‘I am a Victorian!’: W. B. Yeats, Modern Manliness and the Problems of Work

Abstract

Abstract Examining his writings up to 1909, this article argues that W. B. Yeats was drawn to a specifically modern notion of masculinity based on a material, athletic ideal of the male body, at odds with the more transcendent principles he otherwise professed and associated with the Renaissance. Moreover, he understood this corporeal archetype of manliness to be fashioned through everyday activities, such as work and sport, which are shown to shape his sense of gender in addition to more-oft examined aspects of his life, such as his occultism or relations with women. As a sedentary writer, however, Yeats struggled to embody the model of active Victorian manliness he idealized. Identifying such anxieties in his early poems and stories, this article traces Yeats’s efforts to reconceptualize his wearisome poetic toil as healthy, productive labour: namely, by assuming Thomas Carlyle’s notion of the writer as ascetic prophet, who cuts himself free from the propagandist verbiage of the mob to deliver a message that is physically potent in its radical sincerity. Rather than representing Yeats as a disembodied, heroic voice, speaking out of a patriarchal, Romantic tradition, this article depicts him as an anxiously masculine, late-Victorian man of letters, struggling with the expectations his own era placed upon the male body.