Yeats, W.B., Selected Criticism and Prose, ed. A. Norman Jeffares; Pan Books, London: 1980.
I have a collection of prose and criticism by Yeats (1865-1939). It is one of the first books I ever sought out and read with commitment and passion. The inscription inside it says that I was seventeen at the time I acquired it. At that time, I was a nineteenth-century sort of mind, and I thought of Keats and Shelley as the most important poets of England. Yeats and Eliot were, to me, near contemporaries, and could not therefore be as great, as those nineteenth century men had been. And, the Hellenising, the mythology, the religion-founding poetry of Shelley, and likewise of Keats, dominated my imagination for several years, after I began reading and wanting to write poems, or to understand who I was.
Yeats gave some intellectual respectability to my desire, to enter into myth, and to be as irrational and self-centred as possible, in those difficult times, as a youth. I think, these days, after reading far too many studies and academic articles about writers, too much boring and tiring academic criticism, that when anyone writes about a poet or poetry, and even when he tries to do philosophy, which is a difficult and fine-working task, he should write simply, conversationally, and just say what he thinks. In this way, by being honest and straight, you can be of use to other people.
Yeats writes like that, because he had no reason not to; and what we find in his criticism, his essays, and autobiography, is a quite strange man, who never willingly left mythology, religion-founding, and vast spiritual speculation, behind him. And he talks of these things to us in a familiar way. He told me, as a youth, that his poetry is about the personal life, about his personal life; and he has told us that his self or his personal life was not something which he simply accepted as given, but something he struggled to control, to understand, to modify, in the environment of the supernatural.
Given my preoccupation with what I call the Self, a brief consideration of what Yeats says, will be useful to me, and it could be useful to others. I’m not so concerned here, with any specific poem of his. When in recent years, I have returned to reading Yeats, I have been surprised at how good his late poetry is. I can read Yeats’ work with pleasure any day, while sitting at the table at night, in order to while away half an hour; I can read it with fascination about him, and his problems and his grand lyrical gestures. It has long been my suspicion, that with Eliot, he wrote the best poetry of the last century. And that the pair of them are the equivalent of what Shelley and Keats were to the preceding century, poets with whom everyone should be familiar, an inescapable destiny for the English language in the twentieth century. Even in my fifties, I still consider it a pleasure to read either of them, and I find their books almost irresistible; all the Irish or American, or English people who came later are, to my way of looking at it, just footnotes and variations. But I have no interest here, in talking about why I feel this way, by reference to any specific poem. I hope it can be taken for granted that my admiration of Yeats’ poetry is real.
Both Eliot and Yeats made attempts to do theory and what you might call philosophy. And what they said in their respective attempts toward the abstractions of philosophy is also important. Eliot is known to all conservatives; and his religious ideas are an apparently solitary effort, to hold back the decadence of democracy, which was in his time, carrying all before it. Eliot trained as a philosopher. Yeats, on the other hand, had no academic training of any kind, and thought of philosophical abstraction as the enemy of poetry, and therefore seems to have consciously chosen to steer clear of it, except on a couple of occasions. Nevertheless, he did put his ideas about the self, history, and ultimate reality onto paper, doing so without any compunction, if and when those ideas were vague or unsupported by any argument. He knew what he believed, and he told us about it.
I go back to Yeats’ poetry, and understand him differently, as I myself am different, and as I grow older. His essays on theory are useful as a means of understanding who he thought he was. And that is an interesting thing for me. Here we have a very self-obsessed man, someone who had a theory of being a self, telling us what he thought of himself, and what he thought about existence. He put together a summary of his thoughts about self, history, and reality in his book of 1925, which he called A Vision.
It is specifically for some insight into the Self, by reference to the works of prose which prefigure and comment on A Vision and which explain his philosophy, that I now write this. Anyone who follows me, knows that I have started to put together my thoughts on becoming the Son of God, on the Kingdom of Heaven, and on the centrality of the concept of Self to these things; and I do think that the poet Yeats has some interesting things to say on these matters. Both Yeats and Eliot were what you might call, self-gathering poets. One way or another, they prayed, and wrote poetry which is almost meditative prayer. They practiced ‘centering’, concentration of the self, and had a certain negative attitude toward the world, in a Christian sense of that word. I have selected three pieces of writing from Yeats’ prose, for these own purposes. Again, I’m not writing about Yeats, so much as expounding my own thoughts, while prodding and at him for a response.
