book dedicated to 100

citation of a passage from the Gnostic Valentinus as a ‘motto’ for Yeats’s ‘Cuchulain Comforted’ 96 contrast between Blake and Yeats 16, 20, 100 resistance to Yeats’s emphasis on the ‘wisdom of the body’ 20, 103 body the significance of the body, of sexuality, and of ‘embodied thought’ in Yeats 5-10, 15-17, 20-23, 26, 82, 85-86, 90, 103, 197, 220 Body (Self)-Soul debate tradition iv, 4-5, 11, 23, 26, 41, 55, 68-69, 71-72, 75-77, 79, 89, 93, 98, 107, 111, 113, 137, 144, 146, 162, 187, 191, 200, 202-203, 218, 223-224, 229, 253-254 Browning, Robert 11, 70-71, 158, 196 influence of his ‘Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came’ on Yeats’s ‘A Dialogue of Self and Soul’ 71
Index
‘My Last Duchess’ in connection with Yeats’s ‘Adam’s Curse’ and ‘Ancestral Houses’ 70, 158
Bush, Douglas 63
on Romantics and Newton, in connection with Yeats’s ‘Fragments’ 63
Cardozo, Nancy 34, 134-135, 139, 165 author of 1978 biography of Maud Gonne 135 Castiglione, Baldassare 158, 181 and the courtly love tradition 158 Castiglione’s Platonist, Pietro Bembo, in connection with ‘Yeats’s “The Circus Animals’ Desertion’ 203 his concept of sprezzatura in connection with Yeats’s ‘Adam’s Curse’ 158 influence of his The Courtier on Yeats’s ‘The People’ 181 Chatterjee, Mohini 14, 31-32, 52, 101 his ideas synopsized many years later in Yeats’s poem ‘Mohini Chatterjee’ 32 influence of his concepts of reincarnation and of ‘ecstasy’ on Yeats 31-32 Christ, Jesus 8, 22, 43, 46, 56, 62, 68, 73-74, 84, 87, 91-92, 215 a primary figure in Yeats’s dialectic 59, 68, 92, 100 contrasted by Yeats (following Nietzsche) to Dionysus 46 contrasted by Yeats to Oedipus 92 in Yeats’s ‘Two Songs froma Play,’ the play being The Resurrection 46, 62 opposed to Yeats’s antithetical Homer 68, 100 Parousia of, reversed in Yeats’s ‘The Second Coming’ 56 Cicero 69, 71, 89, 113, 180, 218 his Moral Obligations in connection with Yeats’s ‘The Cold Heaven’ 180 his Somnium Scipionis altered by Yeats in ‘A Dialogue of Self and Soul’ 69, 89, 113, 218
245
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 10, 27, 63, 67, 75, 91, 114-115, 140, 201, 204, 207, 213,255
Coleridge’s ‘Dejection: An Ode’ in connection with Yeats’s ‘The Circus Animals’ Desertion’ 201
his ‘The Pains of Sleep’ in connection with Yeats’s ‘Man and the Echo’ 204
‘Kubla Khan’ and the image of the vatic poet 114-115, 140
the topography of Xanadu echoed in Yeats’s ‘Coole and Ballylee, 1931’ 115
Crane, Hart 75,228
his concept of ‘an improved infancy’ in connection with the Blakean- Nietzschean conclusion of ‘A Dialogue of Self and Soul’ 75
Daniel 59-60 Hebrew apocalyptic visionary and ‘The Second Coming’ 59-60 Dante 7,16, 42,89,95, 113, 121, 123-124, 140, 158, 160, 191 his Beatrice in La Vita Nuovo as one model for Yeats’s own obsessive and unrequited love of Maud Gonne 121-123 in Yeats’s ‘Ego Dominus Tuus’ 123, 160 Dickinson, Mabel 122, 128, 165, 174 sexually involved with Yeats between 1908-13 122,165, 174 Donne, John 8-10, 88, 90 a source for Yeats’s concept of ‘the thinking of the body’ 9-10 in connection with Yeats’s ‘Before the World was Made’ 88 in connection with Yeats’s ‘Chosen’ 88, 90 in connection with Yeats’s ‘Michael Robartes and the Dancer’ 8, 10,90 Donoghue, Denis xi, 16,52, 177 on Yeats’s ‘Sailing to Byzantium’ 52 on Yeats’s ‘The Cold Heaven’ 177
