Yeats's Mask E-Book

Warwick Gould (Editor)

• Herausgeber: Open Book Publishers
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

Yeats’s Mask, Yeats Annual No. 19 is a special issue in this renowned research-level series. Fashionable in the age of Wilde, the Mask changes shape until it emerges as Mask in the system of A Vision. Chronologically tracing the concept through Yeats’s plays and those poems written as ‘texts for exposition’ of his occult thought which flowers in A Vision itself (1925 and 1937), the volume also spotlights ‘The Mask before The Mask’ numerous plays including Cathleen Ni-Houlihan, The King’s Threshold, Calvary, The Words upon the Window-pane, A Full Moon in March and The Death of Cuchulain. There are excurses into studies of Yeats’s friendship with the Oxford don and cleric, William Force Stead, his radio broadcasts, the Chinese contexts for his writing of ‘Lapis Lazuli’. His self-renewal after The Oxford Book of Modern Verse, and the key occult epistolary exchange ‘Leo Africanus’, edited from MSS by Steve L. Adams and George Mills Harper, is republished from the elusive Yeats Annual No. 1 (1982). The essays are by David Bradshaw, Michael Cade-Stewart, Aisling Carlin, Warwick Gould, Margaret Mills Harper, Pierre Longuenesse, Jerusha McCormack, Neil Mann, Emilie Morin, Elizabeth Müller and Alexandra Poulain, with shorter notes by Philip Bishop and Colin Smythe considering Yeats’s quatrain upon remaking himself and the pirate editions of The Land of Heart’s Desire. Ten reviews focus on various volumes of the Cornell Yeats MSS Series, his correspondence with George Yeats, and numerous critical studies. Yeats Annual is published by Open Book Publishers in association with the Institute of English Studies, University of London.

Leseprobe

In the same series

YEATS ANNUALS Nos. 1, 2 Edited by Richard J. Finneran

YEATS ANNUALS Nos. 3–8, 10–11, 13 Edited by Warwick Gould

YEATS AND WOMEN YEATS ANNUAL No. 9: A Special NumberEdited by Deirdre Toomey

THAT ACCUSING EYE YEATS AND HIS IRISH READERS YEATS ANNUAL No. 12: A Special Number Edited by Warwick Gould and Edna Longley

YEATS AND THE NINETIES YEATS ANNUAL No. 14: A Special NumberEdited by Warwick Gould

YEATS’S COLLABORATIONSYEATS ANNUAL No. 15: A Special NumberEdited by Wayne K. Chapman and Warwick Gould

POEMS AND CONTEXTS YEATS ANNUAL No. 16: A Special Number Edited by Warwick Gould

INFLUENCE AND CONFLUENCEYEATS ANNUAL No. 17: A Special Number Edited by Warwick Gould

THE LIVING STREAM YEATS ANNUAL No. 18: A Special IssueEssays in Memory of A. Norman JeffaresEdited by Warwick Gould

YEATS ANNUAL No. 19

W. B. Yeats in the New College, Oxford, rooms of G. K. Chettur, who, from 1918–21 was a Commoner of the College (1918–21). The photograph was taken by Chettur some time after Yeats had addressed the Oxford Majlis on 23 November 1919.

YEATS’S MASK

YEATS ANNUAL No. 19

A Special Issue

Edited by

Margaret Mills Harper and Warwick Gould

in association with the Institute of English Studies

School of Advanced Study, University of London

http://www.openbookpublishers.com

© 2013 Margaret Harper Mills and Warwick Gould, unless otherwise stated.

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All attributions in relation to any part of this work should include the following information:

Mills Harper, Margaret and Gould, Warwick (eds.), Yeats’s Mask: Yeats Annual No. 19, Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2013. http://dx.doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0038

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ISBN Paperback: 978-1-78374-017-8

ISBN Hardback: 978-1-78374-018-5

ISBN Digital (PDF): 978-1-78374-019-2

ISBN Digital ebook (epub version): 978-1-78374-020-8

ISBN Digital ebook (mobi version): 978-1-78374-021-5

DOI: 10.11647/OBP.0038

Cover image taken from the cover design of Wheels and Butterflies (London: Macmillan, 1934). Artist unknown.

All paper used by Open Book Publishers is SFI (Sustainable Forestry Initiative), and PEFC (Programme for the Endorsement of Forest Certification Schemes) Certified. Printed in the United Kingdom and United States by Lightning Source for Open Book Publishers

The bravest from the Gods but ask:

A house, a sword, a ship, a mask.1

1 From Wheels and Butterflies, 157: see below, 369–78.

Contents

List of Illustrations

Abbreviations

Editorial Board

Notes on the Contributors

Editors’ Introduction

Acknowledgements and Editorial Information

YEATS’S MASK

The Mask before The Mask

WARWICK GOULD

The King’s Threshold, Calvary, The Death of Cuchulain:

Yeats’s Passion Plays

ALEXANDRA POULAIN

To ‘make others see my dream as I had seen it’:

Yeats’s Aesthetics in Cathleen ni Houlihan

AISLING CARLIN

‘Oxford Poets’: Yeats, T. S. Eliot and William Force Stead

DAVID BRADSHAW

Playing with Voices and with Doubles in Two of Yeats’s Plays:

The Words upon the Window-pane and A Full Moon in March

PIERRE LONGUENESSE

The Mask of Derision in Yeats’s Prologue to A Vision (1937)

ELIZABETH MÜLLER

A Vision and Yeats’s Late Masks

MARGARET MILLS HARPER

The Mask of A Vision

NEIL MANN

‘I beg your pardon?’: W. B. Yeats, Audibility and

Sound Transmission

EMILIE MORIN

Mask and Robe: Yeats’s Oxford Book of Modern Verse (1936)

and New Poems (1938)

MICHAEL CADE-STEWART

The Poem on the Mountain: A Chinese Reading

of Yeats’s ‘Lapis Lazuli’

JERUSHA McCORMACK

The Manuscript of ‘Leo Africanus’, edited by

STEVE L. ADAMS and GEORGE MILLS HARPER

Reprinted from Yeats Annual 1

SHORTER NOTES

‘My Dear Miss Brachvogel...’ A Ms Version of a Yeats Quatrain

PHILIP R. BISHOP

TheLandOfHeart’sDesire: Some Hitherto Unrecorded

Printings – ‘Work in Progress’

COLIN SMYTHE

Wheels and Butterflies: Title, Structure, Cover Design

WARWICK GOULD

REVIEWS

W. B. Yeats and Lady Gregory, Where there is Nothing

and The Unicorn from the Stars: Manuscript Materials,

ed. Wim Van Mierlo

RICHARD ALLEN CAVE

The King’s Threshold: Manuscript Materials, edited by Declan Kiely

RICHARD ALLEN CAVE

W. B. Yeats, At The Hawk’s Well and The Cat and the Moon:

Manuscript Materials, ed. Andrew Parkin

RICHARD ALLEN CAVE

Karen E. Brown, The Yeats Circle, Verbal and Visual Relations

in Ireland, 1880–1939

TOM WALKER

W. B. Yeats and George Yeats, The Letters ed. Ann Saddlemyer;

W. B. Yeats’s ‘A Vision’: Explications and Contexts, ed. Neil Mann,

Matthew Gibson and Claire Nally

LAUREN ARRINGTON

Sean Pryor, W. B. Yeats, Ezra Pound and the Poetry of Paradise

STODDARD MARTIN

Writings on Literature and Art: G. W. Russell – A.E., edited

and with an Introduction by Peter Kuch

NICHOLAS ALLEN

Joseph M. Hassett, W. B. Yeats and the Muses

MICHAEL CADE-STEWART

Michael McAteer, Yeats and European Drama

TARA STUBBS

R. F. Foster, Words Alone: Yeats and his Inheritances

GERALDINE HIGGINS

PUBLICATIONS RECEIVED

ix

List of Illustrations

Cover Image: Taken from the cover design of Wheels and Butterflies (London: Macmillan, 1934), artist unknown. See pp. 369–78. Image in the public domain.

