THE REPUTATION of William Butler Yeats as one of the major writers in English of the twentieth century of course rests primarily on his poetry. But while it was the most central, poetry was only one of the many genres in which Yeats worked. The purpose of The Yeats Reader is to present a selection of his poems accompanied by a sampling of his other work. This material is not only a useful adjunct to an understanding of the poetry but also often a substantial achievement on its own terms.
Had Yeats not been first and foremost a poet, he doubtless would have been a dramatist. Indeed, in 1917 he confessed that “I need a theatre; I believe myself to be a dramatist; I desire to show events and not merely tell of them;... two of my best friends were won for me by my plays, and I seem to myself most alive at the moment when a room full of people share the one lofty emotion.”1 Likewise, in his speech accepting the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1923, Yeats suggested that “perhaps the English committees would never have sent you my name if I had written no plays, no dramatic criticism, if my lyric poetry had not a quality of speech practised upon the stage . . .”2 In fact, from the end of the century forward, Yeats was very much a practicing dramatist, and many of his plays were significantly strengthened as a result of their first production, often at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin. The. selection included here ranges from the early nationalistic Cathleen ni Houlihan, a collaboration with Lady Gregory which Yeats would point to when criticized for being insufficiently committed to the struggle against English rule in Ireland; to At the Hawk’s Well, the first play showing the influence of the Japanese Noh drama to which he was introduced by Ezra Pound; to The Words upon the Window-pane, which closely follows the conventions of the drawing-room drama, only to undercut them by the introduction of the supernatural.
Both Yeats’s poetry and plays were often derived from events in his personal life, the most famous being his nearly ceaseless pursuit of Maud Gonne for almost thirty years, from their encounter in London on 30 January 1889 to shortly before his marriage on 20 October 1917 to Bertha Georgie Hyde-Lees. He began to compose his autobiography proper shortly before he began his fiftieth year, and he continued it sporadically for the next two decades. Not wanting to compromise the privacy of those still living, he ends his narrative just after the start of the new century;1 but some diaries and his account of the Nobel Prize offer glimpses of the later years. Moreover, a comparison of Memoirs, a draft of part of his autobiography, with the published version discloses what he chose not to disclose, as well as demonstrating that even in this supposedly most personal of genres, Yeats was at least as interested in the artistry of his work as in its factual accuracy.
Yeats also tried his hand at prose fiction. His third separate publication, John Sherman and Dhoya (1891), consisted of a realistic novelette and an heroic Irish tale, and the latter would provide the model for most of his later endeavors in the genre. His work ranges from fairy and folk tales, often collected with the assistance of Lady Gregory, to occult and esoteric stories such as “The Adoration of the Magi.” Although Yeats’s work in prose fiction was essentially completed in the early years of the century, he would resurrect some of its characters for both his poetry and his philosophical prose in his later years.
Indeed, there is a continual interchange between Yeats’s creative work and his critical writings. In the early years he produced a considerable body of reviews and journalistic writings. By the turn, of the century, however, his critical writings took on a more substantial form, with essays on such subjects as William Blake (one of his masters), “The Symbolism of Poetry,” or the contemporary condition of the English and Irish stage. In 1918 he published Per Amica Silentia Lunae, a summary of his thinking to date on the relationship between the Self and the Anti-Self and between the Self and the World, particularly the archetypal repository of images on which the artist draws. But even before Per Amica was in print, his wife had begun the automatic writing and related psychical activities which provided the basis for A Vision, first published in 1925 and revised in 1937, Yeats’s fundamental statement on such topics as the nature of human personality, the fate of the soul between lives, and the cyclical basis of history. In 1937 he composed three prefaces for the Scribner Edition, an unpublished seven-volume edition of his essential canon: of these, the Introduction to the first volume is a seminal statement of his objectives, as a writer.
Whether within or across the various genres which Yeats essayed, arguably a fundamental characteristic is the refusal to be satisfied with what had been accomplished. Any published text was always available to be revised for its next printing, and often was. If a particular kind of writing had been—as he wrote in “What Then?”—“to perfection brought,” such was only the occasion to search for a new style, a new consummation (it was not for want of a better title that the volume of poetry published a month before his seventy-third birthday was called simply New Poems). For much of his life Yeats was haunted by the specter of “Wordsworth withering into eighty years, honoured and. empty-witted” (see page 408). Yeats would not reach eighty, but neither would his wits nor his imaginative powers diminish. Rather, his astonishing achievement may cause us to think that, as he wrote of the figure of the poet in the Introduction to the Scribner Edition, William Butler Yeats “has been re-born as an idea, something intended, complete.... He is part of his own phantasmagoria and we adore him because nature has grown intelligible, and by so doing a part of our creative power” (see page 422).