William Butler Yeats: Notes 1: General Index and Miscellany

William Butler Yeats: Notes (1) - General Index & Miscellany

Commentary on the Poetry
File 1	File 2	File 3	File 4	File 5	File 6
General Notes	Collections 1888-1913	Collections 1914-1928	Collections 1929-1932	Collections 1935-1939	Plays & Prose 1885-1925

Note: The annotations on individual poems are substantially copied from A. N. Jeffares, A New Commentary to the Poems of W. B. Yeats (Macmillan 1988) with some additional notes and remarks notes added during the compilation of RICORSO. For longer extracts see RICORSO Library, “Criticism > Major Writers” > Yeats - infra

See extended notes on

“Mount Meru”

Index
“Lake Isle of Inisfree” Hibernian Tales	Cathleen Ni Houlihan Wanderings of Oisin	Oxford Modern Verse The Herne’s Egg	Words [...] Windowpane Poems From Ireland

Jacob Bryant Walter Pater Algernon Swinburne Oscar Wilde Arthur Symons T. Sturge Moore James Joyce T. S. Eliot Daniel Corkery Oswald Spengler A. N. Whitehead Walter Wentz	George Orwell Marianne Moore Una Ellis Fermor Olivia Shakespear Conor Cruise O’Brien Denis Ireland Edmund Gosse Horace Plunkett Anne & Michael Yeats Reg Skene Bloom v. Hough The Cornell Yeats	Macmillan Edns Stilts and all Wasteful virtues Irish heirman Raging youths Quit Ireland Hugh Lane Gallery Yeat in Sao Paolo Click does the trick Minting Ireland Dramatis Personae Chez Yeats	Clubs & Hons Dreams & dollars Gaol-gaels Yeats Plays in Sligo Under Ben Bulben Riversdale House Cuala Press Yeats Memorial Irish Acad. of Letters Portraits Sylvia Plaith

NLI Accessions

“Lake Isle of Innisfree”

“Lake Isle [...]” - an origin tale - Yeats’s Autobiographies (1955; 1999 edn.):

‘My father had read to me some passage out of Walden, and I planned to live some day in a cottage on a little island called Innisfee, and Innisfree was opposite Slish Wood where i meant to sleep.
I though that having conquered bodily desire and the inclination of my mind towards women and love, I should live, as Thoreau lived, seeking wisdom. There was a story in the county histoory of a tree that had once grown upon that island guarded by some terrible monster and borne the food of the gods. A young girl pined for the fruit and told her lover to kill the monster and carry the fruit away. he did as he had been told, but tasted the fruit; and when he reached the mainland where she had waited for him, he was dying of its powerful virtue. And from sorrow and from remorse she too ate of it and died. I do not remember whether i chose the island because of its beauty or for the story’s sake, but I was twenty-tow or three before I gave up the dream.
I set out from Sligo about six in the evening, walking slowly, for it was an evening of great beauty; but though I was well into Slish Wood by bedtime, I could not sleep, not from the discomfort of the dry rock I had chosen for my bed, but from my fear of the woodranger. Somebody had told me, though I do not think it could have been true, that he went his round at some unknown hour. I kept going over what I should say if found and could not think of anything he would believe. However, I could watch my island in the early dawn and notice the order of the cries of the birds.
I came home next day unimaginably tired and sleeping having walked some thirty miles party over rough and boggy ground. Dor months afterwards, if I alluded to my walk, my uncle’s general servant (not Mary Battle, who was slowly recovering from an illness and would not have taken the liberty) would go into fits of laugher. She beleived I had spent the night in a different fashion and had invented the excuse to deceive my uncle, and would say to my great embarrassment, for I was as prudish as an old maid, “And you had a good right to be fatigued.”’

Autobiographies (Macmillan 1950), pp.72-73; 1999 edn., p.85.)

“Lake Isle [...]” - First draft: Yeats sent a draft of “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” to Katherine Tynan with a letter of 21 Dec. [1888], from Blenheim Rd. / Bedford Pk., London (Coll. Letters., ed. Kelly, OUP 1986, pp.116-21:

‘Hear [sic] are two verses I made the other day. There is a beautiful Island of Innis free in Lough Gill Sligo. A little rocky island with a legended past. In [120] my story I make one of the charecters when ever he is in trouble long to go away and live alone on that Island - an old day dream of my own. thinking over his feelings I made these verses about them:

I will arise and go now and go to the island of Innis free
And live in a dwelling of wattles - of woven wattles and wood work made,
Nine bean rows will I have there, and a hive for the honey bee
And this old care shall fade away.

There form the dawn above me peace will come down dropping slow
Dropping from the veils of morning to where the household cricket sings
And noontide there will be all a glimmer, midnight be a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnets wings.

I write this letter hoping it will be in time for Xmas and close with it many good wishes. / Yours always / W B Yeats.’ Note: The editors write in a footnote that this poem was ‘destined to be the most popular of WBY’s poems’ and ‘gave him some embarrassment in later life’. Also that it seems ot have inspired the opening to Tynan’s “To Iniskhea” in her Ballads and Lyrics (60-1): ‘I’ll rise and go to Inishkea’. (Coll. Letters, Vol. I, pp.20-21.)

“Lake Isle of Innisfree”: When Yeats writes of ‘the deep heart’s core’ in his “Lake Isle of Inisfree”, he appears to be borrowing a phrase from Rose Kavanagh in her poem “Gerald Griffin” in which Kavanagh imagines the Irish novelist living and writing in ‘the London gloom’ which ‘barred the heaven’s blue / From thy deep Celtic eyes’ - and sending his ‘music’ - i.e., poems, and in particular “Gille Machree” - back ‘o’er the waves to Ireland’s holy shore’. He does so, in her imagining, rather as St. Patrick is called back to Ireland by the people (or the spirit) of the country: ‘’twas from her deep heart’s core / She called thee: ‘“Gille Machree,” come home, I pray - / In my green lap of shamrocks sleep, asthore!’ Yeats reviewed her verse shortly after her death at the request of Fr. Matthew, editor of the Irish Monthly Review. (See Rose Kavanagh and Her Verses, ed. Matthew Russell, S. J., Dublin: M. H. Gill 1909, p.40; also under Kavanagh, q.v., Notes, infra.)

John Mitchel: Note that the phrase ‘the very heart’s core’ was previously employed by Mitchel in The Last Conquest of Ireland (Glasgow 1861): ‘As for us, expatriated and exterminated Irish, we have every day occasion to feel that our enemy pursues us into all lands with unrelenting vengeance; and though we take the wings of the morning, we can never escape it — never until Ireland shall become, as Scotland is, a contented province of the British Empire, thoroughly subdued, civilized, emasculated, and “ameliorated” to the very heart’s core.’ (p.209; my italics.) It probably has a still earlier occurrence though possibly the poem by Kavanagh ante-dates this instance. [Qry.]

[ top ]

“Dust Hath Closed Helen’s Eye”: Eleanor Hull gives “Dust Hath Closed Helen’s Eye” as the title of Lady Gregory’s translation of the poem by [Anthony/Antoine] Raftery on Mary Hynes which Yeats included in The Celtic Twilight under just that chapter-title, adding on her own account that ‘[t]he title is added by Mr. W. B. Yeats to an article written by him on this poem in The Dome (New Series, vol. iv.)’, and further, that ‘Lady Gregory informs me that Mr. Yeats has slightly worked over her translation.’ (Hull, op. cit., p.323.) [See further under Lady Gregory [supra].

The original of the title phrase is a line in a poem of Thomas Nash called “A Litany in Time of Plague” where he writes in Stanza 3 [of 6]: ‘Beauty is but a flower / Which wrinkles will devour; / Brightness falls from the air; / Queens have died young and fair; / Dust hath closed Helen’s eye. / I am sick, I must die. / Lord, have mercy on us!’ Note also that the second line - ‘Brightness falls from the air’ - is also recycled in the “Proteus” episode of Joyce’s Ulysses (1922).

Hibernian Tales- or, properly, Royal Hibernian Talesis a rare chapbook, once widely known and cited by W. M. Thackeray in his Irish Sketch Book (1842). From it Yeats derived his story “Donald and His Neighbours” which he included in Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry (1888), p.299ff. [see epub version -online]. There is an article on the book by Séamus Ó Duilearga in Bealoideas (1940) which makes reference to Yeats and Thackeray - see JSTOR first page, attached.