Eastern thought 14, 25-26, 30-33, 68, 93-94, 96, 98, 101, 179
246
as early and late influence on Yeats’s poetry, from the ‘Indian’ poems in his first collection, through the ‘hermit’ poems in Responsibilities, to ‘Lapis Lazuli’ and ‘Meru’ 30-31, 68, 94,101 Yeats’s attraction and resistance to 14, 31 Eliot, T. S. 3, 15-16, 18-20, 22, 24, 28, 33, 42, 144, 168, 212 Eliot’s denigration of Yeats’s spiritual beliefs as obstacles to be overcome in his achievement of greatness 33 Eliot’s encounter with Yeats’s ghost in ‘Little Gidding’ 16, 42 memorial lecture on Yeats 3 Yeats’s independence-retaining roots in occult tradition compared with Eliot’s ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ 33 Yeats’s rejection of Eliot’s own austere spirituality 22 Ellis, Edwin 17, 57, 162, 253 Yeats’s co-author on 1893 edition of Blake 17,57, 162, 253 Ellmann, Richard xi, 20, 92, 112, 161, 170, 202, 224 comments on ‘No Second Troy’ in The Identity of Yeats 170 Yeats: The Man and the Masks 112,161 Emerson, Ralph Waldo 27, 40, 74-75, 228 and ‘intuitive reason’ 27 Emersonian self-reliance and Yeats’s ‘A Prayer for my Daughter’ 75 his Divinity School Address in connection with ‘A Dialogue of Self and Soul’ 74 Enlightenment, the 62-63, 65-67, 100 attacked in Yeats’s prose and in the gnomic poem, ‘Fragments’ 62-63, 65-67 Eternal Recurrence 4, 76, 187, 191 Nietzsche’s vision of in The Gay Science and Thus Spoke Zarathustra 187
Making the Void Fruitful
nightmare to Blake, but embraced by Yeats in ‘On Woman’ and ‘A Dialogue of Self and Soul’ 76, 187
Eve 49, 62-64, 66, 158
displaced by ‘spinning jenny’ in ‘Fragments’, only to return at end as the city named for her, Ninevah 62-64, 66
Farr, Florence 58, 82, 129, 194 briefly Yeats’s lover 82, 194 gifted actress, musician, and adept of the Golden Dawn 58, 82 participant with Yeats in symbolic card experiment that provided image in ‘The Second Coming’ 58 Ferguson, Trish 135 author of 2019 biography of Maud Gonne 135 Frazier, Adrian 135 author of 2016 biography of Maud Gonne 135 free will and determinism, or Fate 33, 203 as played out in ‘A Dialogue of Self and Soul’ 41,191 a tension central to Yeats’s thought 33 Frye, Northrop xi, 63 on Blake’s ‘gnomic’ poetry 63
Gnosticism 25-27, 32-33, 35, 43, 57-58, 66, 69,71, 73-75, 77, 79, 82-83, 85-87, 95-96, 98, 100-103
the concept of gnosis in Yeats’s thought 32, 37, 41, 58, 60-62, 66, 74, 82-83, 93, 95, 101-102
the concept of the ‘void’ 24, 101-103
Yeats’s rejection of Gnostic and Neoplatonic body-soul dualism in favor of Unity of Being 9,26, 76-77
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 40
possible influence of his elf-king ballad on “The Stolen Child, n. 40
Golden Dawn, the Hermetic Order of the 14, 27-29, 33, 45, 51, 58, 82, 129, 163, 169
Index