Frontispiece: W. B. Yeats in the New College, Oxford, rooms of G. K. Chettur, late 1919 or early 1920. Photograph by G. K. Chettur, and reproduced from his The Last Enchantment: Recollections of Oxford (Mangalore: The B. M. Bookshop, 1934, facing p. 40). Image in the public domain.

Plates

1.

Plaster cast of mask of W. B. Yeats by Kathleen Scott (née Bruce, later Lady Kennet), 1907. 17 1/2 in. (445 mm) high. Photograph courtesy and © The National Portrait Gallery, London. All rights reserved.

20

2.

The ‘Palatium Arcanorum’, frontispiece of Christian Knorr von Rosenroth’s Kabbala Denudata seu Doctrina Hebræorum transcendentalis et metaphysica atque theological etc., 1677. Photograph courtesy and © The British Library. All rights reserved.

42

3 a-b.

Yeats at the Microphone, very probably March 1937. Photographs of unknown authorship, courtesy Colin Smythe. Images in the public domain.

215

4.

Yeats’s Lapis Lazuli mountain (given to him by Harry Clifton, and the inspiration of the poem ‘Lapis Lazuli’), front view. Photograph courtesy and © of the National Library of Ireland. All rights reserved.

260

5.

Mi Fu Honouring a Rock. Photograph courtesy and © of the Shanghai Museum. All rights reserved.

270

6.

Detail from “Ting Qin Tu”: Listening to the Qin, attributed to the Emperor Song Huizong (11th Century). Image in the public domain. See http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Songhuizong8.jpg

274

7.

Writing on a rock-face in Huangshan, Anhui Province. Photograph © H. K. Tang, CC BY-NC-ND license. See: http://www.flickr.com/photos/ehktang/4066986112/

275

8.

Back side of Yeats’s Lapis Lazuli mountain, with poem circled. Photograph courtesy and © of the National Library of Ireland. All rights reserved.

277

9.

First page of Lily Yeats’s letter to her American friend, Clara Brachvogel. Image in the public domain.

341

10.

Photostat copy by Colin Smythe of inscribed front free endpaper of Lady Gregory’s lost bookplate copy of Yeats’s Poems, 1899–1905. Image in the public domain.

344

11.

W. B. Yeats’s poem as inscribed in the Mosher Press edition of The Land of Heart’s Desire (1908). Image in the public domain.

344

12.

Yeats’s inscription in The King’s Threshold – A Play in Verse (New York: Printed for Private Circulation [John Quinn], 1904). Courtesy Yeats Estate and Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. Image in the public domain.

345

13.

Top page of John Quinn’s set of the Cuala proofs of Twenty-One Poems written by Lionel Johnson: Selected by William Butler Yeats (1904), inscribed by Yeats and his two sisters. Lily Yeats’s comment is ‘Not to be pirated, Oct 27th. 1904.’ Photograph courtesy and © private collector, all rights reserved.

349

14 a-f.

Images of various states and editions of In the Land of Heart’s Desire [sic] published by the Thomas Y. Crowell Company of New York, c.1905 and later. Portrait by John Butler Yeats, remaining artwork of unknown authorship. Images in the public domain.

350-53

15 a-b.

Images of The Land of Heart’s Desire [?1904]. Images in the public domain.

355

16 a-b.

Images of The Land of Heart’s Desire published by the Walter H. Baker Company of Boston, 1919. Artwork of unknown authorship. Images in the public domain.

356

17 a-e.

Images of various states and editions of The Land of Heart’s Desire published by Dodd, Mead, New York, c.1909. Artwork of unknown authorship. Images in the public domain.

360-61

18 a-f.

Images of various states and editions of The Land of Heart’s Desire published by the Little Leather Library, New York, 1919 and later. Artwork of unknown authorship. Images in the public domain.

361-63

19 a-d.

Images of various states and editions of The Land of Heart’s Desire [sic] published by the Shrewesbury Publishing Company, Chicago, after 1925. Images in the public domain.

365

20 a-d.

Images of various states and editions of In the Land of Heart’s Desire [sic] published by the Haldeman-Julius Company as their Pockett and Little Blue Books Series, Girard, Kansas and Portland, Oregon, 1923 and after. Images in the public domain.

367-68

21-23.

The bronzes cast before 1929 from Hildo Van Krop’s masks for The Woman of the Sidhe, Emer, and Cuchulain in Vrouwe Emer’s Groote Strijd, the 1922 Dutch production of The Only Jealousy of Emer, and now in the Stadsschouwburg, Amsterdam. Photograph of unknown authorship, predating 1934. Image in the public domain.

370

24.

Title-page design of Wheels and Butterflies (London: Macmillan, 1934). Artwork of unknown authorship. Image in the public domain.

372

25.

Thomas Sturge Moore’s original design for the spine and top board of The Cutting of an Agate (London: Macmillan, 1919). Image courtesy and © Senate House Library, University of London. All rights reserved.

375

Abbreviations

Au

Autobiographies (London: Macmillan, 1955).

AVA

A Vision: An Explanation of Life Founded upon the Writings of Giraldus and upon certain Doctrines attributed to Kusta Ben Luka (London: privately printed for subscribers only by T. Werner Laurie, Ltd., 1925). See also CVA.

AVB

A Vision (London: Macmillan, 1962).

Berg

Books and Manuscripts, The Berg Collection, New York Public Library (Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations).

BIV1, 2

A Book of Irish Verse (London: Methuen, 1895; 1900).

BL Add. MS

Additional Manuscript, The British Library, London (followed by number).

BL Macmillan

Later papers from the Macmillan Archive, British Library, London.

Bodley

Bodleian Library, Oxford.

Bradford

Yeats at Work, by Curtis B. Bradford (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1965).

Brotherton

Manuscript, The Brotherton Collection, Brotherton Library, University of Leeds.

CH

W. B. Yeats:The Critical Heritage, ed A. Norman Jeffares (London: Henley; Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1977).

CL1, 2, 3, 4

The Collected Letters of W. B. Yeats: Volume I, 1865–1895, ed. John Kelly and Eric Domville; Volume II, 1896–1900, ed. Warwick Gould, John Kelly, Deirdre Toomey; Volume III, 1901–1904, and Volume IV, 1905–1907, ed. John Kelly and Ronald Schuchard (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986, 1997, 1994, 2005).

CL InteLex

The Collected Letters of W. B. Yeats, gen. ed. John Kelly, Oxford University Press (InteLex Electronic Edition) 2002. Letters cited by Accession number.

CM

W. B. Yeats: A Census of the Manuscripts, by Conrad A. Balliet, with the assistance of Christine Mawhinney (New York and London: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1990).

