The LIfe of WB Yeats, Terence Brown, review by Pat Boran

The Life of W B Yeats, Terence Brown. Gill and Macmillan.

PAT BORAN

(Sunday Tribune)

As poets go, W B Yeats has aroused more controversy, and by extension attracted more biographers, than most. The fact that the poems range from the intensely private, risking what Terence Brown here calls 'the absence of communicable meaning', to poems such as the famous Easter 1916 which seem to speak on behalf of a nation, has undoubtedly added to his many attractions. But the quasi-mystical origins of much of the work have made him a difficult subject.

For there was another side to the poet who seemed to embody notions of craft and learning. Though Brown's book appears under an oddly generic title, it is, he tells us in the afterword, 'the study of a writer for whom magic, ritual and "communication" with the dead and spirits were profoundly experiential things'. And, as he goes on to say, 'the artistic consequences were not always congenial to liberal humanist moral feeling'..

That Brown identifies Yeats's obsessive relationship with the spirit world as simultaneously a threat to his very humanity and as a source for his work neatly and convincingly outlines the project of this book. That he enables the reader to take the magic as seriously as did Yeats himself, and even to feel how the poet's peculiar brand of cosmic logic drew him on to the Fascism of his later years makes for compelling reading.

For Yeats, where poetry came from was one of the great mysteries. An obsession with symbols and symbolism even led him to claim that 'Poetry and religion are the same thing'. This stance may well have been, as Brown has it, a reaction against 'the materialism of much Victorian science', but the religion Yeats had in mind, it must be said, was far from what most people understood by that word.

For the poet who felt called towards mystery - as The Stolen Child is called towards the wild - religion was a stew of folklore, oriental and occidental mythology, and a fair smattering of the mumbo-jumbo fancy-dress magick of The Order of the Golden Dawn, an organisation in which he crossed swords with the lunatic clown Aleister Crowley, and in which his own initiation involved, among other things, being bound to a cross.

But paradox was a driving force, and the poet who devoted himself to this inward journey (with the discipline of a scientist) was the same man about whom one acquaintance noted 'he is not comfortable with individuals: he needs an audience to which he can discourse in a pontifical manner'. Maud Gonne had already glimpsed this major flaw when she cautioned that 'the outer side of politics' was not for him.

It might be said that this public unease equally affected the poet's love life, so that after his proposal of marriage to Gonne was rejected, a desire to somehow complete the intended project saw him shift his attentions to her daughter. Even his eventual marriage (advised by his astrological chart) was saved only when his new wife appears to have learnt that the only way to hold onto him was to join in his game.

Thus began, on the second night of their honeymoon, what Brown calls their 'occult marriage', a nightly meeting of the minds of William and George, in the presence of a grand cast of guides, facilitators and otherworldly Communicators. (In the beginning George admitted to faking the automatic writing that quickly had William in thrall, but later claimed to feel herself 'seized by a superior power'.)

Among the many dangers of being the conduit for such wisdom and occult learning in a world in which 'the centre cannot hold', however, is the conclusion that one is irreplaceable, a member of a long dreamt-of intellectual elite, rather than, for instance, a person with 'an insecure hold on personal identity'.

From such an elevated, even Promethean position, the journey to Fascism was not long. Indeed, the advent of war in Europe in 1914 found Yeats 'almost indifferent', and the mixed feelings provoked by Easter 1916 provide Brown with the material for some of his most insightful analysis.

Increasingly the life and the poems become one, culminating in the almost deranged fictional complexities of A Vision (first published in 1925), after which perhaps his greatest work, the 1932 sequence Words for Music Perhaps, is 'that vital, exalted, gross text'.

Could Lady Gregory have imagined he was capable of it when, half a lifetime earlier, she'd been bent on, as Brown puts it, 'collecting a poet'? Or the younger Ezra Pound when he had counselled 'concrete statement'? Could even the younger Yeats have foreseen he would find a new direction, a Second Coming of sorts, in his last years? Or that the work would survive the dangerous naiveté of his politics?

Terence Brown has drawn a life which Yeats might not have been entirely happy to recognise, but one can be sure the significance of its appearance on the doorstep of a new millennium would not have escaped him.