Unity of Archetype, Myth, and Religious Imagery in the Work of Yeats

Abstract

Yeats's use of symbolic imagery and of mythic materials from numerous sources and cultures is a subject that has been given considerable attention, as most students of modern literature know. However, the surprising depth and breadth of the poet's knowledge of such materials and his genuine understanding of the meaningful interrelationships between analogous motifs from various matrices have not been so generally recognized. Despite the traditional view that he was a somewhat desultory reader, Yeats was, even early in his career, quite well informed as a comparative mythologist. Throughout his life, he not only continued to use elements of Celtic legend, Irish folklore, classical mythology, Neo-Platonic tradition, Hinduism, Buddhism, Christianity, and the vast body of materials studied by Sir James George Frazer, but he also, like Frazer and more recent authorities on world mythology, increasingly perceived and found significance in parallel patterns of symbol, story, and ritual from these widely disparate sources. In fact, he conceptualized and embodied in his creative works a monomyth well before that term for such a synthesis of mythic materials was coined by Joseph Campbell. In a rather frequently quoted passage, Yeats said: I have often had the fancy that there is some myth for every man, which, if we but knew it, would us understand all he did and thought. In light of this quotation, it is something of an anomaly that the welter of scholarship and criticism on Yeats's work since his death has done relatively little in searching for and delineating his one myth, which when perceived would help make us understand all he did and thought. The two scholars who have dwelt at greatest length upon Yeats's synthesis of mythic materials are F. A. C. Wilson and Morton Irving Seiden. Wilson, however, neglects Yeats's knowledge and use of the tremendous range