CVA

A Critical Edition of Yeats’s A Vision (1925), ed. George Mills Harper and Walter Kelly Hood (London: Macmillan, 1978).

CW1

The Poems,second edition (New York: Scribner, 1997), ed. Richard J. Finneran and replacing The Poems: Revised (New York: Macmillan, 1989; London: Macmillan, 1989), PR, which replaced The Poems: A New Edition (New York: Macmillan, 1983; London: Macmillan London Ltd., 1984), PNE, as the first volume of The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats (formerly The Collected Edition of the Works of W. B. Yeats).

CW2

The Plays, ed. David R. Clark and Rosalind E. Clark (New York: Scribner, 2001), volume II of The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats (formerly The Collected Edition of the Works of W. B. Yeats).

CW3

Autobiographies, ed. William H. O’Donnell and Douglas N. Archibald, assisted by J. Fraser Cocks III and Gretchen Schwenker (New York: Scribner, 1999), volume III of The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats (formerly The Collected Edition of the Works of W. B. Yeats).

CW4

Early Essays, ed. Richard J. Finneran and George Bornstein (New York: Scribner, 2007), volume III of The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats (formerly The Collected Edition of the Works of W. B. Yeats).

CW5

Later Essays, ed. William H. O’Donnell, with assistance from Elizabeth Bergmann Loizeaux (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1994), volume V of The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats (formerly The Collected Edition of the Works of W. B. Yeats).

CW6

Prefaces and Introductions: Uncollected Prefaces and Introductions by Yeats to Works by other Authors and to Anthologies edited by Yeats, ed. William H. O’Donnell (London: Macmillan, 1988), volume VI of The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats (formerly The Collected Edition of the Works of W. B. Yeats).

CW7

Letters to the New Island ed. George Bornstein and Hugh Witemeyer (London: Macmillan, 1989), volume VII of The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats (formerly The Collected Edition of the Works of W. B. Yeats).

CW8

The Irish Dramatic Movement, ed. Mary FitzGerald and Richard J. Finneran (New York: Scribner, 2003), volume VIII of The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats (formerly The Collected Edition of the Works of W. B. Yeats).

CW9

Early Articles and Reviews: Uncollected Articles and Reviews written between 1886 and 1900, ed. John P. Frayne and Madeleine Marchaterre (New York: Scribner, 2004), volume IX of The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats (formerly The Collected Edition of the Works of W. B. Yeats).

CW10

Later Articles and Reviews: Uncollected Articles, Reviews, and Radio Broadcasts written after 1900, ed. Colton Johnson (New York: Scribner, 2000), volume X of The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats (formerly The Collected Edition of the Works of W. B. Yeats).

CW12

John Sherman and Dhoya, ed. Richard J. Finneran (New York: Macmillan, 1991), volume XII of The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats (formerly The Collected Edition of the Works of W. B. Yeats).

CW13

A Vision: The Original 1925 Version, ed. Catherine E. Paul and Margaret Mills Harper (New York: Scribner 2008), volume XIII of The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats (formerly The Collected Edition of the Works of W. B. Yeats).

CWVP1–8

The Collected Works in Verse and Prose of William Butler Yeats, 8 vols. (Stratford-on-Avon: The Shakespeare Head Press, 1908).

DC

Druid Craft: The Writing of The Shadowy Waters, Manuscripts of W. B. Yeats, transcribed, edited & with a commentary by Michael J. Sidnell, George P. Mayhew, David R. Clark (Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1971).

Diaries

Lady Gregory’s Diaries 1892–1902, ed. James Pethica (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1996).

E&I

Essays and Introductions (London and New York: Macmillan, 1961).

Emory

Books and Manuscripts in the Robert W. Woodruff Library, Emory University.

Ex

Explorations, selected by Mrs W. B. Yeats (London: Macmillan, 1962; New York: Macmillan, 1963).

FFTIP

Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry, edited and selected by W. B. Yeats (London: Walter Scott, Ltd., 1888).

G-YL

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

Harvard

Manuscript, Houghton Library, Harvard University.

HRHRC

Books and Manuscripts, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin.

I&R

W. B. Yeats: Interviews and Recollections, ed. E. H. Mikhail, 2 vols. (London: Macmillan, 1977).

IFT

Irish Fairy Tales edited with an introduction by W. B. Yeats (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1892).

J

W. B. Yeats: A Classified Bibliography of Criticism, second edition, revised and enlarged by K. P. S. Jochum (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1990). Item nos. or page no. preceded by ‘p.’.

JBYL

Letters to his Son W. B. Yeats and Others 1869–1922 by J. B. Yeats, edited with a Memoir by Joseph Hone and a Preface by Oliver Elton (London: Faber and Faber, 1944).

Kansas

Manuscripts in the Kenneth Spencer Research Library, University of Kansas, Lawrence.

L

The Letters of W. B. Yeats, ed. Allan Wade (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1954; New York: Macmillan, 1955).

LBP

Letters from Bedford Park: A Selection from the Correspondence (1890–1901) of John Butler Yeats, edited with an introduction and notes by William M. Murphy (Dublin: The Cuala Press, 1972).

LDW

Letters on Poetry from W. B. Yeats to Dorothy Wellesley, with an introduction by Kathleen Raine (London and New York: Oxford University Press, 1964).

Life 1

W. B. Yeats: A Life, I: The Apprentice Mage, by R. F. Foster (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1997).

Life 2

W. B. Yeats: A Life, II: The Arch-Poet, by R. F. Foster (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2003).

Lilly

Manuscript in the Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington.

LJQ

The Letters of John Quinn to W. B. Yeats, ed. Alan B. Himber, with the assistance of George Mills Harper (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1983).

LMR

“Ah, Sweet Dancer”: W. B. Yeats and Margot Ruddock, A Correspondence, ed. Roger McHugh (London and New York: Macmillan, 1970).

LNI

Letters to the New Island by W. B. Yeats, edited and with an introduction by Horace Reynolds (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1934).

LRB

The Correspondence of Robert Bridges and W. B. Yeats, ed. Richard J. Finneran (London: Macmillan, 1977; Toronto: Macmillan of Canada, 1978).

LTWBY1, 2

Letters to W. B. Yeats, ed. Richard J. Finneran, George Mills Harper and William M. Murphy, with the assistance of Alan B. Himber, 2 vols. (London: Macmillan; New York: Columbia University Press, 1977).

MBY

Manuscript in the Collection of Michael Butler Yeats.

McGarry

Places Names in the Writings of W. B. Yeats by James P. McGarry, edited with additional material by Edward Malins and a Preface by Kathleen Raine (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe Ltd., 1976).

Mem

Memoirs: Autobiography – First Draft: Journal, transcribed and edited by Denis Donoghue (London: Macmillan, 1972; New York: Macmillan, 1973).

Myth

Mythologies (London and New York: Macmillan, 1959).

Myth 2005

Mythologies, ed. Warwick Gould and Deirdre Toomey (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005).

MYV1, 2

The Making of Yeats’s ‘A Vision’: A Study of the Automatic Script, by George Mills Harper, 2 vols. (London: Macmillan; Carbondale and Edwardsville, Ill.: Southern Illinois University Press, 1987).

NLI

Manuscripts in the National Library of Ireland, Dublin.

