How to Bag A Jabberwock

We pieced our thoughts into philosophy,

And tried to bring the world under a rule

Who are but weasels fighting in a hole.

(‘Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen’)

There is surely no major poet less amenable to Darwinism than W. B. Yeats. His poetic philosophy is resolutely opposed to the scientific thinking and the arid materialism that he sees stifling modern thought. All students of Yeats quickly learn that the poet set his teeth against the ‘grey truth’ of science, targeted in the first of his Collected Poems, ‘The Song of the Happy Shepherd’ (l. 4). Across his career, one finds him railing against materialism and its associated artistic forms of realism and naturalism. The ancient, visionary Ireland that Yeats valorises opposes ‘this filthy modern tide’, providing a spiritual and idealistic bulwark against a debased epistemology of surfaces (‘The Statues’, l. 29). Like his favoured Romantics, who saw the empiricism of eighteenth-century philosophy as the enemy of the creative imagination, Yeats opposed the scientism of his day.

There are many other ways in which Darwinism is antipathetic to the Yeatsian project. Yeats’s approach to history, apocalyptic and cyclical, opposes the gradual, protracted, incremental change over vast swathes of time on which Darwin based his theory. Historical change in his poetry usually happens with a sudden blow, an incarnatory or transfixing moment, after which all is changed, changed utterly. He hated the rational, gradualist thought of the nineteenth century:

All hated Whiggery; but what is Whiggery?

A levelling, rancorous, rational sort of mind

That never looked out of the eye of a saint

Or out of a drunkard’s eye.

(‘The Seven Sages’, ll. 10–13)

Furthermore his attitude to the past tends towards nostalgia. At various moments in his career, he looks back to ancient Irish legend, to fifth-century Byzantium or to eighteenth-century Anglo-Irish Ascendancy as periods of lost grandeur. There has typically been a fall, a paradise that has been lost. And Yeats follows Blake’s idea that we regain flashes of that pre-lapsarian existence through intense imaginative creativity. The evolutionary notion of history seems very different. Rather than an idyllic garden that we have fallen from, the past is a primeval swamp from which we have evolved. This is not to suggest that evolution, at least in its Darwinian manifestation, implies ‘progress’. Darwin’s natural selection implies a blind process, shorn of telos, purpose or intentionality. We have evolved through a series of random mutations, involving protracted struggle, much death, destruction and chance. There is no design in the universe, no spiritual world to enter or esoteric knowledge to access, but rather the contingent and directionless processes of Darwinian struggle without goal. This removal of teleology and design was a fundamental shock for Yeats, as for so many other late Victorians, which lasted throughout his life. In a 1934 essay on Balzac, Yeats in a telling remark refers approvingly to evolution but excepts that aspect which ‘our instinct repudiates’, namely ‘Darwin’s exaltation of accidental variations’ (1961, 444).

So it might seem a fool’s errand to try to trace a vein of Darwinism in a poet whose avowed view of the world is so inhospitable not just to Darwinism, but to any system of thought which seeks truth through the accumulation of empirically derived evidence rather than through visionary revelation. However, Yeats’s views are mercurial and the intellectual coordinates of his poetry continually shifting. One does not go to his verse to distil or extract views, opinions or consistent outlooks. This is poetry that adopts personae, masks, symbology, elaborate and often arcane philosophical and religious systems, not to resolve questions, but to amplify the power of poetic utterance. But it is poetry, nonetheless, that is profoundly responsive to the intellectual currents and crises of the age. While Yeats might articulate strenuous opposition to scientific thought, his work is far more ambiguous in its response to evolutionary biology than is often recognised. The image of the Irish Revival as anti-scientific, which Yeats more than anyone cultivated, has been thoroughly scotched in recent years (see Caste, 2001; Garrigan Mattar, 2004). Moreover, the impact of Darwin on Irish culture is gaining recognition, partly thanks to the pioneering work of John Wilson Foster (Foster, ed., 1997). While he repudiates Darwinism on one level, that of accident and surfaces, Yeats appropriates it on another, that of struggle, conflict and change. The appropriation is often very complex, involving infiltrations, borrowing, thwarting, distorting, twisting, enlisting, rejecting and reacting. The critical yield here may be subtle, but it is nonetheless powerful in checking our notion of Yeats’s response to the key cultural crisis of his time and how that response relates to other, more often discussed aspects of Yeats’s intellectual disposition, such as nationalism, Celticism, oligarchism and conservatism. Darwinian watermarks may not be the most vivid in Yeats’s work but they can, nonetheless, mark vital points of disruption and disorder, where creative tension and poetic energy are released.

