I am deeply indebted to Desmond Greaves for having encouraged me to write this paper, which was read before members of the Connolly Association and Irish Self-determination League in London in June, 1965, and for giving much stimulating advice during its preparation, but above all for rekindling all my boyhood enthusiasm for Ireland's greatest poet at a memorable session in a pub off Stephens Green some five years ago.

Acknowledgments are due to Mr. M. B. Yeats and Messrs. MacMillan & Co. Ltd. for permission to quote extracts from Yeats's works, and to the BBC. for permission to reproduce the cover picture. BF.

For a modern Irishman aware of the facts and implications of modern Irish history, and believing in Ireland's future as a nation, there is a great deal to find fault with in Yeats. As we move away from that auspicious birthday on June 13th, 1865, and try to size up the events of Irish history over the last 100 years, the part W.B Yeats played in them often looks very much like a tissue of might-have-beens. I mean to point to a number of features of Yeats's poetry, his life and thought in this light. Since it is my intention to be critical, I want to start off by making it clear that I am not setting out in any way to "de-bunk" Yeats.

WB Yeats is without any doubt the greatest Irish poet that ever lived, and one of the major world poets of this century. There may be some we esteem more as men, some whose message seems to us more uniformly true or more directly, earnestly addressed to us. But there is no sensible definition of greatness that can exclude Yeats from this position. We may ask where is the use of the term great In talking about poets, but that is another question. André Gide was once asked who was the greatest French poet and replied: "Victor Hugo, Hélas!" It is possible that we may feel like saying the same of Yeats; Who is the greatest Irish poet? W. B. Yeats, unfortunately.

Possible, I say, but this is not enough. I hope to show that though there is a lot to criticise in Yeats, there is more to admire. And we must remember that we cannot judge in terms of perfection; we can only compare. Most of the grand panjandrums of this century's literature are, if we look closely at them, a sorry lot of charlatans in some way or other. Yeats may have been a romantic, but he did not limit his subject matter to suburban daydreaming as did his Georgian contemporaries. He may have dabbled In right-wing politics but his attitudes are never negative or mean, and there is no trace in his poetry anywhere of the anti-Semitic flavour of certain passages of TS Elliot. He may have hedged and havered over political issues in Ireland, but he never ran away to look at it all from a distance like James Joyce. Yeats's most devastating critic in recent years as regards his poetry has been the Anglo-Irish Robert Graves who for nearly forty years has lived aloof in Majorca. If there were nothing else to be said about Yeats's political attitudes it would be reasonable to set him above the escapists, to prefer the poet who chose wrong to those who did not choose at all.

Now in judging any piece of human speech, poem, political statement or scrap of conversation the first question to ask is always: who said it? who did they say it to? and so m. With a poet this is even more important. For a poet is not just a man talking, he is, whether he likes it or not, a spokesman for others. He is saying what they are too clumsy or too shy or too cowardly or just too muddled and inarticulate to say for themselves. Otherwise no-one would publish his poetry at all. And to criticise or admire a piece of poetry is not simply a personal business between ourselves and the poet. We are also concerned directly with all those he gave a voice to. Before we can say anything useful about Yeats we must therefore first see who he was speaking to, and who he was speaking for, as well as who he was. Mere biographical gossip and personal details axe not enough to help us here. A man Is defined by his social context, the society he is born into and his relations with it. And If he tries to escape from it, or conceal his origins or dress them up, then that is revealing too.

This is a little hard to do with Yeats. Or rather it has been very little done. There is a sort of aura of legend about him which has bemused his admirers and alienated or driven away his detractors so that only a few critics have been able to write of him as they would have done of just another poet. Is it for this that most of the books about Yeats are written by foreigners and that most of the books by Irish writers fail to get to grips with the subject through either admiring or belittling too much.

I confess I am not altogether free from this mythologising view myself. I saw Yeats. The memory Is a very vivid one. It has been made more vivid by the American I once met who, when he heard this stared at me as though I had said I had seen Cuchulain. "You say you ... saw ... Yeats? ..." Still I cannot help recalling the tall, outlandishly distinguished-looking figure, the shock of Persil-white hair, the jutting lip, the pince-nez glasses hanging down on a black silk ribbon, and the haughty rather awkward walk, hands clasped behind the back, head held high. I confess I have had to guard myself against feeling a sort of awe for Yeats that nothing really justified. Certainly I am not alone in this.

