Frank Kinahan, Yeats, Folklore and Occultism: Contexts of the Early Work and Thought (Boston, Mass.: Unwin Hyman, 1988) xxiii + 255 pp.

Abstract

“Our intellects at twenty contain all the truths we shall ever find”, Yeats remarked in 1921 when he was fifty-six. If this be the case, Frank Kinahan argues in Yeats, Folklore and Occultism, then those works that the poet wrote in his twenties (which lasted till 1895) “should by rights reveal themselves as turning upon precisely the same kinds of tensions that made the later work so rich, and thereby … as an integral part of a body of writing that was from start to finish of a single piece”. In other words, it is wrong to try to establish too marked a contrast between what might seem to be an early, dreamy Yeats and a later, brutally realistic poet finally reconciled to lying down in “the foul rag and bone shop of the heart”. The early poetry, it is implied, may not indeed be as “rich” as the later, but the basic theme remains the same. The case has often been made before, of course, that the early Yeats is a good deal more complex than was once supposed and far less escapist than his less careful readers have suggested. What is distinctive about Kinahan’s study is that it sets out to perform the task with more thoroughness and, as a comprehensive account of the early work, in somewhat conscious opposition to Tom Parkinson’s standard, and still admired, W. B. Yeats, Self Critic: A Study of his Early Verse, in which the author asserts that Yeats used his knowledge of Celtic and occult lore to express “his conviction that the natural world … is to be spurned and the eternal world … is to be embraced”. Not so at all, declares Kinahan, and backs up his thesis with example after ‘example from the original versions of the poems themselves and detailed notes for each chapter that are almost as long as the text itself.