NLS

Manuscripts in the National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh.

NYPL

Manuscripts in the New York Public Library.

Norwood

Manuscripts, Norwood Historical Society, Day House, Norwood, Mass.

OBMV

The Oxford Book of Modern Verse 1895–1935, selected by W. B. Yeats (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1936).

Princeton

Manuscript in the Scribner Archive, Firestone Library, Princeton University.

Quinn Cat.

Complete Catalogue of the Library of John Quinn sold by auction in five parts [with printed prices] (New York: The Anderson Galleries, 1924), 2 v.

SB

The Speckled Bird by William Butler Yeats: an Autobiographical Novel With Variant Versions: New Edition, incorporating recently discovered manuscripts, edited and annotated by William H. O’Donnell (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003).

SQ

A Servant of the Queen: Reminiscences, by Maud Gonne MacBride, ed. A. Norman Jeffares and Anna MacBride White (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1994).

SS

The Senate Speeches of W. B. Yeats, ed. Donald R. Pearce (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1960; London: Faber and Faber, 1961).

TB

Theatre Business: The Correspondence of the First Abbey Theatre Directors: William Butler Yeats, Lady Gregory and J. M. Synge, ed. Ann Saddlemyer (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe; University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1982).

TSMC

W. B. Yeats and T. Sturge Moore: Their Correspondence, 1901–1937, ed. Ursula Bridge (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul; New York: Oxford University Press, 1953).

UP1

Uncollected Prose by W. B. Yeats, Vol I, ed. John P. Frayne (London: Macmillan; New York: Columbia University Press, 1970).

UP2

Uncollected Prose by W. B. Yeats, Vol II, ed. John P. Frayne and Colton Johnson (London: Macmillan, 1975; New York: Columbia University Press, 1976).

VBWI

Visions and Beliefs in the West of Ireland, collected and arranged by Lady Gregory: with two Essays and Notes by W. B. Yeats with a foreword by Elizabeth Coxhead (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe Ltd.; New York: Oxford University Press, 1970).

VP

The Variorum Edition of the Poems of W. B. Yeats, ed. Peter Allt and Russell K. Alspach (New York: Macmillan, 1957). Cited from the corrected third printing of 1966.

VPl

The Variorum Edition of the Plays of W. B. Yeats, ed. Russell K. Alspach, assisted by Catherine C. Alspach (London and New York: Macmillan, 1966). Cited from the corrected second printing of 1966.

VSR

The Secret Rose, Stories by W. B. Yeats: A Variorum Edition, ed. Warwick Gould, Phillip L. Marcus and Michael J. Sidnell, second edition, revised and enlarged (London: Macmillan, 1992).

Wade

Allan Wade, A Bibliography of the Writings of W. B. Yeats, third edition, revised by Russell K. Alspach (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1968). Cited by item no. and/or page no. preceded by ‘p.’.

WWB1, 2, 3

The Works of William Blake Poetic, Symbolic, and Critical, edited with lithographs of the illustrated “Prophetic Books”, and a memoir and interpretation by Edwin John Ellis and W. B. Yeats, 3 vols. (London: Bernard Quaritch, 1893).

YA1, 2, etc.

Yeats Annual (London: Macmillan, 1982–) cited by no.

YAACTS

Yeats: An Annual of Critical and Textual Studies, ed. Richard J. Finneran (publishers vary, 1983–1999) cited by no.

YGYL

W. B. Yeats and George Yeats: The Letters,ed. Ann Saddlemyer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).

YL

A Descriptive Catalog of W. B. Yeats’s Library, by Edward O’Shea (New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1985).

YO

Yeats and the Occult, ed. George Mills Harper (Toronto: Macmillan of Canada; Niagara Falls, NY: Maclean-Hunter Press, 1975).

YP

Yeats’s Poems, edited & annotated by A. Norman Jeffares, with an appendix by Warwick Gould (London: Macmillan, 1989). Cited from the second, revised edition of 1991.

YT

Yeats and the Theatre, ed. Robert O’Driscoll and Lorna Reynolds (Toronto: Macmillan of Canada; Niagara Falls, New York: Maclean-Hunter Press, 1975).

YVP1, 2, 3, 4

Yeats’s Vision Papers (London: Macmillan, 1992; Palgrave 2001), gen. ed. George Mills Harper, assisted by Mary Jane Harper, Vol. 1: The Automatic Script: 5 November 1917–18 June 1918, ed. Steve L. Adams, Barbara J. Frieling and Sandra L. Sprayberry; Vol. 2: The Automatic Script: 25 June 1918–29 March 1920, ed. Steve L. Adams, Barbara J. Frieling and Sandra L. Sprayberry; Vol. 3: Sleep and Dream Notebooks, Vision Notebooks 1 and 2, Card File, ed. Robert Anthony Martinich and Margaret Mills Harper; Vol. 4: “The Discoveries of Michael Robartes” Version B [“The Great Wheel” and “The Twenty-Eight Embodiments”],ed. George Mills Harper and MargaretMills Harper assisted by Richard W. Stoops, Jr.

Editorial Board

Seamus Deane

William H. O’Donnell

Denis Donoghue

Yukio Oura

Jacqueline Genet

Marjorie Perloff

Margaret Mills Harper

James L. Pethica

John Harwood

Ronald Schuchard

K. P. S. Jochum

Michael J. Sidnell

John Kelly

Colin Smythe

Edna Longley

C. K. Stead

Phillip L. Marcus

Katharine Worth

Series Editor: Warwick Gould

Research Editor: Deirdre Toomey

Notes on the Contributors

Lauren Arrington is Lecturer in Literature at the Institute of Irish Studies, University of Liverpool. Her book, W. B. Yeats, the Abbey Theatre, Censorship, and the Irish State, was published by Oxford University Press in 2010. She is currently writing Revolutionary Lives: Constance and Casimir Markievicz, a biography which will be published by Princeton University Press.

Philip R. Bishop, independent scholar, writer-essayist, bibliographer, book collector and ABAA/ILAB bookseller, is the compiler of Thomas Bird Mosher: Pirate Prince of Publishers (New Castle DE: Oak Knoll Press; London: The British Library, 1998) and contributes to numerous publications and exhibitions. He has assembled one of the world’s largest book and MS collections on Mosher and the Mosher Press, and maintains the website: www.ThomasBirdMosher.net. His collecting, memoirs and the Collected Letters of Thomas Bird Mosher are his longer term projects.

David Bradshaw is Professor of English Literature at Oxford University and a fellow of Worcester College. As well as numerous articles and essays on all aspects of modernism, he has edited, among other volumes, The Hidden Huxley (1994), A Concise Companion to Modernism (2003), The Cambridge Companion to E. M. Forster (2007), A Companion to Modernist Literature and Culture (with Kevin J. H. Dettmar, 2006), Waugh’s Decline and Fall, Ford’s The Good Soldier, Woolf’s Carlyle’s House and Other Sketches, Huxley’s Brave New World and Oxford World’s Classics editions of Lawrence’s The White Peacock and Women in Love, and Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, Selected Essays, To the Lighthouse and The Mark on the Wall and Other Short Fiction. He is Co-Executive Editor (with Professor Martin Stannard) of the 42 volume Oxford University Press edition of The Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh.