Usually the stage-Irishman does not take in his fellow-countrymen. But Yeats who was a sort of super stage-Irishman is an exception. I remember some years ago hearing a well-known Dublin literary man telling an anecdote about Yeats. Re told how he walked across Stephens Green with the poet to call on a friend, Gogarty I think. On the way they stopped in the Gentlemen's on the corner of Grafton Street. Then they crossed the Green, walked up to Gogarty's house and Yeats rang the bell. As they waited for the door to open, apparently Yeats suddenly said: "Tell me . . . " "Yes?" said the teller of the anecdote. "Tell me," said Yeats, "is my fly open?" "No," answered the other after a quick glance. Then the door opened. Anyway, that was the end of the anecdote. "But what's the point?" said someone. "Don't you see?" said this Dublin literary man, "It's the HUMANITY of the man."

This attitude to Yeats surely explains the curious way in which many people regard the political positions of his later years. Yeats was at one time very close to the fascist movement of O'Duffy's Blueshirts, and for years this fact has been glossed over by people who should have known better. Yeats gave categorical and unambiguous support to O'Duffy at one time. There is no getting away from this. He also wrote some of the most marvellous poetry of this century. There is no getting away from that either. If we set aside the point of view of people to whom poetry means nothing, and the point of view of those people to whom. politics means nothing, and as far as I am concerned neither sort of people is worth listening to, then we areleft with a dilemma. The usual way of dealing with this dilemma has been to say that WB Yeats had a sort of political poetic licence, or else to ignore the political views of his later life, or, as Dr Conor Cruise O'Brien has pointed out, to say that the fascist-approving Yeats was not the "real Yeats" that wrote the poems.

Now people who say this sort of thing are so bemused by the poetry that they will make any excuse in order to feel free to enjoy it. But these excuses are an insult to poetry itself, and applied to Yeats they as good as relegate him among the minor rhymesters who cannot get beyond writing about anything but their private lives. No, we must stop pretending and consider the whole poet, and not just distill out the part that suits us, ignoring the rest. On the other hand we should beware of irrelevant excursions away from the poetry. We are interested In Yeats because he was a great poet. His other writings are most of them only interesting for the light they throw on the poetry. But it is the poems we must consider first and foremost.

Before approaching the poetry, however, let us try to side-step the legend and the Yeats industry and get a little nearer to the humanity of the man. Yeats was a Protestant. We all know that this is a social and not a theological definition. Yeats by birth belonged to a caste, and the rump of a caste at that. Dr Cruise O'Brien has recently shown how in later life he acted in accordance with the reactionary principles of this caste, though always taking up a more extreme position. However, this does not in itself explain all of Yeats, and we should beware of drawing too hastily oversimplified conclusions. After all, Constance Markiewicz and Roger Casement belonged to the same caste as Yeats did. We shall understand Yeats best If we set out to see in what way Yeats can be said to belong to the Protestant society of 19th century Ireland. What was the society from which he sprang and what were his relations to it?

On a famous occasion in the Senate, Yeats produced a resounding peroration against the Divorce Bill. He spoke out, embarrassing his own supporters apparently, saying, "We against whom you have done this thing are no petty people, we are the people of Burke and of Grattan ... we have created the host of this country's political intelligence ... " and so on. When we read Yeats's Autobiographies, and if we let ourselves be carried away by the evocative rhythms of his prose, we find ourselves in a world of beings larger than life-size, whose qualities and defects are enlarged beyond all normal proportion. Yeats's grandfather and uncles, cousins and aunts are pictured to us as extravagant, usually passionate, people. There is no hint of any mediocrity anywhere. And in the introductory rhymes to "Responsibilities," 'Yeats addresses his ancestors describing them as:

Merchants and scholar who have left me blood,
That has not passed through any huckster's loin.

These are big words when used to describe what was after all nothing more than one petty-bourgeois Protestant family among many others in a small provincial Irish town. In fact it is not just Yeats's class background that is suggestive, it is the fact that he should have assiduously raised his belonging to this social category to the level of a myth. Why he should have done so is to be seen partly in his own nature and partly in the nature of that small social world he, was born into.

The answer is to be found in Sligo. In that small Protestant community turned in upon itself, and In what, through circumstances, it came to mean to Yeats. Re spent there the first eight years of his life, the most formative years, the experts tell us, and all through his boyhood he returned to spend holidays in Sligo from school in the suburbs of London, which he hated.

"All the well-known families had their grotesque or tragic or romantic legends, and I often said to myself how terrible it would be to go away and die where nobody would know my story. Years afterwards ... I would remember Sligo with tears and when I began to write, it was there I hoped to find my audience."

