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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
The section of A Vision entitled “Dove or Swan” sets forth in brilliant prose a panorama of Western history that is almost without incoherence or irrelevance. Civilizations seem to rise and fall in nearly strict harmony with Yeats's wheels and gyres—and we suspect a yielding to what Henry Adams called the historian's most serious temptation: “if he cares for his truths, he is certain to falsify his facts.” But Yeats might retort with another romantic, Ralph Waldo Emerson: “Who cares what the fact was, when we have made a constellation of it to hang in heaven an immortal sign?” For, despite conflicting statements of intention, Yeats too was primarily committed to the task of illuminating universal experience. With many other poets of the last two centuries he turned to history for his material—even as historians often turned to poetry for their method. “Dove or Swan” was useful to him as an intermediate stage between the raw data of history and the dense symbolism of his poetry. But it is also important in itself as a typically romantic achievement: a vision of history as art.
1 Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams (Boston & New York, 1918), p. 457; The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. E. W. Emerson (Boston & New York, 1903–04), ii, 9.
2 See my previous articles: “The Early Yeats and the Pattern of History,” PMLA, lxxv (June 1960), 320–328, and “The Dialectic of Yeats's Vision of History,” Modern Philology, lvii (Nov. 1959), 100–112.
3 E. J. Ellis and W. B. Yeats, eds., The Works of William Blake (London, 1893), ii, 152; The Complete Works of S. T. Coleridge, ed. Shedd (New York, 1853), i, 436–437; Emerson, Complete Works, ii, 8–9.
4 Yeats, Plays and Controversies (London, 1923), pp. 112, 91–93, and Essays (New York, 1924), p. 421. The 1910 passage may recall Goethe's comment on Winckelmann: “We learn nothing by reading him, but we become something” (Conversations of Goethe with Eckermann and Soret, tr. J. Oxenford, London, 1879, p. 221).
5 A Vision (London, 1937), p. 25.
6 The Letters of W. B. Yeats, ed. Allan Wade (New York, 1955), p. 170; Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, ed. Robert Ross (Boston, 192-), rv, 45, 253, 114, 30; A Vision (1937), p. 279.
7 Standish O'Grady: Selected Essays and Passages, intro. Ernest A. Boyd (Dublin, 1918), p. 42.
8 Pater, Studies in tlte Renaissance (London, 1910), pp. 124–126, 160.
9 The Autobiography of William Butler Yeats (New York, 1953), pp. 71, 82.
10 Pater, The Renaissance, pp. 205 ff. For Pater's use of Hegel, see Ruth C. Child, The Aesthetic of Walter Pater (New York, 1940), pp. 61–66. This Hegelian progression re-appears in “Dove or Swan” and, much later, in Yeats's poem “The Statues.”
11 Wilde, Complete Works, rv, 269–270.
12 Yeats, Essays, p. 430.
13 W. B. Yeats and T. Sturge Moore: Their Correspondence 1901–1937, ed. Ursula Bridge (London, 1953), pp. 104–105 (1926), 150 (1929); Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West, tr. Chas. F. Atkinson (London, 1926–28), i, 56, 46, 165.
14 Wordsworth, The Prelude, Bk. 6, lines 151 ff.
15 “The Gift of Harun Al-Rashid,” The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats (New York, 1956), pp. 443, 444.
16 The Complete Writings of William Blake, ed. Geoffrey Keynes (London, 1957), p. 605; Shelley, “The Revolt of Islam,” vil, xxxi-xxxii. In 1900 Yeats alluded to this passage, Essays, p. 95.
17 Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Idea, tr. R. B. Haldane & J. Kemp (London, 1896; 4th ed.), i, 318. Jacob Burckhardt had accepted Schopenhauer's view of the rivalry between poet and historian, in Force and Freedom, ed. J. H. Nichols (New York, 1943), p. 153.
18 Benedetto Croce, The Philosophy of Giambattista Vico, tr. R. G. Collingwood (London, 1913), pp. 29, 230. Cf. A Vision (1937), p. 207. For Yeats's reading of Croce, see Joseph Hone, W. B. Yeats, 1865–1939 (London, 1942), pp. 393–394.
