Yeats, Coleridge and the Romantic Sage

  Yeats, Coleridge and the Romantic Sage Matthew Gibson Yeats, Coleridge and the Romantic Sage

  

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Yeats, Coleridge and the

Romantic Sage Matthew Gibson

  First published in Great Britain 2000 by

MACMILLAN PRESS LTD

  Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and London Companies and representatives throughout the world

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  ISBN 0–333–74625–2 First published in the United States of America 2000 by , ST. MARTIN’S PRESS, INC.

  Scholarly and Reference Division, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010

  ISBN 0–312–23022–2 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Gibson, Matthew, 1967– Yeats, Coleridge, and the romantic sage / Matthew Gibson. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 0–312–23022–2 (cloth)

  1. Yeats, W. B. (William Butler), 1865–1939—Knowledge—Literature. 2. Yeats, W. B. (William Butler), 1865–1939—Philosophy. 3. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 1772–1834—Philosophy. 4. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 1772–1834—Influence. 5. English poetry—19th century—History and criticism. 6. Romanticism—Great

Britain. 7. Metaphysics in literature. 8. Philosophy in literature. I. Title.

  PR5908.L5 G53 2000 821'.8—dc21 99–046990 © Matthew Gibson 2000

  

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00 Printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham, Wiltshire Contents Acknowledgements vi

  List of Abbreviations viii

  A Note on the Text xi Introduction

  1 Part I Personality

  9

  1 Phantasmagoria: the Personality of Coleridge in the Earlier Prose of Yeats 11 2 ‘Escaped from Isolating Method’: Coleridge as

  Sage in Yeats’s 1930 Diary

  29 Part II Transcendence and Immanence

  55

  3 Reason and Understanding: Coleridge’s Philosophical Influence on Yeats 57 4 ‘Wisdom, Magic, Sensation’: Coleridge’s ‘Supernatural’

  Poems in the Later Poetry of Yeats

  86 Part III Metaphor 115

5 ‘Natural Declension of the Soul’: Yeats and the Mirror 117

  6 Towards ‘Berkeley’s Roasting Spit’: Coleridge and Metaphors of Unity 149 Conclusion

  175

Appendix: Yeats’s Coleridge Collection 177

Notes

  184 Bibliography

  208 Index 216 Acknowledgements

I should like to extend thanks to the following for the help they

have given me in preparing this book: Michael Baron, Carol Peaker,

Svetlana Salowska, Deirdre Toomey and Anne Varty, all of whom, in

different ways, have helped with either the collection of material or

with the preparation of the manuscript.

  

Special thanks are due to the library of State University of New York

at Stonybrook, and to John Kelly and Roger Nyle Parisious for provid-

ing me with copies of unpublished material.

  

Especial thanks, however, are due to Peter Lewis, for having read over

earlier drafts of chapters and suggesting changes when I was first

preparing this work as a doctoral dissertation, and, of course, to

Warwick Gould for his substantial effort when supervising that initial

thesis and for providing subsequent advice.

  

The author and publishers would like to thank the following for per-

mission to reproduce copyright material:

The extracts from W. B. Yeats, Autobiographies (London: Macmillan,

1955), Essays and Introductions (London and New York: Macmillan,

1961), Explorations, selected by Mrs W. B. Yeats (London: Macmillan,

1962; New York, Macmillan, 1963), The Variorum Edition of the Poems of

W. B. Yeats, ed. Peter Allt and Russell K. Alspach (London and New

York: Macmillan, 1966), are reproduced by permission of A. P. Watt

Ltd, on behalf of Michael B. Yeats.

The extracts from Yeats’s manuscript ‘Diary, begun at Rapallo’ (1930)

are reproduced by permission of A. P. Watt Ltd, on behalf of Michael B.

Yeats and Anne Yeats.

The extracts from W. B. Yeats and T. Sturge Moore: Their Correspondence,

1901–37, ed. Ursula Bridge (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul; New

York: Oxford University Press, 1953), are reproduced by permission of

Routledge.

