Making the Void Fruitful

Front matter

PATRICK J. KEANE

Yeats as Spiritual Seeker and Petrarchan Lover

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Part One: W. B. Yeats as Spiritual Seeker General Prologue: The Thinking of the Body 1

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Introduction: Bodily Decrepitude and the Imagination Hermeticism, Theosophy, Gnosticism The Seeker

The Byzantium Poems; Apocalypse in ‘The Secret Rose’ and ‘The Second Coming’

Gnosis and Self-Redemption Sex, Philosophy, and the Occult Mountain Visions and Other Last Things

Preface to Part Two

Maud Gonne, and Yeats as Petrarchan Lover The Poems: A Sampling

Maud as Helen: The Green Helmet Poems Responsibilities and The Wild Swans at Coole ʻA Bronze Head’ and Beyond

Thought Distracted: ‘Man and the Echo; ‘Politics, and Conclusion

Eulogy: Harold Bloom (1930-2019)

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Select Bibliography 231 Index 241 About the Cover 253

Abbreviations

References to Yeats’s work are abbreviated and parenthetically inserted.

To avoid the clutter of citing page numbers for poems, all are referenced by title. However, to enable readers to date the versions quoted, the list in the Index of poems includes the page numbers in The Variorum Edition of the Poems of W. B. Yeats, ed. Peter Allt and Russell K. Alspach New York: Macmillan, 1957. For the convenience of most readers, I’ve cited the one-volume Allan Wade Letters rather than the definitive but less accessible multi-volume Oxford edition. In all quotes the italics are mine, unless otherwise stated.

Autobiographies. London: Macmillan, 1955.

Essays and Introductions. London and New York: Macmillan, 1961. Explorations. New York: Macmillan, 1963.

The Gonne-Yeats Letters 1893-1938: Always Your Friend, ed. Anna MacBride White and A. Norman Jeffares. London: Norton, 1992.

The Letters of W. B. Yeats, ed. A. Wade. New York: Macmillan, 1955.

Letters on Poetry from W. B. Yeats to Dorothy Wellesley, intro. Kathleen Raine. New York and London: Oxford UP, 1964.

W. B. Yeats and T. Sturge Moore: Their Correspondence, 1901-1937, ed. Ursula Bridge. New York: Oxford UP, 1953.

Memoirs, ed. Denis Donoghue. New York: Macmillan, 1972. Mythologies. London and New York: Macmillan, 1959.

The Variorum Edition of the Poems of W. B. Yeats, ed. Peter Allt and Russell K. Alspach New York: Macmillan, 1957.

(1925) A Vision. London: T. Werner Laurie, 1925 A Vision (1937 edition). London: Macmillan, 1962.

Acknowledgments

The first debt is to the legion of dedicated critics and scholars who have illuminated virtually every aspect of Yeats’s life, thought, and poetry. I have more personal debts to friends: Gordon Boudreau, Barron Boyd, Warren and Susan Cheesman, John Cooke, Elizabeth Costello, Kate Costello-Sullivan, Dan Dowd, Helen Edelman, Laura Faul, Julie Grossman, Maureen Hanratty, Paul Johnston, David Lloyd, Roger Lund, Alicia Mathias, Don and Judy McCormack, Tracie Meisel, Julie Olin- Ammentorp, Tom Parker, John Rigney, Ann Ryan, Jonathan Schonsheck, Linda Schwartzberg, Bruce Shefrin, and Eleanor Souls.

The list of teachers and scholars who encouraged me along the way begins with Elizabeth Sewell, a visiting scholar from Oxford who praised an undergraduate essay on Keats I’d written at Fordham. W. Jackson Bate and John Unterecker both took the time to respond at length to letters and poems I inflicted on them back when I was in the army. At NYU, I found champions in Mack Rosenthal, David Erdman, and Conor Cruise O’Brien (then visiting Schweitzer Professor) who evolved from helpers to friends. Later, my work was amicably supported by transatlantic Romanticists Richard Gravil and Richard A. Brantley.

At the Yeats International Summer School, first as student, then as lecturer, I was encouraged by directors from T. R. Henn to John Kelly to Gus Martin (who once broke up a fist fight I was about to have with John Montague) to Ron Schuchard. During those years I was also helped by Northrop Frye, Erich Heller, M. H. Abrams, Richard Ellmann, and George Mills Harper. At Skidmore, I benefited from the friendship of Tom Lewis and the constant support of Bob Boyers, founder-editor of Salmagundi. Later friends and mentors have included three major critics, Harold Bloom (to whom the book is dedicated), Denis Donoghue, and Helen Vendler. My most recent debts are multiple. First, to Canadian novelist and critic Douglas Glover, who invited me to contribute to his xii Making the Void Fruitful splendid online magazine, Numéro Cinc, where some ideas presented here were test-run. Second and third, to Joe Hassett and Jay Rogoff, who kindly read portions of the manuscript; fourth to Warwick Gould, who corrected my initial confusion of the two figures who share the name Valentinus. Fifth, I’d like to thank the OBP team: Alison Gray, Anna Gatti, Melissa Purkiss and Alessandra Tosi. Sixth and finally, to Sandra Clarke, my cherished companion during the writing of this book and the ongoing COVID crisis.

This Muse-shadowed volume, dedicated to Harold Bloom, would have been, were it not for the discourtesy of death, dedicated to Helen Vendler, who read one entire version of the manuscript with her usual critical acumen and unrivaled love and knowledge of lyric poetry. Or to more intimate Muses in my life. I started to carry out the latter plan, a dedication prefaced by Yeats’s ‘Now must I these three praise—/ Three women that have wrought/ What joy is in my days,’ only to realize that there were, inconveniently, four women.

But there is more than one way to be smitten. Along with many others of my generation, I have had a distant but cherished Muse for more than half a century: a woman whose face and eyes and incomparable voice I have long loved, and whose philosophy of life, political sanity, delight in books, sense of humor, and courageous equanimity in confronting a cruel disease, I have come to admire. So here’s looking at you, Linda Ronstadt.