‘[...] My brother introduced himself to Yeats, accosting him in the vicinity of the National Library. It is reported that at their first meeting my brother said to Yeats: “I regret that you are too old to be influenced by me”; and it seems that my brother always denied the story. To the best of my recollection, it is at least substantially correct, though perhaps Jim may have phrased it somewhat differently. As it stands, it sounds rather like one of Yeats’s good stories; what is certain is that at that meeting my brother told Yeats how much be admired two stories of his, “The Tables of the Law”, and “The Adoration of the Magi”, and urged him to reprint them. In “The Day of the Rabblement” my brother had already spoken of them as “stories which one of the great Russians might have written”. Yeats did reprint them a couple of years later, and in the few lines of preface to the reprint, he said that he had met a young man in Ireland “the other day”, who admired these stories very much and nothing else that he (Yeats) had written. That young man was my brother, unless some other young man told him exactly the same thing, which is improbable, for in that case there would have been at least two “young men in Ireland” who told him so. The words “and nothing else that he had written”, have been added for dramatic effect. I believe that the other phrase has been similarly edited. I do not think that Yeats ever cared much about pointing a moral, but he undoubtedly liked to adorn a tale.
 Already at that time when Yeats was regarded in Dublin as a minor poet and a poseur, and even his friends, except Moore, treated him as an eccentric, whose poetry was likely to find favour only with literary cliques, my brother had claimed for him that his poetry was of the highest order. He considered him to be the greatest poet Ireland had produced, with only Mangan worthy to be his predecessor, and the greatest of contemporary English poets. I have no doubt that he said so to Yeats. [...]’

My Brother’s Keeper (London: Faber & Faber 1958), p.189; see also Yeats’s letter to Joyce, which Stanislaus Joyce reproduces in full - under Joyce, Commentary > W. B. Yeats - infra.

Meeting Joyce (1b): Richard Ellmann states that the meeting occurred in late October (James Joyce, 1965, p.107) while Roy Foster thinks they met in November (Yeats: A Life, Vol. 1, 1997, p.276). Similarly, Ellmann holds that Joyce ‘went on to Lady Gregory (who invited him with Yeats and Yeats’s father [John Butler Yeats], to dine with her at the Nassau Hotel on November 4’ (ibid., p.108; [my italics: BS]) - citing Yeats’s note to Joyce relaying this invitation, dated 3 Nov. 1902, in the Slocum Collection, Yale [p.769, n.19] - while Foster states parenthetically that ‘he had already dined at the Nassau Hotel on 4 November with Gregory and JBY [John Butler Yeats]’ prior to the first meeting with WBY. The difference in the accounts is that Ellmann places Yeats at the table with JBY and Lady Gregory, making it Joyce’s second meeting with him. The difference in the accounts apart from dates, is that Ellmann inaccurately places Yeats at the table with JBY and Lady Gregory. [BS]

[Note: John Kelly & Ronald Schuchard place the first meeting with Joyce at 1-2 Nov 1902. (See Collected Letters of W. B. Yeats, Vol. II, Oxford: Clarendon Press 1997, pp.242ff.) [Information supplied by Warwick Gould in email 16.04.2015.]

See also full-text copys of the relevant passages in Ellmann and Foster in RICORSO Library, Criticism > Major Authors, via index or individually (Ellmann -as attached; Foster - as attached.)

Joyce took the critical term ‘imperishable’ where he found it in Yeats’s story “Rosa Alchemica” and applied it to Stephen’s aesthetic ideals in A Portrait of the Artist (Chap. IV).

Water Pater: Walter Pater makes considerable use of the word ‘imperishable’ in his writings - viz., “Plato and Platonism”: ‘The Republic [...] is the protest of Plato, in enduring stone, in law and custom more imperishable still, against the principle of flamboyancy or fluidity in things, and in men’s thoughts about them.’ (Collected Works, Cambridge, 1901), p.235 [my italics].

Yeats: ‘I had discovered [...] that they sought to fashion gold out of common metals [...] as part of an universal transmutation of all things into some divine and imperishable substance, and this enabled me to make my little book a fanciful reverie over the transmutation of life into art, and a cry of measureless desire for a world made wholly of essences.’ [italics mine] (See “RA”, W. B. Yeats: Short Fiction, ed. in George J. Watson, Harmondsworth: Penguin 1995, p.180.)