The extracts from The Letters of W. B. Yeats, ed. Allen Wade (London:

Rupert Hart-Davis, 1954; New York: Macmillan, 1955), together with

  Acknowledgements vii

  extracts from unpublished letters, are reproduced by permission of Oxford University Press. The extracts from A Vision by W. B. Yeats; copyright 1937 by W. B. Yeats; copyright renewed © 1965 by Bertha Georgie Yeats and Anne Butler Yeats, are reproduced by permission of Simon & Schuster. The extracts from Mythologies by W. B. Yeats, copyright © 1959 by Mrs W. B. Yeats, are reproduced by permission of Simon & Schuster. The extracts from Autobiographies by W. B. Yeats, copyright 1916, 1936 by Macmillan Publishing Company, copyrights renewed © 1944, 1964 by Bertha Georgie Yeats, are reproduced by permission of Simon & Schuster. The extracts from Explorations by W. B. Yeats, copyright © 1962 by Mrs W. B. Yeats, are reproduced by permission of Simon & Schuster. The extracts from Essays and Introductions by W. B. Yeats, copyright © 1961 Mrs W. B. Yeats, are reproduced by permission of Simon & Schuster. The extracts from the poems ‘His Bargain’, ‘The Tower’, ‘An Acre of Grass’, ‘The Seven Sages’, ‘Meditations in Time of Civil War’, ‘Coole Park and Ballylee, 1931’, ‘Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen’, ‘Byzantium’, ‘Vacillation’, ‘To Dorothy Wellesley’, ‘Supernatural Songs’, ‘The Phases of the Moon’ and ‘Long-legged Fly’ are reproduced by per- mission of Simon & Schuster from The Variorum Edition of the Poems of

  

W. B. Yeats, ed. Peter Allt and Russell K. Alspach; copyright 1928 by

  Macmillan Publishing Company; copyrights renewed © 1956 by Georgie Yeats; copyright 1933, 1934 by Macmillan Publishing Company; copyright renewed © 1961, 1962 by Bertha Georgia Yeats; copyright 1940 by Georgie Yeats; copyright renewed © 1968 by Bertha Georgie Yeats, Michael Butler Yeats, and Anne Yeats.

  The extracts from The Variorum Edition of the Plays of W. B. Yeats, ed. Russell K. Alspach, copyright © 1966 by Russell K. Alspach, are repro- duced by permission of Simon & Schuster.

  Every effort has been made to trace all the copyright holders, but if any viii List of Abbreviations List of Abbreviations

  The standard works by W. B. Yeats and S. T. Coleridge listed below are cited in the text by standard abbreviations, including volume number where appropriate, and page number. Works listed here are not included in the Bibliography at the end of the book.

  Yeats Au Autobiographies (London: Macmillan, 1955).

  AV B A Vision (London: Macmillan, 1962).

CM W. B. Yeats: A Census of the Manuscripts, by Conrad A.

  Balliet with the assistance of Christine Mawhinney (New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1990).

  

Col. L1,3 The Collected Letters of W. B. Yeats, vol. 1: 1865–1895, ed.

  John Kelly and Eric Domville; vol. 3: 1901–4, ed. John Kelly and Ronald Schuchard (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986, 1994).

  

CV A A Critical Edition of Yeats’s A Vision (1925), ed. George

Mills Harper and Walter Kelly Hood (London: Macmillan, 1978).

  

E&I Essays and Introductions (London and New York:

Macmillan, 1961).

Ex Explorations, sel. Mrs W. B. Yeats (London: Macmillan,

1962; New York: Macmillan, 1963).

L The Letters of W. B. Yeats, ed. Allan Wade (London:

Rupert Hart-Davis, 1954; New York: Macmillan, 1955).

LTSM W. B. Yeats and T. Sturge Moore: Their Correspondence,

1901–1937, ed. Ursula Bridge (London: Routledge &

  Kegan Paul; New York: Oxford University Press, 1953).

  

Mem Memoirs: Autobiography – First Draft, journal transcribed

and edited by Denis Donoghue (London: Macmillan, 1972; New York: Macmillan, 1973).

  

Myth Mythologies (London and New York: Macmillan, 1959).

MYV1,2 The Making of Yeats’s ‘A Vision’: A Study of the Automatic

Script, by George Mills Harper, 2 vols (London:

  Macmillan, 1987).

  List of Abbreviations ix

NC A New Commentary on the Poems of W. B. Yeats, by

A. Norman Jeffares (London: Macmillan, 1984).

NLI MS Manuscript, National Library of Ireland (to be followed

by number).