But we must not fool ourselves about the idyllic or poetic nature of Sligo society, imagining a small unified homogeneous sort of city- state. Divisions there were in plenty, and marked more by money than by anything else. The town was a busy little port. (Yeats describes going by ship from Liverpool to Sligo, a journey it would be nice to be able to make today... ) and the Protestant middle class were divided between shipping people and millers. Yeats's mother came from a relatively well-off family of millers. It was, however, a distinctly bourgeois, petty-bourgeois world. Yeats's family, as a glance at the Autobiographies shows, was made up of parsons and traders, of small Protestant farmers and business men, schoolteacher and soldiers, land agents, squireens and Castle bureaucrats. It was a small closed community, shut In upon itself, and isolated. Dublin and the Castle were far away. And all around lay alien territory, Nationalists, Catholics, Fenians.

"Everyone I knew well in Sligo despised Nationalists and Catholics but all disliked England with a prejudice that had, come down perhaps from the days of the Irish Parliament."

As might be expected though, they had their own sort of loyalism to England. Yeats tells of the Union Jack he played with as a child, of the Orange rhymes the stable-boy sang to him and which were the first poetry that excited him. We are probably right to suppose that the same sort of resentful loyalism existed there as in other colonial communities.

It would be a mistake though, to say that Yeats was an offshoot of the Big House. When he said in the Senate "We are one of the great stocks of Europe ... " he was claiming to be. And the poems he wrote praising "rich men's ancestral lawns" might suggest that he was. I would like to point to one fact that shows that he was not and and throws a light on the snobberies and social barriers that existed in the little town. Lissadell I-louse just outside Sligo, the residence of Major Gore-Booth and his daughters, was a typical Ascendancy manor. Both of the daughters became famous later, Constance Gore-Booth is better known as Constance Markiewiez. Yeats knew them, and wrote about them in several poems:

The light of evening, Lissadell,
Great windows open to the South,
Two girls in silk kimonos, both
Beautiful, one a gazelle ...

but it is worth pointing out that he was not invited to Lissadell, that he never made their acquaintance until he was 30 years old and already a well-known literary figure, not until the two girls had developed Nationalist sympathies and literary interests.

When he left Sligo and went to school in England, Yeats found himself in an alien society. But he was never able to feel that he had firm roots elsewhere. Or rather his roots were romantic, largely fixed by his imagination. When the other boys bullied him for being a "mad Irishman" he came to question what in fact he was:

"They thought of Cressy and Agincourt and the Union Jack and wore all very patriotic, and I without those memories of Limerick and the Yellow Ford that would have strengthened an Irish Catholic, thought of my grandfather and of ships."

Ireland for him was after all where he spent his holidays, a Tir na nOg of facility and dream. Ireland was never for Yeats a country of whose people he felt himself by birth an organic part.

To put It broadly Ireland was a land of Image and legend, of ease and wonder, England a land of mechanism, system and ugliness. As time went on this fell In tune with the revolt of the English artists against the philistinism of British society, and crystallised in Yeats into the romantic aestheticism that is a key to all his later attitudes: Art for art's sake. His first published lyric bears witness to it:

The woods of Arcady are dead,
And over is their antique joy;
Of old the world on dreaming fed;
Grey Truth is now her painted toy;
Yet still she turns her restless head:
But 0 sick children of the world
Of all the many changing things . . .
Words alone are certain good.

I have dwelt at length upon Yeats's early years. The point of all this has been to show the origins of a basic feeling of social insecurity coming from his family background. This is at the back of the myths he invented about his own ancestors, and also his feudal cult of aristocracy. It is also to show how Yeats's feelings about Ireland spring from the way he saw his native country as it were from outside, as if idealising it. From both these came that isolation which led Yeats to cultivate an aristocratic pose, and his idea of the artist as being in some mysterious way outside society. As an artist, industrial, mercantile society revolted him by its materialism and its ugliness. We shall see in a moment how instead of challenging industrialism as his master William Morris did, with a socialist alternative, Yeats opposed to it the Idea of a folk culture, a peasant society. But first I want to say a word about the Irish literary movement.

Yeats might have remained a minor English poet If It had not been for John O'Leary, the Fenian leader. When O'Leary returned to Ireland from exile he gathered around him a number of young Irish writers. Yeats at the time was writing a play the action of which took place in a crater m the moon, a remoter place in those days than It Is now. O'Leary convinced him of the advantages of an Irish subject and Yeats wrote "The Wanderings of Oisin," his first successful poem, the publication of which 0'Leary helped to finance. Yeats freely admitted how much he owed to O'Leary. In the "General Introduction to My Work," which he wrote In 1939, Yeats said:

"It was through the old Fenian leader John O'Leary I found my theme ... I knew myself to he vague and incoherent. He gave me the poems of Thomas Davis, said they were not good poetry, but had changed his life when a young man. I saw that they were not good poetry, but they had one quality I admired and admire: they were not separated, individual men, they spoke or tried to speak out of a people to a people; behind them stretched the generations."

