book is dedicated to Bloom, a eulogy for whom may be found at the

end. However inadequate as a token of my admiration and personal affection, I add to the present essay this brief coda, commemorating Harold Bloom, but also disagreeing with him.
Having come to half-accept the Gnostic vision he harshly rejected in his 1970 book Yeats, as a pessimism alien to the affirmative vision of Blake and Shelley, Bloom ended the essay he wrote a half-dozen years later— ‘Yeats, Gnosticism, and the Sacred Void’—by positing Romanticism as allied with, rather than a deviation from, Gnosticism. Indeed, it ‘could be argued that a form of Gnosticism is endemic in Romantic tradition without, however, dominating that tradition, or even that Gnosticism is the implicit, inevitable religion that frequently informs aspects of post-Enlightenment poetry.’ But he also contrasted Yeats to one of the Irish poet’s own formational precursors, Shelley, and to Schopenhauer. Though Bloom doesn’t get into the lineage, Schopenhauer, fusing blind ‘will’ and clear-eyed pessimism, was an ‘educator’ of Nietzsche, whose ‘curious astringent joy’ allied him in Yeats’s mind with Blake, and so helped transform the Irish poet from a lyricist of the Celtic Twilight into the most powerful poet of the twentieth century. But here is Bloom: ‘Shelley and Schopenhauer were questers, in their very different ways,
7. Mountain Visions and Other Last Things 101
who could journey through the Void without yielding to the temptation of worshiping the Void as itself being sacred. Yeats, like Nietzsche, implicitly decided that he too would rather have the Void as purpose, than be void of purpose.”
Though Bloom does not mention it, Yeats seems to have been thinking of the Gnostic vision when he ended one of his final letters by declaring, ‘The last kiss is given to the void’ (LISM, 154). No more a believer in linear progress than Nietzsche (for whom the ‘theory of progress’ was a ‘modern’ concept, ‘and therefore vulgar’), Yeats, under Indian influence, the Hindu mysticism he first imbibed from Mohini Chatterjee and to which he returned in his final decade, came to consider cultures and civilizations a succession of provisional illusions: that ‘manifold illusion’ or maya, seen through by those who, in ‘Meru,’ realize that ‘man’s life is thought,’ its ultimate destructive / creative goal to ‘come/ Into the desolation of reality.’ Such seers as the ascetic hermits caverned on Mount Meru or Everest, ‘know/ That day brings round the night, that before dawn/ [Man’s] glory and his monuments are gone.’””
Those who have, after ‘Ravening, raging, and uprooting,’ finally ‘come/ Into the desolation of reality,’ have come far, but—despite the gay farewell to civilizations, ‘Egypt and Greece good-bye, and good- bye, Rome!’—they may not have attained the state of ‘bliss’ achieved by Bhagwan Shri Hamsa, who describes climbing Meru in The Holy Mountain, read and introduced by Yeats shortly before writing ‘Meru.’ In that Introduction, Hamsa is quoted describing his attainment of indescribable ‘bliss [...] all merged in the Absolute Brahma!’ (E&I, 479, 481). Yeats’s sonnet registers the strenuous mental steps to the Absolute, but, reflecting his unwillingness to surrender the individual self to the divine Self of the Upanishads, does not culminate in the merging joy expressed by Hamsa. Nevertheless, Yeats’s hermits, by coming to ‘know’ the truth underlying illusions, have achieved a considerable degree of gnosis.
In the letter I began with, Yeats insists that there is ‘no improvement, only a series of sudden fires,’ each fainter than the one before it. ‘We free ourselves from delusion that we may be nothing. The last kiss is given to the void.’ In early Yeats, lured by Fairyland, it is an apocalyptic ‘God’
9 Bloom, ‘Yeats, Gnosticism, and the Sacred Void,’ in Poetry and Repression, 234, 212. 10 See Charles I. Armstrong, ‘“Born Anew”: W. B. Yeats’s “Eastern” Turn in the 1930s,’ in Gibson and Mann.
102 Making the Void Fruitful
who is said to ‘burn nature with a kiss’; at the end, that divine yet erotic and liberating act becomes human. Glossing this letter, the Irish critic Declan Kiberd, in ‘W. B. Yeats—Building Amid Ruins,’ perceptively observed that, for Yeats, ‘the only hope of humanity was to break out of this diminishing series of cycles by recasting life on an altogether higher plane of consciousness.’!' Kiberd (whose title echoes that favorite Blake saying of both Yeats and Joyce) does not dwell on the ‘void,’ or connect this ‘higher plane of consciousness’ with gnosis, but those familiar with Gnosticism well might. I believe Yeats himself did.