See Patricia Lysaght, ‘The Wonder Tale in Ireland’, in A Companion to the Fairy Tale, ed. Hilda Ellis Davidson & Anna Chaudhri (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer 2003), pp.169-90: ‘[...] Even before the Anglo-Irish antiquarian Crofton Croker published his various works on the south of Ireland, including an important volume of legends in 1825 and others in 1829 and 1831, a collection of popular tales or Märchen called The Royal Hibernian Tales: Being a Collection of the Most Entertaining Stories Now Extant had appeared. Probably of north Antrim provenance, it is listed among three hundred chapbooks of a secular nature in the Reports of the Commissioners of the Board of Education in Ireland in 1825. The collection has been reprinted in Béaloideas (1940, pp.148-203) with a commentary by S´eamus Ó Duilearga. Containing twelve tales, one omitted as “entirely worthless from a folklore standpoint” (p.149), eleven have been classified as international types, of which three are wonder tales (Béaloideas, 200-03). Its appeal and popularity are evident from the appearance of the stories from it in W. M. Thackeray’s Irish Sketch Book (1842), in W. B Yeats’s Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry (c.1888, 299-306), and in Andrew Lang’s The Red Fairy Book (11th imp. 1912, p.54). It also had considerable impact on Irish oral tradition and this was still evident in the early 1940s (Béaloideas, 1932, 340; 1940, 200-1.) (Lysaght, op. cit., p.172.) [Available online; accessed 1.05.2015.]

[ top ]

Cathleen Ni Houlihan (1902)

Cathleen Ni Houlihan - Yeats’s remarks:

(I) ‘I have a play for a little religious play in one act with quite as striking a plot as Cathleen - it cannot offend anybody and may propitiate the Holy Church.’ (Letter to Lady Gregory, 10 April 1902, in Letters, Wade, p.370; quoted in Conor Cruise O’Brien, Ancestral Voices, Religion and Nationalism in Ireland, Dublin: Poolbeg 1994, p.62). In a further letter to Lady Gregory, Yeats described Cathleen ni Houlihan as ‘Ireland herself [...] for whom so many songs had been sung and for whom so many had gone to their death.’ (1903; quoted in Richard Kearney, ‘Myth and Terror’, in The Crane Bag, 2. 1 & 2, 1978; rep. in Crane Bag Book (1982), pp.273-87.)

(2) ‘[i]t may be said that it is a political play of a propagandist kind. This I deny. I took a piece of human life, thoughts that men had felt, hopes that they had died for, and I put this into what I believe to be a sincere dramatic form. I have never written a play to advocate any kind of opinion and I think that such a play would be necessarily bad art, or at any rate a very humble kind of art. At the same time I fell that I have no right to exclude for myself or for others, any of the passionate material of drama.’ (1904 Edn.; See A. N. Jeffares & A. S. Knowland, A Commentary on the Collected Plays of W. B. Yeats, Stanford UP 1975, p.36.)

(3) “The Man and the Echo”: ‘All that I have said and done, / Now that I am old and ill, / Turns into a question till / I lie awake night after night / And never get the answer right. / Did that play of mine send out / Certain men the English shot? / Did words of mine put too great strain / On that woman’s reeling brain? / Could my spoken words have checked / That whereby a house lay wrecked?’ (The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats, NY: Macmillan 1951, pp.337-38; Poems of W. B. Yeats, ed. Daniel Albright, p.392.)

(4) ‘I took a piece of human life, thoughts that men had felt, hopes that they had died for, and I put this into what I believe a sincere dramatic form. I have never written a play to advocate any kind of opinion and I think that such a play would be necessarily bad art, or at any rate a very humble find of art.’ (Quoted in Frank Tuohy, Yeats: An Illustrated Biography, Macmillan 1976, p.104.)

(5) ‘Noble and Ignoble Loyalties’ [article by Yeats in United Irishman[?], 1900]: ‘What can these Royal Processions mean to those who walk in the procession of heroic and enduring hearts that has followed Cathleen ni Houlihan through the ages. have they not given their wills and their hearts and their dreams? What have they left for any less noble Royalty?’ (See Tuohy, op. cit., p.107.) Further, ‘Writing in The United Irishman in 1902 Yeats said of Cathleen ni Houlihan, “My subject is Ireland and its struggle for independence. The scene is laid in the West of Ireland at the time of the French landing. It have described a household preparing for the wedding of the son of the house. Everyone expects some good things from the wedding. Into this household comes Cathleen Ni Houlihan herself, and the bridegroom leaves his bride, and th[eir] hopes come to nothing. It is the perpetual struggle of the cause of Ireland and every other ideal cause against private hopes and dreams, against all that we mean when we say the world” (United Irishman, 5 April 1902; quoted in Richard Ellmann, Yeats: The Man and the Masks, 1948, p.135; also in John McGovern, MA Diss. UUC 2002, citing The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, 1991 Vol. 2, p.597.)

(6) Yeats wrote an interpretation in United Irishman (5 May 1902), explaining that he put in Cathleen ni Houlihan’s mouth verses ‘about all those who have died or are about to die for her and these verses are the key of the rest. She sings of one yellow-haired Donugh in stanzas that were suggested to me by some old Gaelic song.’ (The version given hear prefixes another stanza to that given in the play-text: ‘I will go cry with the woman, / For yellow-haired Donough is dead, / With a hempen rope for a neck-cloth, / And a white cloth on his head.’ (Coll. Plays, p.82; Jeffares, A New Commentary to the Poems, 1984, p.465.) Note: Jeffares provides a bibliography of materials on sources of the song - and hence the idea of the play - and cites the most likely source as Lady Gregory’s ‘West Irish Folk Ballads’, in The Monthly Review (Oct. 1902), rep. in Poets and Dreamers (1903; 1974 Edn., pp.44-45; Jeffares, op. cit., pp.466-67.)

(7) ‘At the enquiry which preceded the granting of a patent to the Abbey Theatre I was asked if Cathleen ni Houlihan was not written to affect opinion. Certainly it was not. I had a dream one night which gave me a story, and I had certain emotions about this country, and I gave those emotions expression for my own pleasure. If I had written to convince others I would have asked myself, not “Is that exactly what I think and feel?” but “How would that strike so-and-so? How will they think and feel when they have read it?” And all would be oratorical and insincere. If we understand our own minds, and the things that are striving to utter themselves through our minds, we move others, not because we have understood or thought about those others, but because all life has the same root. Coventry Patmore has said, “the end of art is peace”, and the following of art is little different from the following of religion in the intense preoccupation it demands.’ (Samhain, 1905; rep. in Explorations [q.p.].)

(8) Referring to Cathleen Ni Houlihan: ‘Did that play of mine send out / Certain men the English shot?’ (“The Man and the Echo”.) cf. - ‘I helped to create a form of emotion that drove to their deaths the poet Pearse and the essayist MacDonagh.’ (quoted in Elizabeth Butler Cullingford, Yeats and Fascism, 1981; p.88.)

(9) [speaking of art at the National Gallery]: ‘The President has just quoted a reference from some author about “Art for Art’s Sake”. When he (Mr Yeats) wrote Kathleen ni Houlihan he did not write it to make rebels. All he meant was that he, like every other artist, wrote that play to express his own feelings at a certain moment, to express them without thought of anybody else, to express them as the bird expresses itself when it sings. The bird was not trying to preach to anybody, the bird did not moralise to anyone; it gave no lessons - it merely sang its song. All artists were precisely the same. “Art for Art’s sake” meant art for the sake of sincerity, for the sake simply of natural speech coming from some simple, natural child-like soul.’ (Irish Times report, 1 Feb 1908; quoted in Richard Ellmann, Yeats: The Man and the Masks, 1948, p.259.) [Note that Ellmann quotes this solely to demonstrate how imagery of bird-song was ‘embedded’ in Yeats’s poetry and prose.]

[ top ]

Cathleen Ni Houlihan - Contemporary Responses

(1) Patrick Pearse: ‘When I was a child I believed that there was actually a woman called Erin and had Mr Yeat’s Kathleen ni Houlihan been then written and had I seen it, I should have taken it, not as an allegory, but as a representation of a thing that might happen any day in any house.’ (The Spiritual Nation; Feb. 1916.)

(2) George Russell (“AE”) wrote in Nationality and Imperialism [pamphlet]: ‘The national spirit, like a beautiful woman, cannot or will not reveal itself wholly while a coarse presence is near, an unwelcome stranger in possession of the home. It is shy, hiding itself away in remote valleys, or in haunted mountains, or deep in the quiet of hearts that do not reveal themselves.’ (Lady Gregory, ed., Ideals in Ireland, 1901; rep. in Mark Storey, ed., Poetry and Ireland Since 1800: A Source-book, Routledge, p.143.)

(3) Dorothy MacArdle testifies that Cathleen Hi Houlihan became one of the sacred works of Sinn Fein and the Republican Movements (The Irish Republic, Corgi 1968, p.58; cited in Flannery, 1976, p.100).

