1937),inwhich he sketches out and schematizes many of his theories. 4. A History of Ireland in the Eighteenth Century, by the Irish historian William Edward Hartpole Lecky (1838-1903). 5. English poet and designer (1834- 1896). Edmund Spenser (1 552?1 599), English poet who, in addition to poetic works such as The Faerie Queene, wrote a treatise proposing the extermination of the Irish. 6. Gulliver's Travels, by the Irish satirist Jonathan Swift (1667?1745). Yeats's poem 'Swift's Epitaph,' a loose translation of the Latin on Swift's tomb, claims that 'Swift has sailed into his rest; / Savage indignation there / Cannot lacerate his breast.' 7. From 'To Toussaint L'Ouverture,' by the English poet William Wordsworth (1770-1850). L'Ouverture (1743?1803) died in prison after rebelling against France's rule in Haiti.
.
INTRODUCTION [A GENERAL INTRODUCTION FOR MY WORK] / 2055
dozen years.8 That there might be no topical speeches I denounced the oppression of the people of India; being a man of letters, not a politician, I told how they had been forced to learn everything, even their own Sanscrit, through the vehicle of English till the first discoverers of wisdom had become bywords for vague abstract facility. I begged the Indian writers present to remember that no man can think or write with music and vigour except in his mother tongue. I turned a friendly audience hostile, yet when I think of that scene I am unrepentant and angry.
I could no more have written in Gaelic than can those Indians write in English; Gaelic is my national language, but it is not my mother tongue.
III. Style and Attitude Style is almost unconscious. I know what I have tried to do, little what I have done. Contemporary lyric poems, even those that moved me?'The Stream's Secret', 'Dolores'9?seemed too long, but an Irish preference for a swift current might be mere indolence, yet Burns may have felt the same when he read Thomson and Cowper.1 The English mind is meditative, rich, deliberate; it may remember the Thames2 valley. I planned to write short lyrics or poetic drama where every speech [would] be short and concentrated, knit by dramatic tension, and I did so with more confidence because young English poets were at that time writing out of emotion at the moment of crisis, though their old slow-moving meditation returned almost at once. Then, and in this English poetry has followed my lead, I tried to make the language of poetry coincide with that of passionate, normal speech. I wanted to write in whatever language comes most naturally when we soliloquise, as I do all day long, upon the events of our own lives or of any life where we can see ourselves for the moment. I sometimes compare myself with the mad old slum women I hear denouncing and remembering; 'how dare you,' I heard one say of some imaginary suitor, 'and you without health or a home'. If I spoke my thoughts aloud they might be as angry and as wild. It was a long time before I had made a language to my liking; I began to make it when I discovered some twenty years ago that I must seek, not as Wordsworth thought words in common use,3 but a powerful and passionate syntax, and a complete coincidence between period and stanza. Because I need a passionate syntax for passionate subject-matter 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.4 I would lose myself, become joyless like those mad old women. The translators of the Bible, Sir Thomas Browne,5 certain translators from the Greek when translators still bothered about rhythm, created a form midway between prose and verse that seems natural to impersonal meditation; but all
8. Paper caps filled with burning pitch were used 2. English river that runs through London. for torture during the martial law preceding and 3. In the preface to Lyrical Ballads (1800), Words- following the Irish Rising of 1 798. Robert Emmet worth says that poetry should be written in 'lan( 1778?1803), Irish nationalist executed after the guage really used by men.' Irish rebellion of 1803. 4. In his Oxford Book of Modern Verse (1936),
9. Long poems by Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-Yeats included free verse by the American poet 1882) and Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837-Ezra Pound (1885-1972), the English poet Walter 1909), respectively. Turner (1889-1946), and the English poet and 1. James Thomson (1700-1748) and William novelist D. H. Lawrence (1885- 1930). Cowper (1731?1800), poets most famous for their 5. English physician and author (1605?1682) long poems. Robert Burns (1759?1796), Scottish with an elaborate prose style. poet of short lyrics.
.
2056 / WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
that is personal soon rots; it must be packed in ice or salt. Once when I was in delirium from pneumonia I dictated a letter to George Moore6 telling him to eat salt because it was a symbol of eternity; the delirium passed, I had no memory of that letter, but I must have meant what I now mean. If I wrote of personal love or sorrow in free verse, or in any rhythm that left it unchanged, amid all its accident, I would be full of self-contempt because of my egotism and indiscretion, and I foresee the boredom of my reader. I must choose a traditional stanza, even what I alter must seem traditional. I commit my emotion to shepherds, herdsmen, camel-drivers, learned men, Milton's or Shelley's Platonist, that tower Palmer drew.7 Talk to me of originality and I will turn on you with rage. I am a crowd, I am a lonely man, I am nothing. Ancient salt is best packing. The heroes of Shakespeare convey to us through their looks, or through the metaphorical patterns of their speech, the sudden enlargement of their vision, their ecstasy at the approach of death, 'She should have died hereafter', 'Of many million kisses, the poor last', 'Absent thee from felicity awhile'; they have become God or Mother Goddess, the pelican, 'My baby at my breast',8 but all must be cold; no actress has ever sobbed when she played Cleopatra, even the shallow brain of a producer has never thought of such a thing. The supernatural is present, cold winds blow across our hands, upon our faces, the thermometer falls, and because of that cold we are hated by journalists and groundlings. There may be in this or that detail painful tragedy, but in the whole work none. 1 have heard Lady Gregory say, rejecting some play in the modern manner sent to the Abbey Theatre, 'Tragedy must be a joy to the man who dies.' Nor is it any different with lyrics, songs, narrative poems; neither scholars nor the populace have sung or read anything generation after generation because of its pain. The maid of honour whose tragedy they sing must be lifted out of history with timeless pattern, she is one of the four Maries,9 the rhythm is old and familiar, imagination must dance, must be carried beyond feeling into the aboriginal ice. Is ice the correct word? I once
boasted, copying the phrase from a letter of my father's, that I would write a poem 'cold and passionate as the dawn'.1
When I wrote in blank verse I was dissatisfied; my vaguely mediaeval Countess Cathleen fitted the measure, but our Heroic Age went better, or so I fancied, in the ballad metre of The Green Helmet.2 There was something in what I felt about Deirdre, about Cuchulain,3 that rejected the Renaissance and its characteristic metres, and this was a principal reason why I created in dance plays the form that varies blank verse with lyric metres. When I speak blank verse and analyse my feelings I stand at a moment of history when instinct, its traditional songs and dances, its general agreement, is of the past. I have
6. Irish novelist (1852-1933). 7. The English artist Samuel Palmer (1805-1881) drew 'The Lonely Tower' (1879) as an illustration of Milton's poem about the pensive man, 'II Penseroso' (1645), in which a scholar in a 'high lonely tower' is dedicated to uncovering Plato's insights; in Shelley's 'Prince Athanase,' the idealistic hero searches for love. 8. From Macbeth 5.4, Anthony and Cleopatra 4.15. Hamlet 5.2, respectively. 'Pelican': thought to feed its babies with its blood and thus often a symbol of self-sacrifice. 9. Mary, Queen of Scots (1542?1587) was served by four women named Mary. 1. From 'The Fisherman' (1916): 'Before I am old / I shall have written him one / Poem maybe as cold / And passionate as the dawn.' 2. The Countess Cathleen (1892, later revised) is written in blank verse; The Green Helmet (1910), in iambic heptameter, which resembles the meter of a ballad (alternating between four- and three- stress lines). 3. The warrior hero of the Irish mythological Ulster Cycle; he also appears in
