Abstract
If the connection from Kleist and Hoffmann to Frost could be traced through idealist and dark romantic leads, Yeats’s part in the same legacy, and specifically the English variety, takes shape in relation to two main influences: William Blake and the Pre-Raphaelite movement of the mid-nineteenth century. In the following, I will first tease out the significance of these influences for Yeats and then go on to read the Modernist streaks of his 1916 poem ‘The Magi’, the analysis of which occupies this chapter.
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Notes
W. B. Yeats (1903a) ‘William Blake and His Illustrations to The Divine Comedy’ in Ideas of Good and Evil (London: A. H. Bullen).
M. L. Rosenthal (1978) Sailing into the Unknown: Yeats, Pound, and Eliot (New York, NY: Oxford University Press) p. 27.
Elizabeth Bergmann Loizeaux (2003) Yeats and the Visual Arts (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press) p. 6.
Elizabeth Bergmann Loizeaux (2003) p. 32. As Gordon Teskey has sug-gested, historically the objective of the theory of the symbol was to merge separate realms of human experience — the spiritual, rational, and natural — into one another so that they would be materially present in poetry, instead of having art talk about itself in allegories, in things that it was not: ‘The collapsing of numinous contexts into numinous works [in the form of allegories] reached its terminus, when the process reversed itself, with the advent of the theory of the symbol. As the movement of collapse continued inside the work it reached the point where the mystery of the world appeared to be concentrated in a single object, in a bird, a blue flower, a river, a mountain, a star. No effectual distinction was made between this object and its representation, between existence in the work and in the world.’ Gordon Teskey (1996) Allegory and Violence (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press) p. 149.
W. B. Yeats (1903b) ‘Symbolism in Painting’ in Ideas of Good and Evil (London: A. H. Bullen).
W. B. Yeats (1903c) ‘The Symbolism of Poetry’ in Ideas of Good and Evil (London: A. H. Bullen)
C. K. Stead (1964) The New Poetic: Yeats to Eliot (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press) p. 31.
First printed in W. B. Yeats (1916) Responsibilities and Other Poems (London: Macmillan).
W. B. Yeats (1914) ‘The Adoration of the Magi’ in The Tables of the Law & The Adoration of the Magi (Stratford-upon-Avon: The Shakespeare Head Press).
Michael Wood (2010) Yeats and Violence (Oxford and New York, NY: Oxford University Press) p. 12.
On the function of Yeats’s symbol, in describing the ‘natural images’ found in ‘Coole Park and Ballylee, 1931’ (1933), Paul de Man says that in the poem ‘the symbolic action springs naturally from a perceived scene, the starting point for the imagination as it grows from natural to historical and mythical vision’. The device, in other words, brings together all these different realms of human experience. Paul de Man (1984b) ‘Symbolic Landscape in Wordsworth and Yeats’ in The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York, NY: Columbia University Press) p. 137.
The thought echoes David Rudrum’s claim that ‘[t]he sense of an ending in Yeats’s apocalypse does not involve closure, but the opening up of a new cycle’ (pp. 63–4). He continues: ‘Whereas traditional apocalypse involved either tragedy (destruction and misery) or comedy (the happy ending of salvation), Yeats’s cyclical apocalypse seems to reject both, turning our sense of an ending into a sense of a new beginning’ (p. 64). However, when viewed from the aspect of ekphrasis as impossible figuration, the prospect of a new beginning may not always appear as positive and welcome but can be experienced with anxiety, as the ever-renewed outbreak of a recurring fear. David Rudrum (2008) ‘Slouching towards Bethlehem: Yeats, Eliot, and the Modernist Apocalypse’ in Ecstasy and Understanding: Religious Awareness in English Poetry from the Late Victorian to the Modern Period, ed. Adrian Grafe (London and New York, NY: Continuum) pp. 58–70.
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© 2013 Jarkko Toikkanen
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Toikkanen, J. (2013). W. B. Yeats: ‘The Magi’. In: The Intermedial Experience of Horror. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137299093_7
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