‘Escaped from Isolating Method’: Coleridge as Sage in Yeats’s 1930 Diary

Abstract

In an unpublished letter of 11 November 1929, Coleridge informed his friend Oliver St John Gogarty that he was ‘just setting out on a study of Coleridge verse and prose’. He was also just off to Rapallo to spend much of the year with Ezra Pound, rewriting A Vision. Yeats’s most intense reading of Coleridge was recorded in a diary begun there in 1930.1 Extracts from this were published posthumously fourteen years later as Pages from a Diary Written in Nineteen Hundred and Thirteen, with Giraldus’s portrait by Dulac on the frontispiece to cement its connection with A Vision. It is clear from reading the manuscript diary that while Yeats was planning to publish some parts of it, others, being intensely personal (such as his discussions with his wife’s automatic writing and speech control Dionertes, and comparison of his children’s characters), were left out of the published text by Mrs Yeats as editor. Some entries in the original are barely grammatical memos to himself, while others contain the elaborate sentence structures and rhetorical questions which characterise the best of his late prose, and were being corrected for publication. These latter passages contain extensive reference to Coleridge’s politics and philosophy, and on the whole have been very faithfully transcribed by Mrs Yeats.