Maud Gonne’s brief membership in 163, 169 Yeats’s sustained membership in 14, 27, 29,51 Goldoni, Carlo 173 his ‘drinking song’ adapted by Yeats 173 Gonne, Iseult 6-7, 33, 81, 128, 130-132, 139, 145, 180, 194-195, 197 addressed in ‘Michael Robartes and the Dancer’ 6-7 her strange conception 130-131, 145 in ‘The Living Beauty’ 180 in the untitled [‘A woman’s beauty’ | curtain-opening song to The Only Jealousy of Emer 197 in ‘To a Young Girl’ 81, 145 Maud’s daughter by Lucien Millevoye 6, 33, 130-131, 139, 145, 198 proposed to by Yeats 33 Gonne, Maud _ 3, 6, 10-12, 17, 23-24, 33-34, 38, 46, 55-56, 79-81, 93, 104— 105, 107-108, 111, 115-118, 121-163, 165-189, 191-207, 212-213, 215-225, 253-254 as Cathleen ni Houlihan in Yeats’s play of that title 38, 160, 193-194, 201, 204 as femme fatale 121, 174, 189 as political activist 118, 121, 135, 174, 176, 182, 185 as type of the Morrigu 156, 193 as Yeats’s composite beloved and Muse 3, 11-12, 79, 81, 107, 116, 121-122, 124, 128-129, 132, 135, 142-145, 152-153, 155-156, 159-160, 166, 170, 174-175, 182, 191-192, 201-202, 212-213, 220-221, 224-225 her marriage to John MacBride 125— 126, 132, 134, 148, 156, 171-172, 182, 184, 189, 198, 212 her ‘mysterious eye’ 169, 193 her qualified charge of Yeats’s cowardice 117-118, 183-184 her spontaneity contrasted to Yeats’s analytic mind 117
247
in Yeats’s poetry 3, passim the sexual consummation of their relationship 79, 145, 168 Yeats’s obsessive and unrequited love for 10,12, 23, 117,121, 123, 126, 128, 156, 171, 201-202, 223 Yeats’s repeated proposals to 33, 134, 153, 157, 181, 222 Yeats’s sublimation of that love into poetry in the Petrarchan tradition 11, 23, 113, 117, 121, 123, 158 Gould, Warwick xii, 14, 85, 139, 219 rondural comment on Yeats’s ‘Politics’ 219 Graves, Robert 11, 119-120, 207 compared and contrasted with Yeats as Muse-poets 11, 119 Gregory, Augusta 95, 121, 132, 136, 145, 154, 158, 165, 173, 179, 189, 204-205 and the writing of Cathleen ni Houlihan 205 in connection with ‘The Folly of Being Comforted’ 154 in Yeats’s poem ‘Friends’ 145 sees Maud as ‘death’s-head’ 189, 191 Gregory, Robert 37, 147, 158 as the original of the fighter-pilot in ‘An Irish Airman Foresees his Death’ 37 as the potential heir to Coole Park 158 Yeats’s elegy for 147, 158 Griffith, Arthur 128, 205, 216 claims to have contributed ‘propagandistic’ ending of Cathleen ni Houlihan 205 fascination with Maud Gonne 128, 205
Hanrahan, Red 115-118, 160 fictional character created by Yeats 115, 160 in Red Hanrahan’s Stories 116 in ‘The Tower, II 115-117 Harper, George Mills xi, 14, 37
248
scholarship on Yeats and the occult 14, 34 Harper, Margaret Mills 14 on Yeats, his wife George, and their collaboration on A Vision 14 Heaney, Seamus 10, 15, 67, 95-96, 120, 176, 202, 207, 210-212, 217, 220-221 comments on Yeats 15, 67, 120, 221 contrasts ending of ‘Under Ben Bulben’ with that of ‘Politics’ 221 on greatness of ‘Cuchulain Comforted’ 95 on “Man and the Echo’ 207, 210-211 on Yeats’s occultism 15, 67, 120 Helen of Troy 6, 61, 125, 129, 165-166 Yeatsian prototype for Maud Gonne 6,125, 129, 165-166 Homer 1,6, 10,43, 46, 53, 68, 92, 98-100, 116, 118, 165-166, 169-170, 176, 189, 200, 205 as embodiment of Nietzschean ‘master morality’ as opposed to slave morality in Yeats’s ‘Ancestral Houses’ 70 contrasted by Yeats to primary Socrates and Christ 43, 68, 92 his ‘unchristened heart’ as Yeats’s antithetical ‘example’ 43, 68, 92 read by Yeats in the light of Nietzsche, who contrasted Homer and Plato 43, 68 Hyde, Douglas 128 dazzled by Maud Gonne’s charismatic beauty 128
Isaiah 1, 45, 58 the simplifying spiritual ‘coal’ that purified the prophet’s lips rejected by Yeats in ‘Vacillation’ 45
