Canada and Other Matters of Opinion (12 page)

This is W.B. Yeats’s formulation, typical in its aphoristic force, the concentrated eloquence he imparts to what is, otherwise, a bare assertion. Typical also in its subject matter.

Yeats was no careless rhapsode. Writers often speak of their craft, the self-conscious, studious, disciplined portion of their calling. Craft is the careful twin of art’s wild mystery. Yeats, more than most poets who have spoken of what they do, was alert from the first days of his muse that it is as much a study and a progress to write poetry, as it is a rush of inspiration, the fluttering of a visiting muse, or the unbidden speech of secret origins.

He thought very much about what he did and knew that real poetry, great achievement, was never merely “given.” It was given only after an apprenticeship of toil,
study, practice and time. It filled a life to “do” poetry. That, I suppose, is the burden of the couplet.

But we must never take poets at their word. Yeats is almost singular in the degree to which the “life” and the “work” are not opponents, not the counter-matter one of the other. It is nice work to find the daylight between the life of William Butler Yeats and the poetry of William Butler Yeats. Where shall we look to find the space open between them? The many poems to, or of, Maude Gonne? Where does the life stop and the poem begin in either of these? Yeats’s passion, yearning, pursuit and eventual renunciation of Gonne is an electrical current in the poetry and the life. “Easter 1916”? The great matter of Ireland, the Troubles, as they have come to be called, were not a spectacle to be limned by the indifferent, fingernail-paring artist.

They were as much of Yeats’s life as sexual passion. The Byzantium poems, with their strange and beautiful, hypnotic rhythms and images—not even these were “dream” poems, pieces carved out of the fantasies of some solitary. Yeats’s spiritualism, his thirst for arcana and busy traffic with the nebulous concourse of the “other world,” was a real pursuit for him. There was a lot of Coleridge in Yeats—the beckoning of the numinous had a reality and force more “grounded” people find difficult to understand, and many dismiss as embarrassingly ridiculous. They eminently were not ridiculous for him. Byzantium and the cluster of poems that seem fixed on the idea of art itself,
art pure and changeless, came out of his insistent intercourse with that (for him) real world of mystic chatter and esoteric speculation.

If we were to take Yeats’s postulated opposites, the life
or
the work, and choose to read just the one or the other, we could not do so. The life infiltrates the work; the work, the life. He who saw poetry as a vocation, who may indeed be the last Western poet to whom we can apply without an inch of irony the term bard, with its connotations of gifted authority or licence to speak “larger” than other men, saw the doing of poetry, the art, as the centre of any hope for the perfect life.

It is because one is wound so intimately, the temptation is to say so perfectly, with the other—how can we know the dancer from the dance?—that the case of Yeats is so singular an instance of the use of biography as a help to poetry. The biography of Wallace Stevens may be interesting. It may offer some clues and hints as to what went on in that strange and coloured mind. But Stevens’s life, such as can be known from biography, will not unwind “The Comedian as the Letter C.”

How different with Yeats. Here we need a concordance of the biographical with the literary. So, for those who think the poetry of Yeats one of the great inheritances of the century now mercifully finished,
W.B. Yeats: A Life; II: The Arch-Poet 1915-1939
, the second half of the mighty work of University of Oxford historian R.F. Foster, is welcome. It is one of the many merits of Foster’s approach that he
demonstrates, frequently and in specific detail, Yeats’s marked awareness that he was “cutting a figure,” that as a poet and an Irish citizen he deliberately composed a persona. All poets are self-aware: it is almost a definition of a poet to be so. Poets mine themselves, their emotions, their family histories. What is the poetry of Wordsworth but a lifelong excavation of certain episodes of intense personal experience, the history of his self-consciousness?

Yeats was self-aware in something of this same precocious and extravagant manner, and aware as well of how others of his time and place were aware of him. He played both to the mirror of himself and of others’ opinion of him. Much of his poetry is pitched to construct what today we call his “image”—how the Irish people saw him, and would come to see him. His poetry is, to some degree, an artful biography, and seen by him as such.

Foster, for instance, gives illuminating comment on what Yeats called his “bread and butter” letter to the Swedish Academy,
The Bounty of Sweden
, which incorporated his lecture to the Academy upon receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1923. It is a calculated document, intended to burnish and reinforce some of Yeats’s central convictions about Irish culture and politics. Foster writes: “
The Bounty of Sweden
, taken as a whole, shows both WBY’s brilliant ability to reconstruct history in terms of its meaning for himself and to place his work, and his circle, at the centre.”

An earlier comment by Foster on the awarding of the Nobel, including a quotation from Yeats, underscores how
deeply the poet saw, or wished others to see, his achievement, his work, as intrinsically interleaved with the achievement and history of his country: “An Irish winner of the [Nobel] prize, a year after Ireland gained its independence, had a symbolic value in the world’s eyes, and he was careful to point this out: His reply to the many letters of congratulations was consistent. ‘I consider that this honour has come to me less as an individual than as a representative of Irish literature, it is part of Europe’s welcome to the Free State.’” In a poet of less capacity, one less intricated with the public life of his country, such an observation might seem the height of giddy, grand egotism, but the truth is simply that Yeats had the right to such a claim. His poetry cannot be detached from the theatre of early modern Irish history; it is a great part of that history’s world voice.

And it achieves not a little of its power, that peculiar Yeatsian sublimity, its unmistakable public voice, from its attachment to the grand themes, the mix of honour, beauty, horror and reverence he saw playing throughout the history of his time. It is a great part of the merit of Foster’s work that it traces the current, the charge which enters Yeats’s poetry, to its sources, and enables those who would understand at least part of that poetry’s power to realize that it springs from his passionate affiliation with the cause of Ireland.