In coming to Ireland and in starting the Irish Literary Movement, Yeats was looking for integration, looking for a tradition to belong to. He was in fact himself taking the advice he was later to give to Synge. And it is only necessary to open an anthology to see what service he did to Irish literature by his influence. Where Irish writing had been provincial and derivative in style, and comic stage-Irishisms the only distinctive national feature, now it took on a definite idiom. Just as in the theatre he taught Irish actors to speak with their own voices and In their own way, and not ape the suburbanisms of travelling English companies, so also he taught Irish poets to write naturally and directly, as themselves.

Yeats gave its form to the Irish Literary and Dramatic Movement. But it is certainly true to say also that the movement would have taken place anyway. And it need not have wandered off into the Celtic Twilight, nor needed it have idealised folk culture in such a way as to suggest that this was the only sort of thing that Ireland could produce in the way of civilisation. Yeats's hatred of industrialism could have crystallised into a positive resistance, into the perspective of an alternative, which was not a retreat into the past. But WB Yeats was not William Morris, and it is maybe idle to wish he had been. The poets of the Cheshire Cheese anyway, among whom he learned his trade, believed that the artist had no responsibility to society at all. In the Introduction to the Oxford Book of Modern Verse he tells us:

"Occasionally at some evening party some young woman asked a poet what he thought of strikes, or declared that to paint pictures or write poetry at such a moment was to resemble the fiddler Nero ... We poets continued to write verse and read it out at the Cheshire Cheese, convinced that to take part in such movements would be only less disgraceful than to write for the newspapers."

Yeats's return to Ireland gave a political meaning to his hatred of industrialism, mechanism, the world of the Manchester merchant and the Victorian scientist. It became a nationalist reaction. The fashionable revolt of the bohemian artist against the bourgeois philistine now became an Irish revolt against the values of English society. Yeats quickly came to see Ireland as a place where men were still untouched by the corruption of industrial civilisation, the corruption of wealth and poverty. He wrote in a letter to Katherine Tynan:

"Any breath from Ireland in this hateful London where you cannot go five paces without seeing some wretched object broken either by wealth or poverty, is good."

And he later described Synge as "escaping to Aran from the squalor of the poor and the nullity of the rich." In all this, Yeats, the pseudo-aristocrat cultivating a pseudo-peasant, was failing true to a pattern of behaviour we can see elsewhere, as for example in Tolstoy. The nobleman and the peasant are allied in their hatred of commercial middle-class civilisation. However, in seeing this in national terms, Yeats was forming a highly romantic view of Ireland in which the most backward aspects of Irish life were often held up to admiration. Many other writers in the Irish Literary movement shared this, disastrously sentimental, view. Plenty of people even nowadays feel a glow of patriotic pride in our superior Irish spirituality any time an Irish clock is wrong or a bus is late.

At the end of the century, therefore, we find the curious spectacle of Yeats, straight from the company of the poets of the Cheshire Cheese, going with Lady Gregory from cottage to cottage collecting folk tales and superstitions. (Did he continue to wear his velvet jacket and floppy tie while engaged in this field-work, we are tempted to ask?) This new interest In the collecting of folk-lore fits in with another aspect of Yeats's refusal of English nineteenth century materialism, namely his hatred of mechanistic scientific thought: Tyndall and Huxley, who had destroyed the fancied world of his childhood.

Yeats, autodidact, artist and would-be mystic, always hated schools and the scholars' "blear-eyed wisdom out of midnight oil." The most consistent theme of his poetry is spontaneity. As a romantic he always hankered after the spontaneous answer, the truth revealed rather than found out by painstaking research, the sudden nugget of inspiration valued a thousand times more than the grains of information patiently rinsed out of tons of sand. In all this he is, of course, only showing an exaggeration of a universal human trait. We would all rather win £5 on a horse than earn it the hard way. But we would not value one £5 above the other.

At any rate, in the folk-tales and superstitions of the countryside, Yeats found a sort of corroboration of his belief in magic, in revealed wisdom. We need not delay over this. No-one knows how much Yeats actually believed in it, or in the elaborate system he erected around it. And it does not matter. The important thing is rather, as Arland Ussher has pointed out, what he meant by it.

At any rate it provided him with a tenable explanation of the workings of poetry, and poetry is still a fairly mysterious business. Even now poems cannot be successfully synthesised in a laboratory. I have only mentioned it to show how his new-found cult of the peasant fits in with his poetic beliefs. Ireland and poetry came together.

It is time now that I came to speak more specifically about the poems and what they are made of. Because there is no point in talking about a poet's background and early life and so on if the attitudes we analyse are not to be found in the poetry he wrote. Likewise, political views that Yeats may or may not have held, his support for the Blueshirt bullies only really concern us in so far as evidence of these things is to be found in his verse. Yeats was first and foremost a poet and it is as a poet that we are honouring him today. On the other hand we must not shrink from pointing out such evidence when it is plain to see. We must learn to distinguish between the man and the poet.