Let’s get some background settled, about Yeats in his later period, roughly from the time of his fiftieth year. Around 1917, when he was fifty one, he met his wife; at the same time, he completed an essay describing his beliefs about himself and the importance of selfhood, called Per Amica Silentia Lunae (Through the friendly silence of the moon). I shall look at one half of this, entitled ‘Anima Hominis’. Shortly after writing that essay, and four days after getting married, he asked his new wife to try automatic writing, and she began to do so fluently, which surprised him. He believed that she was transmitting to him information from spirits; she or they were giving him information so as to compose poetry, as he understood things: “We have come to give you metaphors for poetry” (A Vision, Introduction, II), his wife’s automatic writing told him. They were not giving him the information for any other reason, but nonetheless, he compiled her notes into his book of 1925 (subsequently revised). The essay of 1917 prefigures A Vision, and expands its ideas. In his 1928 introduction to the book, he refers back to the essay of 1917 in particular, singling it out as something decisive in his self-understanding; and these two works do form an expression of his metaphysics.
To me, A Vision, which I read a long time ago, without much profit or understanding, is an attempt to find recurrent patterns in history, similar to the ones made by Arnold J. Toynbee, and Oswald Spengler. “They encouraged me, however, to read history in relation to their historical logic, and biography in relation to their twenty-eight typical incarnations, that I might give concrete expression to their abstract thought” (Introduction, V; p 492-3).
He explained to Lady Gregory at the time when he finished A Vision, that his experiences with his wife’s automatic writing, had made him more educated, and that they had made his poetry better, so that it had gained ‘self-possession and power’ since the ‘incredible experience’ (Vision, Introduction, I; p. 491)
After looking at ‘Anima Hominis’, and with reference to some small parts of A Vision, I will comment on his 1937 essay ‘A General Introduction to my Work’, which, very typically, expounds what can only be called a system, because it goes so much against what everyone else seems to believe these days. I mean, his view of himself and the world is unique, so that it looks like a coherent system, only because it is different from what you might call the common and widely accepted system held by everyone else.
I have said, that a man must work to become a self, and that his self can be lost. I would say, that if we were speaking as Christians, the devil encourages men to take no notice of themselves; so that the aim of life, and the thing which the evil one most involves himself with, in an obnoxious obstructive way, is the activity of self-creation.
Yeats also considered it necessary to become a self, but did so in his poetry; he seems to have considered himself not quite a saint or a sage, but to have allowed himself only this: to become a poetic personality. His works are the personal expression of a man who is wise, and passionless; his poems are written by a man who has created a certain type of self. The person who speaks in his poetry is an ageless Irish man, particularly of the peasant class; he is arrogantly indifferent to the modern democratic world of the English. He claims to have a link to his ancestors. It is a heroic self. But I say this as introduction, of course, and the nature of this self which he created has some depth to it, which I intend to discover.
He proposes, in his 1917 essay, in its first part (Anima Hominis), that any man has two parts. His real self, and his anti-self. His real self is the one which is the hero, the man who has been born from the Irish historic tapestry. On the other hand, his anti-self is the one which lives in the every day world, which quarrels with others: ‘we make rhetoric out of our quarrel with others; we make poetry out of our quarrel with our self’ (Anima Hominis, V).
In Anima Hominis, in the first paragraphs, he makes it plain how this real self is the very centre of all Being, and he refers to Dante’s La vita nuova, where Dante sees a vision which is his real self and his real life, when he sees the ‘Lord of Terrible Aspect’, who tells him ‘ego dominus tuus’ (I am your master). This real, heroic self, need not be a person, or a gesture or mask, but can also be a landscape, an entire world, a tapestry, as it were. What is crucial is, that it is imagined, and the result of a vision, which comes from leaving the world and the common anti-self behind.
Yeats makes surprising numbers of reference to Dante, in fact, in his reflections on poetry and reality. He does so again at an important part of his 1937 ‘General Reflections’, when he announces his lifelong religious and metaphysical belief. I should take the opportunity to quote this reference in full, because in this 1937 summary of what his poetry is, he lays out his Creed, as it were:
“I was born into this faith, have lived in it, and shall die in it; my Christ, a legitimate deduction from the Creed of St Patrick as I think, is that Unity of Being [which] Dante compared to a perfectly proportioned human body, Blake’s ‘Imagination’, what the Upanishads have named ‘Self’: nor is this unity distant and therefore intellectually understandable, but [rather, it is] imminent, differing from man to man and age to age, taking upon itself pain and ugliness, ‘eye of newt, and toe of frog’.” (263)
In Per Amica, which I will just now concentrate on, he brings to bear empirical observations from his experience of people, to prove that there are two selves, in everyone: the one we generally live with, which is chaotic and is no more than an anti-self, and then the real one, which is what poetry gives expression to. In order to give rise to this real self, Yeats says he has to be alone, and to fall silent with himself.