Yeats may have bemoaned the ‘exaltation of accidental variations’ in Darwinism. Yet even in his prose work we can find him speaking of his love for ‘the gaming-table of Nature, where many are ruined but none is judged, and where all is fortuitous, unforeseen’ (1962, 280). If we do not find consistency in Yeats’s prose, still less are we likely to find it in his poetry. ‘We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry’, he famously wrote (1959, 331). The intellectual currents in his verse eddy and whirl variously and often against each other. There is a difference between seeking to identify Darwin’s influence and determining how a writer registers in his work the cultural impact of a Darwinian view of the world. Recognising this trace, however counter-intuitive it might seem, however against the received image of Yeats the anti-materialist, can unsettle received ideas of his intellectual and spiritual investments. Yet we are not necessarily delineating a direct or conscious influence. Darwin’s theories entered the culture like a dye, especially in the early twentieth century, when the rediscovery of Mendelian genetics and the so-called ‘modern synthesis’ validated his theory of natural selection as the principal means of evolutionary change. The Zeitgeist as a whole gets coloured by presumptions of Darwin’s theories and therefore a writer will recreate images and motifs even without being aware of having done so. In reading Yeats’s poetry through a Darwinian lens, we are seldom identifying a direct confrontation with a scientific theory but rather tracing the poetic encounter with a dispersed cultural legacy. For all the scholarly accomplishments of historicist Yeats studies, we will not find this significance solely in the archives and the letters. We also need to look to the energetics of the poetry, for it is here where we will find him grappling with the crisis of value, the livid moments of self-doubt and poetic contradiction that reveal the quarrel of the poet with himself.

There are at least four recurrent concerns in Yeats’s poetic outlook which merit the term ‘Darwinian’, even if they do not always come from a direct encounter with Darwin. First, the depiction of non-teleological, contingent processes of nature, particularly natural reproduction. Repeatedly, in Yeats, sexual desire in its natural manifestation is blindly generative and compulsively driven, suggestive of a process rather than a goal-driven end. The telling Yeatsian noun here is ‘generation’, the telling adjective ‘frenzied’. Second, Yeats writes from an intellectual milieu in which the Romantic bond between humanity and nature has been irrevocably torn. From the early poems of The Wind Among the Reeds (1899) onwards, the lack of design or purpose in the forces of nature can leave the poet terribly isolated, unconsoled and vulnerable. Unlike Wordsworth and Coleridge, for whom nature operates as a salve to the mechanistic debasements of scientific thinking, Yeats, according to Terence Brown, ‘saw in mere nature a cold and alien otherness’ (1999, 79). If the essential alterity of nature, including the animal world, is registered and poetically deployed, there is also, thirdly, a recognition of the kinship between human beings and other animals. The blurring of species can, in some instances, indicate the incursions of the supernatural into the human or cultural realm, as in ‘The Song of Wandering Aengus’ or ‘Solomon and the Witch’. But at other, decisive, moments, Yeats suggests that behind the protective layers of culture and civilisation, humans are bestial and brutally competitive. In one of his great poems of historical crisis, ‘Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen’, he writes of political violence: ‘We, who seven years ago / Talked of honour and of truth, / Shriek with pleasure if we show / The weasel’s twist, the weasel’s tooth’ (section IV). In disgust at the downfall and death of Parnell in ‘Parnell’s Funeral’, the poet pulls away the deceptive layers of civility to reveal a stripped human figure wracked with bestial guilt: ‘Leave nothing but the nothings that belong / To this bare soul, let all men judge that can / Whether it be an animal or a man’ (ll. 29–31). The final trace of Darwinism we could point at in Yeats’s poetry is the engagement with ideas of sexual selection and hereditarianism, especially the linkage between cultural and biological degeneration. Yeats’s late interest in eugenics has received substantial critical attention (see Cullingford, 1981; Stanfield, 1988; Bradshaw, 1992; Howes, 1996; Childs, 2001). But it is usually related to his politics – his long-standing endorsement of oligarchy and aristocracy, and his flirtations with fascism – not the wider presence of evolutionary patterns in his poetry and thought.

Before tracing further the Darwinian strain in Yeats’s poetry itself, it may be worth considering what Yeats’s autobiographies reveal about his response to evolutionary theory. As an adolescent, he was in thrall to science and a cheerleader for the evolutionary theories he would later ostensibly repudiate. He recounts his enthusiasm for natural science and for evolutionary thought throughout Reveries Over Childhood and Youth (1916). However, as he got older, he reacted against Darwin or more particularly against the Darwinian advocates of his day. In Yeats’s second volume of autobiography, The Trembling of the Veil (1922), T. H. Huxley (‘Darwin’s bulldog’) and the controversial Irish scientist John Tyndall are repeatedly linked to the French realist painters Jules Bastien-Lepage and Carolus-Duran as an unlovely quartet who embody the realist-materialist worldview that Yeats scorned. Significantly, the materialism of these thinkers is explicitly linked to what Yeats regarded as the art of surfaces. His autobiographies, written as they are as ‘reveries’ – digressive, associative and suggestive rather than indicative and mimetic – avoid the logic and straight road of the realist form. So the style of the autobiographies replicate the anti-naturalist thrust of their theme.