(4) P. S. O’Hegarty, a Republican rebel, referred to it as a ‘sort of sacrament’, and Constance Markievicz hailed it from her execution cell in 1916 as a ‘gospel’ [see under O’Hegarty, supra].

(5) Countess Markievicz [née Constance Gore-Booth] in Aylesbury Prison in 1916 said: ‘They shall be remembered forever, and even poor little me shall not be forgotten’, and wrote to Eva from prison on the same occasion, ‘That play of W.B.’s was a sort of gospel to me’ (The foregoing all quoted in Conor Cruise O’Brien, Ancestral Voices, Religion and Nationalism in Ireland, Dublin: Poolbeg 1994, p.68-69.)

(6) Maud Gonne quoted Yeats’s Cathleen ni Houlihan on the execution of the 1916 leaders: ‘The deaths of those leaders are full of beauty and romance. They will be speaking forever, the people will hear them forever.’ (q. source; prob. Conor Cruise O’Brien.)

(7) Stephen Gwynn wrote: ‘The effect of Cathleen ni Houlihan on me was that I went home asking myself if such plays should be produced unless one was prepared for people to go out to shoot and be shot. Yeats was not alone responsible; no doubt but Lady Gregory had helped him to get the peasant speech so perfect; but above all Miss Gonne’s impersonation had stirred the audience as I have never seen another audience stirred’. (Irish Literature and Drama, 1936, p.158; quoted in A. N. Jeffares, New Commentary on the Poems of W. B. Yeats, Macmillan 1984, p.423; also in Jeffares, A New Biography, Hutchinson 1988, p.138, and Conor Cruise O’Brien, Ancestral Voices, Religion and Nationalism in Ireland, Dublin: Poolbeg 1994) [q.p.].

(8) G. B. Shaw wrote to Lady Gregory following the London performance of Cathleen Ni Houlihan: ‘When I see that play I feel it might lead a man to do something foolish.’ (Lawrence & Grene, ed., Letters, p.xiii.)

(9) Forrest Reid wrote: ‘Cathleen Ni Houlihan aroused in me an eager spirit of patriotism, the very existence of which I had not suspected. It was strange, because it wasn’t in the least bit mixed up with politics. It was more like a family feeling - the feling one has for brothers and sisters, which lies dormant and unrealised until an outsider says something in disparagement of them.’ (Quoted in John Boyd & Stephen Gilbert, eds., Threshold, Spring 1977, pp.64-65.)

(10) Sean O’Casey (Autobiographies) - ‘Cathleen Ni Houlihan, in her bare feet is singing, for her pride that had almost gone is come back again. In tattered gown and hair uncombed she sings, shaking the ashes from her hair, she is singing of men that in battle array [...] march with banner and fife to the death, for their land [...] The face of Ireland twitches when the guns again sing, but she stands ready, waiting to fasten around her white neck this jewelled story of death, for these are they who will speak to her people for ever; that Spirit that had gone from her bosom returns.’ (Quoted in Richard Kearney, ‘Myth and Terror’, in The Crane Bag, 2, 1 & 2, 1978; rep. in Crane Bag Book, Dublin: Blackwater Press 1982, pp.273-87; p.287, n.17.)

Further: Sean O’Casey borrowed the phrase ‘hearts o’ stone’ from Yeats’s “Easter 1916” when he wrote ‘Give them hearts of stone’ in The Plough and the Stars - and refers further to the play in Drums under the Window: ‘But Cathleen, the daughter of Houlihan, walks firm now, a flush on her haughty cheek. She hears the murmur in the people’s hearts. Her lovers are fathering round her, for things are changing, changed utterly: A terrible beauty is born. / Poor, dear, dead men; poor W. B. Yeats.’ (Quoted in Kearney, op. cit., 1982, p.287, n.17; also in P. J. Kavanagh, Voices in Ireland, 1994, p.280.)

(11): Padraic Colum echoed the title-character of Cathleen Ni Houlihan in writing of the executed leaders of 1916: ‘An Irishman knows well how those who met their deaths will be regarded. They shall be remembered for ever; they shall be speaking for ever; the people shall hear them for ever.’ (Introduction, Poems of the Irish Revolutionary Brotherhood, Boston 1916).

Note: “Plan Kathleen” was the name given by the IRA for a plan of German invasion during the Emergency [see DIH].

(12) Emily Lawless: The phrase ‘the walk of a queen’ which Yeats applied to Cathleen Ni Houlihan is to be found in in Emily Lawless’s Grania: The Story of an Island (London: Smith, Elder & Co. 1892).

[ top ]

Cathleen Ni Houlihan - Scholarly remarks

(1) Richard Kearney, ‘Myth and Terror’, in ‘Myth and Terror’, in The Crane Bag, 2:1 & 2, 1978); rep. in Crane Bag Book, 1982, pp.273-87: ‘In Cathleen Ni Houlihan, Cathleen summons Michael Darcy, a young peasant about to be married, to revolt, counselling blood-sacrifice as the only means to national redempton; In return for such sacrifice she promises that the heroes “shall be remembered for ever”; the play aroused deep reverberations in the Irish nationalist consciousness when it first appeared in 1902’ (q.p.).

(2) Colbert Kearney, ‘St Stephen’s Green’, in Augustine Martin, ed., James Joyce: The Artist and the Labyrinth - A Critical Re-Evaluation, London: Ryan Publ. 1990): For the construction of Cathleen Ni Houlihan as a goddess who only reveals herself on departure, cf. Aeneid: ‘Venus finished speaking and as she turned away her beauty shimmered, a rosetint glowed about her neck and her sacred hair exuded a divine perfume. her gown trailed down to her feet and it was her walk which revealed that she was indeed a goddess.’ (Martin, ed., op. cit., p.106.)

(3) Roy Foster, ‘When the Newspaper have forgotten me ...’, in Yeats Annual 12, ed. Warwick Gould & Edna Longley (Macmillan 1996), notes that O’Hegarty’s calls Kathleen Ni Houlihan ‘a play of captivity’ whose impact was impossible to capture in the independent Ireland of 1939 appreciation of W. B. Yeats [at the time of his death] in Dublin Magazine (July-Sept. 1939), while the Irish Press carried a leader tracing the canonical connection between Yeats, the literary revival and Easter 1916. (p.167.)

[ top ]

Cathleen Ni Houlihan - Miscellaneous Notes

(1) For James Clarence Mangan’s poem-version of the traditional song “Kathaleen Ny-Houlahan”, see Louise Imogen Guiney, “A Study of James Clarence Mangan”, prefixed to J. C. Mangan: The Selected Poems (1897) - available in RICORSO Library > “Irish Classics” - as attached.

(2) The name Ni Houlihan is often taken to be a traditional personification for Ireland in Jacobite poetry - although pre-Yeatsian examples are difficult to trace in folklore or song. In Co. Cork the patronymic name Ó hUallachan was sometimes rendered in English as Harrington by recording clerks and thus became the family name. The pejorative term hooligan also derives from it reflecting the reception of Irish migrants in England, probably during famine times. There is also a celebrated Irish dance called the “The Hullachan Jig”, or “The Hullachan Reel”, a double jig. See The Fiddler’s Companion:

‘“The Reel of Tulloch” has for several centuries been used in Scotland for a specific dance for males which is always performed to the tune, and it has been quite dominent at Highland dances for several centuries. Instructions for the popular dance, but not the melody, appear in the Menzies Manuscript (contained in the Atholl Collection of the Sandeman Library, Perth), 1749, which carries the alternate title “The Mighty Pretty Valley”. J. Scott Skinner, the celebrated violinist who was also dancing master, routinely taught the dance to his students throughout the latter 19th century. Another “Reel of Tulloch (Ruidhleadh Thulachain)”, for two mixed couples, was composed around 1800, and appears in dance literature in 1844 (in The Ballroom Annual), though it was mentioned in accounts of dances from the year 1819 onward. Flett & Flett conclude the dance was originally a “society” dance which was developed at the Breadalbane Balls. It was a particular favorite of Queen Victoria, states Hunter (1979), who first witnessed its performance at a ball at Taywouth Castle given by the Marquis of Breadalbane (the dancers on the occasion were the Marquis of Abercorn, the Hon. Fox Maule, Cluny Macpherson and Davidson of Tulloch). In most parts of Scotland the dance was performed to the tune ‘The Reel of Tulloch” but in Roxburghshire and Berwickshire, where the dance was often known as “The Hullachan Jig”, a double jig such as “The Irish Washerwoman” was played. For an extensive discussion of the dance and its origins see Flett & Flett, Traditional Dancing in Scotland (1964), pp.132-55. See “Ceolas” > The Fiddler’s Companion - online [search results for O Hullachan; 23.12.2011.]

