Abstract
This essay explores the influence of W. B. Yeats on the later fiction of Philip Roth. Tracing Roth's engagement with Yeats from Portnoy's Complaint (1969) right up to Nemesis (2010), I argue that Roth has throughout his career been fascinated with Yeats's various aspirations to escape into aesthetic disinterest. I contend that Yeats's absorption of this struggle between life and art into a poetics of bodily agony in his later poems has a decisive influence on Roth. Yeats not only helps to shape the focus of powerful novellas such as The Dying Animal (2001) but also forms a crucial touchstone for the reckless abandon and sublime style of Roth's major novel Sabbath's Theater (1995). Roth's attentive reading of Yeats's later poems might alert us to trace wider investments in modernist epistemological tensions across Roth's fiction.
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