907 in the company of Lady Gregory (and her son Robert) was something of a revelation. They made their way over the Apennines to Urbino and then down to Ravenna, Ferrara and later Venice. For Yeats this Italian tour was a welcome break from the stifling turbulence of Irish religious and political bigotry, which had manifested itself in the Dublin riots over the performance of Synge’s Playboy of the Western World – a play which had offended Irish pious nationalism and where (according to Lady Gregory) ‘the audience broke into disorder at the word shift’. The Italian visit afforded a refreshing change of scenery and made him all too aware of the power of ducal patronage, in the Renaissance, to sustain art and the life of the mind in miniature city states like Urbino and Ferrara, enabling poets and artists to achieve artistic perfection through assiduous dedication (‘labour’). Castiglione’s The Book of the Courtier (‘the grammar school of courtesies’) with its insistence on courtly refinement, its advocating of astute self-fashioning and its emphasis upon ‘sprezzatura’ (a sort of studied patrician nonchalance), which she read to him in translation, was an immediate source of inspiration and sparked off the fantasy of the cultural appropriation of Renaissance Italy.3 Dublin, in Yeats’s view, could, in similar fashion, become a centre of the arts sustained by the patronage of patriotic and influential women like Lady Gregory and her nephew, the public- spirited connoisseur and collector Sir . ‘To a Wealthy Man’ (which significantly was published in his 1914 collection Responsibilities) was Yeats’s attempt to join in the fray of public controversy on behalf of aristocratic patronage, and particularly in support of Hugh Lane’s offer to bequeath his valuable collection of thirty-nine

 3 For a detailed study of Castiglione’s influence on Yeats, see Corinna Salvadori, Yeats and Castiglione: Poet and Courtier (Dublin: Figgis, 1963).