Michael Cade-Stewart is currently pursuing a British Academy post-doctoral fellowship at King’s College London, where he is researching a history of poetic rhythm from Wordsworth to Auden using innovative digital tools. His PhD (2013) was undertaken at the Institute of English Studies (also University of London) and examined the effects of Yeats’s reading for the Oxford Book of Modern Verse (1936) upon his subsequent poems. He has also published on the form of Yeats’s ‘News for the Delphic Oracle’ in the South Carolina Review (43:1).

Aisling Carlin (née Mullan) is an independent scholar specialising in modern Irish Theatre. Her thesis, ‘Religious Transformations in the Drama of W. B. Yeats and J. M. Synge’ was completed at Queen’s University in 2009. Her current research focuses on concepts of ritual, tragedy and utopia. She has presented papers at the ‘Yeats and Mask’ conference at Lille, IASIL conferences and the Synge Summer School.

Warwick Gould is Professor of English Literature in the University of London (at Royal Holloway) and Senior Research Fellow of the Institute of English Studies (in the School of Advanced Study), of which he was Founder-Director 1999–2013. He is co-author of Joachim of Fiore and the Myth of the Eternal Evangel in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (1988, rev. 2001), and co-editor of The Secret Rose, Stories by W. B. Yeats: A Variorum Edition (1981, rev. 1992), The Collected Letters of W. B. Yeats, Volume II, 1896–1900 (1997), and Mythologies (2005). He has edited Yeats Annual for thirty years.

Margaret Mills Harper is Glucksman Professor of Contemporary Writing in English at the University of Limerick, Ireland. She is the author of Wisdom of Two: the Spiritual and Literary Collaboration of George and W. B. Yeats (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006) and The Aristocracy of Art: James Joyce and Thomas Wolfe (Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 1990). She has co-edited two of the four volumes of Yeats’s “Vision” Papers (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1992 and 2001). With Catherine Paul, she has edited A Vision (1925) and is now preparing A Vision (1937) for The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats (New York: Scribner, 2008 and 2014).

Geraldine Higgins is Associate Professor of English and Director of Irish Studies at Emory University. Her most recent book, Heroic Revivals from Carlyle to Yeats examines the flexibility of heroic identity in a range of Revival writers. She has also published a book on Brian Friel for the ‘Writers and their Work’ series and several articles on Yeats and popular culture. She is currently curating a major exhibition on ‘Seamus Heaney: The Music of What Happens’ which will open at Emory in February 2014.

Pierre Longuenesse is a graduate of the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris and holds a PhD from Paris 4 Sorbonne. He is currently Associate Professor in Drama studies at Artois University in France. His publications include Yeats dramaturge, la voix et ses masques (2012) along with articles in French journals such as Etudes Théâtrales, Registres, Théâtre/Public and Etudes Irlandaises. He is also an actor, and Director of Compagnie du Samovar, a professional theatre company based in Paris.

Neil Mann has taught in Britain, Finland and Spain. He has written primarily on A Vision and related matters, maintaining the website, www.yeatsvision.com and a blog on aspects of A Vision, yeatsvision.blogspot.co.uk. He has also co-edited the collection of essays W. B. Yeats’s ‘A Vision’: Explications and Contexts (Clemson University, 2012). He was involved with the exhibition on W. B. Yeats at the National Library of Ireland, and currently works at the Berg Collection, New York Public Library.

Stoddard Martin is a writer, lecturer and publisher. His academic books include Wagner to the Waste Land, California Writers, Art, Messianism and Crime, Orthodox Heresy and The Great Expatriate Writers, published by Macmillan. He edited anthologies of Byron, Nietzsche and D. H. Lawrence in the Duckworth ‘Sayings of’ series, which he helped to devise. He has reviewed widely on literature and culture, and his essays have appeared in anthologies including George Moore: Dublin, Paris, Hollywood. He has taught at Harvard, Oxford, Łódź and Warsaw universities and is an Associate Fellow of the Institute of English Studies, University of London.

Jerusha McCormack’s work focused on Oscar Wilde and his disciple, John Gray: first through an academic biography, then through a fictionalized account in The Man Who Was Dorian Gray (2000), during her long career at UCD. Two volumes of edited essays reflect current interests: Wilde the Irishman (1998) and China and the Irish (2009; Mandarin edition, 2010), for which her own essay explores the relationship of Oscar Wilde and a fourth-century Chinese sage called Zhuangzi (Chuang Tsŭ). Over the past eight years she has served as Visiting Professor at Beijing Foreign Studies University where she helped found the first multidisciplinary Irish Studies Centre in China.

Emilie Morin is Lecturer in the Department of English and Related Literature at the University of York. Her research interests lie in Irish and European modernism, andher publications include Samuel Beckett and the Problem of Irishness (Palgrave, 2009).

Elizabeth Müller is an Associate Professor at the University of Nantes. She has published numerous articles on Yeats including ‘Yeats and the Figure of the Bard’, ‘Reshaping Chaos: Platonic Elements in Yeats’s A Vision and Later Poetry’ and ‘The Cult of Dionysus in the Work of W. B. Yeats’; ‘“The Embattled Stance”: Resistance in Yeats’s Late Poetry’, and ‘“Of Golden King and Silver Lady”: Yeats and the pre-Socratic Philosophers’. With Meg Harper and Alexandra Poulain, she has also co-organized conferences on Yeats at the University of Lille III, at Emory University, and at the Catholic University of Paris where she also lectures. Her book on Yeats and Dante is forthcoming.

Alexandra Poulain is Professor of Irish Literature and Drama at the Université Charles de Gaulle – Lille 3. Her recent books include Homo Famelicus: le théâtre de Tom Murphy (Presses Universitaires de Caen, 2008), Hunger on the Stage (Scholars Press, 2008), co-edited with Elisabeth Angel-Perez, Endgame ou le théâtre mis en pièces (Presses Universitaires de France, 2009), also with Elisabeth Angel-Perez, and Passions du corps dans les dramaturgies contemporaines (Septentrion, 2010). Her current project is on versions of the Passion narrative in modern Irish drama.

Colin Smythe is presently working on a new bibliography of W. B. Yeats, correcting, enlarging, and updating that by Allan Wade (3rd edition, 1968). He is General Editor of his publishing company’s Irish Literary Studies Series (53 titles) and (with the late T. R. Henn) of the Coole Edition of Lady Gregory’s Works (16 volumes so far published), and with Henry Summerfield, of the Collected Works of G. W. Russell (AE). He is also Sir Terry Pratchett’s literary agent and first publisher. He received an Hon. LLD from Dublin University for services to Irish Literature in 1998.

Tara Stubbs is a University Lecturer in Literature and Creative Writing at the Department for Continuing Education, Oxford University (OUDCE). Her monograph, American Literature and Irish Culture, 1910–1955: the Politics of Enchantment, was published this year by Manchester University Press. It uses a transatlantic framework to consider the ways in which American modernist fiction and poetry was rejuvenated and shaped by cultural and political movements in Ireland during the period. She has worked as a Research Assistant on the Collected Letters of W. B. Yeats, and has published articles and book chapters on Yeats and the Ghost Club, Thomas McGreevy, and Bernard Shaw.

Tom Walker is the Ussher Lecturer in Irish Writing at Trinity College Dublin. He has published essays in The Cambridge Quarterly, The Review of English Studies and The Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish Poetry (Oxford University Press, 2012), and is completing a monograph on the poetry of Louis MacNeice.

