The First Yeats

Tablet
'Poetry and posterity' by Michael Glover
When a poet, 70 years after his death, is released from the constraints of copyright into the public domain, he becomes every man's ghost and every publisher's dream.Posterity plays fast and loose with him.New editions spring up like the first offerings of spring.This is now the case with W.B. Yeats, that great Anglo-Irish poet who died in 1939, and who is still our contemporary in so many ways.Can he really have been dead for so long?Is he not alive, still, within us all?
This month sees the publication of two new paperback editions of selections of Yeats' poetry.One, a Selected Poems, spans his entire career, from the poems of the 1880s to his death.The second, The First Yeats: poems by W.B. Yeats 1889-1899, deals exclusively with those years in which the young Yeats was rhapsodically lost in the miasma of the Celtic Twilight.
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The second book takes us back to the very beginnings of Yeats' career as a poet, long before he had transformed himself into the man who came later to be regarded, alongside Eliot and Auden, as among the greatest of the moderns.The excellent introduction by Edward Larrisy helps us to bridge the gap between the young man and the older.He helps us to understand how a passion for Irish myth and early literature shifted seamlessly into a commitment to Irish nationalism, how fairyfolk and the murderous gun-toter seemed able to link hands.He gives us the earliest published versions of poems which were sometimes later revised in order to accomodate changes of heart and mind.It is a fascinating exercise in literary archaeology.
In an essay published just before the outbreak of the First World War, the poet Ezra Pound inveighed against the vague, slushy, hopelessly outmoded diction of the Victorians: all those dim lands of peace.This phrase sums up the early Yeats to a tee.The poetic diction of many of these early poems feels wearily hand-me-down; you begin to lose yourself in the mind-numbing incantatory monotone of it all.You almost lose count of the times you have read and re-read such adjectives as pale, dim, forlorn, drooping, sad.And yet out of this strangely archaic world emerged a poet who felt the terrible, anarchic violence of the twentieth century on his pulses almost unlike any other.