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293 Pages·2012·1.32 MB·English

by  Nathan Myers

“YEATS”: FASHIONING CREDIBILITY, CANONICITY, AND ETHNIC IDENTITY
THROUGH TRANSNATIONAL APPROPRIATION

A DISSERTATION
SUBMITTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS
FOR THE DEGREE
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
BY
NATHAN MYERS
DISSERTATION ADVISORS: DR. DEBORAH MIX
AND DR. PATRICK COLLIER

BALL STATE UNIVERSITY
MUNCIE, INDIANA
DECEMBER 2012
Introduction:

Yeats Matters

Unlike many canonized literary figures, William Butler Yeats endures as a
curious and multifarious point of reference for both the academic community and for
purveyors of more popular media. Yeats allusions, references, and evocations span time,
location, and genre. Beginning midway through the twentieth century, Yeats’s words
have been used to title a notable sum of books, from those dealing specifically with
Ireland’s political history and other concerns related to Yeats’s preoccupations (Tom
Grime’s A Stone of the Heart), to what might be considered more “highbrow”
contemporary literature that has nothing to do with Ireland (Joan Didion’s Slouching
Towards Bethlehem, Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men), “lowbrow” literature
(Robert B. Parker’s The Widening Gyre), and something in between (Bradbury’s The
Golden Apples of the Sun, Woody Allen’s Mere Anarchy). Indeed it is hardly possible to
identify accurate, comprehensive patterns among these diverse references. Their sheer
volume and consistency, however, clearly indicate that Yeats possesses and continues to
retain an authoritative, enduring, and uniquely protean capital; his literary signature aids
the evoker and affords resources, aligning her with a distinctive, though vaguely defined,
literary tradition, historically popular and urbane, that simultaneously exploits, asserts,
3
and perpetuates Yeats’s eminent and mutable position in the increasingly globalized,
transnational cultural memory of the mid to late 20th century.
Despite this apparent phenomenon, recent studies on Yeats have approached his
texts by not altogether inspired means that demonstrate little concern for their own shared
implicit but fundamental premise: Yeats matters. Yeats Studies seems to have grown
particularly insular; recent overviews reveal that many critics simply write back to one
another and engage in long standing debates over issues like the ordering of Yeats’s
poems (O’Hara, Bornstein, “Of What is Past”). Though academics surely have the
propensity to engage largely, if not solely, with those in their own field of study, it is a
particularly curious phenomenon here because Yeats is remarkably present outside the
academic community. Regardless, the fundamental methodological impulse of these
reassignments largely remains the same throughout the latter half of the 20th century:
critics have continually approached Yeats in an effort to pinpoint the “true” meaning of
his work, and to uncover Yeats’s masks – his capricious identities and intentions.1
Therefore, a more imaginative direction is necessary, one that is concerned less with how
we read, but why we read Yeats. Yeats has been and still may be an important figure for
literary critics who try to isolate meaning and work out issues of authorial intent, but his
worth outside academia is equally fascinating and probes, and ultimately bridges, the
hierarchical division between an academic readership and everyone else. Indeed, it is
ironic that Yeats, the canonical 20th-century poet, has been so markedly treasured by a
popular readership that otherwise cares little for modernist poetry.

1 See Ben-Merre, Bornstein’s “Facsimiles,” Maun, and Schmidt.
4
“Yeats” is a unique cultural phenomenon; by way of compound and diverse
appropriations by numerous groups and institutions, his poetry and personage have been
tangled in complex notions of national, ethnic and social power across the 20th century.
We will see that Yeats has been packaged for different markets, and these varied methods
constitute and assert his value, and are often responsible for the reasons why the public
has bought into Yeats’s greatness. There is a strong distinction between the canonical
Yeats – the poet who has been historically celebrated by academics and nonacademics
alike – and the “complete” Yeats, with all his unattractive compulsions, and truly bizarre,
and sometimes unreadable, occultist visions. Still, we can untangle these problematic
relationships in ways that illuminate Yeats’s work, the work of those who seek his
alliance, and the cultural practice of fashioning a literary, transnational figurehead. Yeats
remains a productive site, a vehicle by which we can approach numerous complex issues:
Irish ethnic identification and construction during the 20th century, the transnational
appropriation of art and politics, and the creation and credence of literary celebrity. The
appropriation of Yeats as a transnational literary and political figurehead in and outside
of Ireland demonstrates an intricate network of notions about ethnic heritages,
nationalisms, and literary alliances that deserves to be thoroughly considered.

