Commentary on Yeats: Older Critical Responses

F. R. Leavis, ‘The Problem and the Challenge’, in Revaluation: Tradition and Development in English Poetry (1936; Pelican Books 1972): ‘How much of the fully achieved thing is there in Yeats’s oeuvre - what proportion of the wholly created poem that stands there unequivocally in its own right, self-sufficient?’ (p.60.)

‘In their hypnoidal vaguenesses ("dim", "dream-pale") and incantatory rhythms, they exemplify that preoccupation with creating a dream-world, or poetic other-world, which Eliot in a famous essay noted as a characteristic of Victorian poetry.’ (p.61.)

‘It is characteristic of Yeats to have no centre of unity, and to have been unable to find one. The lack is apparent in his solemn propoundings about the Mask and the Anti-Self, and in the related schematic elaborations.’ (p.75.) Note: Leavis detects an Irish habit of cultivating ‘attitudes and postures’ (p.75) and finds ‘too much of Parnassian art’ about "Leda and the Swan" (p.79.)

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Louis MacNeice: ‘This attachment - essentially a romantic attachment, of the Ireland that Yeats envisaged is not co-extensive with the real Ireland of small farms and small towns but a doorway on the world of Faery - turned him into a polemicist. One of the characteristics of the Nineties movement that he noted in his early Autobiographies was the indifference of the pre-Raphaelites and their followers to generalisations - yet generalisations was Yeats strongest suit. He was a born argufier, equally about nationality, and ethics, and aesthetics. He resolved this contradiction thus’ (Poetry of W. B. Yeats, 1941, p.27.)

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Denis Donoghue, The Integrity of Yeats (Cork: Mercier Press 1964): [...] Yeats was his own battlefield, victim of his own consciousness and imagination. He could symbolise in great-rooted chestnut trees a condition in which Body is not bruised to give pleasure to Soul; but that condition was not his own, in the day-to-day struggle of his life. In the simplest version of his predicament we find him now drawn towards the pblic world of politics and theatre-management, now again retreating to the severe extremes of privacy, and more often still torn between the two exigencies.’ On Yeats’s preoccupation with the occult: ‘perhaps it is the furnishing of his mind with possessions consistent with his moments of resolute privacy [...; 13] In fact, strictly speaking magic in Yeat’s later work served only the same purpose as the faery-islands in the early poems - to fence off an area of private ground within which his Spirit might roam at will.’ ("Yeats and Modern Poetry: An Introduction", op .cit., pp.12-13.)

Denis Donoghue, We Irish: The Selected Essays (1986): ‘[T]he legends which allowed Yeats’s mind to move freely and suggestively along their margins allowed him also to find their analogues in his own life; they gave him a terminology which he was free to apply and, applying it, to move from legend into history, his own history but history nonetheless. In that sense, a mythologofy reflects not only its region, as Stevens said, but the experience of the mind that receives it.’ (p.46; quoted in Terence Brown, A Life of W. B. Yeats, 1999 [2001 pb. edn.] p.83, with comment: ‘as Denis Donoghue has eloquently stated .., while admitting the problems of unfamiliarity involved in Yeats’s recourse to Celtic symbols and legends as the matter of his early art’; idem.)

Denis Donoghue, ‘Ireland, Race, Nation, State’ [Part 1], in Partisan Review, Vol. LXVI, No. 2 (1999), pp.223-34: ‘Yeats’s main achievement in his early poems, plays, and essays was to bring to composition and form a plethora of national desires that hardly knew themselves to be desires. He told many Irish men and women what they felt, what they wanted, and the more strenuous things they should now want. It was an [p.229] achievement the more remarkable because he spoke from the experience of a social class in decline, the Protestant professional class of parsons and businessmen, and he thought to arouse from their sleep a people mainly Roman Catholic, a type he always disliked and in his later years feared.’ (pp.229-30).