Passionate Reverie: W. B. Yeats's Tragic Correlative

Abstract

As a dramatic theoretician and a dramatist, Yeats has recently been given a good deal of attention. Bnt about the place and meaning of tragedy—and comedy7mdash;in the pattern of his aesthetic something remains to be said. While Yeats undoubtedly had a very good sense of humour, he recoiled from the comic spirit; thongh fearing it, he understood it very well. The threats in comedy were irony and parody, both of which he detected in Wilde and Beardsley, distorting and undercutting the integrity of their art. "I was in despair," he writes in the Autobiography, "at the new breath of comedy that had begun to wither the beauty that I loved, just when that beauty seemed to have united itself to mystery." And, though he responded enthusiastically to Cervantes and Rabelais, Synge and Villon, and cultivated an expert's interest in naughty ballads, it was gusto—another form of passion—which really attracted him, not the comic perceptions of life. The ecstatic moment was, after all, the highest achievement of literary art, and ecstasy was possible only in tragedy. But between the quiet dignity of Greek tragedy and the salty flavour of one of Synge's "reckless" comedies lay the whole spectrum of literary modes. Great combiner that he was, Yeats built into his vision of tragedy, and often into his poems, a tension (he once called it a "quarrel") between the desire to adapt comic gusto, vitality without strain, to the resonant ecstasy of tragedy, passionate and energetic with struggle. This, ultimately, became the dialectic balance between passion and reverie.