Bookplanet: Seamus Heaney on WB Yeats

The defiant self
WB Yeats has always had detractors, not least for his fascist sympathies. But, Seamus Heaney argues, his poetic gifts, his energy and his role in shaping modern Ireland have been a powerful force for good
By Seamus Heaney

WB Yeats managed to create a heroic role for the poet in the modern world, so much so that TS Eliot's evocation of "the shade of some dead master" in "Little Gidding" (1943) is commonly taken to be a tribute to the recently dead Irishman. And the canonisation continues. Nowadays, whether he is thought of as a national bard or a world poet, Yeats figures in the mind as a translated force, an energy released and a destiny fulfilled.

Still, as a poet with a strong histrionic streak and a readiness to identify himself with variously anti-establishment and anti-populist causes over a long lifetime, Yeats was never without his detractors. Yet from the beginning, those most intent upon debunking the man or demythologising the poet could never deny that his commitments were as selfless as they were ardent.

Yeats's active involvement with cultural and political movements in turn-of-the-century Ireland was important to his work as a lyric poet. The Wind Among the Reeds (1899) was continuous with the propagandist essays and reviews of the previous decade, part of an overall effort on behalf of "the Celtic movement": the cadences of "He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven" were another register of a voice that was just as capable when engaged in controversy on the letters pages of British and Irish newspapers. But equally (if more unknowably) Yeats's poetry, from the mid-90s onwards, was affected by his entry into sexual maturity and the full creative confidence that came with it. The cry of the sedge and the curlew may be present in the twilit atmosphere of the 1899 volume, but behind the Celtic landscape of the poems there was the very different townscape of Bloomsbury and the Tottenham Court Road where the poet bought the double bed he and Mrs Olivia Shakespear occupied with such clandestine joy during the happy year of 1896.

And all the while, of course, there was Maud Gonne, "high and solitary and most stern" according to one of the poems about her, "foremost among those I would hear praised" according to another, and "the troubling of my life" according to a famous sentence in his Autobiographies. The passion she inspired - and as readers we experience it more as creative power than erotic need - made her a figure of primary poetic radiance, a Dublin Beatrice, an archetype as much as a daily presence. Nevertheless, Yeats's poetry, his politics and his involvement with the occult received an extra charge of intensity from her day to day reality in his life, and when she appeared in the title role of his subversive play Cathleen Ni Houlihan (1902), another kind of maturity was achieved.

The reality of a world of spirit, the immortality of the soul and its fated reincarnations, the cyclical relations pertaining between the land of the living and the land of the dead, the perviousness of these realms to each other's influence, the possibility of gaining knowledge of reality and destiny through the study of arcane books and symbols - Yeats's mind was hospitable to these ideas. All of his poems have a ring of conviction produced by the fit he always contrived between metre, rhyme and syntax, but the ones that arise from "the half-read wisdom of daemonic images" have an extra strangeness about them. Poems like "The Magi" and "The Second Coming" seem to dwell within their own imaginative ozone layer, translucent yet non-illusory, revelations that are here to stay.

Still, while it is important to insist upon the centrality of unorthodox spiritual disciplines in Yeats's life, it is a mistake to think of him as a gullible consumer of superstitions. He possessed a robust, sceptical intelligence and his grasp of what was happening in his own times was at least equal to that of the most secular and topically focussed minds of his generation. His career as a poet spanned 50 years, from The Wandering of Oisin in 1889 to Last Poems, posthumously published in 1939, the year of his death. Born in 1865, his life coincided with an era of great social and political change. Britain and other European powers moved out of the confidence of the high imperial epoch into the devastation of the first world war and its aftermath: the final decades of the poet's life coincided with the Russian revolution, the rise of fascism in Italy, the Nazi take-over in Germany, the Spanish civil war and, finally, the months of haunted apprehension before the outbreak of the second world war. In Ireland too, drastic events occurred. The Easter Rising in 1916 and the ensuing violence issued first in the Anglo-Irish treaty of 1921 and the creation of the Irish Free State, and then in the outbreak of the Irish civil war. And to all of these crises Yeats responded in his own idiom, at his own pace. He did record direct responses to some events in Ireland, most notably in his poem "Easter 1916", but generally the poems did not arise from the immediate stimulus of happenings or from any desire to set down the story. They arose, rather, from the resonance that the happenings produced within his consciousness and from the meditations and disconsolateness they engendered there.

Yeats's capacity to rekindle the flame of his inspiration at different periods of his life appears as a trium-phant fulfilment of his own prophetic belief in the mind's indomitable resource. Constantly he affirmed the necessity of self-renewal, compulsively he pushed the limits of his own artistic and existential possibilities. Style, he declared, was the equivalent of self-conquest in a writer; early on he professed his belief that we must labour to be beautiful, and described the source and secret of his art as "the fascination of what's difficult".

