Yeats, Coleridge and the Romantic Sage

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Yeats, Coleridge and the Romantic Sage Matthew Gibson

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

Yeats, Coleridge and the Romantic Sage

10.1057/9780230286498 - Yeats, Coleridge and the Romantic Sage, Matthew Gibson



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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.

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 821'.8—dc21

2000 99–046990

© Matthew Gibson 2000 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1P 0LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. 10 09

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Printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham, Wiltshire



ISBN 0–333–74625–2

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

55

Transcendence and Immanence

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

v



Contents

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 providing 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 permission 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 vi



Acknowledgements

Acknowledgements vii

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 permission 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 reproduced by permission of Simon & Schuster.

Every effort has been made to trace all the copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publishers will be pleased to make the necessary arrangement at the first opportunity.



extracts from unpublished letters, are reproduced by permission of Oxford University Press.

viii 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 AV B CM

Col. L1,3

CV A

E&I Ex L LTSM

Mem

Myth MYV1,2

Autobiographies (London: Macmillan, 1955). A Vision (London: Macmillan, 1962). 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). 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). A Critical Edition of Yeats’s A Vision (1925), ed. George Mills Harper and Walter Kelly Hood (London: Macmillan, 1978). Essays and Introductions (London and New York: Macmillan, 1961). Explorations, sel. Mrs W. B. Yeats (London: Macmillan, 1962; New York: Macmillan, 1963). The Letters of W. B. Yeats, ed. Allan Wade (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1954; New York: Macmillan, 1955). W. B. Yeats and T. Sturge Moore: Their Correspondence, 1901–1937, ed. Ursula Bridge (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul; New York: Oxford University Press, 1953). Memoirs: Autobiography – First Draft, journal transcribed and edited by Denis Donoghue (London: Macmillan, 1972; New York: Macmillan, 1973). Mythologies (London and New York: Macmillan, 1959). The Making of Yeats’s ‘A Vision’: A Study of the Automatic Script, by George Mills Harper, 2 vols (London: Macmillan, 1987). viii




NC NLI MS OBMV UPAN

UP1

UP2

VP

VPl

VSR

WWB1,2,3

YA YAACTS

YL

ix

A New Commentary on the Poems of W. B. Yeats, by A. Norman Jeffares (London: Macmillan, 1984). Manuscript, National Library of Ireland (to be followed by number). The Oxford Book of Modern Verse, 1895–1935, chosen by W. B. Yeats (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1936). The Ten Principal Upanishads, trans. Shree Purohit Swa ¯mi and W. B. Yeats (London and Boston: Faber & Faber, 1937). Uncollected Prose by W. B. Yeats, vol. 1, ed. John P. Frayne (London: Macmillan; New York: Columbia University Press, 1970). Uncollected Prose by W. B. Yeats, vol. 2, ed. John P. Frayne and Colton Johnson (London: Macmillan, 1975; New York: Columbia University Press, 1976). 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. 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. 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. 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). Yeats Annual, ed. Warwick Gould (London: Macmillan, 1982– ), to be followed by volume number. Yeats: An Annual of Critical and Textual Studies 4, ed. Richard J. Finneran (Ann Arbor: UMI Press, 1986), to be followed by volume number. Edward O’Shea, A Descriptive Catalog of W. B. Yeats’s Library (New York and London: Garland Publishing,





YVP1,2,3

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

BL1,2

CL1,2,etc. CN

CP EOT1,2,3

LL1,2

LPR

TT

Anima Poetae, from the Unpublished Note-books of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Ernest Hartley Coleridge (London: William Heinemann, 1895). 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. The Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Earl Leslie Griggs, 6 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956). The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Kathleen Coburn (and Merton Christensen, vols 3 and 4), 4 vols (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1957–90). The Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. James Dykes Campbell (London: Macmillan, 1925 [YL 404]). Essays on His Times, ed. David V. Erdmann, 3 vols (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul; Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978); Collected Works, vol. 3. Lectures, 1808–1819, ed. R. A. Foakes, 2 vols (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul; Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987); Collected Works, vol. 5. 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. Table Talk and the Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Christabel, etc., Morley’s Universal Library (London & New York: George Routledge & Sons, 1884 [YL 406]).



x

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.

xi



A Note on the Text




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 practised by Baudelaire and Yeats.1 Robert Snukal, however, examined Yeats’s use of Coleridge’s metaphors of mind in a chapter from his own book on Yeats’s philosophical poems.2 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 attributions, 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 1



Introduction

of A Vision and Yeats’s reading of philosophy should make us take his debt to Coleridge more seriously. For while Coleridge’s poetry contributed 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 comprehending 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 transcendental idealism and the Church of England, which was accompanied 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 parliamentary sketches for the Morning Post were less anti-establishment than they in fact were. Nevertheless, Yeats had clearly read from Chapter Ten by 1909,3 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. While the few brilliant poems were as highly esteemed as they are



2 Yeats, Coleridge and the Romantic Sage

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 readers, but had been largely ignored in the nineteenth century,4 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 Anglican priests.5 Again Table Talk, a collection of his conversation, largely from Highgate over eleven years, was an enduring success throughout the Victorian era.6 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 own age).7 Wolfgang Iser argues that Pater’s answer to Coleridge’s problem was a step on the path to his daring conclusion to Renaissance,8 in which he urges the reader to abandon knowledge for ‘exquisite passions’,9 but Pater otherwise reflects accurately the intellectual attitude to the spiritual philosophy which Coleridge spent most of his life working towards, and which magnum opus was eventually expounded by his disciple J. H. Greene to the yawns of thinkers eager for Hegelianism.10 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 promulgated long before Pater by Carlyle in his Life of Sterling11 and by Matthew Arnold in his comparison with Joubert,12 continues through the criticism of the 1890s into periodicals which Yeats may well have read, but whose opinions surely reflect those of his immediate colleagues. However, a new consensus of Coleridge as ‘weird, unearthly dreamer’ with interest in the supernatural also appears to take hold.13 This eventually culminates in certain figures – notably Arthur Symons – regarding him as forerunner of Symbolism and the new, fin-de-siècle trends in France,14 a view more recently supported by Vlasopolos.



Introduction 3

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 supernatural 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 charming 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 in the establishment of practical criticism as a pedagogical tool.15 Revisions of Coleridge’s metaphysical and political writings had also served to raise the status of The Friend and works like On the Constitution of Church and State,16 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 intellectual history to isolate the original aspects of Coleridge’s thought from its oftentimes tawdry execution.17 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 philosopher 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 the two.




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 rational. The image of philosopher provided by Coleridge acted as a reinterpretation 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, sensuous, bodily’ (AV B 214), but developed in many of the essays and introductory 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 onwards.18 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 importance 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 written outside A Vision, through his adaptation of metaphors of mind taken mainly from Coleridge but also from other figures. Again, however, 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 provided Yeats with means of turning transcendental philosophies into forms of physical immanence: the doctrine that spirit and matter are one.19 This theory conflicts with the explication of Yeats’s sometimes paradoxical descriptions of his Deity or Thirteenth Cone, but also



Introduction 5

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 general 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 ontological 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 complete text. Where necessary, therefore, I have referred to those omissions 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 Hollander’s theory of metalepsis and echo,20 Bloom’s understanding of both metalepsis and misreading appear to me to be wholly inappropriate to this study.21 The reasons are fairly obvious. Yeats may have frequently misread Coleridge, but this was not the result of creative anxiety.22 For the most part the influence of Coleridge on Yeats is to be




found in the latter’s prose works, rather than in the inner intentionality 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 misreading 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 endnotes 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 collected in youth. Let us begin, therefore, with his earliest consideration of Coleridge’s personality, in Chapter 1.



Introduction 7





Part I

Personality





Phantasmagoria: the Personality of Coleridge in the Earlier Prose of Yeats

When telling of how Lionel Johnson was capable of recounting apocryphal stories from his own life as though they were true, Yeats admitted 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 imagination in the Victorian era. Present in the work of writers such as Le Fanu, and Henry James1 – either as a metaphor of mind or as an organisational 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 compared 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 11



1


certainly includes the ‘artistic self’ (YVP1 162). Yeats’s own form of criticism usually paid scant concern to form and rhetoric, but rather consisted 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 secondary to his habitual self (Mem 139).2 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 superior to the real because of its ontological basis.3 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 carefully 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 unimportant 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 ‘bounding outline’ and exactness of Blakean symbolism and then to the more evanescent form of Symbolist verse – but his attempt to create a poetry which could express an Irish identity, and which was imaginative and



12

transcendental in tendency, remained ever the same in this era. It was an epoch in which, for Yeats at least, the personality and selfexpression 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 inheritance and express his personality in spite of himself.4 Yeats was furthermore always using literary history to serve his purpose 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 necessary 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 admiration (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 audience than the poets who appeal to cliques and deal with the more



Phantasmagoria: Coleridge’s Personality 13


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). The recognition of Coleridge as aesthetic poet is more a result of Yeats’s need to illustrate his own binary than a concerted effort to express a considered opinion on his work, although it may testify to Yeats’s consciousness of the sophisticated and reflective nature of conversation poems written by both Coleridge and Wordsworth, such as ‘Lines Written Above Tintern Abbey’ and ‘Frost at Midnight’, and their connection in literary history with the later – and for him preferable – work of Shelley. As a late Victorian he would have read them as part of his education, whether he liked them or not (see Chapter 6, p. 155). Here in the review Yeats was, in effect, making literary history serve his own ideas, and Coleridge’s literary identity – together with that of Shelley and Wordsworth – was fashioned in accordance with this need. Some years later, in a review of Douglas Hyde’s Beside the Fire, for National Observer (28 February 1891), Yeats praised the stories of peasant men and women, asking: And why should Swedenborg monopolise all the visions? Surely the mantle of Coleridge’s ‘man of ten centuries’ is large enough to cover the witch-doctors also. There is not so much difference between them. Swedenborg’s assertion, in the Spiritual Diary, that ‘the angels do not like butter’, would make admirable folk-lore.5 (UP1 190) This shows an early realisation that Coleridge was an authority on Swedenborg, and points to the fact that Yeats may even have read Coleridge’s marginalia to his Swedenborg editions in the British Library. He had certainly read Table Talk, a collection of his conversation which was deeply popular in the nineteenth century, and was to refer to certain of the entries on sexual difference and mysticism several times in his life. One early example of this is his adaptation to an occult context of the phrase: ‘The man’s desire is for the woman, but the woman’s desire is rarely other than for the desire of the man’ (TT 56: 23 July 1827). In their edition of William Blake’s work he and Ellis used the phrase to describe the relationship between the (female) emanations and their precedent (male) Zoas in the famously ill-received interpretation of Blake’s symbolic system (1893 [WWB1 281]).6



14

When Yeats next referred to Coleridge it was as an exemplar, and again in relation to Blake, in the essay ‘William Blake and his Illustrations to the Divine Comedy’ (1896), while seeking to explain the defects in Blake’s work and character as being a necessary by-product of major strengths: The errors in the handiwork of exalted spirits are as the more fantastical errors in their lives; as Coleridge’s opium cloud; as Villiers de l’Isle-Adam’s candidature for the throne of Greece; as Blake’s anger against causes and purposes he but half understood; as the flickering madness an Eastern scripture would allow in august dreamers; for he who half lives in eternity endures a rending of the structures of the mind, a crucifixion of the intellectual body.7 This passage concludes an essay in which he outlined Blake’s doctrine of symbol and allegory and the different techniques that realise the two. Yeats tried to prove that Blake was a forerunner of the Symbolist movement, and discussed his hatred of all empirical forms of creativity. He preferred ‘symbol’ to ‘allegory’, since the former was ‘vision’ and ‘a representation of what exists really and unchangeably’, the expression of the eternal world, while the latter was purely ‘created by the fantasy’, made from ‘memory and whim’ (Savoy, III, 41). In other words, Blake’s theory of imagination was essentially visionary and transcendental.8 Although he agreed with Blake’s preference for the visionary rather than the associative in art, Yeats saw problems in his work: The technique of Blake was imperfect, incomplete, as is the technique of wellnigh all artists who have striven to bring fires from remote summits; but where his imagination is perfect and complete, his technique has a like perfection, a like completeness. (III, 54) It was, in effect, to illustrate this judgement on Blake’s abilities that Yeats introduced Coleridge at the end of the article. By calling all his exemplars ‘exalted spirits’, and by including the Symbolist poet and dramatist Villiers de l’Isle-Adam in the group, Yeats was portraying Coleridge as a poet with a transcendental aesthetic, and as a Symbolist. However, in saying that all three suffered from a vice ‘like the errors in [their] handiwork’ as a result of the exaltation, he was implying that Coleridge incurred a flaw in his personality – the ‘opium cloud’ – because of the nature of his imagination. Living in eternity, he had to





endure, like Blake and de l’Isle Adam, ‘a crucifixion of the intellectual body’ (III, 57) – which induced both poor technique in his work, and an ‘error’ in his life. The method of exemplification used here is as important as the identity assigned to Coleridge, since it affords us insight into Yeats’s method of criticism. He insisted that the errors of the men’s lives actually reflected the errors of their handiwork: in Coleridge’s case, his laudanum addiction. In other words Yeats was comparing Coleridge to Blake in terms of both his work, and his personality, and thus was using the description of his personality to represent his poetry, rather than merely employing his name to illustrate one pole of a binary. In relation to Coleridge’s identity in the earlier review of R. D. Joyce, the portrayal of him as a visionary poet, with flawed technique and damaged personality, is certainly compatible with the poet of aesthetic integrity who writes for a clique, but by no means identical. Given Blake’s interest in Swedenborgian mysticism and Yeats’s relation of magic to literature, it is also compatible with his other references to him up until this point. We might well be forgiven for seeing a consistent attitude to Coleridge emerging in Yeats’s mind, particularly since the view of Coleridge as forerunner of the Symbolist movement would certainly entail for Yeats an occultist bent. This illusion of consistency, however, is soon modified. In his article on Lionel Johnson’s Ireland for The Bookman (February 1898), Yeats again employed his favourite critical device of opposing binaries, and used Coleridge once more as an exemplar. This time, however, the antinomies were not strictly his own, but were taken from Arthur Henry Hallam’s ‘On some of the Characteristics of Modern Poetry, and on the Lyrical Poems of Alfred Tennyson’ (1833). Hallam had distinguished between poets of sensation who ‘have “trembled with emotions, at colours and sounds and movements unperceived by duller temperaments”, and those of reflection, who bring ideas into their work’.9 Hallam’s essay was a welcome explanation to Yeats’s generation for why so much of the poetry of the Victorian era left them cold. The polarities of sensation and reflection seemed to prefigure the later Victorian division between Pater’s philosophy of ‘exquisite passions’10 and Arnold’s belief that poetry should draw upon current ideas to be a ‘criticism of life’. Being a disciple of Pater and Aestheticism, Lionel Johnson, like Yeats, would have fully condoned the distinction between sensation and reflection which the essay sets up, although there is no evidence that he read it. Yeats also evidently saw his fellow member of the ‘Rhymer’s



16

Club’ as an Aesthete, but to his regret, ‘Mr. Johnson, like Wordsworth and Coleridge, has sometimes written in the manner of the “popular schools”, and “mixed up” with poetry religious and political opinions’ (1898 [UP2 88–9]). If we are to understand that Yeats’s division between the two types of poetry in this 1898 review of Johnson was anticipated by his earlier distinction between the poets of the ‘clique’ and the ‘bardic classes’ in 1886, at least in terms of sophistication and popularity, then it must be understood that both Coleridge and Wordsworth have shifted position slightly since then – not to such an extent that they are purely popular poets, but at least to the point of betraying their vision with imported ideas. Whereas before Yeats had seen them as writing for a small audience and as dealing with ‘obscure’ emotions (UP1 105), he now saw them as filling their work with ideas of reflection ‘in the manner of the popular schools’ (UP1 89). Coleridge has also changed since the 1896 essay on Blake’s illustrations, where Yeats deemed him to be a poet who created through transcendental experience and sacrificed the intellectual for the sake of his art. Here, however, the reverse is true, as he sacrifices the body of vision on the cross of intellect, and falls from the company of Blake and de L’Isle Adam. The motivation for linking Coleridge to this sort of poetry is not provided in the text, but it appears to have been no more than Hallam’s view that the main body of ‘Reflective’ poets in his own century were ‘the Lakers’ (Hallam, p. 92), Wordsworth being his specific example (he admired Coleridge too much to mention him by name).11 Therefore, Yeats rather lamely delivered Coleridge’s name alongside Wordsworth, just as one might add the words ‘and butter’ to ‘bread’, although is slightly kinder than Hallam in seeing them as essentially poets of sensation who befoul their vision. The fact that Shelley, whose name Yeats had originally linked with both these ‘Lakers’ in the review of R. D. Joyce’s work in 1886, was opposed to Wordsworth’s in Hallam’s essay on Tennyson and is similarly contrasted in Yeats’s review of Johnson, illustrates both the extent to which Yeats was influenced by Hallam’s own exemplars, and how firmly he associated the two poets of the Lyrical Ballads together. We have, therefore, to conclude that during the era in which Yeats tried to engross himself in an aesthetic which would permit the dissolution of self in symbol, and in which he found most joy in other Romantic forebears such as Blake and Shelley, Coleridge figured very little in his ideas, but when he did so was a poet of aesthetic, visionary and ultimately Symbolist bent, praised for his mystic powers at one




18


II After the turn of the century, Yeats’s views on art changed dramatically, as he began to seek an aesthetic which was more grounded in the common experience of the people (he was attempting to create an Irish National Theatre), and became convinced that the Aesthetes were only writing from a part of themselves (E&I 266). Having declared that his highly Symbolist, and even Decadent essays of the nineties, collected in the volume Ideas of Good and Evil, were ‘only one half of the orange’ (14 May 1903; Col. L3 369), he concluded that all art should be a development of ‘the habitual self’ (E&I 269). On closer inspection, however, one can discern that Yeats did not quite reject Symbolism out of hand, but rather modified the Symbolist aesthetic to a new environment. He still believed with (pre-Symbolist) Sainte-Beuve that ‘there is nothing immortal except style’ (Ex 94) and asserted faith in a literature where form and content, the sound and emotion of language, would be indistinguishable, thus keeping fundamentally to a Symbolist and transcendental understanding of the word. Where Yeats now differed from before was in his perception of how this can be achieved, seeing that a playwright ‘can write well in … country idiom without much thought about one’s words; the emotion will bring the right word itself, for there everything is old and everything alive and nothing common or threadbare’ (1902 [Ex 94 –5]). He was beginning to accept, in other words, that an imaginative literature could be founded upon the language of real people rather than upon the artifice of the cliques. In his essay ‘Literature and the Living Voice’ (Samhain, 1906), Yeats referred to the two authors of the Lyrical Ballads with regard to their attempts to discover ‘simplicity’ in adopting a poetic model which preceded the development of device: In every art, when we consider that it has need of a renewing of life, we go backward till we light upon a time when it was nearer to human life and instinct, before it had gathered about it so many mechanical specialisations and traditions. We examine that earlier condition and think out its principles of life that we may be able to



point, but castigated for betraying them at another. Yeats had clearly read the more important poems, as well as some of the prose, but allowed neither to make so important an impact on him as that of other Romantics.

separate accidental from vital things. William Morris, for instance, studied the earliest printing, the founts of type that were made when men saw their craft with eyes that were still new, and with leisure, and without the restraints of commerce and custom. And then he made a type that was really new, that had the quality of his own mind about it, though it reminds one of its ancestry, of its high breeding as it were. Coleridge and Wordsworth were influenced by the publication of Percy’s Reliques to the making of a simplicity altogether unlike that of old ballad-writers. (1906 [Ex 210 –11]) Here Yeats attributed both Coleridge and Wordsworth with success in finding a form nearer to the fundamental ‘principles of life’ in copying Percy’s collection of ballads. In the context of the rest of the essay this means the discovery of a popular language – a living voice – which appeals to an entire people. Where there is a ‘living voice’ there need be no division between high and low art and there can emerge what Yeats was to call later ‘Unity of Culture’ (1922 [Au 295]), as there had been in the sixteenth century, whose culture Yeats observed in a celebration at Killeenan of the bardic poet Raftery, which is mentioned in the essay. One of the reasons for linking Wordsworth and Coleridge to the effort to find a ‘simplicity’ in keeping with his own attempt to find a living voice may well have been not just their use of Percy, but because Wordsworth himself held to a primitivist doctrine of language in writing the Lyrical Ballads. In the Preface to the second edition of the book, Wordsworth described a language derived from men who ‘hourly communicate with the best objects, from which the best parts of language are derived’ (WP, II, 366),12 and which is ‘plainer and more emphatic’, eschewing ‘traditional associations’, a phrase echoed in Yeats’s praise of the language of the uncorrupted peasantry for having less ‘mechanical specialisations and traditions’ (Ex 211). Both, in Yeats’s view, held to a prelapsarian and spiritual view of the language of the ordinary folk, which in his own case translated to the possibility of Unity of Culture if the high artifice of the Anglo-Irish could use the raw strength of that tradition.13 Yeats’s view of Coleridge here was therefore dependent upon his association with Wordsworth in writing Lyrical Ballads. Nevertheless, he may well have been aware of Coleridge’s own reference to the debt the poets of his day owed Percy in the Biographia,14 which he had possibly read by this time (see Appendix).




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There are artists like Byron, like Goethe, like Shelley, who have impressive personalities, active wills and all their faculties at the service of the will; but he [Synge] belonged to those who, like Wordsworth, like Coleridge, like Goldsmith, like Keats, have little personality, so far as the casual eye can see, little personal will, but fiery and brooding imagination. I cannot imagine him anxious to impress or convince in any company, or saying more than was sufficient to keep the talk circling. Such men have the advantage that all they write is a part of knowledge, but they are powerless before events and have often but one visible strength, the strength to reject from life and thought all that would mar their work, or deafen them in the doing of it; and only this so long as it is a passive act. (E&I 328–9) The distinction here is between two different sorts of imaginative poet: the active re-creator and the passive man who shapes and selects themes from common experience. That Yeats should have created this particular division at all, and have used Coleridge as an exemplar of this ‘passive’ yet ‘brooding’ type of poet, stems from his wish to grind two axes in defending Synge’s genius. Firstly, he wanted to use Synge in his attempt to create a national Irish literature by insisting that what he wrote was founded upon ‘experience’ (E&I 316), and not full of the worthy but sterile abstractions of Young Ireland poets (E&I 313). Secondly, he wished to resolve the partially naturalist Synge’s status as an imaginative artist.15 Despite the modifications his aesthetic theory may have undergone, Yeats always stressed that the artist is a re-creator, who follows the laws of imagination to present the eternal in man, a prerogative upon which he had insisted throughout the many editions of Samhain in this era.16 However, he was adamant that Synge himself had possessed ‘fiery and brooding imagination’ (E&I 329), even though he had a more ‘passive’ disposition. In order to justify this decision Yeats filled the essay with comments which echo the transcendental and Symbolist ideas he had held throughout the nineties, but now to show that, in his selection from the life of real men, Synge was able to depict this world ‘that suggests a correspondence between a lasting mood of the soul and this life that shares the harshness of rock and wind’, as well as a language



In 1910 Yeats paid tribute to a recently departed colleague in ‘J. M. Synge and the Ireland of his Time’, once more creating a binary and using Coleridge, amongst others, to typify one of the poles:

which, although ‘an elaboration of the dialects of Kerry and Aran’, nevertheless ‘checks the rapidity of dialogue’ and so ‘gives direct expression to reverie’ (E&I 333– 4). Yeats’s reason for linking Wordsworth and Coleridge to Synge probably stems from the similar passivity with which they (more properly, Wordsworth) used in writing the Lyrical Ballads, surrendering themselves to the imaginations of those noble savages who peopled the Quantocks and Cumberland. However, the appearance of their names here also owes something to the same reason why Yeats had used them in ‘Literature and the Living Voice’, meaning that he saw in their work an attempt to create a greater simplicity of language that reflects a more fundamental culture, which is what Synge himself achieved. In fact, the two notions are linked. Without his passivity before the Aran Islanders, Synge could never have discovered a language ‘so little abstract … so rammed full with life’, yet based upon experience and observation. Percy’s influence apart, we can see from his echoes of the ‘Preface’ in ‘Literature and the Living Voice’ that Yeats linked the similar passivity of Wordsworth before the language derived from men who ‘hourly communicate with the best objects from which the best parts of language are derived’ (Wordsworth, II, 366), to his success in finding a language rid of ‘mechanical specialisations’, and thus saw a parallel with Synge’s attempt to create a new Irish drama that dissolves the distinction between high art and low, by surrendering himself to experience and adapting the language of the peasantry to artistic ends. Therefore, in 1906 and in 1910, Yeats once again referred to Coleridge, in a way wholly different from any previous reference, and again made history serve his own purpose, recasting the co-author of the Lyrical Ballads as a poet of experience, passivity and simplicity, and reappropriating him into his newly emerging views. Coleridge’s personality in this era was largely dependent upon the way in which Yeats saw Wordsworth – although not exclusively. Yeats may have seen ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ as possessing a ‘simplicity altogether unlike that of old Ballad-writers’ (Ex 211). If he did so, however, the same poem was to help him see Coleridge in an altogether different light over a decade later.

III In 1917 Yeats published his great occult/literary work Per Amica Silentia Lunae, in which he gave his first official description of a new aesthetic theory, which he had been contemplating since 1909. In this theory,





based spiritually on the Cambridge Platonist Henry More’s The Immortality of the Soul (although with some interminglings from Swedenborg and Nietzsche),17 Yeats described art as the struggle for personality: not, as earlier, a development of ‘the habitual self’ ([E&I 269] 1907), but as self seeking the anti-self and finding it through the ‘Mask’: that is, the desired role or image. Ontologically, this realises itself as the Daimon, a disembodied form from the Soul of the World, struggling to impose his will upon the living man, and with the two fighting to emulate each other. When the man, who inhabits More’s Terrestrial region, finally achieves his own will, he incarnates the Daimon in the Aereal, which constitutes the ‘cistern of form’ for the spirits in the Celestial or Aethereal region: in other words, man and Daimon meet half-way between the two ontological realms of body and spirit. This adaptation of More’s neo-Platonic system provided Yeats with a theory of art which he never renounced from that point onwards, and was to elaborate still further in A Vision. It also gave him a philosophical basis for his main method of literary criticism, which was to read the work by describing the personality – the embodied anti-self or ‘Mask’ – as perceived in an artist’s work: from now on the exact opposite of the habitual self. The system was as yet confused, and Yeats still had difficulty distinguishing between the permanent Daimon – the man’s anti-self – and the impermanent: those other minds from the soul of the world which the two incarnate, having completed their struggle (Myth 335).18 Another problem was the distinction between those Daimons in the Aereal region, and those who exist in the Aethereal conditions, having become purified beyond all form: for More, these higher beings were not Daimons at all, but the Gods as Plato understood them in Timaeus, the ‘Inhabitants of the Heavens’, since Daimons exist only in the Aereal region before ascending to the state of the Gods (More, p. 271). Again with More there is no struggle between the Terrestrial and the Celestial conditions, merely an ascent. Yeats, as always, was freely adapting an intellectual source to his own ends. Seeking to explain the difference between two sorts of disembodied spirit, Yeats referred to a poem by Coleridge: We longed to know something – even if it were but the family and Christian names – of those minds that we could divine, and yet remained always, as it seemed, impersonal. The sense of contact came perhaps but two or three times with clearness and certainty, but it left, among all to whom it came, some trace, a sudden silence,



22

as it were, in the midst of thought or perhaps at moments of crisis a faint voice. Were our masters right when they declared so solidly that we should be content to know these presences that seemed friendly and near but as ‘the phantom’ in Coleridge’s poem, and to think of them perhaps as having, as Saint Thomas says, entered upon the eternal possession of themselves in one single moment? All look and likeness caught from earth, All accident of kin and birth, Had passed away. There was no trace Of aught on that illumined face, Upraised beneath the rifted stone, But of one spirit all her own; She, she herself and only she, Shone through her body visibly. (Myth 347) Yeats was attempting to show how the ‘personifying spirits’ whom he divined in either Daimonic struggle, or in the more passive state of evocation, constituted spirits from the higher, Celestial region, purified of memory – whose condition was that of light, not air, but who would descend to the Aereal condition when incarnating in the mind of the man. They are to be distinguished from the grosser spirits, whom we see in ghostly apparitions, and who still keep to the Aereal, living out their past lives. Yeats was trying to merge the three hypostases of Henry More’s The Immortality of the Soul with Swedenborg’s description of the path of the soul after death, which goes from living through its memories, to a higher state of complete purification. Yeats evidently saw Coleridge’s poem as describing the essential nature of these beings whom he had called elsewhere the ‘dramatis personae of our dreams’ (Ex 56 [1914]). This highly supernatural interpretation of Coleridge’s poem conflicts with the author’s own explication of it. That Coleridge did believe in the power of dreams to divine universal truth can be verified by reading both essays and comments recorded by his nephew and son-in-law H. N. Coleridge.19 He also, as Yeats may have realised from reading the Biographia Literaria, nourished an early respect for Henry More (BL2 44). However, he was no believer in the reality of mysticism, or in the occult. The passage was originally written in a notebook after a dream in Malta which begins: ‘On Friday Night, 8th Feb 1805, my feeling, in sleep, of exceeding great love for my infant, seen by me in the





dream! – yet so as it might be Sara, Derwent, and still it was an individual babe and mine.’ After giving the verse, he wrote of the spirit as ‘this abstract self … in its nature a Universal personified, as Life, Soul, Spirit etc.’ (AP 120 –1 [CN II, 2442]). Judging by the passage, Coleridge appears to have been using the poem to illustrate an understanding of love as an innate idea, able to fasten its affections to the same thing yet in a plurality of particular manifestations.20 The poem is, no doubt, about a phantom above a grave, but he also believed in using the supernatural to symbolise states of mind and ideas in a way that the habitual simply does not – that ‘willing suspension of disbelief’ outlined in the Biographia.21 Nevertheless, Yeats was again regarding Coleridge as a source for Swedenborgian mysticism, as in 1891. It was this very ground – the idea that the dead spirits ‘no longer remembering their own names’ become ‘the characters in the drama we ourselves have invented’ (Ex 55) – which provided him with his own right, as critic, to re-create the personalities of writers as a reading of their work into a new phantasmagoria, and even to rewrite history itself upon the grounds of spiritual truth, as he does later, quite self-consciously, with ‘The Tragic Generation’. In other words, it allowed him to discern the ‘Mask’ which they themselves had sought, but from his own evocation. Coleridge’s poem helped him to define those grounds – the very basis upon which Yeats in fact criticised him elsewhere. In ‘The Tragic Generation’ (1922) Yeats goes on to incorporate Coleridge into his phantasmagoria, providing his readers with the most full and considered definition yet of Coleridge as a ‘type’ of poet, as well as the most detailed description of his personality up until this point, not only comparing him, as in 1898, to Johnson, but to Dowson and Beardsley as well. Having recounted numerous tales of Johnson and Dowson’s commensurate brilliance and degeneracy, Yeats concluded: I think that the movement of our thought has more and more so separated certain images and regions of the mind, and that these images grow in beauty as they grow in sterility. Shakespeare leaned, as it were, even as craftsman, upon the general fate of men and nations, had about him the excitement of the playhouse; and all poets, including Spenser in all but a few pages, until our age came, and when it came almost all, have had some propaganda or traditional doctrine to give companionship with their fellows. Had not Matthew Arnold his faith in what he described as the best thought of his generation, Browning his psychological curiosity, Tennyson,



24

as before him Shelley and Wordsworth, moral values that were not aesthetic values? But Coleridge of the Ancient Mariner, and Kubla Khan, and Rossetti in all his writings, made what Arnold has called that ‘morbid effort’, that search for ‘perfection of thought and feeling, and to unite this to perfection of form’, sought this new, pure beauty, and suffered in their lives because of it. The typical men of the classical age (I think of Commodus, with his half-animal beauty, his cruelty, and his caprice) lived public lives, pursuing curiosities of appetite, and so found in Christianity, with its Thebaid and Mareotic Sea, the needed curb. But what can the Christian confessor say to those who more and more must make all out of the privacy of their thought, calling up perpetual images of desire, for he cannot say, ‘Cease to be artist, cease to be poet’, where the whole life is art and poetry, nor can he bid men leave the world, who suffer from the terrors that pass before shut eyes. Coleridge, and Rossetti, though his dull brother did once persuade him he was an agnostic, were devout Christians, and Stenbock and Beardsley were so towards their lives’ end, and Dowson and Johnson always, and yet I think it but deepened despair and multiplied temptation. Dark Angel, with thine aching lust To rid the world of penitence: Malicious angel, who still dost My soul such subtil violence! When music sounds, then changest thou A silvery to a sultry fire: Nor will thine envious heart allow Delight untortured by desire. Through thee the gracious Muses turn To Furies, O mine Enemy! And all the things of beauty burn With flames of evil ecstasy. Because of thee, the land of dreams Becomes a gathering-place of fears: Until tormented slumber seems One vehemence of useless tears. Why are these strange souls born everywhere to-day, with hearts that Christianity, as shaped by history, cannot satisfy? Our loveletters wear out our love; no school of painting outlasts its founders,





every stroke of the brush exhausts the impulse, Pre-Raphaelitism had some twenty years; Impressionism thirty perhaps. Why should we believe that religion can never bring round its antithesis? Is it true that our air is disturbed, as Mallarmé said, by ‘the trembling of the veil of the Temple’, or that ‘our whole age is seeking to bring forth a sacred book’? Some of us thought that book near towards the end of the last century, but the tide sank again. (Au 313–15) The binary used here is essentially the same as Yeats had employed in reviewing Johnson’s poetry in 1898, Hallam’s distinction between poets of ‘reflection’ and ‘sensation’. He now described Arnold (from whose letter he also quoted22), Browning and Tennyson, the most popular poets of the times, as filling their work with ‘impurities’.23 Coleridge, however, is for once contrasted with Wordsworth in being identified as making ‘that search for “perfection of thought and feeling, and to unite this to perfection of form” ’ (Au 313). This view of Coleridge, supported by renewed interest in his ‘supernatural poetry’, casts him in the role of visionary and Aesthete. It shows that by 1922 he associated Coleridge’s best work with Aestheticism and Symbolism, a possibility all the more likely given comments made by Arthur Symons in his edition of Coleridge’s poems that: ‘ “Kubla Khan”, which was literally composed in sleep, comes nearer than any other existing poem to that ideal of lyric poetry which has only lately been systematized by theorists like Mallarmé.’24 Such a judgement would certainly have given Yeats added encouragement to reconstruct Coleridge’s personality on the lines of Baudelaire, Johnson, and Dowson. However, Yeats’s understanding of aesthetic poetry itself has changed since the 1890s, and is now seen as a doomed battle against the encroaching tide of materialism. He supported this opinion with his recently acquired lunar symbolism, introducing it to his prose writings for the first time here (A Vision was not published until three years later, in 1925) to explain the despair of both his friends and of Coleridge on account of their belonging to more subjective Phases than those which governed the eras they lived in. Such figures, deprived of Unity of Culture, and thus of the conditions for Unity of Being, must create beauty by seeking it in separated regions of the mind: hence Johnson and Dowson were placed at Phase 13 in Yeats’s A Vision, the ‘Sensuous Ego’: imaginative art with no synthesis of the intellect (CV A 65). They are truly tragic figures, seeking to create a pure art in



26

an age when it can no longer be understood and when man’s sensibility is the more dispersed. One reason for seeing Coleridge as a tragic poet in line with Johnson and Dowson is the complication of his religion. As early as 1909 Yeats had been aware of the divisions which Coleridge’s need for a personal God had created between some of the ontological arguments he had espoused at certain points of his life, and had quoted his statement that: ‘My intellect is with Spinoza, but my heart with Paul and the Apostles’25 in a letter to John Quinn of that year (12 January). Now, however, as he accepted the view of Coleridge as precursor of the Tragic Generation of Aestheticist and Symbolist poets, he translated this intellectual schizophrenia to a division between Christian morality and aesthetic purity. The varied portrayals of guilt in ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ and ‘Christabel’ may also have contributed to this view. Yeats’s description of Johnson and Dowson earlier on lays blame upon the Christianity which they espoused for the dissipation which led to their deaths, the one fascinated by the Catholic conception of evil which his imagination had grasped and his drinking heightened (Au 310), the other desiring a condition of ‘virginal ecstasy’ (Au 311) which could not be attained. For the occultist who accepts the necessity of antithetical polarities the Vision of Evil is perhaps less a ‘temptation’ and more part of a powerful, transcendental experience. But for the Christian, who has been taught to fear evil and attempt to expurgate it, so strong a Vision can only be mortifying. Due to the varied impressions he had gleaned concerning him, from prose, poetry and Symons’s portrayal, Yeats here attributed exactly the same tragic disposition to Coleridge. Although there is, on the one hand, a definite line of continuity between the construction of Coleridge’s identity in 1896 as flawed visionary, and 1922, this morbid Aesthete has not a great deal in common with the Coleridge of simple expression mentioned in ‘Literature and the Living Voice’ (1906 [Ex 211]) and man of ‘little personal will’ (E&I 329) described in ‘J. M. Synge and the Ireland of his Time’ (1910). This may be explained partly by Yeats’s growing or renewed interest in Coleridge’s great ‘supernatural’ poems, and consequent dissociation of him from Wordsworth, and also perhaps in his changed attitude to ‘Unity of Culture’. By 1922 he realized that there was no ‘living voice’ upon which to draw, and so perhaps prioritised one Coleridge over another – the Coleridge of the supernatural poems over the man who seemed to comply with Wordsworth’s primitivist doctrine of language.





So in the years up until 1922 we see Coleridge variously understood in Yeats’s phantasmagoria as Aesthete and Symbolist poet, as a source for mysticism and as adherent to primitive and popular forms of art. There are some patterns of consistency here, particularly since the tragic Aesthete would have been mystical for Yeats, but no full portrait emerges: rather, two markedly different personalities which would occupy incompatible phases of the moon if placed upon Yeats’s lunar symbolism (13 and 24). Yeats’s more intense reading of Coleridge still lay ahead of him.



28

‘Escaped from Isolating Method’: Coleridge as Sage in Yeats’s 1930 Diary

In an unpublished letter of 11 November 1929, Coleridge informed his friend Oliver St John Gogarty that he was ‘just setting out on a study of Coleridge verse and prose’. He was also just off to Rapallo to spend much of the year with Ezra Pound, rewriting A Vision. Yeats’s most intense reading of Coleridge was recorded in a diary begun there in 1930.1 Extracts from this were published posthumously fourteen years later as Pages from a Diary Written in Nineteen Hundred and Thirteen, with Giraldus’s portrait by Dulac on the frontispiece to cement its connection with A Vision. It is clear from reading the manuscript diary that while Yeats was planning to publish some parts of it, others, being intensely personal (such as his discussions with his wife’s automatic writing and speech control Dionertes, and comparison of his children’s characters), were left out of the published text by Mrs Yeats as editor. Some entries in the original are barely grammatical memos to himself, while others contain the elaborate sentence structures and rhetorical questions which characterise the best of his late prose, and were being corrected for publication. These latter passages contain extensive reference to Coleridge’s politics and philosophy, and on the whole have been very faithfully transcribed by Mrs Yeats. The diary was written at a time when Yeats was becoming ever more interested in the work of eighteenth-century Anglo-Irish writers such as Swift, Burke, Berkeley and Goldsmith, and was beginning to find in them a necessary antidote to the Enlightenment as manifested through the Augustan era in England. Yeats clearly imposed his own Tory politics on the work of Swift’s ‘Discourse’ (written when the Dean was in fact still a Whig in all but his Church politics), and his delight in Goldsmith’s penchant for ‘particularities’ rather than abstractions was an attempt to forge Anglo-Irish difference to the English which was 29



2


perhaps not there. Nevertheless, in the Conservative, anti-democratic impulses which he believed to lie in Burke’s ‘An Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs’, and in the anti-realist ontology of Berkeley’s idealism, Yeats discovered a tradition of intellectual thought which was both Anglo-Irish in origin, and anticipatory of Romanticism. Much has been written about Yeats’s reading of Anglo-Irish Georgians and the role it played in recasting his political identity in the last decade of his life, notably by Donald Torchiana2 and Elizabeth Cullingford.3 Less has been written, however, about the role that Coleridge played as a lens through which to examine all these strands, and to interpret their work. For a perusal of the diary shows that while Yeats may have been attempting to align himself with earlier AngloIrish figures, it was Coleridge who acted as a focus to provide him with a particular concept of philosopher: that of the Romantic Sage. Yeats’s serious reading of Coleridge in 1930 clearly favoured the ideas of the later Conservative and transcendental idealist over that of the young radical and associationist. So much so, that his consciousness of the older Coleridge led him on occasions to reinterpret the younger. For example, in his first diary entry devoted to the English poet, he wrote: I find this in Coleridge’s Fears in Solitude: Meanwhile, at home, All individual dignity and power Engulfed in Courts, Committees, Institutions, Associations and Societies. I think of some saying of Mussolini’s that power is the better for having a Christian name and address. Balzac says that in France before the Revolution a man gathered friends about his table, formed a mimic Court, but since it he satisfies ambition by founding a society and becoming its president or secretary. He seemed to see in such societies and the causes they fostered, personal ambition. Compare the rule of the ‘many’ as described by Swift in his Greek and Roman essay. Balzac and Swift saw predatory instinct where Coleridge saw paralysis.4 (Ex 298) Against the background of preceding passages in the diary, Yeats appears to have found a parallel between the lines from ‘Fears in Solitude’ (April 1798) and the political philosophy of Swift’s ‘A Discourse of the Contests and Dissentions between the Nobles and the Commons in Athens and Rome’ (1701), in which the Dean of St Patrick’s warned of how there could be a tyranny of the ‘many’ as easily as of the ‘one’



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or the ‘few’. Yeats took what was a reference to the important balances of various strata of government to sanction anti-democracy, and, perhaps impressed with the mature Coleridge’s belief that it was not good practice to extend suffrage to those without landed property (Fr 135), read this view into a radical poem by the young Coleridge. The fact that ‘Fears in Solitude’, a conversation poem written about the fear of imminent invasion by France, was castigating the British government for spreading the vices of imperialism, and thus the inability of the conscience to act freely in making moral decisions, was clearly ignored by the eager Yeats.5 He also delighted in another point of parallel he discerned in Coleridge’s ideas, namely the influence of Berkeley: I find this in Coleridge’s Hexameters written during a temporary Blindness. He is talking of the eye of a blind man: Even to him it exists, it stirs and moves in its prison; Lives with a separate life, and ‘Is it the Spirit?’ he murmurs: Sure it has thoughts of its own and to see is only its language. These lines written in 1799 ‘during temporary blindness’, must be taken as the sense in which he understood Berkeley, that given by Charpentier: Through the particular we approach the Divine Ideas – not, I think, the Berkeley of the Commonplace Book.6 (Ex 298–9) Berkeley, who argued that esse est percipi, and that things only exist materially in our perceiving them, was already Yeats’s favourite philosopher, being the first he had read after finishing the original edition of A Vision. He was particularly important to Yeats since he allowed him to turn the occultist theory of man and Daimon present in A Vision into an entire ontological theory (of which more shall be said in the next chapter). The lines from ‘Hexameters’ on the language of the spirit which Yeats quoted were first published in Friendship’s Offering, and originate from a letter written to the Wordsworths from Ratzeburg, Germany (dated 14 December 1798). They were largely employed to illustrate the form of the Hexameter, rather than make an absolute declaration on Coleridge’s views on epistemology. Despite naming one of his children Berkeley, Coleridge’s position on the philosopher during the 1790s is notoriously difficult to ascertain, due to his continued struggle with



‘Escaped from Isolating Method’ 31


the Necessitarian materialism of Priestley and Hartley,7 and by the time of his retirement to Highgate – the period Yeats most admired – he had already surpassed the more primitive idealism of Berkeley for both Kant and post-Kantian philosophy. Yeats, however, took his cue from John Charpentier’s rather shaky work Coleridge the Sublime Somnambulist, a quasi-biography, translated from the French by M. V. Nugent. Charpentier argued that Coleridge was the originator of poésie pure and the aesthetic of the Symbolist movement, and that he had been heavily influenced by Berkeley (a popular opinion of the time) when writing ‘Christabel’, ‘Kubla Khan’, and ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’,8 these last two being works which Yeats had already seen as in keeping with fin-de-siècle trends. This certainly confirmed the view of Coleridge he had gleaned from reading Symons. The last three of the five consecutive entries recorded by Yeats in his 1930 diary which deal explicitly with his consideration of Coleridge and the extent to which Coleridge’s ideas coincided with those of Swift, Burke and Berkeley, marks a shift from his work itself and a point of crucial self-examination. In the third entry (dated 6 June) Yeats started to look more directly at the great man’s personality: Why does Coleridge delight me more as man than poet? Even if I believed, and I do not, the general assumption that he established nothing of value, it would not affect the matter. I think the reason is that from 1807 or so he seems to have some kind of illumination which was, as always, only in part communicable. The end attained in such a life is not a truth or even a symbol of truth, but a oneness with some spiritual being or beings. It is this that fixes our amazed attention on Oedipus when his death approaches, and upon some few historical men. It is because the modern philosopher has not sought this that he remains unknown to those multitudes who thought his predecessors sacred. Perhaps Coleridge needed opium to recover a state which, some centuries earlier, was accessible to the fixed attention of normal man.9 (Ex 299) In the fourth entry on Coleridge (13 June) Yeats went on to equate very introspective questions about his own art with his delight in Coleridge’s personality: No, that is not the explanation, for I have remembered that I thought with like pleasure of Mallarmé’s talk to his famous circle.



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I think the explanation must explain also why, during the most creative years of my artistic life, when Synge was writing plays and Lady Gregory translated early Irish poetry with an impulse that interpreted my own, I disliked the isolation of the work of art. I wished through the drama, through a commingling of verse and dance, through singing that was also speech, through what I called the applied arts of literature, to plunge it back into social life. The use of dialect for the expression of the most subtle emotion – Synge’s translation of Petrarch – verse where the syntax is that of common life, are but the complement of a philosophy spoken in the common idiom escaped from isolating method, gone back somehow from professor and pupil to Blind Tireisias.10 (Ex 299–300) Finally, after several months in which he had been reading the works of both Coleridge and his four Anglo-Irishmen, and had more recently been comparing and contrasting his own work with Coleridge’s, Yeats synthesised his thought to define both the role which all fulfilled, and the positive aspects in all their writings and personal behaviour which united them and excluded him. The role brought together many ideas (some only partially understood) as he groped for a label that would give unity to his thought on 19 June 1930: The other day I came home from a call upon a friend very dissatisfied with my conversation. Presently I said to my wife: ‘Now that my vitality grows less I should set up as sage’. She said: ‘What do you mean by that?’ and I said: ‘Adapt my conversation to the company instead of the company to my conversation’. She said: ‘It is too late to change’. Now I have been running over those words of mine and wonder with sudden excitement if they do not account for emotion in the presence of things so unlike as Swift’s epitaph, Berkeley in his Commonplace Book, ‘We Irish do not hold with this’, Burke at certain famous moments, Coleridge at Highgate, Mallarmé on his Thursday evenings. They, as did blind Tireisias, talked to the occasion, and seeing that they did not scorn our drama, lips as living as those in Fragonard’s Fountain of Life drink of their stream. In that grim and wise account of the Thebaid, the Lausiac History of Palladius, men went on pilgrimage to Saint Anthony that they might learn more about their spiritual states, what was about to happen to them and why it happened, and Saint Anthony would reply neither out of traditional casuistry nor common-sense but





from supernatural power. When I think of Swift, of Burke, of Coleridge, or Mallarmé, I remember that they spoke as it were sword in hand, that they played their part in a unique drama, but played it, as a politician cannot though he stand in the same ranks, with the whole soul. Once or twice I have spoken words which came from nowhere, which I could not account for, which were even absurd, which have been fulfilled to the letter. I am trying to understand why certain metaphysicians whom I have spent years trying to master repel me, why those invisible beings I have learned to trust would turn me from all that is not conflict, that is not from sword in hand. Is it not like this? I cannot discover truth by logic unless that logic serve passion, and only then if the logic be ready to cut its own throat, tear out its own eyes – the cry of Hafiz, ‘I made a bargain with that hair before the beginning of time,’ the cry of every lover. Those spiritual beings seem always as if they would turn me from every abstraction. I must not talk to myself about ‘the truth’ nor call myself ‘teacher’ nor another ‘pupil’ – these things are abstract – but see myself set in a drama where I struggle to exalt and overcome concrete realities perceived not with mind only but as with the roots of my hair. The passionless reasoners are pariah dogs and devour the dead symbols. The clarified spirits own the truth, they have intellect; but we receive as agents, never as owners, in reward for their victory.11 (Ex 300 –2) One could find few better examples of Yeats attempting to ‘ “Hammer [his] … thoughts into unity” ’ (Ex 263) with such intensity and with such a vast and heterogeneous body of past and newly acquired ideas. He had at last ‘discovered’ Coleridge’s true personality, along with those of his favourite Anglo-Irish luminaries, and had reconstructed them in a new, imaginary drama. In doing so he had found a new role for himself: the ‘sage’, a label which he had used before, most recently in A Vision (1925). But here the role was slightly different as a result of both personal experience and this new imaginary drama of personalities. Yeats’s finding delight in certain passages from the work of Burke, Swift, Berkeley, etc. because they ‘spoke to the occasion’ indicates the angst he felt at being out of key with his audience on account of the esoteric philosophy he was trying so hard to master in 1930 (he was rewriting A Vision),12 and at being totally ineffectual as a public figure in the national life of Ireland (he was also recuperating from what he perceived as his failure in the Irish Senate). Could he not atone for this?



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In his introduction to Hone and Rossi’s Bishop Berkeley (1931)13 he was to compare his own fight in the senate against the ‘abstractions’ imposed by the Free State with his intellectual forebear’s rejection of English ‘Whiggery’. This introduction was part of his attempt to speak to Ireland as an Anglo-Irish sage, as were his later planned essays, On the Boiler. In setting up as a sage Yeats wished to combine many things: to mix the philosopher who ‘deal[s] / In abstract things’ (VP 409, ll. 14 –15) with the ‘daemonic rage’ (VP 419, l. 16) of the artist – and then again, he wished to address the whole of society more directly than either the artist (as he now believed) or the philosopher, for different reasons, normally do (the one seeks solitude and is cut off from the mass culture, the other is too ‘abstract’ to appeal to the masses). While Yeats was helped by the great Anglo-Irish luminaries of the past, the most important influence in creating this role was the man he had recently identified with them: Coleridge. It remains therefore to be shown how Yeats reconstructed that poet’s identity in order to remold imaginatively the identity of both Coleridge, and the sage in general, as a figure who mixes social appeal with ‘daemonic rage’ and philosophical argument. These qualities would be incompatible elsewhere in Yeats’s work.

The sage before Coleridge The sage up until 1930 In the Augustan era the sage tended to be a figure of extreme authority advocating retirement from the world in stoicism, such as ‘Thales’ (one of Diogenes Laertius’s original Seven Sages) in Johnson’s ‘London’ and the sage of ‘The Vanity of Human Wishes’ whose ‘scorn’ is ‘Renew’d at ev’ry Glance on Humankind’.14 In the Romantic era, however, writers present him somewhat differently. The sage surfaces as a Romantic figure in Shelley’s ‘Queen Mab’,15 ‘Hellas’ (the old Jew Ahasuerus) and in ‘The Revolt of Islam’ in the form of the saviour of the rebel Laon. He appears in Wordsworth under various guises, such as Matthew the School Master and the Wanderer, or ‘Pedlar’, in the Excursion. He is in all these cases a spiritual philosopher, necessary to the artist, but pointedly lacking in the active qualities of speech, imagination or power: the Wanderer needs his chosen comrade to give expression to his philosophy,16 and also teaches acceptance of providence to his friend the despondent ‘Solitary’. Ahasuerus in ‘Hellas’ cannot affect the events of the Greek uprising, only predict the doom of the Sultan’s empire (Shelley, p. 418), nor can the sage of ‘The Revolt of Islam’ stir the revolt as can Laon, only preserve the traditions of the subjugated people.17





The sage appears to be a character who instructs and tells truth, but is also crucially impotent in comparison with hero and artist: a means by which the Romantic poet claims a tradition for his radical ideas, but simultaneously asserts the need for imagination and action over passive contemplation if we are to transform the world radically, both politically and ontologically. Occasionally the negative qualities of the sage outweigh the positive, as in Keats’s Lamia. Keats, the Romantic poet who was most sceptical about the powers of imagination to divine spiritual truth, has his greybearded philosopher and ‘sage Appollonius’ cast out the ‘foul dream’ of Lamia before her marriage,18 while Carlyle, in describing Coleridge as a sage in a passage that Yeats was also to read later, highlights the ineffectuality of the man of philosophy by using it almost as a term of abuse. Fortunately, Yeats was to transform totally this understanding. Yeats writes of the sage in two very different ways before the 1930 diary, the one positive, the other negative. While the sage could be a prophet-like figure or mystic, like Blake, Pater, Mathers or Ahasuerus, a figure who delivers a philosophy which empowers the artist, and whose method is mysticism rather than logic, more commonly Yeats portrays him as an abstract and unimaginative figure, the archetype of the dry, rationalist thinker who opposes the artist: and even in the case of a figure like Swedenborg, the exemplar sage, or ‘Teacher’, of the automatic script, his visionary nature is seen as empirical, dry, and favouring objectivity over subjectivity. Unlike the different types of saint and artist in ‘Discoveries’ (E&I 286–7 [1907]), and Per Amica Silentia Lunae (1917), characterisation of the sage before A Vision (1925) is much more loose. In a journal entry for 14 January 1909 Yeats wrote that ‘Logic is a machine; one can leave it to itself; unhelped it will force those present to exhaust the subject. The fool is as likely as the sage to speak the appropriate answer to any assertion’ (Mem 139). The sage appears here to be a logician and arguer, escaping from ‘Style’ and ‘personality’ (the Mask [Mem 139]). In ‘The Hour-Glass’ (1914), Yeats exposed the folly of the ‘Wise Man’ (whom I take to be the sage), who trusts only in ‘Reason’ (VPl 587, l. 108), and denies the eternal world asserted by his critic the ‘Fool’. This ‘Wise Man’ is also a teacher, who instructs his pupils to deny the existence of God through their reason. In Per Amica Silentia Lunae (1917), however, the sage shares the same straight path of mystical enlightenment as the saint, in contradistinction to the serpent path of the artist, and thus reaches the centre of the Sephiroth without the mediation of imagery (Myth 340).19 When one considers these three figures side by side, the sage before A Vision (1925) appears to have been the somewhat loose



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figure of either a mystic or a logician and rationalist who does not seek expression through the Mask, and is also a teacher. If these elements do typify a figure who was emerging in Yeats’s mind before A Vision then they certainly crystallise in the character he chose to call Sage therein. To begin with, ‘sage’ is the name Yeats gave to the figure whom ‘Thomas of Durlowicz’, his wife’s automatic-writing control, had continually called ‘Teacher’ (YVP2 88–96). He is also ‘intellectual’ rather than ‘emotional’ (CV A 52). In the twenty-eight lunar Phases of Yeats’s drama of the changing soul, someone who is Sage from Phases 22 to 8, the so-called primary incarnations (where objectivity, spiritual or physical, predominates over subjectivity, and abstraction over sensation) will be Victim, the ‘Emotional Man’, during the antithetical incarnations 8 to 22 (CV A 52–3), in which subjectivity predominates over objectivity, the artist over the statesman. Elsewhere in A Vision (1925) Yeats described the Victim as the ‘strong soul because he attains the greatest strength and renounces it’ and the Sage ‘the frail soul because his strength is in that which surrounds him, in his doctrine let us say’ (CV A 169). To show what this signifies a brief explication of the system of the gyres is in order here. In Yeats’s A Vision man is equipped with four Faculties during life, which rotate in order around the two intersecting and opposed primary and antithetical cones (or gyres) of his symbolism, determining the disposition of a man, and his relative powers of reasoning and imagination (he further translated this opposing symbolism to the twenty-eight phases of the moon). They are determined by the man’s relation to his Daimon or anti-self, a mind from the Soul of the World which is the complete opposite of the man’s habitual self (AV B 71–80). These Faculties are the Will and Mask, the intuitive sense and its desired object, and Creative Mind and Body of Fate, abstract knowledge and the ‘series of events forced upon’ man from without (AV B 82–3). In the Phases 8 to 22 in Yeats’s lunar symbolism, when the antithetical cone predominates, Mask prevails, and the man is most likely to be strong, artistic, emotional, and to achieve the complete harmony with his Daimon and between his Faculties which Yeats called ‘Unity of Being’ (AV B 141) and deemed to deliver the perfect Mask. In the Phases 22 to 8 the primary cone predominates, Body of Fate prevails, and the man is most likely to be unimaginative, rational, involved in affairs of state, or, in the spiritual primary, a Saint: a religious, mystical man who enjoys direct communion with God without intermediary (AV B 180 –1). While the Saint and the Sensuous Man constituted the Wills of particular Phases (27 and 13 in fact), Sage and Victim were more loose,





predominating figures, not caught up in the geometric determinations of the book, but coming into effect at Phases 8 and 22. This means that Yeats was setting the Sage up as a kind of archetype [my word] of the objective or rational man who has only his ‘doctrine’, and who does not fight with his Daimon for personality or artistic expression. In the automatic script it is Swedenborg with his ‘dry mind’, who is an exemplar of Phase 22 when the alternation occurs, and who constitutes the ‘teaching saint’ that seeks abstract ‘spiritual vision’ rather than the ‘illumination granted to the victim’ (YVP2 88–9). A spiritual philosopher whose method is empirical and dispassionate, we can see Swedenborg numbered alongside less spiritual teachers when Yeats declares in ‘Ireland after Parnell’ (1922) that: ‘These are those who must seek no image of desire, but await that which lies beyond their mind – unities not of the mind, but unities of Nature, unities of God – the man of science, the moralist, the humanitarian, the politician, Saint Simeon Stylites on his pillar, Saint Anthony in his cavern’ (Au 247). The Sage is he who seeks either the physical or spiritual objectivity, expressing it in a doctrine.20 He is also important at a more historical level. When examining the Great Year of 2,200-year cycles, or Fountains in A Vision (1925), each of which undergoes its own macroscopic twenty-eight phases of the moon, Yeats wrote: ‘what is most clear is that they [the Fountains] are alternately Victim and Sage’ (CV A 169). Each separate age is alternately that of the strong, emotional Victim, who chooses to renounce his strength, and the frail, intellectual Sage who only gains what little strength he has from his environment. Sage and Victim are each the ‘revelation’ (CV A 148) to the ages they begin, Christ being the Sage whose suffering came at the beginning of our own primary age, Oedipus the Victim who freed man from nature at the beginning of the previous cycle when he solved the riddle of the Sphinx.21 Therefore, the sage was both the type of the objective, rational man who flies from Unity of Being, and the Teacher; a figure who typifies both the primary phases in the cycle of man’s soul, and major 2,200year eras. If seeking unities of God, like Mathers or Saint Anthony (Au 183), an expression of spiritual objectivity, he could provide a mystical philosophy to empower the artist, and thus even constitute a Romantic figure in keeping with his portrayal by Wordsworth and Shelley. However, his practice could never replace the artist in Yeats’s drama. Most often, he would seek unities of Nature, the physical objectivity, and use reason and argument, his doctrine, in order to further himself, and was opposed to the artist.