As regards the man there can be many opinions and degrees of information about what he thought and did. But as regards the poetry all the evidence is there for anyone to look at that will. It is too easy to say of Yeats that his tinkerings with magic were a lot of baloney, that his politics were naif or detestable, but that his poetry was, Is, marvellous. I do not think we should let anyone get away with that. Yeats's work is a whole, and it is often absurd, detestable and marvellous at the same time.

Yeats certainly wrote some detestable lines. To quote only two examples, his description of Maud Gonne,

Hurling the little streets upon the great
Had they but courage equal to desire.

or of Constance Markiewiez where he says she has become

Blind and leader of the blind
Drinking the foul ditch, where they lie.

There are plenty of other lines we could point to which are equally offensive. However, we would do better to turn from this sort of small-minded fault-finding and look at the poems for which Yeats Is most widely, and rightly admired.

"Words alone are certain good ... " We saw a moment ago how Yeats started his poetic career among the decadent believers In the doctrine of Art for Art's sake. Yeats achieved fame, whereas they are only remembered, when they are remembered at all, as a quaint literary fashion. And it was through Ireland that he became famous, because he found there a tradition and a society that he could make himself part of.

But he never lost his essentially aesthetic scale of values. As an artist, alienated from urban industrial society, unable as I have shown, to feel himself organically part of the Irish people, Yeats was all his life an aloof, distant figure. In his poetry this detachment can be seen in his most typical and most triumphantly romantic theme, namely spontaneity. it is one that is common to all romantic poetry, or nearly all, and everyone can respond to it in some way. Spontaneity is the idea of liberation, of escape in the largest sense, the free untrammelled impulse, the soar of the bird, the freedom of mountain waterfalls. It is an escape from the world of trains to catch and meals to get ready, into a Tir na nOg where the processes of time are irrelevant.

All this freedom and beauty are expressed by 'Yeats's favourite symbol, the bird. All the great romantic poets wrote about birds- Wordsworth's Cuckoo, Shelley's Skylark, Keats's Nightingale. And birds are everywhere in Yeats: seagulls, swans, wild geese, eagles, hawks, white herons, you could even say that the Irish Airman was in a sense a sort of mechanical human bird. In the lovely poem he wrote about the Wild Swans at Coole he described them:

Unwearied still, lover by lover,
They paddle in the cold
Companionable streams or climb the air;
Their hearts have not grown old;
Passion or conquest, wander where they will,
Attend upon them still.

And by a clever trick he confuses the reader so that we are never clear whether he is speaking of the real bird or the symbol of eternity.

.....that stormy white
But seems a concentration of the sky,
And, like the soul, it sails into the sight,
And in the morning's gone, no man knows why;
And is so lovely that it sets to right
What knowledge or its lack had set awry,
So arrogantly pure, a child might think
It can he murdered with a spot of ink.

In all this, Yeats is celebrating something that few people have not felt in some way or another. Good poetry is as real as life itself. There is nothing either far-fetched or unreal about such imagery, or the emotions it arouses in us. However, Yeats often carries this imagery on to a point where human life is sneered at in comparison with it.

For example, one of his most famous poems, "Byzantium," celebrates a bird of another kind. This time it is an artificial bird, the work of a clever goldsmith, a sort of clockwork canary. This golden bird will be untouched by time, it cannot grow old and it can continue to sing when the poet can no longer sing. But this artificial bird, because it is immortal, can

...scorn aloud
In glory of changeless metal
Common bird or petal
And all complexities of mire and blood.

You and I, and the poet himself, are mere "complexities of mire and blood." But we should surely be right to protest at being looked down upon by a clockwork canary. (Mind you, Yeats intended the image to be a little grotesque and far-fetched). But the message behind it is clear; in the last resort art is better than humanity. And that is nonsense.

If it were only nonsense then it would not matter very much. Yeats tells in his Autobiographies of a Cabbalist who spent all day trying to look at the world through the eyes of his canary and concluded from it that all things had colour for it, but not form. If we could take Yeats's aestheticism in the same way, and decide that he was only concerned with colours so to speak, it would not matter.

But it becomes more serious when the same scale of values is applied to human action and behaviour. Yeats's artistic or aristocratic turn of mind led him to prize the detached, gratuitous gesture above any purposeful action. He came to value anything that existed for its own sake, instead of being subordinate to some purpose.