OBMV The Oxford Book of Modern Verse, 1895–1935, chosen by

W. B. Yeats (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1936).

UPAN The Ten Principal Upanishads, trans. Shree Purohit Swa ¯mi

  and W. B. Yeats (London and Boston: Faber & Faber, 1937).

  

UP1 Uncollected Prose by W. B. Yeats, vol. 1, ed. John P. Frayne

  (London: Macmillan; New York: Columbia University Press, 1970).

  

UP2 Uncollected Prose by W. B. Yeats, vol. 2, ed. John P. Frayne

  and Colton Johnson (London: Macmillan, 1975; New York: Columbia University Press, 1976).

  

VP The Variorum Edition of the Poems of W. B. Yeats, ed. Peter

  Allt and Russell K. Alspach (New York: Macmillan, 1957). To be cited from the corrected third printing of 1966 or later printings.

  

VPl The Variorum Edition of the Plays of W. B. Yeats, ed.

  Russell K. Alspach assisted by Catherine C. Alspach (London and New York: Macmillan, 1966). To be cited from the corrected second printing of 1966 or later printings.

  

VSR The Secret Rose, Stories by W. B. Yeats: A Variorum Edition,

ed. Warwick Gould, Phillip L. Marcus and Michael J.

  Sidnell (London: Macmillan, 1992). To be cited from this second edition, revised and enlarged from the 1981 Cornell University Press edition.

  

WWB1,2,3 The Works of William Blake, Poetic, Symbolic, and Critical,

  ed. with lithographs of the illustrated ‘Prophetic Books’, and a memoir and interpretation by Edwin John Ellis and William Butler Yeats, 3 vols (London: Bernard Quaritch, 1893).

  

YA Yeats Annual, ed. Warwick Gould (London: Macmillan,

1982– ), to be followed by volume number.

YAACTS Yeats: An Annual of Critical and Textual Studies 4, ed.

  Richard J. Finneran (Ann Arbor: UMI Press, 1986), to be followed by volume number.

  

YL Edward O’Shea, A Descriptive Catalog of W. B. Yeats’s x List of Abbreviations

  1985). To be followed by item number (or page number preceded by ‘p.’).

  

YVP1,2,3 Yeats’s Vision Papers (London: Macmillan, 1992), George

  Mills Harper (General Editor) assisted by Mary Jane Harper, vol. 1: The Automatic Script: 5 November 1917–

18 June 1918, ed. Steve L. Adams, Barbara J. Frieling and

  Sandra L. Sprayberry; vol. 2: The Automatic Script: 25 June

  1918–29 March 1920, ed. Sandra L. Sprayberry; vol. 3: Sleep and Dream Notebooks, Vision Notebooks 1 and 2, Card File, ed. Robert Anthony Martinich and Margaret Mills Harper.

  Coleridge

AP Anima Poetae, from the Unpublished Note-books of Samuel

Taylor Coleridge, ed. Ernest Hartley Coleridge (London:

  William Heinemann, 1895).

  

BL1,2 Biographia Literaria, ed. James Engell and W. Jackson Bate,

  2 vols (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul; Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983); Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Kathleen Coburn, vol. 7.

  

CL1,2,etc. The Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Earl Leslie

Griggs, 6 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956).

CN The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Kathleen

  Coburn (and Merton Christensen, vols 3 and 4), 4 vols (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1957–90).

  

CP The Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. James

Dykes Campbell (London: Macmillan, 1925 [YL 404]).

EOT1,2,3 Essays on His Times, ed. David V. Erdmann, 3 vols

  (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul; Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978); Collected Works, vol. 3.

  

LL1,2 Lectures, 1808–1819, ed. R. A. Foakes, 2 vols (London:

  Routledge & Kegan Paul; Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987); Collected Works, vol. 5.

  

LPR Lectures 1795 on Politics and Religion, ed. Lewis Patton and

  Peter Mann (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul; Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1971); Collected Works, vol. 1.

  

TT Table Talk and the Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Christabel,

  etc., Morley’s Universal Library (London & New York: A Note on the Text

  The words ‘Mask’ and ‘Daimon’, terms Yeats redefined over several years, are frequently written in italics. This is so as to place the terms, which Yeats used in a variety of works, in the firm context of A Vision, whose terminology is almost entirely italicised. This does not mean that when written in roman the terms are not frequently compatible with their description in A Vision, but simply that they are being used more in terms of the system as portrayed in other works, such as The Trembling of the Veil (1922), or indeed his poetry.

