Yeats, “Leda,” and the Aesthetics of To-Morrow : “The Immortality of the Soul”

Abstract

Yeats, “Leda,” and the Aesthetics of To-Morrow: “The Immortality of the Soul” Bernard McKenna In August 1924, a small literary magazine, To-Morrow, went on sale in Dublin. As its title implies, the magazine’s editors, Francis Stuart and Cecil Salkeld, were buoyed with optimism.1 They hoped for a new cultural movement in the arts that would parallel its development and, in turn, influence the newly founded Irish Free State. The young editors felt that “mainstream Irish literature was narrow and that no outlets were available for young writers to publish innovative or experimental work; nor was there a forum for the discussion of developments in poetry, painting, and philosophy.”2 In early 1924, Stuart and his friends had decided to launch To-Morrow: They approached such well-known writers as Lennox Robinson and Liam O’Flaherty for stories, plus their friends Joseph Campbell and F. R. Higgins, who contributed poems, and O’Flaherty’s mistress, Margaret Barrington, who offered a short story.3 After some trouble with a Dublin printer over Robinson’s story, the group had the journal printed in Manchester. Its first issue was well received, but after its second issue in September 1924, political pressures prevented the magazine from appearing again. This was not uncommon; as David Miller and Richard Price note, “Ireland in the 1920s and 30s when seen through the lens of the literary magazine is a country where immense . . . creative forces are faced and faced off by a sensitive and censoring emergent state.”4 The editors of To-Morrow did not shrink from confronting the sensitivities of the new nation. Indeed, [End Page 16] they hoped to confront, expose, and change the more restrictive of those sensibilities, while advancing a program for a new cultural movement. To-Morrow’s editors specifically hoped to start a cultural revolution with Ireland as a base that could stand against both restrictive versions of spirituality—a rigid Catholicism, and such contemporary, secular artistic movements as Cubism, which Stuart and Salkeld viewed as spiritually destructive. The journal’s historical context in part explains the editors’ sense of mission. The early days of the Free State were also infused with optimism. Ireland had its own seat in the League of Nations, with the right to an “independent policy line.”5 In addition, the Irish Civil War had ended, and to celebrate the peaceful new nation, the Free State government relaunched the “Tailteann Festival,” designed to commemorate Irish culture, atheltics, and artisanship. However, the new nation seemed less focused on defining herself than on “self-definition against Britain,” on the institutionalization of a rigorous religious conservatism, and on the maintenance of a ruthlessly self-reliant economic policy.6 To-Morrow expressed the optimism of the new nation and stood against a self definition based in restrictive conceptualizations of religious, political, and material ideologies. 7 William Butler Yeats, as a Free State senator, also tried to curb the restrictive nature of the new nation. As a recent Nobel laureate, he took a prominent role in literary and cultural affairs, actively encouraging the founders of To-Morrow by contributing, under Stuart’s and Salkeld’s names, an editorial and offering “Leda and the Swan” for publication in the new “little magazine.” On June 21, 1924,Yeats wrote “in high spirits” to Olivia Shakespear, foreseeing “an admirable row.” Yeats “heard that a group of Dublin poets . . .were about to publish a review.”8 He suggested they found themselves “on the doctrine of the immortality of the soul”: [End Page 17] They had adopted my suggestion and were suppressed by the printers for blasphemy. I got a bottle of Sparkling Moselle, which I hope youthful ignorance mistook for champagne, and we swore alliance. . . . I saw a proof sheet marked by the printer. . . . My dream is a wild paper of the young which will make enemies everywhere and suffer suppression, I hope a number of times, with the logical assertion, with all fitting deductions, of the immortality of the soul.9 Yeats’s letter reveals both that the editors of To-Morrow expected to encounter hostility from the religious hegemony they hoped to challenge, and that Yeats had faith in the magazine’s...