Early in The Trembling of the Veil, there is an account of Yeats’s intellectual development that is often quoted to illustrate his anti-scientific convictions. He ascribes to the encounter a whole religio-aesthetic outlook:

I was unlike others of my generation in one thing only. I am very religious, and deprived by Huxley and Tyndall, whom I detested, of the simple-minded religion of my childhood, I had made a new religion, almost an infallible Church of poetic tradition, of a fardel of stories, and of personages, and of emotions, inseparable from their first expression, passed on from generation to generation by poets and painters with some help from philosophers and theologians. I wished for a world where I could discover this tradition perpetually, and not in pictures and in poems only, but in tiles around the chimney-piece and in the hangings that kept out the draught. (1955, 115–16)

If Huxley and Tyndall were ‘detested’, they seem nonetheless to have been powerfully formative, robbing Yeats of his ‘simple-minded’ Christianity and impelling him to embrace a combination of the occult and the aesthetic. So they are renounced but also allowed leverage. It is striking that Yeats diagnoses his early attempts to create a poetic and philosophical system – and creating poetic and philosophical systems would be a key feature of his career – as a reaction to theories of evolution. Not only the psychological condition but also the narrative flow becomes disrupted and impeded as the encounter is described. The passage’s diversion into tiles and hangings signifies at once an effort to sacralise the material and ordinary, a knowing metaphor for the protective or prophylactic dimension of this sacralisation (keeping out the draft) and, finally, a narrative waywardness. Autobiography, as a genre, invests in a sense of continuity and progress, in a coherent stable subject, who is affected by his or her environment but ultimately has control over it. Natural selection, the exaltation of accidental variations, is pitted precisely against this idea of agency. Yeats purports to be traumatised by the toppling of divine power, but the more disruptive challenge, which registers at the level of autobiographical form, is that to stable, continuous, causally coherent self-narrative. The relevant encounter with evolution, like the formal qualities of much of Yeats’s autobiography, is marked by narrative indirection, a meandering tone of poetic reverie.

But we must distinguish between the Autobiographies as artistic work on the one hand and as a historical source on the other. Given Yeats’s habit of crafting retrospective teleology, for moulding the past from the point of view of the present, the appropriate response should be scepticism (see Ronsley, 1968; Wright, 1987). According to his biographer, Yeats ‘altered and re-shaped the pattern of his earlier life to fit with the story of his emerging country – changing perspective and even chronology to make his point’ (Foster, 2005, 6). Elsewhere in Yeats’s autobiographies Huxley and Tyndall are adulated, not detested. The first volume, Reveries Over Childhood and Youth, indicates that earlier in his adolescence Yeats was an evangelist for scientific materialism, goading the faithful with geological evidence against Bishop Ussher’s account of the age of the world. Biographical sources confirm this self-image. A friend and contemporary recollects that he was scandalously ‘brimful of The Descent of Man’ (Foster, 1997, 32). So the passage in The Trembling of the Veil is surely anachronistic, included perhaps to give his later hostility to materialism a coherent narrative. The reference to ‘simple-minded religion’ is a misleading description of his religious upbringing. Yes, he was baptised and confirmed, and the periods of childhood spent with his mother’s family in Sligo entailed a large degree of conventional observance. But his adolescence was dominated by his atheistic and materialist father, an influence that followed into his school life, where he excelled at science subjects (Foster, 1997, 28). Yeats’s attitude to science and its subterranean persistence in his work need to be understood within a complex Oedipal reaction against not just his materialist father but also a series of father figures, as detailed in Reveries. From God, to his maternal grandfather, to his actual father, to the established authority of Darwin and Huxley, Yeats had a series of paternal figures. Edward Dowden, a friend of his father, becomes the next occupier of this role, before John O’Leary, the old Fenian, takes it on, as Yeats’s interests move to Ireland and nationalism.

So, against the account Yeats gives in The Trembling of the Veil, the trauma of losing religion is not caused by science, by the detested Huxley and Tyndall. On the contrary, scientific zeal would seem to operate as a compensation for the loss of religion. It, not the ‘infallible Church of poetic tradition’, initially becomes his surrogate passion. When at the age of fifteen he returns to Ireland to live in Howth, a village north of Dublin, he begins to think of his ‘schoolwork as an interruption of my natural history studies’ (1955, 56). He dreams of becoming a celebrated naturalist and, with the zeal of the convert, wants to evangelise his views, especially to those who will be religiously compromised by them:

[I] was hot for argument in refutation of Adam and Noah and the Seven Days. I had read Darwin and Wallace, Huxley and Haeckel, and would spend hours on a holiday plaguing a pious geologist, who when not at some job in Guinness’s brewery, came with a hammer to look for fossils in the Howth cliffs. ‘You know,’ I would say, ‘that such and such human remains cannot be less, because of the strata they were found in, than fifty thousand years old’. ‘Oh!’ he would answer, ‘they are an isolated instance’. And once when I pressed hard my case against Ussher’s chronology, he begged me not to speak of the subject again. ‘If I believed what you do,’ he said, ‘I could not live a moral life’. (1955, 60)

Yeats sounds like a prototype Richard Dawkins here, or the Wise Man in his 1914 play The Hour Glass, eager to refute the superstitious and unenlightened wherever he finds them. He is nonetheless very divided. He has not come on his naturalist explanations without much struggle and, in a sense, their attractions for him are their connections not just with his own father but with authority more generally. At the same time as he feels safe in the conviction of established certainty, he has a conflicted impulse to rebel, to make his own space. He is always drawn to proof and evidence, but he still feels the lure of the secret, the unseen, the supernatural.