From Yeats to “Yeats”: George Yeats and Richard Ellmann
Yeats’s posthumous, constructed persona(s) originates with Yeats’s widow and
literary executor, George Hyde-Lees Yeats, and her specific choice to put Yeats’s legacy
in the hands of Richard Ellmann. The impact of George Yeats on W.B. Yeats’s
philosophies and creative output has seldom been regarded by anyone but Richard
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Ellmann, whose work, we will see, was very much an extension of George’s own vision;
therefore, their efforts provide a valuable lens through which we can begin to
comprehend Yeats’s impact throughout the century, the process of canonical
construction, and the complicated forces of appeasement that play into biographical
composition: those who tell our tales must be granted access, and their voices are
necessarily enabled, only, perhaps, because they will write a history that pleases the one
who provides admittance.
Though she clearly influenced Yeats’s writing during his lifetime, George Yeats
had an even more indelible role in shaping his posthumous construction and is therefore a
vital component in understanding Yeats’s function in the twentieth century. Though
George and W.B. had known each other for years because of their involvement in the
same occultist circles, their marriage was a rather sudden affair that took place in the
wake of Iseult Gonne’s rejection of Yeats’s marriage proposal and came as a surprise to
Yeats’s friends. As the story goes, Yeats, in the early days of his marriage to George,
expressed a melancholic disappointment with his decision to marry, still harboring
apparent feelings for Maude Gonne and her daughter Iseult. Yeats seems to have had
trouble concealing discontent, an emotion that plagued him throughout life. His attitude,
however, quickly changed upon discovering that his new wife had begun practicing what
they would later term automatic writing, a process by which, according to George, she
could channel and receive messages from Controls or Guides; Yeats, who held a lifelong
interest in such matters was instantly and irreversibly captivated. It is evident that
George Yeats’s automatic writing strongly influenced W.B. Yeats’s ideas; much of his
later poetry and what specifically became A Vision were born from the automatic writing
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and their subsequent discussions. But it is also clear that these “messages” worked to the
advantage of George Yeats, ensuring her power in the marriage and, subsequently, in the
management of Yeats’s legacy (Harper).
The primary source of this story, like the majority of biographical details
concerning Yeats, was Richard Ellmann. However, Ellmann took some time to further
illuminate this situation by revising/updating his account of the automatic writing after
the death of George Yeats; this revision has been overlooked, but its details shed much
light on the process of canonical construction. Ellmann remains one of Yeats’s most
important and influential champions and continues to provide a foundation for Yeats
criticism, a foundation that, though its accuracy has been left largely ignored, generates a
number of questions and demonstrates that, though Yeats may have adopted many masks
that served his own ever-changing visions during his own lifetime, he would continue to
be adorned with a range of guises that served his biographers after his death.
In Yeats: The Man and the Masks, originally published in 1948, Ellmann
accounted for George’s automatic writing, a central event in Yeats’s consciousness,
rather casually:
A few days after their marriage, Mrs. Yeats for the first time in her life
attempted automatic writing. There were a few meaningless lines, and
then suddenly she thought that her hand was seized by a superior power.
In the fragmentary sentences that were scribble on the paper her amazed
husband saw the rudiments of the system which he had spent his early life
trying to evoke through vision, and his middle age trying to formulate
through research. Here, in his own home, was miracle without
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qualification. The bush was burning at last. (222)
Here the chapter ends, and Ellmann moves on to evaluate “esoteric Yeatsism.” But
Ellmann apparently was not content with his original account and decided to fill in the
gaps after George Yeats’s death.
In the decades after its original publication in 1948, Richard Ellmann’s Yeats: The
Man and the Masks, became the source literary critics consulted for biographical details
concerning Yeats. But it would take Ellmann thirty years to disclose, if not thoroughly,
some details concerning the help offered by Yeats’s widow. In the preface to the second
edition in 1979, Ellmann describes George Yeats’s role in the construction of the book; in
many ways, the illuminating preface stands as a monument to her. One might also note
Ellmann’s need, implicit but apparent, to assert the credibility of his and George Yeats’s
version of W.B. Yeats this second time around. Though Mrs. Yeats was notorious for not
answering letters, she was uncharacteristically welcoming to Ellmann, a young but
ambitious scholar who wrote to her in hopes of viewing her husband’s manuscripts.
Upon arriving at her home, Ellmann found neatly arranged files and cabinets and quickly
learned of George Yeats’s encyclopedic knowledge of where even the most minor
fragments of information could be found. According to Ellmann, he would turn to her to
fill in the gaps of his evolving narrative and answer his questions, and she would supply
him with an old suitcase filled with papers that would provide the necessary information.
Additionally, Ellmann recalls, without complaint or distrust, how George Yeats aided
him in the interpretation of her husband’s work. He recalls several instances when she
disagreed with his interpretation of one of Yeats’s poems, producing memories of her
own that always asserted the validity of her own analyses. Ellmann strictly adhered to
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her account: “No doubt she was right,” he writes (viii). George Yeats’s apparent
influence, though only emphasized briefly and in each case as assistance rather than
manipulation, is noteworthy. “She had played a great role with aplomb,” he writes, as
though he has little reason to regard the matter any further (ix).
Any reader regarding Ellmann’s account of George Yeats’s utility, rapidity, and
self-effacement with even the merest skepticism will here uncover fertile ground for
doubt and, at the very least, reason to suspect some unintentional distortion in Ellmann’s
account of the life of W.B. Yeats. Such distortions are perhaps inevitable, as
biographical construction necessitates at least some imagination, but the preface does
little to revise the story of the Man and the Masks thirty years later, save in one particular
place. Ellmann writes:
[George] understood that he felt he might have done the wrong thing in
marrying her rather than Iseult, whose resistance might have weakened in
time. Mrs. Yeats wondered whether to leave him. Casting about for some
means of distraction, she thought of attempting automatic writing…. Her
idea was to fake a sentence or two that would allay his anxieties over
Iseult and herself, and after the session to own up to what she had done.
Accordingly on 21 October, four days after their marriage, she encouraged
a pencil to write a sentence which I remember saying approximately,
‘What you have done is right for both the cat and the hare.’ She was
confident that he would decipher the cat as her watchful and timid self,
and the hare as Iseult…. Yeats was at once captured and relieved. His
misgivings disappeared, and it did not occur to him that his wife might
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have divined his cause of anxiety without preternatural assistance. (xii)
According to George (as reported by Ellmann), she had somehow opened herself to the
process through this initial deception, and subsequent forays into automatic writing were
indeed inspired and sincere. Regardless, the difference between these two accounts of a
single event is significant; though Ellmann is in no way unflattering to George in the
second version – indeed, this brief episode may be easily disregarded because it is
couched amidst descriptions of George’s immense helpfulness – these two accounts, read
alongside each other, at the very least expose the complex web of intent, influence, and
agency at work during the time Yeats’s canonicity was still being constructed.
Certainly, George Yeats’s automatic writings, subsequent to her initial foray, can
simply be regarded as productions of her unconscious mind, and indeed they most often
are.2 However, despite her admitted initial manipulation, critics tend to ignore
considerations concerning the validity of George Yeats’s automatic script, or even the
impetus for this venture, perhaps because the automatic writing served as the basis of
much of Yeats’s later poetry and the difficult schemes that would finally constitute A
Vision. When critics do show consideration, it is most often brief and couched in an
optimistic idiom; for example, Margaret Mills Harper quickly glosses over her
skepticism: “George Yeats provided for her husband feminine self-effacement,
unconsciously prophetic wisdom, clever fakery, or patriarchally coerced subordinacy”
(292-93). Regardless of these credibility issues, however, it remains resolutely clear that
during his lifetime, George greatly impacted Yeats’s outlook and output (“For a time he

