“Fool … Look in Thy Heart and Write”: W. B. Yeats”s Return to English Renaissance Poetry in “The Circus Animals’ Desertion”

Abstract

SINCE ITS PUBLICATION in January 1939, the dominant critical interpretation ofW. B. Yeats's Circus Animals' Desertion has been tendentiously autobiographical. The story goes that this poem chronicles Yeats's struggle with his anguished perception of advancing poetic decrepitude. Witness the poem's very title and celebrated conclusion, in which the wretched speaker-Yeats-must he down where all the ladders start/In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.1 Denis Donoghue's statement can stand as synecdoche for the sad consensus: the poem is not a willing commitment to life, but moral accountancy, balancing profit and loss.2 The circus animals have deserted Yeats; that is, he is bereft of poetic inspiration.But this and similar biographical readings overlook the extreme irony contained in Yeats's choice of vehicle for his statement about the Muses' purported desertion-a skilled and beautiful poem, that is, performative refutation of that very poem's ghastly confession. To heighten the irony, the scholarly biographers have overlooked singular biographical fact about the poet, his intellectual heritage from the English Renaissance. Circus Animals' Desertion is profound reworking, both as to form and substantive content, of Sir Philip Sidney's first sonnet in Astrophil and Stella. The abiding cleverness ofthat sonnet resides in its permitting Sidney to rid himself of the encumbrance of earlier poetic tradition, even as he skillfully exploits it. Just so, I will argue, Yeats, too, looks in his heart and writes. But, significant as the Sidney link is, it hardly exhausts Yeats's ramified connections with Renaissance poetry, and Renaissance poetics. Y eats does not only use Sidney to explore his theme; he also gains secondary support from other English Renaissance writers such as Sir Thomas Wyatt and Sir John Davies; and, more significantly, from the Renaissance acceptance of the Delphic injunction, know thyself. Far from bewailing senescent impotence, Yeats is savoring the richness of tradition that has roots not only in his own poetic life, but also in revered poetic repository, one of formidable power. In exquisitely accomplished imitation of his Renaissance predecessors, in returning to his heart, Yeats demonstrates his poetic virtuosity even as he laments his lack, or loss, of poetic talent. This is the feint of magisterial involution.That Yeats had more than passing acquaintance with the material in question is hardly contentious. In Yeats and the English Renaissance, Wayne K. Chapman established the case for Yeats's abiding interest in and formative influence by English Renaissance poetry. Yeats was an expert on Shakespeare, to lesser extent on Spenser and the Elizabethans at very young age (emphasis added)/' In A General Introduction for My Work, Yeats ecstatically confessed that he owed his very soul to Shakespeare, to Spenser and to Blake . . . and to the English language (Chapman 7). His advice to the young Thomas MacDonagh is telling: read the great old masters of English, Spenser, Ben Jonson, Sir Thomas Brown[e], perhaps Chaucer,-until you have gotten our feeble modern English out of your head.4 Yeats was, needless to say, not naive poet; he anticipated our awareness of the frighteningly charged and endlessly recessive dialectic between actual and ideal Irelands and Englands. Still and all, Yeats could unblushingly harbor ambitions for Irish Renaissance that in no way diminished his English affiliations.Renaissance influences are temporally Janus-faced, for Yeats: thus there is modernist component. Though he sometimes ostentatiously professed to esteem the poetry of Pound, Eliot, and Sitwell above his own, Yeats consistently claimed never to fully consider himself member of their assemblage. Nevertheless, in revealing rejection of the modern, Yeats claimed that he was unable to write free verse in the manner of Turner, Lawrence, and Pound because of uneasiness about losing himself in anything but (sometimes altered) traditional stanza. …