Notes CHAPTER 1 TRADITION, 'IMITATION', AND THE SYNTHESIS OF CONTENT AND FORM 1. Roger Ascham, The Scholemaster (London, 1570; facsimile repr. Menston, Yorks: Scholar Press, 1967) bk II, fo. 47r; also see The Schoolmaster (1570), ed. Lawrence V. Ryan (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univer­ sity Press, 1967) bk II, p. 117, where the Latin is translated as follows: 'Similar treatment of dissimilar matter and also dissimilar treatment of similar matter.' 2. First published by C. G. Martin, in 'W. B. Yeats: an Unpublished Letter', Notes and Queries, n.s. 5 (1958) 260-1. Recipient unknown. 3. Sir Philip Sidney, Defence of Poesy, ed. Dorothy M. Macardle (London: Macmillan, 1959) p. 3. 4. See Vivian Mercier, The Irish Comic Tradition (London: Oxford Univer­ sity Press, 1962) p. 107; and Dudley Young, Out of Ireland: The Poetry ofW. B. Yeats (1975; repr. Dingle, Co. Kerry: Brandon, 1982), on Yeats's revival of the Gaelic bard. Young contrasts a sceptical Shakespeare, the 'touchstone of sanity for the English mind', with Yeats, who is distinguished by his faith in magic. 5. See A. Norman Jeffares and A. S. Knowland, A Commentary on the Collected Plays of W. B. Yeats (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1975) p. 43, where Lady Wilde's translation of the tale is reprinted, a version that, unlike Yeats's tragedy, reconciled Seanchan, the Ard-File (Chief Poet of Ireland) and Guaire, the King of the Gort Cats. 6. The publication dates do not always reflect the period during which Yeats was occupied with a particular play. For instance, The Shadowy Waters was composed and rewritten repeatedly in a number of manuscripts dating from 1883 to 1899, before the first printing in 1900. See Michael Sidnell, George Mayhew, and David R. Clark (eds), Druid Craft: the Writing of 'The Shadowy Waters' (London: Oxford University Press, 1972). Jeffares and Knowland (Commentary on the Collected Plays, p. 124) point out that Yeats first conceived of The Hour Glass in 1902 and that its source was, as with The King's Threshold, in Lady Wilde's Ancient Legends, Mystic Charms, and Superstitions of Ireland. See also Curtis Bradford's W. B. Yeats: The Writing of 'The Player Queen' (Dekalb: Northern illinois University Press, 1977). 7. Ben Jonson, ed. C. H. Herford and Percy and Evelyn Simpson, 11 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925-51) vm: The Poems, the Prose Works, pp. 638-9. 8. The letter (in NLI 13,663) is substantially quoted by Edd W. and Aileen 219 220 Notes W. Parks in their study Thomas MacDonagh: The Man, the Patriot, the Writer (Athens, Ga: University of Georgia Press, 1967) p. 7. Much less is provided by Johann A. Norstedt, in Thomas MacDonagh: A Critical Biography (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1980) PP·, 31- 2, and in his 'The Gift of Reputation: Yeats and MacDonagh', Eire­ Ireland 29, no. 3 (1984) 136-7. Though Yeats's letter bears only the heading 'Nassau Hotel I Dublin I Nov. 9', speculation about the year in which it was written (1902) can be laid to rest by comparing its discussion over particulars of production with cost estimates provided by local printers in January 1902, and with a letter from Sealy, Bryers and Walker (Yeats's own first publisher, mentioned in his letter) about revised proofs of MacDonagh's book. With the others, this last letter ('22 Decb. 1902') is in NLI 10,854(1). 9. Full citations for MacDonagh's metrical studies are, in order cited above, Thomas Campion and the Art of English Poetry (Dublin: Hodges, Figgis, 1913) and Literature in Ireland (Dublin: Talbot, 1916). See also Parkinson (YSC&LP n, 189-94) and Hone (WBY 318). 10. Ironically, the young poet, scholar and political martyr lived long enough to suppress these early lyrics from his Poetical Works (1916). Yeats eulogized him, of course, in 'Easter 1916' and 'Sixteen Dead Men'. 11. Hone (WBY 450) dates the composition from 1931, not 1930, and is undoubtedly right. The occasion giving rise to the 'letter' was a search for a school for young Michael in Dublin after nearly two years' residence in Rapallo, Italy (early 1929 to late 1930). 12. Partial accounts of the genesis of this poem are given by Bradford (YW 5-11), by Parkinson (YSC&LP n, 92-113), and by Jacqueline Genet, in William Butler Yeats: les fondements et I'evolution de Ia creation poetique (Villeneuve-d' Ascq: Universite de Lille III, 1976) pp. 552-3 and 703. 13. That Yeats knew Milton's tractate Of Education is probable. His Senate speeches opposing government censorship and copyright restraints suggest familiarity with the Areopagitica, and his impassioned speech opposing the Catholic majority's bill on divorce makes issue of Milton's tracts on that subject. See Ch. 6, section 1; and SS 92, 100 and 102. 14. Ben Jonson, vm, 637, 639 (in Discoveries). For more on Jonson's views on imitation, see RichardS. Peterson's Imitation and Praise in the Poems of Ben Jonson (New Haven, Conn., and London: University Press, 1981). 