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However, the image of Ahasuerus provides us with a potentially more antithetical understanding of the sage in The Trembling of the Veil (1922), when Yeats, describing his quest for self-identity as a gregarious youth, describes how looking for an ‘anti-self … . In later years my mind gave itself to gregarious Shelley’s dream of a young man, his hair blanched with sorrow, studying philosophy in some lonely tower, or of his old man, master of all human knowledge, hidden from human sight in some shell-strewn cavern on the Mediterranean shore’ (Au 171). The mixture of the solitude of Prince Athanase with the sage of ‘The Revolt of Islam’ is then followed by a quotation from ‘Hellas’ about the wisdom of ‘ “the sage” ’ of ‘ “dreadful abstinence” ’ Ahasuerus, and continues with a description of Yeats’s search for spiritual philosophy. Later on Yeats’s descriptions of ‘sages’, like Mathers, involve comparisons with ‘that old Jew’ (Au 183), and indeed Ahasuerus seems more in keeping with those who seek ‘unities of God’ and are thus primary. However, his original enunciation of this image of solitude, being Yeats’s anti-self, definitely casts the sage as being an antithetical figure at that point, as much as Yeats did in ‘Meditations in Times of Civil War’, for once combining the character of the poet with that of the man of ideas. This could be an image more compatible with the intellectual beauty synthesised at Phase 17 (CV A 76–7), and would seem to be so given Yeats’s subsequent description of the intellectual failings of Phase 18, Emotional Philosophy, when the tinctures begin to close: ‘The Will’s object of desire is no longer a single image of passion, for it must relate all to a social life; the man seeks to become not a sage, [not] Ahasuerus, and seeks a woman who looks the wise mother of children’ (CV A 80). Despite the obvious biographical influence on this comment, and that Ahasuerus is probably mixed with the younger Prince Athanase, the sentence permits us to see the sage as a passionate, solitary philosopher, divorced from ‘social life’. It provides a rare glimpse of the sage as an alternative figure to the Sage as primary archetype, but one nevertheless as distant from social life as the other is abstract an unexciting. The sage was nevertheless a much looser definition than, say, the saint, and there was room for yet more change in Yeats’s characterisation. The sage in the diary When Yeats first began to discuss the sage as a figure in the 1930 diary, he clearly had aspects of the Sage from A Vision in mind: It has always seemed to me that all great literature at its greatest intensity displays the sage, the lover, or some image of despair, and





that these are traditional attitudes. When I say the lover I mean all that heroic casuistry, all that assertion of the eternity of what Nature declares ephemeral; and when I speak of an image of despair I think of a passage in Sophocles, or many passages in Shakespeare and in the Old Testament; and when I say the sage I think of something Asiatic, and of something that belongs to modern Europe – the pedlar in The Excursion, an old hermit in The Well at the World’s End, passages in Matthew Arnold.22 (Ex 295) The examples Yeats chose here demonstrate that he still regarded the sage as a teacher. For example, the ‘hermit’ in William Morris’s The Well at the World’s End (the sage of Swevenham) spends two days instructing the young Ralph and Ursula in the lore of a book which holds the secrets to making the final stages of their journey to the wisdom and health-inducing well of the title.23 Similarly, the ‘Pedlar’ or Wanderer in Wordsworth’s The Excursion is a teacher who had ‘singled out’ (Wordsworth, VI, 12, l. 58) the narrator as a boy to be his ‘chosen comrade’ (VI, 13, l. 61), but also for instruction in the mysteries of the natural world (12–13, ll. 58 and 61). Matthew Arnold had also been a teacher for Yeats, especially with regard to Celtic folklore, although not always one whose doctrine that art be a ‘criticism of life’ he appreciated. In this sense the sage, in this early entry of the 1930 diary, clearly has affinities with the Sage of A Vision. The fact that the sage is ‘something Asiatic, … something that belongs to modern Europe’ is also compatible with the Sage of A Vision. This combination is in part due to a belief latent in the first edition of that book (1925), but to be expressed slightly more clearly in the second (1937), that East and West alternately ‘impregnate’ (E&I 432) each other to create the avatar of a new age. In the second part of ‘The Completed Symbol’ we learn that: A wheel of the Great Year must be thought of as the marriage of symbolic Europe and symbolic Asia, the one begetting upon the other. When it commenced at its symbolic full moon in March Christ or Christendom was begotten by the West upon the East. This begetting has been followed by a spiritual predominance of Asia. After it must come an age begotten by the East upon the West that will take after its Mother in turn. (1937 [AV B 203])



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Each 2,200-year cycle begins not only with the reversal of Sage and Victim but with West impregnating East, or vice-versa.24 Although this must relate to the characters Sage and Victim (and the author was to refer to both in his new section ‘The Great Year of the Ancients’ [AV B 243]), Yeats never made the relationship between the two types of alternation explicit in the second edition of A Vision, and only vaguely and unclearly so in the first. It seems appropriate, however, that, since Sage and Victim in the macrocosmic sense of the terms (i.e. characterizing a 2,200-year-cycle), change round at Phases 28 and 1, when one lateral polarity ‘impregnates’ another,25 the sage should indeed be ‘something Asiatic, and … something that belongs to modern Europe’. In his later essay, ‘An Indian Monk’, however, Yeats identifies ‘the magic of Christabel or Kubla Khan … the wise pedlar in The Excursion … Ahasuerus in Hellas’ with a ‘wisdom, magic, sensation’ that ‘seem Asiatic’, as a result of East impregnating West (1934 [E&I 432–3]). Since Ahasuerus and Wordsworth’s ‘Pedlar’ are both types of the sage, this shows that he not only linked this figure with the alternation between the two gyres, but also that he considered the sage who seeks unity with God to share many ideas with the religions of the East. In this case the ‘Pedlar’ in The Excursion is an obvious choice, for Yeats clearly discerned a kind of Eastern ‘magic’ and ‘sensation’ in Wordsworth’s portrayal of the Wanderer. Later extracts from the diary show that Yeats was in fact becoming increasingly interested in what he deemed to be the philosophy underpinning the poetry of the ‘lakers’: ‘Have we exhausted Deism’, he asks, ‘even that form which Blake denounced as pagan nature worship, which Wordsworth got from Coleridge?’ (Ex 308). This is perhaps one respect in which the sage in the diary differs from the Sage in both editions of A Vision, in that he endorses this exciting, Eastern form of mysticism, which manifests itself in the work of the first generation of Romantics, even if Yeats’s consideration of the sage as such is a logical development of his view of primary Sage as illumination to an age when East and West change relationship. However, one major respect in which the sage here differs from its description as the Sage of A Vision, is that it is, in part, antithetical, ‘daemonic’ and passionate in character. Referring again to the lover, the image of despair, and the sage, Yeats wrote: All three have collapsed in our day because writers have grown weary of the old European philosophy and found no other. I think of the passage from Bacon quoted by Wordsworth as a motto to





The White Doe of Rylstone – God puts divinity into a man as a man puts humanity into his dog. When the image of despair departed with poetical tragedy the others could not survive, for the lover and the sage cannot survive without that despair which is a form of joy and has certainly no place in the modern psychological study of suffering. Does not the soldier become the sage, or should I have granted him a different category, when some Elizabethan tragedy makes him reply to a threat of hanging: ‘What has that to do with me?’26 (Ex 296) Yeats’s descriptions of the sage and the lover here encapsulate his own theory of tragedy,27 which involved the struggle for ‘Unity of Being’, causing ‘joy’ in the face of defeat.28 Tragedy should be a ‘joy to the man who dies’ (OBMV xxxiv). The sage, the lover, the image of despair: all are examples of this sort of tragic hero, who, like Major Robert Gregory, feels his ‘lonely impulse of delight’ (VP 328, l. 11) at the point of death, and is nearest to the description of Ahasuerus in Phase 18, a passionate philosopher who escapes ‘social life’. As a tragic figure, the sage can no longer be seen as opposed to the artist. The nonchalance of the ‘soldier’ who ‘become[s] the sage’, with gallant indifference in the face of death, makes the figure appear to share qualities with its opposite, the antithetical Victim, who sacrifices all in a state of absolute strength. The mere equation of soldier with sage is in itself indicative of this tendency, drawing as it does upon the type of metaphor Yeats usually employed to describe a man’s conflict with his Daimon in the pursuit of Unity of Being. In Per Amica Silentia Lunae (1917) Yeats used images of warfare to describe the behaviour of the imaginative man who would escape from his habitual self and impose his will on that other, simple, eternal self, his permanent Daimon. Such a man dreams of ‘eyelids that do not quiver before the bayonet’ (Myth 325) and enjoys a love–hate relationship with the mind behind them (Myth 336).29 The belief that the soldier becomes the sage is, effectively, a belief that the antithetical man can be a sage or philosopher, and fight for Unity of Being with his anti-self in articulating his doctrine. Yeats therefore gives a much clearer explication of the sage earlier considered as Ahasuerus or Prince Athanase in Phase 18, while also combining it with qualities of the primary Sage of A Vision. Yeats had come close to establishing finally the Daimonic nature of the sage by the time he came to consider Coleridge as one, but he had not as yet specified what the sage, as a Romantic figure, actually does,



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and how he achieves his aims. He was yet to find in Coleridge and the others a preferable model of instruction to the habitual ‘abstractions’ of ‘pupil’ and ‘teacher’ (Ex 301), and a figure who can make his work accessible to the masses without compromise. The problem of the sage’s relation to ‘social life’ was something he also still needed to resolve.

Coleridge in Pages from a Diary written in Nineteen Hundred and Thirty The past recalled We must now return to and examine the third consecutive entry in the diary on Coleridge, that of 6 June, where Yeats began: ‘Why does Coleridge delight me more as man than poet?’ (Ex 299). The sentence is surprising since it comes directly after two passages which quote and examine lines from ‘Fears in Solitude’ and ‘Hexameters’. Surely the man who had just found delight in discerning a parallel with the political thought of Swift, and influence from the philosophy of Berkeley in two poems by S. T. Coleridge, cannot have meant that he preferred the character of the author to the poetry itself? There is, of course, a fundamental reason for Yeats’s preferring Coleridge as man to poet, quite apart from the one he gives here. It is in keeping with his entire method of criticism, which depended upon depicting an image and personality for artist and politician: the ‘part’ they play in history, or rather their Mask in Yeats’s imaginary drama. However, Yeats’s immediate reply to the question was that poetry was not a sufficient medium for Coleridge to express all he had felt and perceived, if indeed there were such a medium. From about 1807 Coleridge had an ‘illumination … only in part communicable’ because his goal was not a symbol, but ‘oneness with some spiritual being or beings’, and judging by further sentences Yeats appears to have been intending by this that Coleridge’s real talent was for philosophy, not poetry. The delight Yeats had shown in the political ideas of ‘Fears in Solitude’ and the ‘Berkeleian philosophy’ of ‘Hexameters’ (the latter in part due to Charpentier) was not an aesthetic delight, and influenced his portrayal of Coleridge as a philosopher in the present entry. However, while Yeats did not see Coleridge as a poet, he was equating him quite consciously with his new, more Daimonic type of sage – the man of objective interests who yet desires the Unity of Being usually desired by the artist. This is apparent from Coleridge’s goal of ‘oneness with some spiritual being or beings’ which, while not ending





in a ‘symbol of truth’, is still the desire for union with the permanent Daimon and other impermanent Daimons.30 The comparison with ‘Oedipus when his death approaches’ is also indicative of this, since Oedipus was to play a significant role in the second edition of A Vision as an implicit exemplar of the Sage’s opposite, the antithetical Victim, in the incarnations of the Great Year.31 Further than this, the comparison with Oedipus – he had recently translated both plays – shows that Yeats was recalling ideas from earlier entries in the diary and previous descriptions of Coleridge’s personality. We may recall that when recasting the sage previously Yeats wrote that while thinking of the ‘image of despair’ he remembered ‘a passage in Sophocles’, and then continued to describe this despair as ‘a kind of joy’ in tragedy, without which sage and lover ‘cannot survive’ (Ex 295–6). The fact that Oedipus, who was a tragic figure in Sophocles’s plays with ‘that despair which is a form of joy’ (Ex 296), and therefore Daimonic and antithetical, is here compared to Coleridge, suggests that Yeats held his new, re-orientation of the sage in mind at this point. And the fundamental reason for making the comparison is this: that Yeats had for some years seen Coleridge as a tragic figure who suffers despair as a result of his ‘ “morbid effort” ’ to find a ‘ “perfection” ’ out of keeping with his time (Au 313). In fact, the major reason for portraying Coleridge as a philosopher who ‘needed [required] opium to recover a state which, some centuries earlier, was accessible to the fixed attention of normal man’ (Ex 299) was that Yeats had previously understood him as struggling to create an imaginative art more in keeping with an earlier era. The qualities which Yeats had attributed to Coleridge the poet of ‘Kubla Khan’ and ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ in ‘The Tragic Generation’ (1922), forerunner of Aestheticism, he was now recalling but attributing to Coleridge the philosopher. On 13 June, when he wrote the fourth of these consecutive entries on Coleridge, Yeats decided that the original answer he had given to his question had been wrong, not least because Coleridge could communicate extremely well; after all ‘I have remembered that I thought with like pleasure of Mallarmé’s talk to his famous circle’ (Ex 299). The answer Yeats wanted could only be discovered through introspection and reflection on his own life, and the point in his career which he chose to analyse was the period from 1898 to 1909 when he was working most furiously for the Abbey Theatre: ‘when Synge was writing plays and Lady Gregory translated early Irish poetry with an impulse that interpreted my own’ (Ex 300).



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Yeats’s description in this entry of how he ‘disliked the isolation of the work of art’ at that time and needed to ‘plunge it back into social life’, shows that he was in fact recollecting the problem of how, in an era of ‘mechanism’, where there is no Unity of Culture, one can make the work of poetry or drama accessible to all classes, not just the educated32 (in a deleted part of this entry he had talked of creating a ‘simplicity that never condescends’). Yeats’s obscure final answer to why he preferred Coleridge as man to poet is, therefore, that the Englishman was capable, like Synge, of writing in an accessible and appealing language, which Yeats no longer associated with the poet as such – not Oedipus the tragic hero so much as Tireisias, the blind prophet. It was perhaps influenced by his previous identification of Coleridge with ‘simplicity’ and the ‘living voice’ in 1906, and further identification of him with Synge in 1910. Now, however, with Coleridge the philosopher in mind, Yeats was beginning to apply these criteria to philosophy, the ‘complement’, or ‘correspondential revery’33 of this literature. How could the philosopher become accessible to the masses? Judging by the 19 June entry, Yeats deemed Coleridge and the Anglo-Irishmen of the eighteenth century to do battle, ‘sword in hand’ (Ex 301), against both philosophical and linguistic ‘abstractions’ through their ‘daemonic rage’, but in doing so to be able to appeal to an audience which the Yeats of the Irish Dramatic Movement had never been able to, with this ‘idiom escaped from isolating method’. It is paradoxical that Yeats wanted philosophers to achieve Unity of Being, through struggle and make ‘logic serve passion’ (Ex 301), and yet that this antithetical trait made them all the less isolated, all the more capable of escaping the artist’s solitude, of communicating with society as a whole; of using, in fact, a language which Yeats had in the past associated with a more passive and objective mind, like that of Synge. In other words, he is describing a philosopher and teacher who maintains the impossible by his own system’s standards. This paradox was a result of Yeats recalling past attitudes to Coleridge, coupled with his more recent identification of Coleridge as philosopher. While the Coleridge of ‘Kubla Khan’ and ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ made a ‘morbid effort’ to create an art of ‘new, pure beauty’ in ‘The Tragic Generation’ (1922 [Au 313]), in which the mind struggles to achieve an art no longer appreciable by the masses, the Coleridge of the Lyrical Ballads, with less personality and a more passive disposition, had been seen as achieving just the opposite in ‘Literature and the Living Voice’ (1906) and ‘J. M. Synge and the Ireland of his





Time’ (1910), ridding abstractions and ‘mechanical specialisations’ (Ex 211) from his work. Now, however, Yeats was in effect uniting the two dispositions in a philosopher, political theorist and teacher who not only shares the ‘daemonic rage’ of the artist, out of phase with his time, but has the social relevance and mass appeal of the man of ‘little personal will, but fiery and brooding imagination’ ([E&I 329], even though by now Yeats had accepted elsewhere that there can be no Unity of Culture).34 Thus Yeats’s construction of Coleridge’s personality – his attempt to see why he pleased him more as man than poet – not only helped him to see Coleridge the philosopher as conforming to the new ideal of sage who struggles tragically with his Daimon to a joyful despair, but also to expand the powers of this archetype still further to include a greater social appeal and clarity, and to help him understand more fully how the sage avoids abstraction in his work. Oedipus and Tireisias become one, and combine the primary and the antithetical qualities incompatible elsewhere in Yeats’s work. No less important, however, to his past and present readings of Coleridge was his major secondary source, John Charpentier’s Coleridge the Sublime Somnambulist. It is this book which may help us to determine firstly what Yeats actually meant by Coleridge’s language making him not just a new sort of teacher but like the prophet ‘Blind Tireisias’ (Ex 300) and ‘Saint Anthony’ (Ex 301) rather than ‘professor’.35

Charpentier The section in Charpentier’s book from which Yeats created his reading of Coleridge is, like the rest of it, more an attempt to construct its subject in the image of the Baudelairean poet-dreamer who seeks inspiration from mystical experience than either a studious biography or appraisal of the major works. Charpentier noted many of the remarkable achievements of Coleridge’s later career at Highgate, in particular the Imagination/Fancy distinction of the Biographia, and the Reason/ Understanding division of The Friend (1809). He homogenised all into his own construction of Coleridge’s aesthetic, which he deemed to be the foundation of la poésie pure in France (Charpentier, p. 275). He also continually stressed the need to elucidate Coleridge’s analytical work by reference to his poetry, rather than the other way round (pp. 260 and 274). Of all passages in Charpentier’s work, the one which appears to have had a most unusual effect upon Yeats, which he recorded in the 13 June entry, occurs at the end of the third chapter of the last ‘Book’,



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For those who were vexed with heart-searchings as deep-felt as his, he movingly interpreted the still, small voices they dimly heard within. He created for them the illusion that with him as their mouthpiece, these voices were making essential truths plainer to understand, and gave them grounds for strengthening their faith in the very existence of these truths. But I am tempted to go further, and to say that what Mallarmé did as regards poetry, for frequenters of his Tuesday receptions in Rue de Rome, Coleridge succeeded in accomplishing on behalf of something profounder and subtler still, for the benefit of his visitors to Highgate. He was gifted with the magic power to fling open at certain moments, through the medium of words, a window upon his soul, and those who then were drawn near him could gaze upon that flame of divine certainty which else dawns only in moments of contemplative conviction upon the inward eye of the greatest mystics alone. (pp. 312–13) The most striking aspect of this passage, in relation to the diary, is the comparison with Mallarmé. In deeming his original reason for why he preferred Coleridge as man to poet to be insufficient, Yeats remembered that he had felt the same about Mallarmé on ‘Thursday’ evenings. Although it is possible that Yeats had attended talks given by the Symbolist in Paris, he was nevertheless mistaking Charpentier’s thought for his own. Charpentier compared two poets who were also speakers and teachers, in a particular setting, and when illustrating the sage Yeats likewise referred to ‘Coleridge at Highgate’, and ‘Mallarmé on his Thursday evenings’. This extract also provided Yeats with a more firm basis from which to indicate the types of both teacher and philosopher he himself would like to be. The discussion of how Coleridge was capable of creating the ‘illusion’ for ‘those who were vexed with heart-searchings as deep-felt as his … that with him as their mouth-piece’ what they dimly felt might be fully known, must have affected Yeats’s understanding of how the philosopher should endeavour to teach. Rather than explain abstractions to a receiver, he should speak innate truths to which all may commonly assent once asserted. Since Yeats later described himself as speaking words ‘which come from nowhere, which I could not



‘The Seer of Highgate’. Talking of the impression made by Coleridge upon those who visited him at Highgate, he declared:


account for, which were even absurd, which have been fulfilled to the letter’ (Ex 302), Charpentier’s description probably struck a chord with his own views on Anima Mundi, and further show us, as readers of his diary, what Yeats actually meant by changing the model of teacher from ‘professor’ to the prophets ‘Blind Tireisias’ and ‘Saint Anthony’.36 Charpentier described Coleridge’s ultimate failure as a philosopher in this section, but praised his skill as the educator of a coterie of young men who gathered at Highgate and considered him the leading authority on metaphysics in the country. While Crabb Robinson was complimentary about his ‘deed of wizardry’, the other source Charpentier employed, and quoted at some length, Carlyle’s Life of Sterling, contains a chapter given over to the author’s less laudatory recollections of the great man: ‘Coleridge’, wrote Carlyle in his Life of Sterling, ‘sat on the brow of Highgate Hill in those years looking down on London and its smoke tumult like a sage escaped from the inanity of life’s battle; attracting towards him the thoughts of innumerable brave souls still engaged there. His express contributions to poetry, philosophy, or any specific province of human literature or enlightenment, had been small or sadly intermittent; but he had, especially among young enquiring men, a higher than literary, a kind of prophetic or magician character. He was thought to hold, he alone in England, the key of German and other Transcendentalisms, knew the sublime secret of believing by ‘the reason’ what ‘the understanding’ has been obliged to fling out as incredible. … A sublime man, who alone in those dark days had saved his crown of spiritual manhood. … The practical intellects of the world did not much heed him, or carelessly reckoned him a metaphysical dreamer; but to the rising spirits of the young generation he had this dusky sublime character, and sat there as a kind of Magus girt in mystery and enigma; his Dodona oak grove (Mr. Gillman’s house at Highgate) whispering strange things, uncertain whether oracles or jargon.’ (Charpentier, pp. 309–10) In the rest of this passage Carlyle criticised Coleridge’s inability to express his ideas with sufficient clarity, which Charpentier dismissed as being his own jealousy at being unable to get a word in edgeways while in the great man’s company.37 This source must have impressed Yeats, since it actually uses the term ‘sage’, and the idea of battle, which he had himself brought together earlier in the diary (Ex 296).38



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However, Yeats consciously rejected Carlyle’s view that the sage is outside ‘life’s battle’ in the 19 June entry. Rather than being away from the fight, Coleridge was all the more passionate, Daimonic and ‘sword in hand’ (Ex 301), and at the same time all the more relevant to his society by being engaged in the battle with life (1906). Although Yeats accepted Charpentier’s view of Coleridge as a sage, capable of teaching as though divinely inspired, this passage from Carlyle clearly challenged him to assert his own view of the great man. Through rejecting the view of Coleridge as away from ‘life’s battle’, Yeats was spurred on to link the endeavour to find Unity of Being in the sage with social relevance – adapting one’s conversation to the company. Two usually incompatible concepts were resolved in one figure. This was his final and most conclusive correction of Charpentier and Carlyle. As a result of past and present readings of Coleridge’s work, Yeats interacted with his secondary sources and rejected the notion that Coleridge at Highgate was ‘outside’. While he accepted Charpentier’s description of this sage as a different sort of teacher, he whole-heartedly rejected the view that the end of his life was merely a symbol, or that he could not communicate properly. In doing so he linked the man of passion to the man of society – the antithetical and the primary. Yeats’s sage in fact bears uncanny similarities to the personality described by John Holloway in his book The Victorian Sage. Holloway defines Victorian sages as thinkers difficult to classify by normal philosophical standards due to their search for an holistic ‘ “philosophy of life” ’ rather than in any definite area,39 and who, due to the insufficiency of logic to express this, prefer trying to quicken the reader’s perception instead (Holloway, p. 10). It is something of an irony that Holloway sees Coleridge as the precursor of this figure, but that his prime example is Carlyle, that very writer who disparages Coleridge for his isolation. All in all, due to Yeats’s recent readings of ‘Fears in Solitude’ and ‘Hexameters’, of John Charpentier’s biography, and earlier considerations of his identity, Coleridge re-emerged as a ‘sage’ in Yeats’s new imaginary drama; a philosopher who ‘talks to the occasion’, is passionate, and teaches like a prophet, making ‘logic serve passion’, even to the point where ‘logic be ready to cut its own throat’ in asserting spiritual truths (Ex 302). This was Coleridge’s Mask, Yeats’s ultimate critique of him as a writer; for, as always with Yeats, the description of the personality was also a criticism of the artist’s work. It was also the model of philosopher to which he aspired in rewriting A Vision, and in coping with the abstractions both of argument and of neo-Platonism.




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The sage in Yeats’s poetry

It seems that I must bid the Muse go pack, Choose Plato and Plotinus for a friend Until imagination, ear and eye, Can be content with argument and deal In abstract things. (VP 409, ll. 11–15) As he paces over the battlements of the tower, ‘send[ing] imagination forth’ over the landscape, and looking for an historical precedent for fighting passionately this effective movement towards abstraction (albeit of a preferable kind to the material), he prays for the impossible: ‘O may the moon and sunlight seem / One inextricable beam, / For if I triumph I must make men mad’ (VP 411, ll. 54 –6), and then asks towards the end of the poem: Did all old men and women, rich and poor, Who trod upon these rocks or passed this door, Whether in public or in secret rage As I do now against old age? (VP 413, ll. 97–100) In the last part of the poem, however, although he ‘mock[s] Plotinus’ thought / And [cries] in Plato’s teeth’ (VP 415, ll. 146–7) preferring the ‘bitter soul’ of passion, he nevertheless accepts that: Now shall I make my soul, Compelling it to study In a learned school Till the wreck of body, Slow decay of blood. (VP 416, ll. 181–5) Thus he appears to concede both to old age and the inevitability of his mind becoming more abstract. The problems of the antitheses of old age and youth, the philosopher and the artist – the primary and the



Yeats’s reading of Coleridge helped him to solve some of the problems he had discussed in his poem ‘The Tower’ (1926), in which, contemplating the onset of old age, he declared:

antithetical – were neither resolved in this poem, nor in the entire collection, in which Yeats most fully explored the irreconcilable oppositions of his system. This reflects partly on his use of the sage as well. In ‘Sailing to Byzantium’ we read of the ‘sages standing in God’s holy fire / As in the gold mosaic of a wall’ (VP 408, ll. 17–18) who teach the artist to sing. The sages teach the artist who in turn joins them, much as Yeats sought a philosophy to empower the artist. Here the answer to old age is a supernatural immolation in an art world, and although they teach the artist a positive philosophy of the spirit, in which the physical may incarnate the spiritual, they are not themselves artists, nor are they passionate, and only offer him an escape from reality, rather than an attempt to transform it. The same is true of the poem ‘In Memory of Eva Gore-Booth and Constance Markiewicz’ (1927), where Yeats invokes the conflagratio, or burning up of time to reach eternity, commanding their spirits: ‘Run till all the sages know’ (VP 476, l. 29); again, this is an element of the sage compatible with the Sage in A Vision, being identified with a figure who will predict apocalypse, or who even arrives at the end of an age. After the diary, however, Yeats writes of the sage as a figure who is altogether more positive. In ‘An Acre of Grass’ (1937), he announces: Grant me an old man’s frenzy, Myself must I remake Till I am Timon and Lear Or that William Blake Who beat upon the wall Till Truth obeyed his call; A mind Michael Angelo knew That can pierce the clouds, Or inspired by frenzy Shake the dead in their shrouds; Forgotten else by mankind, An old man’s eagle mind. (VP 576, ll. 13–24) Here the old man who retires to ‘an old house / Where nothing stirs but a mouse’ (VP 575, ll. 5–6) – like Ahasuerus in The Trembling of the Veil – can still combine Timon with Lear, or like Blake discover his philosophy through frenzy and violence. The ‘old man’, therefore, no





longer battles against old age, but deems it to provide the necessary frenzy, or ‘daemonic rage’. However, he does this in the pursuit of philosophical truth rather than a ‘loose “imagination” ’ (VP 575, l. 9), and he is moreover able to make ‘mankind’ observe what it had otherwise forgotten, thus plunging himself into social life while still retiring from the world. The Yeats of The Tower, who positioned the artist against the ageing philosopher, has been able to combine the two, and rather than regret becoming old, see seniority as providing him with this fury. The ‘sword in hand’ sage of the diary has recrystallised in this poem, having taught him to see the philosopher’s role as passionate, yet also relevant to the masses. In ‘The Seven Sages’ (1930), where Yeats deals in particular with the Anglo-Irish version of the sage, the speakers describe Swift, Berkeley, Goldsmith and Burke as the ‘four great minds that hated Whiggery … / A levelling, rancorous, rational sort of mind, / That never looked out of the eye of a saint / Or out of drunkard’s eye’ (VP 486, ll. 7, and 11–13). The combination of saint and drunkard indicates the relation of two opposing Phases, 27 and 13. The one seeks a unity with God and spiritual sanctity; the other, through the dissipation of alcohol or drugs – a Johnson or a Dowson – emotional sanctity and a sensitivity out of keeping with the time. Here the two dispositions are brought together, as they were in the 1930 diary, when Yeats asked ‘Why does Coleridge delight me more as man than as poet?’, and drawing upon his previous comparison of Coleridge with ‘The Tragic Generation’, proceeded to describe him as spiritual philosopher who took opium to recover a state belonging to an earlier age (Ex 299). However, the final conclusion as to what made the four so different from the age against which they also raged – the eighteenth century – is that: They walked the roads Mimicking what they heard, as children mimic; They understood that wisdom comes of beggary. (VP 487, ll. 24 –6) Here he links their philosophy to the concreteness achieved by Synge, which made them have a more direct language and a philosophy that dealt with the concrete rather than with the abstract – as with the Coleridge of Percy and the Lyrical Ballads, whom Yeats recalled in his subsequent entry (Ex 300). The sage who made ‘sun and moonlight seem / One inextricable beam’, who wrote a passionate philosophy ‘sword in hand’, and whom



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Yeats’s reading of Coleridge and Charpentier did so much to bring into effect, did survive the diary. Therefore, many of the philosophical goals which Yeats set the sage were resolved, particularly in the poems of The Winding Stair, which often act as a resolution to the proposed antinomies of The Tower, and which will be discussed later. All the same, in the 1937 edition of A Vision the Sage was still the teacher, the type of the primary or objective man, as well as the illumination to a primary age who arrives when the relation between East and West alternates, and the tinctures swap places (AV B 257). His ideal of the sage as a Romantic quester, delivering man from ‘rhymed abstractions’, is not continued there. Furthermore, the possibilities of a Romanticism in which ‘pagan nature worship’ is restored, the spiritual coalescing with the sensory, which emerges in the diary and was to find expression in later introductions, does not find any sustained articulation in A Vision. The major reason for this is that the system of A Vision, with its faith in neo-Platonic spiritual hierarchy, denies this. However much Yeats continually brought the dynamic of contraries into the relation between the noetic and the sensory (no sooner characterizing, for example, the Thirteenth Cone as beyond time and space [AV B 210] than returning it to the logic of opposition [AV B 229]), he could not replace the neoPlatonic abstractions which he needed to organise his spiritual philosophy with a notion of Ultimate Reality which is ‘concrete, sensuous, bodily’ (AV B 214), as he declared optimistically, but hesitantly, at the end of ‘The Completed Symbol’ when quoting Zen mondos. This need to concretise Ultimate Reality, something which he continually discerned (although imperfectly) in the work of Berkeley in the diary, has been interpreted by Mokashi-Punekar as an attempt to understand the immolation with God as a process taking place personally within the individual soul,40 while Colin McDowell sees it as a necessary reminder that the experience of the immanent soul is always more important to Yeats than the transcendent phases of his system.41 But this is to ignore that in the later books of A Vision (1937) the ascent to Ultimate Reality takes place within a community of Daimons, and that in the works surrounding the opus Yeats specifically sees preferred forms of spiritualism – in Zen, in Hinduism, and even in the early Berkeley – as involving a sensory contemplation of Ultimate Reality beyond the personal struggle of the artist, but incorporating his goal to the highest extreme. In his essay on Bishop Berkeley, for instance, he wrote that: Berkeley in his youth described the summum bonum and the reality of Heaven as physical pleasure, and thought this conception made





both more intelligible to simple men. And though he abandoned it in later life, and not merely because incompatible with the mask, one returns to it remembering Blake’s talk of ‘enlarged and numerous senses’, his description of Heaven as an improvement of sense, Lake Harris’s denunciation of Swedenborg as a half man ‘that half saw, half felt, half tasted the Kingdom of Heaven’. Berkeley was fumbling his way backward to some simple age. I think of the Zen monk’s expectation, though maybe but as an inducement to passivity, of an odour of unknown flowers as contemplation reaches its climax; of the Zen painter gathering into the same powerful rhythm all those things that in the work of his predecessor stood so solidly as themselves. (E&I 410) Berkeley’s idealism, Yeats had hoped, could restore sensory delight to the contemplation of the mystic in his apprehension of the absolute, to make his revelation more in keeping with that of the artist. The Zen artist, however, could create the beautiful from such an indivisible selfcontemplation – thus proving that the mind as a divine purus actus could, in whatever way, be embodied sensually – and in doing so, crucially, emulates the apprehension of the Zen monk.42 In another unpublished entry from the diary, numbered 10 in the original and presumably written in mid-May, Yeats had defined the Thirteenth Cone as becoming ‘embodied experience’ when reflected in all those aspects of nature which are ‘least controllable by us’, but as normally impelling particular experience through the incarnations of Creative Mind, Body of Fate and Mask. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that Yeats should have initially (and rather optimistically) summed up A Vision as follows in a letter to Olivia Shakespear: ‘Heaven is an improvement of sense – one listens to music, one does not read Hegel’s logic’ (9 February 1931; L 781). The goal of the sage, as defined in the diary, was to provide a concrete spirituality, combining the spirituality of the saint with the concreteness of the artist, and such was the impossible goal of Yeats’s reading of philosophy. The philosopher who makes ‘logic serve passion’ is, most importantly, one who can articulate a doctrine of God’s physical immanence as opposed to one of transcendence. As such, Coleridge, a philosopher of spiritual transcendence, was misread as a philosopher of fleshly immanence.



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Transcendence and Immanence



Part II




Reason and Understanding: Coleridge’s Philosophical Influence on Yeats

Yeats made a slightly unflattering comparison between his father and the great man in an unpublished letter to John Quinn of 30 September 1921, when he wondered aloud ‘whether Coleridge was not much the same. His philosophy is full of wisdom, but his application of it never is.’ Given the references to Coleridge in The Trembling of the Veil (1922), published a year later, Yeats may have been musing on the gap between the advice on imagination in the Biographia and the relative paucity of great poems by the tragic proto-Aesthete he described therein, when he delivered this stock nineteenth-century comment on his forebear. By 1930 this view was certainly no longer one Yeats seriously entertained, and even in The Trembling of the Veil itself Yeats had made reference to the Biographia and Coleridge’s refutation of Hartley’s ‘mechanical philosophy’ (Au 358). Coleridge’s most important philosophical contribution to Yeats was an understanding of the ‘nous’, or active principle of Reason in the mind, as being more concrete than it appeared to him from either a neo-Platonic or Kantian perspective. Although later entries show that he found Coleridge’s style boring and unimpassioned, compared to that of his Anglo-Irish ‘counterparts’ (Ex 314), his metaphysics and their political application were to be of great importance to him in understanding his own system. As such Coleridge did fulfil, to some extent, Yeats’s impression of him as sage or Romantic philosopher. Despite referring to various periods of Coleridge’s political and philosophical development, Yeats imposed a universal understanding of all genres and épochs on his literary forebear’s work. Because of this, the radical republican poem ‘Fears in Solitude’, written when Coleridge was still an extreme liberal and admirer of Fox, was interpreted by Yeats as sanctioning the more Tory sentiments of Swift and the older 57



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Burke (Ex 298). A poem written in 1797 to Wordsworth as an illustration of the hexameter he interpreted as showing both Berkeleian and Platonic leanings at a time when newer research shows Coleridge was still largely an empiricist and realist, and not as truly Berkeleian as he occasionally declared (Ex 299), although in this Yeats was repeating a standard view of the time. Just as earlier constructions of Coleridge were homogenised into the sage, Coleridge at Highgate, so the views of his great work, the enlarged 1818 version of The Friend, were used to totalise all his views. It was in The Friend, a series of essays first published in 1809, soon after his return from Malta, that Coleridge had confirmed his philosophical and political direction towards transcendental idealism and Conservatism respectively. He described the mind in this work as employing both innate ideas and empirical knowledge, and thus further defined political morality as being based upon the divine organ of Reason, but only under the condition that it be tempered by the expediency of prudence from the empirical faculty. Whereas the youthful Coleridge had seen landed property as the root of human vices, the sage at Highgate now considered it a system essential for determining the fitness of men to vote.1 From 1928 to 1937, Coleridge’s writings helped Yeats to end abstraction in three major spheres: the transcendental, the political and the life after death. Although the major record of Yeats’s reading is to be found in his 1930 diary, it is really from A Vision and related essays of the 1930s that we can judge the further extent of Coleridge’s influence on him.

Abstract and concrete In 1928 Yeats wrote to T. Sturge Moore, his correspondent in all things philosophical, that ‘Coleridge restated Kant in terms of Plato’ ( June 1928 LTSM 131). He had been reading The Friend for the first time and was clearly delighted to see that, in Coleridge’s Kant-inspired division of the mind into Reason, Understanding and Sense – innate knowledge, acquired knowledge and the faculty of sensation itself – he was prepared to base Reason on a more openly Platonic and spiritual ontology than Yeats felt Kant himself did. This insight confirms the importance of Platonism and neoPlatonism to Yeats’s new plans for A Vision, as he had already successfully dismissed the material abstractions of British Common Sense philosophy (see Chapter 5, pp. 136– 41). Coleridge’s ability to provide a Platonic ontology for Kant’s pure Theoretic reason was to exert an



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important influence on the ‘The Completed Symbol’, the Book describing the Principles, and aided him in understanding their essential difference from the Faculties from both a microcosmic and macrocosmic perspective. The Wheel of the Principles contains the ‘innate grounds’ (AV B 187) of the Faculties, and rotates not merely during the life of the man, but in the life between lives as well. It consists of two gyres, the hour-glass and the diamond, with the double cone of the 28 Phases and Faculties within life further transposed, as in Figure 2. 8

Will Phase 17

Husk Body of Fate Phase 27

8

The Faculties and Phase of the major incarnation of both life and the life between lives, is represented outside the Wheel (here Phase 17).

15 1 Spirit r

22 Mask Phase 3

P.B. Creative Mind Phase 13 22 Figure 1 Wheel of the Principles

15 22 8 1

Will Phase 17 The 28 Phases and Faculties within the major life incarnation are on the first half of the hour-glass, and end when Husk reaches its Phase 15 in the centre

Mask Phase 3 Figure 2 Wheel of the Principles showing Gyres within Life Transposed



Reason and Understanding


When Will begins a new major incarnation (here Phase 17), the Husk will travel along the hour-glass from its own Phase 1 to 8, and then back to Phase 15, Passionate Body performing the opposite movement. After death these two Principles swap sides of the hour-glass, and the Passionate Body will go past its Phase 1 to Phase 8 and then backwards to its Phase 15, although the living Faculties within one life (not of the major life incarnation, represented by the Faculties outside the Wheel) are by now finished. The Spirit, however, moves along the diamond, and when Husk is at its own Phase 15, sets out from the point Aries, the point where the Creative Mind of the major incarnation is always fixed on the outside of the circle.2 The Principles inform the ‘voluntary and acquired’ Faculties. The Husk, the memory of the Daimon’s past lives, is reflected as the Will, while the Passionate Body – the Daimon’s incarnation of other ‘discarnate Daimons’ from the Soul of the World – reflects as the Mask (AV B 187–9). When the man dies the Spirit takes over from the Husk as his centre of consciousness (AV B 188), and seeks to purify itself by finding and becoming one with the Celestial Body, before the man is reborn into a new Phase, with hour-glass and diamond shifting their positions, or passes into the phaseless Thirteenth Cone (AV B 223–5). Yeats read Stephen Mackenna’s translation of Plotinus’s Enneads in 1926, and later used it as the major organising structure of the Principles, whose importance he had failed to understand in the first edition of A Vision. In Plotinus’s universe there are four major Hypostases, each higher Hypostasis emanating into that below it, each lower one contemplating that above it. The First is the One, beyond Knowledge or Being, which transcends all things, but emanates or ‘overflows’ into the Second, the Intellectual realm, ‘nous’ or Spirit. This Second Hypostasis constitutes the realm of the Authentic Existents (a term which Yeats took to mean ‘Hypostasis’ itself), or Platonic Ideas, in which Act and Being, knower and known, coalesce but also begin to break up into separable parts, as they do in our own world of subjects and objects. This then overflows into the Third Hypostasis, the All-Soul or Soul of the World. The individual soul is an emanation from both the Second and Third Hypostases.3 According to Rosemary Ritvo,4 Yeats matched the Celestial Body and the Spirit of his ‘unknown instructors’ with Plotinus’s Second Hypostasis, in which reside the principles of Being and Knowledge, confusingly calling them the First and Second ‘Authentic Existants’, as though the two parts of this realm become separate Hypostases in themselves. When united the Spirit and Celestial Body are ‘pure thought’ (Ex 316) or



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‘pure mind’ (AV B 189): the Divine Ideas. The collective, discarnate Daimons Yeats believed to exist in the Third Authentic Existant (really Hypostasis), or Soul of the World, which is an emanation from the Second, or Spirit, but also contemplates it in its moving circle (AV B 194). These discarnate Daimons are the basis for the Husk and Passionate Body, or ‘Sense … and the objects of sense’ (AV B 188) which are reflected as Will and Mask in the living man, in conjunction with his incarnate Daimon, which, Ritvo believes, corresponds to Plotinus’s individual logoi of the soul (although this is more doubtful).5 Above and transcending all of these is Yeats’s Ultimate Reality, or Thirteenth Cone, Plotinus’s ‘One’, which for Yeats is ‘neither one nor many’, and frees the souls who enter it from ‘the twelve cycles of time and space’ (AV B 210). In Yeats’s terms it is a ‘phaseless sphere’ beyond antinomies (AV B 210), with ‘all movement, all thought, all perception extinguished’ (Ex 307). Despite roundly dismissing materialism with such a system, Yeats still had a problem both accepting his own Principles, and the neoPlatonic explanation of them. Essentially the problem was this: in seeking to deny the ‘abstractions’ of Locke’s primary qualities, he was forced to identify with philosophers whose own positing of a Platonic Deity was itself an ‘abstraction’, since it was not a part of sensory experience, nor something he could see working directly in the mind. The problems of making the abstractions of the philosophy he preferred more concrete were originally postulated and answered in the 1930 diary. In a later entry for 19 June we see Yeats complaining that although Coleridge calls sight a ‘language’, thus expressing the view that ‘through the particular we approach the Divine Ideas’, and so making reality more concrete, he still fails to deliver the Divine Ideas from ‘abstractions’ (Ex 304). He complains that: ‘I can call them spaceless, timeless beings that behold and determine each other, but what can they be to monotheistic Burke and Coleridge but God’s abstract and separate thoughts?’ (Ex 305). Yeats’s implication here is that the Christian Coleridge and Burke fail to accept the neo-Platonic understanding of Divine Reason (in which Act and Being do genuinely ‘behold and determine each other’ through the mutual contemplation and limiting of each other) a problem which he does not believe Berkeley to share.6 However, despite this assertion the neo-Platonic ‘nous’ was as much an abstraction for the Berkeleian Yeats as was any Christian understanding of the spiritual. The tensions which run throughout The Completed Symbol between Plotinus’s hierarchy and his own conflation





of that hierarchy to the same realm, and the further tension between the conceptions of ‘reality as a congeries of being … reality as a single being’, show that the Divine Ideas, taken at face value, were also abstractions: partly because they were unacceptable to a man who wished to make Ultimate Reality ‘concrete, sensuous, bodily’ (AV B 214), and furthermore because, from reading Plotinus, he saw them as part of the World ‘nous’, and not of individual souls, or ‘congeries of being’. This twofold abstraction, in part forced by the necessary lack of separateness and personality in people governed by Spirit and Celestial Body in the last phases of the gyres, plagued Yeats in his attempt to adapt Plotinus to the Wheel of the Principles. Therefore, while in Plotinus’s system their emanation provides the necessary separation into a world of subjects and objects, Yeats was more preoccupied with trying to see the two parts of the Second Hypostasis, Act and Being – the ‘Divine Ideas in their unity’ (AV B 187) – as components of the original consciousness of man (not merely in the emanated form of the ‘logoi’), and yet still with reconciling this individual understanding within the macrocosmic, historical movements of the gyres for which he was also discovering correlations in the work of anthropologists such as Gerald Heard and Flinders Petrie. In other words he wanted to see the ‘Divine Ideas’ working in individual man and in world movements. Although he may have initially shown doubts in the above-mentioned entry about Coleridge’s ability to promote the concrete over the abstract, the re-reading of The Friend was to prove helpful in resolving this. Later in the diary, in an entry of 9 August, when he was back at Coole Park, Yeats was to use Coleridge’s definition of ‘Reason’ for just this purpose. Reason, the innate or divine organ of the mind, and Understanding, the experiential faculty, were at the centre of Coleridge’s philosophy in The Friend. Coleridge had defined the former as ‘supersensuous’: an organ bearing the same relation to spiritual objects, the universal, the eternal, and the necessary, as the eye bears to material and contingent phaenomena. But then it must be added, that it is an organ identical with its appropriate objects. Thus God, the soul, eternal truth, etc., are the objects of reason; but they are themselves reason. We name God the Supreme Reason; and Milton says, ‘Whence the soul reason receives, and reason is her being.’ Whatever is conscious self-knowledge is reason; and in this sense it may be safely defined the organ of the supersensuous. (Fr 102)



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Reason is therefore innate, and connate with man’s ability to coalesce subject with object through apperception. However, Coleridge also insisted that while every man possesses Reason, not all have ‘the means of exercising it, and the materials (i.e. the facts and ideas) on which it is exercised’ (Fr 105). He had declared that all men possess the ideas of Reason, but that the organ can only become a faculty, or the vis rationalis, by working through the empirical power of the Understanding (vis regulatrix), which creates concepts through experience ([Fr 102–5] the sense, which ‘perceives’, is the ‘vis sensitiva vel intuitiva’ [Fr 103]). Coleridge’s philosophy of mind was a post-Kantian adaptation of the ‘Critique of Pure Reason’, whose author did not give the ontological basis Coleridge required for proving man’s link with divinity.7 Kant had distinguished between a priori and a posteriori faculties of knowledge, the ‘vernunft’ (Reason) and ‘verstandt’ (Understanding), and demonstrated that there was a pure theoretic reason, as well as a practical, which, through synthetic judgements a priori, revealed the higher innate powers of the mind in perceiving known identities between unlike things from a basis which precedes experience (e.g. ‘all happenings have a cause’).8 These judgements were in turn only possible because of the existence of the a priori forms of sensuous intuition, space and time, which could be proven to pre-exist experience through induction: space, for example, or the sense of an object’s outness, must be prior to experience as we cannot cease to intuit its existence, even though we may block out the sensed objects to which it gives spatial form. For Kant, therefore, our a priori faculties were contained in the pure theoretic reason of the mind, as they were for Coleridge too. Nevertheless, since his standpoint was epistemological, induction, or the ability to make judgements divorced from experience, rather than coalescence or direct self-intuition, constituted his synthetic method: the existence of God could be proven by the innate sense of ethics rather than through internal revelation and feeling (McNiece, p. 21). For Coleridge, who followed Fichte, Schelling and Jacobi in seeking to place the innateness of reason in the inner sense of consciousness and thus in ‘the supersensuous’, Kant’s work was simply not spiritual enough.9 He demanded instead a more mystical dissolution of subject and object. A further distinction between Kant and Coleridge is that the latter stressed Reason’s dependence on the Understanding in realising itself: that Reason could only work properly as a faculty, rather than an organ, if it did so through conceptual knowledge. While Coleridge did





follow Kant’s own distinction between morality and politics, or ‘ethos’ and ‘ios’, as he showed in his later critique of Rousseau and other thinkers of the French Enlightenment, he went further than Kant’s ‘pure theoretic’ in making all Reason’s decisions dependent on the Understanding. Thus, in distinguishing between the supersensuous organ of Reason, which reveals its spirituality to us, and the action of the vis rationalis, which can only work properly through the wisdom of acquired knowledge, Coleridge was able to create a theory of mind which was at once moral and pragmatic, effectively dividing the two spheres of religious contemplation and worldly action with added justification, a distinction he was to pursue later in Aids to Reflection (1825). We can see that Yeats’s earlier comment in a letter to T. Sturge Moore that ‘Coleridge restated Kant in terms of Plato’ in arguing that ‘ “regularity” “universality” “unity” ’ were more than ‘a priori forms or rules of the mind, which only come into “existence” through experience (Kant)’ (1928 [LTSM 131]) constituted an extremely perceptive reading of The Friend, although would be more correctly phrased ‘in terms of Plotinus’. The discovery reflects Yeats’s interest in Kant’s antinomies, but also his attempt to find an ontological ground congruent with the Spirit and Celestial Body for the working powers of abstract knowledge in his new system. When Yeats came back to The Friend after reading Charpentier, two years later rediscovering what he had in fact known previously, he had a wider context in which to apply its wisdom, despite initial dumbfoundedness. On 9 August he discerned in Coleridge’s political philosophy an improvement on Swift’s, and that the sage of Highgate made one particular abstraction more ‘concrete’ for him: What has set me writing is Coleridge’s proof, which seems to me conclusive, that civilisation is driven to its final phase not by the jealousy and egotism of the many, as Swift’s too simple statement implies, but by ‘pure thought’, ‘reason’, what my System calls ‘spirit’ and ‘celestial body’, by that which makes all places and persons alike; that clay comes before the potter’s thumb. I remember that my Instructors instance that understanding the ‘faculties’ wears thin at the end of an age, and begin to speculate about the plasticity that is the theme of Mr. Wyndham Lewis in The Apes of God and of Pirandello at all times.10 (Ex 316)

Closer inspection of the diary shows that Mrs Yeats, the editor, was for once in error, and should have put ‘understanding’ between



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quotation marks, since her husband was clearly equating this with the Faculties. The political context of the passage aside, one can see from here that Coleridge allowed Yeats to see the ‘Divine Ideas’ as appertaining to the soul of individual man. For Yeats, who by 1930 had already perceived the similarities between his own Spirit and Celestial Body and Plotinus’s Second Hypostasis, Coleridge’s belief that Reason could be discovered internally through apperception, or ‘conscious self-knowledge’, was an important revelation. He was to be quick in quoting from this passage when introducing the Spirit and Celestial Body at the beginning of The Completed Symbol (1937), and explicitly related Reason in Coleridge’s passage to these two Principles. In the following passage from The Friend Coleridge writes ‘reason’ where I write ‘mind’. ‘I shall have no objection to define reason with Jacobi, with my friend Helvetius, as an organ bearing the same relation to its spiritual object, the universal, the eternal, the necessary, as the eye bears to material and contingent phenomena. But then it must be added that it is an organ identical with its appropriate objects. Thus God, the soul, eternal truth etc. are the objects of reason; but they are themselves reason … whatever is conscious self-knowledge is reason.’ Later on he distinguishes between ‘the outward sense and the mind’s eye which is reason’; on the next page between mind and its object, or as we put it Spirit and Celestial Body, ‘reasoning (or reason in this its secondary sense) does not consist in the ideas or in their clearness but simply, when they are in the mind, in seeing whether they coincide with each other or no’. (AV B 187n) Grosvenor Powell has written that Coleridge’s distinction between Reason and Understanding allowed Yeats to see Spirit as transcendental, and thus part of a wider reality of consciousness in comparison with the more particular Faculties.11 However, since Yeats had already used Plotinus before reading Coleridge, we can see that Coleridge’s more specific role was the opposite: to make the Divine Ideas of the Second Hypostasis particular to the consciousness of individual man. Yeats’s use of Reason here was clearly an attempt to link microcosm with macrocosm: to see Plotinus’s Second Hypostasis, which normally emanates into the soul of man to make the ‘logoi’, as being itself individual. Thus he could comprehend the cycle of the soul as being at once both an individual and particular process with Husk, Passionate Body, Spirit





and Celestial Body going through the various soul cycles after death in the hour-glass and diamond, but as doing so simultaneously within a community of Daimons, or World Soul. God is Reason, but so is ‘conscious self knowledge’. Reality is, therefore, both a congeries of being, and a single being. However paradoxical it may seem, the ‘Divine Ideas’ exist both in Individual Consciousness, as Spirit and Celestial Body, and as part of a World ‘nous’, informing a World Soul. Thus, through restating Kant in terms of Plato, Coleridge convinces Yeats that we may approach the Divine Ideas through the particular. This is despite one error in Yeats’s adaptation of Coleridge here, since his last quote concerning ‘reasoning (in this its secondary sense)’ concerns the vis rationalis, or applied reason, which for Coleridge can only use its innate logic to determine whether acquired conceptions in the understanding are identical or not, rather than a priori ideas; however, one can forgive Yeats for having made this error, since in post-Kantian terminology Coleridge should not have used the term ‘idea’ in this sense at all. Therefore, while Coleridge did not completely live up to the mantle of sage, his later work did perform a task which Yeats expected of his role. Yeats’s re-reading of The Friend allowed him to end the abstraction of the Divine/Platonic Ideas of which he had read in Plotinus, and to see Spirit and Celestial Body as being neither simply the neo-Platonic Second Hypostasis, nor in fact ‘God’s abstract and separate thoughts’ (Ex 305), but as a Second Hypostasis that is within man’s full consciousness, in effect collapsing macrocosm into microcosm, and yet still within a community of spirits. What Plotinus had seen as above man, emanating into a World Soul which in turn emanates into the ‘logoi’ of the individual soul, Yeats was able to consider as ‘already’ part of the full consciousness of man, because Coleridge, like Schelling before him, equated divine Reason with the ability to ‘make ideas dim’ and find the primal oneness of God within one’s own self. This accommodation of the abstract to the concrete takes Yeats even farther than Berkeley had gone when proving that we approach the divine through sensory percepts, and in part justifies Mokashi-Punekar’s belief that Yeats believed first and foremost in the individual soul, and that all its experiences of absorption and change in a monad in fact occur within itself,12 although the fact that reality ‘as a single being’ is part of the equation with the ‘congeries’ – that our spiritual world is not wholly individual – should also be taken into account. Coleridge only solved the problem of their ‘abstraction’ in one sense, however. The Divine Ideas were still not so ‘concrete’ as to be sensory



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this diagram suggests a descent from Principle to Principle, a fall of water from ledge to ledge, whereas a system symbolising the phenomenal world as irrational because a series of unresolved antinomies, must find its representation in a perpetual return to the starting-point. The resolved antinomy appears not in a lofty source but in a whirlpool’s motionless centre, or beyond its edge. (AV B 194 –5) Yeats’s belief in unresolving antinomies was only part of the reason for usurping the hierarchy of Plotinus’s fountain symbol. Between the Ultimate Reality of the Thirteenth Cone and the experience of the Faculties, he conflated the realms of spirit and soul because he could not accept that the asensory Spirit and Celestial Body should be superior in hierarchy to the Husk and Passionate Body, a factor borne out by his concluding paragraph to ‘The Completed Symbol’, where he declares that: ‘Logical and emotional conflict alike lead to a reality which is concrete, sensuous, bodily’ (AV B 214). But in Plotinus’s system they certainly are higher. Accepting this would be tantamount to admitting that the Saint (Phase 27), who renounces experience, has a more valuable knowledge of God than the artist. While Coleridge’s Reason allowed Yeats to see the Divine Ideas as being part of human consciousness, this did not make them any more involved in the imaginative experience of the artist; any less, in fact, abstracted from the senses – or at least not in A Vision (1937). In ‘Bishop Berkeley’ (1931) figures taken from Coleridge’s Treatise on Method go some way to incorporating what Yeats discerned in Coleridge’s Reason into a theory of imagination. However, we shall reserve this more properly for the final part of this work, on ‘Metaphors of Mind’.

Politics The relation between Reason and Understanding in Coleridge’s The Friend was to have profound implications for Yeats’s political philosophy in his later essays, and for his interpretation of cyclical change in A Vision. In fact, Yeats really only equates Reason with Spirit and Celestial Body therein as part of a wider political discussion in which he



in themselves. Faced with this ‘problem’, Yeats drew attention to the hierarchy of the Three Authentic Existants and their symbol of the emanating fountain only to suggest greater equality between the levels:


sought to discover points of correspondence between Coleridge, Burke and, most importantly, Jonathan Swift’s ‘Discourse’.13 When Swift wrote the ‘Discourse’ he was effectively still a Whig in all but his Church policy – being an Anglican Dean, his ecclesiastical politics were Tory. At the time the House of Commons was Tory, the House of Lords predominantly Whig. Swift’s writing the essay was an attempt both to attract the attention of King William III (who died before its publication), and to advise his own party not to pay too much attention to the factional rivalries between parties.14 Originally published in 1701 by Swift himself (through John Nott of London), the ‘Discourse’ was its author’s first purely political piece. Influenced mainly by Polybius, it proposes that liberty in a state depends upon a just balance between ‘one’, ‘few’ and ‘many’. The ‘one’ constitutes ‘an eminent spirit’ who has previously shown his patriotism and worth either in defence of his country or in civil duties at home, and so may become leader in time of war or preside over civil assemblies.15 The ‘few’ are the aristocracy who, due to a common interest in securing their land rights, form ‘a great council, or senate of nobles’, while the ‘many’, who rule either collectively or by deputation, are the rest of the populace in a nation (Swift, II, 367). For there to be a just balance of power when the majority is held between two of the three, the ‘balance must be held by a third hand, who is to deal the remaining power with the utmost exactness into the several scales’, which third hand will in itself be the weakest (II, 368; therefore, in a situation where the House of Lords is Whig, and the Commons Tory, the king holds it). A rupture of the balance causes the state to fall to a ‘tyranny’. However, this is not necessarily rule by an individual. It may at first be a tyranny of the ‘many’ usurping the power of the ‘few’, using the word ‘tyranny’ in what Swift considered to be its truest sense: ‘the breaking of the balance by whatever hand, and leaving the power wholly in one scale’ (II, 368). In his ‘Introduction to The Words upon the Window-pane’ (1934) Yeats was to impose what can only be described as his own anti-Whiggish, anti-democratic views on Swift’s essay,16 to see it as cautioning against rule by and for the people: ‘He [Swift] defines a tyranny as the predominance of the One, the Few, or the Many, but thinks that of the Many the immediate threat’ (Ex 352). Rule of the many would always precede rule by the one. Yeats was delighted to discover in the essay what he also considered a highly fatalistic theory of political change, which predicted the tragic but inevitable triumph of Whiggery (Ex 354).