  

This pa

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A work with as bold an object as this one requires some apologia before

commencing its journey. Scholars of Yeats and Romanticism – Bloom,

Bornstein, Adams and others – have charted the various debts which

Yeats bore to Shelley, Blake, Keats and Wordsworth in painstaking

detail, to the point where much of Yeats’s work has been explained as

an attempt to escape the shadow of these powerful forebears, whose

images recrystallise under a new aegis in his poetry. A full-scale analysis

of Yeats’s reading of Coleridge, however, has seemed improbable given

the lack of available evidence that he delighted in this Romantic so

much as in others.

  

Those who have concentrated on Yeats and Coleridge have been few

and far between, and even then tend to have done so along unusual

lines. Anca Vlasopolos has argued that the method of symbolisation

suggested by Coleridge, in Chapter Fourteen of the Biographia and in

various Lay Sermons, was the foundation of the Symbolic method

  

1

practised by Baudelaire and Yeats. Robert Snukal, however, examined

Yeats’s use of Coleridge’s metaphors of mind in a chapter from his own

  2

book on Yeats’s philosophical poems. The first is interesting in itself,

and correctly observes Yeats’s belief that Coleridge was a precursor of

Symbolism, although I would argue that this has more to do with his

reading of ‘Kubla Khan’ than any conscious research into Coleridge’s

views on symbol. The other book appears to me flawed in its attribu-

tions, although this is largely due to the mainly poor understanding of

Yeats’s later esoteric work during the epoch when Snukal was writing.

  The time is ripe for a reappraisal.

  

While discussions of the relation between Yeats and other Romantics

will continue to be enriched by the ongoing publication of Yeats’s letters,

I would also argue that continued heightening of the understanding

2 Yeats, Coleridge and the Romantic Sage

  of A Vision and Yeats’s reading of philosophy should make us take his debt to Coleridge more seriously. For while Coleridge’s poetry con- tributed rather less than Shelley’s or Blake’s to Yeats’s own, it is also the case that his prose contributed far more than that of any other Romantic figure – than any other mainly ‘literary’ figure – to Yeats’s reading of philosophy after 1925. This gives Coleridge an almost unique importance to Yeats, since the latter in the last part of his career was continually attempting to reconcile the passion of the artist with the abstraction of the philosopher, and that he managed to do so – albeit rather ambivalently – owes much to his reading of this English literary forebear, whose ideas and personality became a lens for com- prehending Anglo-Irish ancestors, Classical and Modern philosophers, as well as a model for his own identity.

  How well Yeats understood Coleridge is another matter. In Chapters Nine and Ten of the Biographia Literaria, Coleridge himself described his intellectual journey from Associationism and Unitarianism to tran- scendental idealism and the Church of England, which was accompa- nied politically by a similar movement from Radicalism to Tory Politics and an avid defence of the rights of the propertied classes. Long before Richard Holmes, Coleridge himself loosely drew the divisions between the young, post-Cambridge radical in College Street, Bristol and the permanent resident at Highgate – not particularly faithfully we might complain, as he tried to pretend that both The Watchman and his par- liamentary sketches for the Morning Post were less anti-establishment than they in fact were. Nevertheless, Yeats had clearly read from

3 Chapter Ten by 1909, and had he read nothing else would have understood the antinomies of Coleridge’s youth and middle age.

  Despite this, his portrayal of Coleridge’s views frequently pays scant regard to historical accuracy, and even when it does often confuses eras. Yeats occasionally takes an historicist’s eye for Coleridge’s later beliefs when examining the poems of his earlier career, and is quite capable in any case of disregarding the flawed argument of a secondary source to absorb him as he wished. Paradoxically, the consistency and regularity with which he does this reveals a certain pattern, and a degree of thought that is by no means accidental and anecdotal, but systematic in its attempt to assert its own view over the material.

  The critical idiom through which the late nineteenth century saw Coleridge, when Yeats began to write, must nevertheless be taken into account in dealing with his emergence in Yeats’s work. To begin with, the Coleridge canon was approached somewhat differently from today.