[ See also comments and quotations on The Countess Kathleen (1893) under Notes (6) - as supra. ]

[ top ]

Wanderings of Oisin: Yeats’s Wanderings of Oisin is based on Nicholas O’Kearney’s trans. of “Battle of Gabhra’, Standish [Hayes] O’Grady’s trans. of “The Lament of Oisin after the Fenians’, Brian O’Looney’s trans. of Michael Comyn’s “The Lay of Oisin in the Land of Youth’, and also David Comyn’s translation of same in Gaelic Union Publications (1880), and John O’Daly’s trans. of “The Dialogue of Oisin and St Patrick.’ A. N. Jeffares characterises it as a ‘remarkable narrative poem which conveys sadness, weariness and an intense perception of beauty - and does so fluently, sensuously and most evocatively. It was a tour de force for a young man of twenty-three to have created it and to have expressed it with such distinctive force.’ (See Jeffares, W. B. Yeats: A New Biography, Hutchinson 1988, p.39.)

Wandering C.S. Lewis: The ending of Yeats's Wanderings of Oisin the poem, in which Oisin professes that he would be happier with his pagan companions in Hell than with the saints in Heaven - ‘I will go to Caoilte, and Conan, and Bran, Sceolan, Lomair, / And dwell in the house of the Fenians, be they in flames or at feast’ - is possibly echoed in C. S. Lewis’s account of the tradition of service to ladies which he describes in The Allegory of Love (1936): ‘Frauendienst may be any of these, or any combination of them. It may even be the open enemy of religion - as when Aucassin roundly declares that he would rather follow all the sweet ladies and goodly knights to hell than go without them to heaven.’ [chap. 1; p.22; see full text of Lewis, op. cit., attached.]

[ See extensive comments on The Wanderings of Oisin in Notes 2 - infra. ]

[ top ]

The Oxford Book of Modern Verse (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1936), was greeted harshly, Auden calling it the worst book ever issued under the Clarendon imprint as including Margaret Ruddock and 17 pages of Buddhist poems by Lady Gerald (Dorothy) Wellesley, which Yeats had actually doctored while also producing good poems of his own from her originals, such as ‘The Three Bushes’; other women-poets incl. were ‘Michael Field’, Lady Gregory, Mary Coleridge, Alice Meynell, Vita Sackville-West, Edith Sitwell (19pp.), and Sylvia Townsend Warner; along with 14 of T. S. Eliot, as well as 17 poems by Oliver St. John Gogarty (‘but no one will count’), while excluding Austin Clarke to the latter’s intense chagrin. Yeats was criticised especially for excluding Wilfred Owen and other war poets who ‘plead for the suffering of their men’, since ‘passive suffering is not a theme for poetry’ (Introduction).

The Herne’s Egg was rejected as obscene by the Abbey Theatre in 1938; The Death of Cuchulain was first staged by Austin Clarke’s Irish Lyric Theatre Co., Dublin, in 1945 (DES Maxwell, 1984, 134).

Words Upon the Windowpane was made into a 78-min. film by Mary McGuckian (dir.) and Anna Devlin (co-prod. with McGuckian) in 1994, with Geraldine Chaplin, Geraldine James, Ian Richardson, John Lynch, Gerard McSorley, Donal Donnelly, Gemma Craven, Orla Brady, Brid Brennan, and Jim Sheridan in the cast, and with music by Niall Byrne. Duration: 78-min. Filmed in Wicklow by Pembridge Productions. (See Irish Film Board/Bord Scannan na hEireann - online; accessed 07.11.2014.)

Poems From Ireland: In Poems from Ireland, ed. & intro. by Donagh MacDonagh; preface by R. M. Smylie (Dublin: The Irish Times, 1944), Yeats’s his biog. notice reads briefly, ‘Poet, critic, playwright, and great gentleman.’

Golden Dawn (1): The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, fnd. in Paris by Stanislas de Guaïta as Kabbalistic Order of the Rosy Cross, 1883 - though supposedly based on earlier tradition established by a certain medieval Fr. Rosenkreuz. Mme Blavatsky wrote of the motto (Demon est Deus Inversus) espoused by Yeats: ‘This symbolic sentence in its many-sided forms is certainly most dangerous and iconoclastic in the face of all the dualistic later religions - or rather theologies - especially so in the light of Christianity.’ (H. P. Blavatsky, The Secret Doctrine,I, pp.411-24; quoted by Virginia Moore in The Unicorn, VI: 29, [q.d.] n.; see The Arcane Archive [online].)

Golden Dawn (2): The Golden Dawn formed by Freemasons of the thirty-third degree, led by Samuel Liddell Mathers, called McGregor Mathers out of pride of Scottish ancestry; Yeats was involved in both organisations; joined Theosophical Soc. in 1888; sought membership of the Golden Dawn in 1890; Golden Dawn embodied the idea of the Kabbala (Qaballah) and the Tree of Life, composed of ten emanations, called the Sephiroth, arranged in two columns of three and a middle column of four; the divine essence is believed to purest at the top of the Middle Pillar; at the bottom is Malkuth, the kingdom of physical matter; adepts may pass upwards by grades or stages, but the top three Sephiroth are not attainable by those in the middle of an incarnation; only if the abyss or void between the three top Sephiroth and the Lower Seven is deliberately passed, divinity can only come in bursts of intuition or inspiration; the Kabbala is attended by three dominant symols of which the rose is most important; it is divided into three concentric circles, each segmented, viz, the Tree Mothers, the Seven Planets, and the twelve signs of the Zodiac; a candidate preparing to enter the inner order of the Golden Dawn performs an initiation called Rubea Rosea or Arum Crucis; vision is not a passive regard by a gazing with active and transform imaginative power through knowledge; ‘revival’ of literature was, in Yeats’s mind, subordinate to the revival of theosophical lore in the modern world. See Graham Hough, The Mystery Religion of W. B. Yeats (Sussex: Harvester Press 1984); Okifumi Komescu, The Double Perspective of Yeats’s Aesthetic (NJ: Barnes & Noble 1984); Peter Kuch, Yeats and AE: The Antagonism that Unites Dear Friends (Barnes & Noble 1986).]

[ top ]

Jacob Bryant, author of A New System; or, An Analysis of Ancient Mythology, 2 vols. (1775-76), held in Coole Park Library, with a 13-line autograph note by W. B. Yeats, sold at Sothebys in 1972 and purchased by F. Edwards at £260. Yeats’s note as follows: ‘Bryant [sic] had a great influence on William Blake. This work especially influenced him so far as I can judge from a rather hasty search in it ... the influence of Bryant is strong in the later Prophetic Books, Jerusalem particularly. ... Bryant made Blake’s symbolism rather [?arbitrary] and ugly, I think.’ WBY further notes that the book was not available in the British Library when he was writing on Blake. (Signed & dated 1901) The book was acquired by Richard Gregory in 1779 in a contemp. tree calf gilt copy ‘Bound by Baumgarten’ - an elusive craftsman - acc. to bookseller’s hand-written note the verso of the front free endpaper of each vol.) See Sotheby Sale: Printed Books formerly in the Library at Coole, The Property of Lady Gregory, London: Sotheby & Co., Auction Catalogue, 20-21 March 1972; Lot 70.)

Notes on Bryant -

Bryant (1715-1804) was private tutor to the Duke of Marlborough at Eton and travelled with him to Germany, afterwards enjoying a lucrative post in the Ordnance Office which allowed him to pursue his studies. in A New System; or, An Analysis of Ancient Mythology, 2 vols. (1775-76) he traced all mythology to a single source before the Flood holding that the Book of Genesis contained an account of the ‘dispersion’ of human races and cultures; he believed that the rebellious Ham of Genesis was the original of the Egyptian God Amon and consequently called the descendants Amonites, placing all classical mythologies in that line of descent. The effect was to abolish the impression of the relativism or arbitrariness suggested by the variety of such mythologies which were encountered at that date in the study of civilisations of the Middle East. Bryant had a great influence on William Blake, who worked on the engravings for the new edition of his book (viz., 3rd edition, London: Walker, Richardson, et al., 1807).

The allusion to Bryant which Yeats had met with in Blake’s writings is contained in his “Description” of his paintings, a catalogue raisonnéeissued in 1809: ‘The antiquities of every Nation Under Heaven, is no less sacred than that of the Jews. They are the same thing as Jacob Bryant, and all antiquaries have proved. How other antiquities came to be neglected and disbelieved, while those of the Jews are collected and arranged, is an enquiry, worthy of both the Antiquarian and the Divine. (“A Descriptive Catalogue of Paintings, Poetical and Historical Inventions, painted by William Blake [... &c.]” (1809), in David V. Erdman, ed., The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake [rev. edn.], with an commentary by Harold Bloom (NY: Doubleday 1988), p.543; available online; accessed 19.04.2015.).

