He believed that London, with its newspapers, factories, and slums, was the inevitable result of this mind-set, and he regarded those who stood in opposition as radical visionaries championing art, the imagination, and universal spiritualism. What Yeats offered in The Celtic Twilight was thus not simply an oral tradition that might serve as an object of national pride in Ireland but an entirely different mode of being or way of existing in the modern world. Although most of his readers would never live among the peasants, they could emulate this imaginative Celtic temperament by following Yeats’s own lead: “You too meet with like imagination, doubtless, somewhere, wherever your ruling stars will have it, Saturn driving you to the woods, or the Moon, it may be, to the edges of the sea.” Like many other mystical thinkers, Yeats believed that the turn of the century signaled the beginning of a new spiritual age, and The Celtic Twilight offered readers a guide. Beauty is the gateway to this realm of light and shadow, where reason is cast away and our thoughts move freely between the seen and the unseen, the mundane and the magical.

THE PLAYS

As is the case with folklore, Yeats’s early commitment to drama was rooted in spiritualism, cultural nationalism, and a broader desire to revitalize the arts in an imaginatively bankrupt modern age. This unconventional dramatic vision put him at odds with the dominant trends in late-nineteenth-century Irish theater. Most productions in Dublin featured works that were popular in London and that were often staged by English touring companies, including the comic operas of Gilbert and Sullivan, contemporary social realism, English melodramas, and, of course, Shakespeare. Yeats generally viewed these types of drama, with the notable exception of Shakespeare’s works, as examples of what we would today call cultural imperialism, in that they either ignored Ireland altogether or merely used Irish characters for comic purposes, part of a long tradition of drunken, boisterous, and teary-eyed “stage Irishmen.” Yeats, though, was equally hostile to the productions at the Queen’s Royal Theatre in Dublin, which, beginning in the 1880s, sought to boost ticket sales by featuring patriotic Irish melodramas (and, according to George Bernard Shaw, by serving “as a market for ladies who lived by selling themselves”).11 Although Yeats would later overstate his willingness during this period to champion artistic quality over nationalist sentiment, his suspicion of patriotic melodrama underscores an important point. Yeats’s dramatic vision was less about what is represented onstage and more about how it is represented. Plays that relied upon elaborate plots, multiple character interactions, or dialogue and scenery intended to mimic real life—the basic elements, that is, of theatrical realism—would inevitably reinforce the empty superficiality of modern existence because they appealed mainly to the rational mind and not the imagination. For Yeats, patriotic melodrama, though Irish in theme, was thus essentially English in spirit. True cultural transformation required a fundamentally different theatrical approach.

The core aspects of this new approach are evident in The Land of Heart’s Desire, which Yeats completed in early 1894. Set in an Irish peasant cottage during the late 1700s, the play focuses on Maire, a newly married bride who is instinctively drawn to a life of the imagination, even as the other characters stress her duties to the home and to the Catholic Church. Although operating mainly within the parameters of realism, the play has little in common with commercial theater. Indeed, just after completing The Land of Heart’s Desire, Yeats traveled to Paris for the premiere of Villiers de l’Isle-Adam’s decadent symbolist play Axel, and he immediately recognized a kinship, claiming that Villiers’s work was part of a “new current” in drama that would inspire all those who “have grown tired of the photographing of life, and have returned by the path of symbolism to imagination and poetry, the only things which are ever permanent.”12 In his deceptively simple peasant folk drama, Yeats was already traveling down the same path. All of the props, including the yellow book of ancient Irish legends and the crucifix, are symbolically charged, suggestive of the opposing forces acting upon Maire’s heart. The stage space fixes our attention upon the cottage door, which marks a boundary between the realms of ordinary human consciousness and the supernatural, while the plot is advanced by repeated patterns of movement and poetic language. Each time that Maire goes to the door, scattering primroses or offering milk and turf to unseen travelers, the play takes on an increasingly ritualized quality that culminates in the dance of the fairy child. As the curtain falls and we are left contemplating the song of the fairies, the audience is momentarily brought into a liminal space, at the threshold between the known and the unknown, where all that we can imagine is as real as anything that we merely see.

The Land of Heart’s Desire was written for the actress and bohemian “New Woman” Florence Farr, whose unconventional lifestyle Yeats greatly admired, but the primary inspiration for so many of his works during this period, including The Countess Cathleen, was Maud Gonne. Tall and classically beautiful, the wealthy daughter of a British army officer, yet an ardent nationalist, a commanding speaker, interested in spiritualism, and deeply invested in women’s rights, Gonne was not simply unconventional; she was otherworldly. Or at least that is how she seemed to Yeats when they first met on January 30, 1889:

Presently a hansom drove up to our door at Bedford Park with Miss Maud Gonne, who brought an introduction to my father from old John O’Leary, the Fenian Leader. . . . To-day, with her great height and the unchangeable lineaments of her form, she looks the Sibyl I would have had played by Florence Farr, but in that day she seemed a classical impersonation of the Spring, the Virgilian commendation “She walks like a goddess” made for her alone. Her complexion was luminous, like that of apple-blossom through which the light falls, and I remember her standing that first day by a great heap of such blossoms in the window.13

This overtly theatrical passage from his Autobiographies, which includes the unlikely detail of apple blossoms in January, highlights an obvious but important point. Maud Gonne the muse, the offstage presence in so many of his early works, is only tangentially related to Maud Gonne the human being, the complex person who was such a force in Yeats’s day-to-day life. Where art is concerned, Yeats was always reinventing Gonne as a symbol or persona in order to reawaken his own creativity. When writing The Countess Cathleen, Yeats was directly motivated by Gonne’s efforts on behalf of the poor in Donegal but indirectly by his sense that her commitment to political causes, though indicative of a noble selflessness, belied a yearning for the solitary realms of art and the imagination. His assessment of her character hardly squares with the historical woman who seemed energized by political activism, yet this romantic vision of Gonne enabled Yeats to transform what would initially seem an unpromising melodramatic plot—an aristocratic heroine sells her soul to the devil in order to save her starving peasants—into a stirring meditation on Celtic spiritualism. Although God ultimately redeems Cathleen’s sacrifice, her melancholic “longing for a deeper peace” among the pagan lands of the fairy “Shee” generates some of the most haunting passages in all of Yeats’s works, including the lyric “Who Goes with Fergus?” which so moved a young James Joyce that he sang it to his dying mother. This does not mean that we must uncritically accept the way that Yeats’s play limits female power to an expression of noble self-sacrifice, a far cry from Gonne’s own belief that women should take an active role in transforming society. It does, however, remind us that Yeats’s aesthetic vision was, from the start, rooted in drama. Art was meaningful precisely because it turned ordinary existence into a formalized performance, thereby exposing those deeper emotions and spiritual truths that we cannot grasp amid the chaos and incoherence of our daily lives.

THE POEMS

Yeats’s 1895 collection Poems brings together, in revised forms, early works drawn mainly from The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems (1889) and The Countess Kathleen and Various Legends and Lyrics (1892).