Such an attitude is not necessarily anti-human. In a way we can see this as a healthy reaction against the measly utilitarianism of those people who see everything as a means to something else, "They prefer the stalk to the flower, and believe that painting and poetry exist that there may be instruction, and love that there may be children ..." To prize things for their own sake is the right and generous way of looking at life. Only Yeats took it a bit further than just that. Look for example at the poem called An Irish Airman Foresees his Death:

I know that I shall meet my fate
Somewhere among the clouds above;
Those that I fight I do not hate,
Those that I guard I do not love...
Nor law nor duty bade me fight,
Nor public men, nor cheering crowds,
A lonely impulse of delight
Drove to this tumult in the clouds.

The way the poem works up to its climax is very effective. And the picture it gives of the disengaged free spirit embodied in this Irish Airman is very moving. It is highly romantic. This airman is free from the usual constraints of military life. He is no conscript, he is tied to no soul-destroying discipline, he is not dragooned into the armed forces against his will. He is not even harnessed to a cause, to any king or country, nor is he dedicated to a proposition. "A lonely impulse of delight . . . " But what after all does this mean? It means that he is just fighting for the "hell" of it. And this cannot but remind us of the stage-Irishman of 100 years ago with his "shillelagh undher his arrum," spoiling for a dust-up with anyone on any pretext. Only the airman is a more dangerous figure, bombing cities, machine-gunning villages. How would the villagers react to the information that they were being killed because the airman had a lonely impulse of delight?

I know the poem wan written during World War 1, and that airmen were more romantic and less lethal and less sinister figures then than they are now. I know that in the last lines of the poem the airman speaks of his own death in the same casual way. But there is no getting away from the fact that this much-admired poem comes very near to being a plain-spoken celebration of the killing of people for fun. I know I am being unfair; I am being unfair on purpose. And I do admire the poem as well. But we must not shut our eyes to what it implies, for all our admiration.

The Irish Airman did not care which side he was fighting on. And Yeats in the poem on his ancestors praises them for giving "whatever die was cast... " that is to say for fighting irrespective of what they fought for. If this does not amount to an adolescent type of admiration for sheer irresponsibility it can at best only mean the making of political choices for entirely emotional reasons. In other words it is like marching behind the procession or party with the biggest band. This is a complete denial of the value of dedication to a cause chosen by patient determined thought, or inspired by principle or love of justice. Then Yeats's admiration for the detached gratuitous action leads him, all through his life to celebrate violent, lonely extravagant men, and to delight in high extravagant gesture. His poem, Beautiful Lofty Things is a typical example. He could never see that mere gesture Is mere futility.

We can see examples of all this in Yeats's treatment of a particular political action, namely his treatment of Ireland and 1916. Ireland is a constant theme in Yeats's poetry. Some of his most memorable lines are about Ireland, and if it were only for the consistently national colouring of his poetry we should be grateful to Yeats in this age of boring cosmopolitanism. (Yeats in Gort or Rathfarnham writing about life in general anyway is more relevant and cogent to us in Ireland now than for example, Joyce in Trieste or Zurich writing about Sandymount).

But we may ask what Ireland meant in fact to Yeats. Maud Gonne tells us "to Willie, less aware of the people of Ireland, Ireland was the beauty of unattainable perfection". Maybe it is a bit unfair to quote this. But in essence it is not very far out. "A glimmering girl, Cathleen ni Houlihan, purer than a tall candle before the holy rood, Romantic Ireland," these were his labels for Ireland in the years before 1916. To this purely emotional and inhuman patriotism it was fitting that political action should have been seen in terms of detached, heroic, and sacrificial gesture. 1916 was to Yeats a supremely heroic event. For a poet whose great theme in tragedy was always that of heroic defeat it must be said that the circumstances were certainly suited to his treatment of them. More than one historian has described the Insurrection and the events that followed it as the triumph of failure. And there is plenty of evidence that the sentiments expressed for example by Yeats in The Rose Tree were shared by many patriots of the time:

"Oh plain as plain can be
There's nothing but our own, red blood
Can make a right rose tree."

In the poem Easter 1916, Yeats expresses with great power and honesty what must have been not only his own reaction to the Insurrection, but also that of a wide range of people.

Was it needless death after all7
For England may keep faith
For all that is done and said.
We know their dream; enough
To know they dreamed and are dead;
And what if excess of love
Bewildered them till they died?
I write it out in a verse--
MacDonagh and MacBride
And Connolly and Pearse
Now and in time to be,
Wherever green is worn,
Are changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is horn.

The famous refrain is justly admired. It is magnificent. But it has all the same an ambiguous quality. Why, we may ask, a terrible beauty? Is this an evaluation in aesthetic terms? It is not of course, and the extraordinary clash: terrible beauty resounds in the mind with a multitude of meanings. Nevertheless there is something here that falls short.