Blake goes on to express his antipathy to the ‘reasoning historian’ — those such as Hume, Gibbon and Voltaire - who ‘turn and twist one fact or disarrange self evident action and reality’ in order to dispute the truth apparently substantiated by Bryant that, ‘All had originally one language, and one religion, this was the religion of Jesus, the everlasting Gospel’ with the effect that we may conclude ‘Antiquity preaches the Gospel of Jesus.’ (Idem.)

Blake’s lengthy verse-description of the Jesus he believed under the title “The Everylasting Gospel” thus combines with a wider doctrine that Jesus was the bearer of the original truth which had been dispersed by the Flood and was now being obscured again by enlightenment philosophers’ false reasoning. Cf. Yeats’s “Fragments” (1931): ‘Locke sank into a swoon; / The Garden died; / God took the spinning-jenny / Out of his side.’ [CP240] (See Poems of William Blake, ed. W. B. Yeats, London: Routledge 1910 - online.)

Where got I that truth?
Out of a medium’s mouth.
Out of nothing it came,
Out of the forest loam,
Out of dark night where lay
The crowns of Nineveh. [CP240]

—”Fragments” (Collected Poems, 1950, p.240.)

[ top ]

Walter Pater: though influenced by his style - pervasively in the esoteric fiction - Yeats ultimately formed a dismissive idea of the stylistic master of the aesthetes: ‘Surely the ideal of culture expressed by Pater can only create feminine souls. The soul becomes a mirror not a brazier.’ (“Estrangement: Extracts from a Diary Kept in 1909”, in Autobiographies, 1955, p.477; quoted in G. J. Watson, ed., W. B. Yeats: Short Fiction, Harmondsworth: Penguin 1995, p.258 [notes to “Rosa Alchemica”].

Algernon Swinburne: At the death of Swinburne Yeats told his sister: ‘I am the King of the Cats’; quoted in Jeffrey Meyers, Manic Power: Robert Lowell and His Circle (London; Macmillan 1987, p.26.) The sentence was echoed by Roethke at Yaddo in May 1950. Meyers writes of ‘[t]he American emphasis on immediate success, the idea of art as a competitive business and a gladiatorial conception of the writer, encouraged by Hemingway ...’

Oscar Wilde: Wilde wrote a review of Yeats’s Wanderings of Oisin (1889), praising ‘its nobility of treatment and nobility of subject matter, delicacy of poetic instinct, and richness of imaginative resource.’ (Artist as Critic, ed. Ellmann, p.150). Note also that Wilde employs the phrase ‘terrible beauty’ in Dorian Gray (1890), Chap. 8 [remarked by John Wilson Foster, ‘Against Nature? Science and Oscar Wilde’, in Between Shadows: Modern Irish Writing and Culture,Dublin: IAP 2009, p.44, n.8.)

Arthur Symons: Symons visited the Aran Islands with W. B. Yeats [1895] and wrote that he felt: ‘[s]o far from civilisation, so much further out of the world than I have ever been before’. Further: ‘We seemed also to be venturing among an unknown people, who, even if they spoke our own language, were further away from us, more foreign than people who spoke an unknown language and lived beyond other seas.’ (‘Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands’, London 1918, p.303, 306; quoted in Patrick Sheeran, The Novels of Liam O’Flaherty: A Study in Romantic Realism, UCG 1972, p.28.)

T[homas] Sturge Moore (1870-1944), friend and illustrator of Yeats: a box of his papers (25 ft. & 1 oversize paper) are held in the Robert W. Woodruff Library at Emory University, comprising chiefly his correspondence with Charles Wilson (Willington, Co. Durham, England) but also containing Pen and ink drawings of the binding of Yeats’ Reveries, a Bookplate designed by Moore [entitled] “Leda and the Swan”, and a Pen and ink drawing of the binding of Yeats’ Reveries [oversize]. (See online at Emory UL online; accessed 28.09.2010.)

James Joyce: Joyce attended the première of Yeats The Countess Cathleen (8 May 1899), watching from the ‘gods’; clapped vigorously at Florence Farr’s singing of the lyric “Who Goes with Fergus?”, though surrounded by Irish-Ireland protesters incl. Skeffington, who protests against the ‘type of our people [as] a loathesome brood of apostates’ in the Freeman’s Journal (10 May 1899); later told his brother Stanislaus that he counted Cathleen Ni Houlihan by Yeats and Gregory ‘political claptrap’ (My Brother’s Keeper, p.187). [See further remarks on Yeats-Joyce connection under Joyce > Notes > “Literary Figures” > W. B. Yeats - supra.]

Joyce held copies of the following works by W. B. Yeats in his Paris Library:

Autobiographies: Reveries over Childhood and Youth and The Trembling of the Veil (London: Macmillan & Co. 1934
The Collected Poems (London: Macmillan 1934) [presentation - ‘Inscribed for James Joyce by W. B. Yeats, October 29, 1935.’.
The Poetical Works of William Butler Yeats in Two Volumes, Vol. II: Dramatic Poems (NY: Macmillan 1919)
A Vision (London: Macmillan 1937)
The Wild Swans at Coole (London: Macmillan & Co. 1919)

See The Personal Library of James Joyce; ed. Thomas E. Connolly (Buffalo UL 1953), p.40.

“Who Goes With Fergus?” (composed 1892) refers to the mythical Irish king Fergus and dedicates himself to the mystical beauty of the universe. The song is sung in Act II of Yeats’s play The Countess Cathleen to the title character when she sells her soul to the devil. In Ulysses, Stephen Dedalus repeatedly thinks of this poem which he sang to his mother on her deathbed, remembering especially the lines, ‘And no more turn aside and brood / Upon love’s bitter mystery.’ The subject of the poem is treated in “The Abdication of Fergus MacRoy,” by Samuel Ferguson in his Lays of the Western Gael, London: B[e]ll & Daldy, 1865), p.27. The poem was reprinted in The Rose (1893) with “Fergus and the Druid” as a companion-piece preceeding it.

[ top ]

T. S. Eliot: In Notes Towards A Definition of Culture (London: Faber & Faber 1948), Eliot writes: ‘[... H]ere we may remark that when a dominant class, however badly it has performed its function, is forcibly removed, its function is not wholly taken over by any other. The “flight of the wild geese” is perhaps a symbol of the harm that England has done to Ireland - more serious, from this point of view, than the massacres of Cromwell, or any of the grievances which the Irish most gladly recall. It may be too that England has done more harm to Wales and Scotland by gently attracting their upper classes to certain public schools, than by the wrongs (some real, and some imaginary, some misunderstood) voiced by their respective nationalists. But here again, I wish to reserve judgement about Russia. That country, at the time of its revolution, may still have been at so early a stage of its development, that the removal of its upper class may prove not only [sic] to have arrested its development but to have stimulated it. There are, however, some grounds for believing that the elimination of an upper class at a more developed stage can be a disaster for a country: and most certainly when that removal is due to the intervention of another nation.’ (p.46.) (Available as .pdf at US Archive.org [in Internet Archive] - online.

Note: The resemblance between Yeats’s and Eliot’s view of this matter is clear both as regards the role of an aristocracy and the fate of Ireland - might well suggest a conversation between them on the subject. The copy of Definition [... &c.] from which the above is quoted contains a slipped in letter from Eliot to the previous owner, Mrs. Sybil Le Brocquy, acknowledging with pleasure the intention of the Dublin Drama League to perform his play The Reunion. The type-written and signed letter is dated 10th September 1941 and refers to a letter from her of August 26 of that year. [BS]

Daniel Corkery: In “Seamus - I”, a story in The Hounds of Banba (1920), Corkery writes of the young woman Monica O’Sullivan: ‘Of Monica, Seamus used always to speak, to speak quite openly, in the phrase Naisi uses of Deirdre in Mr. Yeats’s play, “My Eagle!” - and we never cavilled at it. [...] Was ever any other girl so much of a piece? - figure, bearing, voice, spirit? Her background that windy night was one of the myths - the story of Emer, of Fand, of Deirdre. / She greeted me in Irish [...]’. (p.80.)

Oswald Spengler: Yeats’s personal library - now held in the National Library of Ireland - contains copies of The Decline and Fall of the West, respecting which 45 and 96 sheets of photocopy annotations were made by Roger Parisious in 1968. (See the selected list of many such annotations in his library, attached.)

Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World [Lowell Lectures, 1925] (Macmillan 1925). CONTENTS: Preface [signed Harvard 1925]. I. The Origins of Modern Science [1]; II. Mathematics as an Element in the History of Thought [28]; III. The Century of Genius [55]; IV. The Eighteenth Century [80]; V. The Romantic Reaction [105]; VI. The Nineteenth Century [134]; VII. Relativity [160] VIII. The Quantum Theory [181]; IX. Science and Philosophy [193]; X. Abstraction [219]; XI. God [242]; XII. Religion and Science [252]; XIII. Requisites for Social Progress [270]. Available at Project Gutenberg - online; accessed 29.11.2024. Note: For Whitehead's importance to Yeats, see Matthew deForrest under Commentary - supra.

Note: In Science and the Modern World, Whitehead - a Cambridge Fellow, FRS, and Harvard Professor - prefers the phrase ‘spatio-temporal continuum’ (e.g., p.219). The chapters that must have interested Yeats most were that on “Religion and Science” (Chap. XII)—and his own sentence about ‘educated men’ is undoubedly shaped by Whitehead’s in that chapter: ‘Science is even more changeable than theology. No man of science could subscribe without qualification to Galileo’s beliefs, or to Newton’s beliefs, or to all his own scientific beliefs of ten years ago.’ (p.219.) Whitehead’s book is is available in full at at Project Gutenberg [online; accessed 01.12.2024]; also as numbered paragraphs at Open Edition - online, accessed 03.11.2024. [BS]

Walter Wentz: In his personal library Yeats held The Fairy Faith in Celtic Countries (1909), a PhD. thesis by Walter Yeeling Evans Wentz, in a complementary copy supplied by the author to Lady Gregory (See the selected list of many such annotations in his library, attached.)

[ top ]

George Orwell: A copy of the Collected Poems [1933] (Macmillan 1939), formerly owned by George Orwell and at one time by Richard Rees, is held in the National Library of Wales. [COPAC record, online; accessed 22.10.2010.]

Marianne Moore saw Yeats lecture at Brooklyn, NY, in 1932 and wrote: ‘he is hearty, smiling, benevolent and elegant with a springiness and vigor that no invalid could very well counterfeit … You could never hear more finished speaking or a finer manner; he has the hand of a hereditary royalist who never picked up a stone or touched his own shoes.’ (Letters, ed. Bonnie Costello, Celeste Goodridgee & Cristanne Miller, Faber 1998; reviewed by Nicholas Jenkins, Times Literary Supplement, 22 May 1998, p.3.)

Una Ellis Fermor attributes the power of Yeats’s language to its origin in the speech of Irish peasants, arguing that ‘the unconscious and spontaneous revelation of the living imagination’ was embodied in ‘the living speech of the people of Ireland in his own day’ (1964, p.62). [See Loreto Todd, The Language of Irish Literature, 1989, p.73]. ALSO, Yeats knew that words had to be allied to ‘a powerful and passionate syntax’ (Essays and Introductions, pp.521-22; Loreto, op. cit., p.74]

Olivia Shakespear: Olivia Shakespear’s affair with Yeats was not disclosed in Ellmann’s biography (1948); she herself protrayed it in the thinly disguised title character of her novel Rupert Armstrong.

Conor Cruise O’Brien: O’Brien remarks on Yeats’s inveterate use of ‘violent’ as a term of encomium, e.g., “Cuchulain Comforted”: ‘violent and famous, strode among the dead.’ (Passion and Cunning, 1988, q.p.). Noe also that the story of Cruise O’Brien’s successfully getting Yeats to admit that he has not read Carlyle (but his wife has) is told in an interview with R. M. Smyllie in W. R. Rodgers, Irish Portraits and reprinted in Patricia Boylan, All Cultivated People (1988), p.34.

Denis Ireland: Ireland remarks of Yeats’s attitude to Ulster: ‘As for Willie Yeats, factory chimneys and fairies were assumed to cancel one another out […].’ (From the Jungle of Belfast, 1973, p.18; quoted in F. L. S Lyons, ‘Yeats and Victorian Ireland’, in A. Norman Jeffares, ed., Yeats, Sligo and Ireland [Irish Literary Studies 6], Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe 1980.)

Edmund Gosse: in his Introduction to Restoration Plays (London: Dent 1912; new edn. 1932; rep. 1968), Gosse remarks about the “heroic” drama introduced by Roger Boyle [Lord Orrery] that ‘[i]t must be remembered that, whether in rhymed or blank verse, tragedy under Charles II was delivered in a kind of undulating sing-song. Some idea of its effect may perhaps be gained from Mr. Yeats’ experiments in the delivery of verse in his Irish theatre. This was pleasing to the noble amateurs who patronised the stage, and it gave the audience, eager for self-improvement, an impression of being in the best company. The tradition of Elizabethan acting […] was entirely lost [when the theatres opened again […]’. (p.ix.) Further speaks of Thomas Betterton, the actor who played Owen Tudor for Boyle; see under Roger Boyle, supra.

Horace Plunkett wrote in his diary entry about Yeat as ‘the young Poet - a rebel - a mystic - an ass - but really a genius in a queer way’ (cited in Peter McDonald, ‘The Necessary Nan’, review of The Collected Letters of W. B. Yeats, ed. Warwick Gould, et al., OUP 1997; in Times Literary Supplement, 5 Dec. 1997.)

Anne Yeats, the poet’s daughter, b. 26 Feb. 1919; d. 4 July 2001 [corr.; note vars. b. 2 Feb. or 9 May 1919]

Michael Yeats, Irish senator and son of W. B. Yeats, d. 2006 (bur. 7 Jan. 2006).

Reg Skene: Reg[inald] Skene produced the entire cycle of the Cuchulain plays at Univ. of Winnipeg in 1969, later publishing, The Cuchulain Plays of W. B. Yeats (London: Macmillan 1974)

x'x'[ top ]

The Cornell Yeats - Introduction: ‘The volumes in this series will present the manuscripts of W. B. Yeats’s poems (all extant versions), plays (complete insofar as possible) and other materials (including selected occult writings) from the rich archives preserved in the collection of Senator Michael B. Yeats, the National Library of Ireland, and elsewhere. The primary goal of the editors is to achieve the greatest possible fidelity in transcription. Photographic facsimiles will be used extensively to supplement the texts. … They will be essential reference works for scholars who wish to establish authoritative tests of the published works.’ Note: 2 items at Emory (Stephen Enniss, Curator of the Literary Collections at the Robert W. Woodruff Library, Emory Univ.); also items from MBY (Michael Yeats) and NYPL. Bibl. cites Edward O’Shea, A Descriptive Catalog of W. B. Yeats’s Library (NY & London: Stanford UP 1984). See also Cornell Series as listed on the publisher’s web site, infra [copy] and in Ricorso [infra].

Macmillan Edns.: There was a chorus of regrets among the critics at the time of the several Macmillan editions of his prose that these volumes were delivered without scholarly apparatus. Herbert Read, in ‘What Yeats Believed’, review of Essays and Introductions, in Listener (9 March, 1961), remarked that ‘this collection of what Yeats called his “critical prose” appears with a minimum of editing and no index. It has an introduction written by Yeats in 1937, but the publishers do not tell us why it has taken twenty-four years to produce the book, the proofs of which were seen and corrected by the author shortly before his death. There is nothing within the volume to explain the origin and first appearance of the various items ... All this is a pity, because the volume is important for an understanding of Yeats’s mind and development, and the special introductions which he wrote for this volume, for his Plays, and for the Works as a whole are published here for the first time.’ (Listener, q.p.); See also the attitude expressed by Richard Murphy in his review of Explorations [Under Murphy, as attached].

London diner (1): Yeats dined with Douglas Hyde at the Unwins’ on 6 March only to find out that Mrs. Fisher Unwin is daughter of ‘the great Cobden, MP’; he next takes Douglas Hyde to the Cheshire Cheese. (See Dominic Daly, The Young Douglas Hyde, p.161.)

London diner (2): Yeats was dining with others in London when news of the 1916 Easter Rising arrives, 25 April 1916; responds to executions of Pearse and others with “Easter 1916”, written between May and September, first printed in edn. of 25 copies, 1917, and published in book-form at the height of the War of Independence in 1920.

Scrambled Irish: Yeats contributed “The Irish Censorship” to The Spectator (29 Sept. 1928), asserting that ‘they do not understand that you cannot unscramble eggs’; also contributed “The Censorship and Thomas Aquinas” to Irish Statesman, quoting Aquinas in refutation of the puritanical usage of the term ‘indecent’ (to mean ‘calculated to excite sexual passion’) in the Bill of 1929, writing of Raphael’s representation of the Blessed Virgin ‘an entirely voluptuous body’ with ‘all the patience of his sexual passion’.

Scraps & films: Scrapbooks containing cuttings of Yeats newspaper and magazine articles, with his manuscripts notes and alterations, are held in NLI as MS Books 12147 and 12148; microfilms of United Ireland and Dublin Daily Express held in Univ. of Illinois Library. (See John Frayne, ed., Uncollected Prose, 1970; Pref., p.12.)