15. Sidney's apologia is most akin to Jonson's critical line, as was Puttenham's The Art of English Poesy (1589). Yeats knew Shelley's Defence of Poetry (1823), which is informed at several points by Sidney's treatise. See Shelley's Poetry and Prose: Authoritative Texts, Criticism, ed. Donald H. Reiman and Sharon B. Powers (New York: Norton, 1977) pp. 478-508. Shelley, who equated the poet of imagination with the vates (see p. 482), was not insensitive to the Platonic concept of imitation: 'in the motions of the dance, in the melody of the song, in the combinations of language, in the series of [men's] imitations of natural objects, ... there is a certain order or rhythm belonging to Notes 221 each of these classes of mimetic representation, from which the hearer and the spectator receive an intenser and purer pleasure than from any other' (p. 481; see also pp. 486-7). Arnold was interested in human character, too, as well as in 'human actions'; hence the argument of his Preface rests conventionally on the authority of Aristotle's Poetics. 16. Ascham, The Scholemaster, bk n, fo. 48r. 17. The album is signed but not dated. In YL Notes, I argue for a dating around 1881 for drafts of an unpublished poem found in this album and on the back flyleaf of Yeats's copy of Tennyson's Locksley Hall and Other Poems (1874; YL 2115). This date is suggested by watermarks on a related loose sheet in the album and by a stationer's stamp on a sheet of drawing-paper. The first poems that Yeats published- all written in the shadow of Spenser - appeared in 1885 in the Dublin University Review, although drafted the previous year in other exercise books. Other evidence in NLI 12,161, including pastel and ink sketches by George Russell, associates the album with Yeats's time as a student at Erasmus Smith High School, Harcourt Street, Dublin (1881-3), and at the Metropolitan School of Art, Kildare Street, Dublin (1884). The 'Inscription for a christmas card', written beneath another derivative poem, 'The Dell', appears on L2r. Though much was unused, a good many of the album's leaves have been removed, presumably destroyed. 18. The woodland meeting which the last five lines of the draft depict is not in Spenser. Yeats probably had in mind the alliance of the Faerie Queene (here, 'mab') and Prince Arthur which was to have formed the climax of Spenser's twelfth book. Spenser discusses his stratagem in the prefatory letter (to Raleigh) affixed to his epic. See The Works of Edmund Spenser: A Variorum Edition, ed. Edwin Greenlaw, Charles Osgood, and Frederick Padelford, 10 vols (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1932-57) I, 167-70. 19. MacDonagh, Literature in Ireland, p. 17. 20. In The Life of Cowley, Johnson wrote that 'Wit' perceives unity despite extreme differences; it is a thought-process in which 'the most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together'. See Samuel Johnson, The Lives of the English Poets, ed. George B. Hill, 3 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1905) I, 20. The underscoring of 'Genius' in my transcription might be read as a cancellation. 21. From the earliest manuscript (NLI 13,587[20]) to the corrected typescript in the Berg Collection, New York Public Library, and every version reported in VP, the only change in these lines was the addition of a comma in 1. 46. Yeats rather spectacularly confused his speakers in the NLI manuscript. But the message itself seems always to have been clear. 22. Here I am most indebted to Frank]. Warnke's Versions of Baroque (New Haven, Conn., and London: Yale University Press, 1972). However, I take exception to his view that Baroque poetry 'is more specifically form-conscious than is Renaissance poetry' (p. 20). The content­ orientation of most seventeenth-century verse (outside the Spenser- 222 Notes ians') is antithetical to the Elizabethan commitment to form. Since both Elizabethan and seventeenth-century styles might as easily be defined in terms of form as in terms of intellectual content, the point should be that Baroque style (particularly in Metaphysical poetry) intervened between two periods of classicism - Renaissance and Augustan - and is distinguished from each of these by its very opposition to classical style and fixed forms. 23. See Morris W. Croll, 'Attic' and Baroque Prose Style (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1969) p. 87. 24. George Williamson, Seventeenth Century Contexts, rev. edn (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969) p. 124. 25. Though Chapter 4 addresses Yeats's kinship to Jonson and will have more to say about both on the epigram, it is worth noting that 'Against Unworthy Praise', a companion to 'The Fascination of What's Difficult' employs the same vocabulary (see II.