Preface

In 1942, the American poet Delmore Schwartz asked whether any book could tell ‘the whole truth’ about W.B. Yeats (1865–1939):

Yeats studies have globally multiplied during the last seventy years, and ‘the whole truth’ will remain ever elusive. Yet Schwartz raised questions of critical perspective that still affect Yeats’s position in modern Anglophone poetry, however secure that position may be. Critics have often explored his diverse impact on individual poets (not only English-language poets), and ‘influence’ will be a factor in this study too. But rather than attempt the Sisyphean task of tracking every homage, echo or reworking, I want to consider Yeats’s broader aesthetic presence: to look at some facets of Yeats with ‘modern poetry’ in mind, some facets of ‘modern poetry’ with Yeats in mind. If Yeats can be hard to get into focus, ‘modern poetry’, in theory and practice, can be hard to get into focus without Yeats. It does not help that the foundational narratives are more likely to centre on T.S. Eliot or Ezra Pound. So I will be partly concerned with ways in which Yeats’s poetry has, or has not, been read. That includes critiques conditioned by ‘native feelings about Ireland’, aesthetic categories like ‘modernism’ and ‘Symbolism’, cultural-political theory as represented by the ‘archipelagic’ and ‘postcolonial’ (‘death of the old gang’) paradigms and approaches more specific to poetry: one chapter discusses Yeats the ‘war poet’. There is also the key question of how Yeats himself reads ‘Yeats and modern poetry’.