19 Croce, p. 241; Blake, Complete Writings, ed. Keynes, p. 528; Ellis and Yeats, Works of Blake, i, 289.
20 Helena P. Blavatsky, The Secret Doctrine (London, 1893), ii, 235. See also her description (n, 214) of Tiphereth, the divine manifestation that is “a circle formed of spirals”: “Coiled within, so as to follow the spirals, lies the serpent … ; the cycle representing . . . the divine mind . . . , and the serpent . . . , the Shadow of the Light (non-eternal, yet the greatest divine light on our plane).” In A Vision (1937), p. 73, the “sphere is reality” or God. “The cones and tinctures mirror reality but are themselves pursuit and illusion.” But Yeats, whose occult order name was Demon Est Deus Inversus, also believed that this “Satanic” world is a form of good, “the recurring and the beautiful, all the winding of the serpent” (Essays, p. 357).
21 Collingwood, “The Theory of Historical Cycles” (n), Antiquity, ι (1927), 446; “Oswald Spengler and the Theory of Historical Cycles,” Antiquity, i, 325.
22 Yeats had seen the antinomy in Boehme and Blake (“a reaction of God against man and man against God”—Ellis and Yeats, Works of Blake, i, 242); and his description —“Rosa Alchemica,” Savoy No. 2 (April 1896), p. 58—of spirits who wander “one and yet a multitude” in the great deep was an early attempt to transcend it. Cf. Yeats and Moore: Their Correspondence, p. 131, where the thought of the “instructors” is related to Kant and to Platonism, and Pages from a Diary Written in Nineteen Hundred and Thirty (Dublin, 1944), pp. 18–19, where the antinomy is related to his poetry and his vision of history. Yeats was delighted to discover later Ludwig Fischer, The Structure of Thought, tr. W. H. Johnston (London, 1931), which traces the antinomic structure of thought through the history of philosophy (see Letters, ed. Wade, pp. 783–784).
23 A Vision (1937), p. 81. Cf. his similar statement about Blake's cycles, Ellis and Yeats, Works of Blake, i, 308.
24 A Vision (1937), p. 255. Croce (p. 132) had noted that the lack of progressive enrichment in Vico's history caused men and events to lose their individual character.
25 A Vision (1937), p. 302. 26 A Vision (1937), p. 25.
27 W. M. Flinders Petrie, The Revolutions of Civilisation (London, 1911), pp. 4–5, 9–10; A Vision (1937), p. 268. Yeats apparently read Petrie in 1921: see A Vision (1937), p. 261.
28 Petrie, Fig. 57; A Vision (1937), p. 271.
29 Letters, ed. Wade, p. 666; see Henry Adams, “The Rule of Phase Applied to History,” in The Degradation of the Democratic Dogma, ed. Brooks Adams (New York, 1919), pp. 287–308; and The Education of Henry Adams, pp. 457, 482, 498. L. A. G. Strong's assertion, in “Yeats at his Ease,” London Magazine, ii (March 1955), 61, that Adams “caught Yeats's attention with a view of human development embodied in the image of . . . alternate cones or spirals, narrowing towards subjectivity, or widening towards objectivity,” though it might conceivably reflect Yeats's conversation, is otherwise misleading.
30 The Degradation of the Democratic Dogma, pp. 300–304, 309–310.
31 A Vision (1937), p. 257.
32 A Vision (London, 1925), pp. 174–175. Cf. the more tentative statement in A Vision (1937), pp. 257–258.
33 Strzygowski said, for example—The Origin of Christian Church Art, tr. O. M. Dalton & H. J. Braunholz (Oxford, 1923), p. 153: “the North, like the East, . . . excluded the human figure.”
34 A Vision (1937), p. 203; Strzygowski, p. 5; A Vision (1937), p. 271; Strzygowski, pp. 51–52 (cf. A Vision, 1937, pp. 271–272).