  Introduction 3

  currently, the accepted group of great prose works incorporated certain texts which are no longer considered part of that greatness, and excluded others which are now very much revered. The Biographia

  

Literaria was slowly coming to the attention of a new generation of

  4

  readers, but had been largely ignored in the nineteenth century, and nowhere near approaching the seminal popularity of Aids to Reflection: a work adapting Coleridge’s spiritual and ethical philosophy of Reason, Understanding and Sense to the scriptures, and popular among

  5 Anglican priests. Again Table Talk, a collection of his conversation,

  largely from Highgate over eleven years, was an enduring success

  6

  throughout the Victorian era. Its popularity led Ernest Hartley Coleridge to publish Anima Poetae in 1895, a selection of notebook entries which followed in the same strain as Table Talk, offering ‘a collection of unpublished aphorisms and sentences’ ( AP xiii–xiv) from a man whose intellectual genius was not in doubt, but whose ability to sustain it over a lengthy period was.

  Yeats does not appear to have read either Aids to Reflection or Anima

  

Poetae, but like many of his generation had certainly read Table Talk,

  possibly before reading the Biographia, as well as the major poems. He was also no doubt aware of Pater’s essay on Coleridge, included in

  

Appreciations, in which the Oxford sage described him as the last great

  failure of fixed principles who attempted to create an absolute system in an era of increasing ‘fine gradations’ and relativism (as he perceived his

  7

  own age). Wolfgang Iser argues that Pater’s answer to Coleridge’s prob-

  8

  lem was a step on the path to his daring conclusion to Renaissance, in which he urges the reader to abandon knowledge for ‘exquisite

  9

  passions’, but Pater otherwise reflects accurately the intellectual attitude to the spiritual philosophy which Coleridge spent most of his life work- ing towards, and which magnum opus was eventually expounded by his

  10 disciple J. H. Greene to the yawns of thinkers eager for Hegelianism.

  This nineteenth-century view of Coleridge as a fabulous failure in all but a few seminal poems and all but a few prose pieces, one promul-

  11

  gated long before Pater by Carlyle in his Life of Sterling and by

  12 Matthew Arnold in his comparison with Joubert, continues through

  the criticism of the 1890s into periodicals which Yeats may well have read, but whose opinions surely reflect those of his immediate col- leagues. However, a new consensus of Coleridge as ‘weird, unearthly

  13 dreamer’ with interest in the supernatural also appears to take hold.

  This eventually culminates in certain figures – notably Arthur Symons – regarding him as forerunner of Symbolism and the new, fin-de-siècle

  14

4 Yeats, Coleridge and the Romantic Sage

  The younger Yeats, impressed by Coleridge’s interest in Swedenborg and Boehme, although failing to understand the intellectual scrutiny he applied to the causes of mysticism, took to both the possible super- natural and Symbolist elements in his work which his contemporaries were beginning to discern. He largely rejected the view of Coleridge as failure, although did develop an image of him as tragic Aesthete out of key with a wretched time, suffering from a spiritual sense blunted by Christianity, naturally inclined to the marvellous. On the other hand, a Coleridge of the ‘lakes’, and simple expression, who was friends with Wordsworth, sits alongside this other image in Yeats’s prose in a way which appears incongruous. The two were ultimately to be fused together improbably in the 1930s, when Yeats looked at Coleridge the philosopher to define a role for himself when trying to ‘set up as sage’.

  By 1929, when Yeats first began a systematic reading of Coleridge’s work, the critical idiom had been greatly modified. The major poems were still adored, but the Table Talk had dropped from view as a charm- ing Victorian curiosity, while the Biographia had gathered enormous esteem thanks to the new self-consciousness about criticism breaking out in the English-speaking world, and had played an important role

  15 in the establishment of practical criticism as a pedagogical tool.

  Revisions of Coleridge’s metaphysical and political writings had also served to raise the status of The Friend and works like On the

16 Constitution of Church and State, as historians of ideas retrospectively

  acknowledged Coleridge’s important role both in introducing German ideas to England, and as an original thinker in Conservative thought who blended English and German traditions. The view of Coleridge as only capable of evincing brilliance spasmodically came under attack in the early twentieth century, as his meandering prose style was finally able to reach an appreciative audience, now sufficiently versed in intel- lectual history to isolate the original aspects of Coleridge’s thought

  17 from its oftentimes tawdry execution.