By the time he reaches his later teenage years, some of his occult interests are beginning to stir: ‘I still carried my green net but I began to play at being a sage, a magician or a poet’ (1955, 64). But this seems more like a trouble-free segue than a grandiose renunciation. His interest in Sligo folklore slides into the investigative mechanisms that are already in place. His naturalist forays for eggs and butterflies become instead a hunt for raths and faery hills. This move from science to the supernatural, in other words, rather than being an inversion, is in important senses a continuation. This is a crucial pattern. Yeats’s poetic constructions of the supernatural often resemble the natural world against which they stand, ostensibly, in opposition. As he continues his Oedipal overthrow of his father’s influence, he turns against science. But his anti-scientific beliefs are mediated by that which he seeks to renounce. He comes to think of his father’s philosophy as ‘a misunderstanding created by Victorian science, and science I had grown to hate with a monkish hate; but no good came of it, and in a moment I would unsay what I had said and pretend that I did not really believe it’ (1955, 82). There are clearly split and divided motivations here, more even than the usual fickleness and faddishness of adolescence.

The autobiographies suggest that psychical research and mystical philosophy helped Yeats break from the influence of his father and his father’s friends. But Yeats’s early scientific interests laid the ground for his attraction to various modes of the occult, including the spiritualist works of Madame Blavatsky. The attraction of theosophy for Yeats, as for other fin-de-siècle thinkers, was its splicing of evolutionary patterns onto spiritualist accounts of the universe. The writings of Blavatsky and, another key work for Yeats, A. P. Sinnett’s Esoteric Buddhism (1883) determinedly reveal symmetries between Eastern religious doctrine and Western science, especially Darwinism. Theosophy allows Yeats to incorporate the force of evolutionary theory into a system that removes from it its materialist threat. We can see the attraction of this belief for someone who found Huxley and Tyndall at once compelling and religiously traumatic. Luckily, Darwinian accident, according to theosophy, is an incomplete picture. It can be absorbed by a totality at once more uplifting and redemptive, sanctified by the impenetrable operation of unseen and superior powers.

At all stages, however, Yeats preserves an abiding obsession with verification. He may, as he claims, be naturally religious in one respect, but this never extends to faith. However incredible some of his occult beliefs seem now, he never stopped seeking proof of them. If he renounced the evidence of the senses, Yeats never renounced evidence per se. Of his membership of the Esoteric section of the Theosophical Society in the 1890s, he wrote, ‘I was always longing for evidence, but ashamed to admit my longing’ (1972, 23–24), and as a result of some attempts to evoke the spirits of dead flowers he was expelled. It is scientific materialism that he seeks to eschew, not scientific proof. Towards the end of his life Yeats is still trying to splice the natural with the supernatural, to find a way to reconcile the powers of the imagination and science:

I am convinced that in two or three generations it will become generally known that the mechanical theory has not reality, that the natural and the supernatural are knit together, that to escape a dangerous fanaticism we must study a new science. (1961, 518)

This is consistent with the way Yeats always approached his supernatural and esoteric forays: meshed in the urge for proof, for verifiability. He does not forsake arid science for the allure of occultism and faery lore. Rather, he moves from enchantment with science in adolescence to the science of enchantment in adulthood.

III

It is well known that Yeats is a poet of conflict, opposition, dialectic, irresolution. Despite the current of evolutionary biology in the Autobiographies, and its endurance in more submerged form in Yeats’s theosophical interests, scholarly investigation has underplayed the impact of scientific thinking in general, and Darwinism in particular, in reading Yeats’s conflictual aesthetics. His renunciations of science have tended to be taken at face value. For Lionel Stevenson in his classic study of Darwinism in modern poetry, Darwin Among the Poets, the ‘Celtic poets’ Yeats and Æ were evasive, deploying reincarnation and spiritualism as a way of avoiding the intractable realities of the material world (1932, 298–99). Yet the Darwinian understanding of the sphere of nature, shot through with the aleatory, fecund, desiring, directionless impulses of natural selection, is one of the systems of belief that Yeatsian conflict must negotiate. Yes, there is often a move towards ‘escape’ in Yeats, but there is a counterpointing register and awareness of the physical and transient world. If he turns away from the natural world of struggle and change, the poetry critiques itself for the renunciation. Every student of Yeats knows that the move into artifice in ‘Sailing to Byzantium’ is a fraught and ambivalent journey. Though Yeats seeks to escape ‘[w]hatever is begotten, born and dies’ (I, l. 6) for the transcendent mythical world of Byzantium, he cannot quite refrain from hearing that sensual music in the mythic world of purified souls and gold enamelling. Indeed, he is covertly dependent on it, as he can but sing of a temporal dimension – ‘Of what is past, or passing, or to come’ (IV, l. 8). As Richard Ellmann puts it, the bird here is ‘irrevocably dependent upon the nature which it effects to spurn’ (1964, 45).