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Yeats had been making a study of Swift’s ‘Discourse’ and Drapier Letters during the early summer months of 1930 before reading Coleridge, and continued to do so throughout the rest of the summer (Ex 289).17 He had also been reading Burke, whose leading metaphor for the organic and evolutionary model of society, the oak-tree, had long figured in his views of nation,18 and whose ‘An Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs’, in which Burke cautioned against revolution, he considered ample justification for the class to which his friends Lady Gregory, Hugh Lane and Edward Martyn belonged (Ex 346). A passage from the long ‘April 30th’ section of Pages from a Diary (numbered VIII in the original, VII in Mrs Yeats’s edition), ends by concluding that Swift’s ‘Discourse’: ‘leads up to Burke so clearly that one may claim that Anglo-Ireland re-created conservative thought as much in one as in the other. Indeed the Discourse with its law of history might be for us what Vico is to the Italians, had we a thinking nation’ (Ex 292). Elizabeth Cullingford has written that ‘As well as Balzac and Plato, Yeats made use of Vico, Swift, and Coleridge, all of whom saw society experiencing in never-ending succession the rule of the One, the Few, or the Many.’19 However, neither Swift, nor Burke, nor indeed Coleridge, actually developed a predestined, cyclical theory, merely one of political law given certain conditions. Nevertheless, while Yeats’s identification of Coleridge with these Anglo-Irishmen was an equation with a highly conservative brand of anti-democratic and autocratic government, closer inspection shows that Coleridge helped him to interpret Swift’s and Burke’s theories as being cyclical. Coleridge’s major motive for introducing the theory of Reason, Understanding and Sense in ‘The First Landing-Place’ of The Friend was to attempt to define the role of morality in politics and the fundamental basis of government by applying his transcendental model of mind. Due to his belief in Reason and conscience he fiercely attacked Jacobin politicians who believed laws could only be imposed by fear for selfinterest, and who would leave all to the vicissitudes of the marketplace. Instead the principles of government resided in the innate Reason of man. Despite this, he was also sceptical that there could be absolute forms of government suiting all times and all ages, based upon fixed principles for, like Kant, he distinguished between morality and politics, and initially set out in The Friend to reconcile the consciences of many of his Quaker friends with patriotism during the continuing war with Napoleon.20 Borrowing heavily from the Conservative Hooker, and from the anti-revolutionary Burke, he disparaged the French Enlightenment





philosophers whom the Anglo-Irishman had blamed for allowing the individual’s Reason to create universal laws of government without the necessity of experience (Coleman, p. 118). While Reason should provide the principles of government, for both Burke and Coleridge expediency should also be used to determine prudent decisions in government, and expediency and prudence could only be derived from experience.21 It was because a society was driven by the pure Reason of the many and attempted to establish a perfect and eternal system that would suffice for all ages that events such as the French Revolution occurred, and resulted in tyranny (Fr 130). For although Reason provides principles of government to individual man, it does not to the whole society (Fr 123– 4). Consequently society is continually changing in accordance with expediency, and should feel no shame in doing so. Furthermore, attempts by philosophers such as Rousseau to create universal systems on the basis of pure Reason ultimately serve to depersonalise and amass men rather than grant them freedom of judgement, however much they may pretend to liberate and individualise. Despite claiming that man can be free to exercise his Reason and still cleave to society’s consent, Rousseau’s philosophy is the result of Reason abstracted from its personal exercise through Understanding, and thus cannot in fact reconcile societal interests with the freedom of the individual. For although all men possess Reason, not all have the means of applying it effectively through their Understanding and use of free will. Rousseau’s claim, therefore, that reason in ‘one man cannot be subjugated to the reason of any other’ (Fr 128) is simply untrue, and attempting to make this manifest will only cause genuine lack of personal freedom. As a result of this Coleridge did not see universal suffrage as true democracy (Fr 132), since it would involve the exercise of Reason through Understanding in unequal degrees,22 and as such would only pave the way for tyranny. He rather saw those who had no dependency on others, i.e. landowners, as those best able to decide who should govern a country, whose status as landowners was justifiable by prudence rather than by Reason ([Fr 135] again, Coleridge can be seen as attacking Rousseau, whose Discourse on Inequality argued the opposite). Having freedom through property their judgements were most likely to be unimpaired. He was leaning heavily towards the gentry and away from the merchant class as being the more enlightened property owners, and thus further towards the Tory, or even ‘Country’ party, rather than towards the Whigs.23



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Yeats, himself interested in preserving the inherited rights of the Anglo-Irish, and favouring a landed aristocracy over the bourgeiosie as the rightfully governing group, could only be impressed by Coleridge’s views on landowners. He was clearly numbered among those thinkers – Spengler and Mussolini included – who seemed to defend land inheritance rights should those who inherit prove their reliability before the rest of the society: Spengler is right when he says all who preserve tradition will find their opportunity. Tradition is kindred. The abrogation of equality of rights and duties is because duties should depend on rights, rights on duties. If I till and dig my land I should have rights because of that duty done, and if I have much land, that, according to all ancient races, should bring me still more rights. But if I have much or little land and neglect it I should have few rights. This is the theory of Fascism and so far as land is concerned it has the history of the earth to guide it and that is permanent history. A day will come, however, when man’s ever-increasing plasticity will make possible and compel a decision among the rights and duties which constitute refined society.24 (Ex 312) This protective view of the rights of land-owners, a view consonant with a pre-industrialised society, Yeats took to be both Anglo-Irish in conception, from the thought of Swift and Burke, and as supporting Anglo-Irish interests. In the next entry he echoed, rather sardonically, Coleridge’s justification of land-ownership as prudent (Fr 135) when declaring: ‘Landed property gets its fascination from its inequality: divide it up into farms of equal size or fertility and it would still retain its inequality, no field or hedge like another’ (Ex 313). Yeats was even more struck by Coleridge’s description of just and prudent government. He concentrated on Coleridge’s own application of his transcendental theory in refuting the French Revolution, largely because it seemed to explain the Tory politics which he saw in the work of Swift and of Burke: Swift, in his largely premonitionary Discourse, and Burke in his own writings, which were a reaction to the same event. In fact, Yeats considered Coleridge’s theory, in a somewhat isotopic way, an extension of that of these two men. Swift’s … is more important to modern thought than Vico and certainly foreshadowed Flinders Petrie, Frobenius, Henry Adams, Spengler, and very exactly and closely Gerald Heard. It needs interpretation,





for it had to take the form of a pamphlet intelligible to the Whig nobility. He saw civilisations ‘exploding’ – to use Heard’s term – just before the final state, and that final state as a tyranny, and he took from a Latin writer the conviction that every civilisation carries with it from the first what shall bring it to an end. Burke borrowed of him or re-discovered and Coleridge borrowed from Burke all but that inevitable end. Without the passion and style of either, Coleridge found through his very languor and hesitation time to approve the motives of acts that he hated. ‘The victory of the Plebs’ was ‘explosive’ but it originated in our civilisation from the misapplication of ‘pure thought’ which, when rightly applied is religion or philosophy. Though Luther was right to grant free judgment, Rousseau was not right, for though we have all the ‘reason’, ‘pure thought’ or conscience that judges motives, we have not all the ‘understanding’ or prudence to judge of acts and their consequences.25 (Ex 314) Yeats’s reading of Coleridge here is quite thorough. Coleridge had praised the general philosophy of Burke, but had seen his genius as suffering ‘misapplication’, largely because the great man was outnumbered as a politician and so had to ‘compromise’ (Fr 126 [Coleman, pp. 120 –1]). Coleridge had furthermore admired the elder statesman’s work on the French Revolution although criticised its ineffectuality before events (Fr 148).26 However, while Yeats discerned parallels between the two writers, he found in Coleridge’s ‘pure thought’ a prescription for tyranny rather than anarchy (Burke was writing before Napoleon). He also rightly observes Coleridge’s attack on Rousseau for not using the Understanding to give contemporary and local validity to Reason in both ‘The First Landing Place’ (Fr 86; 105) and the later essays of The Friend, and notices the unfavourable contrast he makes with the more pragmatic Luther (Fr 130).27 His echo of Coleridge here is accurate, as is his description of the sage’s complaint that many people are not fit to exercise the organ of Reason properly through the rationalised understanding, in particular children. Through comparing Coleridge’s theory with that of the other two sages, he explains to himself what Swift meant by a tyranny of the ‘many’, and the ‘plasticity’ which he identified in a previous entry as threatening an earlier age: it is pure Reason, wrongly emancipated from experience, that creates terror.28 The most important consequence of this is that, more so than the other two, Coleridge seems to



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Yeats to deliver a theory of cyclical change in politics and civilisation which he could recognise as working in relation to his own system in A Vision, comparable with those of the anthropologists he discusses here. It is later in the entry that he identifies Coleridge’s Reason with his own Spirit and Celestial Body, and reminds himself that ‘ “understanding” the “faculties” wears thin’ at the end of an age (meaning a 2,200-year cycle), thus allowing ‘pure thought’ rather than the jealousy and egotism of the many to draw a civilisation to its ‘final phase’. Thus he discovered in Coleridge a reason for seeing why the last phases of a full era collapse in democracy and then anarchy and tyranny in his gyres of history, before another Sage or Victim provides the illumination for a new one: the Principles overriding the Faculties. He may or may not have been aware of the real nature of Coleridge’s debt to Burke – the faith in experience as opposed to reason – although appears to indicate that it was the anti-democratic, counter-revolutionary and seemingly cyclical aspect of Burke’s philosophy which was most important. However, Yeats chose well in concentrating on the Englishman here, for one major difference between Burke and Coleridge is that the latter, in applying his transcendental theory, sees absolute Reason as depersonalising and becoming, paradoxically, anti-individual in a way which was totally counter to Burke who attacked Rousseau for trusting the individual rather than the ‘collected Reason of ages’ (Coleman, p. 118). Coleridge, however, saw only experience as creating individuality, and thus pure Reason as being Reason abstracted from man: reality as a single being rather than a congeries.29 This aspect of Coleridge’s thought explained the predominance of ‘plasticity’, a tendency among humankind which straddled both politics and the arts. By plasticity Yeats basically meant a lack of personality and thus man’s malleability in the primary phases of the moon. Coleridge of course helped Yeats to understand the Spirit and Celestial Body and Plotinus’s Second Hypostasis in both an individual and general sense, and thus why as a congeries of being man can still become part of an amorphous unity in a ‘concord of the many’. Looking for a contemporary articulation of this ‘plasticity’ Yeats lighted on Wyndham Lewis’s satire of Bohemian Life, The Apes of God, which for him showed this tendency at work. Lewis’s book was a roman-à-clef satirising Bloomsbury life in 1926, showing how culture and art had become the prerogative of a small group of wealthy literati whose whole aim was to ‘ape the Gods’: in other words to mimic genuine artists, and thus contribute to the bifurcation of society by creating unnecessary cliques. The General





Strike at the end of the book is a typical false dawn, although for Yeats may have signified the ‘great multitude’ who ‘put in control and invited to create without a model, must make ready for the tyrant’ (Ex 316). Yeats considered the evaporation of the Faculties before the Principles, or Understanding before Reason, as the major motor for this ‘plasticity’ in art, and coined his contemporary example of the notion through an obscured interpretation of a passage in Lewis’s book. Lewis wrote in the second chapter of his work about how, on a Bloomsbury street corner, the ‘ape’ Matthew Plunkett (based on Lytton Strachey): ‘roared – disparting and shutting his jaws, licking his lips, baying and, with his teeth, grinding, then again baying, while he stretched the elastic of his muscles elevating his arms with clenched fist, in heavy reproduction of the plastic of the Greek’.30 Although the description of Plunkett as an ape mimicking the ‘plastic of the Greek’ is a satirical way of undercutting his pretensions, Yeats took the word to refer not to sculpture, but the plasticity and impersonality of mind which these bohemians possessed. This further influenced his later description of ‘emptiness’ in Greek statuary, caused by its incorporation of Pythagorean number, or spirit considered as one (Ex 451; VP 610, ll. 1–8). The impersonality of Reason, and the inevitability of its overriding the Understanding, explained Wyndham Lewis’s satire to him, and why poverty of culture coincided with the creation of mass democracy: both imply a paucity of experience which will lead towards anarchy and then tyranny. However, while Lewis gave Yeats proof of the predominance of Coleridge’s Reason in his own age, it was anthropologists like his friend Gerald Heard and William Flinders Petrie, whose The Revolutions of Civilisation Yeats was reading simultaneously, which in fact demonstrated to him the cyclical nature of the relation between Reason and Understanding. One of the most distinguished Egyptologists of his day, Petrie had written this short, popular (and highly idiosyncratic) work in which he rendered his own descriptions of the continuous rise and fall of different civilisations from the Egyptians to the Arabs in the Middle East, and the early Cretans to the Middle Ages in Europe. Concentrating purely upon art, Petrie saw consecutive cultures as reaching a peak and then declining, but above all saw European civilisation from the Renaissance onwards as being in terminal decay, since it constituted merely the copying of former eras, and thus was not a genuine achievement.31 The various fluctuations in the stages of civilisation in Egypt and Europe he believed to correspond exactly.



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Petrie charted various beginnings, refinements and ends to civilisations beginning with the Egyptians, and followed Plutarch’s description of the mythology of the Etruscan sages, who believed there were eight great races, each enjoying their own ‘great year’ (Petrie, 9–10). Although his own use of the term was as an ‘analogy’ rather than as a sanctioning of astrology, Yeats was clearly impressed by it, since he himself – largely following Duhem32 – was trying to organise his own continual round of phases in history as one Great Year, although was not aware that Plutarch and Petrie used the concept to refer to individual civilisations rather than the complete cycle.33 In seeing art as the barometer of civilisation it provided a corollary with his own practice in the already completed ‘Dove or Swan’, and further proof of the connection between artistic expression and political structure. Yeats was considering the ruin of many areas of human thought when he asked further in his diary: Has ‘pure thought’ changed its ground, and so dissolved those historical forms and occupations wherefrom we have drawn our personalities, that we must take every chance suggestion, or deliberately create a personality and live henceforth as Homunculus in his bottle? Flinders Petrie shows where in the history of a civilisation sculpture, painting, mechanism, will put off what he calls archaism and gain control of their material, and, because vigour implies effort, begin their decline?34 (Ex 316) Coleridge’s description of Reason in society without prudence and expediency from the Understanding accounts for what Petrie describes as the cyclical decline of a civilisation’s later stages. Petrie’s conclusion that there have been no improvements in art after the late medieval era Yeats took to mean that Understanding was exhausted, and thus that Reason was predominant. We have gained too much control over our material, and so there is no place for a passionate and personal art which comes from Daimonic struggle – ‘vigour’ and ‘effort’ – and thus from experience: we are merely copying from the already revealed, trusting what we know passively. With reference to his own system, which incorporated Petrie’s ideas, this would mean that the Faculties ‘wear thin’ (AV B 89) at the end of any double gyre of a civilisation in the twelve lunar months of the Great Year. Thus Coleridge’s political views were important to Yeats in three major ways. First, in that his attitude towards landed property as justifiable





through prudence gave support to his own defence of the Anglo-Irish aristocracy. Second, in that the relation between Reason and Understanding helped him to realise why the rule of the many feared by Swift and Burke, despite its seeming altruism, was fundamentally flawed. Third, in that the resemblance between Reason and Understanding and the Principles and Faculties – plasticity and personality – helped him see the theories of Swift and Burke as being as much cyclical as was that of Flinders Petrie in The Revolutions of Civilisation. And fourthly, they aided him in understanding the relation of the Principles to the history of art and architecture as enunciated in the anthropological theories he read. Thus The Friend acted as an arbiter between his own system, the cyclical theories of anthropology which he was reading and the autocratic Tory politics of Swift and Burke, allowing him to see their systems as cyclical and predestined, when in fact they were not. However, Coleridge was absent in this capacity from the final edition of A Vision, largely because Yeats decided that the Principles could not be seen to be working in the Great Year, even if, logically, the Faculties of the Magnus Annus and its twelve cycles must depend upon Principles for their existence. ‘I shall write little of the Principles except when writing of the life after death. They inform the Faculties and it is the Faculties alone that are apparent and conscious in human history’ (AV B 207). While Yeats declares that the Faculties ‘wear thin’ towards the end of their cycle in the gyres of the living soul, he does not provide the reader with the opportunity of seeing the Great Year as operating in such a way. Petrie, Heard and Hermann Schneider all contribute to the various phases of change in Yeats’s description of the cycles (AV B 202–7), but sadly not Coleridge, who had been so important to him formerly. The geometry of A Vision is simply not sophisticated enough to present the more fascinating understanding of history which Yeats had been preparing in his diary. The editing of the diary seems to further bear this out. In the last (and unpublished) passage in the 10 August entry, when still at Coole, Yeats reminded himself that he must write about the ‘counter wheel or movement’ in ‘The Great Year of the Ancients’ which would account for despotism. People who are in phase with an earlier historical wheel will be antithetical during the ‘final passivity’ to become ‘the enforced mask of the historical phase’, through whom the Thirteenth Cone acts – the ‘living through the dead’. It seems here at least Yeats was trying to understand how the general plasticity of Reason ‘paved the way’ for the tyrant in the more precise terms of his system, but then fell short of articulating such complexities in the second edition of his book



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when discussing the Great Year, thus making this passage redundant for Pages from a Diary itself. As such the problems of general Reason and individual Understanding remained in ‘The Completed Symbol’ and did not extend beyond it. That said, there are moments in A Vision when the necessity of the Spirit and the Celestial Body overriding the Faculties in the final phases of a cycle seems to assert itself. In discussing typical movements of the gyres, he declares that: All these cultures, as I am directed to see them, having attained some Achilles in the first blossoming, find pious Aeneas in their second, and that second is preceded by Utopian dreams that come to little because no civilisation can spend what it has not earned. (AV B 206) The ‘Utopian’ dreaming which has not been ‘earned’ recalls the predominance of pure thought over experience which Coleridge saw as providing unworkable solutions for all mankind in The Friend, and which Yeats had originally interpreted as explaining the end of civilisation in Swift’s tyranny of the many. The portrayal of Swift in The Words upon the Window-pane (1934), however, bears all the hallmarks of Yeats’s earlier reading of Coleridge, when the young Cambridge student John Corbet explains that: His ideal order was the Roman Senate, his ideal men Brutus and Cato. Such an order and such men had seemed possible once more, but the movement passed and he foresaw the ruin to come, Democracy, Rousseau, the French Revolution; that is why he hated the common run of men – ‘I hate lawyers, I hate doctors’, he said, ‘though I love Dr. So-and-so and Judge So-and-so’ – that is why he wrote Gulliver, that is why he wore out his brain, that is why he felt saeva indignatio, that is why he sleeps under the greatest epitaph in history. (VPl 942, ll. 129– 40) Coleridge’s own descriptions of the French Revolution were incorporated into the theory of one, few and many described by Swift in Yeats’s portrayal of his forebear’s views. This is partly because the movement of tyranny of the many to tyranny of the one seems to correspond to the description of French Enlightenment philosophy creating a lack of education which paves the way for Napoleon’s rule or, as





Yeats put it in the diary, ‘all historical inequalities swept away, as a machine ready for Napoleon’ (Ex 315). Coleridge’s views on general Reason and its opposition to the exercise of freedom and personal understanding also influenced Yeats’s understanding of Swift’s hatred of groups, or abstractions, but not of individuals. Again, the particular and concrete as opposed to the abstract. So we can see that one of the major reasons why Coleridge does not figure outside the 1930 diary in a political context is that his views became incorporated into those of another figure. The Swift presented in ‘Introduction to The Words upon the Window-pane’ is a political philosopher who presents a cyclical theory of history, much like Spengler, Vico or Petrie. This is despite the fact that Swift’s tyranny of the many leading to tyranny of the one was not a theory of historical necessity akin to that of Marx and Hegel, but of political law within society should certain balances of power arise. Yeats, however, because of his association of Swift’s politics with those of Coleridge, and his further alignment of Reason and Understanding to his own Principles and Faculties, made the theory of One, Few and Many all the more cyclical, to the point where Swift becomes political prophet or sage.

Nature and thought Yeats’s final use of Coleridge as a lens for a philosophical problem drew upon the rather enigmatic poem ‘What is Life?’ to help him clarify the highest state in the Mandukya Upanishad, and thus, by implication, the role of the light in his own system, since he used the Hindu philosophy to distinguish between the solar light of thought and the lunar light of nature in A Vision (1937). Despite an enduring interest in all things Indian from his meeting with Mohini Chatterjee as a young Dublin theosophist, Yeats’s interest in Hinduism and the Upanishads, and its ultimate colouring of A Vision, _ began from his meeting with Shri Purohit Swami in 1931. The Upanishads were to affect further Yeats’s understanding of the discarnate states of the Soul described in ‘The Soul in Judgement’, and he _ wrote various essays in collaboration with the Swami which never veer far from A Vision, despite being published for an audience more interested in the original. The Upanishads teach that Brahman – spirit, or absolute self – is in everything, and is the creator of all; even the material and the sensory, which, indeed, are the transcendent made immanent (UPAN 52–3). We



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can choose to live well, according to the true self within us – the ‘atman’ – in the regions of the moon: that is, to live in the world of immanence; or we can try to attain the regions of the sun, and through yoga attempt to become one with Brahman and the transcendent (UPAN 40 –1). The difference between moon and sun, as taught by the Prasna Upanishad, was bound to be picked up by Yeats, given that his own symbolic system contained the twenty-eight phases of the moon to describe man’s various states. By means of chanting the word OM, in meditation, which represents Brahman, we can attain this state of supreme atmanship or selfhood, in which we are one with the impersonal absolute. Within OM, there are the letters A U and M: A represents the waking state, in which we may perceive objects, U the dream life, in which we perceive the objects of our own inner consciousness, and M the state of dreamless slumber, when the consciousness is aware of nothing, but in deep sleep. The fourth state, represented by all three sounds together, is the complete Atmanship of Supreme Consciousness, in which all duality ends (UPAN 59–61). One of Yeats’s most important philosophical beliefs was that light formed the substance of sensation: that it was what constituted the appearances of both imaginary and sensory objects alike. Originally Yeats had believed that light is present in occult experiences (E&I 439) – something which he expressed in Per Amica Silentia Lunae through Coleridge’s poem ‘Phantom’ (Myth 437) – and this, together with his reading of Berkeley’s Siris, developed into an idealist interpretation of sensation in which all sensory experience is the result of Husk, Passionate Body and Daimon. As he wrote in a separate entry from 17 October in his 1930 diary: Light then – colour, light and shade – fabricated by the intellect and changed with its forms is perception, that which gives a visible unity to the multiple Passionate Body. The ‘Perception’ may be considered as a circle or space of light encircling each man, and it is the Husk. The dead past thrown off by the living present.35 (Ex 332) In the context of A Vision the ‘sensation’ in the man (or Husk) becomes incarnate due to the Daimon’s desire to incarnate other Daimons.36 This it does in the form of the Passionate Body: the Passionate Body is not simply, therefore, the vehicle of the incarnate Daimon, or anti-self, but of the other discarnate Daimons with which he communicates through





the man’s senses (hence the early term ‘multiple Passionate Body’ [Ex 332]), and realises itself as ‘physical light’. In the world of the Faculties, Husk and Passionate Body reflect as the ‘voluntary and acquired’ Faculties of Will and Mask (AV B 187), meaning most probably that the innate grounds of sensation are necessary for the living man to pursue his desired role or image. Light, therefore, is the agent of this ground, and in Yeats’s new understanding manifests more than simply mystical experience, but all sensation in a conjunction of Husk and Passionate Body, orchestrated by that great stage-manager, the permanent or incarnate Daimon. Although light manifests itself through the incarnation of these two Principles, Yeats also identifies another light, that of Spirit, which he claimed was completely different: It is because of the identification of light with nature that my instructors make the antithetical or lunar cone of the Faculties light and leave the solar dark. In the cone of the Principles, the solar cone is light and the other dark, but their light is thought not nature. (AV B 190) At death consciousness is transferred from Husk to Spirit, but the goal is different, as well as the form of luminosity (AV B 222–5). The Spirit must seek absorption with the Celestial Body – to make it a part of itself (an identity of Knowledge and Being) – and in doing so become limitless light. As Yeats writes at the beginning of The Soul in Judgement: The Spirit is not those changing images – sometimes in ancient thought as in the Cimitière Marin symbolised by the sea – but the light, and at last draws back into itself, into its own changeless purity, all it has felt or known. (AV B 220 –1) and in a footnote to the word ‘light’ here wrote: ‘In my symbolism solar light, intellectual light; not the lunar light, perception.’ By the time of rewriting his great book, Yeats saw the light of Spirit and Celestial Body as separate and contrary to the light of Husk and Passionate Body. In A Vision (1937) Yeats seeks to define this light of the Spirit, in particular when it has found complete absorption with the Thirteenth Cone, by comparison with the Upanishads: Certain Upanishads describe three states of the soul, that of waking, that of dreaming, that of dreamless sleep, and say man passes from



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waking through dreaming to dreamless sleep every night and when he dies. Dreamless sleep is a state of pure light or of utter darkness, according to our liking, and in dreams ‘the spirit serves as light for itself’. ‘There are no carts, horses, roads, but he makes them for himself.’ (AV B 220) Later he shows that there is an even higher condition than this: The Mandukya Upanishad describes a fourth state, which is reached not in dreamless sleep but in contemplation and in wakefulness. This fourth state, pure light to those that reach it, is that state wherein the soul, as much ancient symbolism testifies, is united to the blessed dead. (AV B 222–3) Yeats was clearly relating the four states – which he also identified very strongly with Patanjali’s four states of meditation in Aphorisms of Yoga – to the discarnate states of the soul (the life between lives) in which the Spirit (which travels from Aries to Libra in the diamond-shaped cone on the Wheel of the Principles [AV B 199; See Figure 1]) tries to become one with the Celestial Body by purifying itself of the Husk and the old Passionate Body. The first state ‘A’, the waking state, is either the living world of the Faculties or The Vision of the Blood Kindred (Aries), when the dead spirit is still living in its own Husk and Passionate Body, and appears as it did in life (AV B 223–5). The second state, U, the dreaming state, corresponds to Taurus: states of the Dreaming Back, the Return and the Phantasmagoria, where the Spirit, using its own and other Husks and Passionate Bodies, lives again through its moments of passion, then the complete events of its life, and then the imaginative consequences of its acts (AV B 225–31). The third state in the Upanishads, M, or Patanjali’s ‘Sushupti’ – that of dreamless sleep – corresponds to the states of Gemini, Cancer and Leo, which are the Shiftings, when the Spirit is purified of good and evil (AV B 231), the Marriage, where there is complete equilibrium after the vanishing of good and evil (AV B 232), and the Purification, where a new Husk and Passionate Body occur and the Spirit is at last free (AV B 233), having been lent the ‘divine cloak’ of the Celestial Body. There is a final phase after this, Scorpio, the Foreknowledge, where the soul sees its past life before being reborn.37 If these correspondences are just, which Yeats suggests but does not rigidly chart, between the states in the Upanishads and the discarnate




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In the fourth stage the ascetic enters one or more of these stages at will and retains his complete memory when he returns; this is _ _ Turiya , but as yet only in the form called Savikalpa; full Turiya or _ ‘seedless’ Samadhi comes when all three states are as a single timeless act, and that act is pure or unimpeded personality, all existence brought into the words: ‘I am.’ It resembles that last Greek number, a multiple of all numbers because there is nothing outside it, nothing to make a new beginning. It is not only seedless but objectless because objects are lost in complete light. Darkness is the causal body of existence. Objects are its serrates and dentures. One remembers those lines of Coleridge: ‘Resembles life what once was deemed of light, Too ample in itself for human sight? An absolute self – an element ungrounded – All that we see, all colours of all shade, By encroach of darkness made?’ (E&I 462–3) Judging by this paragraph and quotation from Coleridge’s poem, ‘What is Life’, ‘Turiya’, or OM, most closely corresponds to the Thirteenth Cone, a state where there is no ‘causal body of existence’. For Hindus this is the ‘seedless’ Samadhi where there is a complete putting off of old personality, and in which we return to the absolute self (UPAN 42). The fourth stage of meditation, Patanjali’s ‘Turiya’, is the very origin of life itself. However, there are various difficulties in this, the first relating to Coleridge’s lines and their compatibility with the philosophy expounded in the Upanishads. The Upanishads teach the belief in an Absolute Self which causes life and ultimately all duality and matter, as well as the senses. It is the centre of the wheel upon which the spokes depend (UPAN 42). However, Coleridge’s poem – which he apparently wrote during the Valetta races in Malta on 16 August 1805 at a time38 when he had been feeling guilt and suffering from bad dreams – sees darkness as destroying light, as being alien to it, rather like the Gnostic belief that the material world came into being with the fall from paradise.39 It is a rare break from Coleridge’s usual theories of nature, although in keeping with some of the other notebook entries he had been making that month.40



phases of the soul, then we have to ask to what does the fourth state, OM, or Patanjali’s ‘Turiya’, correspond? In his essay of introduction to ‘The Holy Mountain’, Yeats wrote of ‘Turiya’ as follows:


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Is very life by consciousness unbounded? And all the thoughts, pains, joys of mortal breath, A war-embrace of wrestling life and death?41 (CP 173) These lines do not articulate a hypostatial divide, but rather a dynamism used to explain the rotation of equal elements, something one finds in both Empedocles’, and of course in Yeats’s system: even though in extreme cases of ‘concord’ (the primary tincture between 26 and 4) we are clearly near the realm of the Principles, the Spirit and Celestial Body in particular (where the Faculties ‘wear thin’ [AV B 89]). Another problem lies in Yeats’s insistence that the ‘act’ of ‘Turiya’ is ‘pure or unimpeded Personality’, not merely ‘absolute self’. In this it resembles the highly antithetical ‘Unity of Being’ and not a state of spiritual absorption. Yeats clarifies this relationship in his later essay ‘The Mandukya Upanishad’: _ In pure personality, seedless Sama dhi, there is nothing but that bare ‘I am’ which is Brahma. The initiate, all old Karma exhausted, is ‘the Human Form Divine’ of Blake, that Unity of Being Dante compared to a perfectly proportioned human body; henceforth he is self-creating. But the Universal Self is a fountain, not a cistern, the Supreme Good must perpetually give itself. The world is necessary to the Self, must receive ‘the excess of its delights’, and in this Self all delivered selves are present, ordering all things, from the Pole Star to the passing wind. They are indeed those spirits Shelley imagined in his Adonais as visiting the inspired and the innocent. (1935; E&I 483) In the essays and introductions Yeats wrote around A Vision, he confirmed his tendency to conflate the light of ‘Turiya ‘ with the lunar light of the full moon, partly because in the Prasna Upanishad the movement towards light is towards sun and ‘Turiya’, and the movement towards darkness is towards moon and the material, thus allowing him to confuse a noetic state with a sensory state (the light of his own full moon), and reaffirm the concreteness of the abstract (E&I 470). The relation of light to dark in Coleridge’s poem, as embattled contraries, reasserts this confusion.



Another problem is that the ideas here correspond to the sense of opposites suggested by Empedocles and the antithesis of discord to concord. The last three lines in the poem, which Yeats does not quote, bear this out, since we are told:


A further reason for the confusion is that the highest state of the Upanishads is, as in the poem he uses to illustrate it, one of ‘Absolute Self’, and not the One beyond Knowledge and Being of the neoPlatonism which otherwise informs A Vision. Therefore, Yeats saw the potential of presenting the noetic as both concrete and spiritual, as something which gives primacy to the sensuous. He was led both by the symbology of the Upanishads, and by the ‘What is Life?’ to confuse ‘Turiya’, that which corresponds to the absorption in Thirteenth Cone, with pure personality. And yet perhaps all these confusions are also intentional. In ‘An Indian Monk’ he claimed: The Russian, like most European mystics, distrusts visions though he admits their reality, seems indifferent to Nature, may perhaps dread it like Saint Bernard, who passed the Swiss Lakes with averted eyes. The Indian, upon the other hand, approaches God through vision, speaks continually of the beauty and terror of the great mountains, interrupts his prayer to listen to the song of birds, remembers with delight the nightingale that disturbed his meditation by alighting upon his head and singing there, recalls after many years the whiteness of a sheet, the softness of a pillow, the gold embroidery upon a shoe. These things are indeed part of the ‘splendour of the Divine Being’. (1934 [E&I 431]) We are close here to the early, unpublished entry from the 1930 diary, in which Yeats talked of the particularity of the Thirteenth Cone through nature and that which we cannot control: a faith in God’s physical immanence. The East, and especially the Upanishads, could be the saviour of Western forms of mysticism, no sooner asserting the ‘abstraction’ of a spirit that precedes the material than reasserting its sensuousness. Sages who are ‘something Asiatic … something that belongs to Modern Europe’ (Ex 295), like Coleridge and Berkeley, in their ‘attempt’ to concretise the abstract and use logic to serve passion, even to the point where it is ready to ‘cut its own throat’, could be relied upon to mediate different traditions of thought to serve Yeats’s own ends. In conclusion, we can see how Coleridge’s Reason and Understanding contributed significantly to Yeats’s understanding of the Principles: how they relate to both the individual mind of man and to a higher unity as well as their role in history and thus further relevance



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to other political writers. His poem ‘What is Life?’ also helped Yeats to interpret the light of thought and nature as being more unitary than his own system dictated, and so to conflate the noetic with the sensory. This was a goal Yeats further perceived in Coleridge’s great ‘supernatural’ poems, as he searched once more for a physical incarnation of the spiritual.




‘Wisdom, Magic, Sensation’: Coleridge’s ‘Supernatural’ Poems in the Later Poetry of Yeats

By the 1930s ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’, ‘Christabel’ and ‘Kubla Khan’ had already long figured in Yeats’s pantheon of great poems. As long ago as 1916 he clearly acclaimed the beauty of ‘Kubla Khan’ when he called it, with ‘Ode to the West Wind’, ‘the most typical modern verse’ (E&I 222), an opinion influenced by Arthur Symons. In 1922, in keeping with his then view of Coleridge as tragic aesthete, Yeats praised Coleridge’s ‘morbid effort’ to find a synthesis of form and feeling in these poems, a ‘new, pure beauty’, as though he were a precursor of Aestheticism and Symbolism. Such an opinion of Coleridge’s aesthetic was also voiced in the work of later critics such as Charpentier. Prompted by both Charpentier and Muirhead, in Pages from a Diary Yeats noted confidently that Coleridge was under the influence of Berkeley when he wrote these poems, thus confirming the idealist link with the early Coleridge. Four years later, in ‘An Indian Monk’ (1934), he instances the ‘magic’ of Eastern spirituality impregnating Western form in a new double millennium in ‘Kubla Khan’ and ‘Christabel’, with Wordsworth’s ‘Pedlar’ in The Excursion and Shelley’s ‘Ahasuerus’ proving the simultaneous ‘wisdom’ and ‘sensation’ of this Asiatic influence. In 1936, when writing of those ‘good’ (but not brilliant) English poets who have stirred the public, in his introduction to the The Oxford Book of Modern Verse, he noted that: ‘Sturge Moore [wrote] of centaurs, amazons, gazelles copied from a Persian picture: De la Mare short lyrics that carry us back through Christabel or Kubla Khan.

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4

‘Wisdom, Magic, Sensation’ 87

Through what wild centuries Roves back the rose?

The poem to which Yeats compares Coleridge’s verses here is ‘All Things Past’, where De la Mare describes a wood with reference to its rootedness and tradition (OBMV 160). In Yeats’s handling, however, the reference is more to a sense of enchantment, or the ‘magic’ which he clearly discerned in the enchanted wood of ‘Christabel’ and in the park and pleasure-dome of ‘Kubla Khan’. Yeats explicitly related a quality of ‘magic’ with Coleridge’s poems, ‘wisdom’ with the nature philosophy of Wordsworth’s Pedlar, and ‘sensation’ with Shelley’s Ahasuerus. All the same, the sensuousness of idealism and an ability to deliver the wisdom of concrete philosophical truth in relation to Ultimate Reality, were still important aspects of Coleridge’s poems for Yeats, realising, as they do, the ‘concrete, sensuous, bodily’ (AV B 214) nature of Ultimate Reality, which he was unable to articulate convincingly in the second edition of A Vision (due to the neo-Platonic hierarchies) but which he continually expressed in the essays written around the same time, such as ‘Bishop Berkeley’ (1931) and ‘The Mandukya Upanishad’ (1935). The phantasmagoric qualities of Coleridge’s poems led him to echo them in The Winding Stair and beyond, allowing their influence to express Platonic notions of the soul and reality, but as the spiritual become materially immanent rather than transcendent: philosophy serving the passion of the artist. In reading Charpentier, his major source, Yeats would have been made thoroughly aware of the sense of separation between the early Coleridge and the later sage at Highgate: the one, in Charpentier’s view, a Berkeleian, the other developing a system of transcendental philosophy based on reading Kant, Schlegel and Schelling. Charpentier’s account of Coleridge’s development is, of course, unreliable by modern standards, and its division between the earlier and later parts of Coleridge’s career does not draw the distinction between Radical and Conservative, Unitarian and Trinitarian, Necessitarian and believer in free will in the same way as do recent scholars. Nevertheless, distinctions are still drawn, and Yeats exhibits the same totalising spirit in reading these poems as he did when interpreting ‘Fears in Solitude’. The ideas and symbology of the radical Unitarian – who denied Christ’s divinity, man’s free will, and who saw matter as an effect of spirit, moving ever onwards to a millenarian brotherhood of youth1 – were



(OBMV xvi)


opaque to Yeats in 1929, who read these poems in the light of his own construction of Coleridge as passionate sage. The question arises, however, as to what teleology we can see working in Coleridge’s influence on Yeats’s poetry. So far we have been looking at influence of a wholly conscious kind on the latter’s part, and the effect of the great ‘supernatural’ poems on the later writer was, as we shall see, a certain result of viewing his literary forebear as sage, and impression of the idealist and sensuous qualities of these verses. The notion, therefore, of influence as a kind of anxiety, as articulated by Bloom in his six revisionary ratios, in which the later poet unconsciously misreads the earlier as part of the creative process, is out of order. That said, Yeats’s processing of certain elements of Coleridge’s poems is wholly unconscious when it does appear, and certainly constitutes a misreading of the work, albeit one influenced by the values of the time. Misprision abounds, but the misprision is consonant with an already articulated set of misinterpretations of Coleridge’s prose. For this reason, perhaps the best way of understanding the changes which Yeats makes is to see them in relation to the ideas and practice of John Hollander’s work The Figure of Echo. Hollander distinguishes between conscious and unconscious allusions, the latter of which he calls ‘echoes’.2 In doing so he also attempts to raise from neglect the rhetorical figure of ‘metalepsis’, or ‘transumption’, the trope in which echoes most frequently become manifest. Metalepsis is a diachronic trope,3 he argues, understandable only in relation to its prior source, and is therefore unpopular compared to the synchronic methods of looking at figurative language favoured by the semioticians of today. Defining metalepsis, however, does present a problem for him: Quintilian identified transumption as a movement from one trope to another, which operates through one or more middle terms of figuration. Subsequent rhetoricians, from St. Augustine through the English Renaissance critic George Puttenham (who refers to it as the trope of the far-fetched) are in confused disagreement about its function. It can be the effect for the cause, the subsequent for the antecedent, the late for the early, for example, but there is a general sense that it is a kind of meta-trope, or figure of linkage between figures, and that there will be one or more unstated middle terms which are leapt over, or alluded to, by the figure. A synchronic treatment of metalepsis – of a trope of a trope, as it were – might merely



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For Hollander, metalepsis is less to do with the sub-Freudian theory of literary influence which Bloom espouses, and more to do with accounting for the verbal omissions – the ‘unstated middle terms’ – which help create the change between one line of verse and that which it unconsciously echoes. Hollander seeks to illustrate his theory of echo itself by examining the allegorical significance of the two Echo myths of Pan and Narcissus: how they were used by Ovid to represent respectively lyrical and satirical poetry (p. 12); how sixteenth-century neo-Platonists used them to symbolize the World Soul (p. 16); and how the writers of Pastorals used acoustical echo to represent confirmation to the hero ([pp. 14 –15] both these latter figures finding their way into Milton, echo’s most supreme exponent). From this he concludes: ‘It is … inevitable that the delay between prior voice and responding echo in acoustical actuality should become in naturalized romantic mythology a trope of diachrony, of the distance between prior and successive poems’ (Hollander, p. 21). This is the crux of Hollander’s argument in raising the status of both echo and metalepsis to that of other modes of allusion and tropes in criticism. Our understanding of literary echo, as the metaphorical term for a type of (unconscious) allusion, is in fact influenced by the actual literary interpretations of the ‘echo’ myth and ‘acoustical’ echo, as is our understanding of the diachrony. It fragments the prior voice as the new speaker interprets and changes, giving an answer to the old text which stamps a new identity upon the lines. Unlike Hollander, Bloom is not interested in looking at the diachrony of the ‘unstated middle terms’ (Hollander, p. 114) in metalepsis. He explores the space between the texts in terms of ‘repression’ or ‘anxiety’ rather than the undisclosed associations involved in the change, and which for Hollander are a crucial part of the figure.4 Although Bloom argues that ‘The use of any psychopoetics is to find a way back to an enrichment of rhetorical criticism’ (Bloom, p. 79), it is Hollander, and not Bloom, who really examines the rhetorical changes and the verbal associations which cause them; and, in doing so, frees himself of the anxiety to examine anxiety. For this reason I shall be frequently referring to Hollander’s ideas in both this chapter and the two subsequent ones to show the path from prior voice to new text which



be a catachresis, or thoroughly mixed metaphor. But in a highly allusive situation, in which an image or fable is being presented as a revision of an earlier one, the diachrony is inescapable. (Hollander, p. 114)

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explains the changes and misreadings of Coleridge which appear in Yeats’s work.

The first verse-paragraph of ‘Kubla Khan’, with its description of the pleasure-dome set among ‘sinuous rills’, ‘incense-bearing tree[s]’, ‘forests ancient as the hills’ and ‘sunny spots of greenery’ (CP 94, ll. 8–11) establishes the scene and theme for the rest of the poem: the description of one man’s attempt to create a second paradise upon earth in spite of the forces of nature. The dome and garden enclose a sacred river which runs through measureless caverns down to a large lake or ocean without motion or light. However, unbeknown to Kubla, the ‘deep romantic chasm which slanted/Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover’ (CP 94, ll. 12–13) possesses less predictable forces. In the second verse-paragraph we discover that through this chasm ‘A mighty fountain momently was forced’ which threw up ‘Huge fragments’ (ll. 19–21). In facilitating this the chasm: flung up momently the sacred river. Five miles meandering with a mazy motion Through wood and dale the sacred river ran, Then reached the caverns measureless to man And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean. (CP 94, ll. 24 –8) So the river beneath the pleasure-dome is forced up above the ground of the enclosed park, but eventually reaches the caverns and the ‘sunless sea’ (l. 5) beneath it. The sudden ‘tumult’ which it creates finally has a supernatural effect, in providing the background for the ‘Ancestral voices prophesying war’ (l. 30) which Kubla then hears. The palace and environs cease to be a cultural realm in which man stakes his mastery over the concealed life of nature, but become one in which the two clash incongruously to make a place of ‘mingled measure’ (l. 33) and ‘a miracle of rare device,/A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice!’ (ll. 35–6). In the last verse-paragraph the poet recalls the vision of the ‘damsel with a dulcimer’ (l. 37) and ‘Abyssinian maid’ (l. 39) whom he identifies as the source for his knowledge about both the pleasure-dome and momentary fountain, and confirms that if he could only ‘revive within me/ Her symphony and song’ (ll. 42–3) it would allow him to



‘Kubla Khan’

imaginatively rebuild both the ‘sunny dome’ and the ‘caves of ice’ (l. 47). Thus he could don this madness, this special understanding of the supernatural powers of nature, so as to make him a danger to all those who meet him. The poem is a complex one, but deals with the importance of nature’s opposition to man as a revitalising element to man’s own creative powers. Nature overcomes man’s creation, but in doing so dignifies his constructions with greater worth by further unleashing the supernatural. Through symbolic form Coleridge shows how man’s inability to master the unknown also confirms his apprehension of the sublime. The poem is in many ways a metaphorical illustration of negative capability in the face of divinity, and thus deals in symbolic form with the nature philosophy which Wordsworth and Coleridge were simultaneously exploring more literally in their conversation poems. However, the poem also represents much of Coleridge’s religious and philosophical thinking at the time. John Beer has explained ‘Kubla Khan’ in terms of Coleridge’s interest in contemporary scientific theory, natural energy, and belief in the need for ‘absolute genius’ to restore the primal energy of the world into the primary consciousness of man, allowing him to absorb in his own mind the fundamental forces of nature.5 He points to Coleridge’s current interest with solar mythologies, one popular myth being that the descendants of Cain ‘built places sacred to the sun because they were trying to re-create the paradise-garden which had been lost by the first man, and to set up a firm defence against the awareness of death which had consequently come to obsess them’ (Beer, p. 116). Paradise reconstructed, he argues ‘is necessarily precarious’, but the man of ‘commanding genius’ can still dream of a construction which will resolve the ambiguous energies of nature, hence the poet seer at the end. Such a view is consonant with Coleridge’s Unitarian and Necessitarian belief that the physical universe is really energy, moving ever onwards to paradise. However, H. W. Piper’s research into the biblical and religious sources for the poem show it to be a bizarre turn on the description of the second paradise, to be built according to Ezekiel on David’s Hill, Mount Zion, which draws in particular from descriptions both there, and Milton’s Paradise Lost.6 The major difference from Milton, however, is that the description of the ‘deep romantic chasm’ down a valley, which contains such demonic forces and threatens the idyll, is still ‘holy and enchanted’, while for Milton this was the route by which Satan enters paradise (Piper, pp. 63, 65). Bizarre, too, is the description of the ‘sunny pleasure-dome’ and ‘caves of ice’ being a ‘miracle of rare





device’ since the caves are part of the ‘caverns measureless to man’ which cannot be artificial (p. 68). Piper concludes that the poem, turning upon Milton’s own pun that Eden means ‘pleasure’, seeks to demonstrate that holiness exists even in physical delight (pp. 71–2), but one might go further and say that the poem consciously illustrates the Unitarian belief that within Necessitarian doctrine both good and evil are part of the ‘Great Design’ working in history ([LPR 216–19] which explains why the clash between Kubla’s palace and the chasm are all part of the ‘device’), and thus also that the attempt by a pagan to create a pleasure-dome which precedes apocalypse and God’s manifestation of the second paradise upon earth is still wondrous, as is that of the Prophet poet to build it in air again, despite the many who may deem him to be dangerous and mad, as did many Church of England worshippers who condemned Unitarians. Whatever the ultimate meaning of the prophecies of war and ‘miracle of rare device’, the juxtaposition between the static gardens of Kubla and the deep romantic chasm, the paradisal imagery and the coexistence of good with evil in the sacred all made their impact on Yeats, although sometimes with the result of his reversing Coleridge’s original organisation. In the first part of ‘Meditations in time of Civil War’, ‘Ancestral Houses’, Yeats recalls parts of Coleridge’s poem and in doing so reinterprets the meaning of images taken from Shelley’s ‘The Revolt of Islam’. This is interesting since ‘Meditations’ antedates Yeats’s more serious reading of Coleridge by some six to seven years, although it would have been composed almost contemporaneously to ‘The Tragic Generation’, when Yeats added a passage on Coleridge’s status as poéte maudit to his earlier draft due to the near-Symbolist qualities of ‘The Ancient Mariner’ and ‘Kubla Khan’ (Au 314). The poet employs the image of the fountain as a possible symbol of the creative order manifested by the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy: Surely among a rich man’s flowering lawns, Amid the rustle of his planted hills, Life overflows without ambitious pains; And rains down life until the basin spills, And mounts more dizzy high the more it rains As though to choose whatever shape it wills And never stoop to a mechanical Or servile shape, at others’ beck and call.



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Mere dreams, mere dreams! Yet Homer had not sung Had he not found it certain beyond dreams That out of life’s own self-delight had sprung The abounding glittering jet; though now it seems As if some marvellous empty sea-shell flung Out of the obscure dark of the rich streams, And not a fountain, were the symbol which Shadows the inherited glory of the rich. (VP 417–18, ll. 1–16) Written two years before Yeats began his reading of Plotinus, it is likely that he was aware of the spiritual meaning of the fountain as an ontological hierarchy, and the poem’s placement in the volume after the title poem, in which Plotinus is discussed, may demonstrate an awareness of the symbol’s implications. More immediately, however, the fountain – which is also an emblem for Yeats’s hierarchical ideal of Unity of Culture – represents the joy and plenitude which comes from the life of the Anglo-Irish Aristocracy: an image for both life, and for a social order in which the wealth of men such as Sir Hugh Lane provides public works of art for the delight of the lower orders. No sooner, however, does Yeats use this image than he replaces it with the ‘empty sea-shell flung/Out of the obscure dark of the rich streams’ which he tells us ‘Shadows’ the tradition of aristocracy, or rather threatens it. Yeats’s immediate source for the fountain is Shelley, as he had already explained its appearance in ‘The Revolt of Islam’ as representing abundance of life, taken from Porphyry, in his essay ‘The Philosophy of Shelley’s Poetry’ ([1900] E&I 82–3). Jeffares points out, in his Commentary on Yeats’s poetry, that the image of the sea-shell comes from canto IV, verse I of Shelley’s poem, which describes the abode of the hermit who saves Laon from his confinement in a cavern (NC 224). The sage lives in a crumbling tower, full of books, on a sea shore: Upon whose floor the spangling sands were strown, And rarest sea-shells, which the eternal flood, Slave to the mother of the months, had thrown Within the walls of that great tower, which stood A changeling of man’s art nursed amid nature’s brood.7 Sea-shells are later identified as symbols of imagination and culture in the poem, which pour from the fountain where Cythna, Laon’s





beloved, is imprisoned and which give her the hope of a better future (Shelley, p. 123, vii 13). Thus both the fountain and the sea-shell, and the ‘eternal flood’ from which they pour are positive images, and had been recognised as such by Yeats when he wrote his essay on Shelley more than twenty years earlier, seeing in them symbols of eternal intellectual plenitude, imagination and spirituality.8 In the poem, however, the running water and sea-shells are juxtaposed against the fountain, and are used to represent dark forces and an exhausted culture respectively,9 thrown off when bankrupt, perhaps from ‘natural declension of the soul’ (VP 423, l. 10), or from warfare. The movement from the dark water also represents violence, thus rephrasing an understanding of Unity of Culture and the aristocratic lifestyle which promulgates the self-delight of creativity as being a result not of ease but rather of violence. It is, as he goes on to say, not ‘slippered Contemplation’ (VP 418, l. 30) but rather ‘Some violent bitter man’ (l. 17) who creates ‘The sweetness that all longed for night and day’ (l. 20), thus justifying the past behaviour of the Anglo-Irish in establishing their ascendancy. This also reflects the hope that from the brutality of the civil war will come beauty and a greater system of government, since all great things ‘take our greatness with our bitterness’ (l. 40).10 The reorganisation of the Shelleyan imagery in fact owes much to ‘Kubla Khan’. ‘Ancestral Houses’ borrows just as heavily from this poem, above all from the distinction which Coleridge draws between the nature which the Mongol ruler believes to have controlled through his enclosure, and the spurting of the fountain from the ‘dark, romantic chasm’, which throws the underground river over the park. Firstly, the title itself is a metalepsis of the ‘Ancestral voices’ which prophesy war to the Mongol ruler: a metalepsis which is made possible not just by the half-rhyme between ‘voices’ and ‘houses’, but also the link with war between both: the one prophesies destruction, the other is both threatened and caused by destruction. Secondly, the first stanza echoes the rhyme pattern of the first verse of ‘Kubla Khan’, when describing a scene not to be found in ‘The Revolt of Islam’, that of an orderly, controlled garden. The ‘sinuous rills’ and ‘ancient … hills’ which are ‘Enfolding sunny spots of greenery’ (CP 94, ll. 8–11) are transumed into the ‘flowering lawns’ and ‘planted hills’ in which the fountain’s ‘basin spills’. There is, therefore, a fundamental echoing of the rhyme-scheme and with this the idyll of a controlled nature from the first part of Coleridge’s poem. Yeats similarly juxtaposes the nature of the flowering lawns around ancestral houses (Coleridge’s ‘spots of greenery’) with the underground



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tumult of some unseen river; just as Coleridge’s ‘chasm’ threw up ‘Huge fragments … like rebounding hail’ when it ‘flung up momently the sacred river’ from its underground ‘caverns’, so Yeats sees ‘some marvellous empty sea-shell flung/Out of the obscure dark of the rich streams’; just as Kubla Khan hears that his ideal of control will be shattered by war, so Yeats’s image of ease is threatened by one of bankruptcy and battle, which begins his discussion of the bitterness and violence which creates beauty. That said, Yeats’s use of Coleridge’s antitheses transforms them in two major ways, partly because of the combining with Shelley’s symbols, and partly because of the impulsion of his own ideas. First, the fountain forms part of the imagery of ease, contentment and an eighteenth-century ideal of nature, and is divorced from the ‘rich streams’ which fling the empty sea-shell – the overabundance of life he had discerned in Shelley’s fountain, although here from an artificial rather than a natural cause. This is wholly different from Coleridge, whose pleasure-dome and park do not come into immediate contact with moving water except in the form of the ‘deep romantic chasm’ which causes the upset in the caverns which finally arrests Kubla’s attention. Yeats needs the image of the fountain to represent the idea of abundance of life, the ideal of hierarchy, but also to describe a park like that of an eighteenth-century Anglo-Irish mansion, and thus divorces the fountain from the underground river and ‘huge fragments’ which are ‘flung’ in Coleridge’s poem, in effect making two different images of projection from water, which thus further sets the images taken from Shelley against each other, divorcing his fountain from the shells and stream. Another difference is that the imagery is self-consciously symbolic on the part of the poet, and creates two metaphors – if not emblems – (the fountain and the sea-shell), although the ‘rich streams’ clearly already have a metaphorical meaning due to Yeats’s prior interpretation of its opposed image, the fountain, as ‘self-delight’. This shows the degree to which Yeats gives conscious symbolic import to the suggested metaphorical potential of Coleridge’s own oppositions. In writing this poem he assigns meaning to the opposed imagery of ‘Kubla Khan’, and presents it as the conscious symbols for two contrapuntal philosophies; the ‘sunny spots of greenery’ and controlled nature represented by walled environs and pleasure-dome become the self-delight caused by pleasurable aristocratic life and its philanthropy, while the potential of the underground river to throw up ‘huge fragments’ become the dark streams and ‘flung’ sea-shell, further recalling the image from Shelley,





but transuming it into a figure of violence and necessary bankruptcy. Thus ‘Kubla Khan’ is not only recalled in ‘Ancestral Houses’, but forms part of the interpretive link in remoulding favourite tropes from Shelley – the ‘unstated middle terms’. The language for two views of man’s relation to nature are transformed into two notions of Unity of Culture; metaphorical possibilities become fixed symbols, and both poems deliver the ominousness of war. ‘Kubla Khan’ was to have a greater influence on another country house poem which Yeats wrote, although this time after he had developed a different consciousness of Coleridge, as sage, and had begun to consider the supernatural poems as examples of a Romanticism which manifests an Eastern ‘magic’, in which the noetic and the sensory become one. In ‘Coole Park and Ballylee, 1931’, Yeats began once again by describing water in a great ancestral home, although in a way which demonstrates a far more meticulous account of the movement of water: Under my window-ledge the waters race, Otters below and moor-hens on the top, Run for a mile undimmed in Heaven’s face Then darkening through ‘dark’ Raftery’s ‘cellar’ drop, Run underground, rise in a rocky place In Coole demesne, and there to finish up Spread to a lake and drop into a hole. What’s water but the generated soul? (VP 490, ll. 1–8) The description of the running water is accurate in relation to the real journey of the river to the lake which Lady Gregory herself gives in her description of Coole,11 except in the force and torrent of the water, which is usually very slow and trickling. Yeats’s setting of the autumn flood season for describing the river’s action (Lady Gregory was ill) allows him also to echo some of the contrasts of Coleridge’s poem, but with significant changes. The echo of ‘Kubla Khan’ in this first stanza can be found in the running of the water underground, the importance of darkness in relation to light, and the eventual ‘finishing up’ of the river in the lake, Coleridge’s ‘lifeless ocean’, as well as in the obvious parallels between the great country house and the pleasure-dome; and, moreover, in the clear tension between man’s control and nature’s spontaneity, symbolised in both poems by the destiny of the water. However, here, in keeping with reality, the water is initially above



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ground and ‘undimmed’ but then runs ‘underground’, and finally meets momentary stasis in the lake of Coole Park where it rises up. ‘Coole demesne’ is therefore not the entire environ of the described water, but rather the place where, after its underground journey, it ultimately discovers peace. The underground journey is perhaps part of the conversion process, but more likely a state of dimness from which the park liberates it. The changes are not simply due to the features of the park, which rather mediate the interpretation. In Yeats’s poem, art wins over nature by crystallising the soul in a static form. Indeed, one can see that ‘Kubla Khan’ has helped to play its own part in transuming the meaning of the source which he uses here, Porphyry, since the line ‘What’s water but the generated soul?’ is a direct reference to the neo-Platonic philosopher’s work On the Cave of the Nymphs. In this short treatise Porphyry explains the allegorical meaning of Homer’s cave in Ithaca where Naiades sit round a stream weaving.12 He interprets the cavern, a dark place, as representing the material world (Porphyry, p. 5), and the water as representing the continual generation of souls into bodily form, realising Heraclitus’s belief that in its downward path fire is attracted to water: ‘We live their death, and we die their life’ (p. 7). Homer’s cave has only running water, symbolising the continual process of these two elements, and in his previous reading of the work in relation to Shelley’s fountain symbols (E&I 84 –5), Yeats had kept to this. In this poem, however, as in ‘Kubla Khan’, there is a contrast between motion and stasis, ‘sacred river’ and ‘lifeless ocean’, racing waters and the lake in Coole Park. The influence of Coleridge’s division between culture and nature, man’s attempt at perfection and nature’s ability to overcome it helped Yeats to add ‘generated’ to Porhyry’s understanding of ‘generating’, by juxtaposing Heraclitus’s ‘becoming’ with Plato and Plotinus’s ‘being’: here, in the park, the Platonic notion of the soul can, however momentarily, overcome the Heraclitan through the lake in Coole’s country-house park. In fact the whole course of the waters from Ballylee to Coole Park is like the cycle of twenty-eight phases from Yeats’s own A Vision, in which the soul runs through the lighter phases of the moon, through the darker phases of the primary, and then returns to the antithetical to find embodiment in Phase 15, Yeats’s own juxtaposition of Heraclitus and Plotinus (AV B 68). It is not, as Marjorie Perloff believes, a dramatisation of the soul’s path through death and rebirth, as described in ‘The Soul in Judgement’, largely since, if we are following Porphyry, the cavern cannot, as she has written, represent death.13





The later descriptions of the artifacts of the house certainly testify to the Gregory family’s desire to create the permanent and the traditional as opposed to the transitory, and the same distinction between motion and rest is made in the difference between those who love tradition and those who live ‘Where fashion or mere fantasy decrees’ and ‘shift[s] about … /Like some poor Arab tribesman’ (VP 491, ll. 38– 40). In Yeats’s poem those who, like Kubla, prefer to ‘decree’ a pleasure-dome with ‘ancestral trees, /Or gardens rich in memory’ (VP 491, ll. 34 –5) like Coleridge’s ‘forests ancient as the hills’ have tradition and stability on their side, and thus he reverses Coleridge’s own portrayal of nature in relation to culture. While the comparison with Arab tribesmen refers to the Judwalis, or diagrammatists who traced the gyres in the sand in A Vision (AV B 41), it also recalls the oriental setting of Coleridge’s paradisal poem. All the same, there appears to be a similar warning of ominousness to the poet Yeats from the ‘tumult’ of noise as there is to ‘Kubla Khan’ from the water of the deep romantic chasm: At sudden thunder of the mounting swan I turned about and looked where branches break The glittering reaches of the flooded lake. (VP 490, ll. 14 –16) The swan, an image Yeats had again taken from Shelley and used before to represent the incarnate soul in imaginative fullness,14 as well as the transitoriness of its appearance in human life, is leaving the park, and thus augurs the change from these values, to a time when, as he says at the end of the poem, the swan ‘drifts upon a darkening flood’. If the swan represents the incarnatory spirit of Romantic verse – and for Yeats Romanticism was by now incarnatory rather than merely passionate and Daimonic (E&I 432; Ex 308) – then the drifting of the swan upon darkening water means most probably the advent of modernism and the ‘flux’ of experience: away from the Platonic possibilities of the soul towards an acceptance of the Heraclitan, which Yeats expressed in his introductions to The Oxford Book of Modern Verse15 and ‘Fighting the Waves’, in which latter he compared man to a swimmer (Ex 373). This further means a movement away from the lighter phases of the moon towards the dark where man is less capable. The change, sadly, is inevitable. Yeats turns the distinction between man’s power and nature in ‘Kubla Khan’ into one between two understandings of the soul and two



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literary movements. This bears out the understanding of Romanticism he expressed in both his 1930 diary and ‘An Indian Monk’, where he identified a ‘concrete’ articulation of Ultimate Reality in which the ultimate may be realised, in Western form, a result of a new impregnation of East on West. Here, the ‘magic’ of ‘Kubla Khan’ becomes transmuted into a coalescence of the noetic and the sensory through the artistic designs of a family which actually turns life into art, and thus manifests the spiritual, or ‘wisdom’, in such a way. It constitutes an embodiment of the pure beauty of Phase 15 in a society and art rather than in an actual ontological adjustment. The aims of the sage are realised, in using art to transform reality, and to concretise the Platonic soul through art. The form of the poem, as George Bornstein declares, uses images to allow nature to become art, in a new Greater Romantic Lyric in which vision replaces meditation and the mind transforms nature into symbol (Bornstein, pp. 48 and 54).16 However, the symbolism of the poem, even in those passages concerned with observations of Coole Park, already involves an interpretation and allegorisation of images from another poem, and conveys the meaning far more effectively than the rhetorical form of external scene and reflection. The interpretation of the imagery in Coleridge’s pleasure-dome, park and ‘lifeless ocean’, as well as chasm, underground river and tumult, demonstrates that the great supernatural poems of Coleridge were more important to Yeats at this time than the conversation poems which form the centre of the ‘Greater Romantic Lyric’ argument, for he saw therein an understanding of nature and the powers of man which was more in keeping with his own effort, as sage, to make the spiritual sensory and place the practice of the philosopher within that of the artist.

‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ Yeats was to interpret Coleridge’s ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ in the same way, as an embodiment of the spiritual through art, in his poem ‘Byzantium’. In ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ the mariner describes how the ship met storms ‘From the land of mist and snow’ (CP 98, l. 134), only to be followed by an albatross which they took for a guardian. The mariner shot the albatross and so the other sailors hung it round his neck. The winds stopped, the sun came out and all slowly began to suffer from extreme thirst. Then a ship appeared, who turned out to be the ‘Night-mare Life-in-Death’ (CP 100, l. 193) – she won the ancient




mariner in a game of dice with ‘Death’, and then all the other mariners died. For seven days the ancient mariner was kept alive in a world of death ‘upon the rotting sea’ (CP 101, l. 240). After this time he saw colourful watersnakes, ‘blessed them unaware’ (CP 102, l. 285) and the albatross fell from his neck. Then, after attaining some sleep he heard ‘a roaring wind’ and ‘The upper air burst into life’ with ‘a hundred fire-flags sheen’ (CP 103, ll. 313–14). Rain came and the other mariners were reanimated to work the vessel with ‘a troop of spirits blest’ (l. 349). The mariner then ‘fell down in a swound’ (l. 392) and heard two angelic voices describe the events he had suffered as being penance for the killing of the albatross, contrived by the Spirit ‘Nine fathom deep’ (CP 98, l. 133) which had followed the ship from the pole. Finally, the mariner reached his own country, and was shrieved by a hermit. He concluded that: He prayeth best, who loveth best All things both great and small; For the dear God who loveth us, He made and loveth all. (CP 110, ll. 614 –17) The wedding-guest to whom the mariner told the tale awoke the following morning ‘a sadder and a wiser man’ (CP 110, l. 625). Interpretations of ‘The Ancient Mariner’ from Lowes onwards have ranged from the wholly solipsistic to the defiantly literal. H. R. Rookmaaker, for example, sees the ‘suspension of disbelief’ involved in the poem as pertaining to the mariner himself, with many of the supernatural events being no more than his own imaginative embellishment (e.g. the seraph choir is the narrator’s mistaken view of the other mariners holding torches).17 Katharine Tave, however, locates many of the processes in the book, such as the appearance of the albatross and Life-in-Death, with medieval demonology and the ability of aquatic demons to change shape in both tempting and punishing men.18 The mariner, according to her, is harassed by a demon, and undergoes a purgative process at the hands of God’s avenging fiend. Tave’s cohesive, although fantastical explication (it depends upon assumptions about Coleridge’s reading when there is no evidence to show that he had read the relevant works),19 points somewhere towards the way in which Yeats himself would have approached ‘The Ancient Mariner’, and takes into account the neo-Platonic glosses which guided the reader through the later 1816 revision of the poem




which evidently impressed Yeats when referring to it, and aided him in seeing Coleridge further as proto-Aesthete, mystic and idealist.20 However, the glosses, despite Coleridge’s genuine interest in Henry More and Cudworth, are more a pseudo-historical context which obscures the original allegory and philosophical meaning of the poem. H. W. Piper sees the poem as an apocalyptic expression of Coleridge’s Unitarianism, in which the mariner is granted a foretaste of the final days before the coming Universal Fraternity of Love, and, following J. L. Lowes, cites sources for most of the major images in the works of scientific religious writers such as Erasmus Darwin, Sir Isaac Newton and Sir Thomas Burnett. The rotting ocean, for example, comes from Burnett’s The Sacred Theory of the Earth, which describes how in the last days we will see ‘the mighty ocean reduc’d to a standing Pool of putrid waters’, while the description of the sea also being like ‘witches oils’ derives from Erasmus Darwin’s more scientific description of the phosphorescence of tropical waters (Piper, p. 52). The original poem is more realistically a dramatisation of the problem of sin and guilt in Coleridge’s own Priestley-oriented Unitarianism, and of the belief that God’s love and God’s wrath are the same (p. 46). For Priestley, like Hartley before him, the mind is a product of external forces and the vibration of the nerves in the brain; man takes part in a Great Design, set in motion by God’s creation of a spiritual materialism. However, the psychological phenomenon known as guilt is still a necessary part of the process through which man comes to have moral feelings within this Necessitarian universe.21 Coleridge employs a gothic scenario to dramatise the psychological sense of sin through real, ontological events – the severance of man from an interconnected universe, or ‘Life-in-Death’ – until he learns to love that universe once more and gain grace through benevolent feeling. Yeats’s ‘Byzantium’, a poem in which art and ‘The golden smithies of the Emperor’ ‘Break’ the ‘bitter furies of complexity’ (VP 498, ll. 35 and 37) involved in life, constitutes Yeats’s most extreme statement on art’s ability to incarnate the spiritual in material form. Art gives simplicity to life by uniting the physical form to spiritual eternity in work which is supernatural: Before me floats an image, man or shade, Shade more than man, more image than a shade; For Hades’ bobbin bound in mummy-cloth May unwind the winding path; A mouth that has no moisture and no breath





Breathless mouths may summon; I hail the superhuman; I call it death-in-life and life-in-death.

Jon Stallworthy and George Bornstein have both noted the debt to Coleridge’s ‘Life-in-Death’ in the poem,22 although Denis Donoghue argues that it derives from Heraclitus’s phrase that fire and water are continually ‘dying eachother’s life, living eachother’s death’ (Donoghue, p. 116). The truth is more, however, an amalgam of the two: Yeats’s interpretation of Coleridge’s ‘Life-in-Death’ owes something to his understanding of Heraclitus, and its relation to the Platonic notion of the soul, as does his interpretation of the underground river ‘Alph’ in ‘Kubla Khan’. Added to this is Yeats’s use of Heraclitus in the exposition of A Vision. That ‘Hades’ Bobbin’ ‘unwind[s] the winding path’ in fact means that the gyres, who are ‘Dying each other’s life, living each other’s death’ (AV B 68), finally find completion and stasis in this Byzantium: that Phase 15 of the major Wheel of the Principles has been reached, rather than simply of the Faculties. The ‘spindle’ was an image Yeats’s controls continually used in the automatic script, and whose significance he was only beginning to understand in 1930 at the time of the diary. The controls had used the ‘spindle’ to represent the movement of the soul from ‘Passionate Body’ at one end to ‘Celestial Body’ at the other (YVP2 390 –2). In the context of ‘The Completed Symbol’ (1937), however, this is the hour-glass, or gyres of Husk and Passionate Body. ‘Hades’ Bobbin bound in mummy cloth’ would represent the exact lengthwise superimposition of the diamond, or gyre of Spirit, over the hour-glass, either at Phase 1 or Phase 15 in the major cycles of life: a wholly supernatural cycle, which Yeats illustrated in A Vision. He frustratingly informs us there that: ‘Sometimes the automatic script substitutes this figure for the wheel itself, the revolving cones drawn without any containing circle, roughly indicating the phase by their position in relation to one another’ (AV B 200). The implication is that this is the point at which the Wheel of the Principles falls into the spherical Thirteenth Cone or Cycle, the end of the journey. In the Wheel of the Principles the entire round begins and ends at Phase 15, and since Byzantium is placed historically at Phase 15 of the first millennium, we can see ‘Hades’ Bobbin’ as representing the diamond superimposed on the hour-glass



(VP 497, ll. 9–16)

at this Phase, rather than Phase 1, the month of March (AV B 196). Yeats is therefore using images from the Historical Phase 15 to represent that point in which the soul reaches the Thirteenth Cone in the Phase 15 of the Principles, although here attained by the artist. However, this is no abstract consummation of the Spirit, but rather one which dissolves the distinction between life and death, the real and the imaginary, and constitutes an immolation of the spiritual in corporeal form. Thus the poet or artist allows a breathless mouth to summon other ‘breathless mouths’, but goes beyond the normal imaginary experience of Unity of Being to see ‘image man or shade/Shade more than man, more image than a shade’, meaning a supernatural dissolution of the above-stated polarities. ‘Hades’ Bobbin’ is also more literally a mummy, representing physical preservation like the ‘supernatural’ miracles of the saints from Von Hügel described at the end of ‘Vacillation’ (VP 503, ll. 80 –5). In Hades’ Bobbin, therefore, we have a description of an unwinding of the spirit to a point of spiritual perfection understood as the incarnation of beauty through the body: something known only to the artists who create this world, and break the flood, both of ‘mire and blood’ and of ‘Spirit after spirit’ (VP 498, ll. 33– 4), creating stasis for both in their homogenisation. That Yeats should have interpreted Coleridge’s ‘Life-in-Death’ in such a way – as the end of struggling polarities – is somewhat ironic, since for the Unitarian it meant the opposite – rather separation from the world. However, this is partly because other images in ‘The Ancient Mariner’ correspond to the symbols of incarnation which surface in Yeats’s poem, themselves mainly the result of other sources. The ‘mouth that has no moisture and no breath’ which ‘Breathless mouths may summon’ recalls the summoning of ‘spirits blest’ to the mariner’s body, by the spirit ‘Nine fathoms deep’, although more evidently represents Yeats’s belief that the incarnate Daimon summons other ‘Ghostly Selves’ (AV B 189), through the senses of the man in imagination.23 The ‘Flames that no faggot feeds, nor steel has lit’ (VP 498, l. 26) recalls the ‘fireflags’ which rise in the air after the mariner has blessed the seasnakes, but was more probably taken directly from the description of fire as purgation in the Japanese play Motemezuka (Stallworthy, p. 123). And the ‘dolphins’ recall the beautiful sea-snakes themselves, although have as a more immediate source Eugenie Strong’s ‘Apotheosis and the Afterlife’ (NC 298),24 which describes the Roman belief that the souls of the dead are carried on dolphins’ backs to be reborn. These other




details of Coleridge’s poem, which correspond to these different images he wished to use to portray eternity when writing the poem, helped Yeats to interpret ‘Life-in-Death’ as meaning the state of incarnation, and allowed him to transpose the two wholly separate stages of spiritual withdrawal and spiritual renewal onto each other. They form, as it were, the ‘unstated middle terms’ which impelled him to echo the phrase in a new metaleptic meaning, completely different from what it originally referred to. Yeats recalled in ‘Dove or Swan’ how Byzantium was an empire in which the speculation of the spirit was incorporated into the work of the artist. Constituting a reversal of the normal process in a civilisation, in which myth becomes reason over a period of time, the closing of the Academy of Plato and the opening of St Sophia in Byzantium around AD 560 (AV B 279) signified to him the assimilation of the rational faculty with the aesthetic, and thus the noetic with the sensory, which characterised Phase 15 and the Ultimate Reality he wished to divine, an Ultimate Reality which is ‘concrete, sensuous, bodily’. However, in the poem ‘Byzantium’ we have more than a description of Phase 15 as understood in the dancing girl of his middle poems or even in his historical Byzantium. The state of Life-in-Death which he echoed and transumed from Coleridge’s poem is effectively a presentation of the immanence of Ultimate Reality, as a world not of dry spiritual absorption, or even Plotinus’s ‘One’ beyond Knowledge and Being, but as supernaturally conceived by the artist. It constitutes, therefore, a further understanding of the combined ‘wisdom, magic, sensation’ of Coleridge’s supernatural poems and the impregnation of Western form by Eastern spirit which Yeats saw therein. As in ‘Coole Park and Ballylee’, with its reinterpretation of ‘Kubla Khan’, the Heraclitan flux of spirit is brought to rest by the work of art and imagination in a supernatural incarnation of beauty beyond even Unity of Being. Above all, however, Yeats was using the poems to philosophise through art, and to portray the aesthetic as having the ability to realise philosophical notions. The ‘sages standing in God’s holy fire’ (VP 408, l. 17), who offer an escape from life described earlier in ‘Sailing to Byzantium’, are ultimately aided by both the sage Coleridge and his ancient mariner to offer instead a vision of Ultimate Reality as aesthetic transmutation, because Yeats discerned therein a spiritualism in keeping with his own preferences. The influence of ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ also pervades Yeats’s later poem ‘Vacillation’, which again deals with the resolution of opposites, but comes to different conclusions compared with either




‘Byzantium’ or, indeed, ‘Coole Park and Ballylee, 1931’. In ‘Vacillation’, the possibility of discovering an end to the antinomies through the devotion of the Attis cult represents, as Ellmann has written, a union of ‘spirit and body’,25 as in these two previous poems, but it would seem as a genuine and unconscious possibility in life rather than as something to be achieved only by aesthetic re-creation. In the fourth part Yeats suggests the potential for such a fusion of soul and body like that of the Attis devotee who may ‘know not what he knows but knows not grief’ (VP 500, l. 18): My fiftieth year had come and gone, I sat, a solitary man, In a crowded London shop, An open book and empty cup On the marble table-top. While on the shop and street I gazed My body of a sudden blazed; And twenty minutes more or less It seemed, so great my happiness, That I was blessèd and could bless. (VP 501, ll. 35– 44) The state which Yeats is here describing he first recounted at the end of Per Amica Silentia Lunae, when he gave the following explanation for his feelings: It seems as if the vehicle had suddenly grown pure and far extended and so luminous that the images from Anima Mundi, embodied there and drunk with that sweetness, would, like a country drunkard who has thrown a wisp into his own thatch, burn up time. (Myth 365) Yeats later associates this with a primordial state of oneness, and cites Shelley’s line from ‘Adonais’ that we are all ‘Mirrors of/The fire for which all thirst’ (Shelley, p. 397, st. 54), but which have been sadly cracked. In the context of ‘Vacillation’, however, in which Yeats discusses the miracles recounted by Von Hügel concerning the body of St Teresa which ‘lies undecayed in tomb’ (VP 503, l. 80), the description of the event in the restaurant means a burning up of time which leads him to a physical incarnation of the spiritual.




Bornstein may be right in suggesting that the line ‘That I was blessed and could bless’ echos ‘A lovely soul formed to be blessed and bless’ in Shelley’s poem ‘Epipsychidion’ ([Shelley, p. 376]; Bornstein, Transformations, p. 87), but the state he is in more properly appears to be Yeats’s misreading of Coleridge’s own Life-in-Death, especially since the mariner goes through the supernatural events when he is able to ‘bless’ creation ‘unaware’ (CP 102, l. 285), and then in sleep thinks that he has become a ‘blessed ghost’ (CP 102, ll. 307–8). This is even more probable when we take into account other references to ‘blessedness’ in the poems of The Winding Stair, which deal with the state as supernatural incarnation, as in ‘Blood and the Moon’, where the tower is ‘Blessed’ and ‘Half dead at the top’ (VP 480, ll. 1 and 12) – it is a state which, according to ‘A Dialogue of Self and Soul’, we only achieve once we ‘cast out remorse’ (VP 479, l. 68). The blazing of the body that attends this consumation in ‘Vacillation’ also recalls the ‘flames that cannot singe a sleeve’ of ‘Byzantium’ (and thus the ‘fire flags’ of ‘The Ancient Mariner’). The impress of Coleridge’s poem is again evident in part five of ‘Vacillation’: Although the summer sunlight gild Cloudy leafage of the sky, Or wintry moonlight sink the field In storm-scattered intricacy, I cannot look thereon, Responsibility so weighs me down. Things said or done long years ago, Or things I did not do or say But thought that I might say or do, Weigh me down, and not a day But something is recalled, My conscience or my vanity appalled. (VP 501, ll. 45–56) Here, the same dissociation of man from nature through guilt as was experienced by the mariner when he shot the albatross and recounted how ‘For the sky and the sea, and the sea and the sky/ Lay like a load on my weary eye’ (CP 101, ll. 250 –1) is recalled in Yeats’s poem when the narrator looks at the water-spread field. Life-in-Death, which Yeats associated in Byzantium with material immanence caused through art, is thus dichotomised in ‘Vacillation’ between the isolation from the




world due to sin (as occurs in the poem after the death of the albatross) and union of the soul with nature (the time of the blessing), and thus in a way which represents a more accurate reading of Coleridge’s narrative stages – although here presented backwards. The poem also comes closest to articulating Yeats’s understanding of the ‘pagan nature worship’ of the earlier generation of Romantics, and the juxtaposition of the blessedness in the restaurant and the inability to love nature through guilt further brings to mind the opposed attitudes of Wordsworth’s ‘Pedlar’ (or ‘Wanderer’), who sees nature as a glorious teacher, and the despondent ‘Solitary’ whose disappointment with humankind has severed this link. The relation of the wisdom of the great Lord of Chou in the sixth poem – which resembles in style a Zen mondo – cements this nexus of associations with the sensuous spirituality of the sage. In its insistence on concretising the contemplation of the spiritual and continued echo of Coleridge, ‘Vacillation’ comes nearest to realising the goals of the sage. However, Yeats finally rejects the resolution of the conflict offered by Von Hügel, and the miracles of the saints and their preserved bodies. Rather, the man of passion, if his goals are philosophical, must use art to combine the noetic with the sensory: the quest is all for a man like Yeats, who prefers to stay with the original sin he no doubt discerned in the mariner as well, and seek an artistic transformation of reality.

‘Christabel’ The first part of ‘Christabel’, lauded by Yeats on more than one occasion for its quality of ‘magic’, was also to have its effect upon his poetry, or at least on one poem, ‘To Dorothy Wellesley’, which closely parallels an especial scene in the earlier work. Christabel, the daughter of Sir Leoline, leaves her castle at midnight in full moon in search of a distant lover, and discovers the unfortunate lady Geraldine beneath an oak, who has been kidnapped and left in the forest (or so she says) by a group of knights who have pledged to return and finish her off. Geraldine begs Christabel to ‘Stretch forth thy hand’ ([CP 117, l. 102] something Christabel had already asked her new acquaintance). Being of a charitable disposition the young and virginal Christabel ‘stretched forth her hand’ (CP 117, l. 104) and takes her back to her own home, making sure that she does not wake anyone, although the mysterious ‘mastiff bitch’ (CP 118, l. 149) which lies outside the walls, and has the ability to see the shroud of Christabel’s





The moon shines dim in the open air, And not a moonbeam enters here. But they without its light can see The chamber carved so curiously, Carved with figures strange and sweet, All made out of the carver’s brain, For a lady’s chamber meet: The lamp with twofold silver chain Is fastened to an angel’s feet. (CP 118, ll. 175–83) Christabel then relates to Geraldine the story of how her mother died when she was born, but that she ‘should hear the castle-bell/Strike twelve upon my wedding day’ (CP 118, ll. 200 –1). Geraldine secretly asks the mother to leave off and allow her to have her daughter for the night and then, having bid Christabel undress for bed, herself undresses, and begins to work her spell through her breast, leaving the unsuspecting maiden in a trance. One of the most striking aspects of the poem’s first part is its moral ambivalence (the second part was written some years later and is less heretical). Geraldine – an elf figure in the Quantock sources Coleridge drew from (Piper, p. 76) – is described in terms that link her to both the divine and the satanic, and the description of nature, as Piper has noted, is at once both celebratory and unnerving: a nature that is both good and evil (p. 80). The poem’s immediate goal is to describe the necessity of evil and the knowledge of it in our religious development for, as Piper observes, Geraldine is simultaneously related to the mother through her appearance ([p. 77] ‘in a silken robe of white’ [CP 117, l. 59]: the mother wears a shroud [CP 116, l. 13]) but is also competing with her. Although John Beer tries to explain it more in terms of Coleridge’s developing belief in primal energies and consciousness, he likewise notes the attempt to harmonise good with evil in the poem (Beer, p. 186). The potential lesbian reading of the story is, however, frequently ignored by critics, although would have certainly made an impact upon Yeats, since Lady Wellesley was herself of the Sapphic persuasion.



dead, guardian mother, lets out an ‘angry moan’ (l. 148) in sleep. Then, having crossed the hall ‘silent as the cell’ (CP 117, l. 117), they climb ‘stair by stair’ to her bedchamber, which Coleridge’s narrator describes as follows:


Stretch towards the moonless midnight of the trees, As though that hand could reach to where they stand, And they but famous old upholsteries Delightful to the touch; tighten that hand As though to draw them closer yet. Rammed full Of that most sensuous silence of the night (For since the horizon’s bought strange dogs are still) Climb to your chamber full of books and wait, No books upon the knee, and no one there But a Great Dane that cannot bay the moon And now lies sunk in sleep. What climbs the stair? Nothing that common women ponder on If you are worth my hope! Neither Content Nor satisfied Conscience, but that great family Some ancient famous authors misrepresent, The Proud Furies each with her torch on high. (VP 579) To begin with, both poems take place at midnight. Secondly, Dorothy Wellesley moves from a forest in which she is urged to ‘stretch’ her hand and to a chamber, just as Christabel is urged to ‘Stretch forth’ her hand towards Geraldine in the forest (under an oak tree) and then goes to a ‘chamber’ for her revelatory consummation. Like Christabel, Lady Wellesley is pointedly protected from the moon by intricate designs: not by carvings, ‘strange and sweet’, but by the ‘moonless midnight of the trees’ which she is urged to grasp and treat like ‘upholsteries/ Delightful to the touch’ as though moving imaginatively to the chamber. Like Christabel she has a sentinel dog which is ‘sunk in sleep’ and thus cannot break the silence (although there is no ‘angry moan’ from Lady Wellesley’s Brutus). Further, the awaiting of the Furies ‘Some ancient famous authors misrepresent’ recalls both the female to female nature of the illumination in Coleridge’s poem, as well as the ambivalent moral aspect of Geraldine and of the knowledge her actions will impart: what one might call the revisionary character of both pieces.



If we turn now to the short poem ‘To Dorothy Wellesley’, we will see that there are many immediately recognisable parallels with the forest and chamber scenes in ‘Christabel’, part one:

The scenario in which Yeats depicts his friend therefore transumes both language and imagery from the forest and chamber scene in the first part of Coleridge’s poem, repeating some literal features (as in the sleeping dog, the importance of moonlessness, the climbing to a chamber), using some as metaphor (as in the comparison of the trees with ‘upholsteries/Delightful to the touch’), and also recalling the atmosphere of moral ambivalence and its revisionary character (in praising the Furies). However, the changes in the later poem are also substantial. Yeats merges some aspects of the forest scene with the chamber; the consummation between Wellesley and the Furies – referring to Yeats’s view of life and artistic struggle as heroic tragedy – deals with her experience as artist rather than with her need for knowledge of sin, and she consciously awaits her illuminators in a state of acknowledgement rather than lying down ignorant. Given Dorothy Wellesley’s known lesbianism, the coded subject of many of their letters, it would have been hard for Yeats to have portrayed her as the naïve and innocent Christabel. That said, he did discern such qualities in her work. In one of his first letters to her, when he was assessing her for the forthcoming Oxford Book of Modern Verse (1936), Yeats paid tribute to her charming naïveté: ‘you play with the real world as a child, as a young girl, as a young man plays, you are full of poet’s learning but it is the learning the unlearned desire and understand’.26 Dorothy Wellesley’s ‘innocence’ as artist may have recalled Christabel’s ‘innocence’ in one context, and one context alone, but this view of her work matured a few months later into a more sophisticated understanding of what he meant by this ability to ‘play with the real world’, when he introduced her in his anthology as follows: To Dorothy Wellesley nature is a womb, a darkness; its surface is sleep, upon sleep we walk, into sleep we drive the plough, and there live the happy, the wise, the unconceived. … As though it were the tale of Mother Hubbard or the results of the last general election, she accepts what Turner and Read accept, sings her joy or sorrow in its presence, at times facile and clumsy, at times magnificent in her masculine rhythm, in the precision of her style. (OBMV xxxii) Yeats then quotes a passage from her poem ‘Horses’ and declares famously that we must now let ‘the mirror turn lamp’, with writers such as her, Walter J. Turner and Herbert Read lighting the wick. In other words, Yeats saw in Wellesley’s very clumsiness and childlike curiosity a move away from realism and back to idealism – a possibility




all the more convincing given that she showed some enthusiasm for his passion for magic. The poem ‘Christabel’ was a famous example, for Yeats, of idealism in practice, since Charpentier’s book had informed him that Coleridge was directly under the influence of Berkeley at the time of composing the first part (Ex 304). However, one can see on closer inspection that this specifically relates to his transuming imagery and ideas from one stanza in particular into the first part of his new poem. The carved figures in the chamber which keeps out the moonlight in ‘Christabel’, to which the heroine and Geraldine repair, are, the narrator tells us, ‘All made out of the carver’s brain.’ This reference to the mental form which preceded the material realisation affected Yeats’s depiction of Lady Wellesley’s own barrier against the moon, since he encourages her to treat the trees as though objects scaled down in size, re-created to be like patterned furniture that can be touched. Yeats therefore did not merely echo the details into a metaphor because of the parallel service of preventing moonbeams from entering, but further transumed the reference to the imagination which went towards making the carved figures into the description of how Lady Wellesley was able to see objects as her own imaginative creation, and thus was essentially Berkeleian in bent. This is why, in fact, two scenes from Coleridge’s poem are transumed into one. The point where Geraldine asks Christabel to ‘Stretch forth your hand’ – the beginning of the process – automatically takes Dorothy Wellesley out of the forest and into the chamber in her mind, since part of her aesthetic process involves a personal absorption of the real world. Thus, as well as a quality of magic, Coleridge’s poem also possessed a quality of ‘sensation’ – the sensation of Berkeleian idealism. Yeats’s later letter explaining the poem to his friend allows some faint moonbeams of its own on what the Proud Furies mean to the Lady Wellesley of the poem: About the conflict in ‘To D.W.’, I did not plan it deliberately. That conflict is deep in my subconsciousness, perhaps in everybody’s. I dream of clear water, perhaps two or three times (the moon of the poem), then come erotic dreams. Then for weeks perhaps I write poetry with sex for theme. Then comes the reversal – it came when I was young with some dream or some vision between waking and sleep with a flame in it. Then for weeks I get symbolism like that in my Byzantium poem or in ‘To D.W.’ with flame for theme. All this may come from the chance that when I was a young man I was




accustomed to a Kabalistic ceremony where there were two pillars, one symbolic of water and one of fire. The fire mark is Δ, the water mark is ∇, these are combined to make Solomon’s seal . The water is sensation, peace, night, silence, indolence; the fire is passion, tension, day, music, energy. (5 August [1936]; Wellesley, 95) The statement here recalls in fact Yeats’s description in ‘The Stirring of the Bones’ (1922) of the archer shooting at the sun, representing the path of Samekh between Yesod and Tiphareth (Au 375), or feminine soul and masculine beauty, one of the many figurations of the union between masculine and feminine, spirit and soul, active and passive, which he took from both cabalistic and alchemical sources (see Chapter 6). In this case the seal of Solomon is being used to symbolise a particular form of Daimonic struggle between an already passive, feminine Dorothy Wellesley, who, abandoning Content, must now shut out the moon influence and struggle with the more masculine furies who hold fire. Yeats elsewhere describes the personal Daimon, or anti-self, as the opposite sex of the artist (Myth 337), although the Furies are of course women. Being a lesbian, the creative muse of Lady Wellesley, her anti-self, could hardly be male, although Yeats seems to characterise her as being essentially feminine and passive in terms of her self, and her opposite as being more masculine and active types of women. Judging by his comments in The Oxford Book of Modern Verse, his friend has her ‘masculine rhythm’ to thank for this. This again explains why the Christabel scene should have been transumed in Yeats’s portrayal of Lady Dorothy, since the narrator of Coleridge’s poem tells us that once they are in the chamber where the moon cannot reach them, the lamp, ‘fastened to an angel’s feet’, is trimmed and lit, providing light from a burning candle, and Geraldine also causes the brands in the Hall to flare up in a ‘fit of flame’ as she approaches the stairs to Christabel’s chamber (CP 118, l. 159). Geraldine also bows before the lamp when about to lie with Christabel, linking its spiritual connotations to her own moral and sexual ambiguity. After all, this is one of the few Romantic poems in which illumination to the heroine comes from another woman: as it did to Lady Wellesley all her life. Moon and fire are therefore just as significant in Yeats’s poem as they are in Coleridge’s, although they are invested with cabalistic meaning. The revisionary understanding of Geraldine in his own poem, who in Coleridge’s gothic source was a more frightening figure entirely,




bears similarities to Yeats’s own understanding both of the necessary warfare with the Daimon if the artist is to achieve Unity of Being, as well as the striking defence of the Furies in Lewis Farnell’s book on the cults of Ancient Greece as worthy female Goddesses, honoured in Attica, who had been grossly misrepresented by Aeschylus in his play ‘Eumenides’: their curses, after all, were part of a system of divine justice.27 Farnell’s revisionary portrayal impressed Yeats, since it further parallels his own Nietzschean acceptance of the joy of tragedy over the Aristotelean, known to the artist who discovers Unity of Being in joyful struggle with destiny (CV A 28). The Furies, as anti-selves to Lady Wellesley, were as necessary as was the illumination of sin to Christabel from Geraldine.28 In summation, we can see that Yeats delighted in the ‘wisdom, magic, sensation’ of Coleridge’s ‘supernatural’ poems: the philosophical ‘wisdom’ of the Platonic notions of the soul transmuted to a physical immanence of Ultimate Reality through the ‘magic’ of artistic process, encapsulated in the ‘pleasure-dome’ of ‘Kubla Khan’ and the ‘Life-in-Death’ of ‘The Ancient Mariner’, further delivered the concretising of abstractions which Yeats had sought in Coleridge’s prose, while the perceived Berkeleian idealism in ‘Christabel’ articulated a ‘sensation’ which also strengthened his belief in the importance of philosophical imagination. The sage provided a model of philosopher which incorporated the method of the artist in his search for a more concrete and passionate philosophy, and in his poems of the early thirties Yeats used art to realise this passionate philosophy of the sage.








Part III

Metaphor





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

According to John Holloway in his book on the Victorian sage, one of the features most prominent in the written work of thinkers such as Carlyle, Newman and Disraeli was the use of metaphor rather than logic as part of the process of giving readers the means to assent and discover rather than be convinced.1 He quotes Coleridge’s own explanation of the method in Aids to Reflection that: ‘Analogies are used in aid of Conviction: Metaphors, as means of illustration’ (Holloway, pp. 9–10).2 Holloway’s understanding of the Victorian sage, a thesis he develops himself, bears uncanny resemblances to aspects of the AngloIrish sage considered by Yeats, and this may owe much to their both centring upon Coleridge as exemplar. However, Yeats’s understanding of the passion of the sage as a Romantic figure does not focus on use of metaphor in prose specifically, even though it is certainly a virtue one might expect of prose-writers who philosophise in a way ‘escaped from isolating method’ (Ex 300). Yeats appears never to have read Aids to Reflection, a later work in which Coleridge reconciled his theory of morality and prudence to Church of England Orthodoxy and the Gospels, but he does appear to have read and reread many of Coleridge’s own philosophical metaphors, to the extent that we may even see this particular use of his forebear as a specific area of the relationship, obviously related to his view of Coleridge as philosopher of Romanticism and sage, but separate nevertheless. Both the Biographia and Table Talk – again a work which was more popular in the late nineteenth century than today – he used more than once for this specific purpose. More generally, much of Yeats’s later prose shows a concerted attempt to use philosophical metaphors of mind in keeping with that of Romantic prose-writers, of whom Shelley and Coleridge are the 117



5

most obvious figures amongst essayists who were also poets. The metaphor of mind, as used in philosophical discourses – particularly critical works – has been a subject of discussion by recent scholars, particularly Paul de Man3 and Kathleen Wheeler, both having looked from a Post-Modern standpoint at the ways in which rhetoric entangles inescapably with logic in supposedly philosophical discourses, and in Wheeler’s case especially at how Coleridge and Shelley were alive to the powers of metaphor as a preferable mode of discourse to logic, as a means of facilitating the synthetic powers of imagination both in writer and reader:4 a position again similar to Holloway’s description of the Victorian sage.5 Such problematic divisions between logic and rhetoric, and writer’s intention and reader’s interpretation, were not important to earlier Humanist scholars such as Erwin Panofsky, M. H. Abrams, and Nesca Robb, whose work deals far more with historical tradition in the classical linear sense than the reception by the reader, and whose scholarship otherwise informs this discussion. Misreading, or rather the attempt simultaneously to allude to authority and yet escape the shadow of influence, consciously or unconsciously, abounds in the philosophical and polemical writings of Romantic poets and essayists. Both Coleridge and Shelley can be regarded as having adapted traditional metaphors and recast them in a way which asserts their own imaginative vision upon intellectual history, and Yeats equally so, although we must remember that he was also acquainted with an occult tradition of metaphor in which to frame his expression. This was one which valued obfuscation and deliberate concealment, as in The Book of Concealed Mystery translated by Mathers, one of Yeats’s earliest sages, and we need only turn to ‘Discoveries’ and Per Amica Silentia Lunae to find its influence on otherwise highly rhetorical and lucid statements. To use the term ‘metaphor’ at all when talking of such passages as that in Discoveries where Yeats asks: ‘He that finds the white arrow shall have wisdom older than the serpent, but what of the black arrow?’ (E&I 288)6 is in itself flawed, since Yeats was using them in a way that would act transcendentally rather than through the intellectual response of the reader. However, from The Trembling of the Veil onwards Yeats required Romantic metaphors of mind to represent adequately his emerging system of thought – whose dynamic was decidedly spiritualist – while still helping to place it within the more respectable tradition of philosophy he was becoming ever more engaged in after 1925. In this sense Coleridge was an obvious choice quite apart from the respect Yeats had for him both as poet and philosopher, since he considered the earlier




poet to share his enthusiasm for magic and spiritualism (UP1 190). This does not necessarily mean that Yeats bracketed Coleridge off in his understanding as ‘source for metaphor’ in the same way as he did tragic Aesthete or sage, but that there was still a consistent search for expressions. Robert Snukal7 has looked at this relationship, although does not seem to have located the degree to which Yeats was imposing his own spiritualist philosophy upon the work of his influence. Yeats read these metaphors with the same freedom that Coleridge himself suggested in Aids to Reflection, although discovered things even beyond the wide scope of intention projected by the great man. A close scrutiny of Yeats’s metaphors of mind is therefore valid for quite other reasons than determining his reading of Coleridge, since it will help us to understand his appropriation of philosophical schools not discussed in A Vision, but nevertheless progressively incorporated into its cyclical theory of history whose basis is supernatural rather than simply spiritual. Perhaps here he shows the greatest signs of Bloom’s ‘strong’ readership and desire to evade influence, but the power of metalepsis, as understood by Hollander, and the importance of linguistic echo, surfaces noticeably in Yeats’s own creative misconceptions, and often parallels his intellectual changes.

Part one: earlier reflections The tradition of the mirror metaphor in Western philosophy The mirror is used in Western epistemology from the Enlightenment onwards to represent two completely opposed views of the mind: as a passive perceiver of an external world, from which it acquires all its ideas, and as a reflection of the Divine Ideas in the higher realm of Being. Both these figures are also loosely related to mirrors which express an aesthetic theory: the mirror of realism, in which the work of art is deemed to imitate reality, and the mirror which imitates the higher reality of the artist’s mind. For the history of both types of empirical mirror we can regard M. H. Abrams’s The Mirror and the Lamp, its title adapted from Yeats’s own introduction to The Oxford Book of Modern Verse, as still being one of the most reliable sources. The original figure is concerned with the ideal of art as imitation, while the other, one of the bevy of metaphors of mind adapted by John Locke for his empirical epistemology, illustrates the character of the passive understanding before the world.



‘Natural Declension of the Soul’ 119

Abrams declares the first type to have its origin in Plato’s Republic. In Book Ten the character of Socrates derides artists by saying that, whereas the real bed- or table-maker constructs something in accordance with the Idea of it, an artist has an easier method of construction: It is not difficult … but is performed in many ways, and quickly; but in the quickest manner of all, if you choose to take a mirror, and carry it round every where; for then you will quickly make the sun, and the things in the heavens, quickly the earth, quickly yourself, and the other animals, and utensils, and vegetables, and all that was now mentioned.8 Here Plato was creating an analogy for poetic creation which would run throughout the history of Western thought, from his own times up until today: art is like a mirror, because it imitates life. The paradox in Plato’s use of his own metaphor was that he employed it in a negative sense, for the sake of deriding art in the Republic – for attacking that which copies the inferior world of becoming, rather than the more important world of being. It was Aristotle who, in his Poetics, formalised the belief that art is an imitation of life into a descriptive inventory, although he did not himself make use of the mirror. Later artists and critics were to link Aristotle’s argument with Plato’s metaphor, to the extent that they became inseparable in the history of ideas. Abrams cites many examples of thinkers from both the Renaissance and the Enlightenment – such as Ben Jonson, Bishop Warburton, Dr Johnson, Rousseau, and Bishop Hurd – who did just that (Abrams, pp. 32–3).9 The second empirical mirror metaphor is not quite so pervasive. Its originator was again Plato, in his Thaetetus (Plato, IV, 74), although during the Enlightenment it was John Locke who developed it into a central metaphor of empirical epistemology (Abrams, p. 57). In an empiricist’s view of man’s relationship to the external world, the ‘understanding’ is passive before the agents of experience, and so acquires all knowledge in this way. The mind merely reflects what it sees, and stores the impressions as ideas in the memory, or what Hobbes called the imagination.10 Although both Hobbes and Locke agreed that how we see things is not necessarily how they really are, nevertheless our sensory perceptions are still the effect of a world that is presumed to exist. Our senses may distort the force behind the impression, but that force is still the result of the external. In An Essay





simple ideas, when offered to the mind, the understanding can no more refuse to have, nor alter when they are imprinted, nor blot them out and make new ones itself, than a mirror can refuse, alter, or obliterate images or ideas which the objects set before it do therein produce.11 One of the most original twists on this trope was provided by Coleridge in the Biographia Literaria, when he complained that the self in the deeply associative theory of David Hartley was ‘the mere quicksilver plating behind a looking-glass: in this alone consists the poor worthless I!’ (BL1 119), and thus that the ‘despotism of the eye’, accepted by Locke, constructs the self as a passive spectator to the mind’s own activity – a critique of the very tradition of that mirror which was to prove useful to Yeats in articulating his own system. In his earlier prose, however, Yeats used the opposite type of mirror metaphor more frequently, the transcendental and Platonic: that of seeing the mind of man as a mirror of Plato’s Divine Ideas. Plato argued in Timaeus that man is a reflection of the cosmos – a microcosm of the macrocosm12 – and suggested the relation between higher active and reflective, passive principles in the universe, which Plotinus turned into the theory of emanation and contemplation in the Enneads. However, while early neo-Platonists saw man as a generated microcosm of the universe, the first figure to use the image of the mirror to represent the transcendental view of the soul was Marsilio Ficino, the fifteenth-century neo-Platonist, who employed it in his Heptaplus and commentary on the Symposium. Ficino saw man as reflecting in miniature the three Hypostases above him, but also as having the power, through love, of a greater consummation.13 As in empirical philosophy, there is a mirror of the mind which receives passively, but in this case it is the metaphysical realm of reason, or ‘nous’, rather than the outside world. There is also a related looking-glass of art, in which art is a mirror of the mind of the artist, and thus of celestial fire and the ideal forms within (Abrams, pp. 42–6). It was Plotinus who first suggested the idea of art as being remedial by reflecting the higher ideal realm which existed in his own ‘nous’14 – thus the idea of art as an imitation of the unbroken realm which precedes the senses, and a use of Plato’s own ontology to give a purpose to art which the fifth-century Athenian



Concerning Human Understanding Locke used the empirical metaphor of the looking-glass to describe the understanding alone:

himself denied. The use of a transcendental mirror for art or the artist, however, was a trope which became popular in both the Renaissance and the Romantic eras. Shelley clearly adapted the transcendental mirror of art to his own aesthetic when he called poets ‘mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present’.15 One should perhaps add one word of caution when delineating these different traditions: namely that the division between nature as a deterministic thing-in-itself and soul during the Enlightenment helped to separate these two traditions in a way which would not have meant as much to an Aristotle or a Pope as it did to a Shelley or a Stendhal. Thus the mirror of nature in art would not necessarily have implied a similar faith in empirical philosophy before the eighteenth century when the more empirically minded Johnson praised Shakespeare’s drama for being ‘the mirror of life’,16 and the subsequent rises of realism and naturalism. By the nineteenth century, however, all this changes as ‘Nature’ becomes ‘steel-bound or stone-built’ (OBMV xxviii) and literary theory becomes inbound with ontological and epistemological fashions, thus recasting tradition in doing so through the prose works of a Coleridge, a Schiller or a Shelley. Whatever the case, Yeats was to draw heavily from the traditions as understood after Romanticism, and to see an integral relation between mirrors of art and ontological fashions. He borrowed from both forms of transcendental mirror traditions. His own belief that art and magic are related meant that he was capable of using the two forms interchangeably, taking a philosophical mirror to express art, and an aesthetic mirror when discussing an occult context, especially in his early work, when his aesthetic theory was transcendental rather than antinomial. Early transcendental mirrors Yeats’s initial use of the transcendental mirror was a direct result of his study of Blake who, like him, understood the Soul of the World as the passive principle in the cosmos. In his first volume of the Complete Works, Yeats and his co-author Ellis described how nature, for Blake, was a ‘vegetable glass’, or ‘Enitharmon’s mirror’, which reflects the ‘thought-forms of god or Holy Spirit’, or ‘the “ideas” of Plato’. The authors also remark on the similarities between this mirror and that described in Boehme’s mystical writings (WWB1 247). Strangely enough, Blake was using this transcendental mirror to lambast empirical forms of art. In his essay on Blake’s illustrations to the Divine Comedy, Yeats describes how the earlier poet despised those artists




‘who studied the “vegetable glass” for its own sake, and not to discover there the shadows of imperishable beings and substances’ (Savoy, III, 117). Later, in his essay ‘At Stratford-on-Avon’ (1904), he refers to this statement in order to qualify Goethe’s own dictum that: ‘ “Art is art, because it is not nature!” It brings us near to the archetypal ideas themselves, and away from nature, which is but their looking-glass’ (E&I 101–2). So we can see that Yeats adopted Blake’s transcendental image of nature as a mirror of ‘ideas’, but used it, perhaps rather ironically, to attack the empirical ideal of art, concentrating on the reflection rather than on that which is reflected. Yeats does, however, write of the ‘ “glass of imagination’’ ’ in a review of Richard Garnett’s book of poems, An Imaged World, for The Speaker, 8 September 1894 (UP1 342). Although he takes the image from the author’s own words, his added description of it involves a transumption from Shelley’s Defence. He defines images as ‘the haphazard shapes and shadows which Nature casts upon’ the said mirror, echoing Shelley’s statement that poets are ‘mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present’, although with some modification: for whereas Shelley was concentrating on seeing the poet as a prophet because the eternal realm of ideas throws its shadows on his imagination, in Yeats’s figure it is the eternal forms of nature which cast their shadows. Although essentially the same, Shelley’s mirror stresses the political purpose of poetic imagination, while Yeats’s figure underlines its ontological basis. This is all the more fitting given that at the beginning of the article Yeats paraphrases the neo-Platonic ideas of medieval mystics.17 Shelley’s use of the mirror of the soul to represent the imagination exerted an influence on Yeats’s descriptions of both art and man’s place in the universe, which he often used interchangeably in both an aesthetic and occult context. Later, in Per Amica Silentia Lunae (1917), Yeats recalls how at certain, unforeseen moments in restaurants he feels a state of complete happiness in which the vehicle of his soul grows suddenly ‘pure and far extended and … luminous’, and asks ‘When I remember that Shelley calls our minds “mirrors of the fire for which all thirst”, I cannot but ask the question all have asked, “What or who has cracked the mirror?” ’ (Myth 364). Yeats is referring to Stanza LIV of ‘Adonais’ in which Shelley declares ‘That light whose smile kindles the universe. … Burns bright or dim, as each are mirrors of / The fire for which all thirst, now beams on me, / Consuming the last clouds of cold mortality.’18 In the context of Shelley’s original poem this means the desire to attain the state which the dead Adonais (Keats) now enjoys (but through imagination rather than reason, since




Shelley’s rational scepticism allowed him to place imagination above the ‘nous’),19 while for Yeats it refers to the loss of concord or sanctity in man’s life that has necessitated such an antinomial system, especially given the later description of ‘blessedness’ which he gave to the event in ‘Vacillation’ (VP 501, l. 44; see Chapter 4, p. 105). Yeats also used the transcendental mirror in poems such as ‘The Wild Swans at Coole’ where the lake ‘Mirrors a still sky’ (VP 322, l. 4) and in ‘Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen’, where the swan, as image of the soul, is shown by ‘a troubled mirror’ (VP 430, l. 62) or wind-disturbed lake. Again, the source for the swan as soul comes from Shelley.20 When using the mirror to represent the mind of man and the poet, Yeats frequently adapts Shelley’s own Platonism to a far more pronounced occult and invocational aesthetic – which, of course, for much of his life he believed Shelley to share. Thus we can see that transcendental mirrors of art and mind were often used interchangeably by Yeats or even combined, in keeping with his belief that art and magic are linked. The ‘mirror of polished steel’ The first instance of an empirical glass in Yeats’s prose is the ‘mirror of polished steel’ in ‘Rosa Alchemica’, which originally appeared in the April 1896 edition of The Savoy. The narrator, who is both an historian of science and a reclusive Aesthete, combines a love of alchemical theory and equipment with a fear of ever experiencing psychic transformation. He relates at the beginning how he had discovered that the Hermeticism of the alchemists was a philosophy, and not just a ‘chemical fantasy … and that they sought to fashion gold out of common metals merely as part of a universal transmutation of all things into some divine and imperishable substance’ (VSR2 126, ll. 13–17). In the story the narrator is persuaded by his old friend, Michael Robartes, to join the Order of the Alchemical Rose. The two go by train to the West Coast of Ireland so that the narrator may be initiated into the Order. While he is taking part in the initiatory dance, he realises that a divine personage is beginning to ‘drink up’ his soul, and so he shrinks back before losing his humanity. The narrator awakes from his reverie, and runs leaving Robartes and the others to die (he thinks) at the hands of angry villagers.21 Although he cited the names of many famous alchemists in this short story, Yeats was little concerned with the intricate details of material alchemy. He was instead more interested in using alchemy as a conceptual framework with which to discuss the spiritual nature of literary imagination, psychic transformation, and the distinction




between the occultist and the Aesthete. At the beginning of the story the narrator uses a mirror metaphor to describe the state of his psyche which helps to illustrate this distinction: ‘I had gathered about me all gods because I believed in none, and experienced every pleasure because I gave myself to none, but held myself apart, individual, indissoluble, a mirror of polished steel’ (VSR2 127–8, ll. 44 –7). During the temptation initiated by Robartes, in which Lear and Beatrice descend from the ‘moods’, the narrator uses this distinction again in protesting to his tempter: ‘ “You would sweep me away into an indefinite world which fills me with terror; and yet a man is a great man just in so far as he can make his mind reflect everything with indifferent precision like a mirror” ’ (VSR2 134, ll. 227–30). The mirror is obviously a very important symbol to the narrator, representing not only his self-identity but his prescription for achievement in all areas of life: very different from the less cautious Robartes who urges him to abandon his timidity (VSR2 132, ll. 163–9). Michael J. Fixler has shown that Yeats was heavily influenced by Huysmans’s novel A Rebours, and that the narrator is a ‘transmigrated des Esseintes … divested of his twisted acerbities, idealistically transmuted, but a des Esseintes nevertheless.’22 This Fixler demonstrates by exposing parallels between the interior of the narrator’s house, the treatment of his servants, his attitude to Poe and Baudelaire, and the same attributes in Huysmans’s hero. A ‘des Esseintes’, who lives apart from both the world and the experiences which he likes to observe, in fact lies between the two choices which Robartes gives the narrator, although Yeats has converted the Aesthetes’ passivity before experience into the passivity of the scientific historian. The mirror of polished steel embodies the narrator’s detachment. He is on the one hand passive and apart from the real world, but is also merely spectating the arcane sciences that he chooses to reflect with ‘indifferent precision’ (VSR2 134, l. 230) a quality his friends perceive as ‘timidity’. For this reason, when he gives himself up to the Rose, unknown voices announce the mirror’s rupture: I was sinking into the depth when the green and blue and bronze that seemed to fill the world became a sea of flame and swept me away, and as I was swirled along I heard a voice over my head cry, ‘The mirror is broken in two pieces,’ and another voice answer, ‘The mirror is broken in four pieces,’ and a more distant voice cry with an exultant cry, ‘The mirror is broken into numberless pieces’. (VSR2 135, ll. 243–9)




In order for the narrator to achieve Robartes’s ‘mystical union’, this mirror which represents his passivity and detachment from both the external and the eternal worlds must be smashed. Since it is made of steel, and yet is broken into ‘numberless pieces’, we may see just how powerful the immortal moods are. That the narrator is a scholar, who observes the occult practices of others through empirical rigour, or rather ‘indifferent precision’, means that the ‘mirror of polished steel’ is a symbol not only of the narrator’s passivity and detachment from the world, but also of his skills as a rational man, who employs analysis rather than imaginative sympathy.23 Thus, although it is not an empiricism of matter, the mirror is empirical in the original epistemological sense that it represents the dispassionate, detached and analytical upon which the realist and naturalist artist, and empirical philosopher, is dependent – all that Yeats most abhorred. Stendhal’s ‘Mirror dawdling down a lane’ In the later period of Yeats’s thought, he frequently referred to ‘Stendhal’s “mirror dawdling down a lane” ’ when discussing realism in art. The phrase ‘A novel: a mirror which one takes out on one’s walk along the high road’,24 which Stendhal attributed to Saint-Réal but in fact invented himself,25 constitutes the epigraph to Chapter Thirteen of his masterpiece, Le Rouge et le Noir. It is his central metaphor for referring to the role of the author and is repeated later in the work, which was an attempt to represent faithfully French society in 1830 by relating the fortunes of a brilliant but low-born youth, Julien Sorel, as he climbs his way up in the world. In this novel the mirror certainly moves along the road from Verrières, to Besançon to Paris and back to Verrières in tracing the fortunes of Julien. Ann Jefferson informs us that Stendhal was concerned that in nineteenth-century France novels had become models for life, rather than the other way round (Jefferson, p. 23). He was similarly concerned that false conventions for conveying verisimilitude were pandering to the expectations of readers, rather than being truly mimetic. The mirror became a metaphor for the author’s art since his goal was the description of real psychological reactions under topical social and political influences. In the spirit of this rigorous mimesis, Stendhal consistently uses the mirror to defend his novel against charges of sensationalism, claiming that it is showing contemporary France in its proper light (Jefferson, pp. 20 –1). The same is true when he consciously breaks the conventions of Romance, and shows the impure feelings involved in Julien’s reaction to the wealthy Mathilde,




and complains that instead of blaming the mirror ‘which goes out on a highway’ the reader should: ‘Rather accuse the main road where the mud is, or rather the inspector of roads who allows the water to accumulate and the mud to form’ (Stendhal, p. 366). Walter Kelly Hood and George Mills Harper cite Yeats’s father as the source for his son’s figure (CV A n. 25). The evidence rests on one letter, written to Yeats in 1916.26 However, Yeats demonstrated personal knowledge of Stendhal’s novel in his essay on Balzac’s ‘Louis Lambert’ (1934 [E&I 446]). His reading shows elsewhere, since he frequently used this looking-glass in a way similar to the original. It makes its first appearance in ‘The Stirring of the Bones’ (1922) when representing the realism in art which accompanies the necessary ‘mere quick-silver plating behind a looking-glass’ which the mind becomes due to the natural declension of the soul and the philosophy of Locke. In ‘Introduction to “Fighting the Waves” ’ (1934), Yeats employed it in the same way to describe the art which results from eighteenthcentury Empiricism (although confuses the tradition, like Blake, with rationalism): When Stendhal described a masterpiece as a ‘mirror dawdling down a lane’, he expressed the mechanical philosophy of the French eighteenth century. Gradually literature conformed to his ideal. (1934 [Ex 373]) Earlier, however, he had used the figure when characterising the art of Phase 22 in A Vision (1925), which teeters between the imaginative and the naturalistic, exemplified in the technique of Flaubert: One never doubts for a moment that Flaubert was of the phase; all must be impersonal; he must neither like nor dislike character or event; he is the ‘mirror dawdling down a road’ of Stendhal, with a clear brightness that is not Stendhal’s; and when we make his mind our own, we seem to have renounced our own ambition under the influence of some strange, far-reaching, impartial gaze. (CV A 94) Stendhal’s mirror becomes current because of the changes in the phases on the gyres of the double millennium described in ‘Dove or Swan’. In the case of Phase 22 this is due to the death of the intellect as the influence of the antithetical gyre wanes in contrast to that of the primary, and the two tinctures achieve a balance in power. At any rate,




Yeats exploited the indifference inherent to the mirror metaphor as used by Stendhal, and chose it as his model for the empirical ideal of art – an ideal which is extremely objective and unbiased (although Yeats’s reading of Stendhal led him to believe that the master himself was not as objective as his follower). For Yeats the distinction between the looking-glass of realist art and that used in empirical epistemology was quite consistent (and he took Coleridge’s image for the latter figure).27 That said, Yeats also brought other associations on board the trope. His adaptation of Stendhal’s figure drew upon characteristics which he had first invested in the portrayal of the narrator of ‘Rosa Alchemica’ (1896). The classification of the typical artist of the twenty-second phase in A Vision, Flaubert, is, after all, remarkably similar to the self-description of the Aesthete in his earlier work. After introducing the mirror in order to describe Flaubert, he continued: ‘We feel too that this man who systematised by but linking one emotional association to another has become strangely hard, cold and invulnerable, that this mirror is not brittle but of unbreakable steel’ (CV A 94). The dispassionateness of the original ‘mirror of polished steel’ was here transumed into Yeats’s understanding of Stendhal’s ideal of imitation. Yeats was in effect echoing his earlier self, and in doing so was interpreting Stendhal’s aesthetic in a very negative way. The artist is apart from the society which he chooses to reflect with unbiased precision and empirical rigour, as was Yeats’s narrator from the arcane subjects which he chose to examine in ‘Rosa Alchemica’ (Flaubert’s reclusive lifestyle resembled that of Yeats’s narrator in his short story of 1896). The difference now is that there is nothing with which to break the mirror, as Yeats has adopted a system of cyclical fatalism. Therefore, by echoing the mirror of polished steel from ‘Rosa Alchemica’ when using Stendhal’s, Yeats developed a strong metaphor of mind which is close to the Frenchman’s own except in two important senses: the connotations which he echoed from his original trope he used to emphasise the dispassionate nature of Flaubert’s style indirecte libre (the ‘linking one emotional association to another’ from which the artist nevertheless remains detached), and to infuse a negative evaluation into his reading of Stendhal’s type of mimesis. This was not, however, the only occasion on which he had echoed the original mirror of ‘Rosa Alchemica’. In Per Amica Silentia Lunae (1917) he described the passive state of the mystic who prepares himself for evocation by drawing upon the transcendental mirror tradition: You have discovered how, if you can but suspend will and intellect, to bring up from the ‘subconscious’ anything you already possess




a fragment of. Those who follow the old rule keep their bodies still and their minds awake and clear, dreading especially any confusion between the images of the mind and the objects of sense; they seek to become, as it were, polished mirrors. (Myth 344) The object which this ‘polished mirror’ of evocation reflects is most definitely non-empirical in the related, realist sense – the objects of sensation are obliterated by the polishing of the glass – and the looking-glass itself is being used to describe union with subconscious mind. However, it clearly shares a common root (the ‘mirror of polished steel’ [VSR2 128, l. 47]) with Yeats’s looking-glass of realist fiction in A Vision (1925), Stendhal’s ‘mirror dawdling down a lane’. However, there is a further point of unity between this mirror of evocation, and ‘Stendhal’s mirror dawdling down a lane’ as portrayed in A Vision (1925). The word ‘subconscious’ was one Yeats rarely used, but when he did so it tended to mean a passive apprehension of the Soul of the World as opposed to invocation through symbol or the active, Daimonic state of ‘Unity of Being’, attained by the artist. In The Trembling of the Veil Yeats talked of how his friend George Russell, mystic and poet, enjoyed perpetual communion with visions on a par with no man since Swedenborg, but that ‘in Swedenborg alone the conscious and subconscious became one … so completely one indeed that Coleridge thought Swedenborg both man and woman?’ (Au 243– 4 [see Chapter 6, pp. 161–5). Swedenborg’s mind is like a perpetually polished mirror, and although Yeats does not openly equate him with the one he uses in Per Amica, an earlier passage in his essay Swedenborg, Mediums and Desolate Places (1914) shows how Swedenborg treated the transcendental with a wholly empirical method: He considered heaven and hell and God, the angels, the whole destiny of man, as if he were sitting before a large table in a Government office putting little pieces of mineral ore into small square boxes for an assistant to pack away in drawers. (Ex 33) Swedenborg, the later primary Sage of A Vision, who can describe ‘distant events as if they were before his eyes’ and observes the spiritual world, the ‘subconscious’, as though he were still an inspector of mines, is clearly linked to the polished mirror of evocation in Per Amica and helps Yeats to define it as an empiricism of mysticism, passive and indifferent, just as the early mirror of polished steel which informs it reflected alchemical practice from a scholarly distance.