Editors’ Introduction

THE MASK, a symbolic object used for disguise, as protection, and in performance in many cultures and for most of human history, has been associated with practices as various as ancient religious ritual and contemporary psychoanalysis. That the Mask had an enduring fascination for Yeats, and that a number of principles that are useful in reading his work can be understood by means of the concepts associated with it, is hardly a surprising notion. Indeed, the opposite is true. Yeats’s Mask is one of the ideas that spans his oeuvre, from poems like ‘The Mask’, to prose texts such as Per Amica Silentia Lunae, to plays that use physical masks, to recurring characters like Cuchulain and influences like that of Wilde, to take several obvious examples. As early as two years after the poet’s death, Louis MacNeice could mention in passing ‘Yeats’s favourite doctrine of the Mask’, knowing his fellow admirers of the poet would agree with its importance, and a decade had not passed before Richard Ellmann entitled his influential literary biography Yeats: The Man and the Masks.1 Both MacNeice and Ellmann began their respective studies with notions of poetry and poets that were commonplaces of the time, that, in Ellmann’s words, ‘a poet has what Thomas Nashe called a “double soul”. The relation of the man and the poet is close but it is not simple.’2 MacNeice begins his preface with the same assumption, that there is a doubleness of ‘man’ and ‘poet’, and that this binary is crucial:

There is not, to my knowledge – nor do I think there can be – any satisfactory definition of the relationship of poetry to life. I am convinced however, that there is such a relationship and that it is of primary importance; I am also convinced that a poem is a thing in itself, a self-contained organism, a ‘creation’ – I might almost say, saving the presence of philosophers, an absolute.3

Despite Ellmann’s reference to Nashe,4 and MacNeice’s to ‘philosophers’ (or ‘Dr Johnson’, in the sentence that follows the quotation above), MacNeice and Ellmann, writing when and where they did, were likely to consider the mortal self and the aesthetic creation of an artistic self or mask as two distinct items, an easy extension of the assumption that reality falls into that handy structure of Art and Life. To a large degree, Yeats shared this assumption.

Such assumptions are now part of a historical context available for analytical exposure. Moreover, contemporary Yeats studies can now take advantage of decades of superb textual and archival scholarship. Yeats’s work as a dramatist, rhetorician, and theoretical occultist is now recognized, and correspondingly interdisciplinary scholarship has been pursued. It is, therefore, timely to revisit the Mask. Its obviousness as a relevant term in Yeats studies has ironically contributed to its being overshadowed in the critical landscape: as a commonplace, it can be used in service of other arguments more often than focused on directly. Yet it is not difficult to imagine a number of benefits of reanimating the Mask in light of recent scholarship. After all, the Mask brings into focus a number of concepts fascinatingly relevant to the study of Yeats. For instance, a mask as an object connected with the human body as well as a common synecdoche for notions of self and agency, among others, make it vital to investigations of his form and technique, including poetic and dramatic voice. Insofar as masks are ritual objects in a number of the early religious and philosophical systems of which Yeats was a student, our increased awareness of the details of his spiritual and intellectual development should lead (as it does in several essays in this collection) to understanding the Mask as a continuum rather than one element in a more or less stable binary. In that masks have been common in theatrical practices for millennia, as well as finding dense use in theatrical practice in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (for example, in the theories of Edward Gordon Craig), much can be learned by focusing on the Mask about Yeats’s dramaturgy no less than his intellectual excitement in his studies in classic Athenian drama and Japanese Nó tradition. As Emily Morin argues, Yeats found himself an actor on a different kind of stage in his often overlooked work with the BBC. Many of the essays in this collection use manuscript and newly discovered material to find connections that may surprise readers (as they did the editors) with their apt examinations, in areas that in retrospect seem obvious. Of course, we should look into the ubiquitous narratives of Christ’s Passion, the Chinese verses engraved on the sculpture described in the poem ‘Lapis Lazuli’, personal questions Yeats asked himself about how to control his temper, or the massive reading he undertook to prepare to edit The Oxford Book of Modern Verse, to take a few examples from the essays that follow. In general, all the contributors are less interested in finding a completed ‘Mask’ than noting precise internal variations and probably also the inherent inconsistencies of the idea, the alien quality of finding, in Yeats’s words, that when the hero of classical epic found his mask ‘hanging upon some oak of Dodona’, ‘another’s breath came and went within his breath upon the carven lips, and that his eyes were upon the instant fixed upon a visionary world’ and that, ‘all religious men have believed that there is a hand not ours in the events of life’ (Per Amica Silentia Lunae,CW5 11; Myth 335–36).

Given the doubling or multiplicity of Yeats’s masks, and the performativity at the heart of the concept of the Mask, it is appropriate that this volume started its life as twin conferences. In the spring of 2009, Alexandra Poulain and Margaret Mills Harper hosted scholars at their respective universities, the Université Charles de Gaulle – Lille III and Georgia State University, to investigate ideas of mask and voice in Yeats’s work. The calls for papers described the aims of the conferences thus:

Yeats’s impressive array of personae or masks combines with the conscious manipulation of voice, ranging from the remote and dignified to the trivial and lowly. Variations on voice and mask are decisive modalities of Yeats’s effort to recreate an oral tradition and thus contribute to the elaboration of Ireland’s cultural identity. On the other hand, they also relate to his histrionic propensity for ‘remaking himself’ simultaneously with his own creation. Whether collective or individual, ‘identity’ is thus envisaged as plural and dynamic, as performance rather than essence.

Thus, this paradoxical ontology of ‘voice and mask’ in turn calls attention to the element of theatricality at the heart of Yeatsian aesthetics, in dramatic and non-dramatic forms alike. It also invites analyses of the ways in which literature overlaps with, and sometimes seeks to absorb, other art forms, in particular music and the visual arts; central to Yeats’s oeuvre, for instance, is the tension and constant alternation between stasis and kinetic energy.5

Part of the aim of the twin conferences was to explore differences that would arise from the different settings, of the various papers as well as musical and theatrical performances and displays of archival materials, which were a feature of both events. The two universities at which the conferences took place are outside expected centres of research on Yeats and therefore, the organizers reckoned, possible sites for new ideas, but they are also both locations that might attract significant participants from a range of disciplinary and methodological specialisms. The Université de Lille is a major centre for Irish Studies in Europe and easily accessible from Paris as well as Ireland and the United Kingdom; the research opportunities at Georgia State University include, for the purposes of Yeats study, the links between Irish Studies there and Emory University, also located in Atlanta. The conveners of the conferences felt also that the linked events would be likely to further transatlantic collaboration, a goal that has been met in numerous ways, including the present issue of the Yeats Annual. Many thanks are due, first and foremost to Alexandra Poulain, for her inspiration and work on the project; also to Geraldine Higgins and Elizabeth Müller for their work in transforming the events into this publication.

The ‘Voice and Mask’ project has expanded. The collection now includes some essays developed from presentations given at the two conferences and others that were not part of the original events. This issue of the Yeats Annual fills out the contours of what we hope are informational as well as provocative new readings and directions for further thought on this subject. The essays are ordered in roughly chronological sequence, beginning with Warwick Gould’s analysis of the development of the concept of the Mask before its fully developed form in about 1918, to Michael Cade-Stewart’s study of the connections Yeats made from his wide reading in contemporary English-language poetry in his role of editor of The Oxford Book of Modern Verse and his multiple masks as presented in New Poems.