Joyce, James 21, 48, 58, 102, 144, 151, 168, 201-202, 205, 219, 221-222 ending of Ulysses compared to final lines of Yeats’s ‘Politics’ 222
Kant, Immanuel 23, 79
Making the Void Fruitful
his ‘antinomies’ allied by Yeats with
Blake’s ‘Contraries’ 23, 46 Keats, John xi, 8, 11, 38, 44, 52-53, 91,
94-95, 144, 180, 189, 213, 229
‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ compared with Yeats’s ‘Lapis Lazuli’ 94-95, 189
‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ compared with Yeats’s ‘News for the Delphic Oracle’ 91
‘Ode to a Nightingale’, echoed in Yeats’s ‘The Wild Swans at Coole’ 180
‘Ode to a Nightingale’, echoed in Yeats’s “To the Rose upon the Rood of Time’ 44
‘On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer’ compared with Yeats’s ‘Her Triumph’ and ‘A Deep-sworn Vow’ 189
‘On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer,’ echoed in Yeats’s ‘Her Triumph’ 189
Locke, John 25, 58, 62-64, 66 as swooning substitute for Adam in in Yeats’s ‘Fragments’ 62-63 his empiricism rejected by Yeats 25, 58, 62-63
MacBride, John 125-126, 132, 134, 148, 156, 171-172, 182, 184, 189, 198, 212 alluded to in ‘A Prayer for my Daughter’ 148 ‘drunken, vainglorious lout’ of ‘Easter 1916’ 126, 132, 135 married to and separated from Maud Gonne 125-126, 132, 134, 148, 156, 171-172, 182, 184, 189, 198, 212 molests Iseult 132 Macrobius 69,72, 89-90 as the ‘learned astrologer’ in Yeats’s ‘Chosen’ 69, 89 Commentary on Cicero’s Somnium Scipioni as major influence on the debate in ‘A Dialogue of Self and Soul’ 69,72
Index
contrast repeated in Yeats’s ‘Politics’ 218-219 Mannin, Ethel 19-20, 34, 103, 162, 194, 219, 254 one of Yeats’s late Muses 19, 194, 254 Markiewicz, Countess Constance 149, 204 in ‘Easter 1916’ 149 in ‘On a Political Prisoner’ 149 physical force activist considered a sister by Maud Gonne 149 Mathers, MacGregor 33, 45, 58 1890 symbolic card experiment as one source of ‘The Second Coming’ 58-59 in Yeats’s ‘All Soul’s Night’ 45 mechanical-organic distinction 64, 148 in ‘A Prayer for My Daughter’ 148 in ‘Fragments’ 64 Milton, John 11, 48, 71, 86, 91-92, 141-142, 192, 228-229 his ‘On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity’ as altered in Yeats’s ‘News for the Delphic Oracle’ 91
Nabokov, Vladimir 213 momentary comparison of Yeats to Humbert Humbert in Lolita, n. 213 Neoplatonism 26-27, 32, 35, 46, 69, 70-72, 77, 83, 88-89, 92, 154. See also Macrobius; See also Plato; See also Plotinus; See also Porphyry Idealist philosophy that both attracted Yeats and induced resistance, usually under the auspices of Nietzsche 70-71, 77 Nietzsche, Friedrich 4, 8, 10, 27, 34-35, 43, 46,59, 67-71, 73, 75-77, 87, 92-95, 98-102, 119-120, 173, 183, 187, 191, 216, 223-224, 228, 255 as Yeats’s principal antithetical counterweight to the primary 27, 59, 68,99, 103 Beyond Good and Evil 87, 224 Daybreak 98-99
249
influence on ‘A Dialogue of Self and Soul’ 4, 68-71, 75-77, 187, 191
Nietzsche’s concept or thought- experiment of Eternal Recurrence 3-4, 76, 187, 191
On the Genealogy of Morals 68, 95, 98, 224
The Gay Science 75-76, 187
the Nietzchean concept of conflict— contradiction as life-affirming—in Yeats’s ‘What Then?’ 99
Thus Spoke Zarathustra 76,95,99, 183
Yeats adopts Nietzsche’s emphasis on the body, that all must ‘come to sight and touch’ 8