  Numbered among this audience was W. B. Yeats, who reread the

  

Biographia and made a serious study of The Friend. Influenced in part by

  the new critical estimation of the prose, he turned to the great man for resolutions to questions posed by the abstractions of neo-Platonism – and found answers. He furthermore reoriented his own role as philoso- pher by understanding the methods and aspirations of ‘Coleridge at Highgate’, even if this understanding was frequently flawed. Coleridge’s personality, indeed, was often as important to Yeats as his ideas, although he usually did not substantially distinguish between

  Introduction 5

  This personality was that of the sage – a figure who had appeared in Yeats’s work before, but who was to occupy a slightly different place from this time on as an accommodation of the passionate to the ratio- nal. The image of philosopher provided by Coleridge acted as a reinter- pretation of both philosophy and Romanticism. The sage as a figure in Romantic writing, ambivalent in both Shelley and Keats, became now the spokesperson of a new and exciting form of mysticism, briefly announced in A Vision as an Ultimate Reality which is ‘concrete, sensu- ous, bodily’ ( AV B 214), but developed in many of the essays and intro- ductory pieces outside, where Yeats was able to enunciate this faith more freely.

  The first part of this book, therefore, centres in particular on Yeats’s depiction of Coleridge’s personality in his prose writings. This is of especial importance when seeking to understand Yeats’s reading, since his entire critical method – itself based upon a belief in phantasmagoria and the predominance of spiritual truth – involves an acceptance that the personality and the work are the same. For him a reading of the man was a reading of the work and while this only became finalised in 1917 as the aesthetic theory of self, anti-self and Mask, it had in fact always been his technique of criticism from his meeting with Wilde

  18 onwards.

  Yeats’s later depiction of Coleridge is as philosopher, although as a philosopher who empowers the artist and incorporates his methods and aims into the discussion, making ‘logic serve passion’. The second part deals with the realisation of this Mask as a focus for adopting the philosophy of other thinkers into A Vision and then with the impor- tance of Coleridge’s great ‘supernatural’ poems – ‘Kubla Khan’, ‘The Ancient Mariner’ and ‘Christabel’ – on Yeats’s philosophical poetry.

  The last and longest section deals with Yeats’s attempt to take not so much the Mask of sage, but of Romantic prose-writer in his essays writ- ten outside A Vision, through his adaptation of metaphors of mind taken mainly from Coleridge but also from other figures. Again, how- ever, the discussion affords insight into how Yeats uses Coleridge to explain different schools of philosophy in a way which makes them understood in Yeats’s own terms of spiritualism and cyclical fatalism, and also to adapt philosophical ideas to passionate ends.

  Chiefly, however, we shall see the extent to which Coleridge pro- vided Yeats with means of turning transcendental philosophies into forms of physical immanence: the doctrine that spirit and matter are

  19

  one. This theory conflicts with the explication of Yeats’s sometimes

6 Yeats, Coleridge and the Romantic Sage

  explains many of the aporias to be found in A Vision. In this respect Coleridge’s influence can be considered as seminal.

  Much of my argument and the material to be examined derives from the text known as Pages from a Diary Written in Nineteen Hundred and

  

Thirty, which was published in 1944 and edited by Mrs Yeats. While I

  draw attention to the significant omissions which Mrs Yeats made in preparing the piece for publication, I have kept to her text rather than reverting to the original owing to the great skill she herself exhibited in editing his work, and the unavailability of the manuscript to the gen- eral reader. Yeats was preparing either the diary or at least significant parts of it for publication: whether in the form of a ‘Discoveries’ (1907) or an Estrangement (1926), or as parts for separate essays is hard to tell, but the fact that he wrote it as numbered passages rather than simply day by day, frequently returning to earlier parts to add emendations in the form of footnotes, and laboured over the construction of the more philosophical sections, shows that its ultimate publication five years after his death was not simply the revelation of a private manuscript, but the execution of an original intention. Nevertheless, he never edited it himself, perhaps because of the late publication of A Vision to which it acts as a natural support text, clarifying many of the ontologi- cal problems therein. Mrs Yeats, however, transcribed the majority of the passages very faithfully, making occasional omissions to better express the sense of her husband’s entries, and left certain passages out either because of their too-personal nature, inappropriateness with the final design of A Vision or because of a danger of repetition in the com- plete text. Where necessary, therefore, I have referred to those omis- sions which are poignant. Generally, however, the entries from June to August which deal with the consideration of Coleridge were published undisturbed.

