The Major Works [antikvár]

INTRODUCTION I Yeats's early work is usually seen as a late development of Romanticism: it would be quite surprising if it were not. He was born in 1865, only thirty-eight years after the death of his revered William Blake. He reached 15 years of age in 1880, when the reputations of Byron and Shelley, for example, were in the main still unchallenged and secure. But there are many different Romanticisms, and many ways of learning from them. Although Blake and Shelley are dominating influences on his work, his view of them was conditioned by the late nineteenth-century emphasis on lyric intensity and on the poetic characteristics required to achieve it: symbolism and musicality. It is hard to imagine the early Yeats even attempting to write something like the more abstract passages in Blake's Prophetic Books or the more philosophical ones in Shelley's Prometheus Unbound. And Yeats had recent and contemporary models to whom he could turn who would support his reading of Romanticism—the Pre-Raphaelites and, in particular, William Morris. It is not necessary, then, to assume the influence of French symbolisme on Yeats's earliest work, for instance on The Wanderings of Oisin, and indeed it is highly unlikely that this was an influence until he met Arthur Symons in the early 1890s, after the composition of Oisin and the poems which now come under the heading Crossways. Nevertheless, Symons, whose The Symbolist Movement in Literature (1899) was dedicated to Yeats, offered a more pondered theory and also new models, in the form of Verlaine and Mallarmé, in particular. Verlaine's recommendation in his 'Art poétique' of suggestive musicality, and Mallarmé's in 'Crise de vers' of a technique of symbolic suggestion, are undoubted influences on the distilled intensity of Yeats's most truly symbolist volume The Wind among the Reeds (1899). It is, to say the least, unfortunate that this book, perhaps the one symbolist masterpiece in the English language, should have been for so long overshadowed by the anti-Romantic battles of Anglo-American modernism. A feature of these battles was the tendency to relegate Yeats's early 'Romantic' work in favour of the directness of the later work. Yet any dispassionate consideration of The Wind among the Reeds reveals a ruthless concentration of purpose and means, and a unique richness and complexity of effect.