Yeats ‘excited’ by the Nietzschean ‘curious astringent joy’ he associates with Blake 34, 100
Yeats’s career-shaping diagram drawn ina margin of the Nietzsche anthology given him by John Quinn 68, 102
Zarathustrian tragic joy in ‘Lapis Lazuli’ 95
Ninevah 64-66, 93
as city of myth and imagination in
Yeats’s ‘Fragments’ 64-66
occultism 3-5, 9,11, 13-15, 18, 20, 23-24, 29,31, 33, 35, 42, 53, 56, 58-60, 64-67, 69,79, 82,87, 119, 121, 127, 129, 131, 139, 163, 165, 179, 194-196
and mediumship and séances 30, 32, 35, 64-65, 82
as altered and eroticized in Yeats’s poetry 3, 15, 23, 66, 82, 87, 195, 253
Yeats’s immersion in 3-4, 13-15, 18, 24, 27-28, 31, 33, 35, 42, 66, 79, 82, 87, 119, 121, 139, 165, 195
Yeats’s mixture of credulity and skepticism 28, 30
Oedipus 3, 92, 109, 221
as Yeats’s antithesis to Christ 92
Yeats’s translations of Sophocles’ Oedipus the King and Oedipus at Colonus 3,92, 221
250
O'Leary, John 27, 64, 66, 126, 131 expedites Maud Gonne’s meeting with Yeats 126 venerable old Fenian who writes to Yeats about his father’s displeasure with his son’s occult pursuits 27
Petrarch (Francesco Petrarca) 3, 11, 23, 61, 105, 113, 117-118, 120-124, 151, 154-155, 158-160, 176-177, 195, 213
creator of first enduring (and endlessly imitated) collection of spiritual-erotic love poems in European literature 23, 113
Yeats as a poet consciously writing in the Petrarchan tradition of obsessive and unrequited love 10-11, 23, 113, 117, 121, 123, 158
Plato 18, 21, 26-27, 30, 41, 43, 46, 52, 68, 80-81, 83-84, 89, 91, 97-100, 102, 114, 118,120,122, 154, 188, 191, 199, 203
anagon Yeats inherited from Nietzsche 43,99
as the primary figure in Yeats’s debate with antithetical Homer 41, 68, 100, 103
as the supreme idealist in ‘Among School Children,’ the philosopher who ‘thought nature but a spume that plays/ Upona ghostly paradigm of things 98
‘Plato’s ghost’ as the spiritual spokesman and antagonist in Yeats’s ‘What Then?’ 98
Yeats’s defiance of in ‘The Tower’ 21, 41
Plotinus 9, 18, 21, 27, 41, 52, 70-71,
86-87, 89, 91-92, 186-187, 228
‘Plotinus’ thought’ mocked in ‘The Tower’ 21, 41
sexualized in ‘News for the Delphic Oracle’ 91
the principal Neoplatonist, both revered and resisted by Yeats 21, 27, 41, 86, 89, 186
Making the Void Fruitful
Yeats influenced throughout his work and thought by Plotinus’ vision 27, 70-71, 86, 91, 186
Pope, Alexander 8, 49, 64-65, 142, 203-204
contrasted by Yeats to Wordsworth 64
in connection with Yeats’s ‘Fragments’ 65
intended epitaph for Isaac Newton 65
Pope’s heavens bespangled with ‘disheveled’ light at the end of The Rape of the Lock a source for Yeats’s ‘all disheveled wandering stars’ at the end of ‘Who Goes with Fergus? 48-49, 142
The Rape’s ‘toyshop-of-the-heart’ image altered by Yeats in ‘The Circus Animals’ Desertion,’ becoming the ‘foul rag and bone shop of the heart’ 203
Porphyry 91-92
report on Plotinus altered by Yeats in ‘The Delphic Oracle upon Plotinus’ and ‘News for the Delphic Oracle’ 91
Pound, Ezra 16, 28, 139, 146, 170, 176, 200
helps Yeats revise ‘From the Antigone’ 200
his description, in Canto IT, of Helen of Troy (adapted from Aeschylus’ Agamemnon) 176,200
on Yeats’s shift from the ‘sweet’ to the ‘grand style’ in ‘No Second Troy’ 170
primary. See antithetical-primary distinction