Whatever the blandishments of the other world – the non-natural world – nature exerts a pull which Yeats cannot resist. In an early poem ‘To the Rose upon the Rood of Time’, first published in 1892, he summons the Rose so that:

I find under the boughs of love and hate,

In all poor foolish things that live a day,

Eternal beauty wandering on her way.

(I, ll. 10–12)

Yet in the second stanza he urges the rose to

Come near, come near, come near – Ah, leave me still

A little space for the rose-breath to fill!

Lest I no more hear common things that crave;

The weak worm hiding down in its small cave,

The field-mouse running by me in the grass,

And heavy mortal hopes that toil and pass.

(II, ll. 11–18)

For all his investment in imaginative transfiguration, Yeats is enduringly drawn to those ‘common things that crave’ and ‘heavy mortal hopes that toil and pass’, that Darwinian world of effort, struggle and death that cannot be renounced. The common things here (the weak worm and the frightened mouse) are susceptible to predators, their vulnerability reinforcing the poet’s obligation to grant them his attention. So the poem simultaneously acknowledges and resists the call to transcendence. The resistance is underpinned by a sense of nature that is shot through with the processes of natural struggle without goal. It will not be the last time that Yeats negotiates the opposition.

The feature of Yeats’s depiction of nature which makes it most attuned to the idea of natural selection is its anti-teleological orientation. From his earliest work, the natural world in Yeats represents fecundity, destruction and desire, but it is often a force as blind and directionless as it is restless and generative. In early poems like ‘The Pity of Love’ (1892), ‘He Reproves the Curlew’ (1896) and ‘He Thinks of His Past Greatness when a Part of the Constellations of Heaven’ (1898), the sounds of nature, of wind, birds and animals, are often a torment to the lovelorn poet, a reminder of his own disconnection both from his beloved and from the world of sexual generation: ‘O beast of the wilderness, bird of the air, / Must I endure your amorous cries’ (‘He Thinks of His Past Greatness’, ll. 11–12). The processes of animal copulation and predation, desire and death, resist amalgamation into any organic whole or purposive vision. In poems like ‘The Sorrow of Love’ (1892; rev. 1925), Yeats does not assume a human connection with the natural world, but rather enacts the process by which such a connection is forged through the agency of the human imagination.

Moving to a later phase of Yeats’s career, we still find the competing allure of supernatural renunciation of a transient world and the poetry’s need for embodied experience. ‘A Dialogue of Self and Soul’, a long and complex poem in two parts first published in 1929, pits the contesting calls of spiritual renunciation of self and plenitude against the embrace of the physical world of change and struggle. In Part I, ‘My Soul’ urges ‘My Self’ to

Think of ancestral night that can

If but imagination scorn the earth

And intellect its wandering

To this and that and t’other thing,

Deliver from the crime of death and birth.

(I, ll. 20–24)

But My Self, contemplating Sato’s sword and its embroidery, claims ‘as by a soldier’s right / A charter to commit the crime once more’ (ll. 31–32). To follow the soul in renouncing the sensible world, the world of change and death, is to give up one’s individuation, the pith of one’s self, and – most devastating of all for a poet – one’s capacity to express. My Soul’s final words are ‘when I think of that my tongue’s a stone’ (l. 40). My Self speaks the whole of Part II, avowedly choosing the option of living ‘again’ (presumably through reincarnation) rather than following My Soul into the silence of transcending night. He concludes by affirming the physical world, despite its pain and blind struggle, through images of enmired, purposeless biological conflict:

I am content to live it all again

And yet again, if it be life to pitch

Into the frog-spawn of a blind man’s ditch,

A blind man battering blind men.

(II, ll. 17–20)

The Darwinian watermark in Yeats is discernible in these last two lines, in the arresting use of frog-spawn imagery and the merging of blindness with conflict. But the atmosphere is, nonetheless, one of triumphant contentment concluding on a final chiasmatic couplet, ‘We are blest by everything, / Everything we look upon is blest’ (ll. 31–32). It is perhaps the most upbeat acceptance of blind generative natural force in Yeats’s work.

Perhaps the poem can afford to be affirmative because the choice to live ‘again’, allowing reincarnation into the balance, removes the horrors of mortality that poets of a more materialist bent have had to confront. But despite the supernatural elements, this is a poem which is enmeshed in biological struggle and the physical world, especially in Part II. Yeats’s esoteric systems do not preclude a semantic debt to Darwin. The blind creature struggling in a ditch is a powerful image for Yeats, used for various ends. There are other moments in his corpus when it suggests baseness, squalor, disgust or degeneracy. Blindness, eyes, sight are perennially rich images and symbols. But among their significations is the notion of the random and aleatory, the blind chance that disturbs him in natural selection.