It is no coincidence, therefore, that Stendhal’s looking-glass is placed at the same point of ‘balance’ in A Vision (1925), as the mystic Swedenborg, whose method is empirical, but whose object for reflection is anything but ‘empirical’, in the usual sense. Swedenborg, who observed visions with the same clarity as he had originally assayed minerals for the Swedish government (CV A 94), shares the disposition of Flaubert, who observed the external world. Both are men far from the active struggle for ‘Unity of Being’, and both men are, or have been, represented by mirrors inspired by the earlier ‘mirror of polished steel’. And this, I think, points to a further degree of self-echo. In 1925 Yeats was not only echoing the dispassionateness of the original ‘mirror of polished steel’, but in doing so was unconsciously recalling aspects of the mirror of evocation of 1917. That Stendhal’s mirror should represent Flaubert’s style indirecte libre as the ‘linking one emotional association to another’ is in no small part due to the fact that the ‘polished mirrors’ of Per Amica Silentia Lunae required that the images of Anima Mundi be initially ‘called … up by their association with traditional forms and sounds’ (Myth 344). The echo in 1925 of the 1896 ‘mirror of polished steel’ resurrected qualities from another, earlier echo of that mirror in 1917, so that Yeats was forced to see not only a similarity with the passive mystic and Sage Swedenborg, but an ‘Associationist’ link with the new, realist looking-glass of Phase 22. The fact that the automatic script had Swedenborg, whose mind was so like that of the adept back in 1917, share the phase with Flaubert, can only have placed more pressure for echo from the Yeats of 1917 on the Yeats of 1925.28 We have seen, therefore, that the different traditions of the mirror metaphor held quite distinct places in Yeats’s mind. Nevertheless, all enjoy certain attributes which especially appealed to him, and which made him use them in both an empirical and transcendental sense – clarity, passivity, and in certain cases indifference. Indeed, they demonstrate the extent to which seemingly unrelated concepts – style indirecte libre and evocation, for example – were in fact linked at the back of Yeats’s mind due to the underlying similarity of passivity in the minds which experience them. This was in itself because Yeats did not so much believe in the models of mind and art he used the mirrors to represent, as in the primary disposition of the soul which led man to be passive before either physical or spiritual objectivity in his own system. They are, in fact, the attributes of men who become Sage rather than Victim at Phase 22, seeking unities of God or of Nature (Au 183) rather than images of desire.




Thus Yeats skilfully used other people’s metaphors of mind to represent his own Daimonic theory of the mind. And in describing phases where there is a fundamental passivity of the mind, the original ‘mirror of polished steel’ from ‘Rosa Alchemica’ was continually echoed, leading him to transume certain of its qualities as well when describing these varied movements.

Part two: Coleridge’s ‘mere quick-silver plating behind a looking-glass’ One of the most important metaphors of mind which Yeats used to express his views on philosophy was Coleridge’s description of the self in Hartley’s psychology as ‘the mere quick-silver plating behind a looking-glass’, from Chapter Seven of the Biographia Literaria. In Yeats’s own copy of the Biographia a piece of paper is folded inside the book at this page. On it are written the words ‘plating behind a looking-glass’ in his own hand (p. 57; see Appendix p. 177). From the evidence at our disposal it seems to have struck him. As a Unitarian, the young Coleridge had had no difficulties in accepting the philosophy of Dr David Hartley, whose ideas, and those of his disciple Priestley, were still a major influence on Cambridge intellectual life while he was an undergraduate there.29 Unitarianism effectively denies man free will, and so does Hartley’s Doctrine of Vibrations, a deterministic theory of the mind’s material movement in thinking. Later, however, as his faith in Unitarianism waned, Coleridge became more interested in the work of philosophers incompatible with Hartley. His reading of Berkeley, and later of Kant, convinced him that the mind is active in perception and that individuals do possess free will: our minds are not, therefore, passive before a spatial manifold. Hartley’s work eventually became anathema to him, and long before writing the Biographia (fourteen years in fact) he had rejected utterly this most important influence of his youth.30 When Coleridge used the metaphor, he did so as part of a vehement refutation of Hartley’s system. This refutation in fact begins in Chapter Five, where he set out, ostensibly, to prove wrong Sir James Mackintosh’s understanding of the history of Associationism.31 Mackintosh had claimed that the true ‘law of association’ was ‘established in the contemporaneity of the original impressions’ – i.e., that if two objects A and M are impressed together, when M is impressed alone it will recall the idea originally caused by A – and that it ‘formed the basis of all true psychology’ (BL1 91). He further claimed that Hobbes was the




originator of this theory, but that it was Hartley who had applied it to the ‘whole intellectual system’ (BL1 92). Coleridge’s attack on Mackintosh can certainly be supported from the historical angle. Although Hobbes and Locke presumed that the mind moves physically in thinking and in sensation, neither of them had, like Hartley, created a full material system exactly correspondent to the mind’s internal activities. Indeed, Locke denied that such physical speculations had any relevance to his particular study.32 In the first Book of Observations on Man, however, David Hartley attempted to create a physiological system which would account for both the creation and the association of all ideas in the mind, including the manufacture of so-called ‘complex ideas’ such as ‘will’ and ‘judgement’. In this system external objects would cause the ether in the nerves of the brain to vibrate next to each other, and then for deeper trains of vibration, representing the ideas of the object, to establish themselves next to each other in the medullary substance of the brain. Thus when one object is seen alone its vibration down the nerve and then down the train of idea would also cause the train next to it to vibrate, so calling up the idea of the object which was once next to it in the person’s apprehension. Association of ideas and the principle of contemporaneity is explained physiologically (Hartley, I, 67–79). The consequences of his physical system were to cause major deviations from Hobbes and Locke in his understanding of the mind’s powers, since they, despite what Mackintosh said, still believed association to involve free will.33 In Chapters Five and Six of the Biographia Coleridge refuted Hartley’s notion that the mind moves physically in thinking, and cited Aristotle’s De Anima as the source which informed him otherwise (BL1 102). One pressing reason why Coleridge rejected the material system was that he believed it to reduce all association to being caused and controlled necessarily by the contemporaneity of the original external impressions alone, since proximity of place inside the brain can only work through proximity of place outside it (BL1 110). Coleridge believed rather that contemporaneity of impressions merely provided the conditions for the innate powers of the mind to associate in, using the laws of Aristotle’s De Memoria as his support (BL1 102–3). He further considered both contemporaneity and materiality to enforce the denial of free will to the conscious self, and to divorce the latter from the thinking mind. This final objection, that the self is ultimately merely an experiencer in Hartley’s system, separate from the actions of a manufactured mind, is in fact Coleridge’s most important one, since it denies the self any active role in creativity. The self is both




passive, and furthermore cut off from the activity of the mind, which is really the creation of the external universe: ‘Thus the whole universe co-operates to produce the minutest stroke of every letter, save only that I myself, and I alone, have nothing to do with it, but merely the causeless and effectless beholding of it when it is done’ (BL1 119). It was against these particular consequences of the Doctrine of Vibrations that Coleridge used his metaphor ‘It is the mere quick-silver plating behind a looking-glass: and in this alone consists the poor worthless I!’ (BL1 119). The metaphor represents these two related objections figuratively. If we see the mirror as referring to the whole mind, then the fact that the consciousness is merely ‘quick-silver plating behind a looking-glass’ implies that it is not the entire mind, but that which imbues it with its powers of reflecting, or rather of experiencing what is there. This in turn symbolises the self’s passivity: it is merely a ‘reflector’ or experiencer, subordinated and trapped behind the rest of the mind, the glass. That said, what subordinates it is not the ‘glass of a mirror’ but, surprisingly enough, the complete ‘looking-glass’ itself. The fact that the quick-silver is ‘behind’ the ‘looking-glass’ (or whole mind), when it provides the glass with its powers of reflection (or experiencing), indicates just how ridiculous is Hartley’s and Priestley’s denial of freedom, activity and innate ideas to the conscious self. How can the thinking mind be divorced from the primacy of self-hood? Without the quicksilver, the looking-glass would not be able to operate at all, would not even be a mirror. Without the conscious self, the mind would cease to think. Hartley’s reduction of all powers of the mind to complex ideas is untenable, and Coleridge’s use of metaphor far more subtle than it at first appears to be, since it gives form to his philosophical objections to Hartley’s theory. It would appear then that Coleridge made his metaphor symbolise his objections to the Doctrine of Vibrations that it separates consciousness from the thinking mind and reduces the self to complete passivity and ineffectuality. Moreover, the figure also suggests surreptitiously the incompatibility of this dichotomy between self and mind. It can also be construed as an implicit attack on all empiricism since it is a variation of the usual metaphor for the understanding in the British empirical tradition. Yeats was to grasp these points and use them for his own purposes. The Trembling of the Veil (1922) Yeats first made use of Coleridge’s metaphor in passage IV of ‘The Stirring of the Bones’, when comparing Michael Davitt to the





The founders of the Irish Agrarian movement had acted upon the doctrine, contradicted by religious history, that ignorant men will not work for an idea, or feel a political passion for its own sake, and you must find a ‘lever’ as it was called, some practical grievance; and I do not think that I am fantastic in believing that this faith in ‘levers’, universal among revolutionaries, is but a result of that mechanical philosophy of the eighteenth century, which has, as Coleridge said, turned the human mind into the quicksilver at the back of a mirror, though it still permits a work of art to seem ‘a mirror dawdling along a road’. (Au 358) Yeats met Davitt in 1897, when trying to heal the rift in the Irish Republican Brotherhood before the 1898 Centennial celebrations. He found the philosophy behind the Land League – the belief that Nationalists should ‘link Repeal to some other question, like a railway carriage to an engine’ (a statement made by James Finton Lalor, meaning that Nationalists should find some indirect route to repeal of the union)34 – quite distasteful. He also believed British empirical philosophy to be its immediate cause. Although Davitt was himself responsible for the Land League, and therefore more guilty of believing in ‘levers’ than anyone else, Yeats exempted him from the charge due to the impact he made upon him. He instead turned him into an examplar of a politician who has achieved ‘Unity of Being’ – a rare thing in any politician. In contrasting Davitt with the men of the Land League, Yeats used two metaphors of Unity of Being, the stringed instrument and the perfectly proportioned human body, to govern his portrayal. Davitt is described as possessing ‘emotional intensity’ (Au 356), and we are informed that he is ruled by instinct rather than by the intellect, linking him straight away to the language of Unity of Being which Yeats had been using in the passage immediately precedent (where he discusses these metaphors). Yeats compares him to men who were not politicians, and tells us what made Davitt so different: ‘I think that he shared with poet and philosopher the necessity of speaking the whole mind or remaining silent or ineffective’ (Au 357–8). This ‘wholeness’ of the mind relates him once more to the images of Unity of Being: ironically, since Davitt had only one arm, making any literal



men of the Irish Land League and other contemporary Nationalist politicians:

association with the ‘perfectly proportioned human body’ somewhat ridiculous. Coleridge’s image is similarly present as an organising principle in his portrayal of the men of the Land League. Yeats described the whole philosophy of ‘levers’ in terms which imply both deep scepticism about the motives behind the 1879–82 land-agitation – ‘an agitation where some men pretended to national passion for the land’s sake; some men to agrarian passion for the nation’s sake; some men to both for their own advancement’ (Au 358–9) – and also depicted these politicians as ‘small, unimaginative, ineffective men’ (Au 357). This description is embodied by the quick-silver image: the fact that the mercury is behind the looking-glass symbolises this ‘smallness’, as well as their ineffectuality, since the mercury is shrunken, cut off from the rest of the mirror (like Hartley’s self from the rest of the mind). Yeats further seems to have grasped the ideas implicit to the dichotomy in Coleridge’s figure, since he translated the original distinction between the passive, spectating consciousness and the thinking mind into one between public expression and private feeling. He tells us that they used ‘make-believe’ and ‘had never indeed shared anything in common but the sentimental imagery, the poetical allusions inherited from a still earlier generation, but were faced by a generation that had turned against all oratory’ (Au 359). They continue to mimic passion, using an inherited rhetoric, but their open expression of passion is quite divorced from what they really feel, just as the ‘quick-silver at the back of a mirror’ is distinct from the mirror itself. Thus the dichotomy is used to portray hypocrisy. Their emotional sterility and their indifference is divided from the public expression represented by the glass which faces the crowd. And obviously, men in whom there is a division between thought and behaviour have not come anywhere close to achieving that organic state called Unity of Being. We can see that Yeats understood the meaning of Coleridge’s original metaphor, but chose instead to exploit the subtle ideas with which his predecessor had invested it, giving the dichotomy of mind new meaning: to such an extent, in fact, that we can see the metaphor as actually influencing the portrayal of the politicians. That said, although Yeats comprehended the sense of Coleridge’s figure, he did in part misrepresent the relationship between the self and the ‘mechanical philosophy’, a term he also took from the Biographia (BL1 109). This may have been conscious on his part, since it is a change which his own philosophy and understanding of history forced him to make. Coleridge never said that the mechanical philosophy




reduces the human mind to quick-silver. When the latter wrote of ‘the sum total of my moral and intellectual intercourse dissolved into its elements’ being ‘reduced’ to ‘extension, motion, degrees of velocity’ (BL1 119), the word ‘reduced’ is certainly mildly pejorative, but does not imply that the nature of consciousness is as such because of Hartley’s philosophy. What Coleridge meant was that Hartley’s description of the way the mind works broke it down into its constituent parts, and did so in a negative way. In his own work Yeats translated this into a causative link. The ‘mechanical philosophy’ ‘reduced’ the mind into passivity within a divided soul. The reason why he drew his false inference is because he wished to suggest that the powers of the soul could change, as they certainly do during the twenty-eight phases of the moon, about which he had already written in ‘The Tragic Generation’ (Au 293). Furthermore, the link with Stendhal’s mirror shows how Yeats equates the new philosophy of levers with a major movement of the mind which includes the arts as well. This further explains why Coleridge’s image appealed to him, and also how the mentality it describes is surely linked in a fundamental way to the ‘polished mirror’ of evocation (1917): whichever world the mind reflects, the external or the universal, it is still passive, and distant from the ‘daemonic rage’ for Unity of Being around Phase 17. This passivity may have a positive effect, as in the original ‘polished mirror’, where the ‘critical faculty’ must be suspended for the mind to unite with the ‘subconscious’ (Myth 344). However, in the case of the ‘quicksilver at the back of a mirror’, and of Stendhal’s mirror with which Coleridge’s metaphor is closely associated, the passivity is negative, replacing Unity of Being with a logical and mechanical mind which is totally ineffectual. 1925: Philosophical correspondence Yeats next employed Coleridge’s figure in a letter to T. Sturge Moore, at the time when he was just beginning to read philosophy after the publication of A Vision (1925). As well as reading Berkeley, Croce and Gentile, Yeats also read Common Sense philosophers such as Bertrand Russell and G. E. Moore, the brother of his correspondent, who argued for a very extreme form of positivism in ontology. Yeats the idealist used psychical experience and irony to poke fun at the claims made by G. E. Moore in ‘The Refutation of Idealism’ (1903) that sensation is the result of consciousness coinciding with an object which exists independently of it (8 December 1925; LTSM 59). He also centred on Moore’s later and more extreme arguments concerning the relation between




ontology and epistemology in ‘On the Status of Sense Data’ (1913) and ‘A Defense of Common Sense’ (1922). Moore had argued there that sense-data, being distinct from sensation, must be apart from the human mind, and as much in the objective world which we apprehend as are the objects which cause them:35 at the very least they were not in the mind,36 as the empiricist Locke had argued were all secondary qualities (such as roundness and greenness), due to their relative status, but not primary qualities (like shape and colour), and as the idealist Berkeley had argued were all qualities of objects, both the primary and secondary, before arguing that reality was in fact spiritual.37 G. E. Moore, therefore, had gone further in problematising the status of sense-data than even his fellow analytical philosopher and realist Bertrand Russell had done, when he declared that sense-data were ‘partly in the mind, and partly in the external world’.38 He had, in effect, denied the mind subjectivity in perceiving the world, albeit as a logical conclusion. Yeats found Moore’s realist ontology unacceptable. If this argument were true, then a phantom book (his example) would exist equally independently of human perception, and be every bit as real, spatially and temporally, as the table on which it rests. T. S. Moore, who understood Yeats’s irony but failed to join in the humour, argued that his brother’s philosophy should not be used to deny the possibility of hallucinations (LTSM 63). In the letters which followed, he continued to defend his brother’s position (and that of Bertrand Russell), on the grounds of ‘shared experience’ (LTSM 60).39 Sturge Moore totally ignored the fact that Yeats also argued that phantoms like a dream stone and Ruskin’s cat could be ‘shared experience’40 as, he urged, was the Indian rope trick which he had witnessed Dr Smyllie perform in Dublin (LTSM 63).41 It was T. S. Moore’s failure to understand what he was saying that led Yeats to write a quite unironical and rather vehement reply in which he stated his position unambiguously. Having begun with the words ‘Damn Russell!’ and dismissed the realist’s arguments by referring to his politics as well, he proceeded to make his point: Berkeley and practically all philosophers since have contended that ‘sensations’ are a part of the human mind and that ‘we know nothing but spirits and their relations.’ Your brother and his school contend that ‘sensations’ are ‘behind,’ not in, the mind. They, like Berkeley, are concerned with immediate knowledge: what you write about hallucinations has nothing to do with it. I, so far as I can at





If it were not for the unfortunate use of the word ‘behind’ instead of ‘before’, we could heartily commend Yeats for his concise and clear summation. He accepted esse est percipi: that the reality of material objects and a spatial manifold exists only in the mind, and that Russell, G. E. Moore and other neo-realists are wrong. As a consequence of his choice, Yeats could see the house-cat as being no more real than Ruskin’s phantom cat. They are both equally ideal, since neither has a material existence independent of our perceiving them. Yeats continued, in the two subsequent paragraphs, to make deductions about the necessary consequences of G. E. Moore’s system: Now Ruskin’s cat and the house cat are both sensations (or your brother would say each is a ‘sense-datum’) and therefore both are ‘behind’ the mind. I do not think your brother would refuse to admit this. I know that his school meets the Berkeleian argument that all things get their form and colour from the nature of our senses and are therefore only ‘appearances’ by saying that if a hot object on touching the body produces a cold sensation that cold sensation is ‘objective’ and that if two people see the same object but differently coloured both colours are ‘objective,’ from which it obviously follows that Ruskin’s cat is ‘objective’ and from which a whole lot follows which is not scientific materialism but which may, for all that, put so great a part of what the ‘realist’ considers human thought – vivid imagination of all sorts – outside the mind that it turns that mind, or seems to me to do so at the moment, into the quicksilver at the back of a mirror. Why should nature create that useless quicksilver? My own belief is that we know nothing but ‘spirits and their relations,’ but if I could escape from the useless quicksilver [I] would see nothing I care for involved if I had to consider the stream of images (‘sense-data’, Ruskin’s cat and the house cat), which since Berkeley have seemed a part of the mind, as separate from it. (LTSM 66–7) Various critics have attended to Yeats’s question concerning the self in G. E. Moore’s philosophy ‘Why should nature create that useless quicksilver?’ (LTSM 67). Grosvenor E. Powell writes: ‘Why, in other words,



the moment see, do not accept your brother’s argument – what immediate knowledge have we of that ‘behind’? – but it interests me. (LTSM 66)

should there be needless repetition of the thing, once in the external world and once in the mind? Yeats wants the thing to exist once, either in the external world or in the mind’.42 Powell’s argument is that Yeats interpreted Moore’s philosophy as dictating that objects exist both spatially and mentally: although this is true in a very roundabout way, it is not the exact purpose for which he employed Coleridge’s image. Virginia Moore ignores it entirely, while Donald Torchiana evades a discussion of the metaphor’s significance when he writes: ‘Yeats’s … next major objection – and I am skipping some of his reasoning – is that the neo-realist puts so much of what is the working of the imagination “outside the mind that it turns that mind … into the quicksilver at the back of a mirror”.’43 Closer observation shows that he was using the figure to represent a far more subtle argument than has been previously supposed. In stating that this philosophy turns our minds into ‘the quicksilver at the back of a mirror’ because ‘a great part of what the “realist” considers human thought’ and ‘vivid imagination of all sorts’ are also placed ‘outside the mind’, Yeats was implying that there is a necessary consequence to Moore’s position which the neo-realist had himself overlooked; namely, that it denies the mind subjectivity in imagination, and places not just the appearances of present material objects in the region of sense-data, but imagined appearances as well (he conveniently forgot that Moore himself denied that sense-data, or ‘sensibles’, were present in imagination, whose status he did not examine).44 This idea was largely fuelled by his own belief that there is no distinction between either the ontological or relative statuses of a ‘real’ book, a phantom book, or, indeed, an imaginary book. All images apparent to the mind could in fact be shared experience which, rather than making them equally real, in fact made them equally ideal to Yeats, since it exploded the criterion of ‘shared experience’ for determining the physical reality and subsequent ‘objectivity’ of an object. As far as Yeats was concerned, if you gave independent reality to the appearances in sensation of present material objects, then you were awarding independent reality to imagination as well. Nevertheless, Yeats’s initial excuse for refuting Moore’s Realism depended less upon his occultist convictions than upon a genuine philosophical objection. In both ‘On the Status of Sense-Data’ (1913), and ‘A Defense of Common Sense’ (1922) Moore’s sense-data are not in the mind, and therefore deny the perceiving subject any subjectivity in creating the appearances in sensation. For this reason Yeats described Moore’s school as ‘meeting’ Berkeley’s argument that all perception is




subject to distortion by the senses in allowing all the objects (the sense-data in this case) to have ‘contradictory qualities’. In other words, the relativity argument, which both Berkeley and Locke had used to deny the objectivity of secondary qualities, like roundness or greenness (the immediate qualities in sensation), had been overlooked by Moore who, in allowing sense-data to exist independently of consciousness, also allowed them to have contradictory qualities, thus ignoring their relative status: how can a sense-datum be ‘objective’, he argued, and exist independently of consciousness, when it will appear different to different people, and even to the same person at different times? It is this neo-realist theory of perception which ‘turns [the] mind … into the quicksilver at the back of a mirror’. The consciousness plays no part in constructing what it sees. It is purely passive. The ‘stream of images … which since Berkeley have seemed a part of the mind’ are inevitably ‘separate from it’ in Moore’s philosophy (LTSM 67). Yeats adopted a convenient metaphor he had employed before in order to suggest the limitations imposed on our experience by Moore’s philosophy. He was once again using Coleridge’s original dichotomy between a passive, spectating consciousness and an active, manufactured mind for his own purposes, although this time in the context of a philosphical argument. A consciousness which has been reduced to playing no part in creating the appearances in sensations – all qualities being impressed from without – is being described by a metaphor originally constructed in order to symbolise a consciousness which has no innate will or power, and plays no part in the activity of thought. Yeats was taking a figure initially used to describe the limitations imposed by an empirical epistemology and employing it to interpret a neo-realist ontology, and thus increasing its original referent beyond anything known to Coleridge. Perhaps the most important effect of this confusion of arguments was the influence it had on Yeats’s own understanding of Berkeley. Yeats equated philosophical ‘subjectivity’ with poetic ‘subjectivity’, and this cannot have been in small part because he related Coleridge’s argument to his own when describing how Moore denied imagination to the mind. This equation of poetic ‘subjectivity’ (i.e. imagination) and philosophical ‘subjectivity’ was one of the reasons why Yeats came to discover a new reason for delighting in Coleridge’s great ‘supernatural’ poems after 1930 (Ex 304; E&I 432), and why he was to accept wholeheartedly Charpentier’s description of Coleridge as a Berkeleian. Coleridge’s metaphor, in helping him to articulate his objections to





neo-realism, also helped Yeats to define his own unique ontological views, which were to be made apparent in the second edition of A Vision.

In his introduction to Hone and Rossi’s Bishop Berkeley (1931), published a year after he had decided to ‘set up as sage’, Yeats first took it upon himself to describe the descent since the eighteenth century from idealism to empiricism and to modern realism, which corresponded in the arts to the decline from Romanticism to Naturalism and to Modernism. It was also the first occasion in which he openly equated idealism with Romanticism. While defining the ‘new naturalism’ of Joyce, Pound and Proust in the following section of the introduction, and the ‘modern realist’ philosophy with which he associated it, Yeats used Coleridge’s quick-silver metaphor once more, this time to characterise another type of philosophical realism, although one every bit as threatening as the school of Moore and Russell: The romantic movement with its turbulent heroism, its self-assertion, is over, superseded by a new naturalism that leaves man helpless before the contents of his own mind. One thinks of Joyce’s Anna Livia Plurabelle, Pound’s Cantos, works of an heroic sincerity, the man, his active faculties in suspense, one finger beating time to a bell sounding and echoing in the depths of his own mind; of Proust who, still fascinated by Stendhal’s fixed framework, seems about to close his eyes and gaze upon the pattern under his lids. This new art which has arisen in different countries simultaneously seems related, as were the three telegrams to the three bodies, to that form of the new realist philosophy which thinks that the secondary and primary qualities alike are independent of consciousness; that an object can at the same moment have contradictory qualities. This philosophy seems about to follow the analogy of an art that has more rapidly completed itself, and after deciding that a penny is bright and dark, oblong and round, hot and cold, dumb and ringing in its own right, to think of the calculations it incites, our distaste or pleasure at its sight, the decision that made us pitch it, our preference for head or tail, as independent of a consciousness that has shrunk back, grown intermittent and accidental, into the looking-glass. Some Indian Buddhists would have thought so had they pitched pennies instead of dice. (1931 [E&I 405–6])



1931: Bishop Berkeley

Yeats was no stranger to the Modern Movement: he had known Joyce, was friends with Pound, and his own experiments with mythology at the turn of the century were later identified by T. S. Eliot as the beginning of the ‘mythical method’.45 However, he was to a great extent an outsider to the core of the movement and, to begin with, the psychological and philosophical ideas which helped put it into effect. Although he mentioned neither the book nor the author here, the work which demonstrated to him the link between Modernism in literature and recent developments in philosophy was Percy Wyndham Lewis’s Time and Western Man. The Correspondence with T. Sturge Moore shows that Yeats began reading Lewis’s book shortly after its publication in 1927 (LTSM 115; 18 November 1927), and he appears to have found in it an articulation of his own dislikes.46 In the first few chapters of his book, Lewis condemned the ‘Time-mind’ of contemporary literature: principally Pound, Joyce, Proust and Stein. He looked at some of the fashionable fetishes of the day, but in particular concentrated his attack on those writers obsessed not with personality but with the movement of consciousness through time, over which they believe it to have no control. In the second part Lewis moved away from this literature in order to examine in detail the recent ‘Time-philosophers’ whose work underpinned it. Although he looked at each philosopher separately, and criticised them from different angles, there are certain areas in which they may certainly be compared. To summarise his many objections as succinctly as possible, the work of Bergson, James, Whitehead and Alexander collectively promulgated the falsehoods that: time is an external phenomenon, not a mental one. It is the ‘flux’ of the space we perceive. It is not a subjective condition.47 This is because nature is organic, and not a dead, mechanical substratum.48 Because of this both the primary and the secondary qualities are objective, and outside the mind.49 All this was of course anathema to Yeats, the idealist, and he pitted himself against this philosophy just as he pitted Berkeley against Locke. However, although Lewis clearly influenced Yeats’s understanding of neo-realism and literary Modernism, he informs us in a footnote to section IX (marked just after the words ‘the secondary and primary qualities are alike independent of consciousness’), that it is in fact ‘M. W. Catkins’ (Calkins), who provided him with his definitions. In the introduction to her selection from Berkeley’s work, Mary Whitton Calkins wrote of the two arguments put forward by the ‘modern realist’ to deny idealism.50 One is the reversal of the relativity argument used




by Berkeley and Locke, thus allowing objects to have contradictory qualities (e.g. hot and cold at the same time [Calkins, pp. xxxix–xl]). The other argument, a consequence of the first, is that the secondary and the primary qualities must be both outside the mind, and not ‘mental’ as Berkeley had maintained (p. xl). By this time Yeats had made a very careful study of Bergson and Whitehead, as well as of Lewis’s book, and Calkins’s neat summations form a concise statement on the position of these philosophers, but defined in opposition to Berkeley.51 Yeats again uses Coleridge’s metaphor to symbolise these objections, although for a very different kind of ontological realism to that of the Common Sense philosophers he attacked in his correspondence with T. Sturge Moore. The fact that the philosophy sees the penny as being simultaneously ‘hot and cold’ (E&I 406) illustrates the definition that the new realism allows the world to contain ‘contradictory qualities’; that it should be ‘ringing in its own right’ symbolises the other part of the definition Yeats took from Calkins, that the secondary qualities were as objective as the primary.52 He regarded the philosophy which allows this as causing a split between consciousness and thought, as much as he had seen Moore’s realism as allowing one between consciousness and imagination. In the ‘mind’ of the new realism, consciousness is as distinct from judgements and affections – ‘calculations’, ‘taste or displeasure’ – as it is in the extreme empiricism refuted by Coleridge in Chapter Seven of the Biographia Literaria. It is a mere spectator; or, in Yeats’s words, ‘intermittent and accidental’. Yeats was no longer merely exploiting and re-orienting Coleridge’s original meanings for his own purposes; he was leaving them intact. That he should have referred to the ‘consciousness’ as ‘shrinking back’ ‘into the looking-glass’, shows that he perceived the dichotomy in ‘modern realism’ to be not just between the mind and an objective ‘outside’, but also, as with Coleridge, within the mind itself. The artists affected by this philosophy are ‘helpless before the contents of [their] own mind[s]’ – a type of consciousness which Yeats most probably identified with Pound’s Cantos more than the work of any other Modernist.53 That said, Coleridge’s metaphor is also used to demonstrate how the two are linked in this movement: that is, the causal relation between one and the other. In section IX Yeats informs us that the two spheres of the movement are related ‘as were the three telegrams to the three bodies’ (E&I 405), recalling a story he had told some four years




earlier concerning his two sisters’ corresponding dreams. Movements in literature, he informs us, are not related merely through ‘traceable influence but through their whole substance’ (E&I 404 –5). Yeats was implying very gently the relation between an age and its Daimon, and the cyclical fatalism which he had already explained in The Trembling of the Veil and ‘Dove or Swan’ (A Vision [1925]), where changes in art, philosophy and politics occur due to the altering relationship between self and anti-self, but on a macrocosmic scale. When, in section IX, he described the consciousness of man as having ‘shrunk back, grown intermittent and accidental, into the looking-glass’, he gave metaphoric form to this belief. He also, for the first time, did not respect the division between the mirror of art and the mirror of the mind, thus cementing the impression of simultaneity even further. Yeats was now trying to portray the Daimonic ontology through the same image far more accurately than he had earlier suggested in ‘The Stirring of the Bones’. While there he had taken Coleridge’s own complaint that Hartley and Priestley ‘reduced’ the mind to ‘extension and motion’ to mean that the ‘mechanical philosophy’ reduces the mind, but ‘allows’ art to continue as long as it is Stendhal’s ‘mirror dawdling down a road’, here he shows how the new realist philosophy and literary Modernism are both the result of a fundamental ‘reduction’ of the mind, rather than the one causing the other. Nevertheless, Yeats would appear to contradict himself immediately in the subsequent paragraph: If you ask me why I do not accept a doctrine so respectable and convenient, its cruder forms so obviously resurrected to get science down from Berkeley’s roasting-spit, I can but answer like Zarathustra, ‘Am I a barrel of memories that I should give you my reasons?’ Somewhere among those memories something compels me to reject whatever – to borrow a metaphor of Coleridge’s – drives mind into the quicksilver. And why should I, whose ancestors never accepted the anarchic subjectivity of the nineteenth century, accept its recoil; why should men’s heads ache that never drank? (E&I 406–7) This ‘driving’ of the mind is more than just ‘traceable influence’ over art which he conceded to come from philosophy in section VIII. ‘Modern realism’ reduces the mind; it actually drives it into passivity, away from the raging fire to which Berkeley’s idealism could guide it (the roasting-spit). While Yeats manages to inject his own dynamic of





The Oxford Book of Modern Verse (1936) In his famous anthology of 1936 Yeats again sought to illustrate the movement of art and thought away from idealism to modern realism – Romanticism to Modernism – by writing a polemical and largely unpopular introduction. One of the reasons why the volume ruffled feathers was because Yeats refused, with the exception of Herbert Read, to give space to the war poets and – insult of insults – used Coleridge’s trope to describe them when explaining why not: I have a distaste for certain poems written in the midst of the great war; they are all in anthologies, but I have substituted Herbert Read’s End of a War written long after. The writers of these poems were invariably officers of exceptional courage and capacity, one man constantly selected for dangerous work, all, I think, had the Military Cross; their letters are vivid and humorous, they were not without joy – for all skill is joyful – but felt bound, in the words of the best known, to plead the suffering of their men. In poems that had for a time considerable fame, written in the first person, they made that suffering their own. I have rejected these poems for the same reason that made Arnold withdraw his Empedocles on Etna from circulation; passive suffering is not a theme for poetry. In all the great tragedies, tragedy is a joy to the man who dies; in Greece the tragic chorus danced. When man has withdrawn into the quicksilver at the back of a mirror no great event becomes luminous in his mind; it is no longer possible to write The Persians, Agincourt, Chevy Chase: some blunderer has driven his car on the wrong side of the road – that is all.54 (OBMV xxxiv) Jon Stallworthy writes that Yeats’s accusation of ‘passive suffering’ is not in fact the major reason for his indictment of Owen’s work, arguing that it is groundless.55 He then proceeds to examine the more deep-rooted reasons why Yeats should have disliked Owen so much: his denial that poetry was joyful, and death heroic and ecstatic in the moment of defeat. The wretchedness of anonymous millions had no place in the poetic genres of the man who wrote ‘An Irish Airman



historical change into Coleridge’s figure, he simultaneously contradicts this by employing it for emotive and rhetorical purposes. A work as impassioned as this introduction did not have to be as internally consistent as a work like A Vision.

Foresees His Death’ and ‘Easter 1916’.56 Passive suffering is, in fact, exactly that type of pain which is not willingly borne by the saint or hero, which does not involve the ‘lonely impulse of delight’ in the face of death, and which does not find any place in the largely hortatory elegies which Yeats wrote in memory of Major Robert Gregory, Patrick Pearse, etc. Yeats did, however, have another reason. In the Introduction to the book he described modern literary history much as he had in earlier essays: as a movement away from the lamp of Romanticism towards the mirror of Stendhal, and thus as a gradual falling away of the powers of the soul, but with some possible movement back towards the lamp in his present decade. It is partly because their poetry plays no part in the three main phases (the movement away from Victorian ‘impurities’ to a purely aesthetic poetry in the nineties; the reassertion of a new realism in philosophy by the Modernists; and the attempt to give the mind back all its powers by Walter J. Turner and Herbert Read) that the work of the Great War poets does not feature in Yeats’s anthology, and not just because he felt antipathy towards their verse. However, Yeats’s use of Coleridge’s quick-silver metaphor, and the term ‘passive suffering’, does at least show that he associated the war poets with the fundamental, and inevitable, movement away from Unity of Being, which he described in the introduction just before enunciating Turner’s cry. Into this fundamental decline Yeats incorporated both the Victorians and the Modernists, as well as nearly all great novels of the era, and explained it as the reason why his own generation failed in their aims: The mischief began at the end of the seventeenth century when man became passive before a mechanized nature; that lasted to our own day with the exception of a brief period between Smart’s Song of David and the death of Byron, wherein imprisoned man beat upon the door. Or I may dismiss all that ancient history and say it began when Stendhal described a masterpiece as a ‘mirror dawdling down a lane’. (OBMV xxvii). When Yeats later described the Great War poets as ‘withdrawing’ into ‘the quicksilver at the back of a mirror’ (OBMV xxxiv), he was again exploiting both the dichotomy present to Coleridge’s original – in suggesting internal separation as the soul of man moves away from union with the Daimon – and that wrongly inferred ‘reduction’ of the mind,




which he now expressed as a ‘withdrawing’. The metaphor illustrates the reverse of what he optimistically described in the section on Dorothy Wellesley (immediately previous to that on the Poets of the Great War), as the ‘swing from Stendhal’ (OBMV xxxiii). Instead, it represents the movement away from the lamp of subjectivity and towards realism, symbolising the actual process of man becoming ‘passive before a mechanized nature’, as it had done in ‘The Stirring of the Bones’ and ‘Bishop Berkeley’. However, in this case Coleridge’s mirror is integrally and causally connected to another metaphor of mind, the lamp, and indeed signifies its extinguishing. No great event can become ‘luminous’ in the mind because the quick-silver presents an image as it appears – it does not strike the mind in any way other than the immediate. Elsewhere, in both this Introduction and other essays, Yeats equated his belief that light formed the basis of perception with subjectivity not only because it shines from the ‘lamp’, but because, in a more wholly spiritualist context, it forms the vehicle of the Soul of the World, and the artist’s images from either evocation or conflict with the Daimon.57 Coleridge’s mirror provides no such opportunity for luminosity, or, given the fact that Yeats called the lamp ‘the one activity’ (OBMV xxxiii), for Unity of Being (see Chapter 6). In the more specific context of ‘passive suffering’, however, this luminosity also signified the ability to find joy in tragedy which Yeats understood as being part of the heroic tradition, that of the man who discovers Unity of Being in the face of defeat (CV A 28). Thus we can see that Yeats was using Coleridge’s metaphor and idea of reduction here in order to suggest the fundamental swing from the ‘luminosity’ of the lamp, which he identified as the subjectivity in poetry and philosophy from which man has moved further away, from the end of the seventeenth century onwards. The major significance of Coleridge’s image here, however, compared to previous uses, is that it represents a ‘universal’ movement away from idealism and Unity of Being in an essay where Yeats groups so many different, individual movements beneath two opposing metaphors: mirror and lamp. His reading of philosophy was much greater by 1936, and the generality of the image represents the confidence with which he could incorporate movements in art and philosophy completely within his system; more so than in 1922, when his reading had effectively not yet begun. In Yeats’s use of Coleridge’s looking-glass metaphor we see extremes of both understanding and misunderstanding, but above all a great deal of inventiveness. Like Coleridge himself, Yeats took metaphors of




mind from a precursor in order to stress his own place in a tradition of Romantic apologists and speculators, and yet, also like Coleridge, changed them to give expression to the originality of his philosophical and literary views. He also placed the mirror consciously in a tradition of empirical epistemology. We can see that Yeats grasped the true meanings of the dichotomy between the quick-silver and the glass, but wrongly inferred that Coleridge saw Hartley as actually reducing the mind to the state described by the image. Both comprehension and miscomprehension led Yeats to turn the trope into his major metaphor of mind representing the movement away from Unity of Being in its individual manifestations: Locke’s ‘mechanical philosophy’, Moore’s realism, Modernism in literature and the mind of the war poets; a degeneration from Locke to our own age, explained as a result of Daimonic influences. As such, the metaphor acts as an invaluable guide to understanding the way in which Yeats interpreted different philosophical traditions apart from those which directly influenced the system of A Vision, but in accordance with its dictates of cyclical fatalism. Once again we see the fortunate nature – if not the shrewdness – of the creative misconception. When Yeats took another metaphor of mind from Coleridge to illustrate Unity of Being – the water-insect in ‘Long-legged Fly’ – the misconception was all the more complete, and all the more inventive.




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

The lamp, the metaphor in opposition to the mirror, itself affords another instance of how Yeats stamps his own system upon a traditional figure. M. H. Abrams traces the lineage of the lamp as an image of the spirit changing the world emotively through perception, and as a portrayal of ‘absolute idealism’.1 Wordsworth talks of ‘an auxiliar light’ (Wordsworth, VI, 38; Prelude, II, 378) that transforms the setting sun in the Prelude, and Coleridge uses the same image, writes Abrams, in a poem describing his reaction to that work.2 However, while he may have taken the title of his book The Mirror and the Lamp from Yeats’s Introduction to The Oxford Book of Modern Verse, there are certain differences between the description of the tradition of the image there and the meanings with which Yeats injected his own variation of the trope, for the previous occasions on which he mentioned it veer some way from the tradition as understood by Abrams. Before the 1930s it had not been one of his favourite figures, and when he had used it, it had been more to explicate Blake’s philosophy rather than anything to do with Wordsworth or Coleridge. In his serialised essay of 1897, ‘William Blake and his illustrations to the Divine Comedy’, Yeats explained the distinction between Symbol and Allegory in Blake’s own terminology: a symbol is indeed the only possible expression of some invisible essence, a transparent lamp about a spiritual flame; while allegory is one of many possible representations of an embodied thing, or familiar principle, and belongs to fancy and not imagination.3 The use of Coleridge’s imagination/fancy terms to divide the two forms, in an essay where Yeats refers to Coleridge by name later, might encourage us to see the lamp as his own.4 The portrayal of the lamp here, 149



6

however, is as the container and protector of a divine essence, and shows the transcendental and magical nature of the external symbol, rather than the internal workings of the mind’s ‘esemplastic power’ (BL1 301). Yeats deployed the trope once again in the essay when describing artists who have no interest in the material or acquired, because ‘the more pure and fragrant is their lamp, [they] pass the further from all limitations’ (Savoy III 26). He writes in ‘Symbolism in Poetry’ of how a line from a poem ‘flickers with the light of many symbols that have given the story its beauty, as a sword-blade may flicker with the light of burning towers’ ([E&I 156], a long metaphor which may remind one of Shelley5) and depicts the symbolic world of imagination as the ‘shining stag among enchanted woods … the fool of Faery with his shiny cup full of dreams’ (E&I 161–2). Indeed, the importance of light to Yeats’s occult experiences would seem to make the lamp obvious as an image of Symbol during Yeats’s most transcendental and Symbolist phase, as would his interest in the Cabala, in which sun is equated with spirit, moon with formation or soul: the symbols for Tiphareth and Yesod on the Tree of Life.6 However, in later poems such as ‘The Phases of the Moon’ (1919) and ‘Meditations in Time of Civil War’ (1923) the candle in the tower is associated with the poet’s desire to shut out nature,7 while when Yeats later used the symbol of the lamp in the thirties, it was definitely as a metaphor for the mind’s ability to create and reabsorb what it sees, rather than of what it apprehends. This owes something to the renewed importance of light in his Berkeleian theory of perception, and Yeats mentions his deduction from Siris that ‘light must mean sight’ (Ex 304) as a way of introducing Herbert Read’s highly idealist ‘The Phoenix’, and the work of Walter J. Turner in The Oxford Book of Modern Verse. Thus there is a metonymic quality to Yeats’s lamp as well, due to its association with the light of perception. The development of the lamp – which he could have adapted just as easily to represent the incarnating Daimons – is certainly influenced by his reappraisal of Blake as a proto-idealist after reading philosophy. Yeats had been aware when writing his work with Ellis in the 1890s of Blake’s gnostic belief in the universe as ‘ “discrete” degrees of light’ (WWB1 236), which, through the ‘spectre’ or Zoa, Los (the creator of the principles of time and space, or ‘vehicular form of Urthona’ [WWB1 280]), throws his ‘reflected colours’ on his emanation ‘Enitharmon’s mirror’ (or ‘vegetable glass of nature’ [Savoy III 42]). When first working out his own theory of perception through Husk and Passionate Body in 1930, Yeats remembered how Blake had spoken of ‘the bright sculptures




of Los’s hall from which all love stories renew themselves … we could walk round it as if there was no fixed point of view’ (Ex 331). In A Vision he declares them to be ‘the Passionate Body lifted out of time’, the eternal ‘Record’ (AV B 193) of that which later incarnates actively to us as perception. Thus Blake’s ideas were retrospectively employed to understand the relation of Husk to Passionate Body, and may explain why Yeats resurrected the image of lamp when illustrating his idealist model of imagination. However, there are certain irregularities with both the lamp’s relation to Yeats’s use of Berkeley and its place in the tradition as defined by Abrams. For the description of the lamp being ‘the one activity’ recalls not only the activity of perception and of Unity of Being, but that of the mind as a coalescence of subject and object which Yeats described in his introduction to Hone and Rossi’s book on Bishop Berkeley as a ‘purus actus’ (1931), and which he had originally used Coleridge’s Reason to help him understand (E&I 407). According to Yeats there, the notion of both God and the individual spirit as one pure activity was Berkeley’s great achievement, although in his reading this ultimately involves a conflation of the noetic and the sensory incompatible with the shaky hierarchies of A Vision. After all, as was shown earlier, the light of thought and of nature were supposed to be distinct, Spirit and Husk never combining in consciousness. In Yeats’s lamp, like in his essay on ‘The Mandukya Upanishad’ (1935), the two lights become one (E&I 483). The Yeats of the thirties sought ways of providing a greater concreteness to spiritual experience in keeping with his model of sage and the Eastern philosophies which delighted him. The organicism which stood in opposition to Stendhal’s mirror and the division of the quick-silver was originally articulated as a synthesis of intellect and emotion, but came more to represent a union of noetic and sensory in certain metaphors of mind, of which we may deem the lamp to be one. And in this Coleridge was again an important source; more so, in fact, than either Shelley or Wordsworth. More generally, we shall see that Coleridge contributed to metaphors of mind which represent a drive towards organicism and synthesis in Yeats’s work, and an apprehension of spiritual reality – although not always of one and the same kind of unity.

An instrument of many strings Yeats occasionally used the image of a stringed instrument, taken from his father, when discussing Unity of Being, although greatly preferred



Towards ‘Berkeley’s Roasting Spit’ 151

the ‘perfectly proportioned body’ of Dante.8 The one stresses the fact that a man uses all faculties in all areas of life when applying himself to work, that ‘all strings murmur faintly when only one is touched’, as he wrote in ‘Ireland after Parnell’ (Au 355). The other expresses the organicism and inseparability of the mind’s various faculties when ‘the whole man’ is involved. Although the latter image was the more important, the instrument is perhaps the more interesting from the point of view of Romantic tradition, since it is clearly a transumption of the eighteenth-century commonplace the Eolian harp, adapted first by J. B. Yeats and then by his son for his own purposes. In his earliest surviving review, a piece written on the poetry of Sir Samuel Ferguson for the 9 October 1886 edition of Irish Fireside, Yeats made a highly self-confident analogy about how audiences react to epic poetry: Man is like a musical instrument of many strings, of which only a few are sounded by the narrow interests of his daily life; and the others, for want of use, are continually becoming tuneless and forgotten. Heroic poetry is a phantom finger swept over all the strings, arousing from man’s whole nature a song of answering harmony. It is the poetry of action, for such alone can arouse the whole nature of man. It touches all the strings – those of wonder and pity, of fear and joy. It ignores morals, for its business is not in any way to make us rules for life, but to make character. It is not, as a great English writer has said, ‘a criticism of life,’ but rather a fire in the spirit, burning away what is mean and deepening what is shallow. (UP1 84) Yeats used the Eolian Harp itself when describing a speech delivered by Maud Gonne to the Association Irlandaise in his article ‘The New Speranza’, for United Ireland, 16 January 1892: The speech itself is given by one paper in its entirety, to the complete exclusion of the speeches of Clovis Huges [sic]9 and the other eminent politicians who were present. Shorn of the marvellous delivery of the speaker, it has yet many beautiful passages, and it has throughout the wild sweetness of an Aeolian Harp upon which the winds play, a little fitfully perhaps, but ever musically. (UP1 214) The image, as used by Yeats in 1886 and 1892, differs from the way in which Coleridge and others had portrayed it.10 From Akenside onwards




the Eolian Harp had been adapted by Romantic and Victorian apologists to symbolise the poet’s interaction with nature, and was illustrative of a variety of different ontologies and theories of mind. But in the majority of cases the harmony of the music symbolised both that other harmony between the internal and external, and the sympathy through which this was effected. In these two reviews, however, the harmony of both the instrument of many strings and the Eolian harp is completely internal. In the first it is the poetry represented by the ‘phantom finger’ which activates the instrument and not some universal spirit or the external world to an inner harmonisation of notes. With the later, more overt allusion to this romantic commonplace, Maud Gonne’s speech is symbolised by the harp and breeze, and her speaking presence (by implication) by the (stronger) wind which blows over it: in other words, the space usually occupied by the soul of the poet is now filled by the speech, and that usually occupied by the universal spirit with the speaking presence of Maud Gonne in a synthesis of the two. The metaphor is made to apotheosise Yeats’s beloved, and present her as being a more divine, greater ‘wind’ even than that which the wind itself represents (the reading mind). It also blends with United Irishman’s Nationalist image of the female harp. In the first of these images there are clear traces of his father’s influence. While there is no surviving letter from father to son which contains the metaphor, there is one from J. B. Yeats to Dowden which echoes it, and presents much the same ideas as we see in Yeats’s first essay: My dear Dowden – It seems to me that the intellect of man as man, and therefore of an artist, the most human of all, should obey no voice except that of emotion, but I would have a man know all emotions. Shame anger, love, pity, contempt, admiration, hatred, and whatever other feelings there be, to have all these roused to their utmost strength, and to have all of them roused, (two things you observe), is the aim, as I take it, of the only right education. A doctrine or idea with Catholicity in it is food to all the feelings, it has been the outcome of some strong and widely developed nature, and every other nature is quickened by it. Art has to do with the sustaining and invigorating of the Personality. To be strong is to be happy. When I spoke of emotions as the first thing and last in education, I did not mean excitement. In the completely emotional man the least awakening of feeling is a harmony, in which every feeling vibrates. Excitement is the feature of an insufficiently emotional





We find here the same stress upon internal ‘harmony’ and the rousing of all emotions as we do in the younger Yeats’s review of Samuel Ferguson’s poetry, who seems to be adapting his father’s views to his own literary criticism. Just as in that piece heroic poetry substitutes for both ‘education’ and ‘Art’, but still seeks to stir ‘character’ (UP1 84), so here the aim is ‘invigorating personality’. There is no reference in J. B. Yeats’s letter to the ‘phantom finger’ or to the instrument per se, but the mention of ‘chords’ and ‘vibrating’ indicates that the metaphor which W. B. Yeats referred to as his father’s in The Trembling of the Veil (1922) was also at the centre of the elder Yeats’s thoughts in 1869; that in this letter to Dowden, J. B. Yeats was echoing and transuming his own metaphor of mind, which is itself a transumption of the Eolian harp. The most likely source for the father’s image is Shelley’s famous Defence. Like his son, J. B. Yeats was an avid reader of Shelley, and although he became more cautious in his praise as he grew older, at the time of writing the letter to Dowden in 1869 he was still unreserved, seeing Shelley as one of the main influences upon his own ‘brotherhood’. Shelley had introduced the image in the second paragraph of his apology: Poetry, in a general sense, may be defined to be ‘the expression of the imagination’: and poetry is connate with the origin of man. Man is an instrument over which a series of external and internal impressions are driven, like the alternations of an ever-changing wind over an Aeolian lyre, which move it by their motion to ever-changing melody. But there is a principle within the human being, and perhaps within all sentient beings, which acts otherwise than in the lyre, and produces not melody alone, but harmony, by an internal adjustment of the sounds or motions thus excited to the impressions which excite them. It is as if the lyre could accommodate its chords to the motions of that which strikes them, in a determined proportion of sound; even as the musician can accommodate his voice to the sound of the lyre.12 Shelley’s observations on both the image and its shortcomings imply that the harmony is not simply between man and the other, but between the synthetic Imagination and analytic Reason, whose import he had just described in the first paragraph of the Defence (Shelley, p. 2). It is tempting to see the image chosen by John Butler Yeats as a further



nature, the harsh discourse of the vibrating of but one or two chords. This is what Ellis also meant by ‘violent and untiring emotion.’11

accommodation of Shelley’s principle of ‘harmony’ in a single metaphor to represent his own improbable harmonisation of different emotions when reading rather than creating poetry. Given his own interest in Shelley, Yeats also may be deemed to have been aware of the Eolian harp from the Defence during this era. In his essays on Sir Samuel Ferguson and on Maud Gonne’s speech we appear to have opposite types of allusion – one echoing his father’s own version, the other constituting a more conscious borrowing from a primary source. Both, I would argue, involve echo and transumption, to a lesser and greater degree respectively, from the same previous figure. However, that figure is not, as it was for J. B. Yeats certainly, Shelley’s image in the Defence, but Coleridge’s. Coleridge’s most famous use of the image is to be found in his poem of 1795, ‘The Eolian Harp’, in which the narrator, sitting outside a cottage in Clevedon in Somersetshire (it was just before his marriage to Sara Fricker) effectively juxtaposes Unitarian speculation with Church of England orthodoxy (the latter represented by his wife).13 It deploys the harp as an image of the Hartleian belief that the soul is animated into life by the external forces of nature. The poem also makes the metaphorical actual, before allowing the thinking, speaking narrator to make it metaphorical again. In the passage just after he has told his ‘pensive Sara’ that: … most soothing sweet it is To sit beside our cot, our cot o’ergrown With white-flowered Jasmin, and the broad-leaved Myrtle (Meet emblems they of Innocence and Love!)14 (CP 49, ll. 2–5) the narrator describes another object in their vicinity, the harp, and launches into a Miltonic simile of Fairy-land describing its sound, and the associations it brings to his mind. He finally asks: And what if all of animated nature Be but organic harps diversely framed, That tremble into thought, as oe’r them sweeps Plastic and vast, one intellectual breeze, At once the Soul of each, and God of all? (CP 49, ll. 44 –8) The narrator then, under the ‘more serious eye’ of ‘a mild reproof’ offered by his wife, reconciles the difference between the two of them through stressing his Christianity (CP 49, ll. 49–64).