primary-secondary distinction. See Locke, John
Quinn, John 68, 95, 134, 157, 215, 217 as attorney 134 major patron of modernist artists 68, 95, 157
Ronsard, Pierre 151-152 his sonnet 151 Rosenthal, M. L. xi, 225 on Yeats’s ‘The People’ 225
Index
Russell, George (AE) 28, 30, 77, 131
a ‘saint’ to Yeats’s ‘poet,’ according to Mrs. Yeats 77
his response to Yeats’s ‘A Dialogue of Self and Soul’ 77
repeated to Maud Gonne the myth that a dead child might be reborn 131
Shakespeare, William 53,56, 61, 93-94, 114, 124, 154, 158-159, 191, 210, 213, 228-229
echoes of Sonnet 53, and of Hamlet and Lear in Yeats’s ‘A Bronze Head’ 191-192
echoes of Sonnet 116 in ‘The Folly of Being Comforted’ 154
King Lear 7,75, 192, 210
Shakespear, Olivia 3-4, 43, 86, 89, 129,
145, 194-196 addressed in Yeats’s ‘After Long Silence’ 195 Yeats’s first sexual partner and lifelong friend, recipient of many of his most intimate letters 3, 43, 86, 89, 129, 145, 194-195 Shaw, George Bernard 128-129 attracted to Florence Farr 129 on Maud Gonne’s beauty 129 Shelley, Percy Bysshe 16, 19-20, 26, 37, 67, 83, 96, 100, 189 influence of Alastor on Yeats’s quest- poems 37 influence of Shelley’s final fragmentary masterpiece, The Triumph of Life, on both Yeats and T. S. Eliot 16, 19-20 Sidney, Sir Philip 124, 158-160 model for Robert Gregory in Yeats’s Gregory elegy 158 opening poem of his sonnet-sequence Astrophil and Stella in connection with Yeats’s ‘Adam’s Curse’ 124, 159-160 Socrates 68, 84, 102, 114 contrasted by Yeats to Homer 68 Sophocles 3, 92, 200, 221
251
‘From Oedipus at Colonus’ and ‘From the Antigone,’ final poems, respectively, to ‘A Man Young and Old’ and ‘A Woman Young and Old’ 109, 200, 221
Oedipus plays translated by Yeats 3,92, 221
Sturm, Frank Pearce 69
introduces Yeats to Macrobius’ Commentary on Cicero’s Dream of Scipio 69
Swedenborg, Emanuel 17, 69, 87, 92, 171, 186-187, 253
and the incandescent sexual intercourse of angels, an image that haunts Blake and Yeats 17, 87,92, 171, 187, 253
Swift, Jonathan 16, 65, 84, 202
as ghost in Yeats’s séance-play, The Words upon the Window-pane 16, 65
imagery from his ‘A Description of a City Shower’ echoed in Yeats’s ‘The Circus Animals’ Desertion’ 202
Synge, John Millington 161
death of 161
Szymborska, Wislawa 60
1996 Nobel Laureate ona poet’s need to admit ‘I don’t know’ 60
connection with the questionable finale of ‘The Second Coming’ 60
Teeling, Charles MacCarthy 131-132 morally attacks Maud Gonne 131 physically attacks John O’Leary 131
Tennyson, Alfred, Lord 37, 156 Yeats influenced by his ‘Ulysses’ and
the Romantic quest-tradition 37
Unity of Being 4,7, 9,22, 26,76, 81,199 Yeats’s conception of body and spirit in a state of ultimate union 26, 69, 82
Vendler, Helen xi-xii, 54, 56, 148, 167-168 on Yeats’s ‘A Prayer for my Daughter’ 148 on Yeats’s ‘Byzantium’ 54
252
on Yeats’s “The Second Coming’ 56 on Yeats’s ‘Words’ 167 von Hiigel, Baron Friedrich 42-43 Catholic mystical philosopher who plays a role in Yeats’s ‘Vacillation,’ and in T. S. Eliot’s ‘Little Gidding’ 42-43
Wieseltier, Leon 216-217 on politics in art 216 Winters, Yvor 146 critical of supposed excess emotion in Yeats’s ‘Friends’ 146 Wordsworth, William 7-8, 27, 45, 64, 67, 125, 180, 213-214, 216, 229 contrasted by Yeats to Pope 64 on ‘spontaneous wisdom’ as opposed to book-knowledge 7-8 the Intimations ode and The Excursion in connection with ‘Man and the Echo’ 213-214
