Title: Literary epiphany in the poetry of W. B. Yeats Author: Eliene Mąka-Poulain Citation style: Mąka-Poulain Eliene. (2015). Literary epiphany in the poetry of W. B. Yeats. Praca doktorska. Katowice : Uniwersytet Śląski FACULTY OF PHILOLOGY UNIVERSITY OF SILESIA IN KATOWICE Eliene Mąka-Poulain LITERARY EPIPHANY IN THE POETRY OF W. B. YEATS A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the University of Silesia Supervisor: Prof. zw. dr hab. Wojciech Kalaga Katowice, 2015 WYDZIAŁ FILOLOGICZNY UNIWERSYTETU ŚLĄSKIEGO W KATOWICACH Eliene Mąka-Poulain EPIFANIA LITERACKA W POEZJI WILLIAMA BUTLERA YEATSA Praca doktorska Promotor: Prof. zw. dr hab. Wojciech Kalaga Katowice, 2015 How habitable is perfected form? And how inhabited the windy light? Seamus Heaney, “Lightenings,” xxii CONTENTS INTRODUCTION................................................................................................ 2 CHAPTER ONE EPIPHANY IN LITERATURE AND LITERARY CRITICISM ..................... 17 1.1 The Origins and Development of the Concept in Literary Criticism.. 17 1.2 Literary Epiphany Today: Aspects, Definitions, Classifications ........ 33 CHAPTER TWO A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE LITERARY MOMENT: AN INTERPRETATIVE OVERVIEW ............................................................. 52 CHAPTER THREE THE BARD AND THE MYSTIC: THE ROMANTIC EPIPHANY OF THE EARLY YEARS (1885-1903)......... 77 CHAPTER FOUR THE NEW VOICE: THE YEARS OF THE MODERNIST EXPERIMENT (1904-1924) ............... 98 CHAPTER FIVE A VIEW FROM THE TOWER: LITERARY EPIPHANY IN YEATS’S LATER POETRY (1925-1939) ....... 148 CONCLUSION ................................................................................................ 203 BIBLIOGRAPHY ............................................................................................ 218 SUMMARY (ENGLISH)................................................................................. 226 SUMMARY (POLISH).................................................................................... 231 INTRODUCTION Epiphanies – or the “moments of awakening,” as Wallace Stevens once called them – are often described as the brief, fleeting instants when the human mind, responding to everyday, familiar situations, suddenly discovers its ability to feel and experience far beyond its usual capacity. The exceptional ability to shock, to astound and to transform often ascribed to this sudden flash of recognition has not surprisingly made epiphany a valuable and important tool of writers and poets. In his introduction to the 1996 anthology of poems by different authors, A Book of Luminous Things, Czesław Miłosz looks at the Greek origins of the word epiphany and makes a connection between the origin of the word and the modern, literary counterpart of the “divine manifestation.” Miłosz’s words vividly illustrate the unusual appeal epiphany holds for countless writers and readers: What in Greek was called epiphaneia meant the appearance, the arrival, of a divinity among mortals or its recognition under a familiar shape of man or woman. Epiphany thus interrupts the everyday flow of time and enters as one privileged moment when we intuitively grasp a deeper, more essential reality hidden in things or persons. A poem-epiphany tells about one moment-event and this imposes a certain form.1 In Epiphany in the Modern Novel Morris Beja suggests that the Modernists – among them James Joyce, who is probably one of the most celebrated practitioners of 1 Czesław Miłosz, “Epiphany,” in: A Book of Luminous Things: An International Anthology of Poetry, ed. Czesław Miłosz (New York: Harcourt Brace and Company, 1996), p. 3. 3 the Moment – often “relied on epiphany as an essential technique”2 and used it as a “structural device,”3 while Ashton Nichols in his study The Poetics of Epiphany,4 using interchangeably the terms literary moment and literary epiphany, traces its earlier, Romantic origins. Nichols notes the impact of William Wordsworth’s decision to arrange his longer poems by including passages known as spots of time and then discusses the development of similar practices in the poetry of other English Romantics.5 Epiphany in literature, unlike, for example, vision, whose depiction is less bound by literary convention, is then not merely a presentation of a certain type of human experience – as such it typically portrays short-lived but intense flashes of insight, moments of heightened self-awareness and those of keen, vivid perception – but also a literary mode which usually aims at intensifying the reader’s engagement with the text. Writing about such privileged moments of insight gradually evolved into a variety of literary practices and techniques and is today to a significant extent shaped by conventions. Apart