  This book is therefore essentially a study of influence, and is inescapably diachronic. By ‘influence’, however, I mean a relationship more objectively conceived than anything proposed by Harold Bloom. Arguments over whether Yeats’s poems were unconscious misprisions of Coleridge’s, misreadings caused by the anxiety of being influenced, are absorbing as speculation, but I have deliberately not sought to apply Bloom’s theories. While I have on occasion used John

  20 Hollander’s theory of metalepsis and echo, Bloom’s understanding of

  both metalepsis and misreading appear to me to be wholly inappropri-

  21

  ate to this study. The reasons are fairly obvious. Yeats may have fre- quently misread Coleridge, but this was not the result of creative

  22

  Introduction 7

  found in the latter’s prose works, rather than in the inner intentional- ity of his poems, and in the prose Yeats alluded consciously to Coleridge, seeing in him a source for philosophical and mystical ideas. Bloom’s approach is far too solipsistic for a study as objective as this, which in part tries to measure the extent and nature of Yeats’s misread- ing against more researched readings of the ideas he mistook.

  A few words should also be said about my use of primary texts. I have, where possible, used the original owned by Yeats, except in the case of the Biographia Literaria. The reason for making an exception in this case is the number of times to which it is referred and the relative rarity of Yeats’s own edition. While I do refer to Yeats’s copies in end- notes and Appendix, so that crucial evidence is not kept from the reader, citations in the main text are always to James Engell’s and W. Jackson Bate’s edition of the Biographia Literaria (1983).

  Coleridge was most important to Yeats in old age, but his reading of him even then was governed largely by the impressions of him he col- lected in youth. Let us begin, therefore, with his earliest consideration of Coleridge’s personality, in Chapter 1.

  

This pa

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This pa

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1 Phantasmagoria: the Personality

  of Coleridge in the Earlier Prose of Yeats

When telling of how Lionel Johnson was capable of recounting apoc-

ryphal stories from his own life as though they were true, Yeats admit-

ted that ‘these conversations were always admirable in their drama, but

never too dramatic or ever too polished to lose their casual accidental

character; they were the phantasmagoria through which his philosophy

of life found its expression’ ([1922] Au 306). This comment could easily

be seen as referring to Yeats’s own memoirs, as well as to his method of

criticism.

  

The phantasmagoria was a favourite figure for representing the imagi-

nation in the Victorian era. Present in the work of writers such as Le

1 Fanu, and Henry James – either as a metaphor of mind or as an organ-

  

isational principle – it was the most sophisticated means of creating

sudden scene changes in theatre in the nineteenth century, akin to the

modern-day slide projector, and thus a potential symbol for the sudden

materialisation and replacement of images in the mind. Whereas in

some writers it was a useful metaphor for describing the appearance of

ghosts and opium-induced phantasies, Yeats used it – long after its

redundancy – to represent the imagination as the embodiment of those

spirits, now purified of their memories, residing in the Soul of the

World or Anima Mundi. For Yeats the phantasmagoria represented a

drama, in which real history and real personalities mattered little com-

pared with the ‘dramatis personae of our dreams’ (Ex 56), and which he,

as critic and artist, embodied in both his own memoirs and his essays.

Spiritual truth was certainly at a premium over the empirical.

  

Yeats once argued with his automatic controls that ‘the style is the

man and so may be the mask’, although was told to distinguish

between the ‘artistic self’ of the man, and the more wide ontological

dimension of what the Mask was to be in A Vision, which nevertheless

12 Yeats, Coleridge and the Romantic Sage

  certainly includes the ‘artistic self’ (YVP1 162). Yeats’s own form of crit- icism usually paid scant concern to form and rhetoric, but rather con- sisted of the description of the personality he intuited through the writings. From 1909 onwards, he was developing his theory of ‘Mask’, in which the artist attains an aesthetic ‘personality’ completely

  2 secondary to his habitual self (Mem 139).