The Insurrection of 1916 was part of a chain of events that ended in the partial independence of Ireland, the first colonial nation in the world to achieve it. Yeats's lines, however, see the rebellion as a self-contained gesture, springing from nothing (note the element of surprise) and leading on to nothing. In this poem Pearse and Connolly and MacDonagh and MacBride are shown as prosaic people transmuted by one wild gesture into heroes and that is that.

In all this, Yeats' highly romantic view is similar to that of other political romantics who are not poets, and who cannot help setting a man who died for a cause above one who lives for it. I am not saying here that to die for a cause is not the noblest thing a man can do. But we must not go on from that to conclude that it is also necessarily the most useful. In many ways the death of a patriot is a failure because he is from then on lost to the cause he served.

This would not have seemed so to Yeats to whom the gesture, the act of sacrifice counted above all. In fact he devotes a long section of Easter 1916 to telling how "Too long a sacrifice can make a stone of the heart," and it is a theme he returned to more than once. Long drawn out dedication to a cause, to any "common wrong or right" is a folly, he wrote. And the lines in which he celebrated the heroic gesture and martyrdom of Pearse and Connolly can be compared to those in which he described Constance Markiewicz "Dragging out lonely years, Conspiring among the ignorant." Plenty of his admirers would follow him in this attitude saying that death for a cause is greater than life for it, and suggesting that a stray bullet can make a youngster of 20 into a greater patriot than a man who has given 40 years of his life to political work.

In fact one of the worst things we can say about Yeats's poetry is that it often encourages this sort of easy thinking. For all the nobility and beauty of Yeats's tribute to the 1916 leaders I think we must say clearly that this sort of patriotism is sentimental vulgar and facile. Not only Connolly and MacDonagh but Pearse also deserved better of Ireland's major poet, for more was born on that Easter morning than a terrible beauty, and it was Yeats's job to say so.

However, Yeats's belief in art above humanity, his view of life in in aesthetic terms failed him when war, which he had so neatly avoided writing about (we have no gift to set a statesman right...) suddenly exploded in all its beastly reality on his own doorstep. The Black and Tan repression provoked Yeats to make an appalled bewildered protest:

Now days are dragon-ridden, the nightmare
Rides upon sleep: a drunken soldiery
Can leave the mother murdered at her door,
To crawl in her own blood, and go scot free;
The night can sweat with terror as before
We pieced our thoughts into philosophy,
And planned to bring the world under a rule
Who are but weasels fighting in a hole.

More than once he blamed himself for his artist's share in avoiding man's responsibility and allowing such a brutality to come into being:

We had fed the heart on fantasies,
The heart's grown brutal with the fare.

From this period onwards brutality, power and terror figure largely in his poetry. it is this indeed that gives it much of its special significance to us today. No other contemporary poet of his stature has shown himself so involved in the process by which barbarism has broken through the surface of 19th century middle-class culture and civilisation. No other poet has given so dramatic expression to the nightmare of realising that after all war, rapine, political murder can "happen here."

It is obvious to point out here that Yeats had in this an advantage over his English contemporaries, and those critics who hail in him a prophet of fascism should remember that 20 years before 1940 Ireland had had a foretaste of what Occupied Europe was to suffer. Indeed what Yeats was writing about was not European fascism at all, but merely the seamy side of Empire as it had for generations been shown to Indians and Sudanese and other peoples. This may explain but it does not take anything away from the effect of a poem like The Second Coming, in which Yeats found a powerful symbol for the decay of liberal Western Civilisation. The image is a compelling one even today when we read the poem 40 years the wiser:

Somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That 20 centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round, at last
Slouches towards Bethlehem to he born?

Now we can go on praising Yeats in general terms like this, but sooner or later we must face the fact that when it came to choosing himself he accepted and in fact heartily approved of government by violence and compulsion. Dr O'Brien has shown how the tendency Yeats always had to admire strong arm government increased in the early years of the Irish Free State. In the 1930s his pro-fascist sympathies indeed were only eclipsed when O'Duffy's movement showed its weaknesses and Yeats realised he was backing the wrong horse. And having faced this fact how can we continue to admire the poetry that Yeats was writing at this time?

The answer is surely that there is some of Yeats' poetry of this period that we cannot admire at all. And, as I have tried to show, our admiration for much even of his best and greatest poetry must be tempered by our awareness of the fault in many of his attitudes. But in the rest, and it includes the greatest poetry Yeats wrote, we have an example of a poet writing out of his intuitions and not his opinions. It is as though the poet had a power of comprehension and expression that transcended the intelligence and explanations of the man. This is something similar to what George Lukacs has pointed out in the novels of Balzac, the contrast between the legitimist royalist and essentially snobbish opinions of the man and the comprehensive understanding of the novelist. The painter Dégas is another example, whose painting shows a sensibility and compassion that are in complete contradiction with his anti-semitic authoritarian political views.