35 Strzygowski, pp. 14, 33, 35. 36 Pp. 41, 48.
37 Essays, pp. 195 (1900), 524 (1917); Emerson, Complete Works, ii, 9. 38 A Vision (1937), p. 270.
39 Pater saw, on the one hand, “the centrifugal, the Ionian, the Asiatic tendency, . . . working with little forethought straight before it, in the development of every thought and fancy; . . . delighting in brightness and colour, in beautiful material, in changeful form everywhere,” and, on the other, the centripetal, Doric, or “salutary European tendency, which . . . enforces everywhere the impress of its sanity, its profound reflexions upon things as they really are, its sense of proportion.” These “met and struggled and were harmonised in the supreme imagination, of Pheidias, in sculpture—of Aeschylus, in the drama.” (Greek Studies, London, 1910, pp. 252, 253, 35.) Yeats called Sophocles and Aeschylus “both Phidian men” (A Vision, 1937, p. 269). Yeats had also read Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy—for Pater's use of which, see Child, The Aesthetic of Pater, p. 89n. The antithesis of Doric and Ionic formed the basis of Yeats's description of the “horizontal dance” at other full moons: he noted in Byzantium, with Stryzygowski's help, the contrast of Greco-Roman figures and decoration of Persian origin (A Vision, 1937, p. 281; Strzygowski, pp. 150–151), and in the Renaissance the contrast of Donatello or Michael Angelo, who reflect “the hardness and astringency of Myron,” and Jacopo della Guercia or Raphael, who “seem . . . Ionic and Asiatic” (A Vision, 1937, p. 291).
40 Essays, p. 113 (1900).
41 A Vision (1937), p. 271. Pater had said—Plato and Platonism (London, 1910), pp. 24–25—that in Plato's time the Asiatic “centrifugal forces had come to be ruinously in excess of the centripetal.” When Yeats adds that, as Greek civilization loses itself in barbarism, Alexander is “but a part of the impulse that creates Hellenised Rome and Asia,” he may be recalling a phrase in H. G. Wells, The Outline of History (New York, 1921), p. 365: “he was not the cause, he was a part of the Hellenization.” T. R. Henn, The Lonely Tower (London, 1950), p. 198, has suggested that Yeats used Wells.
42 A Vision (1937), p. 273; “The Madness of King Goll,” Collected Poems, p. 17; A Vision (1937), pp. 244–245. Yeats may have been led to Mommsen by Croce's statement (Philosophy of Vico, p. 243) that he brought to maturity Vico's view of Roman history. Mommsen supported Yeats's vision of the decline of Rome into mechanism—Theodor Mommsen, The History of Rome, tr. W. P. Dickson (New York, 1903), v, 326—and probably supported the parallel of Christ and Caesar by calling Caesar “the entire and perfect man” and saying, “In his character as man as well as in his place in history, Caesar occupies a position where the great contrasts of existence meet and balance each other” (v, 313).
43 A Vision (1937), pp. 273–274.
44 A Vision (1937), p. 277; Orwell, Dickens, Dali, and Others (New York, 1946), p. 166.
45 A Vision (1937), p. 279.
46 A Vision (1937), pp. 279, 280–281. Blavatsky distinguished between the Serpent and the Devil of Christianity (Secret Doctrine, i, 198, 410; ii, 528).
47 A Vision (1937), pp. 291–292; see Blavatsky, Secret Doctrine, i, 411 ff., 71–72, and cf. the union of Ennoia and Orphis, ii, 214.
48 Yeats, “The Vision of MacConglinne,” Bookman, in (Feb. 1892), 157; Praz, The Romantic Agony, tr. Angus Davidson (London, 1951; 2nd ed.), pp. 383 ff. Praz does not deal with Yeats, who knew many of the works Praz discusses, and whose own work contains much the same split between inspiration and erudition. A. N. Jeffares has noted—W.B. Yeats: Man and Poet (London,1949),pp.260,261,334—Yeats's use of Ο. M. Dalton, Byzantine Art and Archaeology (Oxford, 1911) and W. G. Holmes, The Age of Justinian and Theodora (London, 1912). But the important fact is that Yeats drew from them only specific bits of description: Dalton has nothing to correspond with Yeats's general view, and Holmes engages in a comprehensive attack upon Byzantine culture.
49 Autobiography, pp. 70, 337, 338; Blake, Complete Writings, ed. Keynes, pp. 776, 777. In fact, though ironically qualified, Yeats's Byzantium is close to the Platonic ideal as described by R. C. Lodge, Plato's Theory of Art (London, 1953), p. 252: the citizens are “living in a kind of dream-aura. They are all parts of one and the same dream,” which has “a sense of guidance towards a final, ideal vision. This vision they are capable of apprehending (for the most part) only through art.”