This real self is not a standard thing, not a universal type which falls upon everyone. Men are each different and unique. Rather, it is a thing of dream, and vision, in each case. Among Christian saints, the phantasmagorical visionary real self, is Christ. The saint, as I myself have frequently said, lives among nothing but dust (“the world is changed into a featureless dust and can be run though with the fingers” (A Vision, Book Five, IV)), but his imagination of himself as Christ, as God, is his real self and his real world. A man must turn from the mirror, toward the mask. And putting on a mask changes the world around one. Looking from the eye-holes of a mask, makes him part of a drama, and changes the world, alters its quality with imagination.
He calls this true self the Daimon, from a word Shelley used, meaning spirit, from the Greek. The self brings about a destiny. It gathers the person into the centre of his own story. When he becomes his true self, the man becomes his own Daimon, the opposite of his anti-self. And, to summarise briefly, Yeats also mulls over whether a man’s love of beauty in a woman, is likewise the love of what is opposite. I think this is what he means: when a man refuses to become his true self, he can still see his opposite in the physical sexual love for a woman, who is his opposite, too. For ‘it may be that “sexual love”, which is founded upon “spiritual hate”, is an image of the warfare of man and Daimon’ (175). If a man fails to become his real self, he can still find the visionary imaginary satisfaction in a beautifully attractive woman.
As can be seen in comments I have made about Matthew’s gospel recently, a man finds himself in the Kingdom of Heaven, when he is broken, and when he seeks the yoke which is easy, from the other world. The kingdom of heaven, I do not say I agree with this, is what Yeats would call the anti-thetical self, the vision, the Imagination of Blake. Here are some pointers for further reflection on this matter:
The saint and the sage alone have found a lasting true self. In the saint or sage, the passions must be broken, and they will ideally turn into visions alone. The poet, unable to attain that high perfection, will rise and fall to it, to be broken again and again, and, being less spiritual powerful than the saint, he will never hold onto the real self indefinitely. The poet is a lower form of man, so to speak, and these different types of man and types of power, is what the metaphysics of A Vision is essentially about. Again, if, attaining this real self, we become interested in our selves, in our mundane interests and objectives, we pass out of the vision, just as in meditation, as I have said, there must be no pride or objective, no aim, to this self-creation, which yields to vision.
Here are two quotations regarding these points, particularly pertaining to the saint and the sage:
“The saint alone is not deceived, neither thrusting with his shoulder nor holding out unsatisfied hands. He would climb without wandering to the antithetical self of the world, the Indian narrowing his thought in meditation or driving it away in contemplation, the Christian copying Christ, the antithetical self of the classic world. For a hero loves the world till it breaks him, and the poet til it has broken faith; but while the world was yet debonair, the saint has turned away, and because he renounced experience itself, he will wear his mask as he finds it.” (176)
Yeats proposes that there is the self, which is real, and the anti-self, which is more common and is the type of self which we are familiar with in a chaotic way. He also posits ‘the world’, and then this other thing, which is more properly understood as a field for the mask and the imagination, the phantasmagoria. Yeats is quite plain about this, too, that ‘the world’ as the newspapers and the law might understand it, is not really real. It is not intelligible in any other way than as a mechanical and meaningless process.
“I am convinced that in two or three generations it will become generally known that the mechanical theory has no reality, that the natural and supernatural are knit together, that to escape a dangerous fanaticism we must study a new science; at that moment Europeans may find something attractive in a Christ posed against a background not of Judaism but of Druidism, not shut off in dead history, but flowing, concrete, phenomenal” (‘A General Introduction’, pp. 262-3).
The merely mechanical world, bereft of vision, and without any impetus to find itself in a higher unique form, and to be considered living and more than natural, is to him an aberration, a historical nightmare. I take the opportunity to cite another of his predications, in the same essay (we are dealing with his 1937 ‘General Introduction’):
“When I stand upon O’Connell Bridge in the half-light and notice that discordant architecture, all those electric signs, where modern heterogeneity has taken physical form, a vague hatred comes up out of my own dark and I am certain that wherever in Europe there are minds strong enough to lead others the same vague hatred rises; in four or five or in less generations this hatred will have issued in violence and imposed some kind of rule of kindred” (269).
This points us toward Yeats’ belief, that the heroic self, whose passion is broken and turned into vision, and which is the real self, is also a kindred and racial memory, a mask worn for the sake of a people. It is possible to be a self on behalf of a nation. His first teachers in poetry, he recalls, were: “not separated individual men; they spoke or tried to speak out of a people to a people; behind them stretched the generations” (‘A General Introduction’; 257). In the same late essay, he repeatedly expresses his dislike of Wordsworth, who refused to wear a mask, or allow himself to be part of any drama, any destiny. And he associates Wordsworth, modernity, and the machine view of reality, with the English.
