Yeats

Andrew Fitzsimons’ lecture

William Butler Yeats

• William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)• One of the greatest poets in the English language.• 1923 Nobel prize.• Early poetry and plays: inspiration in Irish ancient folklore and

legends. The Celtic Twilight.• Founded the Abbey Theatre.• Later poetry influenced by French symbolism, Pound,

modernism: Poetry concerned with politics, society, contemporary reality..

• Esoteric influences. Poems inspired by apocalyptic visions. A Vision, his own attempt at finding order in the universe (his Commedia). Theory of the Daemon.

Fitzsimons’ Thesis

• Castiglione and Dante, and in a wider sense the art of Italy, provided Yeats with the ambition for an art of «earned contemplation» and «excitement», an art in which the artist is «mirrored in all the suffering of desire» and in which, finally, «we gaze not at a work of art, but at the re-creation of the man through that art» (Autobiographies p. 217).

Yeats and Italy

• Yeats loved Italy.• Fictive Italy. Idealized.• Italy of the Renaissance. Refined courts with

enlightened rulers. Urbino.• it was to Italian example, Castiglione and

Dante, he turned at moments of public and personal crisis.

Castiglione, Il Cortgiano

• Castiglione’s sprezzatura. Doing things effortlessly

• It became a governing ideal for Yeats, defining the poet’s sense of true aristocracy.

• Idealizes a privileged caste which, as in Renaissance Italy, produces, or enables the creation of, the greatest art.

“To a wealthy man…”

• Irish society, unlke Italian Renaissance society, indifferent to the arts.

• A fictive society of “Paudeens” and “Biddies”• Italian enlightened aristocracy above public opinion.• For art to flourish, the best society is one controlled

by the enlightened indifference of a powerful, cultured elite.

• Ideal of an Irish aristocracy, Protestant and superior to the masses, inspired by sprezzatura

• Itaian turbulence conducive to artistic achievement.

• His own best poetry out of the turmoil of Civil War.

Italian courtly conventions (amor cortese)

• indebtedness to courtly convention in his treatment of woman,

• the female is often presented in terms of the nation and vice versa.

Dante

• Dante represents the figure of the poet he would like to become.

• “Dante, having attained, as poet, to Unity of Being, as poet saw all things set in order . . . and was content to see both good and evil”

• “Dante suffering injustice and the loss of Beatrice, found divine justice and the heavenly Beatrice”

Dante

• As Dante turned history and biography into poetry so did Yeats.” Easter 1916”

• In Dante, the «verses are at moments a mirror of his history, and yet more» (Later Essays)

• Dante an example of an artist who sought to find himself and not an image

• art as «compensation» for an abject life. (“Ego Dominus Tuus”).

• Source for his view of Dante, Boccaccio’s Life of Dante.

«Ego dominus tuus» • From La vita nuova. Also 10 Commandments.• Part of Per Amica Silentia Lunae which includes a prose explication of the

poem.• “(I] had schemed out a poem, praying that somewhere • upon some seashore or upon some mountain I should meet face to face

with the divine image of myself.• Aspiration to find the being that bears my likeness but is without

weariness or trivial desires” • A quarrel with himself. A dialogue between two stages of Yeats’ thinking.

Self and anti-self (also called Daemon).• Ille’s thoughts like Dante’s vision, more difficult to understand and more

demanding. • On whether the imagination’s contents originate within or outside the self.

Origin of self and anti-self

• 1821 Spiritic seance in London.• Made contac wth Leo Africanus. Letters

exchanged.• His opposite, his antithesis. An emanation of

Spiritus Mundi.• The unconscious.• But Yeats also believs Leo is the fruit of his

imagination

Per Amica Silentia Lunae

• Title from Virgil, Dante’s guide.