Traces of this may be found in Yeats’s own writing. The reader may recall that Yeats wrote in his 1886 review of Sir Samuel Ferguson’s poetry that: ‘Man is like a musical instrument of many strings, of which only a few are sounded by the narrow interests of his daily life; and the others, for want of use, are continually becoming tuneless and forgotten. Heroic poetry is a phantom finger swept over all the strings’ (UP1 84). The ‘sweeping’ over the strings is to be found neither in Shelley’s nor J. B. Yeats’s image, and it is interesting that Yeats should use the word ‘sweep’ at all, when Coleridge clearly employed it to imply the action of a wind, and not a finger. If W. B. Yeats recalled accurately in The Trembling of the Veil (1922), then his father’s image for Unity of Being necessarily involves the touching of only one string, since the whole point about the man who has ‘Unity of Being’ is that ‘if we touch a string all the strings murmur faintly’ (Au 190): that the whole soul is used in any sphere of human behaviour. In the review the heroic poetry, or ‘phantom finger’, touches every string, just as in Coleridge’s poem the Eolian harp is ‘boldlier swept’ by the wind – both figures are images of ‘wholeness’, stressing the entirety of the soul’s response to that which activates it. Harmony with the world becomes harmony with heroic poetry. There is a far stronger echo of Coleridge’s poem in the essay ‘The New Speranza’ (1892). Yeats described the speech of Maud Gonne, when read to himself and not heard spoken by his beloved, as having ‘throughout the wild sweetness of an Aeolian Harp upon which the wind plays, a little fitfully perhaps, but ever musically’ (UP1 214). Not only was the figure quite probably taken from ‘The Eolian Harp’ but its ‘wild sweetness’ is an echo of epithets describing the music of the lyre in that poem. Coleridge’s narrator remarks how ‘soothing sweet’ it is to sit ‘beside our cot’ (CP 49, ll. 2–3), at the beginning of the poem and then, when conveying the initial noises made by the harp, explains how the instrument: ‘like some coy maid half yielding to her lover, / … pours such sweet upbraiding’ (CP 49, ll. 15–16). Once the harp has been ‘boldlier swept’, however, Coleridge launches into the Miltonic simile describing the ‘soft floating witchery of sound’ as being like the noise of Fairy creatures. The subject of the simile would have made Yeats, the folklorist, take note – at this point in particular since Yeats had just read a French review which called Maud a ‘Celtic Druidess’ with ‘mystic foreknowledge’.15 Coleridge called the music of the strings: Such a soft floating witchery of sound As twilight Elfins make, when they at eve




Voyage on gentle gales from Fairy-Land, Where Melodies round honey-dropping flowers, Footless and wild, like birds of Paradise, Nor pause, nor perch, hovering on untamed wing! (CP 49, ll. 20 –5) Later, when transforming the actual into the metaphoric, Coleridge used the epithet ‘wild’ a second time to describe his own reaction to the dancing sunbeams, calling the ‘many idle flitting phantasies’ that ‘Traverse my indolent and passive brain, / As wild and various as the random gales / That swell and flutter on this subject lute!’ (CP 49, ll. 40 –3). The echos of ‘wild’ and ‘sweet’ are present in Yeats’s ‘The New Speranza’ as the compounded form ‘wild sweetness’, perhaps because of the association of the ‘Melodies’ with honey, which is one of the only products in nature which is both simultaneously. Again, these constitute the ‘unstated middle terms’ of Hollander. In maturity Yeats went on to develop the instrument of many strings into a seminal metaphor for Unity of Being in a way which outgrew any influence from Coleridge, as when describing in A Vision (1925) the opening of the tinctures before Phase 12 and ‘the approach of Unity of Being’: ‘Every emotion begins to be related, as musical notes are related, to every other. It is as though we touched a musical string that set other strings into sympathetic vibration’ (CV A 61). This echoes J. B. Yeats far more than Coleridge (although, given his use of the nineteenth-century word ‘sympathetic’, it was already a metaphor which he saw from a standpoint of acknowledged historicity). However, we can nevertheless see the role Coleridge played in Yeats’s career as he groped towards articulating notions of mental unity.

Sexual difference Another important area of Yeats’s involvement with Coleridge is his use of the latter’s eclectic statements about the relationship between the sexes, collected in Table Talk, a volume of aphorisms and comments which was widely popular in the nineteenth century, and which would have given Yeats his first taste of ‘Coleridge at Highgate’ (the material all stems from that period). Yeats used these exclusively in mystical and magical contexts to discuss two possible organic relationships: the longitudinal and the lateral. Or, put another way, he used them to represent the relationship between either a masculine consciousness and a feminine Soul of the World, or a synthesis of intellect and will necessary for mysticism.




Masculine and feminine valences are legion in cabalistic and Rosicrucian writing, and Yeats was well used to dealing with such notions in his reading. On the Tree of Life the relationship between the right and left side of the tree, as described by Mathers, is that of masculine to feminine (Mathers, p. 27), as Yeats happily recalled in ‘Supernatural Songs’ when trying to bring two sexes to his notion of the Trinity. For the alchemist too the relation between gold and silver, like that between Tiphareth (beauty) and Yesod (World Soul) in the Cabala, is considered as a relation between man and woman, something which prompted Yeats, in 1910, to talk of the relation between the ‘marriage of sun and moon’ in his introduction to Lady Gregory’s Gods and Fighting Men: the sun being the ‘disciplined kingly mind’ and the moon the imagination of the peasantry (Ex 24).16 Through all the major phases of Yeats’s thought the relation between the self and what it desires is seen in sexual terms: from the lady with pale hands and dim hair of The Wind among the Reeds (1899) to his description in A Vision (1925) that our permanent Daimon is always the opposite sex to ourselves (CV A 121). In Yeats’s work there are also similar ‘horizontal’ marriages between a masculine reason and a feminine will, as in ‘Under the Round Tower’ (1917), where the ability to ‘master … a sweet measure’ of ‘golden king and silver lady’ (VP 331, ll. 15 and 13) symbolises the harmony of Faculties in the phases around Phase 15 when the Creative Mind becomes imagination and integrates most successfully with the designs of the Will in finding the Mask (CV A 76–7). Yeats also used Blake’s poem ‘The Mental Traveller’, in which man and woman become alternately weak and strong in a perpetual cycle, to represent a similar ‘horizontal’, or lateral, relationship between the Will and the Body of Fate, although here representing the more general ‘Discord’ between them (CV A 134). Yeats’s later description of ‘The Cones of Sexual Love’ (CV A 172–3) sheds little further light on this, though, and he did not pursue it in the second edition of A Vision (1937).17 Yeats referred most frequently to Coleridge’s statement that: ‘The man’s desire is for the woman, but the woman’s desire is rarely other than for the desire of the man’ (TT 56: 23 July 1827) in situations where the relationship is ‘longitudinal’. This was an interesting way of articulating the vapid and sometimes perplexing relationship between beauty and those who seek it, but also the frustration that Yeats felt concerning his unrequited love for Maud Gonne. In his work on Blake Yeats made it characterise the relation between ‘spectre’ and ‘emanation’, the Zoas and the passive spaces that they




occupy in their rotation round the elemental table ([1893] WWB1 281). The comment represents a principle of attraction, desire being the major dynamic of the system. Later, in his note to the poem ‘Mongan laments the Change that has come over his Beloved’,18 he explicates the symbols in the lines ‘Do you not hear me calling, white Deer with no horns? / I have been changed to a hound with one red ear’ (Wind, p. 28) with the same statement by Coleridge: I got my hound and deer out of a last century Gaelic poem about Oisin’s journey to ‘the country of the young.’ After the hunting of the hornless deer, that leads him to the sea-shore, and while he is riding over the sea with Niam, he sees amid the waters – I have not the Gaelic poem by me, and describe it from memory – a young man following a girl who has a golden apple, and afterwards a hound with one red ear following a deer with no horns. This hound and this deer seem plain images of the desire of man ‘which is for the woman,’ and ‘the desire of the woman which is for the desire of the man,’ and of all the desires which are as these. (pp. 92–3) Yeats had earlier used these symbols in his poem ‘The Wanderings of Oisin’,19 but in using Coleridge’s aphorism was seeking to convey a more mature understanding of the evasiveness of transcendental beauty. The comment thus illustrates the ever-demanding and coy nature of the beauty which he and many of the ‘Principles of Mind’ in The Wind among the Reeds sought, in trying to serve the woman with pale hands and dim hair who represents the Soul of the World, transcendental beauty, the Irish Goddess Dana and Maud Gonne in these poems. In the second phase of Yeats’s poetic development, after the turn of the century, when he abandoned the articulation of desires since he no longer wished to write from a part of himself, he used the comment to denigrate the search for impersonal beauty which had meant so much to him in the previous decade. In ‘Discoveries’ (1907), where he supported the development of the ‘habitual self’, Yeats portrayed this relationship with much greater scorn: The more I tried to make my art deliberately beautiful, the more did I follow the opposite of myself, for deliberate beauty is like a woman always desiring man’s desire. Presently I found that I entered into myself and pictured myself and not some essence when I was not seeking beauty at all, but merely to lighten the mind of some burden of love or bitterness thrown upon it by the events of life. We are





Having explained indirectly the aesthetic of Edwardian poems such as ‘Words’ and ‘The Fascination of What’s Difficult’ (in which Yeats makes the failure to achieve beauty his actual subject matter), he then asks whether there should be a new place on the ‘Tree of Life’ ‘yet low enough to be out of the little wind-tossed boughs’ for this new dimension of personality, and thus tantalisingly near. The aphorism is therefore now understood to characterise the coy and ultimately defeating nature of the search for impersonal beauty in either the Soul of the World or immanent Shekinah of the Cabala. The later portrayal of the relationship between man and Daimon in Per Amica Silentia Lunae is also sexual, but in keeping with the new philosophy of antinomies, or battle between self and anti-self, the latter is no coy lover but rather an active fighter, mirroring Yeats’s changed relationship to Maud Gonne in middle age: I am persuaded that the Daimon delivers and deceives us, and that he wove that netting from the stars and threw the net from his shoulder. Then my imagination runs from Daimon to sweetheart, and I divine an analogy that evades the intellect. I remember that Greek antiquity has bid us look for the principal stars, that govern enemy and sweetheart alike, among those that are about to set, in the Seventh House as the astrologers say; and that it may be ‘sexual love,’ which is ‘founded upon spiritual hate,’ is an image of the warfare of man and Daimon. (Myth 336) The Daimon, as the spiritual other, has some of the deceit and elusiveness of the ‘deliberate beauty’ of ‘Discoveries’, but is more active and demanding than earlier articulations of the World Soul. This is an understanding of the ‘other’ as desiring more than the desire of its opposite, but the properties of the man himself. Because of this, Yeats became more wary of using sexual metaphors in this case, never referring to the Daimon in the feminine gender except when consciously discussing the sexual relation of the two antinomies. We find this in the first edition of A Vision, when he explains that the Mask of the Man is the Will of the Daimon, and the Creative Mind of the Man the



only permitted to desire life, and all the rest should be our complaints or our praise of that exacting mistress who can awake our lips into song with her kisses. But we must not give her all. (E&I 271–2)

Daimon’s Body of Fate, and thus that: ‘This relation (the Daimon being of the opposite sex to that of man) may create a passion like that of sexual love’ (CV A 27). He did not pursue this particular masculine/ feminine figuration in any further detail, and, apart from a brief description of ‘woman’ being occasionally ‘man’s goal and limit’, and thus ‘Mask and Body of Fate’ (AV B 213), he did not explore this relation in the second edition. Gender was therefore an important way of symbolising the attraction of opposites which Yeats understood as the dynamic of both personality and history, and as leading to Unity of Being, but by the time of his later aesthetic Coleridge’s comment was no longer a sufficient trope for representing the mutual hatred and attraction which the two enjoyed, except perhaps in the continued elusiveness of the Daimon and its ability to set the man hard tasks. Moreover, the sexual nature of Daimonic struggle was far more literal than the previous forms of symbolism he had used, since the ontological battle was between two gendered minds, rather than with a transcendent World Soul whose passivity was feminine and thus effectively symbolised by a silvery woman. Yeats made use of another comment on the sexes from Coleridge’s Table Talk in ‘Ireland after Parnell’ (1922), when recalling his youth in Dublin, to illustrate both his understanding of Swedenborg’s mystical genius, and why that of his old friend George Russell had disappeared: He [George Russell] and I often quarrelled, because I wanted him to examine and question his visions, and write them out as they occurred; and still more because I thought symbolic what he thought real like the men and women that had passed him on the road. Were they so much a part of his subconscious life that they would have vanished had he submitted them to question; were they like those voices that only speak, those strange sights that only show themselves for an instant, when the attention has been withdrawn; that phantasmagoria of which I had learnt something in London: and had his verse and his painting a like origin? And was that why the same hand that painted a certain dreamy, lovely sandy shore, now in the Dublin Municipal Gallery, could with great rapidity fill many canvases with poetical commonplace; and why, after writing Homeward; Songs by the Way, where all is skilful and much exquisite, he would never again write a perfect book? Was it precisely because in Swedenborg alone the conscious and subconscious became one – as in that marriage of the angels, which he has described as a contact





Yeats was implying here that Russell had a mentality similar to that of Swedenborg, in which the conscious and subconscious minds are so united as to be almost indistinguishable, but in an effortless, impassive way, unlike Unity of Being – and more like a ‘unity of God’ for the exemplar primary Sage of A Vision. Yeats thought Coleridge – whom he mistook to be a believer in Swedenborg’s mystical experiences – to have used the union of the two sexes in one man in order to describe Swedenborg himself in this way. The original comment from which Yeats created his metaphor runs as follows: I have known strong minds with imposing, undoubting, Cobbettlike manners; but I have never met a great mind of this sort. And of the former, they are at least as often wrong as right. The truth is, a great mind must be androgynous. Great minds – Swedenborg’s for instance – are never wrong but in consequence of being in the right, but imperfectly. ([TT 173]) 1 September 1832) Coleridge was little concerned with the relation between conscious and subconscious when he made this comment. However, when using this image Yeats did not actually mean the relation between a masculine conscious and feminine subconscious, as one might expect from his other uses of occult symbology elsewhere. Rather, the organicism is wholly ‘lateral’, or horizontal, and relates to the bizarre reciprocal relation between the mind of the mystic and that which he apprehends in ‘Swedenborg’s “marriage of the angels” ’. Swedenborg wrote in many places about marital union between angels and between souls after death, the two most notable being his treatise Concerning Heaven and Hell and The Delights of Wisdom relating to Conjugial Love. A virtuous soul attempts to conjoin love and wisdom in the form of ‘use’: all of which are aspects of the ‘interior’ man, not the ‘exterior’. Yet while all men contain love and wisdom, love predominates in the female sex, and wisdom in the male.20 The ‘female man’ loves the wisdom of the man, while the ‘male man’ understands and desires the love of his opposite. Therefore, the interiors of men and women unite in this earthly ‘correspondence’ of the perfection



of the whole being – so completely one indeed that Coleridge thought Swedenborg both man and woman? (Au 243– 4)

that is in heaven, and they ‘conjugate’ in conjugal love. In other words, they marry. Sadly, their union is also sexual, resulting in children. This impedes love truly conjugial, which they can only achieve once their souls have been purified beyond the grave (n. 38, p. 39). After death the two partners will keep their exteriors and continue as man and wife in one of the lower heavens (n. 51, p. 54): one of Swedenborg’s most enigmatic beliefs is that we live out of our memories after death. In this situation they find out whether they are fit for a purely conjugial union. If so they will gradually cast off their exteriors, become interior alone, and form the perfect union of love and wisdom, which Swedenborg also characterised as the conjunction of good and truth, will and understanding.21 This state is the marriage of the angels. Swedenborg’s own account of the marriage of the angels does not explain why Yeats used it with such idiosyncrasies. He described it not only in ‘Ireland after Parnell’ (1922), but in other texts as a ‘contact / conflagration of the whole Being’ (L 805 and 807), as a union between the conscious and subconscious mind and, furthermore, as a sexual rather than a conjugial union. In the one poem where Yeats made use of the ‘marriage of the angels’, ‘Ribh at the Tomb of Baile and Aillinn’, he did so in a purely mystical sense, without reference to literature or lateral polarities. Yeats combined the story of these two famous Irish lovers (whose deaths were contrived by the God Aengus so that he could make them live with him in the land of the dead), with Swedenborgianism and the Cabalistic Tree of Life. They become ‘pure substance’ and ‘the intercourse of angels is a light / Where for its moment both seem lost, consumed’ (VP 555, ll. 11 and 15–16). The organic wholeness of their intercourse during union creates the light, which in turn illuminates ‘the pitch-dark atmosphere above’ (VP 555, l. 17). This enables the priest, Ribh, to read his book, suggesting that the light forms a further union between his own world and that above: ‘Though somewhat broken by the leaves, that light / Lies in a circle on the grass; therein / I turn the pages of my holy book’ (VP 555, ll. 25–7). Ribh, a Pre-Patrick, Coptic priest, rejects the purely masculine trinity accepted by orthodox Catholics (as did Macgregor Mathers), believing the sexual intercourse of the transmigrated Baile and Aillinn to represent an androgynous Holy Spirit, and that it is this which enlightens him. This would seem to indicate that a Swedenborg or a George Russell, whose conscious and subconscious lives were completely blended, are ‘man and woman’ because of a similar, perpetual enlightenment from




an androgynous Soul of the World, as though both constitute ‘correspondences’ to the angels. However, Yeats understood man’s relationship to the ‘marriage of the angels’ in a complex way, and in suggesting that Coleridge called Swedenborg both man and woman because in him alone the conscious and subconscious minds were one, may have also been implying that Swedenborg balanced perfectly the emotional and intellectual sides of his nature (which Yeats chose to symbolise as female and male), so as to be ready for mystical experience.22 In other words, that the relation is reciprocal. We need only look at other references to Swedenborg outside ‘Ireland after Parnell’ to illustrate this point. The reader will recall that in A Vision (1925), Swedenborg (who is also an exemplar of the [ primary] Sage), is at Phase 22, the point of ‘balance’ between the predominance of the antithetical and primary influences, a phase of passivity. The complexities of the automatic script aside, what Yeats was in fact conveying here is exactly the same as the subordination of ‘will’ and ‘intellect’ in the passage from Per Amica where he describes the mystic as becoming a ‘polished mirror’ (Myth 344). Because both properties of the mind are equal in power, the man is passive and receptive; the two forces are mutually cancelling. It is for just these reasons that Coleridge’s comment acts not only as a metaphor for the state achieved through mysticism, but also as one for the passivity and subordination of intellect and emotion necessary for mysticism. Coleridge’s aphorism allowed Yeats to see this union of mutually cancelling opposites as existing in one man, a mystic, and so to represent opposing influences of the mind which have to be suppressed with an equality that becomes passivity. As such, Coleridge contributed to Yeats’s understanding of our twoway relationship with the ‘marriage of the angels’, and the Soul of the World, and thus to his seeing the minds of those who are passive and like ‘polished mirrors’ as being nevertheless organic. He provided a ‘lateral’ understanding of the organic mind, even if this particular organicism is actually wholly different from the alternative and more active organicism of Unity of Being, and is more fundamentally a part of the movement away from the soul’s unity, as discussed in the previous chapter. The possible contradictions in such portrayals only help to show the lack of complete internal consistency in Yeats’s articulation of the difference between primary and antithetical minds, or rather that the passive mind of the mystic has its place – even if such a perfect organicism destroys one’s art, as it did for George Russell. In general, however, for Yeats Coleridge was consistent for masculine/feminine





symbology, and for articulating spiritualist and Cabalistic understandings of the mind of both artist and mystic.

The last and most poignant use of one of Coleridge’s metaphors of mind occurs in the poem ‘Long-legged Fly’, the only occasion when Yeats successfully took an image from him to represent Unity of Being. However, it is one which accords with his use of Coleridge to conflate the noetic with the sensory, Principles with Faculties, rather than the blending of the practical reasoning of the Creative Mind with the aims of Will, which delivers Unity of Being during Phase 17 in A Vision (AV B 142). It is also the only occasion on which Yeats comes close to incorporating that aspect of Coleridge’s work which most scholars have lit upon into his own frame of reference: namely, the imagination. More than one critic has located the source of the refrain in Yeats’s poem ‘Long-legged Fly’ to the Biographia Literaria. Both Mario L. D’Avanzo and William Elford Rogers see it as derived from Coleridge’s water-insect,23 a metaphor of mind used to demonstrate that association is as much the result of the conscious will governing ideas as it is the reception and storing of those ideas from the original external impressions – a watershed in Coleridge’s intellectual development: Most of my readers will have observed a small water-insect on the surface of rivulets, which throws a cinque-spotted shadow fringed with prismatic colours on the sunny bottom of the brook; and will have noticed, how the little animal wins its way up against the stream, by alternate pulses of active and passive motion, now resisting the current, and now yielding to it in order to gather strength and a momentary fulcrum for a further propulsion. There are evidently two powers at work, which relatively to each other are active and passive; and this is not possible without an intermediate faculty, which is at once both active and passive. (In philosophical language, we must denominate this intermediate faculty in all its degrees and determinations, the IMAGINATION. But in common language, and especially on the subject of poetry, we appropriate the name to a superior degree of the faculty, joined to a superior voluntary controul over it.) (BL1 124 –5) Rogers sees the long-legged fly in the refrain as an exact replication of Coleridge’s idea that in thinking and creating the mind is alternately



The long-legged fly and the water-insect

active and passive. He also considers it to have been consciously chosen by Yeats because the poet had already adapted Coleridge’s quicksilver metaphor from the later Chapter Five of the Biographia in order to describe the break-up of the mind caused by the philosophy of Locke (Con. P. 8:1, 14). He uses the dialectic to construct an ingenious interpretation of the dynamic within the poem, and sees a causal relation in the order of the stanzas: civilisation (Caesar) creates the grounds for beauty (Helen), and beauty inspires the artist (Michael Angelo); on the other hand, the artist creates beauty, and beauty itself becomes civilisation (8:1, 15–17). Mario L. D’Avanzo similarly concludes that: ‘The three historical persons dramatize Coleridge’s observation of the tension between the active and passive faculties of the creative mind.’ He notes that there is a ‘contrast between stasis and motion’ in the activity of each figure: ‘Helen’ dances a ‘shuffle – a dance on the spot; Michaelangelo lies on his back while maintaining a steady movement of the hand, and Caesar is motionless before battle’. D’Avanzo’s major difference with Rogers is more in his interpretation of Coleridge’s original image, as he sees the two components of the water-insect as being opposed forces which become reconciled – the creativity is not due to an alternation of the passive and active, but a reconciliation of the two, Coleridge’s ‘ “balance or reconcilement of opposite or discordant qualities” ’ (Expl 34:3, no. 23). D’Avanzo also stresses how the fly represents not only the water-insect’s activity and passivity, but a sense of ‘timelessness’ in the creative act, since the creature is above the stream. Whatever the differences between D’Avanzo’s and Rogers’s interpretations, both believe that Coleridge’s water-insect is the source for the refrain, and both concur that Yeats’s ‘meaning’ is an exact replication of Coleridge’s original.24 However, closer analysis shows that Yeats’s use of the figure owes little to its original meaning. Rather, it is a transumption, or metalepsis, of the figure which Yeats believed to be Coleridge’s symbol for the imagination, changed to express what he thought to be Coleridge’s theory of imagination. The source for this ‘theory’ is to be found outside the Biographia and in The Friend (1818). There is no evidence that Yeats actually understood the original significance of the water-insect; instead, it appears that he interpreted the image in accordance with a misconception, which was in turn the result of further misconceptions about Coleridge. In seeking to understand how Yeats reconciled apperception with creation we, like Yeats himself, must go ‘looking for a clue’ in Coleridge’s The Friend.





We need only isolate the last half of ‘Long-legged Fly’ to see that there is a causal relation between its agents (although not, as Rogers believes, one which illustrates the active–passive alternation of the water-insect). The whole second half of the poem (from ‘She thinks’ onward) presents an argument which was earlier dramatised in the poem ‘Michael Robartes and the Dancer’ (1919), where Robartes tells a young girl that Michael Angelo’s paintings should teach her that the body ‘Can rule by supernatural right / Yet be but sinew’ (VP 386, ll. 36–7).25 Yeats, like Blake before him, saw fit that the work of great artists should be a part of the education of young women – not so that they might have visions, but instead that they might incarnate those visions through their own earthly beauty. The imagined beauty of the artist causes the realisation of beauty in the young girl who dances a tinker shuffle; although for Michael Angelo to paint the ‘first Adam’ (meaning to create the prelapsarian, ideal man through art; as in Byzantine mosaic ‘the second Adam had become the first’ [AV B 291–2]), she, and other ‘girls at puberty’, must be shut out to give him the required peace. The mind which ‘moves upon silence’ represents both Unity of Being in Michael Angelo’s case, and, in the case of the girl, thoughtless incarnation: both are experiencing time differently from normal, one through finding the Mask offered by his Daimon or antiself; the other, like the ‘beautiful women’ (AV B 131, 137) used as exemplars in the phases closest to the full moon, by both being and transcending the Mask. Both figures are above the stream, but through different means. We may see the long-legged fly as being a transumed allusion – that is, as an attempt to allude, but after a long period of time. Coleridge originally selected the stream against which the water-insect has to propel itself precisely because it represented force: the despotism of objects upon the senses. Yeats chose the stream because of its quality of mutability: the Heraclitan image of time and consciousness which he had used elsewhere.26 For some reason Yeats associated Coleridge’s utterly different stream with Heraclitus’s, and changed the insect accordingly. The water-insect is within the force of external impressions; the long-legged fly rises, as D’Avanzo shows, above the stream of time and consciousness, even though it is perilously close to the water’s surface.27 Close analysis of the nouns and epithets used in the refrain ‘Like a long-legged fly upon the stream / His / Her mind moves upon silence’ (VP 618, ll. 29–30) betrays what at first might appear to be a selfcontradiction in Yeats’s thought. The fly’s body is moving not upon air,



Abnegation

or ‘nothing’, but instead upon ‘silence’, for it moves like the mind it is used to describe. This mixing of sensory experiences is reminiscent of Baudelaire’s belief in sensory correspondences between touch and smell, seeing and hearing (the signatures for spiritual correspondences); except for the fact that silence is, of course, no sensation at all – nor in fact is the ‘nothing’ which it substitutes. Nor indeed can the mind be deemed to ‘move’ physically or upon something like the fly. Yeats was constructing a simile which is incomprehensible, for it is exactly the incomprehensible world anterior to the senses which he was trying to conjure. He was, consciously or unconsciously, conveying the ‘mind’s self-beggotten unity’ (AV B 207) and Coleridge’s theory of imagination as something distinctly asensory. This is certainly a paradox, since all the figures taken by Yeats to illustrate the mind represented by the long-legged fly are antithetical, Caesar included. It is Caesar whom the Hunchback recalls from his past along with ‘Greek Alexander’ and ‘wild Alcibiades’ in ‘The Saint and the Hunchback’, one of the ‘Roman and Christian’ conquerors whom the saint ‘famishe[s] in his cell’ (Myth 338). Although in ‘Dove or Swan’ the Caesars arrive at a primary phase of the gyres (AV B 273), in ‘The Great Year of the Ancients’ Julius Caesar is placed opposite Christ the Sage, and dies in the month of ‘victims’ (AV B 244–5). His system of government – autocratic – is part of the old, antithetical era of the Victim (rather than that of the primary Sage28) which is now about to wane – but not sink completely, as Byzantium (560) and Renaissance Italy (1450) demonstrate. However, Yeats’s Caesar fixing his eyes upon ‘nothing’ and the mind which moves upon silence, bear more resemblance to the primary phases around Phase 1, and which are wholly uncreative (AV B 180 –1). Even though the Daimon knows all in its eternal moment, and the mind creates in its ‘self-beggotten unity’ (AV B 207), it must nevertheless do so sensorily – the Mask or Image is a sensory experience. The ‘mind’ that ‘moves upon silence’ is more like the Saint’s denial of the sensory, in which the mind contemplates itself in a totally reflexive way: the Spirit contemplating the Celestial Body as ‘pure thought’ (Ex 316) or ‘pure mind’ (AV B 189). Why should Yeats have illustrated antithetical creation with an image which clearly represents the abnegation of the senses and the denial of the Mask as well? The answer perhaps lies yet again in his peculiar understanding of Coleridge. The creative act of the mind If we return to Yeats’s introduction to Hone and Rossi’s Bishop Berkeley (1931), which he had been planning while writing his diary in 1930,





When Berkeley abandoned that first opinion he did not exalt in place of perception some abstract thought or law but some always undefined apprehension of spirits and their relations. Looking for a clue, I think of Coleridge’s contrast between Juliet’s nurse and Hamlet, remember that Shakespeare drew the nurse from observation, from passive sense-impression, but Hamlet, the Court, the whole work of art, out of himself in a pure indivisible act. (E&I 410) Just as he took the quick-silver image from the Biographia, Yeats took figures from the first of Coleridge’s essays on method in The Friend to illustrate his peculiar understanding of Berkeley’s idealism at this stage, which involved linking the activity of spirit to the activity of the mind’s creation of sense percepts and further to the activity of Unity of Being and artistic expression. He was interpreting Berkeley, partly due to the influence of Coleridge, as conflating the realms of the noetic and the sensory. This relates directly to the ‘abstractions’ of the Divine Ideas and the asensory nature of Ultimate Reality – his own Thirteenth Cone – which he had been discussing in the 1930 diary, and which, to some extent, Coleridge helped him to resolve. It troubled him not only because of its abstraction but because he was a creative artist, and his own occult experiences had been full of the rich imagery of Anima Mundi. In rejecting empiricism and realism and accepting neo-Platonism he was faced with denying the importance of sensory experience, and thus with the possibility that the concrete perception of God by the artist was less important than the self-intuition of the Saint. As was indicated in Chapter 4, Berkeley was supposed to provide a resolution to the problem of the abstraction of neo-Platonic Ultimate Reality, through making sight a ‘language’ for the spiritual. In this essay, however, in which Yeats makes extensive reference to the Commonplace Book, he deems this resolution to go even further than there. Due to their essential activity he was to equate the Divine Ideas of Plotinus’s Second Hypostasis with Berkeley’s Deity: It is plain, however, from his later writings that he thought of God as a pure indivisible act, personal because at once will and



we will see that he saw the philosopher as attempting to define Heaven and the ‘summum bonum’ as ‘physical pleasure’, before rejecting this conception of Ultimate Reality. However:

understanding, which unlike the Pure Act of Italian philosophy creates passive ‘ideas’ – sensations – thrusts them as it were outside itself; and in this act all beings – from the hierarchy of Heaven to man and woman and doubtless to all that lives – share in the measure of their worth: not the God of Protestant theology but a God that leaves room for human pride. (E&I 408) Berkeley believed that the ‘ideas’ of sensation are a language for spirits, and that the world is ultimately subsumed beneath one omniscient Deity, Who both perceives and constitutes as ideas in His mind what we see sensorily as ideas (sense-percepts) in our own.29 In this doctrine Yeats had found a cause for identifying Berkeleianism with Platonism and neo-Platonism, since it depended upon a God-head similar to Plotinus’s Second Hypostasis (in which the ‘Divine Ideas’ ‘behold and determine each other’ [Ex 305]), and therefore, partly thanks to Coleridge, he also related it to his own Spirit and Celestial Body (although not the ‘phaseless’ Thirteenth Cone).30 Yeats moreover came to associate the activity of creating ideas (sense-percepts) with the mind’s partaking of and imitating in miniature the ultimate activity of God in Berkeley’s system (Whom, of course, we see through ideas, He being the original unity from which all else derives), and he related this activity yet furtherto the activity of artistic creation. As he wrote later in the essay: ‘Only where the mind partakes of a pure activity can art or life attain swiftness, volume, unity; that contemplation lost, we picture some slow-moving event, turn the mind’s eye from everything else that we may experience to the full our own passivity’ (E&I 409). The Zen artist, about whom Yeats knew due to his reading of Arthur Waley,31 ‘gather[s] … all into the same powerful rhythm’, while the Zen monk enjoys, he believed, sensory contemplation of the Divine. This trisemous activity of the mind was incompatible with the primary/antithetical division postulated in A Vision, where the selfintuition of the Saint is diametrically opposed to the Sensuous Man (Phases 27–13), even though at the end of ‘The Completed Symbol’ he talked of an Ultimate Reality which is ‘concrete, sensuous, bodily’ (AV B 214). However, this reconciliation was extremely important to Yeats if he was to make the abstractions of the ‘Divine Ideas’ accessible to sensory perception, and above all to artistic expression, as in his poem ‘Long-legged Fly’. For this reason he went ‘looking for a clue’ in Coleridge, who now provided an even greater concretisation of the abstract than shown in the diary itself.





Coleridge had originally conceived of his treatise on Method as the Introduction to the projected Encyclopaedia Metropolitana in 1817. Because of both inefficiency and the heterodox nature of some of his views, the publishers Rest Fenner soon squeezed him out. Ironically, the Treatise (which was published separately after The Friend), ran to nine editions in the fifty years after the author’s death. In order to salvage for publication what he thought might otherwise be lost for an audience, Coleridge published a series of essays in the second part of the new 1818 edition of The Friend which related the theory of method in great detail. The order of his argument was not absolutely replicated in the subsequent Treatise, which seems to have had his ‘final word’ on the subject. Nevertheless, the later text is of little present importance since Yeats only read The Friend. Coleridge’s understanding of method is in effect an application of his theory of Reason and Understanding, and can be briefly summarised as follows: good method depends upon understanding the relations between things, and using them to synthesise and analyse experience. Method must be used to discover relations; once these relations are discovered they may be incorporated into the method itself. But of relations there are two sorts. The first sort is a law: it is innate, present to the a priori reason of the mind (Fr 324 –5). Due to the pre-established harmony between mind and matter we may discover the same relations in astronomy, for example, as we find in innate mathematical and geometrical ideas (Fr 328). To use laws in this way is to employ synthetic method (Fr 326).32 The second, and inferior type of relation, is theory, which constitutes the aggregate of experience and observation from the a posteriori Understanding. To establish the inferiority of this sort of relation compared to the former, Coleridge stated that perfect method could be grounded on the first type alone, and added that instances of the second were: ‘at best but approximations to the first, or tentative exercises in the hope of discovering it’ (Fr 329). As an example he showed how the arbitrary gendering of plants in botany had resulted in ‘Little more than an enormous nomenclature’ (Fr 331). Coleridge described and exemplified both types in Chapters Five and Six respectively of Part Two of The Friend, after introducing the art of method itself in Chapter Four. In the fourth essay he also made use of the exemplars later taken by Yeats. Coleridge began by talking quite generally about how the man of good method is able to subordinate each part of what he relates to its proper place, and appears to have



Method

complete mastery over time. He illustrated poor method with the example of Mistress Quickly in Henry IV, Part 1 (Act II, Sc. 1, ll. 74 –86), from a speech where she reminds Falstaff that he promised to marry her, and proves the fact by recalling and listing every possible associated memory of what happened at the time. As Coleridge explained: ‘the absence of method, which characterizes the uneducated, is occasioned by an habitual submission of the Understanding to mere events and images as such, and independent of any power in the mind to classify or appropriate them’ (Fr 318). People with poor method have no knowledge of the relations between things, nor do they possess the ability to discover them: ‘To enumerate and analyze these relations … is to teach the science of method’ (Fr 318). In order to illustrate this type of ‘cultivated’ and ‘well-disciplined’ Understanding, Coleridge drew examples from Act V of Hamlet, where the protagonist first tells Horatio of how he discovered the plot to have him executed in England, and how he conspired to have Rosencrantz and Guildenstern killed in his place (Hamlet, V, ii, ll. 4 –26). From this illustration Coleridge first deduced that Hamlet gave equal breath to all events related, to the extent that the speech seemed an organic whole, and secondly that even the digressions ‘consist of reflections, truths, and principles of general and permanent interest, either directly expressed or disguised in playful satire’ (Fr 319). The ability to relate one’s recollections in a ‘methodised’ way, giving each subordinate part the correct amount of space, and to analyse and enumerate towards general reflections, is what distinguishes both a superior Understanding and good method. After the second quotation, which Coleridge admitted to contain too much reflection and generalisation, he declared: ‘that method, therefore, must result from the due mean or balance between our passive impressions and the mind’s own reaction on the same’ (Fr 320). Although Coleridge supposedly limited himself to the Understanding and its relations alone in this introductory essay, this clearly included the vis rationalis (rationalised understanding [Fr 105]), and he was careful to mention the innate power of the mind as well which, as he went on to prove in the next essay, contains the superior relations he designated ‘laws’. This was enough to convince Yeats that the ‘pure indivisible act’ of the mind (E&I 410) was involved in Coleridge’s theory of imagination, especially since this description of method, as an alternation between the passive and the active, bears such a resemblance to the description of imagination attendant upon the water-insect.




If we return to how Yeats used the examples of Hamlet and Juliet’s nurse to illustrate the ‘pure indivisible act’ of creation, we can see that Yeats made several changes from his source. The most obvious of these is that he attributed the method to Shakespeare as creator rather than to the characters themselves, and that he chose an example mentioned in passing by Coleridge ( Juliet’s nurse), but not illustrated. Yeats’s need to associate artistic creation with ‘activity’ of an altogether more philosophical kind clearly affected this misconception.33 Another change is that the two have now become examples of opposing types of philosophy. Shakespeare’s own creation of Hamlet has come to represent the activity of the mind which contains ideas anterior to experience; it is capable of the ‘timeless act of self-creation’, like the mind that ‘moves upon silence’ (VP 618, l. 30). For Yeats, of course, this pure activity also included the activity of creating sensory percepts – the idealist position – and so the mind was ‘active’ in this other sense as well. The idealist and Platonic, active mind, which strives to achieve Unity of Being, is exemplified by Shakespeare’s creation of Hamlet, and the empirical, passive and acquired mind, present to (certain) primary phases, by his creation of the nurse.34 Shakespeare’s conception of Hamlet involved ‘one indissoluble act’, and this ‘act’ comprised of Yeats’s own form of trisemous activity.35 In linking the ‘activity’ of art to the pure ‘activity’ of the spirit, Yeats was also trying to give sensibility to Ultimate Reality, to make it more ‘concrete’. The Zen monk has a sensory experience (‘an odour of unknown flowers’) at the climax of his thought – but this is only as an ‘inducement’ to passivity; possibly the grounds for discovering the ‘Pure Act’. While trying to find a source for an Ultimate Reality which both precedes sensation, and yet may be known sensorily, Yeats went ‘looking for a clue’ (E&I 410) in the work of a favourite philosopher, and found the answer he required. Coleridge’s theory of imagination therefore involves, for Yeats, a contemplation of the divine within us, in which the spirit becomes a ‘pure indivisible act’ like that of its maker, and yet results in a sensuous, artistic creation. Given Yeats’s distinction between Spirit and Celestial Body, Husk and Passionate Body (which latter are reflections of the Daimon), it is highly paradoxical, but necessary. The denial of the senses represented by the refrain to ‘Long-legged Fly’ and the poem’s Caesar, the antithetical Victim, fixing his eyes upon ‘nothing’, derives from this same misreading of Coleridge. Mistaking Coleridge’s description of Hamlet’s method in The Friend for a description of Shakespeare’s own creation from inner contemplation, or




apperception, caused Yeats, ironically, to transume the image of the water-insect, for ‘the mind’s self-experience in the act of thinking’ (BL1 125), into an image of inner-contemplation more akin to the Spirit’s union with the Celestial Body, than the Will’s seeking the Mask, since the insect is placed above the stream, and moves not within sensory impressions but upon an asensory silence. The description of Hamlet constitutes the crucial middle terms in the leap between the two figures, and accounts for why a transumed allusion to Coleridge’s theory of imagination, which Yeats was no doubt quite consciously trying to take from Coleridge to illustrate Unity of Being, should describe what are usually, in his work, sensory contemplations of the eternal as being completely asensory. However, as with his obscured understanding of the poem ‘What is Life?’ (E&I 463), it would appear that the misconception was more due to wilfulness than genuine error, for it completes the search for concrete articulations of Ultimate Reality which Yeats had sought for in Berkeley and Coleridge when writing the 1930 diary. Thus we see how Coleridge contributed more to Yeats’s understanding of philosophy than simply the distinction between reason and understanding, and the particularisation of the Plotinian ‘nous’ in the individual mind. As early as 1931 we see that Coleridge’s theory of Reason and Understanding had affected Yeats’s attempt to conflate the noetic and the sensory through his reading of the essays on method, although this reading was only to bear its greatest fruits in a poem written some years later. Coleridge helped Yeats to link the activity of esse est percipi to the mind as a pure act, and further to the sensory activity of artistic creation. As in Zen Buddhism, saint and artist partake of the same act – there is now no distinction between the path of the serpent and the straight path of the saint (Myth 361). This culminated in ‘Long-legged Fly’, but, as in various of his essays in the 1930s, represents a conflation of the realms in A Vision which the polarities of the work would not itself allow. Yeats was again using Coleridge as Romantic sage, to make logic serve passion, and to link the philosopher with the artist in Daimonic renewal, although this time in a way which joins the philosophy to the concrete expression of metaphor. In summation, we can see that Coleridge was a continual source for images of mental and spiritual unity in Yeats’s work: from the instrument of many strings, to various portrayals of the masculine and feminine, to a major trope for the imagination. As always, he absorbed Coleridge’s figures into his own system, making his work serve the impulsion of the Daimon and the gyres.




In a letter to his daughter of 4 January 1939, some twenty-five days before his own death, Yeats complained of the probable reaction of Dublin critics to the productions of his colleague Frank O’Connor: All sound criticism everywhere should go on the principle that until his qualities are known you must not attack a man’s faults. Coleridge lays the principle down in so many words, but the Dublin critics are cruel because ignorant men. It is fitting that Yeats, himself looking back at a long life of literary production, should condone Coleridge’s famous attack on reviewers in Chapter Two of the Biographia Literaria, but what otherwise interests us here is that not only was he linking judgement of writing with appraisal of personality, but he was still identifying with Coleridge’s own situation. Right up until his own death he was capable of sympathising with the observations of the great man, not only intellectually, but in terms of life-experience. It is because of his identification with Coleridge in the thirties that Yeats’s reading of him, as personality, as philosophical interpreter and as source for metaphors of mind, takes on the consistency shown in the work above. A fully rounded image of him, based upon past associations and more recent research, emerged in a new, largely Anglo-Irish phantasmagoria in 1930, and the power of this image, including as it did interpretations of his poetry and ideas, provided a consistent lens for concretising the ‘abstract’ and reading a doctrine of God’s physical immanence into both his poetry and prose. These misconceptions further coloured Yeats’s search for metaphors of mind in Coleridge, as did the belief that the great man believed in the reality of mysticism as 175



Conclusion

much as he himself did. I hope, therefore, to have shown this throughout the three sections of this work, and to have demonstrated that while Coleridge’s role in Yeats’s development may not be as pervasive as Shelley’s or Blake’s, it is certainly more positive than that of Wordsworth, and absolutely seminal as regards his rewriting of A Vision. Roy Foster reports that Yeats was favourably compared to Coleridge by Todhunter in a letter urging Edward Dowden to subscribe to The Wanderings of Oisin (1889), his first major publication,1 although such a comparison would have meant as little to the Yeats of the 1880s as it would have been a compliment to him as an old man. The older Coleridge, therefore, sage, philosopher and mystic, though still as fired with the power of poetic quest for concrete reality as in early youth, is the Coleridge to whom Yeats turned at Rapallo, ill and bruised by a ‘failed’ political career, yet simultaneously energised by new reading and a growing confidence that he had finally ‘solved’ the mystery of the automatic script, and its description of the Principles. Since he was also reading detective novels at the time, it is hardly surprising that he should have treated this exercise somewhat like the solution of a puzzle and go ‘looking for a clue’ (E&I 410) in The Friend, although this is a subject for a separate study. One turns from our own investigation asking what Sage or Victim shall be the illumination to the next double millennium. Sadly, Yeats’s own system does not permit such a synthesis of the primary and the antithetical as to deliver a Coleridge or a Berkeley at this interchange of the tinctures. The recent publication of Richard Holmes’s second part of Coleridge’s biography, as well as Foster’s ongoing reappraisal of Yeats’s life, testifies to the enduring, if not heightened, interest in their personalities, but we shall almost certainly be saddled with some Gladstone, pushing the mind ever further from Berkeley’s roasting-spit, into the quick-silver at the back of a mirror.




The following is a description and analysis of the marginalia and annotations made in Yeats’s collection of books either by or about Coleridge. It is compiled from information provided both by Edward O’Shea’s catalogue and further xeroxes of copies kindly given by Roger Nyle Parisious of Hayesville, Ohio. As such, it is not meant to be exhaustive. Yeats possessed seven books by Coleridge, and four either about him or inspired by him. O’Shea’s catalogue lists them as follows: 0400. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. BIOGRAPHIA EPISTOLARIS, being the biographical supplement of Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria, with additional letters etc. by A. Turnbull. 2 vols. London: G. Bell, 1911. 0401. ——. BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA … and two lay sermons ‘The Statesman’s Manual’ and ‘Blessed are ye that sow beside all waters.’ New ed. London: George Bell, 1876. v, 440 pp. Inside frt. cover, on paper label: From Coventry Patmore’s Library On 1st Contents p. : man & state – 360/‘notion of time’ & space 61 [WBY’s]. Pp. 61, 353, 354, 360, marginal strokes. At pp. 56–7, a piece of paper inserted with: plating behind a looking-glass [WBY’s; refers to passage on p. 57, ‘It is the mere quick-silver plating behind a looking-glass …’]. 0402. ——. THE FRIEND: a series of essays. London: George Bell, 1875. [6], 389 pp. On label inside frt. cover: From Coventry Patmore’s Library. 402A. Another edition. Bohn’s Standard Library. London: George Bell, 1906. [6], 415 pp. P. 102, marginal strokes and at top of p.: reason spirit/understanding – G.M. P. 104, a note referring to last two pars.: reasoning:spirit/ ideas:Celestial Body P. 118, margin, mid-page: understanding pure reason P. 138, mid-page: principle Section I, marginal stroking passim. *403.

——. POEMS. Selected and arranged with an intro. and notes by Arthur Symons. London: Methuen, 1905. 223 pp.

0404. ——. THE POETICAL WORKS OF SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. Edited by James Dykes Campbell. London: Macmillan, 1925. xcciv, 667 pp. Sig.: GY

177



Appendix: Yeats’s Coleridge Collection

178 Appendix P. 149, page corner turned back for ‘Ode to Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire’

0406. ——. TABLE TALK, AND THE RIME OF THE ANCIENT MARINER, CHRISTABEL ETC. London: George Routledge, [1884]. xxvii, 298 pp. (YL pp. 60–1). 0371. Charpentier, John. COLERIDGE, THE SUBLIME SOMNAMBULIST. Translated by M. V. Nugent. London: Constable, 1929. x, 332 pp. Flyleaf: list of topics, pencil, with p. refs: Wittstengein [not WBY’s; cancelled: ink] Coleridge meets a sage at Reading/ page 59 Read Plato, Plotinus, Berkeley/ page 84 Probably met Wordsworth in 1795/ page 118 Has influence on Wordsworth/ page 121/ 274 [?] (Words [?] 27) When writing ‘Ancient Mariner,’ ‘Cristabel’ etc. was reading Berkeley/ page 132 Ancient Mariner, first part of Cristabel & Kubla Khan was written [the following cancelled] between spring of 1797 and [?] of 1798. Marginal strokes on pp. 116, 118, 119, 120, 121, 131, 132, 133, 134, 135, 195, 205. P. 56, line 9: Boethius P. 59, line 12: ‘illuminate’ P. 84, at second par.: Plato, Plotinus, Berkeley P. 110, lines 3–5: Thomas Taylor P. 172, at ‘where Schiller resides’: so far knew nothing of German philosophy P. 172, at ‘in his notebooks’: Boehme P. 206, lines 1–5: light as sensation A slip of paper inserted at P. 226 and annotations stop there (YL p. 56). 0775. Green, Joseph Henry. SPIRITUAL PHILOSOPHY: FOUNDED ON THE TEACHING OF THE LATE SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. Edited with a memoir by John Simon. 2 vols. London and Cambridge: Macmillan, 1865. Bps: WBY Vol. 1, flyleaf, verso: M. B. Wilkin/ from her Aunt Mrs. J. H. Green. [above this in pencil:] & following/ Page 14–21–30. Vol. 1, marginal strokes, pp. 4, 5, 20, 21, 37, 51. Vol. 1, p. 25, corner turned back. Vol. 1, p. 295 (last of book): 20/4/37/51 Vol. 1, back flyleaf, pencil: ‘Space & Time:Objectivity & Subjectivity – Page 20’/ ‘Abstraction – page 21. Worth quoting in / “A Vision”’ (YL pp. 108–9) 1386. Morris, H[erbert] N[ewall]. FLAXMAN, BLAKE, COLERIDGE and other men of genius influenced by Swedenborg. Together with Flaxman’s allegory of the ‘Knight of the Blazing Cross.’ London: New-Church Press, 1915. viii, 166 pp.



0405. ——. SELECT POETRY AND PROSE. Edited by Stephen Potter. London: Nonesuch Press, 1933. xxx, 821 pp. Sig.: WBY Inside back cover, WBY’s signature, upside down.

Appendix

179

Back flyleaf: at end of Sibly’s Astrology is a letter from Arthur Bedford to the Bishop of Gloucester written in 1705 describing one who saw spirits. / P. 1121, 1124

1398. Muirhead, John H[enry]. COLERIDGE AS PHILOSOPHER. London: George Allen and Unwin, 1930. 287 pp. Marginal strokes, underscoring, pp. 54n, 58, 67, 68. P. 67, at ‘the substantiating power’: exact description of imagination passage on fly leaf of my copy of my edition of Blake’s ‘Poems’ [See 209]. Back flyleaf: realism and the ‘manifold’ 92 [on P. 92 first two lines are stroked; there follows a discussion of the manifold] (YL, p. 184). O’Shea cannot be taken as having exhausted the collecting of Yeats’s marginal notes, underscorings, etc., and is in some cases mistaken. My own observation of xeroxes of Yeats’s copy of the Biographia (YL 402) and 1875 edition of The Friend (YL 403), both of which originally belonged to Coventry Patmore, has revealed certain markings ignored by O’Shea, perhaps because he doubted their authenticity or importance. Here is a full list of them: 401.

Biographia Literaria Table of Contents: man & state 360/ ‘notion of time’ & space 61 P. 11 – small ticks lines 2, 9, 11, 21 P. 15 – small tick line 5 P. 21 – top page corner turned in. Bottom 4 lines, marginal strokes and: Swift’s “few” not less “the Landed Interest” written in Yeats’s own hand P. 43 – small ticks lines 19 and 22 P. 50 – small marginal stroke along ll. 20–2 P. 52 – ‘‘ “ “ll. 11–3 “ “ “ ll. 42–3 P. 53 – top page corner turned in small marginal stroke ll. 27–30 P. 61 – small marginal stroke ll. 18–21 P. 86 – “ “ “ ll. 13–5 P. 106 – top page corner turned in P. 112 – marginal strokes ll. 33-37 P. 294 – “ “ “ “ “ P. 321 – “ “ “ “ “ P. 347 – marginal strokes P. 348 – underscoring ll. 2, 3 & 4 P. 349 – top page corner turned in P. 350 – “ “ “ “ “.

402.

The Friend (1875). P. 225 – bottom page corner turned in P. 281 – “ “ “ “ “ P. 299 – “ “ “ “ “



Yeats’s note would seem to be a ref. to 1912 though the page nos. do not correspond to that ed. (YL, p. 182).

The markings to the Biographia which O’Shea does not mention cover interesting places in relation to Yeats’s own writing. On page 21 the top corner is turned over where Coleridge is lampooning critics for being ‘men of undoubted talent, but not men of genius’ and thus ‘irritable by their desire to appear men of genius’. The bottom reference to ‘Swift’s “few” not less the “Landed-Interest” ’ seems to be a mistaken understanding of Coleridge’s claim that the man of genius deserves the same respect as the man of property, and that he is less excited by his personal interests than any other. It points to Yeats’s reading of the Biographia in conjunction with The Friend in 1930 (see Chapter 3, p. 71). The marginal line on page 50 parses vertically Coleridge’s description of Aristotle’s account of association, that ‘Ideas by having been together acquire a power of recalling each other; or every partial representation of which it had been a part.’ The marginal lines on page 52 parse vertically both the comment Coleridge makes in refuting Hartley that metaphysical systems tend to be popular when they ‘attribute to causes a susceptibilty of being seen’, and then lower, that ‘if it be replied, that we must take in the circumstance of life, what then becomes of the mechanical philosophy?’ This last phrase was echoed along with the quick-silver in 1922, in The Trembling of the Veil (Au 358). After this comes the pot of broth story, where the page corner is turned down, which Yeats was marking because he would either later turn, or more probably already had turned, it into a play – The Pot of Broth (1904). The marginal note on page 61 marks the comment that time as consciousness should not be considered together with ‘our notion of time; for this is always blended with the idea of space, which as the contrary of time, is therefore its measure’, and was also mentioned in Yeats’s note on the frontispiece. This would appear significant in relation to Yeats’s understanding of Coleridge as Kantian (LTSM 131). On page 86 the marginal parsing concerns Coleridge’s recollection in Chapter Ten of how, when he gave up The Watchman to concentrate on poetry at Nether Stowey, he abhorred revolutionary principles in the England of the 1790s since ‘it was part of my political creed that whoever ceased to act as an individual, by making himself a member of any society not sanctioned by his government, forfeited the rights of a citizen’. Although Coleridge portrays his younger self as being less radical than he in fact was, the comment throws light on the lines Yeats quoted from ‘Fears in Solitude’ (Ex 298), although failed to interpret accordingly. Page 106 is turned over at the passage at the end of Chapter Ten describing both the importance of his work as well as the faults in his prose-style – something which may have coincided with Yeats’s own quibble that his style lacks the passion of Swift and Burke (Ex 314). Page 112 contains vertical parsing over the lines where Coleridge discusses how, in a literary career, it is far better to have a profession than be a ‘mere literary man’, and that it is best for him to be out of the house during the day: intimating, ironically, that women ultimately get in the way of literary work. On page 294 the top page corner is turned in at the conclusion of the Biographia where Coleridge is considering the immanence of God in the natural world. The final annotations and marginalia of Yeats’s edition of the Biographia are to the Lay Sermons ‘The Statesman’s Manual’ and ‘Blessed are Ye Who Sow beside all Waters’. Of the former, in which the Bible is demonstrated to be



180 Appendix

181

revealed Reason, there is only one marking, when the top corner is turned over at page 321 where Coleridge declares, in relation to whether virtue or wealth is the ‘good’, that ‘Berkeley indeed asserts, and is supported in his assertion by the great statesmen, Lord Bacon and Sir Walter Raleigh, that without an habitual interest in these subjects a man may be a dexterous intriguer, but never can be a statesman’. There is extensive marginalia to the less well-known ‘Blessed are Ye that Sow beside all Waters’, the most important of which is the parsing of terms in the following passage (pp. 347–8), where Coleridge was enunciating his Schellingian belief that the principles of the finite self are demonstrably the same as those of the absolute self which are symbolised through nature: True natural philosophy is comprised in the study of the science and [new page] language of symbols. The power delegated to nature is all in every part: and by a symbol I mean, not a metaphor or allegory or any other figure of speech or form of fancy, but an actual and essential part of that, the whole of which it represents. The words ‘by a symbol I mean’ and ‘an actual and essential part of that, the whole of which it represents’ are underlined in ink, and may point to Yeats having read this edition of Biographia by 1896, since in the ‘William Blake’s Illustrations to the Divine Comedy’ Yeats related symbol and allegory to Imagination and Fancy in a way which echoes Coleridge’s distinction (Savoy, III, 41 [see Chapter 1, p. 15]). This is unlikely, however, since Yeats wrote his essay on Blake for the Savoy from June to August of 1896, while Coventry Patmore did not die until 26 November of that year. Since the bookseller pasted ‘From Coventry Patmore’s Library’ at the front, it is likely that, whether it were the poet’s or not, he would probably have had to be dead before such a ploy could be allowed to work. Otherwise, from Yeats’s reference to how Coleridge felt his head to be with Spinoza and heart with St Paul as a young man, in a letter to John Quinn in 1909 (12 January), we can safely assume he had read the Biographia by that point. His marginalia to the chapters refuting Hartley and associative tradition point to his having reread the Biographia between 1919 and 1922 (the first draft Autobiography and The Trembling of the Veil), and again in 1930, given his marginalia concerning Swift and Berkeley. In Yeats’s earlier edition of The Friend there are upturned pages in the ‘Second Landing Place’, at the point where Coleridge discusses the unfortunate story of the orphaned Maria Eleonora Schöning, describing her peaceful appearance (p. 225). Later in the first essay of section II Yeats shows an interest in Coleridge’s division of the mental qualities valued in Germany, France and England (p. 281). The page is also turned up at the discussion of method in Mistress Quickly (p. 299), which Yeats used in ‘Bishop Berkeley’ (E&I 410). We can safely assume that he did not read this work until 1928 (LTSM 131). It is extremely difficult to determine when Yeats obtained any of these books. Publication date is no guide at all since Yeats was rich enough to buy books regularly only in old age. It is certainly probable that Symons’s edition of the poems was given to him hot off the press by the editor himself as a present.



Appendix

Suffice to say that, with perhaps the exception of the 1884 edition of Table Talk, Yeats probably possessed no book outside the family library by or on Coleridge until the 1890s, and that the bulk of them – Muirhead’s book, Charpentier’s, the 1906 edition of The Friend, Campbell’s edition of the poems, and even Green’s Spiritual Philosophy – he did not buy until around 1930, when his interest in Coleridge increased greatly. Yeats’s access to the family library, the British Library and even Lionel Johnson’s, would have assured that, had he not even attained any of these books until 1930, he would still not have been starved of access to Coleridge’s work. While I have already written about the effect of Charpentier and Muirhead on Yeats’s understanding of Coleridge, a few words should be said about Yeats’s use of Morris and J. H. Green. Morris’s book – possibly a gift from a Swedenborgian – was a collection of essays originally published individually in the New Church’s young persons’ magazine. It seems to have had no effect upon Yeats except perhaps to cement the belief that Coleridge was a Swedenborgian. Green’s work was potentially more interesting, and sheds light on yet another area of idealist philosophy to which Yeats expected Coleridge to contribute – the relationship between the experiences of space and time. As other notes in Yeats’s copies of Coleridge show, he equated Kant’s a priori forms of sensuous intuition, which he found in Italian idealism and used to construct the single gyre of time and space in A Vision ([AV B 70–1] 1937), with Coleridge’s own philosophy of Reason and Understanding, although he never pursued the connection in his published works or correspondence. The passage from Green which Yeats never got round to quoting in A Vision was perhaps going to be used to illustrate the ‘abstract knowledge’ of Creative Mind: 17. But the process of Generalization implies a correspondent process of Abstraction: ‘Abstraction designates the process by which in contemplating any object our thoughts are directed to some one part or property exclusively, withdrawing our attention from the rest. Generalization indicates the process by which the mind occupies itself with like parts or properties in dissimilar objects, and in consequence of the likeness includes them in one genus or kind.’ By noticing the Different in the Like, and the Like in the Different, these elementary factors of thought, Abstraction and Generalization, are the indispensable aids to the naming, sorting and classing of all materials of which sensible and conscious experience are composed. The propensity to look for resemblances amid differences in the multitudinous objects and agencies by which we are influenced may be regarded as one of the earliest and most universal characteristics of the human mind. (Green, I, 21–2) It is a shame that Yeats did not finally quote this in A Vision, as it would have provided a very clear description of the Faculty the Creative Mind and its relation to Spirit and Celestial Body.



182 Appendix

Appendix

183


All in all, Yeats’s marginalia to his editions of The Friend, The Biographia, Muirhead’s book and Charpentier’s Coleridge the Sublime Somnambulist would appear to be extensive and highly relevant to his published statements about Coleridge. However, there is still more work to be done, and my own and O’Shea’s observations cannot be taken to be the final word on this subject.