“Coole Park” (1st Draft): ‘These woods are in their autumn colours / But the Coole Water is low’: first draft of “Coole Park” (Quoted in Brenda Maddox, Yeats’s Ghosts: The Secret Life of W. B. Yeats, NY: HarperCollins 1999, p.35.)

[ top ]

Stilts: In his Preface to The Oxford Book of Modern Verse (1936), Yeats said, ‘we all got down off our stilts’ - perhaps meaning chiefly himself. “The Circus Animals’ Desertion” has a corresponding reference to ‘Malachi, stilts and all’ as one of the things he discarded in his mature poetic. Curtis Bradford has pointed out that, in the draft-version of the poem, he used the phrase ‘the men on stilts’ (Curtis Bradford, Yeats at Work, S. Illinois UP 1965). See also Richard Ellmann, Yeats: The Man and the Masks (1948): ‘[...] purging his style of its more obvious dream-like trappings, in a word, seeming to get off his stilts.’ (p.293.) [BS]

Wasteful virtues: Epigraph for all issues of Threshold taken from Yeats’s The King’s Threshold, ‘Cry that not a man alive would ride among the arrows with high heart / or scatter with an open hand, had not our heady craft / commanded wasteful virtues.’

Irish heirman: While staying at Coole Yeats caused Robert Gregory to feel jealous and antipathy not least because he drank Sir William’s vintage Tokay.

Raging youths: Richard Ellmann quotes Maud Gonne’s autobiography, in Yeats: The Man and the Masks (1948; rev. edn. 1962), where she speaks of his autobiography and the fact that they gave little indication of the intensity and enthusiasm which raged in his youth since the self-possessed old man had buried the extravagant boy. Frank O’Connor said[,] ‘Every time I leave the old man I feel like a thousand dollars’. “AE” (George Russell) called him ‘The Poet of Shadows’ in Some Irish Essays (1906). [pp.1-4.]

Quit Ireland?: David Pierce reports the discovery in Melville library of a letter of 1 Feb. 1923 in which, writing from Merrion Sq. in the thick of the Civil War, George Yeats - who was then staying at the Savile Club, London - attempts to persuade her husband not to contemplate leaving Ireland for good. (See Times Literary Supplement, Letters, 1 Dec. 1995, p.15.)

Hugh Lane Gallery: WBY signed a letter to The Irish Times (Dec. 1904; printed 5 Jan. 1905), appealing for donations to the value of £30,000 or £40,000 to purchase the collection of impressionist paintings ‘chosen by experts from the Staats-Froves and Durand-ruel Collections, and admitted to be the finest representation of modern French art outside Paris’, currently showing at the Royal Hibernian Academy. with Jane Barlow, Augusta Gregory, S. H. Butcher, Douglas Hyde, Edith Oe. Somerville, Martin Ross, Emily Lawless, W. B. Yeats, Geo. W. Russell (“AE”). (Denson, op. cit, p.54.)

Sao Paolo U.: The William B. Yeats Chair of Irish Studies was established under an agreement between Brazil and Ireland, signed on 29 Sept. 2009 by Franco Maria Lajolo, Vice-President of the Universidade de Sao Paulo Sandra Margarida Nitrini, Dean of the Faculty of Humanities, on one side, and Ambassador Michael Hoey, representing Ireland on the other, with a view to promoting lasting cooperation between the Embassy and University in future. The Chair is coordinated by Professor Laura P. Z. Izarra (Professor Hon. Causa NUI/Maynooth) and guest-directed by Dr. Munira H. Mutran.

[ top ]

Click does the trick:

In letter to Dorothy Wellesley, Yeats wrote that ‘a poem comes right with a click like a closing box.’ (Letters on Poetry from W.B. Yeats, London 1940, p.24). Geoffrey Hill juxtaposes this description and the experience described with T. S. Eliot’s similar account - identified with “Three Voices” - ‘of exhaustion, of appeasement, of absolution, and of something very near annihilation’ on successfully finishing a poem. (See ‘Poetry as “Menace” and “Atonement’’’ in Hill, The Lords of Limit; cited by Adam Piette of Glasgow Univ., on Modbrits e-list, March 1998.)

Note also that Rudyard Kipling ends the novel Kim with ‘an almost audible click’ when the boy ‘regrasp[s] things’, as Edward Said puts it in his interpretation of the novel. (See Said, Culture and Imperialism, Chatto & Windus 1993, p.172). Said goes on to equate this ‘regrasping of the scene’ with George Eliot and Henry James in other novels, and further notes that the ‘lock[ing] up anew on the world without’ that Kim experiences is reinforced by Mother Earth’s blessing upon him as she ‘breathed through him [what had been] lost’. (Op. cit., p.173).

‘I am Kim. I am Kim. And what is Kim? His soul repeated it again and again ... tears trickled down his nose and with an almost audible click he felt the wheels of his being lock up anew on the world without’ (Ch.15; OUP Edn., 2000; intro. Edward Said, p.331; cited at http://www.english-literature.org/essays/kipling.html.)

Plainly the experiences described by Yeats and Eliot are more nearly opposite than identical; but does Yeats’s choice of word owe anything to Kipling? [BS]

Cf. James Joyce - reviewing Lady Gregory’s Poets and Dreamers, in Daily Express, Dublin (26 March 1903): ‘[...] The story-teller preserves the strange machinery of fairyland, but his mind is feeble and sleepy. He begins one story and wanders from it into anoter story, and none of the stories has any satisfying imaginative wholeness, none of them like Sir John Dawe’s poem that cried tink at the close.’. (p.103; see longer extract under Gregory - as supra.) [N.b., Sir John Dawe is a character in in Ben Jonson, Epicoene, II.ii.]

[ top ]

Minting Ireland: Yeats’s authorship of the report of the irish Coinage Commission as Coinage of Saorstat Eireann (1928) is suggested by its inclusion in Wade’s Bibliography of Yeats as item 317 [Wade 317]. The work has 11 plates.

Dram. Pers.: RED HANRAHAN founded on Aoghan Rua Ó Súilleabháin; MARY BATTLE, the clairvoyant servant of George Pollexfen who saw from a window at Rosses Point ancient superhuman forms on Knocknarea (see Autobiographies, p.266; also “Under Ben Bulben”); CRAZY JANE, founded on “Cracked Mary”, an old woman near Gort with an ‘amazing power of audacious speech’.

Bloom v. Hough: Harold Bloom praised Brenda S. Webster, Yeats: A Psychoanalytical Study (1975), as the best book on Yeats while Graham Hough condemned it as the work of an ‘opinionated bitch.’ (See Times Literary Supplement, 14 Feb. 1975).

Clubs & Hons.: W. B was in receipt of Civil List pension of £150 due to influence of Asquith and others since 1910; Academic Committee of English Letters; member of United Arts, Sackville St., and Stephen’s Green club and Kildare St. clubs; in London, Royal Societies, and Savile Club (after Jan. 1917); offered membership of the Athenaeum, 16 Feb. 1937, without entrance fee (Rule 2). (See Brenda Maddox, Yeats’s Ghosts, HarperCollins 1999).

Dreams & dollars: Yeats received 3,000 dollars (£600) from Testimonial Committee chaired by James A. Farrell, pres. of U.S. Steel, the sec. of the committee writing that the gift was not to defend ‘old Ireland’ against the charge of being a country of peasants but rather to express a genuine admiration for Yeats and to prove that ‘we Irish can clothe our dreams in reality and be a practical as the best.’ (James D. Mooney to WBY, 7 April 1937, NLI; quoted in Maddox, op. cit., 1999, p.341.)

Gaol-gaels: Garret Fitzgerald writes of the Sinn Féin leaders incarcerated after 1916, ‘Some 70 were arrested, most of whom were sent to British prisons, a number of them to Gloucester jail. These included my father and professor Eoin MacNeill who, as president of the Irish Volunteers, had unsuccessfully sought to countermand the 1916 rising. During their year in prison these prisoners invented an imaginary Irish festival in honour of W. B. Yeats and persuaded the rather nervous governor, who knew little of Ireland, to lay on a special meal for the occasion, which they greatly enjoyed!’ (Review of Sean McConville, Irish Political Prisoners 1848-1922: Theatre of War, in The Guardian, 29 March 2003.)

Yeats Plays in Sligo: The Cat and the Moon by Yeats was produced at the Factory Performance Centre, while Sam McCready directed The Dreaming of the Bones at the Hawk’s Well Theatre as part of the Yeats International Summer School in August 2004.