There is an important sense in which not just the vision the poetry expresses but also the form and shape of Yeats’s poetry accords with natural fecundity, ‘Those images that yet / fresh images beget’ (1957, 498). Clearly, Yeats’s poetics is tremendously determined and ‘authored’ insofar as its rhythm, metre and syntax are concerned. In this respect, the poet stands opposed to the accidental quality of natural selection. ‘The poet’, in one of Yeats’s more perplexing quotations, ‘is never the bundle of accident and incoherence that sits down to breakfast’ (1961, 509). But even this assertion of ordered and determined poetic activity registers the accidental forces that pervade the non-poetic spheres. The images of nature that Yeats’s poetry depicts are, typically, distanced from intentionality or design in a manner befitting a post-Darwinian world. This is so for the alienating images of nature that disturb the lovelorn poet in The Wind Among the Reeds but also for a poem like ‘Easter, 1916’, which pits a heavily directed, teleological idea of political fanaticism against the ‘blind’ processes of nature, or ‘Sailing to Byzantium’, where the generative power of sexuality specifically produces a sort of blindness and amnesia.

The effect of ‘Easter, 1916’ would be lost if the poem did not set up an opposition between the purposive hearts and the random forces of procreating nature. Hence the crucial third stanza:

Hearts with one purpose alone

Through summer and winter seem

Enchanted to a stone

To trouble the living stream.

The horse that comes from the road,

The rider, the birds that range,

From cloud to tumbling cloud,

Minute by minute they change;

A shadow of cloud on the stream

Changes minute by minute;

A horse hoof slides on the brim,

And a horse plashes within it;

The long-legged moor-hens dive,

And hens to moor-cocks call;

Minute by minute they live:

The stone’s in the midst of all. (ll. 41–56)

Critics differ on Yeats’s political stance here, as befits a poem so rich in ambivalence, but all agree on the centrality of this verse paragraph. Unlike the other three paragraphs it does not conclude on the famous refrain ‘a terrible beauty is born’; unlike the others, the verbs are active rather than passive. Elsewhere the rebels are ‘changed, changed utterly’ (ll. 15, 79) but here it is nature itself which changes ‘minute by minute’ – the natural world is one of adaptation to an ever-shifting environment based on survival and sexual reproduction. Those moorhens dive to eat and survive; they call to the males not just to live but to reproduce, though they act not because their hearts are of ‘one purpose’ but rather because they are driven by the instincts of blind nature. The world here operates according to multiple non-directed energies, which contrasts with and arguably rebukes the petrified fanaticism and unnatural ideology of the rebels. The multiplicity of a non-teleological nature is placed alongside over-determined political sacrifice.

If the Darwinian trace is discernible in Yeats’s political poetry, it is all the more so in the poetry which imagines supernatural alternatives to the physical, embodied, transient world of nature. Typically, the lure to another world, be it to the faery world in his early work or fifth-century Byzantium in his maturity, is shot through with peril and unreality. The afterlife is itself often haunted or imaged by the teeming natural world, marked by desire and change, brutality and death. The energy of Yeats’s poetry often depends on images of profusion and variation, from which he is at the same time alienated. If he is excluded from the sensuous music at the start of ‘Sailing to Byzantium’ and must forsake ‘that country’ (I, l. 1) for the purged and gilded ‘artifice of eternity’ (III, l. 8), in ‘Byzantium’ the furious, sexual energies of the roiling waters as spirits make their way towards the shores impinge on the stable purities of the emperor’s pavement:

Astraddle on the dolphin’s mire and blood,

Spirit after spirit! The smithies break the flood,

The golden smithies of the Emperor!

Marbles of the dancing floor

Break bitter furies of complexity,

Those images that yet

Fresh images beget,

That dolphin torn, that gong-tormented sea.

(ll. 33–40)

In ‘Byzantium’, organic ‘complexity’ is disdained or mocked by the purged, night-time images and changeless artifice of this afterlife. That the world of change and biology is figured in this way – ‘All mere complexities / The fury and the mire of human veins’ (ll. 7–8) – registers the organic diversity created by natural selection but, more notably, separates ‘complexity’ from ‘progress’. Non-Darwinian versions of evolution often depict it as ascending ever upwards, towards an implied goal; but natural selection generates degeneration and obsolescence as well as sophisticated adaptation. The point is that this is a value-free process: natural selection operates by blind struggle without goal. That use of the adjective ‘mere’ in ‘Byzantium’, alongside the idea of ‘furious’ movement and change, suggests conflict, struggle and non-teleological reproduction. So pressured is the urge to ‘beget’ in these final stanzas that it bleeds into the non-biological too. Hence, the poem depicts ‘flames begotten of flame’ (l. 27), which seem determined by the generative mechanisms of the physical world which they are there to purge. There is even a suggestion that imagery and language, the raw materials of poetry, are themselves caught up in an ineluctable reproductive process: ‘Those images that yet / Fresh images beget’.