Notes to the Introduction 01 Anca Vlasopolos, The Symbolic Method of Coleridge, Baudelaire and Yeats. 02 Robert Snukal, High Talk: The Philosophical Poetry of W. B. Yeats, pp. 185–213. 03 He refers to a passage from it in an unpublished letter to John Quinn of that year (12 January). 04 According to Isobel Armstrong, Coleridge’s critical technique had very little influence on the reviewers of the mid-nineteenth century – Victorian Scrutinies: Reviews of Poetry 1830–1870, p. 14 – although the Biographia and lectures on Shakespeare and Milton did have their effect on other writers. Keats, for example, in his letter to his brothers of 28 December 1817, complained of Coleridge’s want of ‘negative capability’ (Keats’s Letters, I, 77), echoing famously Coleridge’s phrase ‘negative faith’ from the Biographia (BL2 134). 05 Walter Jackson Bate, Coleridge, p. 211. 06 In his introduction to Anima Poetae, Ernest Hartley Coleridge summed up the critical reaction to Coleridge’s prose during the nineteenth century: ‘Specimens of the Table Talk of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, which the poet’s nephew and son-in-law, Henry Nelson Coleridge, published in 1835, was a popular work from the first, and has won the approval of the two generations of readers. Unlike the Biographia, or the original and revised versions of The Friend, which never had their day at all, or the Aids to Reflection, which passed through many editions, but now seems to have delivered its message, the Table Talk is still well known and widely read, and that not only by students of literature’ (AP vii). 07 Walter Pater, Appreciations, p. 66. 08 Wolfgang Iser, Walter Pater: the Aesthetic Moment, p. 15. 09 Walter Pater, The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry, p. 252. 10 Muirhead writes of Greene’s ‘Spiritual Philosophy’ ‘it did not see the light till 1865, by which time fresh impulses were coming from Germany, that seemed to put the results of the earlier movement out of date.’ See J. H. Muirhead, Coleridge as Philosopher, p. 256 (under ‘Other Primary Sources’ in the Bibliography). 11 Thomas Carlyle, The Life of John Sterling, pp. 69–80. 12 In comparing Coleridge at Highgate, otherwise favourably, with his French contemporary Joubert, Arnold lamented ‘How many reserves must be made in praising either his poetry, or his criticism, or his philosophy! How little either of his poetry, or of his ciriticism, or of his philosophy can we expect permanently to stand!’ See Matthew Arnold, Essays in Criticism, p. 319. 13 ‘Unsigned review of the Letters entitled “Samuel Taylor Coleridge” ’, in Atlanctic Monthly, September 1895, pp. 397–413. Coleridge: the Critical Heritage, vol. 2: 1834–1900, ed. J. R. de J. Jackson, pp. 199 and 211. As early 184



Notes

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16

17

18 19

20 21 22

as 1869, Swinburne had written that ‘In reading [“Kubla Khan”] we seem rapt into that paradise revealed to Swedenborg, where music and colour and perfume were one, where you could hear the hues and see the harmonies of heaven’. See Coleridge, Christabel and the Lyrical and Imaginative Poems of S. T. Coleridge, ed. Algernon Charles Swinburne, p. xii. Coleridge, Poems of Coleridge, ed. Arthur Symons, p. xxxvii. I. A. Richards, Practical Criticism: a Study of Literary Judgement, 1929. Richards only refers openly to Chapter 14 of the Biographia in a few places (p. 199 and p. 277), but his technique of analysing these poems in relation to their success or failure bears much resemblance to Coleridge’s description of imagination and of poetry as a unifying organic phenomenon in the second part of the Biographia. He went on to analyse Coleridge’s Imagination in a subsequent book (Coleridge on Imagination, 1934). On the Constitution of Church and State had in fact been an important influence on mid-nineteenth-century reformers such as Thomas Arnold and Gladstone, but not a popular success. See Coleridge, On the Constitution of Church and State, ed. John Colmer, pp. lxii–lxvii. ‘To-day we can afford to separate between his enunciation of principles and his success in carrying them out in detailed application, and the contention of this Study is that we do wrong if we allow his failure to influence immediately the current of philosophical thought, and the limitations, which were the cause of it, to conceal from us the place he occupies in his own right in the development of idealistic philosophy in England and America’ (Muirhead, p. 261). A. Norman Jeffares, ‘Yeat’s Mask’, The Circus Animals: Essays on W. B. Yeats, pp. 3–14. Coleridge lambasts Priestley’s own theory that matter is spirit in the Biographia under the term hylozoism (BL1 132), although it has little in common with the consummation of the spiritual with the physical desired by Yeats. John Hollander, The Figure of Echo. Harold Bloom, The Map of Misreading. Chapters Four, Five and Seven deal with metalepsis. The single exception is ‘A Prayer for My Daughter’, which is surely an example of the Bloomian repression and re-expression of ‘Frost at Midnight’. For a wholly un-Bloomian, but nevertheless thorough, comparison of these two poems see Douglas Archibald, Yeats, pp. 1–12.

Chapter 1 Phantasmagoria: the Personality of Coleridge in the Earlier Prose of Yeats 01 The first phantasmagoria, akin to the modern slide projector, was shown to William Beckford by De Loutherby in 1802. See Warwick Gould, “Lionel Johnson Comes First to Minds: Sources for Owen Aherne”, Yeats and the Occult, pp. 255–84 at p. 260n. J. Sheridan Le Fanu used the image in a short story entitled ‘An Account of Some Strange Disturbances in Aungier Street’, in which the student sees the ghost of the hanging Judge Horrocks ‘mysteriously glued to the window panes’ and called it a ‘strange phantasmagoria’.



Notes 185

2

3

4

5

6

7 8

9

See J. Sheridan Le Fanu, Madam Crowl’s Ghost and Other Tales of Mystery, pp. 106–7. Much later in the nineteenth century Henry James described the perspective of young Maisie Farrange after her parents’ divorce as follows: ‘phantasmagoric – strange shadows dancing on a sheet’. See Henry James, What Maisie Knew, p. 18. In this light, Donald Torchiana’s statement concerning Yeats’s essay on the Anglo-Irish hero John Shawe-Taylor is also illuminating: ‘Yeats found his handsomeness to be the mirror of his character, so that his whole person seemed his mind.’ See Donald Torchiana, W. B. Yeats and Georgian Ireland, p. 47. James Olney sees in Yeats’s imperfect recollection of events covert reference to the distinction between Plotinus’s two types of memory, those of the higher and lower souls. The lower soul will recall the real events of its life with emotion, the higher soul forget them in order to retain the ideal and archetypal – James Olney, ‘Some Versions of Memory/Some Versions of Bios: The Ontology of Autobiography’, Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical, pp. 236–67 at p. 259. John Harwood shows how many of the poems of The Wind Among the Reeds (1899) dramatise the real-life problems of Yeats when torn between Olivia Shakespear and Maud Gonne. See Harwood, Olivia Shakespear and W. B. Yeats, pp. 59–82. Attempts to trace the ‘man of ten centuries’ to any of Coleridge’s writings have, alas, proved unfruitful; however, it may be an imperfect recollection of the phrase ‘myriad-minded Shakespeare’ in the Biographia Literaria (BL2 19) and of Coleridge’s earlier lament on the lack of originality in philosophy: ‘For many, very many centuries, it has been difficult to advance a new truth, or even new error, in the philosophy of the intellect or morals’ (BL1 91). Yeats echoed the comment once again in ‘Discoveries’ (1907) when describing how he saved himself, artistically, by becoming less self-conscious: ‘The more I tried to make my art deliberately beautiful, the more did I follow the opposite of myself, for deliberate beauty is like a woman always desiring man’s desire’ (E&I 271). See Chapter 6, p. 159 for a fuller discussion. Yeats, ‘William Blake and his illustrations to the Divine Comedy’, The Savoy (July 1896), III, 57. Underlining of language concerning symbol, allegory and fancy, to which Yeats also referred in this essay (Savoy, III 41), is to be found at the back of Yeats’s edition of the Biographia, although is probably not his own. See Appendix, p. 181. Yeats also used Crabb Robinson’s diary when working on Blake, and may well have been struck by a comment made by Coleridge at Charles Lamb’s residence. Coleridge ‘made an elaborate distinction between fancy and imagination. The excess of fancy is delirium, of imagination mania. Fancy is the arbitrary bringing together of things that lie remote, and forming them into unity.’ See Henry Crabb Robinson, Diary, Reminiscences and Correspondence, I, 160. In a much later entry, however, Robinson describes Blake’s views on imagination as vision: ‘Imagination is the divine vision, not of the world, nor of man, nor from man as he is a natural man, but only as he is a spiritual man. Imagination has nothing to do with memory’ (II, 49). Yeats was in possession of The Poems of Arthur Henry Hallam, Together with his Essay on the Lyrical Poems of Alfred Tennyson, 1893 (YL 830). Hallam had



186 Notes

10 11

12 13

14

15

16

17 18

19

originally published his essay on Tennyson in the Englishman’s Magazine (August 1831). Pater, Renaissance, p. 252. In his essay ‘Remarks on Professor Rossetti’s Disquisizioni sullo Spirito Antipapale’, Hallam attributed Coleridge with being the most recent revivalist of ‘those systems of semi-platonic philosophy which represented Reason as impersonal, and existing as a divine universal medium in and around our minds’. See Arthur Hallam, Remains in Verse and Prose, p. 170n. He also quoted from Coleridge’s Aids to Reflection over Pythagoras’s antipathy to Pantheism (p. 218n) and was a regular visitor at Coleridge’s soirées. Wordsworth, Poetical Works, II, 366. In his article ‘Yeats, Wordsworth and the Communal Sense: the Case of “If I were Four-and-Twenty” ’ , Michael Baron claims that Wordsworth and Coleridge’s emulation of Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry in order to find simplicity was considered by Yeats to underline the perception that speech is prior to writing, pre-lapsarian and uncorrupted (YA5, 62–82 at 72). John Beer, amongst others, sees the influence of the poem ‘The Wandering Jew’ (Percy, Reliques, II, 291–6) on ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’, and cites manuscript sources to prove that the figure of the Wandering Jew (derived from Matthew Lewis’s The Monk as well) was on Coleridge’s mind at the time of composition. See John Beer, Coleridge the Visionary, p. 145 and note. In an earlier essay on Synge, his Preface to the first edition of The Well of the Saints (27 January 1905), Yeats wrote of how ‘unreflecting’ and ‘clear-seeing’ were Synge’s eyes, on account of his endeavour to record with unbiased precision whatever he had seen: ‘all these people pass by as before an open window, murmuring strange, exciting words’ (E&I 300). Yeats wrote of imaginative writers: ‘in Synge’s plays also, fantasy gives the form and not the thought, for the core is always, as in all great art, an overpowering vision of certain virtues, and our capacity for sharing in that vision is the measure of our delight’ (E&I 339). Henry More, The Immortality of the Soul, so farre forth as it is Demonstrable from the Knowledge of Nature and the Light of Reason, Bk II, Ch. 15, pp. 267–77. Colin McDowell, ‘ “The Completed Symbol”: Daimonic Existence and the Great Wheel in A Vision’, YA6, 193–208: ‘In other words the “certain Daimons” which our own Daimon wants to find appear as the Passionate Body through the agency of this desire: the Daimon becomes an incarnate Daimon, meaning that the human body or Husk is created, in order for it to be able to see these other Daimons, who also manifest themselves through their own Husks, and for the same reason. These other Daimons are, from the point of view of one’s own Daimon, the impermanent Daimons, whether one calls an impermanent Daimon by the name of father, mother or beloved’ (197–8). In an entry for Table Talk, 1 May 1823, H. N. Coleridge reports his uncle as having said: ‘There is a great difference in the credibility to be attached to stories of dreams and stories of ghosts. Dreams have nothing in them which are absurd and nonsensical; and though most of the coincidences may be readily explained by the diseased system of the dreamer, and the great and surprising power of association, yet it is impossible to say whether an inner sense does not really exist in the mind, seldom developed, indeed, but which may have a power of presentiment. All the external senses have their correspondents



Notes 187

20

21

22

23

24

25

in the mind; the eye can see an object before it is distinctly apprehended – why may there not be a corresponding power in the soul?’ (TT 42–3). In Coleridge’s Metaphors of Being, Edward Kessler argues that ‘The poem “Phantom” reveals a poet striving to create a naked language for Being, a speech for the “abstract self” that would still be poetry’ (p. 45), effectively showing how the personal and the general can be conveyed together. As such, it clearly relates to Coleridge’s enduring problem announced in the Biographia, of reconciling personality with infinity (BL1 201). In Chapter 14 of the Biographia Literaria, Coleridge described the sort of poems he and Wordsworth had decided that he should write for the Lyrical Ballads as follows: ‘In the one, the incidents and agents were to be, in part at least, supernatural; and the excellence aimed at was to consist in the interesting of the affections by the dramatic truth of such emotions, supposing them real’ (BL2 6). Yeats’s source for much of the passage under examination in this section was a letter which Arnold wrote to his friend Mrs Forster (6 August 1858, seven years before the first edition of Essays in Criticism). Mrs Forster had apparently sent Arnold a copy of Charles Kingsley’s remarks on his Merope, which led him to muse upon the relationship between himself and the general public, as opposed to the ever-appreciative critics. See Matthew Arnold, Letters, 1848–1888, I, 62–3. Yeats misread Arnold, and construed his idea of attempting to unite perfection of form to perfection of thought and feeling as endorsing the aesthetic alone. In fact Arnold was saying the exact opposite – if no one is going to read a poet’s work, he might as well write verses which are purely aesthetic, rather than make that really hard, self-destructive effort to unite them to the best ideas current at the time. His doctrine was, after all, that art should be a criticism of life; a doctrine which Yeats had raged against in the nineties (e.g. UP2 92–3). Yeats appears to have recognised, as Hallam did not, the problem of Shelley’s political commitment by attributing to him ‘moral values that were not aesthetics values’ (Au 313). Coleridge, Poems of Coleridge, sel. and arr. Arthur Symons, p. xxxvii. Symons’s further statement that ‘it will determine the poetic value of any lyric poem which you place beside it’ (p. xxxviii) may also have contributed to Yeats’s calling the poem ‘the most typical modern verse’ (E&I 222) in 1916. T. P. Foley’s belief that a deleted variant of Coleridge’s ‘The British Stripling’s Warsong’ forms the source for Yeats’s ‘terrible beauty’ in Easter 1916 seems unlikely, given that these are not provided in Symons’s edition. See ‘A Source for Yeats’s “Terrible Beauty” ’, Notes and Queries, 1984, 509. The real sentence was ‘For a very long time indeed I could not reconcile personality with infinity; and my head was with Spinoza, though my whole heart remained with Paul and John’ (BL1 201).

Chapter 2 ‘Escaped from Isolating Method’: Coleridge as Sage in Yeats’s 1930 Diary 01 W. B. Yeats, Notebook labelled ‘Private’, ‘begun at Rapallo’ (1930). 02 Donald T. Torchiana, W. B. Yeats and Georgian Ireland, pp. 120–278.



188 Notes

3 Elizabeth Cullingford, Yeats, Ireland and Fascism, pp. 115–43. 4 There are differences compared with the original: in the original the piece is unnumbered. ~(ll. 53–6)~ after: ‘Fears in Solitude’ ~ … ~ after: Societies ~an~ before: address no comma before: personal ambition. 5 In an article for the Morning Post, ‘Pitt and Bonaparte’ (19 March 1800), Coleridge had written: ‘still Mr. Pitt proceeds in an endless repetition of the same general phrases. This is his element; deprive him of general and abstract phrases, and you reduce him to silence. But you cannot deprive him of them. Press him to specify an individual fact of advantage to be derived from a war – and he answers, SECURITY! Call upon him to particularise, and he exclaims – JACOBINISM! Abstractions defined by abstractions! Generalities defined by generalities’ (EOT1 223). Coleridge’s subsequent explanation of his early radicalism in the Biographia as a defence of the ‘individual’ was also noted by Yeats, although appears to have had little effect on his interpretation of the poem. See Appendix, p. 180. 6 Differences are as follows: Originally numbered: 16 (the passage before last beginning: Protestant Ireland … numbered: 15). Originally: ‘Hexameters’ – No colon after: blind man Originally: These lines were written No commas around: I think ~the Commonplace Book~ originally ~ ‘The Common Place Book.’ ~ 7 While the lines Yeats quoted here are certainly compatible with his own reading of Berkeley, they in fact probably owe more to Coleridge’s tentative reading of Kant and rejection of Hartley. The sense in which Coleridge understood Berkeley at this stage was far more limited than either Yeats or Charpentier believed it to be. See Kathleen Wheeler, The Creative Mind in Coleridge’s Poetry, p. 10 8 John Charpentier, Coleridge: The Sublime Somnambulist, p. 132. Yeats also mentions ‘The Ancient Mariner’ amongst the poems he was currently reading to his children at Rapallo, in a letter to Olivia Shakespear (1 June 1930; L 776). 9 Differences are as follows: Originally numbered: 16 Comma after: delight me No commas around: as always Comma after: in such a life Comma after: Oedipus No comma after: approaches Comma after: sought this Comma after: multitudes Word substitution: ~needed~ for ~required~ Comma after: state No comma after: which The word substitution distorts Yeats’s sense here slightly, reducing the sense of choice involved in Coleridge’s habit.



Notes 189

10 Differences are as follows: No comma after: No No comma after: explanation Comma after: thought with Comma after: also No comma after: why Comma after: Irish poetry No comma after: dialect Deletions as follows: After: social life: the sentence: The plays could not be complete either spoken philosophy, the philosopher at his circle. After: common idiom: a philosophy [indecipherable] great passions [indecipherable], ideas, Tireisias, a simplicity that never condescends Other deletions mainly former phrasings of eventual form. 11 Differences are as follows: Originally numbered: 19 Full-stop replaced by question-mark after: What do you mean by that Originally – after: ‘too late to change.’ Comma after: do not account [in part] No comma after: Swift’s epitaph Originally: ‘We Irish do not think so.’ Originally: Mallarme on his Thursday day evenings No comma after: They No comma after: Thebaid No comma after: Palladius ~Saint~ originally ~St~ ~commonsense~ originally ~common sense~ ~supernatural power~: power deleted in the original. ~When I think of St Anthony I remember that of a certain type [rest indecipherable]~ ignored by editor ~in a~ repeated before: in a unique drama After: with the whole soul: – and then a break before continuing: Once or twice ~nowhere~ originally ~no where~ ~certain metaphysicians~ originally ~certain great metaphysicians~ full-stop not question-mark after: Is it not like this Comma after: discover truth ~serve~ originally ~Serve~ Comma after: and only then Comma after: beings seem always Second ~myself~ written as ~my self~ ~overcome~ written as ~over come~ The significant omission of the lines on Saint Anthony and the description of the metaphysicians as ‘great’ is perhaps, in the first case, due to the editor not having understood the first allusion, and as seeking to denigrate Yeats’s estimation of other philosophers in the second. 12 In ‘The People’, the narrator complains of all the time wasted trying to serve the people: ‘I might have used the one substantial right / My trade



190 Notes

13 14 15 16

17 18 19 20

21

22

allows: chosen my company, / And chosen what scenery had pleased me best’ (VP 352, ll. 19–21). J. M. Hone and M. M. Rossi, Bishop Berkeley, His Life, Writing and Philosophy, with an Introduction by W. B. Yeats (1930). Samuel Johnson, The Complete English Poems, p. 84, ll. 69–70. Shelley, Poetical Works, pp. 34–7. In the first book the narrator tells us of the Wanderer: ‘Oh many are the poets that are sown / By Nature; men endowed with highest gifts, / The vision and the faculty divine; / Yet wanting the accomplishment of verse’ (Wordsworth, Poetical Works, VI, 13, ll. 77–80). The old man ‘deemed that fate / Which made them abject would preserve them so’ (Shelley, p. 92, IV, st. 3). John Keats, The Complete Poems, p. 156, ll. 222 and 270. See T. Jeremiah Healey III, ‘ “That Which is Unique in Man”: The Lightning Flash in Yeats’s Later Thought’, YA13, 253–61. George Mills Harper writes: ‘Victim and Teacher (changed to Sage in A Vision) are important contraries in AS [Automatic Script] and in the CF [Card File]. … Yeats apparently intended to make more of them in A Vision than he did. … Although Yeats promised in a note that “These terms will be explained later”, he never did explain them satisfactorily’ (MYV1 288). Yeats discovered that Victim and Teacher were opposing polarities when simultaneously writing The Resurrection and communicating with the controlling spirits of his wife’s automatic writing. According to Harper, ‘in Yeats’s normal thinking Christ is the archetypal frail soul (Phase 22) and Judas the triumphant Victim (Phase 8)’ (MYV2 151). Christ has pity for objective suffering, while Judas is the more subjective kind of person, whose betrayal of Christ he sees as an act of free will. Oedipus is not mentioned at all in the first edition of A Vision, but I would argue that Yeats saw him as Victim by the time he wrote the second. In the last section of ‘A Packet for Ezra Pound’, Yeats referred to Oedipus as being Christ’s contrary (AV B 28–9). Although this is not evidence enough in itself for seeing Oedipus as an incarnation of Victim, Yeats does attribute him with the role of inceiving the double-millennium before Christ’s birth in ‘The Completed Symbol’ (AV B 202–3) and, as Yeats wrote in both editions of ‘Dove or Swan’, the 2200-year cycle before Christ was ‘the antithetical age’ (CV A 184 [AV B 272]). Differences are as follows: Comma after: seemed to me ~these are traditional~ originally ~these these are traditional~ No full-stop after: attitudes ~Nature~ originally ~nature~ Comma not semi-colon after: ephemeral ~and when I speak~ originally ~and speak~ ~think~ undeleted by editor to keep sense ~Old Testament~ originally ~old testament~ Comma, not semi colon, after: testament no-after: modern Europe [~passages in Matthew Arnold~ deleted]



Notes 191

23

24 25

26

27

28

29

30

31

~a magic work of~ before: an old hermit in ‘The Well at the World’s End’ The editor’s concealment of the last, undeleted words, meaning the Sage of Swevenham, may have been due to confusion on her part as to which act he referred to. William Morris, The Well at the World’s End, II, 29–30. George Yeats had been reading The Well at the World’s End aloud in bed at night, and Yeats himself recorded in an unpublished section of his diary an event describing how, when George was reading The Well at the World’s End on 21 May, they both experienced a false earthquake, making them think they were like Ralph and Ursula (Friday, 23 May, passage 13). In earlier, but deleted passages of his 1930 diary, Yeats was working over these ideas. In A Vision (1937) Oedipus is in fact identified with Greece, and the Sphinx, whom he overcomes at the beginning of the new double millennium, with Asia (AV B 202–3). This is as close as Yeats in fact comes to equating the polarities of Sage and Victim with the reactions of East to West and vice-versa. Differences are as follows: No-before: God puts ~God puts … etc~ at page bottom, inserted over deletion. Deleted phrase: “Those, those alone are everlasting, + the blessed spirits which thou includest; on the sea her waves.” Originally: “God puts divinity into man, as man puts humanity into his dog.” Deletions otherwise constitute former phrasings of: All three have collapsed in our day, because man has grown weary of the old European philosophy and found no other. Yeats may in fact have been recalling here the words of the sailor Pierre in Thomas Otways’s Venice Preserved. At the point of execution Pierre refuses absolution from the Priest, remarking: ‘You say my conscience / Must be mine accuser: I’ve searched that conscience, / And find no records there of crimes that scare me’. See Gosse (ed.), Restoration Plays from Dryden to Farquar, p. 300. This theory was in part influenced by Matthew Arnold, a man Yeats recognised as sage here (Ex 295), whose withdrawal of Empedocles on Etna from publication in 1853 on the grounds that unrelieved suffering, where the subject finds ‘no vent in action’, is not a fit subject for poetry (since all art should induce ‘joy’), gave Yeats his excuse for criticising Synge’s Riders to the Sea in 1910 (E&I 336), and for excluding the work of the war poets from his Oxford Book of Modern Verse in 1936. Thinking of his fencing bouts with Ezra Pound, Yeats also related how, after an evening’s fencing, when he would meet ‘in the deep of the mind … that other Will’ he would find ‘a foil playing before me, the button to my face’ (Myth 337). In the 19 June entry, when Yeats really does ‘Set up as sage’, Yeats talks about ‘spiritual beings’ (Ex 301) as though they were part of his anti-self, and he striving for Unity of Being. For my arguments on seeing Oedipus as Victim see above, note 21.



192 Notes

32 In his preface to Synge’s poetry and translations, Yeats had written: ‘Even the translations of poems that he has made his own putting them into that melancholy dialect of his, seem to express his emotion at the memory of poverty and the approach of death. The whole book is of a kind almost unknown in a time when lyricism has become abstract and impersonal.’ See John M. Synge, Poems and Translation, pp. ix–x. Synge’s translations of Petrarch’s sonnets use a very self-conscious Irish dialect. 33 Yeats used this phrase when referring to how movements in art, politics and philosophy changed in the same way simultaneously, without (he believed) enough conscious influence to explain why they should do so (E&I 406). 34 Yeats’s reference to Hafiz making a bargain with hair is something of an exaggeration. In his Rubaiyat Hafiz uses hair as a means of combining sexual love with contemplation of the divine, but I cannot anywhere find a passage which corresponds to anything like the Rosicrucian quest Yeats appears to read into it. See Hafiz and his Rubaiyat, trans. Dr Zahmurul Hassan, p. 53. This clearly relates to the poem ‘His Bargain’ in the Crazy Jane Poems: ‘However they may take it, / Before the Thread began / I made, and may not break it / When the last thread began / A bargain with that hair / And all the winding there’ (VP 402, ll. 7–12). 35 Yeats’s changed view of St Anthony from ‘Ireland after Parnell’ (Au 247) owes much to his reading of Palladius. Whereas formerly he had been influenced by Flaubert’s The Temptation of Saint Anthony to see him as the archetype of self-denial, Palladius’s history of the early anchorites round the Mareotic Sea describes how men received answers from him ‘as come from God’, and that he possessed ‘exactness of language’. See Palladius, Lausiac History, pp. 63–4. 36 Yeats’s reference to the sage as being like the fountain in Fragonard’s painting in his 19 June entry may be a recollection of Matthew Arnold’s comparison of Joubert with the older Coleridge, which former was like a ‘fountain’ to the ‘thirsty comers’ who visited him after the French Revolution. See Matthew Arnold, Essays in Criticism, p. 315. 37 See Thomas Carlyle, The Life of John Sterling, pp. 69–80. 38 This is fortuitous, for one must assume that Yeats had not read Charpentier’s book when he first mentioned the sage, or else he would have mentioned either him or Coleridge. This is reinforced by the fact that Yeats clearly did not take Charpentier’s view of ‘Fears in Solitude’ into account, and so had probably not got as far as that part of the book by that time (Charpentier, p. 161), let alone ‘The Seer of Highgate’. Although Yeats wrote ‘Coleridge meets a Sage at Reading / p. 59’ (meaning the Dragoon officer who took pity on him and got him a discharge!) on the frontispiece of his copy of Charpentier (YL 56) this was part of an overall summary, and was probably written retrospectively (see Appendix, p. 178). 39 John Holloway, The Victorian Sage, p. 4. 40 Shankar Mokashi-Punekar, The Later Phase in the Development of W. B. Yeats, p. 122. 41 Colin McDowell, ‘To Beat Upon the Wall: Reading A Vision’, YA4, 219–27 at 226. 42 See also my articles ‘“What Empty Eyeballs Knew”: Zen Buddhism in Yeats’s “The Statues” and the “Principles” of A Vision’ YA11, 141–57. And



Notes 193

194 Notes

Chapter 3 Reason and Understanding: Coleridge’s Philosophical Influence on Yeats 01 Yeats would have read this in Chapter Ten of the Biographia as well, when Coleridge praises the ‘interdependence of property’ (BL1 213). 02 Colin McDowell ‘“The Completed Symbol”: Daimonic Existence and the Great Wheel in A Vision (1937)’ YA 6 (1989), 193–208. 03 For a fuller precis read the ‘Bibliography and Explanatory Matter’ of Mackenna’s translation of Plotinus, The Enneads, I, 118–25. 04 Rosemary Puglia Ritvo, ‘A Vision B: the Plotinian Metaphysical Basis’, Review of English Studies, 26 (1975), 34–46. 05 In ‘To Beat upon the Wall: Reading “A Vision” ’ (YA4, 219–27), McDowell disagrees with Ritvo’s ‘statements about the Daimon’ although otherwise finds her argument ‘sound’ (YA4 224). Later, he sees the permanent Daimon as consisting of all four Principles (YA6 196). 06 Muirhead probably provided Yeats with his understanding of the distinction between the early Berkeley and the late: ‘the difference between the earlier empirical Berkeley to whom esse is percipi and the later Platonic to whom esse is concipi … the discovery of this difference was one of the important philosophical steps in Coleridge’s development [1796–8].’ See Muirhead, Coleridge as Philosopher, p. 46. 07 Gerald McNiece, The Knowledge that Endures: Coleridge, German Philosophy and the Logic of Romantic Thought, pp. 17–30, pp. 149–58. 08 Immanuel Kant, ‘Prologemena to any Future Metaphysic’, I, ch. ii, pt 2, pp. 14–16, Kant, ‘Critique of Pure Reason’, pp. 41–61, Intro, pt 4, pp. 30–2. 09 ‘Kant’s philosophy, which valorised inner experience over externals, remained a basic support for Romanticism, though his followers, including Coleridge, animated by religious feeling and giving larger play than Kant did to feelings, intuitions and inspirations, revived the passion for an absolute’ (McNiece, p. 25). 10 Changes are as follows: ~that civilization~ originally ~that that civilisation~ No comma between: many, as Swift’s No comma between: ‘reason’, what ~System~ originally ~system~ ~‘spirit’ and ‘celestial body’ ~ originally ~ ‘Spirit’ :’Celestial Body’ (inserted over deletions) No comma after: ‘celestial body’ ~alike; that clay ~ originally ~alike: that clay the clay~ ~that understanding the ‘faculties’ wears thin~ originally ~the understanding the faculties ‘wear thin’~ ~ the plasticity that is the theme~ originally ~plasticity as the theme~ Deleted passages prove further that Yeats meant to equate ‘understanding’ with the ‘faculties’ since in a deleted section between ~‘Celestial Body’~ and ~by that which~ Yeats wrote: the faculties – the understanding – ‘wear thin’



‘Satori in Yeats’s “Stream and Sun at Glendalough”’ , Irish University Review, 28:1, 28–36.

11 ‘Yeats’s Second “Vision”: Berkeley, Coleridge, and the Correspondence with Sturge Moore’, MLR 76 (1981), 273–90, at 287. See Appendix for Yeats’s marginal notes to The Friend [YL 402A], linking Spirit and Celestial Body to Reason. 12 Shankar Mokashi-Punekar, The Later Phase in the Development of W. B. Yeats, p. 122. 13 ‘A Discourse of the Contests and Dissensions between the Nobles and the Commons in Athens and Rome’. 14 This view is somewhat disputed, however, by Hone and Rossi, who consider him to have been merely shopping for patrons. See Joseph M. Hone and Mario M. Rossi, Swift, or the Egotist, pp. 135–6. 15 Swift, Works, ed. Thomas Sheridan, vol. II, 366. 16 Hone and Rossi, whose book on Swift Yeats may have read, described the ‘Discourse’ as advocating a moving constitution, totally ‘opposed to the medieval idea of a state determined from on high, of powers appointed to their immoveable places by an eternal decree of God’ (Hone and Rossi, p. 138). 17 In an early and undated passage not included in Pages from a Diary written in Nineteen Hundred and Thirty, Yeats contrasted Swift’s thought with that of Gerald Heard, trying to find some common ground between them for a theory of history: ‘Perhaps neither had seen that not only the demagogue – Swift’s present person – but the men of genius in all their kinds even those who restore unity, breaks up the line with their present thoughts. The plant must soon die. When Heard describes a civilisation as ‘exploding’ he describes the pod bursting; but the dry stalk remains.’ The reference to the ‘men of genius’ clearly shows that Yeats was reading the Biographia at this point, since it echoes a phrase he noted in the second chapter. Yeats also referred to Petrie and the ‘Great Year’ for the first time in this entry. 18 The analogy appeared in ‘Reflections’, a copy of which was read by Yeats and certainly in his possession. See Edmund Burke, Works, II, 357. Donald Torchiana quotes the transcript of a speech given in New York, 1903–4, in which Yeats argued that: ‘A nation is like a great tree’. See Donald T. Torchiana, W. B. Yeats and Georgian Ireland, pp. 192–3. 19 Elizabeth Cullingford, Yeats, Ireland and Fascism, p. 125. 20 Deirdre Coleman, Coleridge and the Friend (1809–10), pp. 80–106. 21 Coleman outlines the ‘specific debts’ to Burke, in particular his understanding that Rousseau and the French Enlightenment philosophers, with their emphasis on the ‘individual reason’, were to blame for the failure of the French Revolution (Coleman, pp. 120–131). 22 Coleridge’s own examples are the difference between ‘a well-educated English lad’ and a ‘brutal Russian, who believes that he can scourge his wooden idol into good humour’ (Fr 131). 23 John Morrow, Coleridge’s Political Thought: Property, Morality and the Limits of Traditional Discourse, pp. 88–93. Morrow also states that Coleridge’s critique of commerce was more accommodating than the traditional Tory line. The Country Party represented an ideological affiliation of Tories and Old Whigs who followed Harrington’s Oceana in seeing landed-property interest as more supportive of just constitution than that of the modern Whigs Morrow (Coleridge’s Political Thought, p. 30).



Notes 195

24 Differences are as follows: The passage comes from a larger entry of July at Renvyle (Mrs Yeats sees it as 23 July, the date of the previous entry) The original number is: 33, not xxxi ~rights and duties is because~ originally ~rights and duties is is because~ No comma between: rights, rights ~much land~ originally~land~ No comma between: land, that No comma between: that, according No comma after: ancient races No comma before: however Last phrase originally: which [contains] [the] [higher] which constitute [th] which refines society. Thus Yeats’s original sense in the last line has been slightly modified by the editor. 25 Changes from the original are as follows: No comma after: Henry Adams No comma after: interpretation No ~He~ before: saw civilizations (undeleted by editor) No dashes around: to use Heard’s term No comma between: either, Coleridge No ~of~ between: motives acts (undeleted by editor) Originally ~so~ between: ‘explosive’, but ~the misapplication of ‘pure thought’~ originally ~ the the misapplication ~ Indecipherable passage after: religion or philosophy. ~free judgement~ originally ~free judgment to all~ ~Rousseau~ originally under erasure (undeleted by editor). 26 Yeats may also be recalling Coleridge’s praise of Burke’s principles in the Biographia, when he describes him as a prophet or ‘seer’, his relevance undiminishing through the years (BL1 191–2). 27 ‘With a wretched parrotry they wrote and harangued without ceasing of the Volonté générale – the inalienable sovereignty of the people; and by these high-sounding phrases led on the vain, ignorant, and intoxicated populace to wild excesses and wilder expectations, which entailing on them the bitterness of disappointment cleared the way for military despotism, for the Satanic government of horror under the Jacobins, and of terror under the Corsicans’ (Fr 130). This passage, more than any in Coleridge, appears to parallel Swift’s views on the inevitability of tyranny. 28 ‘Children are excluded from all political power – are they not human beings in whom the faculty of reason resides? Yes; but in them the faculty is not yet adequately developed’ (Fr 131). 29 I take issue here with Coleman, who sees the abstract reason as described by Coleridge to mean man’s potential reason. What Coleridge seems to be saying is that reason takes man away from individual personality towards abstraction, and that only ‘Understandings, enlightened past experience’ govern expediency (Fr 132). This differs from Kant, who believed that man is only free and individual when exercising his reason and will (Coleman, pp. 136–7). Coleridge in fact takes issue with Burke’s belief in established and ancient Reason in essay four of section one, when quoting his ‘Speech



196 Notes

30 31

32 33

34

35

36 37

38 39 40

41

from the Throne’. Burke stated that ‘“the determinations of equity and reason”’ are grounds for exercising correctives to ‘sovereign authority’, but Coleridge counters this by stating that in reality the only good correctives come from ‘understanding and prudence’ (Fr 129). Percy Wyndham Lewis, The Apes of God, p. 60. ‘As all architecture since 1500 has been mere copying and playing variations, without any continuous natural development, the last four centuries are omitted as being variously appreciated’. See W. M. Flinders Petrie, The Revolutions of Civilization (1911), p. 87. Pierre Duhem, Le Système du Monde: Histoire des Doctrines Cosmologiques de Platon à Copernic, V, 133–7. This is mainly because Yeats had referenced the Great Year to Hastings’s encyclopaedia in his 1930 diary. In the same entry as his comparison with Swift and Gerald Heard, Yeats cited the Encylopaedia of Religion and Ethics, ed. James Hastings (V, 538). Entry no. 36 describes how ‘The Etruscan Cosmogony was of a very remarkable character … the demiurge appointed twelve milleniums for his acts of creation, and assigned them severally to the twelve signs of the Zodiac.’ In the sixth he finally creates man, who has another six millenia before doomsday. The twelve-month description of the Great Year clearly delighted Yeats. Changes are as follows: No inverted commas around: ‘pure thought’ No comma after: changed its ground ~henceforth as Homunculus~ originally ~material and because~ Full-stop, not question-mark, after: decline Changes are as follows: No comma after: colour ~Passionate Body~ and~Husk~ originally underlined. Colin McDowell, YA6, 193–208 at 197–8. My attribution of the various states to zodiacal signs in the diamondshaped cone of the Spirit is based on Colin McDowell’s deductions in ‘The Six Discarnate States of A Vision’ (1937), YAACTS 4, 87–98. McDowell is particularly convincing since he makes his attributions in the light of Yeats’s statement that the six discarnate states in the Wheel of the Principles in death ‘correspond’ (AV B 188; 223n) to the Phases 22–28 in life, and thus matches and groups them accordingly. Coleridge: Poetical Works, ed. Ernest Hartley Coleridge, p. 394n. Robert McQueen Grant, Gnosticism and Early Christianity, p. 136. The poem does not appear in the Collected Notebooks, but an entry recorded perhaps two days earlier clearly has a bearing upon it: ‘2639 18.191 A flash of Lightning / struck terror into my Heart – yea – as if Spiritual Things, Beings of Thought (Entias Rationis) could cloath themselves & make a space of Light – the Shekinah of the Conscience /’. The interest in light and guilt, despite the reference to the Kabbalistic Shekinah, shows a movement towards a Gnostic understanding of reality as fallen, a state of darkness. The poem is, significantly, on the page facing ‘Phantom’ of the Campbell Dykes edition of the poetry, which he had earlier used to describe the light of evocation: it is not, however, in the Symons edition. Ernest Hartley Coleridge demonstrates that Coleridge saw ‘What is Life?’ as forming a



Notes 197

198 Notes

Chapter 4 ‘Wisdom, Magic, Sensation’: Coleridge’s ‘Supernatural’ Poems in the Later Poetry of Yeats 01 The problem of free will in Unitarianism is actually more complex, since Priestley’s Doctrine of Philosophic Necessity Illustrated preached that man can do no wilful wrong due to Necessity, but also stressed the importance of keeping man’s will within that of God (see Hasting’s Encyclopaedia, XII, 523–4). Coleridge could ultimately not reconcile the two (BL1 119). For a description of Priestly’s Doctrine see Nigel Leask, The Politics of Imagination in Coleridge’s Political Thought, pp. 19–21. 02 John Hollander, The Figure of Echo: A Mode of Allusion in Milton and After. 03 That is, a literary figure or symbol whose meaning is dependent upon change from a previous (i.e. chronologically precedent) figure. 04 Harold Bloom, The Map of Misreading, p. 74. 05 John Beer, Coleridge’s Poetic Intelligence, pp. 116–17. 06 H. W. Piper, The Singing of Mount Abora: Coleridge’s Use of Biblical Imagery and Natural Symbolism in Poetry and Philosophy, p. 62. 07 Shelley, Poetical Works, p. 92, IV, 1. 08 For Russell Alspach, who first grouped the various fountain images together for comparison: ‘the fountain and fountain-jet symbolized for Yeats, it seems to me, an almost fierce joy in mere living.’ See Russell K. Alspach, ‘Yeats and Innisfree’ , Yeats Centenary Papers, no. 3, pp. 79–80. 09 Declan Kiberd, ‘Inventing Irelands’, Yeats’s Political Identities, pp. 146–64, p. 156. 10 A view in the verse which corresponds to Yeats’s own endorsement of Kevin O’Higgin’s tough stance during the civil war. See W. B. Yeats, Senate Speeches, p. 34. 11 ‘Our own river that we catch a glimpse of now and again through hazel and ash, or outshining the silver beech stems of Kyle Dortha, has ever been an idler. Its transit is as has been said of human life “from a mystery through a mystery to a mystery”; suddenly appearing, as a French writer has put down in his book “dans le beau parc privé de Coole, derriére [sic] le village de Kiltartan.” And dipping presently under great limestone flags that form a natural bridge “la derniére réapparition se fait voir a 350 métres de là toujours dans le parc de Coole.” Then, flowing free, it helps to form a lake whose fullness, finding no channel above ground, is forced “de chercher sa route par les passages souterrains de lac vers la mer … ” ’ (Lady Gregory, Coole, pp. 27–8; see also Yeats’s Autobiography, 260). 12 Porphyry, On the Cave of the Nymphs, p. 1. 13 Marjorie Perloff, ‘ “Another Emblem There”: Theme and Convention in Yeats’s “Coole Park and Ballylee, 1931”’ , Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 69:2 (1970), 223–40 at 228–31. Perloff ignores the significance of the cavern in both Yeats and Porphyry, seeing it as death rather than corporeality, as well as the fact that Yeats used Heraclitus to refer to the gyres of life rather than the Principles, whose basis is inescapably neo-Platonic.



unity with ‘Phantom’ and ‘Sunset,’ all of which were written in the same year (Hartley, p. 394n), even though ‘Sunset’ was not published until 1893.

14 The image comes from Prometheus Unbound, and was used most notably in ‘Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen’, when Yeats declared that ‘Some moralist or mythological poet / Compares the solitary soul to a swan’, only to lament at the end that ‘we were crack-pated when we dreamed’ (VP 430, ll. 59–60 and 88). 15 ‘Nature, steel-bound or stone-built in the nineteenth century, became a flux where man drowned or swam’ (OBMV xxvii). 16 Denis Donoghue sees the stance of Coleridge’s ‘Ode on Dejection’ in Yeats’s second stanza. See Denis Donoghue, ‘On “The Winding Stair”’ , An Honoured Guest: New Essays on W. B. Yeats, pp. 106–23, at p. 121. 17 H. R. Rookmaaker, Towards a Romantic Conception of Nature: Coleridge’s Poetry up to 1803, pp. 65–93 at p. 82. 18 Katharine Bruner Tave, The Demon and the Poet: An Interpretation of ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ according to Coleridge’s Demonological Sources, pp. 52 and 83. 19 For example, when describing the ‘reanimation of the other mariner’s bodies’ by ‘a troop of spirits blest’, the gloss explains this through a Christian neo-Platonism as ‘But not by the souls of the men, nor by daemons of earth or middle air, but by a blessed troop of angelic spirits, sent down by the invocation of the guardian saint’ (CP 200). For Yeats, who had read Henry More, the distinction between angels and the daemons of ‘earth or middle air’ would have definitely been exciting. 20 According to Tave, Coleridge certainly read Psellus (Tave, p. 14) who would have informed him that sea-birds are aquatic demons, and life in death the same. However, a deeper knowledge of the mechanics of demonology is sheer speculation. 21 David Jaspers observes, however, that in a letter to his brother George of 10 March 1798, Coleridge expressed a belief in original sin, two weeks before the completion of the poem. See David Jaspers, Coleridge as Poetic and Religious Thinker, p. 50. 22 Jon Stallworthy, Between the Lines: Yeats’ Poetry in the Making, pp. 120–1. See Bornstein, Transformations, p. 83. 23 Colin McDowell, ‘ “The Completed Symbol”: Daimonic Existence and the Great Wheel in A Vision (1937)’, YA6, 193–208 at 197. 24 I am wholly reliant on Jeffares’s Commentary for this information, since I have not been able to locate an existing copy. 25 Richard Ellmann, The Identity of Yeats, p. 172. 26 Dorothy Wellesley (ed.), Letters on Poetry from W. B. Yeats to Dorothy Wellesley, p. 4, 14 June 1935. 27 Richard Lewis Farnell, The Cults of the Greek States, V, 440. 28 Elizabeth Butler Cullingford sees the later references to androgyny in their letters as having a bearing upon the portrayal of the Furies in the poem. See Gender and History in Yeats’s Love Poetry, pp. 271–4.

Chapter 5 ‘Natural Declension of the Soul’: Yeats and the Mirror 1 John Holloway, The Victorian Sage, pp. 13–14.



Notes 199

2 S. T. Coleridge, Aids to Reflection, p. 181, Aph 104, para. 5 3 Paul de Man, Blindness and Insight, p. 67. 4 In her chapter on ‘Shelley and Nietzsche: “Reality” as Rhetoric’, Wheeler writes that Shelley understood, from Coleridge, the shift towards metaphor as a means of fusing reality, and empowering the reader’s mind. See Kathleen Wheeler, Romanticism, Pragmatism and Deconstruction, pp. 9–10. 5 Except in that Holloway assumes a spiritual interconnectedness which smooths over the possible points of conflict in this schism (Holloway, pp. 9–10). 6 The image of the arrows may be influenced by Mathers’s table of the Tree of Life between pages 50 and 51. See Kabbala Denudata, trans. S. L. Mathers. 7 Robert Snukal, High Talk: The Philosophical Poetry of W. B. Yeats, pp. 185–213. For my arguments against Snukal’s claim that the mirror in ‘The Statues’ is related to Coleridge’s image, please see: ‘“What Empty Eyeballs Knew”: Zen Buddhism in Yeats’s “The Statues” and the “Principles” of A Vision’, YA11, 141–57. 8 Plato, Works, I, 448. 9 M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp, pp. 32–3. 10 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, p. 15. 11 John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, I, 142–3. 12 According to Timaeus the lower gods create man, ‘the circular figure of the head is an imitation of the universe – the movement of the mind an imitation of the circuits of the same and the different, the planets and the stars’ (Plato, II, 516). 13 Nesca Robb, Neoplatonism of the Italian Renaissance, pp. 71, 81 and 87. 14 Abrams, p. 42; Plotinus, ‘On Intellectual Beauty’, Ennead, V. iii. 15 Shelley, Essays and Letters, ed. Ernest Rhys, p. 40. 16 Samuel Johnson, Mr Johnson’s Preface to his Edition of Shakespear’s Plays, p. xii. 17 He begins the review by writing: ‘When Vaughan the Silurist said that man was a world and had another to attend him, he but expressed the faith of those mediaeval mystics who held the soul to correspond to the universe, and its emotions to the stars and the forest, the seas and the storms’ (UPI 342). 18 Shelley, Poetical Works, pp. 396–7. ‘Adonais’ is very heavily marked in Yeats’s copy of this book, the printed words ‘sustaining Love’ marked with the handwritten words, ‘The Artifices in the Timaeus’ (YL pp. 247–8). Bornstein, Yeats and Shelley, p. 105. 19 C. E. Pulos, The Deep Truth: A Study of Shelley’s Scepticism, p. 77. Pulos’s argument that Shelley was a sceptic in epistemology and not a Berkeleian, as his wife asserted, enjoying a belief in imaginative faith ‘divining the other’, is not universally accepted, but to me is very convincing. 20 Prometheus Unbound (Asia: “My Soul is an enchanted boat, / Which, like a sleeping swan, doth float / Upon the silver waves of thy sweet singing” (Shelley, Poetical Works, p. 235, ll. 72–4). 21 Robartes turns up again twenty-three years later in The Wild Swans of Coole (1919), in the poems ‘The Phases of the Moon’ and ‘The Double Vision of Michael Robartes’ (1919), and his magic book is referred to by Ille in ‘Ego Dominus Tuus’. Robartes again appears in the poem ‘Michael Robartes and



200 Notes

22 23

24 25

26

27

28

29

30

31

32

the Dancer’ (1921), and later in the preface to A Vision (1925), where he expresses deep anger at the way in which Yeats described his Order. Michael J. Fixler, ‘The Affinities between J. K. Huysmans and the “Rosicrucuian” Stories of W. B. Yeats’, PMLA, 74, 464–9 at 466–7. Another alchemical mirror which Yeats used was the Speculum Angelorum et Hominum in A Vision, a volume which Michael Robartes found propping up his bedstead in Cracow (CV A xvii). It was a spoof book which Yeats originally referred to as his source in place of the automatic script, although he still cited it as an authority for the twenty-eight phases of the moon in the second edition in which he described his real sources (AV B 38). Stendhal, The Red and the Black: a Chronicle of 1830, p. 79. Ann Jefferson, Reading Realism in Stendhal, p. 26: ‘The real for Stendhal is the “holy real”, the “saint-réal”, cited as the source for the mirror metaphor in Le Rouge.’ ‘January 27th 1916. Stendhal said that a novel should be like a lookingglass dawdling along the road. That describes Dostoievsky’s method. Dickens was a romancist, and romance Stendhal hated. Dostoievsky finds and Dickens invents, yet both are filled with a kind of natural goodness. Not so George Eliot; in her I find the law, always the law’. See John Butler Yeats, Passages from the Letters of John Butler Yeats, p. 46. This is an important point to grasp, not least because Robert Snukal appears to have equated Stendhal’s mirror with that of Coleridge without regard for their different functions. See Robert Snukal, High Talk: The Philosophical Poetry of W. B. Yeats, pp. 96–7. This does not mean that the associations in evocation are the same as the emotions linked in associations in Flaubert’s style indirecte libre, as it is purely a case of metalepsis. What is similar is the underlying passivity both enjoy. Hartley, himself a Cambridge don, had published his major work Observations on Man: His Frame, His Expectations and His Duty, in 1749, although Coleridge’s own copy (now in the British Library) was published in London by J. Johnson in 1791. Joseph Priestley, scientist and Unitarian, had published Hartley’s Theory of the Human Mind, on the Principle of the Association of Ideas, in 1775. ‘The final step in 1801 of completely rejecting Hartley is made verbal and public in a letter to Thomas Poole in mid-march: “If I do not greatly delude myself, I have not only completely extricated the notions of Time, and Space: but have overthrown the doctrine of Association, as taught by Hartley, and with it all the irreligious metaphysics of modern Infidels – especially the doctrine of Necessity” (CL1 706, March 1801)’ (Kathleen Wheeler, The Creative Mind in Coleridge’s Poetry, p. 13). Mackintosh’s lecture was delivered in 1799. According to Engell and Bate (eds): ‘for Coleridge he had always seemed a symbol, both personally and intellectually, of what Coleridge considered the parochially positivistic, quasi-commercial, and legalistic strain of British empirical thinking that needed to be corrected by the broader philosophical stance of the Continent, especially Germany’ (BL1 91n). ‘I shall not at present meddle with the physical consideration of the mind; or trouble myself to examine wherein its essence consists; or by what motions of our spirits or alterations of our bodies we come to have any



Notes 201

33

34 35

36

37 38 39

40

41

42 43 44

sensation by our organs, or any ideas in our understandings; and whether those ideas do in their formation, any or all of them, depend on matter or not’ (Locke, I, 26). See Locke (I, 213–14). This is not the place for a complete discussion of the various meanings of the word ‘will’, as used by the philosophers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. See Engell and Jackson Bate (eds) (BL1 116n–17n). See Norman Dunbar Palmer, The Irish Land League Crisis, p. 108. ‘On the Status of Sense-Data’ ([1913], Moore, pp. 168–96). Moore discussed the concept of the ‘sense-datum’, or ‘sensible’ as he preferred to call it, which constitutes the appearance of an object but not the object itself (p. 171). It acts as a kind of medium between reality and consciousness. He concluded: that all ‘sensibles’ (all appearances in sensation) such as ‘blackish marks’ (p. 185) do exist independently of our perceiving them, but that they do not necessarily show us the world which produces them as it really is (pp. 194–6). In the second of these two essays, Moore defended the common-sense view of the world, and in particular the view that what we see is actually a part of a world which exists independently of our consciousness of it – ‘A Defence of Common Sense’, Contemporary British Philosophy, 2, pp. 193–223. He looked at various positions regarding the relation of sense-data to the world, and proposed that they are part of the surfaces of the things which we see, although readily admitted that, due to relativity of perspective, could not be identical to it (Defence, p. 220), further confessing that he could not provide an analysis to a proposition which he nevertheless took to be true (p. 223). Thus, he still saw the secondary qualities as being in the external world, although was more aware of the faults involved in his earlier proofs. The ‘double-image’ (p. 218) – that we may have two sense-data of an object at the same time – was to dominate the discussion of the Correspondence from 17 February 1926 (LTSM 72–3) until 31 March (pp. 88–90). Berkeley, Works I, 184. Bertrand Russell, The Problems of Philosophy, p. 63. Moore’s and Yeats’s understanding of ‘shared experience’ was possibly influenced by Russell’s knowledge by description which ‘enables us to pass beyond the limits of our private experience’. See Russell, p. 92. Yeats made much of the story recounted by Frank Harris that he had seen John Ruskin rush to pick up a phantom cat in his house. Yeats insisted that this cat was every bit as ‘real’ as the house cat (LTSM 63–5). Virginia Moore, The Unicorn: William Butler Yeats’s Search for Reality, p. 308: ‘Moore ignored Yeats’s conviction that it could be seen by others if they would only develop certain latent faculties. (Not that Yeats mentioned Golden Dawn methods. This was a philosophic argument.)’ Grosvenor E. Powell, ‘Yeats’s Second Vision: Berkeley, Coleridge, and the Correspondence with T. Sturge Moore’, MLR, 76 (1981) 273–90 at 281. Donald T. Torchiana, W. B. Yeats and Georgian Ireland, p. 257. G. E. Moore concluded in ‘On the Status of Sense-Data’ (1913–14) that ‘sensibles’ are only present to our consciousness as appearances of physical objects in the moment of perception, and that mental images were not ‘appearances’ as such at all (Moore, pp. 179–80).



202 Notes

45 See T. S. Eliot, Selected Prose, p. 177. See also Michael J. Sidnell, ‘Yeats, Synge and the Georgians’, YA3 (1985), pp. 105–23. 46 His letters to Olivia Shakespear at the time identify Lewis as the prime source influencing Yeats’s understanding of the ‘new naturalism’. In fact, in a letter to Olivia Shakespear, dated 24 March, Yeats wrote about an article he read in The Enemy by Wyndham Lewis (The Enemy, I, January 1927). This article was to be included in Time and Western Man under the title ‘The Revolutionary Simpleton’ (L 723). In a letter to Lady Gregory, dated 1 April 1928, Yeats writes: ‘Have you read Wyndham Lewis? He attacked Ezra Pound and Joyce in Time and Western Man, and is on my side of things philosophically’ (L 739). 47 ‘Time, on the physical side, and apart from its discrimination, in the hands of Bergson, into mental time and mathematical time, is merely change or movement. An object … realizes itself, working up to a climax, then it disintegrates. It is its apogee or perfection that is it, for classical science. It is the rounded thing of common-sense’ (Wyndham Lewis, Time and Western Man, pp. 167–8). 48 ‘The Doctrine of Bergson, Alexander or Whitehead is labelled “organic”: and its advertisement is that it is Life, as contrasted with the mechanical “deadness” of materialist science’ (Lewis, p. 174). 49 ‘The “science” that to-day mixes the “secondary qualities” into the external world is the same that is mixing Time into it – “saturating” it with Time, as Alexander says’ (Lewis, p. 183). 50 Berkeley, Essay, Principles, Dialogue, ed. Mary Whitton Calkins. 51 In the rest of the footnote, however, Yeats wrote about Moore (E&I 406n) – a philosopher whom Lewis praised, and contrasted with the ‘Time-philosophers’ due to his insistence that the substratum was ‘dead’ and ‘mechanical’, rather than being ‘vital’ and ‘organic’ (Lewis, pp. 478–9). The reason for making this exemption was probably that Lewis had convinced him that Moore was a different kind of realist from the philosophers of ‘flux’ who had most influence on Modernist literature. 52 The exemplar object chosen by Moore in ‘On the Status of Sense-Data’ (1913–14) to illustrate his ideas was a florin. 53 In The Oxford Book of Modern Verse (1936), Yeats asked, ‘did Pater foreshadow a poetry, a philosophy, where the individual is nothing, the flux of The Cantos of Ezra Pound?’ (OBMV xxx). 54 In a letter to Dorothy Wellesley, dated 21 December 1936, Yeats wrote that Wilfred Owen: ‘is all blood, dirt and sucked sugar-stick (look at the selection in Faber’s Anthology – he calls poets “bards” and a girl a “maid”, and talks about “Titanic wars”). There is every excuse for him, but none for those who like him’ (L 874). 55 Jon Stallworthy, ‘W. B. Yeats and Wilfred Owen’, Critical Quarterly, 11 (1969), 198–215 at 209. 56 Stallworthy writes: ‘Speculation on this subject is, however, irrelevant here, since I hope I have shown that “passive suffering” – in any meaningful sense of those words – was no theme of Owen’s. Yeats of course thought otherwise, or at any rate found this a convenient label for his dislike of Owen’s poetry and what it stood for. Some insight into other reasons for his



Notes 203

204 Notes

Chapter 6 ‘Towards Berkeley’s Roasting-spit’: Coleridge and Metaphors of Unity 01 M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp, p. 60. 02 Coleridge, ‘To a Gentleman [William Wordsworth] Composed on the Night after his Recitation of a Poem on the Growth of an Individual Mind’: ‘power streamed from thee, and thy soul received / The light reflected, as a light bestowed’ (CP 176, ll. 18–19). 03 Yeats, ‘William Blake and his Illustrations to the Divine Comedy’, The Savoy, III, (July 1896) 41. 04 Blake used the terms Fancy and Imagination interchangeably in his work, thus making Coleridge a possible source for the division which Yeats makes. Blake wrote: ‘The Nature of visionary fancy or imagination is very little known, and the eternal nature and permanence of its ever existent images is considered less permanent than the things of vegetable and generative matter’ (WWB2 394). Yeats’s quotations in the first paragraph where he distinguishes between symbol and allegory are entirely from Blake’s own introductory passage to this catalogue addition. 05 Yeats writes of tower imagery in Shelley’s poetry as follows: ‘I believe Shelley had more than a romantic scene in his mind when he made Prince Athanase follow his mysterious studies in a lighted tower’ (E&I 87). 06 Mathers, Kabbalah Denudata, table facing p. 30 in Mathers’s introduction. 07 In ‘The Phases of the Moon’ Robartes declares the poet has ‘chosen this place to live in / Because, it may be, of the candle-light / From the far tower where Milton’s Platonist / Sat late, or Shelley’s visionary prince’ (VP 373, ll. 13–6). 08 In Dante and English Poetry, Steve Ellis demonstrates how Yeats in fact conflated two entirely different statements in Convivio (not Yeats’s ‘Convito’) to conclude that Dante both studied Unity of Being and saw it as ‘the subordination of all parts to the whole as in a perfectly proportioned human body’. See Ellis, pp. 160–1; Ex 250. 09 Should be Hugues. 10 Whispering reeds, themselves an alternative version of the Eolian Harp, are a real metaleptic echo as the title of Yeats’s third volume of poetry, The Wind Among the Reeds, which Allen Grossman nevertheless believes to allude consciously to the stance and posture of Coleridge’s ‘Dejection: an Ode’ in which the ‘Aeolian Lute / … better far were mute’ (CP 363, ll. 7–8). See Allen R. Grossman, Poetic Knowledge in the Early Yeats, p. 46. We find the same type of transumption in the fluttering of the old beech leaves in the original version of ‘The Madness of King Goll’ (originally ‘King Goll’ [1887]). See Yeats, ‘King Goll’, The Leisure Hour (1887), p. 636. 11 J. B. Yeats, Letters to his Son W. B. Yeats and Others, 1869–1922, p. 48; 31 December 1869. 12 Shelley, Essays and Letters, ed. Ernest Rhys, p. 2.



disapproval is afforded by a look at the war poets and war poetry of which he approved’ (CQ , 11, 209). 57 See Chapter Three, ‘Nature and Thought’.

