Beautiful and interesting piece on William Butler Yeats by Seamus Heaney. Peteb sent it to me a whlie back but I am just getting to it now.
Some great observations:
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”.
I had such a good time, this past fall, reading the complete works of Yeats – sitting backstage in my dressing room, I had a lot of time back there during other scenes – and I would sit at the makeup mirror, dressed in my costume, as the show went on out on stage, and read. It’s really cool to read all the early stuff – because then the later poems just shine all the more.
I was very very interested to read Heaney’s words on Maud Gonne, in terms of her effect on Yeats’ life (and, more importantly – his creativity):
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.
This makes me think of Anne’s post about Maud Gonne quite a while back (it took me some searching to find it!!) – but it gives a really interesting glimpse of this woman, the great unrequited love of Yeats’ life. I read some funny quote somewhere (can’t remember where) that said: “Any biography of Yeats would have to have in every chapter the following words: ‘And he proposed marriage yet again to Maud Gonne’.” Poor man! But oh – the creative energies it unleashed!
Anyway, go read the whole thing. It’s goosebump-inducing for me – to read Heaney’s words. He expresses so well what I feel, yet in a much more articulate way.