The memorable paragraph in Per Amica Silentia Lunae that begins, ‘We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry,’ ends: ‘I shall find the dark grow luminous, the void fruitful, when I understand that I have nothing; that the ringers in the tower have appointed for the hymen of the soul a passing bell’ (Myth, 332). Most are committed to the world and to social conventions symbolized by the marriage bell. By contrast, the soul of the poet achieves its ‘hymen’ or marriage when it forsakes the gratifications of a merely material world, a forsaking symbolized by death’s ‘passing bell,’ though a ‘last kiss’ is given to the void. A lifelong Seeker, Yeats, though his imagery remains fecund and erotic, seems at times as much a Gnostic Quester as he is a Romantic Poet. In his very last letter, written to Elizabeth Pelham on 4 January 1939, three weeks before his death, Yeats concluded:
I am happy, and I think full of an energy, an energy I had despaired of. It seems to me that I have found what I wanted. When I try to put all into a phrase I say, ‘Man can embody truth but he cannot know it.’ I must embody it in the completion of my life. The abstract is not life and everywhere draws out its contradictions. You can refute Hegel but not the Saint or the Song of Sixpence. (L, 922)
It had been thirty-seven years since Yeats, annotating Nietzsche, had scribbled in the margin his polar contrast between ‘denial of self,’ the soul ‘seeking knowledge, and ‘affirmation’ of a self that energetically ‘seeks life.’ In that diagram, Yeats was, under the auspices of Nietzsche, refuting Plato’s Socrates, who, in his advocacy of mind and knowledge, famously insisted, in the face of imminent death, that ‘the unexamined
11 In Kiberd’s Irish Classics, 454.
7. Mountain Visions and Other Last Things 103
life is not worth living’ (Apology 38a5-6). Anticipated by others, including Mark Twain and Oscar Wilde, William James responded that, while that was perfectly true, it was equally true that the ‘unlived life was not worth examining.’ In the October 1938 letter to Ethel Mannin in which he described his ‘idea of death’ as best depicted by Blake’s Grave illustration of ‘the soul and body embracing,’ Yeats immediately added: ‘All men with subjective natures move towards a possible ecstasy, all with objective natures towards a possible wisdom’ (L, 917). It was the old antithetical-primary polarity once again, with Yeats presenting both sides, but making his intuitive preference clear. Happy even on the threshold of his own death, the ‘completion of my life,’ Yeats had not forgotten the vital affirmation he embraced in his 1902 marginalia; and I for one have no wish to resist let alone refute his gay farewell, celebrating both primary and antithetical, Saint and Song.
Not so Harold Bloom; in his 2004 book Where Shall Wisdom Be Found? Bloom resisted that Yeatsian emphasis on embodiment by choosing, in keeping with his title, to focus on wisdom rather than that ‘truth’, which Yeats said could not be ‘known’ but could be embodied. ‘Of wisdom,’ writes Bloom—who thought his reversal of Yeats important enough to place in splendid isolation on his book’s back cover—'I personally would affirm the reverse. We cannot embody it, yet we can be taught how to learn wisdom, whether or not it can be identified with the Truth that might make us free.’ His final, skeptical allusion is to the Gospel of John (8:32), but Bloom’s emphasis on being taught how to learn wisdom would appeal to all Seekers, certainly Gnostic Seekers. And yet Harold Bloom—critical, as we saw at the outset, of Yeats’s emphasis on ‘the wisdom of the body’—is not William Butler Yeats, a ‘singer born, whose poetry and vision, however drawn to the spiritual, remains life- affirming and perpetually ‘embodied’—a poet who, to ‘put all into a phrase,’ finds even the ‘void fruitful.’
Fig. 1 Maud Gonne, 19 November 1897; inscribed by Maud: ‘Onward
always till Liberty is won!’ Negative: glass. Library of Congress, Prints
and Photographs Division, https://commons.wikimedia.org /wiki/ File:‘Maude_Gonne_McBride_nd_jpg.
PART TWO
LOVEP’S LABYRINTH: YEATS AS PETRARCHAN POET (THE MAUD GONNE POEMS)
So what do you say? That I invented the name of ‘Laura’ to give myself something to talk about and to have others talk about me! And that in fact there is no Laura in my mind except that poetic Laurel to which I have aspired with long-continued unwearied zeal, as my labor bears witness; and that concerning the living Laura, by whom I seem to be captured, everything is made-up, that my poems are fictions, my sighs pretended. Well, I wish it were all a joke, a pretense and not a madness! [...] Believe me, to labor to appear mad, to no purpose, is the height of madness. Petrarch, Familiar Letters, ILix
Does the imagination dwell the most Upon a woman won or woman lost? If on the lost, admit you turned aside From a great labyrinth out of pride, Cowardice, some silly over-subtle thought Or anything called conscience once; And that if memory recur, the sun’s Under eclipse and the day blotted out. Yeats, ‘The Tower,’ II
Preface to Part Two
As noted in the General Prologue, my emphasis in both parts of this