13 Coleridge was by no means the first poet writing in English to use the figure of the Eolian Lyre: Akenside, Thompson and Collins had all used it before him, to name but a few. Coleridge was, however, the first to employ it in symbolising the vital-mechanic pantheistic universe of Priestley and Hartley, in which the materialist theory of the mind’s motion, and a thoroughly deterministic view of the growth of the human mind, in no way contradicts either the idea of God or the resurrection of the soul after death. Later, when attacking Hartley’s theory of Association in Chapters Five to Seven of the Biographia, he referred in passing to the image of the ‘breeze-harp’, as used by Unitarian apologists to illustrate Hartley’s and Priestley’s model of the human mind (BL1 117). 14 I have kept to the Dykes Campbell edition of Coleridge’s poetry for the sake of consistency. 15 Yeats quoted this in the review himself (UP1 214). 16 William Gorski sees this as the chemical marriage of the alchemist, but Yeats’s more likely sources are both the Cabala and Rosicrucianism. See William T. Gorski, Yeats and Alchemy, pp. 121–58. 17 Except perhaps in the macrocosmic sense of East and West alternately being male and female (E&I 432). 18 Yeats, The Wind Among the Reeds, p. 22. 19 Oisin tells St Patrick that ‘We galloped; now a hornless deer / Passed by us, chased by a phantom hound / All pearly white, save one red ear’ (VP 11–12, ll. 139–41). 20 Emanuel Swedenborg, The Delights of Wisdom relating to Conjugial Love, n. 32, p. 36 21 Emanuel Swedenborg, A Treatise Concerning Heaven and its Wonders, and also Concerning Hell, p. 255. 22 Yeats may have had both Swedenborg’s marriage of the angels and Coleridge’s definition in mind earlier than 1922, in 1917, when he wrote of the final ‘Condition of Fire’, and stated: ‘We may pray to that last condition by any name so long as we do not pray to it as a thing or a thought, and most prayers call it man or woman or child: For Mercy has a human heart, Pity a human face. Within ourselves Reason and Will, who are the man and woman, hold out towards a hidden altar a laughing or crying child’ (Myth 364). 23 Mario L. D’Avanzo, ‘Yeats’s “Long-legged Fly” ’ The Explicator, 34:3. (1975), no. 23; W. E. Rogers, ‘Yeats’s “Long-legged Fly” and Coleridge’s “Biographia Literaria”’ , Concerning Poetry, 8:1 (1975). 24 Anca Vlasopolos sees echoes of Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria in the ‘synthetic’ imagination of ‘Long-legged Fly’, as a means of subordinating part to whole. She does not look at the water-insect. See Anca Vlasopolos, The Symbolic Method of Coleridge, Baudelaire and Yeats, pp. 170–1. 25 Although Yeats had already undertaken the automatic script by the time he wrote ‘Michael Robartes and the Dancer’, the poem was nevertheless the late expression of an idea gleaned from his early work on Blake, which taught him that the best way to purify one’s mind and make it susceptible to visions was ‘in study of the works of the great masters, who were great because they had



Notes 205

26 27

28 29

30

31 32

33

34

been granted by divine favour a vision of the unfallen world from which others are kept apart by the flaming sword that turns every way’ (1896 [E&I 117]). For example, in ‘Coole Park and Ballylee, 1931’ and other poems (see chapter 4) and A Vision (AV B 68). In his article ‘ “Long-legged Fly” and Yeats’s Conception of Mind’, Dennis Haskell concludes that both the poem’s central metaphor and the actions of the three main figures symbolise the philosophical position expressed in the Correspondence with T. Sturge Moore, that ‘all minds may make under certain circumstances a single mind’, and discerns the ‘psychic unity of Caesar, Helen and Michael Angelo’ (YA10, 250–6 at 254). Not the sage of the 1930 diary or ‘An Acre of Grass’. Yeats clearly recalled an entry in the Commonplace Book in which Berkeley, after looking at the dangerous concepts of Person and Will, wrote: ‘N. B. To use utmost caution not to give least handle of offence to the Church or Church-men’ (see Berkeley, The Commonplace Book, sec. 727, p. 87). In one entry to his Commonplace Book, Berkeley wrote: ‘The substance of Body we know. The substance of Spirit we do not know – it not being knowable, it being a purus actus’ (sec. 713, p. 86). Arthur Waley, An Introduction to the Study of Chinese Painting (1923). Yeats possessed one of only fifty printed copies. Coleridge’s understanding of the term ‘synthetic’ differs from Kant’s notion of synthetic judgement a priori, as opposed to the a posteriori. For Kant there were three major forms of judgement: the analytic, in which the predicate is identical in some way to the subject (e.g. ‘All bodies are extended’), the synthetic, in which the predicate is external to the subject (‘All bodies are heavy’); the one is a priori, dependent upon consulting our innate knowledge in Reason, the other a posteriori, a result of experience collected in the Understanding. The third, the synthetic judgement a priori, is that judgement which intuits truth between unidentical things without experience (e.g. ‘All happenings have a cause’). This higher, intuitive judgement provides evidence of the greater powers of our innate Reason in providing us with knowledge and the power of cognising the world of phenomena presented in our empirical egos. See Immanuel Kant, ‘Prologemena to any Future Metaphysic’, ch. ii, pt 2, pp. 14–16) and Critique of Pure Reason, Intro. pt 4, pp. 30–2. Coleridge terms ‘analytic’ what would have been for Kant in fact synthetic judgements a posteriori. He was, however, a post-Kantian, and his insistence that Kant’s pure theoretic reason was in fact an organ rather than a faculty would have changed his understanding of what the synthetic could be: its intuitions revelatory rather than demonstrable. That he should have attributed the ‘method’ to Shakespeare may be in some small part due to a quotation in brackets in a later paragraph, from Themistius, which Coleridge now used to label Shakespeare as: ‘He that moulded his own soul, as some incorporeal substance, into various forms’ (Fr 321n). Yeats may have discerned a similarity between Coleridge’s description of poor method’s dependency on association and the ‘conditions of time and space’, and his refutation of Hartley in Chapter Seven of the Biographia



206 Notes

Literaria, although there Coleridge was attacking a description of the mind, and here the use of its powers. 35 The fact that Coleridge had also called the ‘primary’ Imagination ‘the living power and prime agent of all human perception, and a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM’ (BL1 304) may have helped Yeats to see Coleridge’s theory of imagination in such a way, but direct evidence only points to his interpretation of The Friend.

Conclusion 1 R. F. Foster, W. B. Yeats: A Life, Part One, p. 86.



Notes 207

The Bibliography does not include works included in the List of Abbreviations (pp. vii–ix; namely those primary works by Yeats and Coleridge most frequently cited in this book), and is divided under the following subsections: (a) Secondary Sources on Yeats: (i) Books, (ii) Articles; (b) Secondary Sources on Coleridge; (c) Other Secondary Sources; (d) Other Primary Sources; (e) Manuscripts. Those primary texts by Yeats and Coleridge not listed in the List of Abbreviations are to be found under section (d).

(a) Secondary sources on Yeats (i) Books Adams, Hazard, Blake and Yeats: the Contrary Vision (Cornell University Press, 1955). Archibald, Douglas, Yeats (New York: Syracuse University Press, 1983). Bloom, Harold, Yeats (London, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1970). Bornstein, George, Yeats and Shelley (London and Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970). ——, Transformations of Romanticism in Yeats, Eliot, and Stevens (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1977). Cullingford, Elizabeth, Yeats, Ireland and Fascism (Basingstoke and London: Macmillan, 1981). ——, Gender and History in Yeats’s Love Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). Ellis, Steve, Dante and English Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). Ellmann, Richard, The Identity of Yeats (London: Macmillan, 1954). Esterley, James, ‘Yeats, Plotinus, and Symbolic Perception’. PhD thesis, University of Cambridge, 1972. Foster, R. F., W. B. Yeats: A Life. Part One: the Apprentice Mage, 1865–1914 (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). Gorski, William T., Yeats and Alchemy (New York: SUNY Press, 1996). Grossman, Allen R., Poetic Knowledge in the Early Yeats (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1969). Harwood, John, Olivia Shakespear and W. B. Yeats (London: Macmillan, 1989). Mokashi-Punekar, Shankar, The Later Phase in the Development of W. B. Yeats (Dharwar: Karnatak University, 1966). Moore, Virginia, The Unicorn: William Butler Yeats’s Search for Reality (New York, Chicago, Dallas, Atlanta and San Francisco: Macmillan, 1952). Snukal, Robert, High Talk: The Philosophical Poetry of W. B. Yeats (London: Cambridge University Press, 1973). 208



Bibliography

Stallworthy, Jon, Between the Lines: Yeats’s Poetry in the Making (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963). Torchiana, Donald T., W. B. Yeats and Georgian Ireland (Evanston: North Western University Press, 1966). Vlasopolos, Anca, The Symbolic Method of Coleridge, Baudelaire and Yeats (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1983).

(ii) Articles Alspach, Russell K., ‘Yeats and Innisfree’, Yeats Centenary Papers (Dublin: Dolmen Press, 1965), no. 3. Baron, Michael, ‘Yeats, Wordsworth and the Communal Sense: the Case of “If I were Four-and-Twenty” ’, YA5 (1987), 62–82. D’Avanzo, Mario L., ‘Yeats’s “Long-legged Fly” ’, The Explicator, 34:3 (November 1975), no. 23. Donoghue, Denis, ‘On “The Winding Stair” ’, An Honoured Guest: New Essays on W. B. Yeats, ed. Denis Donoghue and J. R. Mulryne (London: Edward Arnold, 1962), pp. 106–23 at p. 121. Fixler, Michael J., ‘The Affinities between J.-K. Huysmans and the “Rosicrucian” Stories of W. B. Yeats’, PMLA, 74 (1959), 464 –9. Foley, T. P., ‘A Source for Yeats’s “Terrible Beauty” ’, Notes and Queries (1984), 509. Gibson, Matthew, ‘ “What Empty Eyeballs Knew”: Zen Buddhism in Yeats’s “The Statues” and the “Principles” of A Vision’, YA11 (1995), 141–57. ——, ‘Satori in Yeats’s “Stream and Sun at Glendalough” ’, Irish University Review, 28:1, ed. Anthony Roche (Dublin, 1998), 28–36. Gould, Warwick, ‘Lionel Johnson Comes First to Mind: Sources for Owen Aherne’, Yeats and the Occult, ed. G. M. Harper (Toronto: Macmillan, 1975), pp. 255–84. ——, ‘A Crowded Theatre: Yeats and Balzac’, Yeats the European, ed. A. N. Jeffares (Gerards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1989), pp. 69–90. Haskell, Dennis, ‘ “Long-legged Fly” and Yeats’s Conception of Mind’, YA10 (1993), 250 –6. Healey, T. Jeremiah, III, ‘ “That Which is Unique in Man”: The Lightning Flash in Yeats’s Later Thought’, YA13 (1997), 253–61. Jeffares, A. Norman, ‘Yeats’s Mask’, The Circus Animals: Essays on W. B. Yeats (Basingstoke and London: Macmillan, 1970), pp. 3–14. Kiberd, Declan, ‘Inventing Irelands’, Yeats’s Political Identities, ed. Jonathan Allison (Ann Arbor : University of Michigan Press, 1996), pp. 145–64. McDowell, Colin, ‘The Six Discarnate States of A Vision (1937)’, YAACTS4 (1986), 87–98. ——, ‘To Beat Upon the Wall: Reading A Vision’, YA4 (1987), 219–27. ——, ‘ “The Completed Symbol”: Daimonic Existence and the Great Wheel in A Vision (1937)’, YA6 (1989), 193–208. Olney, James, ‘Some Versions of Memory/Some Versions of Bios: The Ontology of Autobiography’, Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical, ed. James Olney (Guildford and Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), pp. 236–67. Perloff, Marjorie. ‘ “Another Emblem There”: Theme and Convention in Yeats’s “Coole Park and Ballylee, 1931” ’, Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 69:2 (1970), 223– 40.



Bibliography 209

Powell, Grosvenor E., ‘Yeats’s Second “Vision”: Berkeley, Coleridge, and the Correspondence with Sturge Moore’, Modern Language Review, 76 (1981), 273–90. Ritvo, Rosemary Puglia, ‘A Vision B: The Plotinian Metaphysical Basis’, Review of English Studies, 26 (1975), 34 – 46. Rogers, William Elford, ‘Yeats’s “Long-legged Fly” and Coleridge’s “Biographia Literaria” ’, Concerning Poetry, 8:1 (Spring 1975). Stallworthy, Jon, ‘W. B. Yeats and Wilfred Owen’, Critical Quarterly, 11 (1969), 198–215.

(b) Secondary sources on Coleridge Bate, Walter Jackson, Coleridge (New York: Macmillan; London: CollierMacmillan, 1968). Beer, John, Coleridge the Visionary (London: Chatto and Windus, 1959). ——, Coleridge’s Poetic Intelligence (London: Macmillan, 1977). Coleman, Deirdre, Coleridge and the Friend (1809–10) (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988). Hamilton, Paul, Coleridge’s Poetics (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1983). Jaspers, David, Coleridge as Poet and Religious Thinker (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1985). Kessler, Edward, Coleridge’s Metaphors of Being (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979). Leask, Nigel, The Politics of Imagination: Coleridge’s Critical Thought (Basingstoke and London: Macmillan, 1988). McNiece, Gerald, The Knowledge that Endures: Coleridge, German Philosophy and the Logic of Romantic Thought (Basingstoke and London: Macmillan, 1992). Morrow, John, Coleridge’s Political Thought: Property, Morality and the Limits of Traditional Discourse (Basingstoke and London: Macmillan, 1990). Piper, H. W., The Singing of Mount Abora: Coleridge’s Use of Biblical Imagery and Natural Symbolism in Poetry and Philosophy (Rutherford, Madison, Teaneck: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press; London and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1987). Richards, I. A., Coleridge on Imagination (London: Kegan & Paul, 1934). Rookmaaker, H. R., Towards a Romantic Conception of Nature: Coleridge’s Poetry up to 1803 (Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1984). Tave, Katharine Bruner, The Demon and the Poet: An Interpretation of ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ according to Coleridge’s Demonological Sources (Salzburg: Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, 1983). Wheeler, Kathleen, Sources, Processes and Methods in Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria (Cambridge, London, New York, New Rochelle, Melbourne and Sydney: Cambridge University Press, 1980). ——, The Creative Mind in Coleridge’s Poetry (London: Heinemann Educational, 1981). de Man, Paul, Blindness and Insight: Essay in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism, 2nd (revised) edn (London: Methuen, 1984). ——, Romanticism, Pragmatism and Deconstruction (Oxford and Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1993).



210 Bibliography

Bibliography 211

Abrams, M. H., The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and Critical Tradition (London, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1953). Armstrong, Isobel, Victorian Scrutinies: Reviews of Poetry, 1830–1870 (London: Athlone Press, 1972). Bloom, Harold, The Map of Misreading (Oxford, New York, Toronto and Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1980). Grant, Robert McQueen, Gnosticism and Early Christianity (New York: Columbia University Press, 1959). Hollander, John, The Figure of Echo: A Mode of Allusion in Milton and After (London and Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981). Holloway, John, The Victorian Sage (London: Macmillan, 1953). Hone, J. M. and Rossi, M. M., Swift, or the Egoist (London: Victor Gollancz, 1934). Iser, Wolfgang, Walter Pater: the Aesthetic Moment, trans. D. H. Wilson (Cambridge, London and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987). Jefferson, Ann, Reading Realism in Stendhal, Cambridge Studies in French (Cambridge, London, New York, New Rochelle, Melbourne and Sydney: Cambridge University Press, 1988). Lewis, Douglas, ‘Moore’s Realism’, Moore and Ryle: Two Ontologists, Laird Addis and Douglas Lewis, Iowa Publications in Philosophy (Iowa City: University of Iowa; The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1965), pp. 102–84. Palmer, Norman Dunbar, The Irish Land League Crisis (New York: Octagon Books; a Division of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1928). Pulos, C. E., The Deep Truth: a Study of Shelley’s Scepticism (London: University of Nebraska Press, 1954). Richards, I. A., Practical Criticism: a Study of Literary Judgement (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1929). Robb, Nesca, Neoplatonism of the Italian Renaissance (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1935).

(d) Other primary sources Editions to be found in Yeats’s personal library are given their Catalogue number in O’Shea’s A Descriptive Catalog of Yeats’ Library, at the end of their entry, with YL followed by number. Aristotle, De Sensu and De Memoria, trans. G. R. T. Ross (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1906). Arnold, Matthew, Essays in Criticism, 3rd edn (London: Macmillan, 1875). ——, The Poems of Matthew Arnold, ed. A. T. Quiller-Couch (London: Henry Froude, 1909). ——, Letters of Matthew Arnold, 1848–1888, ed. George W. E. Russell, 2 vols (London and New York: Macmillan, 1895 [YL 52]). Balzac, Honoré de, Comédie Humaine, ed. George Saintsbury, 40 vols (London: J. M. Dent; New York: Macmillan, 1897–1901), 34: ‘Séraphita’, trans. Clara Bell (YL 106). Berkeley, George, The Works of George Berkeley D.D., Late Bishop of Cloyne in Ireland, 2 vols (London: G. Robinson; Dublin: John Exshaw, 1758 [YL 160]).



(c) Other secondary sources

——, Essays, Principles, Dialogue, with Selections from Other Writings, ed. Mary Whitton Calkins, The Modern Student’s Library: Philosophy Series (London: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1929). ——, Berkeley’s Commonplace Book, ed. G. A. Johnston (London: Faber & Faber, 1930 [YL 159]). Burke, Edmund, The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Bohn’s Standard Library, 3 vols (London: George Bell, 1877–83 [YL 306]). Carlyle, Thomas, The Life of John Sterling (London: Chapman & Hall, 1851). Charpentier, John, Coleridge, the Sublime Somnambulist, trans. M. V. Nugent (London: Constable Press, 1929 [YL 371]). Coleridge, S. T., Christabel and the Lyrical and Imaginative Poems of S. T. Coleridge, arranged and introduced by Algernon Charles Swinburne (London: Sampson Low, Son, & Marston, 1869). ——, Aids to Reflection in the Foundation of a Manly Character on the Several Grounds of Prudence, Morality and Religion (Liverpool: Edward Howell, 1873). ——, Biographia Literaria … and Two Lay Sermons; vol. I: The Statesman’s Manual; vol. II: Blessed are Ye that Sow beside all Waters, new edn (London: George Bell, 1876 [401]). ——, Coleridge: the Critical Heritage, ed. J. R. de J. Jackson, vol. 2: 1834–1900 (London and New York: Routledge, 1991). ——, On the Constitution of Church and State, ed. John Colmer (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul; Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976); Collected Works, ed. Kathleen Coburn, vol. 10. ——, Coleridge, Poetical Works, ed. Ernest Hartley Coleridge (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1912). ——, Poems of Coleridge, sel. and arr. Arthur Symons (London: Methuen, 1905 [YL 403]). Duhem, Pierre, Le Système du Monde: Histoire des Doctrines Cosmologiques de Platon à Copernic, 10 vols (Paris: Librairie Scientifique, A, Hermann et fils, 1910 –28). Eliot, T. S., Selected Prose, ed. Frank Kermode (London: Faber & Faber, 1975). Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics, ed. James Hastings, 13 vols (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clarke; New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1912). The Enemy: A Review of Art and Literature (London, January 1927). Farnell, Richard Lewis, The Cults of the Greek States, 5 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1896–1909 [YL 659]). Flaubert, Gustave, The Temptation of St. Anthony, trans. D. F. Hannigan (London: H. S. Nichols, 1895 [YL 682]). Gosse, Edmund (ed.), Restoration Plays from Dryden to Farguar (London: J. M. Dent, 1925 [YL 1737]). Gregory, Lady, Coole (Dublin: Cuala Press, 1931). Hafiz and his Rubaiyat, trans. Dr Zahmurul Hassan Sharib (Southampton: Polygon, 1993). Hallam, Arthur, Remains in Verse and Prose (London: John Murray, 1863). ——, The Poems of Arthur Henry Hallam, Together with his Essay on the Lyrical Poems of Alfred Tennyson, ed. Richard Le Gallienne (London: Elkin Mathews and John Lane, 1893; New York: Macmillan, 1893 [YL 830]). Hartley, David, Observations on Man: His Frame, His Duty and His Expectations, 2 vols (London: Printed by S. Richardson, 1749).



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Heard, Gerald, The Ascent of Humanity: an Essay on the Evolution of Civilisation (London: Jonathan Cape, 1929 [YL 865]). Hobbes, Thomas, Leviathan, ed. Richard Tuck (Cambridge, New York, Port Chester, Melbourne and Sydney: Cambridge University Press, 1990). Hone, J. M. and Rossi, M. M., Bishop Berkeley: His Life, Writing and Philosophy (London: Faber & Faber, 1931 [YL 991]). —— ——, Swift, or the Egoist (London: Victor Gollancz, 1934). James, Henry, What Maisie Knew, ed. Adrian Poole, The World’s Classics (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1996). Johnson, Samuel, Mr Johnson’s Preface to his Edition of Shakespeare’s Plays (London: J. & R. Tonson, H. Woodfall, 1765). ——, The Complete English Poems, ed. J. D. Fleeman (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1971). Kant, Immanuel, ‘Prologemena to any Future Metaphysic’, Kant’s Critical Philosophy for English Readers, trans. and ed. J. P. Mahaffy and J. H. Bernard, 3rd edn, 2 vols (London: Macmillan, 1915 [YL 1052]). ——, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. J. M. D. Meiklejohn (London: J. M. Dent; New York: E. P. Dutton, 1934. Keats, John, The Letters of John Keats, ed. Maurice Brixton Forman, 2 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1931 [YL 1054]). ——, The Complete Poems (London: The Softback Preview, 1993). Le Fanu, J. Sheridan, Madam Crowl’s Ghost and Other Tales of Mystery, ed. M. R. James (London: G. Bell, 1923). Lewis, Percy Wyndham, Time and Western Man (London: Chatto & Windus, 1926 [YL 1126]). ——, The Apes of God (London: Arthur Press, 1930 [YL 1116]). Locke, John, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Alexander Campbell Fraser (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1894). Mathers, S. L. (ed.), Kabbala Denudata, translated from the Latin of Knorr von Rosenroth, and collated with the original Chaldee and Hebrew text by S. L. Mathers (London: George Redway, 1887 [YL 1292]). Moore, G. E., Philosophical Studies [repr. from 1922] (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1922). ——, ‘A Defence of Common Sense’, Contemporary British Philosophy, ed. J. H. Muirhead, second series (London: George Allen & Unwin, Ruskin House; New York: Macmillan, 1925), pp. 193–223 (YL 1400). More, Henry, The Immortality of the Soul so farre forth as it is Demonstrable from the Knowledge of Nature and the Light of Reason (London: William Morden, 1659 [YL 1378]). Morris, H[erbert] N[ewall], Flaxman, Blake, Coleridge and other men of genius influenced by Swedenborg. Together with Flaxman’s allegory of the ‘Knight of the Blazing Cross’ (London: New-Church Press, 1915 [YL 1386]). Morris, William, The Well at the World’s End, 2 vols (London: Longmans, Green, 1896 [YL 1394]). Muirhead, J. H., Coleridge as Philosopher, Library of Philosophy (London: George Allen & Unwin; New York: Macmillan, 1930 [YL 1398]). Palladius, The Lausiac History of Palladius, trans. W. K. Lowther Clarke, translations of Christian Literature Series: Greek Texts (London: SPCK, 1898).



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Pater, Walter, The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry, 4th edn (London and New York: Macmillan, 1888 [YL 1539]). ——, Appreciations (London and Edinburgh: Macmillan, 1889). Percy, Thomas (ed.), Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, re-ed. Henry B. Wheatley, 3 vols (London: Swan Sonnenschein, 1889 [YL 1556]). Petrie, W. M. Flinders, The Revolutions of Civilization, 3rd edn (London and New York: Harper & Brothers, 1922). Plato, The Works of Plato, trans. and ed. Thomas Taylor (with nine dialogues by Floyer Sydenham), 5 vols (London: Thomas Taylor, 1804). Plotinus, The Enneads, trans. Stephen Mackenna, 6 vols (London: P. L. Warner for the Medici Society, 1917 [YL 1589–94]). Porphyry, On the Cave of the Nymphs, trans. Thomas Taylor, Theosophical Siftings Series. Seventh Year (London: Theosophical Publishing Society, 1895). Robinson, Henry Crabb, Diary, Reminiscences and Correspondence of Henry Crabb Robinson, 2 vols, ed. Thomas Sadler, 3rd edn (London and New York: Macmillan, 1872). Russell, Bertrand, The Problems of Philosophy (London: Williams and Norgate, 1912). Shelley, Percy Bysshe, The Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. William B. Scott, Excelsior Series (London: Reeves & Turner, 1880 [YL 1908]). ——, Shelley, Essays and Letters, ed. Ernest Rhys, The Camelot Classics (London: Walter Scott, 1882 [YL 1902]). Stendhal, The Red and the Black: A Chronicle of 1830, trans. Horace B. Samuel (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner; New York: E. P. Dutton, 1914). Swedenborg, Emanuel, A Treatise Concerning Heaven and its Wonders, and also Concerning Hell, introduced by T. Hartley (London: T. Goyder, 1823). ——, The Delights of Wisdom relating to Conjugal Love, trans. A. H. Searle (London: Swedenborg Society, 1891 [YL 2038]). Swift, Johnathan, The Works of the Rev. Dr Johnathan Swift, ed. Thomas Sheridan, 17 vols (London: W. Strahan, B. Collins, J. F. and C. Rivington , 1784 [YL 2043]). Synge, John M., Poems and Translation (Churchtown Dundrum: Cuala Press, 1909). Waley, Arthur, An Introduction to the Study of Chinese Painting (London: Ernest Benn, 1923 [YL 2215]). Wellesley, Dorothy, (ed.), Letters on Poetry from W. B. Yeats to Dorothy Wellesley (London: Oxford University Press, 1940). Wordsworth, William, The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, ed. Edward Dowden, Aldine Edition of the British Poets, 7 vols (London: George Bell, 1892 [YL 2292]). Yeats, John B., Letters to his Son W. B. Yeats and Others, 1869–1922, ed. J. M. Hone (London: Faber & Faber, 1944). Yeats, W. B., ‘King Goll’, The Leisure Hour (London, 1887). ——, ‘William Blake and his Illustrations to the Divine Comedy’, The Savoy, ed. Arthur Symons, 4 vols ( July 1896), vol. III, pp. 41–57. ——, The Wind among the Reeds (London: Elkin Mathews, 1899). ——, Passages from the Letters of John Butler Yeats, selected by Ezra Pound (Dublin: Cuala Press, 1917). ——, Wheels and Butterflies (London: Macmillan, 1934).



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(e) Manuscripts Yeats, W. B., Notebook labelled ‘Private’, ‘begun at Rapallo’, 1930 –[1931], NLI MS 30354 ([CM 184], Copy at State University of New York at Stonybrook).



——, Pages from a Diary written in Nineteen Hundred and Thirty (Dublin: Cuala Press, 1944). ——, The Senate Speeches of W. B. Yeats, ed. Donald R. Pearce (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1960; London: Faber & Faber, 1961).

Abbey Theatre, 44 Abrams, M. H., 119–21, 149, 200, 204 Achilles, 77 Adams, Hazard, 1 Adams, Henry, 196 Aeneas, 77 Aeschylus, 113 ‘Ahasuerus’, 35, 36, 39, 41, 42, 51, 86–7 Akenside, Mark, 152, 205 Alcibiades, 168 Alexander the Great, 168 Alexander, Samuel, 142, 203 Alspach, Russell K., 198 Anima Mundi, 11, 12, 130, 189 Archibald, Douglas, 185 Aristotle, 120, 122, 132 Armstrong, Isobel, 184 Arnold, Matthew, 3, 25–6, 40, 191 Empedocles on Etna, 145, 192 Essays in Criticism, 184 Merope, 188 Arnold, Thomas, 185 Associationism, 1, 130, 131–2 Attis cult, 105 Bacon, Sir Francis, 41, 181 Balzac, Honore de, 30, 69, 127 Bate, Walter Jackson, 7, 184, 201, 202 Baudelaire, Charles, 1, 26, 46, 125 Beardsley, Monroe, 24 –5 Beckford, William, 185 Beer, John, 91, 108, 187, 198 Bergson, Henri, 142, 203 Berkeley, George, Bishop of Cloyne, 43, 52– 4, 58, 61, 66, 86–7, 111, 131, 174, 178, 181, 189, 195, 202, 203 ‘esse est percipi’, 194 idealist philosophy of, 29–30, 31–2, 43, 53– 4, 113, 137–8, 139– 44

and Platonism, 168–70 as sage, 33– 4, 52, 84, 176 and spirit, 151 The Commonplace Book, 189, 206 Siris, 79, 150 Blake, William, 1, 2, 12, 17, 36, 41, 54, 83, 127, 167, 176, 178, 179, 186, 205 the Four Zoas, 150 –1, 158–9 illustrations to the Divine Comedy, 15–16, 149, 181, 186, 204 ‘The Mental Traveller’, 158 mirror in, 122–3 Bloom, Harold, 1, 6–7, 88–9, 119, 185, 198 Body of Fate, 37, 54, 158 Boehme, Jacob, 4, 122, 178 Boethius, 178 Bornstein, George, 1, 99, 102, 106, 199 Browning, Robert, 24, 26 Brutus (Roman Senator), 77 Buddhism (Hinayana), 141 Burke, Edmund, 58, 61, 76, 180, 196 as sage, 32– 4, 52 An Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs, 29–30 Reflections on the Revolution in France, 72–3, 195 ‘Speech from the Throne’, 196–7 Burnett, Sir Thomas, 101 Burns, Robert, 13 Byron, Lord, 20, 146 Cabalism, 112, 150, 158, 160, 197, 200, 204 Caesar ( Julius), 166, 168, 206 Calkins, Mary Whitton, 142–3, 203 Campbell, James Dykes, 177, 182, 197, 205

216



Index

Carlyle, Thomas, 3, 36, 48–9, 117, 184 Cato, 77 Celestial Body, 62, 64, 66–7, 81, 168, 170, 173– 4, 182 Charpentier, John Coleridge the Sublime Somnambulist, 32, 46–9, 53, 64, 86, 87, 11, 140, 177, 182, 183, 189, 191 Chatterjee, Mohini, 78 Christ, 38, 40, 87, 168, 191 Church of England, 92, 117, 155 Coleman, Deirdre, 70, 72, 73, 195, 196 Coleridge, Derwent, 24 Coleridge, Ernest H., 3, 184, 197 Coleridge, Herbert N., 184, 187 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, Themes: analysis and synthesis, 206 as Berkeleian, 31–2, 43, 87, 111, 140, 169–70 and Christianity, 25, 27, 185 Imagination, 165–6, 174, 207 Imagination/Fancy distinction, 46, 149–50, 204 at Highgate, 4, 33– 4, 47–9, 157, 193 and Kant, 63– 4, 180, 182 in Lyrical Ballads, 19, 45–6 and mysticism, 4, 14, 16, 24, 157–65 as passive poet, 20, 27, 45–6 as philosopher, 5, 43– 4, 46, 49, 52, 57–85, 179 as political thinker, 30 –1, 57–8, 67–78 as post-Kantian, 63– 4, 66, 206 as proto-Aesthete, 14, 17, 24 –7, 44, 52, 101 as proto-Symbolist 3, 15–16, 17, 26, 32, 46 Reason and Understanding, 46, 58, 62–7, 69–78, 84, 171–3, 182 as sage, 5, 33–5, 42–6, 48–9, 88, 104, 113, 117, 174 and Wordsworth, 4, 17, 19, 21, 41

217

Works: prose volumes Aids to Reflection, 3, 64, 117, 184, 187, 200 Anima Poetae, 3, 23– 4, 184 Biographia Epistolaris, 177 Biographia Literaria, 1, 2, 3, 4, 7, 19, 23, 27, 46, 57, 175, 177, 179, 180 –1, 183, 185, 186, 188, 189, 194, 195, 196, 202, 205, 206–7 imagination in, 150, 165–6, 174, 207 mirror-metaphor in, 117, 121, 131–3, 135–6 water-insect in, 165–6, 169, 174, 206–7 Collected Letters, 201 Collected Poems, 83, 90 –1, 94, 99–100, 106, 107–8, 112, 155, 156–7, 177, 199, 204 Essays on his Times, 189 The Friend (1818), 4, 31, 46, 58, 62–7, 69–73, 76, 166, 169, 171–3, 176, 177, 179, 180, 181–2, 183, 184, 195, 196–7, 206, 207 Lectures on Politics and Religion, 92 Notebooks, 24 On the Constitution of Church and State, 4, 185 Table Talk, 3, 4, 14, 117, 158, 161–2, 178, 182, 184, 187–8 Treatise on Method, 66, 171 The Watchman, 2, 180 essays ‘Blessed are Ye who Sow beside All Waters’, 177, 180, 181 ‘Pitt and Bonaparte’, 189 ‘The Statesman’s Manual’, 177, 180 –1 poems ‘The British Stripling’s Warsong’, 188 ‘Christabel’, 5, 32, 41, 86–7, 107–13, 178, 185 ‘Dejection, Ode on’, 204 ‘The Eolian Harp’, 156–7



Index

‘Fears in Solitude’, 30, 49, 57, 87, 180, 189 ‘Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, Ode to’, 178 ‘Hexameters, Written during a Temporary Blindness’, 31, 43, 49, 189 ‘Kubla Khan’, 5, 24 –6, 32, 41, 44, 86–7, 89–99, 113, 188 ‘Phantom’, 23 ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’, 5, 21, 25–6, 27, 32, 44, 86–7, 92, 99–107, 113, 178 ‘Sunset’, 198 ‘To a Gentleman’, 204 ‘What is Life?’, 83–5, 197 Coleridge, Sara, 24 Colmer, John, 185 Commodus, 25 Common Sense philosophy, 58, 136 Coptic Christianity, 163 Creative Mind, 37, 59–60, 158, 160, 165, 182 Cretan civilisation, 74 Croce, Benedetto, 136 Cudworth, Henry, 101 Cullingford, Elizabeth, 30, 69, 189, 195, 199 Daimon (of A Vision), 37, 53, 66, 79, 103, 158, 160, 161, 173, 174, 187 Dana, Irish Goddess, 159 Dante, 152, 204 Darwin, Erasmus, 101 D’Avanzo, Mario L., 165, 167, 205 Davitt, Michael, 133– 4 de la Mare, Walter, 87 de Lisle Adam, Villiers, 15–16, 17 de Loutherby, 185 de Man, Paul, 118, 200 des Esseintes’, 125 Dickens, Charles, 201 Dionertes (automatic speech control), 29 Disraeli, Benjamin, 117

Donoghue, Denis, 102, 109 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 201 Dowden, Edward, 153– 4, 176 Dowson, Ernest, 24 –6, 27, 52 Duhem, Pierre, 75, 197 Dulac, Edmund, 29 Echo, theory of, 6, 88–90; see also Hollander, John Egypt, Ancient, 74 –5 Eliot, George, 201 Eliot, T. S., 142, 203 Ellis, Edwin J., 14, 122, 150, 154 Ellis, Steve, 204 Ellman, Richard, 105, 199 Empedocles, 83 Empiricism, 120 –1, 126–7, 131– 4, 140 Engell, James, 7 Enlightenment, the, 29, 77, 119, 120 Etruscan Cosmogony, 75, 197 Farnell, Richard Lewis, 3, 199 Fascism, 71 Ferguson, Sir Samuel, 13, 152, 154 –5, 156 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 63 Ficino, Marsilio, 121 Fixler, Michael J., 125, 201 Flaubert, Gustave, 127–30, 193, 201 Flaxman, 178 Foley, T. P., 188 Foster, Roy, 176, 207 Fox, George, 57 Fragonard, 33, 193 French Revolution, 71–2, 77 Freudianism, 89 Fricker, Sara, 155 Frobenius, Leo, 71 Furies, 109, 110, 112–13 Garnett, Richard, 123 Gentile, Giovanni, 136 Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, 178 Gillman, James, 48 ‘Giraldus’, 29



218 Index

Gladstone, Sir William, 176, 185 Gnosticism, 82, 150, 197 Goethe, 20, 123 Gogarty, Oliver St John, 29 Goldsmith, Oliver, 20, 29, 52 Gonne, Maud, 152, 153, 155–6, 158–9, 160, 186 Gore-Booth, Eva, 51 Gorski, William T., 205 Gosse, Edmund, 192 Gould, Warwick L., 185 Grant, Robert McQueen, 197 Green, Joseph Henry, 3, 178, 182, 184 Gregory, Lady Augusta, 33, 44, 69, 96, 158, 198 Gregory, Major Robert, 42, 146 Grossman, Allen R., 204 Hafiz (and his Rubaiyat), 34, 193 Hallam, Arthur Henry, 16–17, 26, 186, 187, 188 Harper, George Mills, 127, 191 Harrington, James, 195 Harris, Frank, 202 Hartley, David, 32, 57, 101, 121, 173, 180, 181, 189, 205, 206 in Biographia Literaria, 131–3, 135–6, 144, 148, 155, 201 Harwood, John, 186 Haskell, Denis, 206 Hastings, James, 197, 198 Healey, T. Jeremiah, 191 Heard, Gerald, 62, 74, 76, 195, 196 Hegel, and Hegelianism, 3, 54, 78 Heraclitus, 97–8, 102, 104 Hobbes, Thomas, 120, 132 Hollander, John, 6, 88–90, 119, 157, 185, 198 Holloway, John, 49, 117–18, 193, 199, 200 Holmes, Richard, 2, 176 Homer, 13, 93, 97 Hood, Walter Kelly, 127 Hooker, Richard, 69 Hone, J. M. and Rossi, M. M., 35, 141, 168, 191, 195

219

Hugo, Victor, 13 Hugues, Clovis, 152 Hurd, Bishop, 120 Husk, 65, 67, 79, 81, 102, 150, 151, 173, 187 Huysmans, J. K. de, 125, 201 Hyde, Douglas, 14 Impressionism, 26 Irish Agrarian Movement, 134 Irish Dramatic Movement, 45 Irish National Theatre, 18 Irish Republican Movement, 134 Iser, Wolfgang, 3, 184 Italian idealism, 182 Jackson, J. R de J., 184, 186 Jacobi, 65 Jacobinism, 189, 196 James, Henry, 11 James, William, 142 Jeffares, A. N., 93, 185, 199 Jefferson, Ann, 126, 201 Johnson, Lionel, 11, 16–17, 25–7, 52, 182, 185 Johnson, Samuel, 35, 120, 122, 191, 200 Jonson, Ben, 120 Joubert, Joseph, 3, 184, 193 Joyce, James, 141–2, 203 Joyce, R. D., 13–14, 16, 17 Judwalis (or Diagrammatists), 98 Kant, Immanuel, 32, 69, 87, 131, 182, 189, 196 analysis and synthesis, 206 Reason and Understanding, 58, 63– 4 Critique of Pure Reason, 194, 206 Kantianism, 180 Keats, John, 1, 5, 20, 36, 123, 184, 191 Kessler, Edward, 188 Kiberd, Declan, 198 Kingsley, Charles, 188 Lalor, James Fintan, 134 Lane, Sir Hugh, 69, 93 Lewis, Matthew, 187



Index

220 Index

McDowell, Colin, 53, 187, 193, 194, 197, 199 MacKenna, Steven, 60, 201 Mackintosh, James, 131–2, 194 McNiece, Gerald, 63, 194 Mallarmé, Stéphane, 26, 32– 4, 44, 47, 190 Markiewicz, Constance, 51 Martyn, Sir Edward, 69 Marx, Karl, 78 Mask (in A Vision), 37, 54, 60, 154, 161, 168 Mathers, S. L. Macgregor, 118, 158, 163, 200, 204 as sage, 36, 38 ‘Michael Robartes’, 124 –6, 167, 200, 201, 204 –5 Michelangelo, 51, 166, 167, 206 Milton, John, 89, 155, 184, 204 Mokashi-Punekar, Shankar, 53, 66, 193, 195 Moore, G. E., 136– 41, 143, 148, 202, 203 Moore, T. Sturge, 58, 64, 86, 136–8, 142, 143, 195, 202, 206 Moore, Virginia, 139, 201 More, Henry, 22–3, 101, 187 Morrow, John, 192 Morris H. N. (Swedenborgian), 178, 182 Morris, William, 19, 40, 192 ‘Motemuzeka’ (Noh play), 103 Muirhead, J. H., 86, 179, 182, 183, 184, 185, 194

Mussolini, 30, 71 Napoleon, 70, 72, 78 Necessitarianism, 32, 87, 91–2, 101, 198, 201 Neo-Platonism, 4, 50, 57, 87, 97, 100, 199 in theory of Echo, 89 in A Vision (1937), 53, 60 –1, 64 –7, 168, 198 transcendental mirror of, 121, 123 Neo-realism, 138– 40 Newman, Cardinal, 117 Newton, Sir Isaac, 101 Niam (Irish Goddess), 159 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 22, 200 O’Connor, Frank, 175 Oedipus, 32, 38, 44, 45, 46, 189, 191 O’Higgins, Kevin, 198 Olney, James, 186 O’Shea, Edward, 177–80, 183 Otway, Thomas, 192 Ovid, 89 Owen, Wilfred, 145, 203 Palladius, 33, 193 Palmer, Norman Dunbar, 202 Panofsky, Erwin, 118 Parisious, Roger Nyle, 177 Passionate Body, 60, 65, 67, 79, 81, 102, 151, 173, 187 Patanjali, 108, 109 Pater, Walter, 184, 187, 203 and Aestheticism, 3, 12, 16 as sage, 36 Patmore, Coventry, 177, 179, 181 Pearse, Patrick, 146 Percy, Bishop, 19, 21, 187 Perloff, Marjorie, 97, 198 Petrarch, 193 Petrie, W. M. Flinders, 62, 74 –6, 78, 195 Piper, H. W., 91, 101, 108, 198 Pirandello, Luigi, 64 Pitt the Younger, William, 189 Plato, 50, 58, 63, 69, 121, 178, 200



Lewis, P. Wyndham, The Apes of God, 64, 73– 4, 197 The Enemy, 203 Time and Western Man, 142–3, 203 Le Fanu, J. Sheridan, 11, 185–6 Locke, John, 61, 127, 132, 148, 202 mirror of empiricism, 119–20 primary and secondary qualities, 137, 140, 142, 143 Lowes, J. L., 100, 101 Luther, Martin, 72

Index

Quinn, John, 27, 29, 57, 184 Quintillian, 88 Raleigh, Sir Walter, 181 Read, Herbert, 110, 145, 146, 150 Rhymers’ Club, 17 Rhys, Ernest, 200 Ritvo, Rosemary Puglia, 60 –1, 194 Robb, Nesca, 118, 200 Robinson, Henry Crabb, 48, 186 Rogers, William Elford, 165–6, 205 Rookmaaker, Howard R., 100, 199 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, 25 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 70, 72, 73, 77, 120, 195, 196 Ruskin, John, 137–8, 202

Russell, Bertrand, 136, 137–8, 141, 202 Russell, George, 161, 164 Sage (of A Vision), 37, 53, 66, 79, 103, 158, 160, 161, 173, 174, 187 Saint Anthony, 33, 38, 48, 190, 193 Saint Augustine, 88 Saint Bernard, 84 Saint John, 188 Saint Paul, 181, 188 Saint Teresa, 105 Saint Thomas Aquinas, 23 Sainte-Beuve, 18 Schelling, Friedrich J., 63, 66, 87 Schiller, Friedrich, 122, 178 Schlegel, Friedrich von, 63, 87 Schneider, Hermann, 76 Scott, Sir Walter, 13 Shakespear, Olivia, 54, 189, 203 Shakespeare, 24, 40, 122, 184, 186, 206 Hamlet, 169, 171–3 Henry IV, Pt 1, 172 Romeo and Juliet, 169, 173 Shelley, P. B, 1, 2, 5, 13, 14, 17, 20, 25, 117–18, 122, 150 –1, 156, 176, 188, 191, 198, 200 ‘Adonais’, 123– 4, 200 Defence of Poetry, 123, 154 –5, 204 ‘Hellas’, 35, 41, 86 ‘Ode to the West Wind’, 86 ‘Prince Athanase’, 39, 204 Prometheus Unbound, 98, 199, 200 ‘Queen Mab’, 35 ‘The Revolt of Islam’, 35, 39, 93– 4 Sidnell, Michael J., 203 Smart, Christopher, 146 Snukal, Robert, 1, 119, 184, 200, 201 Socrates, 120 Sophocles, 40, 44 Spengler, Oswald, 71 Spenser, Edmund, 24 Spinoza, 27, 181, 188



Timaeus, 22, 121, 200 Republic, 120 Symposium, 121 Byzantine Academy of, 104 Platonism, 53, 57, 87, 113, 173, 187 in ‘Coole Park and Ballylee, 1931’, 97–9 in theory of art, 121 of Shelley, 124 Plotinus, 73, 93, 97, 121, 186 and A Vision (1937), 60 –2, 64 –7, 104 Plutarch, 75 Poe, Edgar Allan, 125 Polybius, 68 Porphyry, 93, 97, 198 Post-Kantianism, 63– 4, 66, 206 Potter, Stephen, 178 Pound, Ezra, 29, 142, 191, 192, 203 Cantos, 141, 143, 203 Powell, Grosvenor E., 65, 139, 202 Priestley, Joseph, 32, 185, 198, 201 and Hartley’s Doctrine of Vibrations, 101, 131, 133, 144 Proust, Marcel, 141 Pulos, Christos E., 200 Puttenham, George, 88 Pythagoras, 74, 187

221

Stallworthy, Jon, 102, 103, 199, 203 Stein, Gertrude, 142 Stendhal, 122, 126–30, 136, 141 Sterling, John, 184 Strachey, Lytton, 74 Stratford-upon-Avon, 123 Strong, Eugenie, 103 Stylites, St Simeon, 38 Swami, Shri Purohit, 78 Swedenborg, Emanuel, 4, 14, 16, 23, 36, 38, 54, 185 ‘marriage of the angels’, 161–5, 205 as primary Sage in A Vision (1925), 36, 38, 129–30 Swift, Jonathan, 32, 43, 52, 57, 179, 180, 181, 194 ‘Discourse’, 29, 30 –1, 64, 68–9, 71–2, 195 Epitaph, 190 Yeats’s portrayal of, 77–8 as sage, 33– 4, 76 Swinburne, Algernon Charles, 185 Symons, Arthur, 26, 32, 86, 188 Synge, J. M., 20 –1, 27, 33, 44 –5, 187, 203 Poems and Translations, 193 ‘Riders to the Sea’, 192 Tave, Katherine Bruner, 100, 199 Taylor, Thomas, 178 Tennyson, Alfred Lord, 16–17, 24, 26, 187 Thirteenth Cone, 5, 53, 54, 60, 67, 76, 84, 102, 103, 169, 170 Thomas of Durlowicz, 37 Thomson, James, 205 ‘Tiresias’, 33, 45, 46, 48, 190 Todhunter, John, 176 Torchiana, Donald T., 30, 139, 186, 188, 195, 202 Trinitarianism, 87 Turner, Walter J., 110, 146, 150 Unitarianism, 2, 87, 91–2, 101, 103, 131 United Ireland, 152

United Irishman, 153 Unity of Being, 26, 37, 49, 84, 113, 129, 135–6, 147, 157, 162, 204 Unity of Culture, 19, 26, 27, 46, 93 Upanishads, the, 78–85 Mandukya Upanishad, 78, 81, 83, 87 Prasna Upanishad, 79, 83 Vaughan, Henry, 200 Vico, Giambattista, 69, 78 Victim (of A Vision), 37, 38, 39, 41, 44, 73, 173, 176, 191, 192 Vlasopolos, Anca, 1, 3, 184, 205 Von Hügel, 103, 105, 107 Waley, Arthur, 206 war poets, 145–7, 148 Warburton, Bishop, 120 Wellesley, Dorothy, 107–13, 147, 199 Wheeler, Kathleen, 117–18, 188, 200 –1 Whitehead, Alfred N., 142, 143, 203 Wilde, Oscar, 5 Will, 37, 39, 60, 61, 174 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 178 Wordsworth, William, 5, 13–14, 17, 31, 38, 41, 58, 91, 178 The Excursion, 35, 40, 41, 87, 191 Lyrical Ballads, 19, 21, 25, 26, 27, 188 The Prelude, 149 Yeats, George, 37, 192 Yeats, J. B., 152– 4, 156, 157, 204 Yeats, W. B., Collected prose volumes: Autobiographies, 11, 24 –6, 27, 38–9, 45, 57, 92, 112, 129, 130, 134 –6, 152, 161–2, 180, 188, 193 Correspondence, with T. Sturge Moore, 58, 64, 136– 40, 142, 180, 202, 206



222 Index

A Critical Edition of Yeats’s A Vision (1925), 22, 26, 34, 113, 127–8, 130, 136, 144, 147, 157, 158, 160 –1, 164, 191; Sage and Victim in, 36–7, 38, 39 Essays and Introductions, 18, 20 –1, 22, 27, 36, 40, 41, 46, 53– 4, 79, 82, 83, 84, 86, 93, 97, 98, 118, 123, 127, 140, 141– 4, 150, 151, 159–6, 169–70, 172– 4, 176, 181, 186, 187, 188, 192, 193, 204, 205, 206 Explorations, 18–19, 21, 24, 27, 34 –5, 39– 40, 41–2, 42–6, 48–9, 52, 57–8, 61, 64, 68–9, 71–2, 74, 78, 79, 84, 98, 111, 117, 127, 129, 140, 150, 151, 158, 168, 180, 192, 204 Letters (includes new Collected Edition), 18, 54, 163, 189, 203 Letters to Dorothy Wellesley, 110, 111–12, 199 Memoirs, 12, 36 Mythologies, 22–3, 36, 42, 79, 105, 112, 123, 128–9, 130, 136, 160, 164, 168, 174, 205 Oxford Book of Modern Verse, 42, 86–7, 98, 110, 122, 145–7, 14, 150, 192, 199, 203 Senate Speeches, 198 The Ten Principal Upanishads, 78–9, 82 Uncollected Prose, 13–14, 17, 119, 123, 152, 154, 188, 200, 205 Variorum Secret Rose (second edition), 124 –6, 129 A Vision (1937) (includes general references to A Vision), 5, 6, 29, 49, 53, 87, 97, 98, 102–3, 119, 148, 151, 158, 161, 165, 174, 176, 182, 192, 194, 201, 206; cyclical theories of,

223

73–5, 76–7; and Plotinus, 60 –2, 65, 67; and Upanishads, 79–81, 83– 4 Works of William Blake, 14, 122, 150, 159, 204 Yeats’s Vision Papers, 11–12, 37, 38, 102 Collected poetry and plays: Variorum Plays, 36, 77–8 Variorum Poetry, 12, 35, 42, 50 –2, 74, 92–3, 94, 96, 98, 102–6, 109–13, 124, 163, 190 –1, 193, 199, 204, 205 Individual poetry volumes: The Wild Swans at Coole, 200 The Wind among the Reeds, 13, 158–9, 186, 205 The Winding Stair, 53, 106 Essays, articles and smaller prose works: Autobiography, 181, 198 ‘Bishop Berkeley’, 35, 53– 4, 67, 87, 141–5, 168–70, 181 ‘The Completed Symbol’, 40, 59, 67, 77, 102, 170 ‘Dove or Swan’, 104, 144, 168 ‘Discoveries’, 6, 36, 118, 159–60, 186 Estrangement, 6 ‘Fighting the Waves, Introduction to’, 98, 127 ‘Gods and Fighting Men, Introduction to’, 158 ‘Great Year of the Ancients’, 41, 76, 168 ‘The Holy Mountain’, 82 ‘Ideas of Good and Evil’, 18 ‘An Indian Monk’, 41, 84, 86, 99 ‘Ireland after Parnell’, 38, 152, 161, 163, 164, 193 ‘J. M. Synge and the Ireland of his Time’, 20 –1, 45–6 ‘Journal written in 1909’, 36 ‘Literature and the Living Voice’, 18–19, 45–6 ‘Louis Lambert’, 127



Index

‘The Mandukya Upanishad’, 83, 87, 151 ‘The New Speranza’ 152 ‘On the Boiler’, 35 ‘Pages from a Diary’, 6, 29–35, 39– 46, 48, 52, 57–8, 61–2, 64 –5, 66, 69, 71–3, 74, 75–7, 79, 86, 206 Per Amica Silentia Lunae, 21– 4, 36, 42, 79, 105, 118, 123, 128–9, 130 review of Beside the Fire, 14 review of Lionel Johnson’s Ireland, 16–17 review of R. D. Joyce, 13 review of Richard Garnett’s An Imaged World, 123 ‘Rosa Alchemica’, 124 –6, 128, 131 ‘The Stirring of the Bones’, 112, 133 ‘At Stratford-on-Avon’, 123 Swedenborg, Mediums and Desolate Places, 129 ‘Symbolism in Poetry’, 150 ‘The Soul in Judgement’, 78 ‘The Tragic Generation’, 24, 44, 45, 52 ‘The Trembling of the Veil’, 39, 57, 118, 129, 144, 154, 156, 180, 181 ‘William Blake and his Illustrations to the Divine Comedy’, 15–16, 122–3, 149, 181, 186, 204 ‘The Words upon the Windowpane, Introduction to’, 68 Individual poems: ‘An Acre of Grass’, 51–2, 206 ‘Ancestral Houses’, 92–5 ‘Blood and the Moon’, 106 ‘Byzantium’, 101– 4, 106 ‘Coole Park and Ballylee, 1931’, 96–9, 104, 206 ‘A Dialogue of Self and Soul’, 106 ‘To Dorothy Wellesley’, 109–13 ‘Easter 1916’, 146

‘Ego Dominus Tuus’, 200 ‘The Fascination of What’s Difficult’, 160 ‘His Bargain’, 193 ‘In Memory of Eva Gore-Booth and Constance Markieiwicz’, 51 ‘An Irish Airman Foresees his Death’, 42, 145–6 ‘Long-legged Fly’, 165–8, 170, 173– 4, 205, 206 ‘The Madness of King Goll’, 204 ‘Meditations in Time of Civil War’, 150 ‘Michael Robartes and the Dancer’, 200 –1, 205 ‘Mongan Laments the Change that has come over his Beloved …’, 159 ‘Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen’, 199 ‘The People’, 190 –1 ‘The Phases of the Moon’, 150, 200, 204 ‘A Prayer for my Daughter’, 185 ‘Ribh at the Tomb of Baile and Aillinn’, 163 ‘Sailing to Byzantium’, 51 ‘The Seven Sages’, 52 ‘The Statues’, 193, 200 ‘Stream and Sun at Glendalough’, 194 ‘The Tower’, 50 –1, 52, 74, 193, 200 ‘Under the Round Tower’, 158 ‘Vacillation’, 103, 104 –7 ‘The Wanderings of Oisin’, 159, 176 ‘Words’, 160 Individual plays: The Hour-glass, 36 The Pot of Broth, 180 The Words upon the Windowpane, 77–8 Zarathustra, 144 Zen Buddhism, 144, 174, 200



224 Index

Yeats, Coleridge and the Romantic Sage

W.B. Yeats and the Muses

Coleridge and Christian doctrine

Coleridge and Scepticism

Yeats And the Logic of Formalism

The Sage And The Housewife

coleridge-poetry

Coleridge, Schiller and Aesthetic Education

The Romantic

The Romantic

The Romantic

Sage

Yeats at songs and choruses

Coleridge and the Crisis of Reason

Romantic Days, Romantic Nights

Wagner and the Romantic Hero

Waterloo and the Romantic Imagination

The SAGE Handbook of Healthcare (Sage Handbooks)

To the Rev George Coleridge

The Hamlet vocation of Coleridge and Wordsworth

Wagner and the Romantic Hero

Romantic Medievalism: History and the Romantic Literary Ideal

Differential Calculus and Sage

A W.B. Yeats chronology

Bloom on the Sage

The True Sage

Seducer 05 - The Romantic

A Yeats dictionary: persons and places in the poetry of William Butler Yeats

Texas! Sage

The Romantic Manifesto

The Romantic Manifesto

Yeats, Coleridge and the Romantic Sage

W.B. Yeats and the Muses

Coleridge and Christian doctrine

Coleridge and Scepticism

Yeats And the Logic of Formalism

The Sage And The Housewife

coleridge-poetry

Coleridge, Schiller and Aesthetic Education

The Romantic

The Romantic

The Romantic

Sage

Yeats at songs and choruses

Coleridge and the Crisis of Reason

Romantic Days, Romantic Nights

Wagner and the Romantic Hero

Waterloo and the Romantic Imagination

The SAGE Handbook of Healthcare (Sage Handbooks)

To the Rev George Coleridge

The Hamlet vocation of Coleridge and Wordsworth

Wagner and the Romantic Hero

Romantic Medievalism: History and the Romantic Literary Ideal

Differential Calculus and Sage

A W.B. Yeats chronology

Bloom on the Sage

The True Sage

Seducer 05 - The Romantic

A Yeats dictionary: persons and places in the poetry of William Butler Yeats

Texas! Sage

The Romantic Manifesto

The Romantic Manifesto

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