Joyce: Cf., A Portrait of the Artist: ‘a prophecy of the end he had been born [...], a symbol of the artist forging anew in his workshop out of the sluggish matter of the earth a new soaring impalpable imperishable being’. (Jonathan Cape Edn., 1968, p.127), and also: ‘Yes! Yes! Yes! He would create proudly out of the freedom and power of his soul, as the great artificer whose name he bore, a living thing, new and soaring and beautiful, impalpable, imperishable.’ (pp.172-73; my italics, BS.)

Remarks: ‘It is conspicuous here that, just as Joyce is separating himself from the Irish literary revival tradition by means of his bold distinction between classical and romantic tempers, he retains a good deal of the vocabulary and the reflexes of a fin de siècle aesthete whose gaze is fixed on the artifice of eternity and the corresponding idea of pure essences. The fact is that Joyce took time to replace the pharmacopia of the symbolists with his own literary language. I think of this as the “stickiness” of style.’ [BS: lecture at International Yeats Summer School (Sligo), 2002.]

See also George J. Watson’s remark: ‘In fact The Secret Rose was far more than a random collocation of unrelated stories [...] The careful arrangement of the 1897 volume may not prove that Yeats had anticipated Joyce’s Dubliners, but it is useful evidence of his early love of design.’ (W. B. Yeats: Short Fiction, ed. Watson, Penguin 1995, ‘A Textual and Editorial Note’, p.xi.)

Alistair Cormack remarks that Joyce held a copy of the selected poems of William Blake in an edition with a preface by W. B. Yeats in his Trieste Library (viz., Poetical Works of William Blake, London: George Routledge & Sons. Ltd. 1905) - a volume listed by Ellmann in The Consciousness of Joyce (London: Faber & Faber 1977), App., p.102. Several sentences in the Introduction correspond closely to others that Joyce wrote in his lecture on Blake - e.g.,

Yeats: ‘Many of his descriptions of “Vala” and other symbolic women [...] may conceivably owe their inspiration to her [i.e., Polly Woods]. Indubitably a certain type of feminine beauty, at once soft and cruel, emotional and egoistic, filled Blake with a mingled terror and wonder that lasted all his days.’ (Poetical Works of William Blake, 1910; 1967 rep. edn., p.xx.)

Joyce: ‘The girl, who seems to have been rather foolish, was called Polly Woods [...] This girl’s face appears in some drawings from his prophetic book Vala; a sweet, smiling face, symbol of feminine cruelty and sensual deception.’ (Kevin Barry, ed. & intro., Occasional, Critical, and Political Writings of James Joyce, OUP 2000), p.177.)

Bibl. Cormack, Yeats and Joyce: Cyclical History and the Reprobate Tradition (Aldershot: Aldgate Publishing 2008), p.51. Note that Occasional, Critical, and Political Writings cites Edwin Ellis, Yeats’s earlier co-editor of Blake, in The Real Blake [1907] as the source of Joyce’s information about Polly Wood, which is also cited by Richard Ellmann & Ellsworth Mason, in Critical Writings (1958, &c.) - an identification disputed by Cormack (p.51n.)

See also The Poems of William Blake [The Muses’ Library] (London: Lawrence & Bullen 1893) - under Yeats > Works - infra [incl. biblographical note by Gerald E. Bentley and Martin. J. Nurmi, 1964.]

Edwin Ellis: In a lecture called “Realism and Idealism in English Literature” given at the Università Populare in March 1912, Joyce delivered the sentence [here in translation}: ‘He [Blake] refused it, fearing that his art would die of inanition in the artificial environment of the court, but, at the same time, so as not to offend the sovereign, he gave up all his other lower-class students who formed the greater part of his income.’ (See Occasional, Critical and Politica Writings, ed. Kevin Barry, OUP 2000, p.176). Barry identifies this as a near quotation from Edwin Ellis, The Real Blake (1907) - especially where Ellis describes the loss to Blake of his pupils in terms to which Joyce ‘adds little more than the epithet “lower-class”.’ (Barry, op. cit., p.184, and Notes, p.332, n.55. Similarly Joyce’s reference to Blake’s initial support for the French Revolution and his departure from it after the executions of 1792 is ascribed to Ellis’s account (p.332, n.54). Indeed, Ellis’s book was Joyce’s major biographical source for the lecture on Blake as a whole, with citations from pages 164-5, 184, 437, 37-8, 435, 91, and 402-03 cited by Barry (op. cit., 332-36) in notes 55-56, 63, 69, 72 & 77 on the remarks on Blake (Barry, op. cit. 175-82).