In addition to the essays published here for the first time, we are happy to reprint ‘The Manuscript of “Leo Africanus”’, a dialogue in letters written by Yeats in 1915 between himself and the sixteenth-century travel writer Johannes Leo Africanus (al-Hasan ibn Muhammad al-Wazzan al-Fasi). The dialogue, a significant experiment featuring Yeats’s assumption of the Mask of a spirit who arrived in séance, and later as a Frustrator in the sessions of automatic writing with George Yeats, forms a significant part of the ‘phantasmagoria’ of Yeats’s spiritual experimentation. The edited text with accompanying essay by Steve L. Adams and George Mills Harper, first published in Yeats Annual No. 1 edited by Richard J. Finneran, has long been difficult of access; now that Yeats Annual is published digitally, it is possible to redress this situation.6 As a final chapter of the essays in this Annual, the ‘Leo Africanus’ letters offer a concrete sense of what the concept meant to Yeats: aesthetics here blend seamlessly into serious, even agonizing, personal commitment to the Mask, an exploration that is challenging as only that ‘of all imaginable things | The most unlike’ (VP 371) can be.

Margaret Mills Harper and Warwick Gould

October 2013

1 Louis MacNeice, The Poetry of Yeats (New York: Oxford University Press, 1941), 107; Richard Ellmann, Yeats: The Man and the Masks (New York: Macmillan, 1948).

2 Ellmann, 4–5. Ellmann’s book appeared in the same year as A. Norman Jeffares’s W. B. Yeats: Man and Poet (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1949) which explores doubleness in a less theorized way. The two books were the first significant biographically based studies after Joseph Hone’s and made rival claims on the critical attention of the public.

3 MacNeice, vii.

4 Nashe’s passage reads: ‘As sweet Angelicall queristers they are continually conuersant in the heauen of Arts, heauen it selfe is but the highest height of knowledge, he that knowes himself & all things else, knowes the meanes to be happie : happie, thrice happie are they whom God hath doubled his spirite vppon, and giuen a double soule vnto to be Poets.’ (The Unfortunate Traveller or, The Life of Jack Wilton (London: 1594), quoted from the edition by H. B. Brett-Smith (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1927, Percy Reprints), 42.

5 ‘La voix et le masque dans l’oeuvre de W. B. Yeats: le théâtre des identités’, 6–7 février 2009, Université Charles-de-Gaulle, Lille III. In addition to Professors Poulain and Harper, the scientific committee of the French conference included Prof. Carle Bonnafous-Murat (Université de la Sorbonne Nouvelle, Paris III) and Dr. Elizabeth Muller (Université de Nantes); keynote speakers were Nicholas Grene (Trinity College Dublin) and Jacqueline Genet (Université de Caen). Yeats’s Anniversary Conference: ‘Voice and Mask: Performing Identities’, 15–16 May 2009, Georgia State University, Atlanta, Georgia. In addition to Professors Harper and Poulain, the organizing committee included Prof. Geraldine Higgins (Emory University) and Dr. Elizabeth Muller; keynote speakers were James Pethica (Williams College) and James Flannery (Emory University).

6 We thank Steve L. Adams, Margaret Mills Harper, Ann Christian Harper, Richard Edmond Finneran and Catherine Finneran for their permission and encouragement to republish this essay.

Acknowledgements and Editorial Information

Our chief debt of gratitude is to the Yeats Estate over many years for granting permission (through A. P. Watt Ltd., now part of United Agents Partnership, Ltd.) to use published and unpublished materials by W. B. Yeats. Our contributors are further indebted to Caítriona Yeats and to the Yeats family for making unpublished materials available for study and for many other kindnesses, as is the Editor.

A number of helpful librarians include Dr Declan Kiely of the Pierpont Morgan Library, New York, Professor Thomas F. Staley, Dr Cathy Henderson and Dr Richard Oram at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, Austin, Catherine Fahy at the National Library of Ireland, all of whom have provided us with materials and research assistance. At the British Library, the Curator of the Macmillan Archive, Dr Elizabeth James, renders invaluable assistance to the Editor, while the research librarians at the Robert W. Woodruff Library at Emory University are equally generous and prompt in recovering specialist materials. Dr Karen Attar in Special Collections at the Senate House Library, University of London has been unfailingly helpful, especially in respect of the Thomas Sturge Moore Collection. Riette Sturge Moore (who died in 1995) allowed us to use in the livery of the Yeats Annuals the rose symbol adapted from Thomas Sturge Moore’s designs for the H. P. R. Finberg translation of Axël (1925). Linda Shaughnessy of A. P. Watt (now United Agents Partnership), Professors Roy Foster, FBA and John Kelly on behalf of Oxford University Press, are generous with permissions. Individuals, institutions and estates which gave permission for the reproductions of images in the Plate section are thanked within the legends. Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders, and while some images are by unknown photographers, the editor would be grateful to acknowledge any omissions in the next issue.

At Open Book Publishers, William St. Clair FBA, Rupert Gatti and Alessandra Tosi provided patient assistance and invaluable advice to facilitate our transfer to Open Access publishing. Members of the Advisory Board continue to read a large number of submissions and we are grateful to them, and also to Mr R. A. Gilbert and other specialist readers who offered valuable assistance.

The present number of Yeats Annual was set in Caslon SSi by Zoe Holman of the Institute of English Studies. Readers will recall that Caslon Old Face was the typeface which Yeats himself preferred for Cuala Press books.

Deirdre Toomey as Research Editor of this journal continues to take up the challenges which routinely defeat contributors, finding innumerable ways to make good articles better by means of her restless curiosity and indefatigable reading. All associated with the volume (as well as its readers) continue to be grateful for her persistence with intractabilities.

Contributions for Yeats Annuals No. 20 are largely in place, and those for No. 21 should reach me, preferably by email, by 1 June 2014 at:

The Institute of English Studies,

University of London

Senate House, 239

Malet Street

London WC1E 7HU

United Kingdom

E-mail [email protected].

Yeats Annual is offered to its publishers in camera-ready form. A style sheet, instructions for the submission of articles to the Editorial Board and ­consequent editorial procedures will be found at our website, http://www.ies.sas.ac.uk/publications/yeats-annual, where it is also possible to find full information about, and to purchase, in-print numbers from the Yeats Annual backlist. The website is being further developed to complement the online and print availability of the current issues through the publisher’s website (http://www.openbookpublishers.com).

Professor John Kelly of St. John’s College, Oxford is General Editor of The Collected Letters of W. B. Yeats. Later years of the letters are now available in the InteLex electronic edition, which presently includes only the first three fully annotated volumes as well as the ‘B’ text of all subsequent letters which have come to light. Priority in the publication of newly discovered letters remains, however, with the print-based volumes, the fifth of which is now in proof at the Clarendon Press. Colin Smythe (PO Box 6, Gerrards Cross, Bucks, SL9 8XA, UK, [email protected]) is completing his revision of the Wade-Alspach Bibliography for the Clarendon Press, while an authorised edition of Yeats’s Occult Diaries, 1898–1901 is being prepared by Deirdre Toomey and myself. We continue to revise A. Norman Jeffares’ New Commentary on the Poems of W. B. Yeats. All the above would be very grateful to hear of new letters, and to receive new information from readers.

