Abstract
This chapter shows the connection between Yeats’s writing and his dwelling place is still more intimate than the ones explored in the previous chapter. It suggests that the forms that Yeats frequently wrote in for the dozen-or-so years from 1919—grand, architecturally constructed octave stanzas—shape and influence the imagery in the poems themselves. Yeats started writing in these great forms at around the same time as he moved into a renovated medieval fortification in the rural west of Ireland, a fact that suggests how close the relationship between writing and dwelling can be. Like Andrew Lanyon’s imagined architectural structure that is both made of a metaphorical creative wind and inspires further creation, Yeats’s forms give rise to the images that fill the stanzas themselves.
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Notes
- 1.
Much of the information about the tower in this chapter comes from Mary Hanley and Liam Miller’s pamphlet, Thoor Ballylee: Home of William Butler Yeats (Dublin: The Dolmen Press, 1977).
- 2.
The way the cottage is remodelled is set out in Yeats’s own letters, including a letter to Ezra Pound dated 16 July 1919, available at http://pm.nlx.com [accessed 15 August 2018]. Further information comes from R. F. Foster, W. B. Yeats: A Life, II: The Arch-Poet, 1915–1939 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 131; Hanley and Miller, Thoor Ballylee, p. 20.
- 3.
Theodore Ziolkowski, The View from the Tower: Origins of an Antimodernist Image (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), pp. 53–54.
- 4.
Letter from W. B. Yeats to J. B. Yeats, 16 July 1919, available at http://pm.nlx.com [accessed on 15 August 2018].
- 5.
Yeats, ‘In Memory of Major Robert Gregory’, first published in 1918 and collected in The Wild Swans at Coole (1919). This poem is available in Collected Poems, edited and introduced by Augustine Martin (London: Vintage, 1992), p. 130. Subsequent references to Yeats’s poetry will be taken from this edition unless otherwise specified, with page references parenthesised in the text.
- 6.
Yeats, ‘A General Introduction to my Work’, in Later Essays: The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats, Vol. V, ed. by William H. O’Donnell (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1994), p. 213.
- 7.
Yeats, ‘A General Introduction to my Work’, p. 213. This was the personality flaw that Yeats identified as his worst. After a record of a conversation in a journal of 1909 he records disconsolately ‘Thought I had cured myself of this kind of boasting’ (W. B. Yeats, Memoirs: Autobiography and First Draft Journal, ed. by Denis Donoghue [Dublin: Macmillan, 1972], p. 210). The fact he believed that his stanza forms helped expunge ‘egotism and indiscretion’ from his work attributes a strong power to them.
- 8.
Yeats quoted in Foster, W. B. Yeats: A Life, II, p. 543.
- 9.
Yeats, Letters on Poetry from W. B. Yeats to Dorothy Wellesley, ed. by Kathleen Raine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1940), p 131. This is not the only time in which the use of verse form is expressed in terms of psychological necessity. In another essay he describes a mad woman he saw talking to herself in a slum before writing ‘I compel myself to accept those traditional metres that have developed with the language. Ezra Pound, Turner, Lawrence, wrote admirable free verse. I could not. I would lose myself, become joyless like those mad old women.’ (‘A General Introduction for My Work’, in W. B. Yeats, Later Essays, pp. 212–13).
- 10.
Yeats, Letters on Poetry from W. B. Yeats to Dorothy Wellesley, p. 24.
- 11.
Daniel Harris writes about the role of Coole Park in Yeats’s imagination in Yeats: Coole Park and Ballylee (Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 1974), pp. 51–86.
- 12.
Yeats, cited in A. Norman Jeffares, A New Commentary on the Poems of W. B. Yeats (London: Macmillan, 1984), p. 93.
- 13.
Yeats, Memoirs, quoted in Foster, W. B. Yeats: A Life, II, p. 438.
- 14.
William Blake, quoted in Jeffares, A New Commentary, p. 300.
- 15.
Yeats famously stated that poetry was made ‘of the quarrel with ourselves’; see ‘Per Amica Silentia Lunae’ (1917), collected in The Major Works, ed. by Edward Larrissy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 410–22 (p. 411).
- 16.
Yeats, The Variorum Edition of the Poems of W. B. Yeats, ed. by Peter Allt and Russell K. Alspach (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1957), p. 418.
- 17.
Yeats, Variorum, p. 524. The Variorum reveals that in another octave-stanza poem centring on an ancient house, ‘In Memory of Major Robert Gregory’, Yeats substituted ‘Beside a fire of turf in the ancient tower’ for ‘Beside a fire of turf in th’ ancient tower’ (p. 130) [my italics]. Whether the contraction is intended to look displeasingly awkward or pleasingly archaic (or both), its effect is to draw attention to the poetic form in which it is housed.
- 18.
Eleanor Cook, Against Coercion: Games Poets Play (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), p. 176.
- 19.
The importance to Yeats of a ‘wavering’ rhythm in poetry is set out in his 1900 essay ‘The Symbolism of Poetry’, in Essays and Introductions (London: Macmillan, 1961).
- 20.
Helen Vendler, Our Secret Discipline: Yeats and Lyric Form (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 69.
- 21.
See, for example, David Lloyd, ‘The Poetics of Politics: Yeats and the Founding of the State’, Qui Parle, 3 (fall 1989), 76–114; Seamus Deane, ‘Yeats and the Idea of Revolution’, in Yeats’s Political Identities, ed. by Jonathan Allison (Ann Arbor: Michigan University Press, 1996), pp. 133–44. For a counter-opinion, see Peter McDonald’s ‘Yeats’s Poetic Structures’, in Serious Poetry: Form and Authority from Yeats to Hill (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002), pp. 138–66.
- 22.
This trope is evident in Yeats’s poetry from 1907 onwards, the year she took him on a trip to northern Italy, as R. F. Foster observes in ‘Yeats and the Death of Lady Gregory’, Irish University Review, 34 (spring–summer, 2004), 109–21.
- 23.
Vendler, Our Secret Discipline, p. 263.
- 24.
Caroline Walsh, The Homes of Irish Writers (Dublin: Dolmen Press, 1977), p. 174.
- 25.
Foster, W. B. Yeats, A Life, II, p. 447; B. L. Reid, ‘The House of Yeats’, The Hudson Review, 18 (autumn, 1965), 331–50 (p. 346).
- 26.
Thomas Hardy, ‘During Wind and Rain’, in Selected Poems, ed. by Harry Thomas (London: Penguin, 1993), p. 122.
- 27.
Karl Shapiro and Robert Beum, A Prosody Handbook (New York: Harper and Row Publishers, 1965); Jack Elliott Myers and Don C. Wukasch, Dictionary of Poetic Terms (Denton: University of North Texas Press, 2003), s.v. ‘Sestet’.
- 28.
Reid, ‘The House of Yeats’, p. 346.
- 29.
Seamus Heaney, The Place of Writing (Atlanta: Scholar’s Press, 1989), p. 29.
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Hanna, A. (2020). Yeats’s Stanzas, Yeats’s Rooms. In: Griffiths, J., Hanna, A. (eds) Architectural Space and the Imagination. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-36067-2_11
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