from the profound impact on the reader the literary moment frequently achieves, both the extensive range of portrayals of epiphany in literature and the different practices and conventions that came to be associated with writing about this type of experience make this multifaceted literary mode an interesting area of study. Therefore, in view of the considerable complexity of the poetics of the literary moment and its sustained popularity in 19th- and 20th-century poetry and prose, it would be difficult not to agree with Ashton Nichols’s remark suggesting that “the concept of literary epiphany has received surprisingly little theoretical attention in recent years” 2 Morris Beja, Epiphany in the Modern Novel (London: Peter Owen, 1971), p. 20. 3 Beja, Epiphany in the Modern Novel, p. 22. 4 The terms literary moment and literary epiphany will be used in the same way, interchangeably and to denote the same concept, also in this study. 5 Ashton Nichols, The Poetics of Epiphany: Nineteenth-Century Origins of the Modern Literary Moment (Tuscaloosa and London: University of Alabama Press, 1987). 4 although epiphany has become “a literary commonplace in poems and prose narratives.”6 Although this gap has been partly bridged, as the monographs and articles authored by, among others, Morris Beja, Robert Langbaum or Ashton Nichols laid the basic theoretical foundations of the concept, both describing this literary mode and roughly tracing its development in literature written in the English language over the last two centuries, the body of literature devoted to the examination of the role of the literary moment in the work of particular writers and poets is still surprisingly small. In this thesis I look at the use and development of the literary epiphany in the poetry of a writer who shared Joyce’s nationality and, like Joyce, is usually seen as one of the most influential Modernists. Unlike Joyce, however, who introduced his aesthetic theory of epiphany in the early versions of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, where the proponent of epiphany is Joyce’s literary alter ego, Stephen Dedalus, William Butler Yeats never explicitly wrote about the poetics of the literary moment in his work and never coined a literary term resembling Joyce’s epiphany. Nevertheless, Yeats was aware of the conventions of the Romantic moment and his poetry offers a remarkable variety of novel approaches to what is today usually labelled as the literary epiphany. The significance this expressive, yet rarely systematically studied literary mode acquires in the work of the Irish poet was the main reason behind the decision to devote a longer text to the analysis of the Yeatsian Moment. The poet’s ability to shape his numerous interpretations of the literary moment in many dissimilar, often almost unrelated ways – a trait uncommonly seen in other poets’ work – is particularly interesting. The originality and versatility of Yeats’s technique is demonstrated by a variety of traceable literary references, including the different degrees of 6 Ashton Nichols, “Cognitive and Pragmatic Linguistic Moments: Literary Epiphany in Thomas Pynchon and Seamus Heaney,” in: Moments of Moment: Aspects of the Literary Epiphany, ed. Wim Tigges (Amsterdam/Atlanta: GA, 1999), p. 467. 5 transformations of the Romantic and later motives, patterns and conventions related to the use of the epiphanic mode. Although Yeats is often seen as a Modernist, his poetry is known to be significantly influenced by Romanticism, and his esteem for the poets of the Romantic period, such as Shelley, Blake or Keats, is well acknowledged. Today, when the origins of the literary epiphany have been traced back to the poetry of the Romantics, Yeats’s poetry may serve as an excellent illustration of how the original, mainly Wordsworthian aesthetics of the Romantic moment gradually changed and evolved, a telling example of a literary mode “in a state of transition” between Romanticism and Modernism. Simultaneously, studying Yeats’s use of the convention of the literary moment may shed light on Yeats’s Romantic lineage and on the different phases of the poet’s life-long dialogue with Romanticism, as the degrees in which Yeats decided to transform the elements of the Romantic literary moment are often reflective of how Yeats positioned himself in relation to Romanticism. The originality of Yeats’s technique is also related to a very specific use of imagery in many Yeats’s poems. Much has been said and written about Yeats the occultist and Yeats the visionary, which is not surprising, seeing that the degree of Yeats’s interest in mysticism and in the occult is unique and unrivalled among other well-known, recognized European poets, with, possibly, the only exception of William