complete Grew in pure mind but out of what began? A mound of refuse or the sweepings of a street, Old kettles, old bottles, and a broken can, Old iron, old bones, old rags, that raving slut Who keeps the till. Now that my ladder's gone I must lie down where all the ladders start 40 In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart. 1939
2. In the long title-poem of Yeats's first successful book, The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems (1889), the legendary poet warrior Oisin (pronounced Usheen) is enchanted by the beautiful fair}' woman Niamh (pronounced Neeve), who leads him to the Islands of Delight, of Many Fears, and of Forgetfulness. 3. A play (published in 1892) about an Irish countess (an idealized version of Maud Gonne) who sells her soul to the devil to buy food for the starving Irish poor but is taken up to heaven (for God 'Looks always on the motive, not the deed').
4. In Yeats's play On Baile's Strand (1904), the legendary warrior Cuchulain (pronounced Cu- HOOlin by Yeats, KooHULLin in Irish), crazed by his discovery that he has killed his son, fights with the sea.
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INTRODUCTION [A GENERAL INTRODUCTION FOR MY WORK] / 2053
From Introduction [A General Introduction for My Work]1
I. The First Principle A poet writes always of his personal life, in his finest work out of its tragedies, whatever it be, remorse, lost love or mere loneliness; he never speaks directly as to someone at the breakfast table, there is always a phantasmagoria. Dante and Milton had mythologies, Shakespeare the characters of English history, of traditional romance; even when the poet seems most himself, when Raleigh and gives potentates the lie,2 or Shelley 'a nerve o'er which do creep the else unfelt oppressions of mankind',3 or Byron when 'the heart wears out the breast as the sword wears out the sheath',4 he is never the bundle of accident and incoherence that sits down to breakfast; he has been re-born as an idea, something intended, complete. A novelist might describe his accidence, his incoherence, he must not, he is more type than man, more passion than type. He is Lear, Romeo, Oedipus, Tiresias; he has stepped out of a play and even the woman he loves is Rosalind, Cleopatra, never The Dark Lady.5 He is part of his own phantasmagoria and we adore him because nature has grown intelligible, and by so doing a part of our creative power. 'When mind is lost in the light of the Self', says the Prashna Upanishad,6 'it dreams no more; still in the body it is lost in happiness.' 'A wise man seeks in Self', says the Chandogya Upanishad, 'those that are alive and those that are dead and gets what the world cannot give.' The world knows nothing because it has made nothing, we know everything because we have made everything.
II. Subject-Matter * * T am convinced that in two or three generations it will become generally known that the mechanical theory7 has no reality, that the natural and supernatural are knit together, that to escape a dangerous fanaticism we must study a new science; at that moment Europeans may find something attractive in a Christ posed against a background not of Judaism but of Druidism, not shut off in dead history, but flowing, concrete, phenomenal.
1 was born into this faith, have lived in it, and shall die in it; my Christ, a legitimate deduction from the Creed of St Patrick8 as I think, is that Unity of Being Dante compared to a perfectly proportioned human body, Blake's 'Imag
1. Written in 1937 and originally printed as 'A General Introduction for lYly Work' in Essays and Introductions (1961), the text is excerpted from Later Essays, ed. William H. O'Donnell (1994), vol. 5 of The Collected Works ofW. B. Yeats. 2. From 'The Lie,' bv the English writer and explorer Sir Walter Ralegh (1552-1618): 'Tell potentates, they live / Acting by others' action; / Not loved unless they give, / Not strong but by a faction: / If potentates reply, / Give potentates the lie.' 3. From 'Julian and Maddalo,' by the English poet Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822). 4. Cf. 'So, we'll go no more a roving,' by the English poet George Gordon, Lord Byron (p. 616, lines 5?6).
5. The woman to whom many of Shakespeare's de-idealizing sonnets are addressed. The rest of the names refer to characters in Shakespeare's plays and in Sophocles' ancient Greek drama Oedipus the King. 6. One of a series of ancient philosophical dialogues in Sanskrit. From Ten Principal Upanishads (1937), translated bv Yeats and the Indian monk Shri Purohit Swami'(1882-1 941). 7. Theory explaining the universe in strictly naturalistic, Newtonian terms. 8. From the second paragraph of 'The Confession of St. Patrick, or His Epistle to the Irish,' by the fifth-century saint, the apostle of Ireland.
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2054 / WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
ination',9 what the Upanishads have named 'Self': nor is this unity distant and therefore intellectually understandable, but imminent,1 differing from man to man and age to age, taking upon itself pain and ugliness, 'eye of newt, and leg of frog'.2
Subconscious preoccupation with this theme brought me A Vision,3 its harsh geometry an incomplete interpretation. The 'Irishry' have preserved their ancient 'deposit' through wars which, during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, became wars of extermination; no people, Lecky said at the opening of his Ireland in the Eighteenth Century/ have undergone greater persecution, nor did that persecution altogether cease up to our own day. No people hate as we do in whom that past is always alive; there are moments when hatred poisons my life and I accuse myself of effeminacy because I have not given it adequate expression. It is not enough to have put it into the mouth of a rambling peasant poet. Then I remind myself that, though mine is the first English marriage I know of in the direct line, all my family names are English and that I owe my soul to Shakespeare, to Spenser and to Blake, perhaps to William Morris,5 and to the English language in which I think, speak and write, that everything I love has come to me through English; my hatred tortures me with love, my love with hate. I am like the Tibetan monk who dreams at his initiation that he is eaten by a wild beast and learns on waking that he himself is eater and eaten. This is Irish hatred and solitude, the hatred of human life that made Swift write Gulliver6 and the epitaph upon his tomb, that can still make us wag between extremes and doubt our sanity.
Again and again I am asked why I do not write in Gaelic; some four or five years ago I was invited to dinner by a London society and found myself among London journalists, Indian students and foreign political refugees. An Indian paper says it was a dinner in my honour, I hope not; I have forgotten though I have a clear memory of my own angry mind. I should have spoken as men are expected to speak at public dinners; I should have paid and been paid conventional compliments; then they would speak of the refugees, from that on all would be lively and topical, foreign tyranny would be arraigned, England seem even to those confused Indians the protector of liberty; I grew angrier and angrier; Wordsworth, that typical Englishman, had published his famous sonnet to Francois Dominique Toussaint, a Santo Domingo negro:
There's not a breathing of the common wind That will forget thee7
in the year when Emmet conspired and died, and he remembered that rebellion as little as the half hanging and the pitch cap that preceded it by half a
9. In Jerusalem the English poet William Blake (1 757?1827) describes imagination as the 'Divine body of the lord Jesus.' Yeats's ideas about the Unity of Being are drawn from his reading of Dante's II Convito. 1. In manuscript Yeats wrote 'imanent' (a misspelling of 'immanent'), but he allowed 'imminent' to stand in the typescript. 2. Ingredients of the witches' cauldron in Shakespeare's Macbeth 4.1. 3. Yeats's mystical writings (1925,