Yeats is a peculiar mix. He can be among the most esoteric of poets—almost hermetic, a delver into mysticism and self-constructed mythologies. At the same time, he can
be among the most exoteric, no more enigmatic than a newspaper headline. It is another virtue of Foster’s work that he combs with diligence and acuity both realms, and marks their intersection, the flashpoint of inspiration, where they flare into lyricism or image.

“Leda and the Swan” is one of Yeats’s fiercest, finest works. It is also a difficult poem, difficult because of the compression inherent in its form—so much “thought” packed into the narrow house of the sonnet. Foster’s treatment of it is typical of the virtues of his book. He cites the journal of Lady Gregory, Yeats’s longtime friend, patron and colleague, for a telling entry on what Yeats was thinking at the time of his first effort at the poem. The Russian Revolution woke him to the thought that “the reign of democracy is over … and in reaction there will be violent government from above.” Lady Gregory’s entry continues: “It is the thought of this force coming into the world that he is expressing in his Leda poem, not quite yet complete.”

The same entry concludes with a glimpse into how the poem “occupies” him, a quick look at Yeats in the workshop: “He sat up till 3o’c this morning working over it, and read it to me as complete at midday, and then half an hour later I hear him at it again.” The last phrase there—the poem’s complete, he’s working at it again half an hour later—is a wonderful vignette.

Foster has much more on “Leda,” its revisions, alterations, the hostile response from the
Catholic Bulletin
, and finally his own (Foster’s) compact, insightful reading of the poem.

The treatment afforded “Leda and the Swan” can be taken as a touchstone of the book’s method and manner. Diligent, thorough, unobstructed by jargon or modishness, careful with the details of both the life and any poem under consideration, measured and intelligent in its readings and criticism, this is a model approach to literary biography.

“Did that play of mine send out/ Certain men the English shot?/ Did words of mine put too great strain/ On that woman’s reeling brain?”
(“The Man and the Echo”). The work of Yeats occupies a brilliant space in the intersection of the private and public “meaning” of poetry. And so it is especially the case that a biography of Yeats, more than of most other poets, is part of our schooling in the poetry. It really is impossible to separate Yeats’s life and work—they interpenetrate so thoroughly. This is what makes
The Arch-Poet
the wonderful work that it is. Foster is unimpaired by any other ambition or agenda, save to offer in accessible language and scholarly detail all that is useful or necessary to tune us to the poetry.

I shall take but one last example of his method. “Easter 1916,” the great poem of the Irish uprising, is infallibly Yeatsian, stamped with his signature rhythms, oracular voice and saturated with the public matter of Ireland. It has also the peculiarly Yeatsian ambition of intending to condition the way its matter, the uprising, would be enrolled in future Irish history.

Is the poem private? Yes, as belonging to, as issuing only from, the particular consciousness of W.B. Yeats. Private in
the manner that all poetry is private, that it is the shaped utterance of one mind, of one singularly tuned imagination. Is the poem public? Yes, both in its subject and its intent. “Easter 1916” is meant to be an influence, a force, in the shaping of Irish understanding and aspiration. It is something of an “uprising” itself. Those unfamiliar with the background to the 1916 rebellion, innocent of Yeats’s complicated relationship to many of its key participants, his lifelong mission to register the essence of Ireland and its people, will find here all that is needed to read the poem in its fullness.

Not all poets deserve the determined application Foster has brought to this biography. But the poetry of Yeats is one of the great achievements of the last century, a lifework of astonishing fertility and accomplishment—it may be the last great instalment, in the high vein, of Romanticism.

It is, as well, very much a part of that history it incorporates in so many brilliant poems. The poetic imagination of W.B. Yeats has inflected the record of modern Irish history, and in a handful of poems—“Leda and the Swan,” “The Second Coming,” “Easter 1916” principal among them—has worked out from that particular history to catch the sombre and deadly themes of the entire murderous century just past.

Yeats is a very Irish poet, and as an Irish poet he began; but he is a great poet not only because of the insuperable verbal gifts with which he was endowed, but because he was also endowed with that last or final gift of real poetry: its ability to reach into and read our world.

Roy Foster has quite magnificently done his best to help us reach into and read W.B. Yeats. To recommend this book to others is an honour.

Pamela Anderson has published her first novel. All the news stories pointedly reference that it’s her first, which means, I suppose, that she’s not just visiting the form, but like the great practitioners of the past—Dickens, Balzac and Jacqueline Susann—Ms. Anderson and the muse are setting up house for the long haul.

I couldn’t be happier. Literature has always cohabited with elitism, and far too shamelessly. From James Joyce to Thomas Pynchon, authors have posed as demigods, vessels of some rare and superfine genius, producing works that demanded of their readers the skills of a cryptographer and the endurance of a Clydesdale. It’s high time art took a stroll on the beach.

I haven’t read her novel yet—it’s so fresh off the presses it’s still dripping mascara—but I know that this will be a heartbreaking work of staggering exposition, as transparent as wind, as still of mind as a tranquillized sheep.

Pamela has always favoured the direct style, and being in the same room as a word processor is unlikely to have changed that. What you get is what you see. This has been
the hallmark of her tradecraft from the beginning. From the Tool Time Girl on
Home Improvement
, to
Baywatch
, to
VIP
, to her studiously unartful home productions, the Anderson oeuvre has the clarity of Evian and the simplicity of lettuce.