We are grateful to receive offprints and review copies and other bibliographical information (acknowledged at the end of each volume).

Warwick Gould

YEATS’S MASK

© Warwick Gould, CC BY-NC-ND http://dx.doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0038.01

The Mask before The Mask

Warwick Gould

PREAMBLE

VISIT A MAJOR EXHIBITIONat a well-known gallery and you will find paper masks of historical characters enduringly popular in the gift shop. Watch a political rally or demonstration and masks worn by protestors fix, define and arraign the villains and reproject their grotesqueries back through global media. The essence of the mask is its ‘immobility’,1 its stillness, its capture of character through characteristic, in some ‘eternal moment’.2

Such simplicity is, however, far from what is variously implied by the term ‘Mask’ in the work of Yeats. Having developed the concept towards that of the Anti-Self until around the publication of Per Amica Silentia Lunae in 1917, he then italicized it as a technical term, the Mask of A Vision. Yeats claimed that his Instructors came to give him ‘metaphors for poetry’ (AVB 8), but A Vision elaborates many existing metaphors. The italics of Mask signify a distinction: and it is not one without difference.3 As he creates and whirls his terms together in an ‘arbitrary, harsh and difficult’ symbolic system, they change meanings (AVB 23). As Neil Mann says

‘The Mask that appears in A Vision, however, seems to have dwindled into a cipher circling the clock-face of the lunar phases along with the other Faculties, its function delimited by the System’s geometry. It retains enough of its former traits to give a sense of A Vision’s continuity with Yeats’s previous thought but is at root a different concept.’4

Yeats’s theories of the Mask have been readily and fruitfully applied to the themes and techniques of his poems, as well as in his theatre, in teaching his work. ‘The Mask’ (and here I mean that doctrine which reaches its apogee in 1918) has seemed to provide an entry-point accessible and fruitful – especially for undergraduates – to the more recondite speculations of A Vision via the mid-career foothills of Per Amica Silentia Lunae and certain poems. However, as our sense of Yeats’s life and thought has been thickened by the publication of his letters and the patient day-by-day filling in of the chronology of his activities, it becomes obvious that much previous criticism is compromised if it attempts to use the undifferentiated terminology of Mask/Mask as a skeleton key to unlock his work. A further difficulty is that ‘Things thought too long can be no longer thought’ (VP 564). The dominant influence of Richard Ellmann’s 1948 study Yeats: The Man and the Masks long after it was superseded (as he himself knew5) is a salutary reminder that until that sudden exhaustion of a ruling idea, overdue change can be hard to effect.

Anachronism is a problem compounded for a generation which has been encouraged to seek answers to the problems of literary texts via the application of post-structuralist literary theory. The allure of applying readings of A Vision back into texts before (say) those poems collected in The Wild Swans at Coole (1917) is dangerously anachronistic. Formulations of Mask doctrine before Per Amica are little studied but have their own integrity. The currency of the term obscures the origin of the thought and erases its unique character when it was at its most influential both as ethic and aesthetic.

My aim, then, is to trace the Mask to its root-tip and review the idea prior to its major exfoliation in Per Amica Silentia Lunae. Of the 647 ‘masks’ in the electronically searchable canon,6 247 fall in AVA and 248 in AVB. The remaining 152 usages fall very unevenly: 34 in Collected Plays, 32 in Memoirs, 29 in Autobiographies, 26 in Later Essays, nine in Essays and Introductions, six in Uncollected Prose 2, five in Explorations, five in Poems, three in The Secret Rose, two in Uncollected Prose 1, and one, very singular usage in Yeats’s preface to Letters to the New Island. The figures confirm an increasing reliance on the Mask as a technical term in the System, but many prior to 1918 may be ignored as objective descriptions of theatrical devices. I start with a brief anthology of Yeats’s remarks c.1908–9 as a vantage point from which to look before and after. The sudden flowering of statements about the Mask in his diary shows that that which had been long-meditated suddenly crystallized as an ethical and aesthetic doctrine during his rereading of his then recently published Collected Works in Verse and Prose. This is unsurprising.7 In the following remarks one discerns the confluence of several earlier lines of thought.

THE MASK: A SELECT ANTHOLOGY

Identifying his ‘worst fault’ as a tendency to be detained by ‘petulant combativeness’, Yeats seems to have embarked on some disciplined ‘anger-management’.

It is always inexcusable to lose one’s self-possession. It always comes from impatience, from a kind of spiritual fright at someone who is here and now more powerful, even if only from stupidity. I am never angry with those in my power. I fear strangers; I fear the representatives of the collective opinion, and so rage stupidly and rudely, exaggerating what I feel and think ... Last night there was a debate on a political question at the Arts Club. I was for a moment inclined to use arguments merely to answer something said by one speaker or the other. In pursuit of the mask I resolved to say only fanciful and personal things, and so to escape out of mere combat. I did so, and I noticed that all the arguments which had occurred to me earlier were said by someone or other. Logic is a machine; one can leave it to itself; unhelped it will force those present to exhaust the subject. The fool is as likely as the sage to speak the appropriate answer to any assertion. If an argument is forgotten, somebody will go home miserable. You throw your money on the table, and you receive so much change. Style, personality (deliberately adopted and therefore a mask), is the only escape from all the heat of the bargaining, from all but the sight of the money changers (Mem 137–39, emphasis added; cf., ‘Estrangement’ 2, Au 461; CW3 341).

‘Mask’ seemingly springs into this 14 January 1909 entry on his old problem of Irish political rhetoric, but I will return to its submerged current of thought a little later.

‘To oppose the new ill-breeding of Ireland, which may in a few years destroy all that has given Ireland a distinguished name ... I can only set up a secondary or interior personality created by me out of the tradition of myself, and this personality (alas, to me only possible in my writings) must be always gracious and simple. It must have that slight separation from immediate interests which makes charm possible, while remaining near enough for fire. Is not charm what it is, perhaps, because it is an escape from mechanism? So much of the world as is dominated by the contest of interests is a mechanism. The newspaper is the roar of the machine. Argument, the moment acknowledged victory is sought, becomes a clash of interests. One should not, above all not in books, which sigh for immortality, argue at all if one is not ready to leave to another apparent victory. In daily life one becomes rude the moment one grudges to the clown his perpetual triumph.8

Having latched onto the Mask as a necessity in social and public life, Yeats began to apply it as a personal ideal after a crisis in his private life, his unhappy sexual consummation with Maud Gonne. On 23 January 1909 he wrote

It seems to me that love, if it is fine, is essentially a discipline, but it needs so much wisdom that the love of Solomon and Sheba must have lasted for all the silence of the Scriptures. In wise love each divines the high secret self of the other and, refusing to believe in the mere daily self, creates a mirror where the lover or the beloved sees an image to copy in daily life. Love also creates the mask.9

In the lecture ‘Friends of my Youth’ (9 March 1910) at the Adelphi Club, Yeats pondered the Rhymers’ Club’s escape from Rhetoric via what he called ‘personality’ and ‘personal utterance’ (YT 29–30). Adapting a nostrum from Goethe ‘“No man ever learned to know himself by contemplation. We learn to know ourselves by action only”’ (YT 31), he developed the equation between personality and the Mask.