‘What then?’ the ghost of Plato asks in a late poem that surveys a life very much like that of Yeats himself: friends, family, a house and garden. But the interrogation that persists above all is of the poet’s legacy. He declares, ‘“Let the fools rage, I swerved in naught, / Something to perfection brought;” / But louder sang that ghost: “What then?”’ Nearly a century later, scholars and everyday readers alike continue to be drawn to the reiterated question posed by Plato’s ghost when offered a short four-stanza litany of the seeming achievements of the artist, impresario, public figure, historical thinker. Did Yeats use his fame and public voice with responsibility in tumultuous times? Did his work vindicate the friendship he had won among a fraternity of artists and thinkers and public women and men? Was he a good father, husband, lover? Did he ever manage to produce the perfection of great art? All of these questions remain open to literary criticism and history as generations of scholars and students continue to pore over the legacy of Yeats’s seventy-three-year life.
Yeats’s work covers a publishing history which began in 1885 and spanned Victorianism to modernism. He had a career as writer and director for the stage which began in 1892 and continued through decades of theatrical experiment. His life as a writer of critical and esoteric prose was surmounted by the two complete versions of a world and art-historical system, A Vision written in collaboration with his wife, George. By middle age, the Nobel Prize-winning Yeats was ‘A sixty-year-old smiling public man’, a senator who took an active part in everyday politics in the new Irish Free State, a performer whose lectures and readings could fill Carnegie Hall.
Above all, Yeats remains a figure whose work intersects at multiple points with the story of world literature. His voice is at once regional—the County Sligo family origins to which his writing returned throughout his career and to which his body was (probably) returned for burial; national—occupied in the political struggles and petty disputes of a small country at the western seaboard of Europe; international—a writer whose audiences, interlocutors, and interests spanned Asia and the Americas as well as European literature from Plato through Dante to Blake and Shelley; and other-worldly—both in terms of an emerging new Einsteinian science and astronomy and the less tangible worlds of communicators, astrologers, and the tarot.
The forty-two chapters in this book consider Yeats’s early toil, his practical and esoteric concerns as his career developed, his friends and enemies, how he was and is understood. This book brings together critics and writers who have considered what Yeats wrote and how he wrote, moving between texts and their contexts in ways that leads the reader through Yeats’s multiple selves as poet, playwright, public figure, and mystic. The book cannot be encyclopaedic and neither can it ever be wholly consistent, but among the virtues of the Oxford Handbook series is that volumes like this can bring together a variety of views, establish a dialogue, and in this instance add to the Yeatsian sense of dialogue, the antinomial or deliberately divided way of thinking that Yeats relished and encouraged. Wedded to the questioning of certainty in a poem like ‘What then?’ is the deliberate ‘Vacillation’ of another late work. This book aims to put that sense of a living dialogue in tune both with the history of Yeatsian criticism and with contemporary critical and ethical debate, not shirking the complexities of Yeats’s more uncomfortable political positions or personal life. It is hoped that the book will speak of Yeats’s life and work from the times in which we find ourselves, and provide one basis from which future Yeats scholarship can continue to participate in the fascination of all the contributors here in the satisfying difficulty of this great writer.
Our collaboration as editors and contributors grew out of other collaborations and networks, especially the many gatherings at the Yeats International Summer School, where we served as co-directors. Many of the contributors in this book met in Sligo, and while it is invidious to mention individuals, we would like to thank Jonathan Allison, Meg Harper, Anne Margaret Daniel, and James Pethica for their invitations to be inducted into the community of the Summer School. For more than half a century the work of the Yeats Society Sligo has been a model for a cultural community which links the work of local and international expertise. We would like to thank those in Sligo who unconditionally shared their knowledge along with their hospitality, among them Martin and Maura McTighe, Damien and Paula Brennan, Susan O’Keeffe, and the inestimable Martin Enright. The International Yeats Society has done tremendous work in expanding the boundaries of where and how W. B. Yeats is read, and we would like to acknowledge the work of those who have organized conferences and edited the journal, including Sean Golden, Catherine Paul, Alexandra Poulain, Charles Armstrong, and Rob Doggett. We owe many thanks to all three of these organizations for the opportunities they continue to provide for scholars to embark on an enterprise such as this book.
We are grateful to Jacqueline Norton at OUP for commissioning this volume and to Aimee Wright and others at OUP for bringing it to publication. The valuable comments of a number of anonymous readers refined the initial plan considerably. We express our thanks to the Department of English and Related Literature at the University of York and Maynooth University Department of English for research support, the F. R. Leavis Fund at the University of York and the National University of Ireland for supporting costs associated with production. Stephen Grace did immense work with the initial task of standardizing the referencing throughout a very big book indeed.
Matthew Campbell would like to thank Valerie Cotter for her unconditional support—and for her willingness to spend at least an annual fortnight for five years in the (admittedly beautiful) county of Sligo. Maeve and Hannah Campbell got dragged along too sometimes and might have had fun. Lauren Arrington would like to thank Ali Shah for learning to tolerate the Irish weather.
The Oxford Handbook of W.B. Yeats
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