  While Yeats’s criticism depended on his own ability to discern the correct dramatis persona of an author through invocation of spirits in a new phantasmagoria, he also understood the writer as having adopted a personality through struggle with his Daimon (Myth 336–7), which again was part of the Anima Mundi, and summoned the discarnate Daimons to its service. In both cases the situation is a drama, a fiction

  3

  superior to the real because of its ontological basis. And while this view may be the latest articulation of Yeats’s understanding of literary creation, as a description of his critical technique it has validity for most of his writing life – that to which his ideas were always leading, one is tempted to say.

  In order to display Yeats’s portrayal of Coleridge we must assess chronologically the disparate and eclectic uses of the earlier poet’s name and personality to determine what, if any, consistent picture of him emerged in Yeats’s mind over the years. While doing so we must remember that at no time does Yeats appear to have made any care- fully researched readings of either Coleridge’s personality or his work; nor does he seem to have had any concern for doing so. Yeats’s own ideas absorbed Coleridge and reappropriated him accordingly. This does not mean, however, that Coleridge was altogether an unimpor- tant figure for him in his earlier career. After all, Yeats himself wrote that a young man does ‘men and women’ honour by ‘conferring their names upon his own thoughts’ (1934 [VP 837]).

  I Yeats’s early prose, from reviews for the United Irishman up until the

more Symbolist-oriented and rarified essays he wrote for the Bookman,

the Speaker and the Savoy in the late nineties, show a young man

attempting to do what he did most of his life: ‘ “Hammer [his]

thoughts into unity” ’ (Ex 263). His tastes may have modified in this

time – from the Pre-Raphaelite, to Paterian aestheticism, to the ‘bound-

ing outline’ and exactness of Blakean symbolism and then to the more

evanescent form of Symbolist verse – but his attempt to create a poetry

  Phantasmagoria: Coleridge’s Personality 13

  transcendental in tendency, remained ever the same in this era. It was an epoch in which, for Yeats at least, the personality and self- expression of the poet dissolves before the essence or mood, which is both eternal and beyond him. Or at least that is what should happen. For even in the most Symbolist of Yeats’s volumes, ‘The Wind Among the Reeds’ (1899), he could never quite escape his older Romantic

  4 inheritance and express his personality in spite of himself.

  Yeats was furthermore always using literary history to serve his pur- pose in finding poets who could act as exemplars for the various binary polarities he would set up in his critical pieces in order to explain the tradition to which he felt he belonged, and to which the poets whom he most admired belonged as well. Often, and certainly in the earlier pieces, this would reflect no studied reading of a poet, but a neces- sary understanding – perhaps uninformed – of where the poet lay in relation to himself.

  This is certainly the case with Coleridge, to whom the younger Yeats only referred a few times by name in his writings, and even then largely to illustrate his own ideas rather than concentrate on a literary hero. He first mentioned him in a review, on the poetry of R. D. Joyce, written for the 26 November 1886 edition of Irish Fireside:

  Poets may be divided roughly into two classes. First, those who – like Coleridge, Shelley and Wordsworth – investigate what is obscure in emotion, and appeal to what is abnormal in man, or become the healers of some particular disease of the spirit. During their lifetime they write for a clique, and leave after them a school. And second, the bardic class – the Homers and Hugos, the Burnses and Scotts – who sing of the universal emotions, our loves and angers, our delight in things beautiful and gallant. They do not write for a clique, or leave after them a school, for they sing for all men.

  (UP1 105) R. D. Joyce, like Sir Samuel Ferguson and Clarence Mangan, was one of the earlier generation of Anglo-Irish poets to whom Yeats turned when beginning his literary career, adopting a kind of forced admira- tion (save perhaps for Mangan). In this critique he sets up a binary of opposed exemplars typifying two types of poet, in order to justify his admiration for Joyce’s rather pedestrian verses, which in reality jarred with his already highly aesthetic bent. The ‘bardic class’, which expresses the more usual feelings of man, appeals to a much wider

14 Yeats, Coleridge and the Romantic Sage

  rare emotions. While R. D. Joyce belongs to the ‘bardic’, and thus has some excuse for writing badly, Coleridge, together with Wordsworth and Shelley, typifies the other group who attract a small audience and give expression in their verse to rare and unusual emotions; what Yeats would more normally call ‘the aesthetic school’ (UP2 88).