Yeats, Anne 107-109, 147-148, 150 in ‘A Prayer for my Daughter’ 107-108 in ‘Father and Child’ 108-109 Yeats, George, Mrs. W. B. 4, 6, 13-15, 33, 77, 81, 92, 97, 108, 121-122, 149, 161, 181, 187, 194-197, 207
Making the Void Fruitful
and Yeats’s ‘Under Saturn’ and ‘An Image from a Past Life’ 196 as the ‘gift’ in Yeats’s long narrative poem, “The Gift of Harun al-Rashid’ 196 automatic writing and her collaboration on Yeats’s A Vision 4, 13-14, 33-34, 197 Yeats, John Butler 25, 27, 126, 129, 177, 181, 183 1889 visit to whom by Maud Gonne was really an excuse to meet his son 121, 126, 129, 181 his agnostic skepticism resisted by Yeats 25,27 Yeats, William Butler xi-xii, 1, 3-20, 22-35, 37-47, 51-77, 79-84, 86-101, 103, 105, 107-109, 111-132, 134-137, 139-157, 159-163, 165-168, 170-185, 187-189, 191-204, 206-207, 209-226, 228, 253-255 plays The Death of Cuchulain 76,95 The Player Queen 174 The Shadowy Waters 139, 144 Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus 3, 92,221 The Words upon the Window-pane 16, 35, 64
About the Cover
The cover illustration reproduces William Blake’s water-colored ink drawing, ‘The Reunion of the Soul & the Body,’ part of a set, published as engravings (not by Blake but by Luigi Schiavonetti) illustrating Robert Blair’s book-length poem, The Grave (1808). Departing from Blair’s conventional ideas, Blake’s series (long lost, but rediscovered in 2001), traces a progression from the initial descent into the Vale of Death to the admission into life eternal. But Blake not only emphasizes immortality over physical death; he depicts in this particular illustration the (male) body and (female) soul rushing passionately into ‘each other’s arms on the last day.’ The flames suggest that Blake’s reunion of soul and body incorporates Swedenborg’s vision of lovers, frustrated on earth, meeting in eternity in incandescent angelic intercourse.
This particular image and the Swedenborgian vision meant a great deal to Yeats. He used the engraved version of Blake’s illustration as the cover design for all three volumes of his (and Edwin Ellis’s) 1893 edition of Blake. Maud Gonne cited the Grave illustrations in a 1908 letter describing an astral projection in which she saw herself and Yeats spiritually entwined between heaven and earth. On the basis of his star-crossed love of Maud Gonne, Yeats came to believe, with Lucretius, that ‘the tragedy of sexual intercourse is the perpetual virginity of the soul.’ Two decades after Maud told him of her astral projection, Yeats echoed and altered her purely spiritual concept in ‘A Last Confession, the ninth poem in his sequence A Woman Young and Old. In the two final stanzas the woman presents us with a characteristically Yeatsian vision of eroticized spirituality:
I gave what other women gave That stepped out of their clothes, But when this soul, its body off, Naked to naked goes,
He it has found shall find therein What none other knows,
254 Making the Void Fruitful
And give his own and take his own And rule in his own right;
And though it loved in misery Close and cling so tight,
There’s not a bird of day that dare Extinguish that delight.