Conquest, difficulty, labour: these terms indicate the nature of Yeats's creative disposition. From the start, he was enamoured of Blake's conviction that energy is eternal delight, yet the development of his own thought brought him more and more to the conclusion that conflict was the inescapable condition of being human. So, as his art matured and the articulation of his beliefs became more clarified and forceful, Yeats's poems typically conveyed a sensation of certitude achieved by great effort and of contradictions quelled. Poems in which the defiant self is pitted against hostile or disabling conditions - "An Irish Airman Foresees his Death", "September 1913", "Meditations in Time of Civil War"- are complemented by poems that read like discharges of pure, self-possessed energy, poems from which the accidental circumstances have been excluded so that all that remains is the melody and stamina of resurgent spirit - "The Cold Heaven", "Byzantium", "Long-legged Fly".

The greatest consolidation of his powers happened during his 50s and 60s, when several occasions conspired to inaugurate a period of abundant creativity. This onset of authority derived from a natural enlargement that came with age and eminence, but it was given further impetus by two related developments in his life: his marriage in 1917 to George Hyde-Lees, and his purchase of a Norman tower at Ballylee in County Galway, which he had restored as a home for himself and his new bride. The three volumes deriving from occupation of that site are the indispensable harvest of his mature years. The speculations of A Vision (1925) and the poems of The Tower (1928) and The Winding Stair and Other Poems (1933) have a planetary range and splendour, and incorporate haphazard yet powerfully registered incidents of personal and public life within the orbit of a single, ardent intelligence.

This unifying drive had always been central to Yeats's mind, but its operations reached a climax with the composition of A Vision. Although this bold formulation of his system of thought was born out of the automatic writings that George began to produce a few days after their marriage, its dominant motifs had been present in Yeats's writings throughout his career. It was as much an arrangement of images into a paradigm of reality as it was a sustained philosophic discourse, and old preoccupations - such as the idea of apocalyptic reversals in history, the doctrine of reincarnation, and the discipline of the mask - began to be reimagined in terms of new conceptions, such as the phases of the moon and the diagram of the gyres. Many of Yeats's endeavours were now converging and reinforcing each other. His life as a husband and householder was at one with his life as a mage and a poet within the symbolic tower, and his work of original ratiocination and inquiry was issuing in a sacred book that both augmented and belonged within an already ancient tradition. Yeats now lived not as a "bundle of accident and incoherence" but as "something intended, complete". He merged his biographical self into the traditional figure of the poet/seer; what spoke in the poems was not so much the voice of a private self as the voice of the bard.

Nobody doubts his fundamental importance as the creator of a cultural idea in and for Ireland, but that is only the beginning of his greatness. His extreme exploration of the possibilities of reconciling the human impulse to transcendence with the antithetical project of consolidation is universally and inexhaustibly relevant. Naturally, some political aspects of his work have been particularly assailed - and justly defended, as when Elizabeth Cullingford concluded her study of Yeats as a political poet with the proposition that his fascist sympathies are best regarded as part of his "fantasies" rather than part of his "convictions"; but perhaps the general implications of his tough-minded insight that all reality comes to us as the reward of labour have been insufficiently pondered.

When all the objections have been lodged, Yeats's work survives as a purely motivated, greatly active power for good. What Andrew Marvell presented as a challenging fantasy - "roll all our strength, and all / Our sweetness, up into one ball" - Yeats actually achieved. To encounter an oeuvre that embodies "thoughts long knitted into a single thought" is to experience the force of what he called "the spiritual intellect's great work". This force transmits itself, of course, by poetic means: Yeats's essential gift is his ability to raise a temple in the ear, to make a vaulted space in language through the firmness, in-placeness and undislodgeableness of stanzaic form. But the force is also present in his persistent drive to "teach the free man how to praise".

Yeats's incitements to generous self-transcendence, his fostering of all that is unconstrained and enjoys full scope, contribute greatly to the value of his work. Its range is ample, from the autumnal serenities of "The Wild Swans at Coole" through the jubilation of "Coole Park and Ballylee, 1931" to the limb-sweetening fullness of the last stanza of "Among School Children". We certainly do not encounter in such work any image of life's surfaces as we know them in our world of consumer capitalism; but its sufficiency and recalcitrance encourage us to be more resolutely and abundantly alive, whatever the conditions. It raises the standards. As I wrote elsewhere:
What's the use of a held note or held line
That cannot be assailed for reassurance?

(This is an edited extract from Seamus Heaney's introduction to a new selection of Yeats's poetry, Poet to Poet: WB Yeats, published by Faber.)