The poetry that Yeats wrote in the last ten years of his life includes of the most excitingly beautiful poems in the English Language. The tremendous vitality that is their most distinctive quality is far removed from the constraining negativity of what are usually considered reactionary writers. There is in Yeats no pessimism, no school-masterly recall to duty, no lamenting over decline and fall, no pomposity, and above all no resignation. Generalising we could say that Yeats's poetry is for things rather than against things. The great quality of it is the love of life that it expresses. The phrase love of life is unfortunately a cliché, but I do not mean by it the usual flatulent sort of jolly hypocrisy, but a full-blooded open-hearted desire for experience and an eagerness to live out every experience to the full in all its complexity and pain. It is this that gives its unique savagery and tenderness to his later verse:

A women, can be proud and stiff
When on love intent;
But love has pitched his mansion in
The place of excrement;
For nothing can he sole or whole
That has not been rent.

It is this obstinate vitality that makes the poetry of Yeats's old age so magnificent. bride was Yeats's own word for it, but we should beware of understanding this as meaning only pride before other men.

Pride like that of the morn
When the headlong light is lose

is another form of that spontaneity that I spoke about earlier. It is an anti-social individualism, but also a pagan stubbornness in not bending before the depredations of Time. No other poet has raged so violently or so movingly against the dying of the light. Yeats was never resigned to "Time's filthy load," the nearest thing in him to resignation was the tragic joy of ancient Greek drama. Instead as age advanced there came an extraordinary element of self-mockery. This is certainly linked to Yeats's hatred of the decay of old age:

...this caricature
Decrepit age that has been tied to me
As to a dog's tall.

In poem after poem he spits into the face of time that has transfigured him, comparing himself to a comfortable kind of old scare-crow, a tattered coat upon a stick, a coat upon a coat hanger. This self-mockery is not only directed against the poet's ageing body, but also against the outworn romantic apparatus of his very poetry itself, all his circus animals. And yet the more outworn his attitudes became the more arrogant he became in maintaining them in face of the world. We could hardly have caricatured the aged romantic more viciously than he did himself in High Talk.

Malachi-Stilt-Jack am I, whatever I learned has run wild,
From collar to collar, from stilt to stilt, from father to child.
All metaphor, Malachi, stilts and all. A barnacle goose
Far up in the stretches of night; night splits and the dawn breaks loose;
I, through the terrible novelty of light, stalk on, stalk on;
Those great sea-horses bare their teeth and laugh at the dawn.

And yet his pride in his own freakish outrageousness is the most striking thing about the poem. The more he mocked himself the more arrogant he became.

In this intensification of opposites, pride and absurdity, we can see a good example of the framework of thought that gives to Yeats's later poetry most of its excitement and power. I mean his way of seeing things, man and nature, himself included, in terms of antinomies. The famous gyres that mystify the unprepared reader are after all only a diagrammatic representation of a neo-Hegelian view of the world that Yeats was almost alone in giving expression to in poetry. Every thing or situation in Yeats has its counterpart, its opposite, and is born of a conflict of opposites. Every situation is made up of a tissue of contradictions and opposites, body and soul, time and eternity, stone and stream. There is no still centre in Yeats, at the heart of every situation there is a conflict, and while there is conflict there must be life. It is Yeats's gift for conveying that dialectical view of life in all its movement and complexity, its sensual reality and intellectual beauty, by means of images and symbols that are at once familiar and haunting in their evocative power that makes him whatever our criticisms into the greatest poet of our age.

Labour is blossoming or dancing where
The body is not bruised to pleasure soul,
Nor beauty born out of its own despair,
Nor blear-eyed wisdom out of midnight oil.
O chestnut tree, great rooted blossomer,
Are you the root, the blossom or the bole?
O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
Now can we, the dancer from the dance?

When Yeats died in 1939, on the brink of war, WE Auden, who was, at that time at any rate, a poet of a very different political and ideological colouring, wrote:

Intellectual disgrace
Stares from every human face
And the seas of pity lie
Locked and frozen in each eye.

Follow poet, follow right
To the bottom of the night
With your unconstraining voice
Still persuade us to rejoice;

In the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountain start,
In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise,

Certainly the body of Yeats' poetry answers this description. With his "unconstraining voice" he is still persuading us to rejoice, and in the current fashionable cult of nihilist futility and despair this is a precious message.

Published (in 1965) by Connolly Publications ltd, 374 Gray's Inn Road, London WCl and printed by Ripley Printers ltd, Nottingham Road, Ripley, Derbys.

Some navigational notes:

Copyright Dr Roy Johnston 2003