2 See Jochum.
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accepted without qualification the messages that came through the automatic writing”),
and that subsequent to Yeats’s death in 1939, George Yeats orchestrated which stories
were told about W.B. Yeats, and who told them (293). She alone provided access to
portions of Yeats’s personal papers, which she had “arranged with care” (Ellmann xvi,
vii). Curiously, only Harper has really tried to evaluate her influence, while other critics
fail to even note her obvious impact; she remains a participant, not a possible originator
or designer of W.B.’s many visions.
Even though he chose to update this particular anecdote concerning George’s
automatic writing, Ellmann’s portrait of George Yeats, albeit a minor part of the
biography, is decidedly complimentary. He even goes so far as to make some rather
subjective evaluations where she is concerned: “She was more intelligent than Maud
Gonne or Iseult,” Ellmann writes, and it is unclear if he is speaking for Yeats or tapping
into his own impressions (xi). He also asserts that Michael Robartes and the Dancer, one
of Yeats’s best collections and one that manifests the impact of his and George’s venture
into automatic writing, “formed an elaborate tribute to his wife” (xiv). But as George’s
primary successor in charge of W.B. Yeats’s legacy, Ellmann certainly had good reason
to depict her in this way. That’s not to say that George didn’t display such admirable
qualities, but Ellmann certainly had ample motivation to portray her in such a
complimentary manner, for she was in many ways primarily responsible for his career.
Moreover, his apparent drive for further transparency in the second edition was certainly
more permissible by the late 1970s because Yeats’s canonicity was even more firmly
intact thirty years after the first edition of the book that helped to cement Yeats’s
reputation. Ellmann, who no longer had to justify his subject, then chose to write about