William Butler Yeats and the Oxford Book of Modern Verse
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SOME HEROIC DISCIPLINE William Butler Yeats and the Oxford Book of Modern Verse Robert Alden Rubin A dissertation submitted to the faculty of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of English and Comparative Literature. Chapel Hill 2011 Christopher Armitage William Harmon George Lensing Allan Life Weldon Thornton © 2011 Robert Alden Rubin ALL RIGHTS RESERVED ii ABSTRACT Robert Alden Rubin Some Heroic Discipline: William Butler Yeats and the Oxford Book of Modern Verse (Under the direction of Christopher Armitage and William Harmon) This project explores William Butler Yeats’s work as editor of the 1936 Oxford Book of Modern Verse, with emphasis on Yeats’s sense of his own place among the poets of his day. The study considers all of the 379 poems by the ninety-seven writers included in the anthology (as well as notable omissions) in the context of Yeats’s critical writings and correspondence; where possible, it identifies the sources consulted by Yeats for his selections, and the circumstances of publication. It also examines the degree to which Yeats saw the anthology as a way to influence the emerging literary consensus of the mid-1930s. Finally, it argues that the anthology offers the same essentially neo-Romantic critique of modernity that can be found in Yeats’s own poems—a sense that to be modern is to wrestle with an impulse to believe, despite circumstances that weaken the basis for such belief. Chapter I relates the details of the book’s conception, gestation, and publication. Chapter II addresses the late-Victorian poets, including both avant-garde “decadents” with whom he identified and late-Victorian mainstream poets against whom he reacted. Chapter III explores Yeats’s selections from contemporaries among the Edwardian-era writers, including those whose modern sensibility separated them from the Victorians. Chapter IV considers the many Irish poets that Yeats included in the anthology, and the iii ways in which the Irish experience embodied the modern problem for him. Chapter V addresses his reaction to the Georgian-era writers and “war poets” whose sensibility was shaped before the First World War, but whose best-known work appeared during and after it. Finally, Chapter VI considers the modernist poets inspired by T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, whom he answered with a more idiosyncratic version of what it meant to be “modern.” iv TABLE OF CONTENTS LIST OF TABLES........................................................................................................... viii INTRODUCTION: AN UNSUITABLE MODERNITY ....................................................1 Chapter I. “THAT I MIGHT BE REBORN IN IMAGINATION”: EDITING AND PUBLISHING THE OXFORD BOOK OF MODERN VERSE................................................................................13 i. The Oxford Books..........................................................................16 ii. The “Q” Precedent .........................................................................20 iii. Answering the “Ezra, Eliot, Auden School”..................................26 iv. “Towards Some Heroic Discipline”: Reading for the Anthology.............................................................35 v. Production of the Anthology..........................................................48 II. THE ANTI-VICTORIAN..........................................................................62 i. Paterfamilias of the Modern..........................................................63 ii. Reinventing Oscar Wilde...............................................................68 iii. Ballads and Lyrics in Translation ..................................................72 iv. Religious Lyrics.............................................................................77 v. The Rhymers..................................................................................83 vi. Celtic Themes ..............................................................................100 v vii. The Hearties.................................................................................104 viii. “Not Quite Infidel”? Yeats and Hopkins .....................................110 III. “KING OF THE CATS” IN PRE-WAR ENGLAND .............................122 i. Imperial Affinities and Antipathies .............................................124 ii. The Threshold Poets: Hardy, Housman, and Bridges..................136 iii. The Sturge Moore Circle of Edwardian “Belles Lettres” ............161 IV. “WE WERE THE LAST ROMANTICS”: THE IRISHNESS OF THE OBMV..........................................................180 i. Early Revivalists: Rolleston, Boyd, and Trench..........................182 ii. The Revivalist Dialects of Lady Gregory, Synge, and AE..........186 iii. The Next Generation: Padraic Colum, Joseph Campbell, James Stephens, and James Joyce................................................202 iv. Yeats’s Careless Counterpart: Oliver St. John Gogarty...............211 v. “Antiquarians and Others”: Higgins, Strong, O’Connor, and MacGreevy............................................................................218 vi Oxford Moderns: MacNeice and Day Lewis...............................232 vii “Our” Anthology..........................................................................241 V. GEORGIANS AND WAR POETS .........................................................251 i. Men of Letters..............................................................................252 ii. Abercrombie, Gibson, and the Dymock Group ...........................257 iii. The Georgian Mainstream ...........................................................265 iv. Omitting Wilfred Owen ...............................................................276 v. The “Yeatsian Brocken Spectre”: War Poets in a Postwar Anthology.......................................................................282 vi. Exotics, Mystics, and the East .....................................................302 vi VI. IN THE PARISH OF RICH WOMEN: YEATS AND THE MODERNS..............................................................310 i. Negotiating with Ezra Pound.......................................................312 ii. T. S. Eliot, Satirist........................................................................318 iii. The Aristocracy of Art in a Banal Age ........................................326 iv. The School of Turner...................................................................341 v. Voices from the Margins .............................................................353 vi. The Poets of New Signatures and New Country ..........................363 CONCLUSION: PARDONED FOR WRITING WELL.................................................373 WORKS CITED ..............................................................................................................377 vii LIST OF TABLES Table I: Authors in The Oxford Book of Modern Verse.....................................................46 Table II: How Yeats Re-ordered Turner’s “From ‘The Seven Days of the Sun’” in the OBMV...........................................................................347 viii Introduction: An Unsuitable Modernity The peculiar problems posed by The Oxford Book of Modern Verse: 1892–1935,1 edited by William Butler Yeats and published in 1936, might best be illustrated by an incident that took place fifteen years after he finished work on the anthology, and twelve years after his death in 1939. In February of 1951, the Irish-born poet Louis MacNeice received an unexpected proposition from an acquaintance, Daniel M. Davin, Assistant Secretary to the Delegates of the Oxford University Press. At the time, MacNeice was working in Athens for an overseas cultural organization, the British Council, and Davin wrote proposing to meet with him there in April to discuss a project. Davin was interested in visiting World War II battlefields in Greece, where he had fought, but memoranda in the Press’s archives make it clear that he also hoped to buttonhole MacNeice and nail down contract terms that would allow the Press to salvage an increasingly problematic anthology. “As you know,” Davin wrote MacNeice, “the Oxford Book of Modern Verse, edited by Yeats, goes only as far as 1935 and we have lately begun to think that it ought perhaps to be brought up to date. The difficulty is to find an editor who could live inside the same pair of covers as Yeats” (26 Jan 1951). Davin had been getting periodic inquiries from the chief executive of the Press, Arthur Norrington, about updating the book. Norrington had written six months earlier, after meeting with Oxford’s book salesmen, “The Travelers told us yesterday that they 1. Henceforth referred to as OBMV. 1 Introduction — 2 are occasionally asked why we do not bring this book up to date. The word ‘modern’ in the title is becoming unsuitable” (28 Jul 1950). From Oxford’s point of view, the word “modern” had actually been unsuitable ever since the anthology first appeared on November 19, 1936. It had immediately caused a furor among poets and critics, who argued that it was unrepresentative of the main currents of modern poetry, or reactionary in its modernity,2 or modern only in ways idiosyncratic to Yeats. In seeking a poet able to “live inside the same pair of covers,” Davin wanted someone who could not only add current poetry to the book, but someone willing, by implication, to get into bed with Yeats’s idiosyncratic vision of what “modern”