The ideas of diversity and multiplicity, so central to Darwin’s theories, are often both compelling and terrifying for Yeats. He seems to accept Herbert Spencer’s idea that the tendency of both nature and society is to move from simplicity to complexity. In a public lecture of 1893 entitled ‘Nationality and Literature’ Yeats found the social organism replicating the natural: ‘Its growth is from unity to multiplicity, from simplicity to complexity, and if we examine the method of this growth, we find that it takes place through a constant sub-division of the constituent cells’ (1970, 268). While Spencer tends to equate complexity with improvement or benefit, Yeats takes the opposite evaluative position (see Dwan, 2008, 79–110). For Yeats, the word ‘simplicity’ is typically a word of praise, ‘complexity’ a word of disdain. He seeks to purify the furious complexities of modern society, its fibrillation of thought and its disintegration of the unity of being. Significantly, though, as in ‘Byzantium’, the complexity that Yeats finds so noxious in modern society and thought has a biological correspondence in evolutionary ideas of variation. Unchecked breeding, like untrammelled culture or society without authority, leads to ugly complexity and variation, at the cost of unity of purpose or development. It is not surprising, therefore, that the later Yeats was to be attracted to the idea of eugenics as a way of checking cultural and biological degeneration.

Yeats’s poetic treatment of natural process, unmediated by intentionality, becomes starker in his late work as he delves more deeply into ‘the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart’ (‘The Circus Animals’ Desertion’, III, l. 8). It could be that the later Yeats is finding more austere and brutal images in response to the violent currents he feels swelling in European politics. It may be too that depictions of physical sexuality are a way of railing against his own ageing body:

You think it horrible that lust and rage

Should dance attendance upon my old age;

They were not such a plague when I was young;

What else have I to spur me into song?

(‘The Spur’)

Or it could be that, as the modern synthesis takes hold and natural selection becomes more fully accepted in the culture, the poet is registering humanity’s place in a nature that is random, mechanical and without solace. One response is to fasten on to types of evolutionism that allow human agency. Alongside his interest in lust and rage in the 1930s comes the notorious enthusiasm for eugenic ideology. This is a late manifestation of Yeats’s tendency to imbibe evolutionary thought while resisting its materialist disenchantments. He refracts the focus from natural selection onto sexual selection. It should be remembered that his interest in sexual choice and its biological determinants is evident much earlier in his work too. It is present, for instance, in the hereditarian hauteur of his ‘Pardon, Old Fathers’, the ‘Introductory Rhymes’ to Responsibilities (1914), where the as yet childless poet asks pardon of his ‘old fathers’, who have bequeathed him blood that has not passed through any ‘huxter’s loin’ (l. 8). The fear of degeneration is also discernible in the play On Baile’s Strand (1903), where Cuchulain is torn by the impulse to procreate but at the same time fearful of the loss of power and energy of the biological copy.

Most attention to Yeats and eugenics has centred on his joining the Eugenics Society in 1936 and his 1938 pamphlet On the Boiler, but by tracing Yeats’s reading some decades beforehand, Donald Childs (2001, 170–231) has demonstrated that Yeats’s involvement in eugenic thought dates back to the early years of the twentieth century. On the Boiler itself, as is well known, not only espouses a virulent form of eugenics, but also calls for class warfare (by the upper classes against the over-breeding masses). It is shot through with the most apocalyptic pronouncements of degeneration and the impending crumbling of civilisation and advocates a notoriously violent and virulent eugenic programme. Those who wish to excuse Yeats read the text as a wayward eccentric performance, designed to scandalise, and atypical of the liberal instincts of his earlier work. Those more inclined to indict the poet, such as W. J. McCormack (2005), see in his ideology a most poisonous fascist apologetic that has been too long exonerated by timid critics. In general, Yeats the eugenicist has been an arena for a debate about Yeats’s politics. Less often has it been seen as a late flowering of a long-standing engagement with ideas of evolutionary biology and, specifically, heredity.

To what extent is this embrace of eugenics Darwinian? On the Boiler and the key text that influenced it, Raymond B. Cattell’s The Fight for Our National Intelligence (1937), are alike in ascribing the biological degeneration that eugenics seeks to ameliorate through active state intervention to society’s inhibition of natural selection. The weak thrive and procreate in advanced civilisations because they do not die as they would in a state of natural competitiveness. But Darwin stopped short of advocating eugenics, famously asserting in The Descent of Man that to inhibit our protection of the weakest would be to damage the ‘noblest part of our nature’ (1874, 134). But part of the appeal of eugenics, for Yeats, came precisely in its reanimation of human agency in the sphere of reproduction. He becomes in the 1930s preoccupied with the idea of sexual choice. This may be a later outgrowth of his long-standing interest in sexual obsession or enchantment, manifest for example in ‘The Song of Wandering Aengus’, in Yeats’s many poems of lost love for Maud Gonne or in his play Cathleen Ni Houlihan (1902). But for Yeats in his Last Poems (1939) sexual choices are, or should be, more deliberate and considered. When the mythic heroine of his early narrative poem The Wanderings of Oisin (1889) reappears in ‘News for the Delphic Oracle’, a poem which figures the afterlife in images of fecund sexuality, she is ‘Man-picker Niamh’ (l. 5). In ‘Under Ben Bulben’, he famously instructs Irish poets to ‘Scorn the sort now growing up / All out of shape from toe to top, / Their unremembering hearts and heads / Base-born products of base beds’ (V, ll. 3–6).

