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The Collected Letters of W. B. Yeats - Volume V: 1908-1910 (Hardcover)
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The Collected Letters of W. B. Yeats - Volume V: 1908-1910 (Hardcover)
Series: Yeats Collected Letters Series
Expected to ship within 12 - 17 working days
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Shortly after the death of Algernon Swinburne in April 1909 Yeats
announced to his sister that he was now 'King of the Cats'. Yet, as
the letters in this volume demonstrate, although widely recognized
as the leading poet in English, he was far less sure of himself
than this triumphant boast suggests. Indeed, this volume tracks
Yeats's unrelenting but often agonised attempts to redefine his
positon as a poet in a time of aesthetic and personal transition
and uncertainty, struggling, as he put it, to fashion 'an art of my
own day' and amid 'doubtings, shrinkings, hatreds,
reconciliations'. His letters about the eight-volume Collected
Works, completed in these years, show him attempting to get his
'general personality' into his readers' minds, but always as 'a
preliminary to new work'. What constituted 'personality', general
or otherwise, was a contested area and in letter after letter he
hammers out its relationship to 'character' in a debate which was
to convert him from a late Romantic into an early Modernist. If
many letters are concerned with the revision and reappraisal of old
work, more reveal the insistent, and often frustrating, attempts to
find new expression, particularly in the writing of The Player
Queen, a process which, as he told a correspondent, convinced him
that no fixed identity was possible. Developments in his personal
life contributed to the sense of uncertainty and transition. In the
spring of 1908 he began an affair with a new mistress, Mabel
Dickinson, but ironically we find this rekindling and intensifying
his feelings for his old love Maud Gonne, and for the first time
they came close to a physical relationship, although she insisted
that their 'spiritual marriage' would be purer if unconsummated.
But the return to mystical sublimation was, after nearly twenty
years of courtship, no longer satisfying to him; the situation, as
he confessed in a letter, had set his 'nerves tight as a violin
string but not one that makes sweet music'. More discordant music
came from the Abbey Theatre. Early in 1908 the Fay brothers,
founder members and mainstays of the Company resigned, and for a
time it seemed that the whole project might come to an end. Over
the next three years, as his correspondence eloquently reports,
Yeats worked tirelessly to make sure this did not happen,
encouraging new actors and playwrights, overseeing the evolution of
a repertory structure, taking rehearsals often for weeks on end,
battling with Fays for their misuse of the Irish National Theatre's
name in America, mediating in the quarrels of the players,
deflecting where he could the cantankerousness of the Theatre's
patron, Annie Horniman, and, on her withdrawal of her subsidies,
helping Lady Gregory in fund-raising, and in a final successful bid
to renew the Abbey's patent. His exertions in the Theatre were much
increased by the terminal illness of his friend and colleague John
Synge (which, he confesses, 'for the first time in my life made
death a reality to me'). The serious illness of Lady Gregory
brought home to him his dependence on her and the ambience of her
house, Coole Park; the massive mental breakdown of his companion
Arthur Symons broke a remaining tie with the 1890s and the passing
of his uncle and fellow occultist, George Pollexfen, severed his
major link with Sligo. But, if these old relationships altered or
disappeared, new ones were forged. Ezra Pound at last succeeded in
meeting him and began encouraging him in his quest for 'an art of
my own day', while Yeats himself fostered the talents of younger
writers, notably the playwrights Lennox Robinson, T. C. Murray, St.
John Ervine, and Lord Dunsany. By the end of the period, Yeats, who
we see brought to edge of a nervous breakdown in 1909, and defying
the Establishment in producing Shaw's Blanco Posnet, became a man
of affairs: pressed to apply for Professorships at Trinity College
and the new National University, elected a founding member of the
British Academy of Letters, and the recipient of a Civil List
pension. The recasting of The Golden Helmet, first produced in the
early months of his volume, as The Green Helmet of two years later,
indicates how the discussions and soul-searching disclosed by his
letters had begun to bear fruit. Less now a play satirizing Irish
divisions and jealousies than a celebration of Nietzschean tragic
joy and Castiglionean sprezzatura, it indicates the qualities Yeats
had learned to prize over the intervening three years.
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