The Lyric and the Philosophic in Yeats' Calvary

Abstract

THE LYRIC AND THE PHILOSOPHIC IN YEATS' CALVARY WHILE THE greatness of William Butler Yeats as a poet is seldom disputed today, his position as a playwright is more open to question. Despite enthusiastic acclaim of his dramatic technique by Archibald MacLeish and Eric Bentley, Yeats' plays are'little performed in this country outside of the universities. Actually, Yeats himself was well aware of certain qualities which he purposefully built into his plays and which he knew would diminish the chances of their success on the conventional, commercial stage. One such quality is, of course, their poetic diction and construction, although it would be unfair to imply that the connection between his poetry and his drama is that simple. For it is fairly obvious, in retrospect, that Yeats' immersion in the drama, beginning slightly before the turn of the century, was at first perhaps a symptom of his desire to alter his style and later a cause of the change toward a more colloquial diction in his poetry. This influence of dramatic technique on poetry has been well demonstrated by Thomas Parkinson in his study, W. B. Yeats, Self-Critic (1951). The difference between Yeats' earlier and later poems does not, however , lie merely in an improved technique; Yeats was the kind of writer who needed a philosophic system; and beginning in 1917 he gradually came into possession of one. The first fruit of that system was included in his Plays and Controversies (1923). Calvary, the last of "Four Plays for Dancers" in that volume, was probably written between The Only Jealousy of Emer (finished in 1918) and the preface to the plays (dated July, 1920). In a note to The Only Jealousy of Emer, Yeats described the kind of drama that he was writing: ". . . intended for some fifty people in a drawing room or a studio," it could "only fully succeed in a civilization very unlike ours." Ideally plays of this sort "should be written for some country where all classes share in a half-mythological, halfphilosophical folk-belief which the writer and his small audience lift into a new subtlety." Not only had Yeats long wished for such beliefs, but, he concluded, "I have now found all the mythology and philosophy I need."l What Yeats had found was published two years later in A Vision. 1. I do not mean to imply that the mythology which Yeats had found was totally responsible for the form of these plays. He had been influenced bY Gordon Craig and the Japanese No drama, to which he had been introduced by Ezra Pound. See Chapter XIV of Richard Ellman's biography, Yeats, The Man and the Masks (1948). 370 1960 Lnuc AND PmLosopmc IN YEATS' CALVARY 371 He had made the discovery, four days after his marriage in 1917, that his wife, the former Georgie Hyde-Lees, could act as a medium through automatic writing. From this source Yeats received a very complicated theory of history, personality, and the soul. The theory was based on a Platonic dualism, replete with what he called the Great Memory, a storehouse ·of archetypal images occasionally available to finite minds, if they are guided by appropriate symbols and rituals. We can therefore understand why he would "desire a mysterious art, . . . doing its work by suggestion, not by direct statement, a complexity of rhythm, colour, gesture, not space-pervading like intellect but a memory and a prophecy." What he was after in fact was "not a theatre, but the theatre's anti-self," a subjective rather than an objective art. In addition to providing him with an aesthetic, Yeats'. philosophy often determined the ideas which he embodied in his plays. As a result, Yeats was able to harmonize content and technique, as the dancer sways to the dance. The sad, dreamy poetry of his youth had this same harmony, of course, and it too aimed to "work by suggestion ." But by means of his direct line to the spirit world, Yeats gained a "mythology and philosophy" which gave to his later work the important qualities of precision and continuity, and made it more worldly , self-assured, and convincing than the earlier often was. In the following...