In many of these poems, as in his late play Pugatory (1939), Yeats’s eugenic ideas are often figured in equestrian metaphor, not surprisingly in a predominantly rural and agricultural country like Ireland. But they are also individuated, aligned with his valorisation of the imagination. He declares in On the Boiler that ‘We should count men and women who pick, as it were, the dam or sire of a Derby winner from between the shafts of a cab, among persons of genius, for this genius makes all other kinds possible’ (1962, 430). Selecting the right horse, or the right breeder for Derby winners, transforms blind gamble into a sort of skill. And surely one of the reasons why Yeats finds eugenic ideology appealing is because it is another version of Darwinism shorn of chance or the ‘exaltation of accidental variations’. He finds a way of clawing human control back from the randomness of natural selection by advocating not simply sexual selection, explicated in The Descent of Man, but rather scientifically controlled methods of goal-oriented breeding. Eugenics, for Yeats, was, like spiritualism or Nietzscheanism, a way of recognising evolutionary patterns but resisting the aleatory aspect which he found uncongenial.

But at the same time as Yeats poeticises sexual selection, there is elsewhere in the late work a searing recognition of the processes of natural selection. Nature is presented as cold, alien, random and inhospitable. One of his most well known late poems, ‘Man and the Echo’, culminates in the ineluctable randomness of brute suffering:

MAN

O Rocky Voice,

Shall we in that great night rejoice?

What do we know but that we face

One another in this place?

But hush, for I have lost the theme,

Its joy or night seem but a dream;

Up there some hawk or owl has struck,

Dropping out of sky or rock,

A stricken rabbit is crying out,

And its cry distracts my thought.

(ll. 37–46)

Just before this signal distraction, the poet fantasises about the moment when ‘Man’ gains a non-bodily state of certainty, consummation and triumphant renunciation: ‘all work done, dismisses all / Out of intellect and sight / And sinks at last into the night’ (ll. 34–36). This embrace of nightly oblivion is disrupted, as so often in Yeats, by the return of nature. Yet now, for the poet on the cusp of mortality, it is no longer the fecund, lively, teeming, generative world that lures him back to life and light, as in ‘The Rose’. He is rather knocked off his meditative stride by the cruelties of predation, red in tooth and claw, the unseen rabbit, snatched by the unidentified, unidentifiable predator. The earlier Yeats tends to be specific when dealing with his birds. They soar on mythic winds, with the eagle representing aristocratic hauteur and superiority (‘the lidless eye that loves the sun’ (1957, 264)). Now, however, the predator is drained of totemic significance, the final off-rhyme of ‘out’ and ‘thought’ acknowledging the dissonance that natural violence visits on the creative imagination. The casual ‘some hawk or owl’ indicates not the indifference of the poet, but the disinterested operations of blind selection. ‘Nothing in modern poetry bears witness to Darwin’s influence more directly than the way poets write about birds of prey’, writes John Holmes in his recent study of Darwinism in poetry. Birds of prey once represented aristocrats or, as in Hopkins’ ‘Windhover’, the glories of God’s creation. Since ‘Darwinism has taken hold, however, falcons have been folded into the more disreputable category of hawks, for poets if not for ornithologists’ (Holmes, 2009, 159). ‘Man and the Echo’ instances the shift. It is, as it were, a metaphor for Yeats’s conflictual aesthetics, where the attempts to construct an alternative to the recalcitrant and unwieldy world of Darwinian accident achieves its fullest expression by covertly admitting the anxiety of its incomplete renunciation.

Seamus Heaney claims that this poem ‘tries to make sense of historical existence within a bloodstained natural world and an indifferent universe’, through bearing witness to the ‘resilience of the man and the vigour of the metre in the face of Echo’s intransigence’ (1995, 160, 163). Yeats’s valorisation of imaginative transformation operates within a conflictual aesthetic, which includes a painful recognition of a natural world that is recalcitrant and random. Yeats registers the modern schism between fact and value, between the way things are and the way human ethical or poetic sensibility would wish them to be. This is true when his poetry confronts political violence and the forces of history, as in the celebrated poems of The Tower. But it also pertains to his depictions of blind and brutal nature from which humanity is alienated. This element is intrinsic to the ‘unconsoled modernity’ of Yeats’s achievement (Heaney, 1991, 789). His is a poetic which struggles with a post-Darwinian world of accident, randomness and purposeless pain, which affirms the power of the human imagination in the face of this world, but which does not yield to easy evasion or shallow consolation.