Of Christ’s law, which finalises and perfects the old law, he says that it is ‘love’; and love only applies to the individual, for love is love of what is unique. Christ demands that each man is individual and self-finding. Love is intellectual, and does not inspire or demand action: “and it belongs to contemplation, not to action, for we would not change that which we love” (A Vision, Book Five, IV; p. 496). He also says, that faith is the highest perfection of the human mind, its highest offering and gift. It is “the only gift man can make to God, and therefore it must be offered in sincerity” (‘Anima Hominis’, V; p. 171).
I draw attention to these statements, to summarise the point, that Yeats was not exactly an Orthodox Christian. There are various reasons why he could not be so, particularly because he was convinced that history develops in a certain supernatural way, which expressed a theory of different types and eras of relationship to God, so that something other than either God or man, determined how their relationship happens; and his admiration for the pre-Catholic western type of Christianity, when Easter was celebrated on the first full moon following the Equinox, points to what we would today call ‘ethno-nationalism’, which prefigured a strictly correct Christian faith. He was not so much an Irish nationalist, as an avatar of Ireland itself, and felt that he could not renounce his poetic destiny. He likes to conflate Christianity with Druidism for that reason, whatever Druidism might be.
But I am also interested to return to my own concerns, and make some notes. Yeats does not exactly give any greater precision to what the self is, than what I have said here; but he does propose a general theory of the two types of it, and its interaction with imagination, and as opposed to ‘the world’. He says that the poet is not a man, but a passion, and more of a type than a passion. His own personal type is the ‘rambling peasant poet’, which is a national archetype:
“No people hate as we do in whom that past is always alive, there are moments when hatred poisons my life and I accuse myself of effeminacy because I have not given it adequate expression. It is not enough to have put it into the mouth of a rambling peasant poet […] This is Irish hatred and solitude, the hatred of human life that made Swift write Gulliver and the epitaph upon his tomb, that can still make us wag between extremes and doubt our sanity” (‘A General Introduction’, II; 263-4).
I suppose that what I mean by ‘self’ is the same as Yeats means, in a vague sort of way. But there ought not to be a harsh definition of the self, perhaps, since it is simple, and single. It is the ground of everything else, and should be something primordial. It only needs a practical demonstration in an individual instance; it does not need to be something gigantic and complex, suitable for fine definition. I mean by the word ‘self’, that concentrated point of consciousness, which has no object; which is outside the constraints of time and space, body and distraction.
It is the message of Christ, to attain that state, and Christ is God in man. And therefore, the Self is God. I don’t mean in the transcendental Emersonian sense, either. Where God is everywhere and in everyone and everything. Rather, I mean that it is the individual in his simplicity; but not with his ideas and attitudes, his opinions, and his point of view about the world; and I do not mean Christ as the activist and healer, and moral teacher. Christ’s moral teachings are the perfection of the law, so Christ was not a moral teacher of a distinct kind. He was pure self and interiority; he was the perpetual antithetical self.
If we were to ask, what is interiority, we should reply: it is being with God. And God as a person, just as the self is a person. I am jealous of my contact with God, and the self is therefore, to me, alone important. I despise the world, naturally. The world is to me a desert, or a quarry, and it could as easily be nothing as something. That is what I really think: that the self is the intimate friend of God, after being broken, after retreat from the world, and in this Yeats and I agree.
I also grow to realise, that the self in its travelling to another stage, leaving the anti-self behind, has obstacles which perhaps, Yeats did not accept, namely some force of interference and evil, or the devil. The world is the open space where the devil arouses our hatred. The evil one, to be straightforward, is what stops you from being a self. And like God, the evil is an internal object.
I would suggest, that the logical necessity of the Trinity, is required by any such mysticism, since we do also nevertheless have to submit to living in the world in some way, and therefore we are always dual or three fold, ourselves. There is real self, vision, and world. But as there is only one self which matters, so there is only one God.
Self-centring and gathering is the still point of consciousness, where God speaks to us, and communicates; and the personal life is the field of that activity, outside the observation of other people. When we ask, however, what is the world, and what are other people, we can say this: that the world is nothing at all; but also, on the contrary, that it is the creative gift of God on an infinite scale. So, while we can claim to be sons of God, and to attempt entry into the Kingdom, the imagination as Yeats might put it, we have no power at all by comparison with God, and this creation; the world whether as imagination or as machine outside us, is the field of self, where we have to live, and God creates that.
Further, unfortunately for philosophy and common understanding between us, as men, we also have to say that God speaks in single instances, to one person alone, uniquely to each man in his solitude, and not to anyone else. God has freedom to do so, or not, and follows no rule. If one had to chose a mask or a destiny in this world, on this basis, then as Yeats said, it is irrelevant what precise character the mask one wears might be; it depends on the individual; what the perfect saint and real self does, is indifferent; he should simply act ethically; but it has been typical for men to try to imitate Christ in their day to day behaviour.
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