Yeats and Spenser: Form, Philosophy, and Pictorialism, 1881–1902

Abstract

Strictly speaking, the autobiographical accounts of Yeats’s conversion from science to poetry are more consistent than absolutely accurate. If he had less than the clearest notion, in 1925, of how his own early aestheticism compared with that of Spenser and Shelley (see above), we know why: he was just then, as he tells us, in the muddle of the first version of A Vision. Nevertheless, he also chose to promote a myth rather than to reveal more than a few tantalizing details about his earliest, mostly unpublished, poetry. He created the impression (as the second epigraph above illustrates — a composite of two compatible quotations) that his career took wing in 1884, just as his first published work was about to appear. It was as if his career, as auspicious as it became, were born of sudden inspiration and little practice. In fact, as surviving manuscripts prove, the poet’s memory served him well in recalling a few details which he did volunteer at last, though he seems consciously misleading about dates. As a consequence, students of this phase of his work — i.e. that part which was most often revised, most scrupulously censured by the poet himself, and generally superseded by the post-1900 phase — have for fifty years groped about in a fog.

I am now once more in ‘A Vision’ busy with that thought the antitheses of day and night, of moon & sun — … ‘The Rose’ … was part of my seco[n]d book ‘The Counte[ss] Cathlee[n]’ a[nd] various lege[n]d[s] & lyrics’, & … I notice, readi[n]g … these poems for the first time for some years that the Rose, diffires from The Intellectua[1] Beauty of Shelley & of Spenser in that I have imagined it has [i.e. ‘as’] suff[e]ring with man, as indi[visible?] inseper[a]bl[e] from its human image & symbol. Thoug[h] not identical with its human image & symbol, & so t[o] a yo[u]ng man inevitably an ideal an idea[?] & n[o]t & not as something pursued & seen from afar. (NLI 13,583; cf. VP 842)

[When ‘I was but eighteen or nineteen’,] I had begun to write poetry in imitation of Shelley and of Edmund Spenser, play after play — for my father exalted dramatic poetry above all other kinds — and I invented fantastic and incoherent plots. (Au 66–7; cf. E&I 510)