The Divisions of Yeats Studies

Abstract

The Divisions of Yeats Studies Daniel T. O’Hara (bio) Pierce, David. W.B. Yeats: Critical Assessments. 4 Vols. Helm Information, 2000. xxx + 678 pp.; viii + 587 pp.; viii + 554 pp.; viii + 856 pp. With Index to Writers and Assessments. $495.00. The Helm Information Critical Assessments of Writers in English, under the general editorship of Graham Clarke, is an invaluable aid to scholarship. For writers such as Henry James and George Eliot, the Bronte Sisters and D.H. Lawrence (just four of the eighteen sets already published, with nine more announced as forthcoming), this series generously makes available truly representative samples of contemporaneous reviews of a writer’s major works, as well as a wide range of general assessments and critical views up to the present moment. Today’s [End Page 511] scholars can discover in these finely edited, exquisitely handsome volumes, not only the histories of critical debates for their chosen writers, but they can also recognize the recurrent features of the writers’ oeuvres that have characteristically defined the object of study. I myself—selection entry number “305” in Volume 4—have found that what I think of as the divisions of Yeats studies have appeared and re-appeared insistently from the earliest reviews and commentaries right up to the latest studies. Such remarkable continuity makes one think that, despite their differences, all the generations of critics are addressing the same realities. The primary division concerns the scholarly conflict about the state of the corpus. Next, there is the division in the field occasioned by the critical discussions about the status of Yeats’s occult system of belief. These divisions between matters of textual analysis (and construal) and critical judgments on the nature and value of Yeats’s religious worldview lead rather naturally to yet another divisive issue, the more speculative or theoretical question of Yeats’s identity—as a person, as a writer, and as a citizen influential in the formation of modern Ireland. Yeats, as we know, was a constant reviser of his texts throughout his career. When he collected work in book-form not only did he usually revise the individual texts therein many times over, but also he would create ever-new arrangements for them that would vary from the first sometimes to all later editions. The first appearance of a poem, and the volume in which it was initially collected, would equally become material for subsequent acts of imaginative creation of increasingly powerful and also chronologically distorting symbolic and mythic patterns. For textual scholars and literary biographers or historians, the question of the “best” version of a poem or a volume is not necessarily answered by determining, when possible, Yeats’s so-called “final intention.” The question is, quite simply: “best” for what and whose purposes? Richard J. Finnegan (see entry 334) and Warwick Gould (see entry 342) are the most recent scholars to debate the comparative merits of symbolic pattern and simple chronology as the principle of judgment for arranging Yeats’s corpus. What complicates their debate, however, is that before his death in January 1939, Yeats expressed a double intention for his collected works. On the one hand, the so-called edition deluxe or “Dublin” edition from Scribner’s, which was never published as such, was to be chronological with respect to the sequence of his published volumes, even as the internal pattern of the volumes was largely to be maintained. Narrative and dramatic poems were to be interspersed among the lyric volumes throughout the projected “Collected Poems” in this edition. On the other hand, the familiar Collected Poems from Macmillan (reprinted many times since 1933, with the addition of the final poems in 1954), divides the lyric from the dramatic and narrative poetry, consigning the latter to the back of the book. Gould argues for the former, chronological arrangement, Finneran for the latter. Finneran, as the general editor of the new Collected Works of W.B. Yeats from Scribner’s, has won the debate, for now, and has published, not without some controversy over his re-arrangements of the final poems, what is billed as the definitive editon of The Poems, with many uncollected poems supplementing, also at the back...