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The Work of W.B. Yeats

Like many of the canonical Modernist writers, the work of W.B. Yeats represents the paradox of a longing for the past and a vision for the future, (Bradbury and McFarlane, 1991; Cantor, 1988). Whether it be the revision of America's political past, in the form of Ezra Pound's "John Adams Cantos" (Pound, 1986) or T.S. Eliot's revisiting of a Christian theological past in the form of his Ariel poems (Eliot, 1989) Modernism constantly sought to find a future from the traditional past, as Hugh Kenner says of Eliot:

".these poems exhaust tradition, or as much of the tradition as lay within the compass of their author's purpose." (Kenner, 1969: 210)

The traditional, then finds resonance not only in the present but also in the future, however, as Kenner suggest this is seldom a holistic past rather, a selective or even a created past that utilized and rediscovered voices and images in order to comment on contemporary issues and problems and suggest avenues of social and aesthetic progression.

This notion, of rediscovery and circularity, is of course most famously expounded upon in T.S. Eliot's essay "Traditional and the Individual Talent" (Eliot, 1975) but also finds parallels in many foundational Modernist texts, like Spenger's circular The Decline of the West (Spengler, 1918) or even certain passages in Yeats' own A Vision (Yeats, 1937):

"One must bear in mind that the Christian Ear, like the two thousand years, let us say, that went before it, is an entire wheel, and each half of it an entire wheel, that each half when it comes to its 28th phase reaches the 15th phase of the first phase of the entire era." (Yeats, 1937: 266)

In this essay I would like to look at this notion and how it manifests itself in the late work of Yeats with regard to the Protestant Ascendancy and Big House literature. I will hope to show that Yeats' rediscovery and use of Ireland's past and historical culture represents not a change but a continuum in his work. However, I will also attempt to show that Yeats used this revision for a number of differing ends; in his early work using Irish folktales and mythologies in order to create an aesthetic vision of a new Irish voice and, in later life, evoking a more personal past, in the form of his own socio-political heritage in order to create psychological and ontological surety for a poet that was, gradually, losing faith in his own psycho-sexual and socio-literary reality.

As Malcolm Bradbury assert in his Modernism: A Guide to European Literature 1890-1930 (Bradbury ad McFarlane, 1991), Modernism has always represented the symbiosis of aesthetic and socio-political ideals:

"One of the word's (Modernism) associations is with the coming of a new era if high aesthetic self-consciousness and non-representationism, in which art turns from realism and humanistic representation towards style, technique and spatial form in pursuit of a deeper penetration of life." (Bradbury, 1991: 25)

Therefore in poems such as Pound's "Hugh Selwyn Mauberly" (Pound, 1990) or even Eliot's "The Waste Land" (Eliot, 1989), Modernist writers sought to combine their aesthetic vision with their socio-political one and, very often, these two tallied.

In the early work of Yeats this took the form of a deliberate evocation of Irish mythology. In such poems as "Red Hanrahan's Song about Ireland" (Yeats, 1987: 90) and those in the volume The Green Helmet and Other Poems (1987: 99-109), the poet evokes an Ireland unified by a shared past, a land that finds homogeneity through appreciation of its environment. The fairy stories and folk tales that form the basic imagistic lexicon of, for instance, "A Faery Song":

"We who are old, old and gay, O so old! Thousands of years, thousands of years, If I were told." (Yeats, 1987: 43)

Connects Yeats with Ireland's bardic past, as Morton Irving-Seidin states in his book William Butler Yeats: The Poet as Mythmaker 1865-1939 (1962):

"The literary traditional of Gaelic Ireland falls into two main currents, of which the first includes the bardic stories of the Red Branch Tribe of Ulster and the Fenians of Connacht and their successors." (Seidin, 1962: 6)

This is mythmaking and myth reinvention on a national scale; not only through his poetry but through his many dramas for the Abbey theatre, Yeats attempted to concretize an Irish aesthetic by reinterpreting and reinventing the tales and stories of Ireland's past; a semi-mythological psycho-temporal space that remained unsullied by the current and recurring political issues.

In poems like "Sailing to Byzantium" (Yeats, 1987: 217) we see this aesthetic vision devoid of the mythologized Ireland, the images and poetic allusions in this poem once again both evoke and create an artistic past, but this time it is a aristocratic past; a history, not of the folk tale, but of the landed, leisured, vibrant aesthetic; not of the bard anymore but the "drowsy Emperor" (Yeats, 1987: 218):

"Once out of nature I shall never take My bodily form from any natural thing, But such as Grecian Goldsmith's make Of hammered gold and gold enalling. To lords ands ladies of Byzantium Of what is past, or passing, or to come." (Yeats, 1987: 218)

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