Odd & Haunting Master

ESSAYS AND INTRODUCTIONS (530 pp.) --William Butler Yeats--Macmillan ($6.50).

When William Butler Yeats paid his first visit to that high priestess of occultism, Madame Blavatsky, the lady's pet cuckoo came out of a broken Swiss clock and cuckooed at him. It would be frivolous to call the encounter a recognition scene, but in some ways the poet and the bird were wackily well matched. Yeats was a genius, probably the 20th century's greatest poet. But his private life and personal beliefs were filled with quirks and oddities, mystical beliefs and spiritualist devotions. Essays and Introductions, published in book form 22 years after his death, is a voyage into that other area of Yeats's life. Behind the book's orchidaceous rhetoric lies the cult of beauty; behind that lies the mystique of art as religion; but behind everything lies the knowledge that however strange his notions, they somehow fed the glories of his poetry. He did not mind seeming foolish:

. . . From all that makes a wise old man That can be praised of all; 0 what am I that I should not seem For the song's sake a fool? I pray--for fashion's word is out And prayer comes round again-- That I may seem, though I die old, A foolish, passionate man.

Vampire for Hire. Merely to contemplate what Yeats seriously believed in is enough to stagger the modern reader. He had, or vowed he had, complete faith in ghosts, fairies, magic, table rapping and spiritualism. He attended seances religiously, and once claimed to have seen a man in black and a hunchbacked woman fashion human flesh out of mysterious chemicals. At another seance, at which the spirits became very annoyed, witnesses reported that "Willie Yeats was banging his head on the table as though he had a fit, muttering to himself." Yeats sometimes primed the medium via telepathy, but he doubtless was not amused by the "seer" who responded: "I have a vision of a square pond, but I can see your thought, and you expect me to see an oblong pond." On another humorously humorless occasion, the poet deputed a vampire to plague one of his enemies. The reckless, insane logic of the spirit world sometimes pursued Yeats far beyond the seance rooms. Years after his long, frustrated courtship of the hauntingly lovely firebird of the Irish Troubles, Maud Gonne, had ended with her marriage to another man, the fortyish Yeats showed up in her home on the coast of France and promptly proposed marriage to Maud Gonne's eleven-year-old daughter, a scene that might bring pause even to the imagination of a Nabokov.

Reason Is Evil. To the romantic temperament, nothing succeeds like excess, and Yeats preached the dogma of excess as an esthetic necessity. He applauded Shelley for agreeing with Blake "that Reason not only created Ugliness, but all other evils." Such statements seem slightly more reasonable when Yeats is placed where he belongs, with the first wave of what might be called the Counter-Industrial Revolution. His obsession with myths, magic and symbols was a poet's way of fighting the machine. In a poet's intuitive fashion, he was plumbing the "collective unconscious" before Jung labeled it, celebrating the irrational before Freud discovered its starring role. Far from having the gift of self-analysis, Yeats possessed instead a talent for endless self-dramatization. There are extended comments in the essays on Shakespeare, Shelley, Blake, William Morris and Balzac, but one quickly discovers that these are pseudonyms for William Butler Yeats. Then there is Yeats, the prophet of the Celtic Twilight (the "cultic twalette," Joyce called it), sitting on the turf in Connacht and self-consciously schooling himself to be a poet of the peasants. But as Stephen Spender once noted, the calculated lyricism of "I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree" suggests "the image of a young man reclining on a yellow satin sofa."

"Lion & Eagle." Yet the Irish literary renaissance is unthinkable without Yeats. It was he who found John Millington Synge dawdling in the cafes of Paris and packed him off to the Aran Islands, conceivably the most significant trip in modern dramatic literature, for out of it came Riders to the Sea and The Playboy of the Western World. Again, if Yeats had not spoon-fed Dublin's infant Abbey Theater with the heady ethnic pabulum of Cathleen ni Houlihan, there would have been neither stage nor actors for the memorable tragi-comedies of Sean O'Casey. And above all, there was the matchless mature poetry of Yeats himself, not popular balladry as he had hoped, not mythic, mysterious and magical as he had planned, but lucid, passionate, realistic, masterly and, at its finest, universal.

As a poet, Yeats was like an element in nature. In old age, he loved to tell the tale of an ancient sage (possibly William Butler Yeats) who was asked, "Who are your Masters?" And he replied, "The wind and the harlot, the virgin and the child, the lion and the eagle."

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