50 Blake, Complete Writings, p. 484.
51 And in the more defiantly humanistic later years of his life, Yeats omitted Byzantium from his panorama: see On the Boiler (Dublin, 1939), p. 37.
52 A Vision (1937), p. 283. Cf. WeUs, The Outline of History, p. 556.
53 A Vision (1937), p. 285. The Virgin of Dreux significantly stands, no longer “that majestic queen who was seated on a throne.” Her portrayal is part of Pierre de Dreux's “masculine compliment.” (Henry Adams, Mont St. Michel and Chartres, Boston & New York, 1913, p. 188.)
54 A Vision (1937), p. 287. Like Vico (Croce, Philosophy of Vico, p. 223) and Pater (Greek Studies, pp. 267–268), Yeats draws a parallel between Homer and chivalric romance.
55 A Vision (1937), p. 287. He supported this by citing, among other things, St. Bernard's denunciation of the extravagance of Romanesque (for which see Migne, Patrologia Latina, cxxxxil, cols. 914–916.)
56 A Vision (1937), pp. 288–289.
57 A Vision (1937), p. 291. Yeats thus resolved geometrically the conflicting claims in behalf of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance as the time of “ideal unity.” Cf. Autobiography, p. 174.
58 A Vision (1937), pp. 291–292. Yeats apparently refers to Dante's discussion of beauty as harmony (Convilo, i, v, 95; iii, xv, 117; iv, xxv, 130). He had probably read his friend T. Sturge Moore's book on Durer, which stresses the idea of reconstituting Adam's form through measurement (Albert Durer, London, 1905, pp. 289–290). Yeats's first symbolic use of Durer in this manner was in 1909 (Autobiography, pp. 304–305).
59 A Vision (1937), pp. 292–293; Baldassare Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier, tr. Thomas Hoby (London, 1928), p. 311.
60 “Initiation upon a Mountain,” Criterion, xin (July 1934), 555–556 (the last phrase is quoted from the poem “Old Tom Again”); Pater, The Renaissance, p. 125.
61 A Vision (1937), pp. 293, 299; in 1924 Yeats wrote with mingled audacity and irony: “We are Catholics but of the school of Pope Julius the Second and of the Medician Popes, who ordered Michael-angelo and Raphael to paint upon the walls of the Vatican, and upon the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, the doctrine of the Platonic Academy of Florence, the reconciliation of Galilee and Parnassus. We proclaim Michaelangelo the most orthodox of men. . . .” (To-Morrow, i, Aug. 1924, 4, quoted in Richard Ellmann, Yeats: The Man and the Masks, New York, 1948 p. 246.)
62 A Vision (1925), pp. 211–212, 213–215.
63 Vico's confusion, which Croce analyzes (Philosophy of Vico, pp. 39–40), of “eternal ideal history,” or “the forms, categories or ideal moments of the mind in their necessary succession,” and the empirical determination of the order in which forms of civilization have appeared, is also evident in Yeats's conflicting statements of intention.
64 The Collected Plays of W. B. Yeats (New York, 1953), p. 243; A Vision (1937), p. 299.
65 A Vision (1937), p. 300; Adams, The Degradation of Democratic Dogma, p. 308.
66 Quoted by Erich Heller, The Disinherited Mind (Cambridge, Eng., 1952), p. 66. See Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Idea, i, 265, 346.
67 A Vision (1937), p. 275.
68 Yeats, ed., The Oxford Book of Modern Verse (New York, 1937), p. xxvii; Autobiography, p. 214 (1922). Cf. Yeats and Moore: Their Correspondence, p. 67 (1926). Coleridge's statement occurs in Complete Works, iii, 233.
69 Oxford Book of Modern Verse, p. xxxiii (cf. the allusion to mirror and brazier in 1909, Autobiography, p. 289); Autobiography, p. 165 (1922). In 1926 Whitehead reinforced Yeats's hope that the “mechanic philosophy” might be abandoned: “What Whitehead calls ‘the three provincial centuries’ are over. Wisdom and Poetry return” (Yeats and Moore: Their Correspondence, p. 93).
70 Oxford Book of Modern Verse, p. XXXV.