‘I have met with you, bird, too late, or if not, too worm and early’: The Eternal Circling of Yeats and Joyce

Abstract

In Finnegans Wake, Joyce recasts, several times over, the central affirmation that he is credited with having made to William Butler Yeats during their much mythologised early encounter: “I have met you too late. You are too old.” These words, or a version of them, have framed studies of the Joyce-Yeats relationship which is thereafter construed as endlessly antagonistic, irretrievably oppositional. This essay will seek to challenge those readings which turn a complex relationship into Irish modernism. Critics have seen the encounter between Yeats and Joyce as an “auspicious meeting” as “an original moment, a primal scene of the modernism which both writers were subsequently to play a part in creating.” Their complex relationship can be seen against the ever widening backdrop of the Irish Literary Revival which took place in the tumultuous thirty-year period between 1891 and 1922 as well as in the context of the tension arising from the Romantic pull of the past and the inexorable draw of Modernism. In this context, Yeats and Joyce were seen as having almost entirely separate agendas, visions, and styles, and as irreconcilable antagonists, although both writers contributed, to underlining the differences and gaps rather than the connections between them. Joyce may well have met Yeats too late to deeply influence him but it might also be suggested that Yeats met Joyce too early to really be able to substantially help him.