The Alchemist

YEATS by Douglas Archibald '55 Syracuse University Press, 1983. 280 pp. $25.00

If it is true, as W. H. Auden wrote, that after his death the poet Yeats "became his admirers," then it would seem that W. B. Yeats has been unusually fortunate in the quality of his posthumous admirers. For since the poet's death in 1939, Yeats's work has consistently attracted because, one could surmise, it has demanded the most agile intellectuals, the best informed scholars, and the most perceptive readers among the literary critics of our time. And indeed, why not! For is it not now time that it be said outright, without cavil or caveat: W. B. Yeats is no doubt the most accomplished and significant poet to have written in English so far in our century.

They are not many, those first-echelon Yeats critics and biographers, five or six at most, and now Douglas Archibald, Dean of the Faculty at Colby College, must be added to the group. For although he was already a recognized authority, having written extensively on Yeats (and on the poet's father J. B. Yeats) in recent years, with this new book Archibald clearly stakes his claim to a place among those distinguished few who have written superlatively well about Yeats. For one thing, Archibald's readings of the major poems of the Yeats canon are surely among the most perceptive ever published. Archibald is obviously an extraordinarily gifted and skillful explicator of poems and in the case of Yeats, indeed,, some of the most densely packed and allusive poems in the language. Perhaps more important, the angle from which Archibald approaches Yeats's poetry suggests several new and potentially fruitful points of departure for future Yeats critics. Seminal, then, but also authoritative, knowledgeable, penetrating. All the adjectives apply.

Not that Archibald says all there is to say about Yeats. Wisely, he does not try to. His book is not, for instance, a biography, not really, in spite of the immense amounts of factual, biographical knowledge required for its writing. Nor is it literary history, in spite of the fact that its organization depends from a more or less chronological thread. Archibald's aim is somewhat more complex than either biography or history. For in this book he attempts nothing less than to illuminate the creative act itself, to analyze those obscure assimilative processes by which the poet Yeats transmuted, in the laboratory of his creative imagination, the base metals of his day-by-day experience into the golden forms of poems.

There is, or at least there used to be, a body of literary critics who believe that the creative process is inherently unexplainable or more accurately, explainable only in its own aesthetic terms, not in the modes of critical, analytical prose to which, of course, the critic is confined. Archibald is no such literary obscurantist. "It is possible," he believes, "approximately to define Yeats's encounters, what happens when his imagination meets the words or work, consciousness or presence, of another human being. These encounters lie at the heart of his poetry. He may have been more gifted and fortunate in devouring and converting influences than any other modern artist save Picasso."

No book, not even a long one like this, can hope to deal with all the "influences" which Yeats devoured and converted into poems. Obviously, Archibald writes, "some selectivity is necessary." And so chapter by chapter he analyzes the processes by which Yeats, with his "extraordinarily athletic intellect and capacious imagination, his eclecticism," created poems out of such recalcitrant materials as his "interaction with the Romantic and modernist traditions in literature; his relationships with his family, especially his father, and his friends, especially Maud Gonne and Lady Gregory; the burden of his Anglo-Irish heritage ... . ; his involvement with the occult, spiritism, and magic;.. . [and] his responses to the turbulence of contemporary Irish and European culture and politics."

Out of such "encounters," from such influences," as Archibald demonstrates, came the major poems. From the poet's immersion in Celtic lore, plus the combined influences of the pre-Raphaelites, the Symbolistes. and the fin-de-siecle Aesthetes, Yeats created the cycle of the early "Celtic Twilight" poems. Out of his conservative political views and his experience in public life (he was, of course, an Irish Senator, that self-styled "sixty-year-old smiling public man") came such famous works as the apocalyptic "Second Coming' and "Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen" as well as, one must add, the three less admirable "Marching Songs" in which Yeats flirted with a mid-1950s Irish version of Italian and German Fascism. From his life-long fascination with the occult and mysticism came not only A Vision but also, ultimately, the theory of history embodied in such poems as "Leda and the Swan," "The Second Coming," and the two Byzantium poems. And from his conception of life as tragic "We begin to live when we have conceived life as tragedy," Yeats wrote came that infinitely complex, resonant evocation of "tragic gaiety," "Lapus Lazuli."

The list could go on. Under one or another of the "influences" Archibald explicates all the major poems of this major poet. But penetrating and well informed as they are, all the analyses serve his single end: to illuminate Yeats's "imaginative growth and the many and various attempts to achieve a personal history , a realized self and a completed oeuvre." That is a huge, indeed almost impossible, job which Archibald carries off supremely well. Archibald's Yeats is not only a delight to read first-rate literary criticism almost always is —but it will also come to serve, I suggest, as a new benchmark in Yeats criticism.

A retired professor of English, Robert H. Rossserved as Reviews Editor of the MAGAZINE from 1976 to 1982.