THERE were writing at the end of the war three poets in general acceptance who really were considerable poets: Hardy, Yeats, and de la Mare. The last two were read and enjoyed by a comparatively large public; but Hardy’s acceptance has, I shall offer reason for supposing, always been mainly formal (indeed, it was perhaps not yet general); so I shall leave him till last.

An account of Mr Yeats’s beginnings is an account of the poetical situation in the eighties and nineties. ‘I had learned to think,’ he tells us in Essays,1 ‘in the midst of the last phase of Pre-Raphaelitism.’ And he describes his hostility to the later fashions in painting that his father favoured: ‘I had seen the change coming bit by bit and its defence elaborated by young men fresh from the Paris art schools. “We must paint what is in front of us,” or “A man must be of his own time,” they would say, and if I spoke of Blake or Rossetti they would point out his bad drawing and tell me to admire Carolus Duran and Bastien-Lepage.’2 But Mr Yeats knew differently: ‘In my heart I thought that only beautiful things should be painted, and that only ancient things and the stuff of dreams were beautiful.’3

He had made Prometheus Unbound his ‘sacred book’, and had begun to write poetry in imitation of Shelley and Spenser, whose styles he had ‘tried to mix together’ in a pastoral play. His father introduced him to The Earthly Paradise and he came to know William Morris personally, and found him a congenial spirit. When he became one of the Rhymers’ Club along with Johnson, Dowson, and the rest he readily adopted the current accent and idiom: ‘Johnson’s phrase that life is ritual expressed something that was in all our thoughts.’4 They had their high-priest – ‘If Rossetti was a subconscious influence, and perhaps the most powerful of all, we looked consciously to Pater for our philosophy’ – and no one exceeded Mr Yeats in devotion. His early prose is sometimes comic in its earnestness of discipleship, in its unctuously cadenced concern for ‘the transmutation of art into life’:

Yet if, dutifully, he ‘noted also many poets and prose-writers of every age, but only those who were a little weary of life, as indeed the greatest have been everywhere’,6 there is a recurrent theme, a recurrent tone, as, for instance, in his reference to ‘simpler days before men’s minds, subtilized and complicated by the romantic movement in art and literature, began to tremble on the verge of some unimagined revelation’,7 that betrays later influences than Pater’s. Pater modulates into the pronounced esotericism indicated by the title, Rosa Alchemica; an esotericism that was among the things brought back by Arthur Symons from Paris. The title Yeats gives to his autobiography over these years, The Trembling of the Veil, comes from Mallarmé, ‘while’, he tells us,8 ‘Villiers de L’Isle Adam had shaped whatever in my Rosa Alchemica Pater had not shaped.’ It is difficult for us today to regard The Symbolist Movement in Art and Literature as a work of great importance, but it was such to Yeats and his contemporaries, and this fact, together with the Continental developments that the book offers to reflect, may serve to remind us that the Victorian poetic tradition was not merely a poetic tradition, but a response to the general characteristics of the age.

‘I am very religious,’ says Mr Yeats in his Autobiographies, ‘and deprived by Huxley and Tyndall, whom I detested, of the simple-minded religion of my childhood, I had made a new religion, almost an infallible church of poetic tradition, of a fardel of stories, and of personages, and of emotions, inseparable from their first expression, passed on from generation to generation by poets and painters with some help from philosophers and theologians. I wished for a world where I could discover this tradition perpetually … I had even created a dogma: “Because those imaginary people are created out of the deepest instinct of man, to be his measure and his norm, whatever I can imagine those mouths speaking may be the nearest I can go to truth.”’9 He hated Victorian science, he tells us,10 with a ‘monkish hate’, and with it he associated the Victorian world. Of A Doll’s House he says characteristically: ‘I hated the play; what was it but Carolus Duran, Bastien-Lepage, Huxley, and Tyndall all over again; I resented being invited to admire dialogue so close to modern educated speech that music and style were impossible.’11 Modern thought and the modern world, being inimical to the hopes of the heart and the delight of the senses and the imagination, are repudiated in the name of poetry – and of life.

This last clause, or the emphasis due to it, distinguishes him from the other Victorian romantics, distinguishes him too from his fellow esoterics. He may quote as epigraph to The Secret Rose Villiers de L’Isle Adam’s ‘As for living, our servants will do that for us’; but there is about his contemplated withdrawal a naïvely romantic, wholehearted practical energy that reminds us more of Shelley than of Rossetti or Pater. ‘I planned a mystical Order,’ he tells us in Autobiographies,12 ‘which should buy or hire the castle, and keep it as a place where its members could retire for a while from the world, and where we might establish mysteries like those of Eleusis and Samothrace; and for ten years to come my most impassioned thought was a vain attempt to find philosophy and create ritual for that Order. I had an unshakable conviction, arising how or whence I cannot tell, that invisible gates would open as they opened for Blake, as they opened for Swedenborg, as they opened for Boehme, and that this philosophy would find its manuals of devotion in all imaginative literature, and set before Irishmen for special manual an Irish literature which, though made by many minds, would seem the work of a single mind, and turn our places of beauty or legendary association into holy symbols.’ It is not for nothing that the Prometheus Unbound had been his sacred book. And the latter part of this passage has another significance: Mr Yeats was an Irishman.

But I anticipate: it is at his poetry that we should be looking by now; it is only as they arise directly out of his poetry that the considerations I have touched on in the last paragraph matter. His early verse bears out what he tells us of his beginnings. William Morris could say with truth, ‘You write my sort of poetry.’13 This (but for the last two lines, which suggest Tom Moore) Morris himself might have written:

And Tennyson is behind this (though it could hardly be mistaken for Tennyson):

And this with its characteristic burden, modulates into Keats and out again:

The long poem which gave its name to the...