[ top ]

Under Ben Bulben?: Yeats was buried at Roquebrune and disinterred for removal to Ireland by Irish corvette in corvette Macha, and reinterred at Drumcliff in keeping with his wishes, Sept. 1948. Identification was performed by reference to the length of his bones and a steel truss which he wore for a hernia problem. The neighbouring grave was occupied by Alfred George Hollis, who also had a steel corset, giving rise to possible confusion. A third rumour to the effect that the grave was reused during the war or after in order to effect the burial of a clochard (tramp) has been repudiated. (See Ann Saddlemeyer, Life of Georgie Yeats, OUP 2002.) For an earlier variant of this matter see Brenda Maddox, Yeats’s Ghosts: The Secret Life of W. B. Yeats (NY: HarperCollins 1999): As to the interment and exumation, Maddox suggests DNA testing, but echoes Yeats on being told that he had confused Missolonghi with Mussolini: ‘But ... does ... it ... really ... matter?’

A grave error: ‘A plaque on the wall of the public ossuary, a unicorn-and-star emblem, a few words, designed (but not sculpted) by the artist Edmund Dulac, a friend of the poet for a quarter of a century; Dulac and Edith Heald, another friend of Yeats, had applied officially at Roquebrune-Cap Martin to have the plaque installed “contre le mur limitant l’ossuaire souterrain du côte est, a la mémoire du poète Butler William Yeats (sic), décedé a Roquebrune-Cap-Martin”. / Yeats didn’t rest long in his grave above the sea. There was no trace of him in June 1947 when friends, Dulac among them, came to visit. Had there been some mistake? / How did the poet’s bones now lie in a fosse commune, a communal ditch? Had there been, quite literally, some grace error? Every few years the fosse was cleared; some of the poet’s bones were lifted in 1941, and rest in early 1946; Yeats was piled in the communal ossuary, the bone-pit. / His friends were distraught; and Yeats’s wish to be buried in Drumcliffe was known to them. / Dulac set about burying the error at Roquebrune. He contacted the abbé of Mention, a nearby town famous for its perfumes, to avoid an unholy stink. Discretion as assured. Dulac worked furiously to avoid scandal, even to the point of deciding that George Yeats, the poet’s widow, shoud be “kept out of it.” / Then George decided, in 1948, that she wanted her husband’s bones brought to Sligo. Dulac owned up. She was appalled, certain she had purchased a grave for ten years, hardly one. / It was decided to hunt through the bones in the ossuary for those of her late husband, looking for anything that might provide a clue; it is possible that bludnering about in an ossuary could have produced the bones of W. B. Yeats, which were later loaded up and taken back to Drumcliffe? / An exhumation order, a demande d’exhumation, was signed at Roquebrune on March 12th, 1948, and authorised with an official 20 francs stamp on paper headed Maison Roblot. / The tales was resurrected by avid reading in the library back in Monaco. (Fred Johnston, “An Irishman’s Diary”, in The Irish Times, Sat. 21 May 2005, p.15.)

Riversdale House (Rathfarnham, Co. Dublin): Developers seek to build apartments on Yeats house lands’: Riversdale House, Ballyboden rd., Rathfarnham, Co. Dublin is the object of a challenge to a development plan to build 18 apartments on its lands; purchased by applications Roy Begley and Gerard Clarke for £1.53 in May 1999; applied to demolish the house, Aug. 1999 for construction of 28 apartments; its gates and piers and arched bridge added to record of protected structures by council, on recommendation of Arts, Heritage Gaeltacht and the Islands Ministry, Feb. 2000, the house being added on 12th June 2000; permission refused for apartments by Bord Pleanála, Dec. 2000; applicant served purchase notice, Sept. 2001; applied ad interim to erect 18 apartments; permission granted by council, March 2001, but successfully appealed by Bord Pleanála, Oct. 2001; High Court challenge made on the basis that the Bord erred in construing the provision of the S. Dublin Development Plan and the extent of the area surrounding the house to be protected. (See report by Mary Carolan, The Irish Times, 23 Nov. 2002.)

Cuala Press - successor the Dun Emer Press - commonly bears the title-page address (carried over from the former) of Churchtown, Dundrum [i.e., a suburb of South Dublin].

NLI Accessions (1972): The National Library acquired Poems Written in Discouragement 1912-1913 (Cuala Press 1913), The Hour Glass ([priv.] Cuala Press [1914], and Mosada ([priv.] Cuala Press 1943). See Report of the Trustee’s 1971-72 (1972).

[ top ]

Yeats Memorial: a ‘tribute in bronze by Henry Moore erected by admirers of the poet’ was dedicated as the Yeats Memorial in Stephen’s Green, 26th Oct. 1967, being unveiled by An Taoiseach Jack Lynch; readings from the poetry of W. B. Yeats were given by Austin Clarke, Brendan Kennelly and Eavan Boland. The Memorial Committee was established in 1953 under the chairmanship of Lennox Robinson and inaugurated by a gift of £500 from the John J. Kelly, and later augmented by a generous gift from the Arts Council, with a sum of £5,000 still being sought in 1967. The committee then comprised Raymond McGrath (Hon. Treas.), Michael Scott, James Johnson Sweeney, and William H. Walsh (Hon. Sec.), with an address at The Munster and Leinster Bank Ltd., 2 Lwr Baggot St., Dublin 2.

Chez Yeats: Monday was the evening of Yeats’s “at-homes” as Sunday was Russell’s, and Saturday Stephen MacKenna’s. (See Richard Kain, Dublin in the Age of William Butler Yeats and James Joyce, Oklahoma UP 1962; Newton Abbot: David Charles 1972, p.69.)

Irish Academy of Letters [& Medals] - the prospectus (Sept. 1932): ‘We have at present in Ireland no organisation representing Belles Lettres, and consequently means whereby we Irish authors can make known our views, nor any instrument by which action can be taken on our behalf. / There is in Ireland an official censorship possessing, and actively exercising, powers of suppression which may at any moment confine an Irish author to the British and American market, and thereby make it impossible for him to live by distinctive Irish literature […].’ (Quoted in Geoffrey Elborn, Francis Stuart - A Life, Dublin: Raven Arts Press 1990, p.92.)

Portraits: There are noted portraits of W. B. Yeats by Albert Power, J. B. Yeats, George Russell, W. Strang, Sean O’Sullivan, Augustus John [Yeats at Renvyle, June 1930], John Sargent, Edmund Dulac, and Max Beerbohm (all rep. in W. B. Yeats: A Centenary Exhibition, with a foreword by James White (National Gallery of Ireland 1965). Other portrait can be found in Benedict Kiely, Yeats’s Ireland, An Illustrated Anthology (Aurum 1993), “Yeats as a Young Man”, by John Butler Yeats (Municipal Gallery); Sean O’Sullivan, “Yeats” (Abbey Theatre Foyer), 1934 [used as cover to Times Literary Supplement, No. 4722, Oct. 1 ‘Ireland’ [q.d.]. See also pictures from public and private collections rep. in A. N. Jeffares, W. B. Yeats, A New Biography (London: Hutchinson 1988).

[ top ]

Sylvia Plath: A. A. Alvarez, The Savage God (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson 1971; Norton Paperback 1990), narrates how Sylvia Plath leases the flat in which she committed suicide: ‘One gloomy November afternoon she arrived at my studio greatly excited. As usual, she had been trudging the chill streets, house-hunting despondently and more or less aimlessly. A block away from the square near Primrose Hill where she and Ted had lived when they first came to London, she saw a “To Let” notice up in front of a newly refurbished house. That in itself was something of a miracle in those impossible, overcrowded days. But more important, the house bore a blue plaque announcing that Yeats had once lived there. It was a sign, the confirmation she had been looking for. That summer she had visited Yeats’s Tower at Ballylee and wrote to a friend that she thought it “the most beautiful and peaceful place in the world”. Now there was a possibility of finding another Yeats tower in her favourite part of London which she could in some way share with the great poet. She hurried to the agent’s and found, improbably, that she was the first to apply. Another sign. On the spot she took a five-year lease of the flat, although the rent was more than she could afford. Then she walked across dark, blowy Primrose Hill to tell me the news.’ (p.43.) Plath and her husband Ted Hughes were much interested in primitive religion black magic in this period - if for different reasons. Alvarez explains: ‘[Hughes] had never properly been civilised - or had, at least, never properly believed in his civilisation. It was simply a shell he sardonically put up for the sake of convenience’ and, as such, an apprehension of the ‘animality of self’ was ‘part of his physical presence, a quality of threat behind his shrewd, laconic manner.’ By contrast, the ‘psychic gifts’ which Hughes claimed Plath possessed were more like ‘a triumph of mind over ectoplasm’. (p.45.)

[ back ]

[ top ]