Unsurprisingly, Yeats never forgot Blake’s ‘Reunion of the Soul & the Body.’ Four months before he died—in a letter written to one of his Muses, Ethel Mannin, but with Maud Gonne as ever hovering in the background—Yeats described Blake’s illustration of ‘the soul and body embracing’ as his own ‘idea of death.’
About the Author
Patrick J. Keane, former Francis Fallon Chair, is Professor Emeritus of Le Moyne College, where a medal in his name is annually awarded to graduating seniors in the Arts and Sciences who have ‘achieved excellence in the field of literary studies and who have demonstrated great scholarly promise.’ Though he has written on a wide range of topics, his areas of special interest are 19" and 20'-century poetry in the Romantic tradition; Irish literature and history; the interactions of literature with philosophic, religious, and political thought; the impact of Nietzsche on 20" century literature; and transatlantic studies, exploring the influence of German Idealist philosophy and British Romanticism on American writers.
He has written several dozen articles (the most recent of which have appeared in Salmagundi, The Mark Twain Annual, and the Yeats Annual) and seven books: William Butler Yeats: Contemporary Studies in Literature (1973), A Wild Civility: Interactions in the Poetry and Thought of Robert Graves (1980), Yeats’s Interactions with Tradition (1987), Terrible Beauty: Yeats, Joyce, Ireland and the Myth of the Devouring Female (1988), Coleridge’s Submerged Politics (1994), Emerson, Romanticism, and Intuitive Reason: The Transatlantic ‘Light of All Our Day’ (2005), and Emily Dickinson’s Approving God: Divine Design and the Problem of Suffering (2008). He lives in De Witt, in upstate New York.
About the Team
Alessandra Tosi was the managing editor for this book. Alison Gray performed the proofreading. Melissa Purkiss performed the typesetting and indexing.
Anna Gatti designed the cover. The cover was produced in InDesign using the
Fontin font.
Luca Baffa produced the paperback and hardback editions. The text font is Tex Gyre Pagella; the heading font is Californian FB. Luca produced the EPUB, MOBI, PDF, HTML, and XML editions — the conversion is performed with open source software freely available on our GitHub page (https://github. com/OpenBookPublishers).
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Literary Temporalities Sophie Laniel-Musitelli and Céline Sabiron (eds)
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https: //doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0232 a Opa ay
Tennyson’s Poems
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Yeats’s Legacies
Yeats Annual No. 21
Warwick Gould (ed.)
https: //doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0135 Ege)
MAKING THE VOID FRUITFUL
Yeats as Spiritual Seeker and Petrarchan Lover
PATRICK J. KEANE
Keane is a superb reader, observant of detail, sensitive to form, and always alert to the complex conversation through which a writer like Yeats finds his place in a tradition.
Terence Diggory, Professor Emeritus of English, Skidmore College
Shedding fresh light on the life and work of W. B. Yeats—widely acclaimed as the major English-language poet of the twentieth century—this new study by leading scholar Patrick J. Keane questions established understandings of the Irish poet’s long fascination with the occult: a fixation that repelled literary contemporaries T.S. Eliot and W.H. Auden, but which enhanced Yeats’s vision of life and death.
Shaped by the conviction that no modern poet exceeded Yeats in animating the enduring themes of love and spirituality through poetry, this book emphasises the influence, of Blake, Nietzsche, and John Donne, on what Yeats called ‘the thinking of the body’. Grounded firmly in the textual materiality of Yeats’s oeuvre, this book will be of interest to researchers and students of W. B. Yeats, as well as to those in the fields of Anglophone literatures and cultures, and philosophy.
This is the author-approved edition of this Open Access title. As with all Open Book publications, this entire book is available to read and download for free on the publisher’s website. Printed and digital editions, together with supplementary digital material, can also be found at http://www.openbookpublishers.com
Cover image: William Blake, watercolor illustrations to Robert Blair’s ‘The Grave’, object 15: ‘The Reunion of the Soul & the Body’ (1805). Cover Design by Anna Gatti.
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ebook and OA editions
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