Countess Cathleen: Richard Ellmann remarks that Joyce echoed the following Yeats’s lines from The Countess Cathleen and Various Legends and Lyrics: ‘And of the embattled flaming multitudes / Who rise, wing above wing, flame above flame, / And, like a storm, cry the Ineffable Name ...’ in his own verses from Shine and Dark (unpub.): ‘O Name, / Ineffable, proud name to whom the cries ascend / From lost angelical orders, seraph flame to flame / For this end have I hated him - for this poor end?’ (See Ellmann, James Joyce, 1965 Edn., pp.84-85.) Ellmann also remarks that Joyce’s poem beginning ‘I intone the high anthem, / Partaking of their festival [...]’ describes a witches’ sabbath suggesting the orgiastic dance in Yeats’s story The Tables of the Law. (Ibid., p.85; 1982 Edn., p.81.) The source of poems from that collection is the verso of pages in Stanislaus Joyce’s diary, this being itself written on the verso of discarded pages of Joyce’s compositions [now held in the Cornell Univ. Library James Joyce Collection].

Countess Cathleen (1892): Joyce quotes from the Countess’s death-speech in W. B. Yeats play of that name in his L&H lecture on “Drama and Life”: ‘Do not weep | Too great a while, for there is many a candle / On the High Altar though one fall.’ (See Kevin Barry, ed. Occasional, Critical and Political Writings of James Joyce, OUP 2000), p.292, n.7. This speech is also quoted in Portrait and “The Day of the Rabblement” where the context would suggest that Joyce is ‘deliberately baiting his audience in his lecture with a quotation from a play which they, but not he, had condemned.’ (Barry, idem.)

Cathleen Ni Houlihan (1902) and “The Dead”: Richard Ellmann remarks in a footnote when he quotes Gretta’s answer to Gabriel’s dismissive question, ‘I think he died for me’ in “The Dead” (Dubliners, 1914): ‘Adaline Glasheen has discovered an echo of Yeats’s nationalist play, Cathleen Ni Houlihan, where the old woman who symbolises Ireland sings a song of “yellow-haired Donough that was hanged in Galway.” When she is asked, “What was it brought [248] him to his death?” she replies, “He died for love of me; many a man has died for love of me.” (James Joyce, OUP 1982 [rev. edn.], pp.248-49; an end-note ref. simply says, ‘I am indebted to Mrs. Glasheen for pointing this out to me.’ (p.768, n.20.)

Greek Tragedy: ‘I think that we will learn again how to describe at great length an old man wandering among enchanted islands, his return home at last, his slow-gathering vengeance, a flitting shape of a goddess, and a flight of arrows, and yet to make all of these so different things “take light from mutual reflection, like an actual trail of fire over precious stones”, and become “an entire word”, the signature or symbol of a mood of the divine imagination as imponderable as “the horror of the forest or the silent thunder in the leaves”’. (1898 essay, “The Autumn of the Body”, in Selected Criticism, Pan Macmillan 1976, p.42; quoted in Munira Mutran, ‘Different Appropriations of Greek Tragedy in Contemporary Drama: Irish and Otherwise’, in Ilha do Desterro Florianópolis, No. 58 (Jan./June 2010, pp.413-38; p.414 - available online as pdf; accessed 15.10.2011). Mutran remarks: ‘Although referring to poetry, Yeats was, in a way, foretelling that James Joyce, and many of the modernist writers, would go back to myth in order to define their world.’ (Idem.)

Yeats: ‘It is from the Dreaming Back of the dead [...] that we get the imagery of ordinary sleep. [...] If [...] I dream in images [...] I may discover [my father] represented by a stool or the eyepiece of a telescope, but never in his natural shape [...].’ (See longer extract under Yeats, infra.)