Abstract: Folk culture is of great significance to Yeats. He collected tales, folklores, and ballads in County Sligo and County Galway and published volumes of folk tales. A hybrid of primitive folk culture and original work, Yeats’s collection reveals that he is not an inauthentic folklorist but imaginative writer who grows into a national poet, and we could attribute its cause and origin to the occultism. The folk tradition he endeavors to revive becomes an indispensable part of his poetry and poetics, with which he creates an esoteric and universal literature for both the elite AngloIrish and the Catholic peasants; and with which he reconciles the religious and political conflicts and achieves the Unity of Culture.
The Yeats Journal of Korea/ 한국 예이츠 저널 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.14354/yjk.2019.58.105 Vol 58 (2019): 105-117 W B Yeats and Folk Culture Zhou Dan Abstract: Folk culture is of great significance to Yeats He collected tales, folklores, and ballads in County Sligo and County Galway and published volumes of folk tales A hybrid of primitive folk culture and original work, Yeats’s collection reveals that he is not an inauthentic folklorist but imaginative writer who grows into a national poet, and we could attribute its cause and origin to the occultism The folk tradition he endeavors to revive becomes an indispensable part of his poetry and poetics, with which he creates an esoteric and universal literature for both the elite Anglo-Irish and the Catholic peasants; and with which he reconciles the religious and political conflicts and achieves the Unity of Culture Key words: Yeats, folk culture, national poet, esoteric literature Author: Zhou Dan is Associate Professor of English in the Department of English, Wuhan University of Technology Her areas of research interest are modern poetry and comparative literature E-mail: danzhou@whut.edu.cn 제목: W B 예이츠와 민속문화 우리말 요약: 민속문화는 예이츠에게 큰 의미가 있다 그는 슬라고와 골웨이 현 지역 의 야담, 민속, 및 민요를 수집하여 민속집을 간행했다 원시민속문화와 창조적 작품으 로서 예이츠의 민속집은 그가 국민시인으로 성장하는 창의적 작가이면서 독창적인 인 속학자인 사실을 보여준다 따라서 우리는 그 근본과 원인을 오컬티즘으로 돌린 수 있 다 그가 재생시키려고 한 민속전통은 그의 시와 시학의 불가분의 부분이 되며, 이로 써 엘리트 앙글로 아이리쉬 계층과 카톨릭 농민들을 위한 신비주의적이고 보편적인 문학을 만들고, 이로써 중교적 정치적 갈등을 풀고 문화의 통합을 달성한다 주제어: 예이츠, 민속문화, 국민시인, 신비주의 문학 저자: 주 단은 우한 기술대학교 영문과 부교수이다 그의 관심분야는 현대시와 비교문 학이다 106 Zhou Dan I rish folk culture is of great significance to Yeats throughout his life and career He views the cultural heritage highly: “From that great candle of the past we must all light our little tapers” (LNI, 158) Born an Anglo-Irish, he stayed in Sligo until nine years old (Au 56) and came back to Sligo once or twice every year The following years he traveled between Dublin and London and finally the family settled in Dublin in 1881 The running-around experience shadows his later career that would be different from his English and Irish peers When struggling to be a poet, he first collected tales, folklores, and ballads in County Sligo and County Galway and published several volumes of folk tales His early acquaintance with the Sligo countrymen influences his taste and likings: “It was through the Middletons perhaps that I got my interest in country stories, and certainly the first faery-stories that I heard were in the cottages about their houses” (Au 48) The “country stories” he had heard then came into his collections of folk tales later, inspired his writing of poetry, prose, fiction and drama, and became an indispensable part of his mythic poetics I An Authentic Folklorist In an 1893 review of T.F Thinstelton Dyer’s The Ghost World, Yeats writes that “Folk-lore is at once the Bible, the Thirty-nine Articles, and the Book of Common Prayer, and well-nigh all the great poets have lived by its light Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Shakespeare, and even Dante, Goethe and Keats, were little more than folklorists with musical tongues” (UP, 284) As a young man, aspiring to preserve and redeem an authentic Irish folk culture, Yeats collected, anthologized, and reviewed the work of Irish writers in his way Although he later becomes a Celtic Revivalist, he begins his career following the nationalist ritual of remembering, honoring, and refashioning the W B Yeats and Folk Culture 107 past, which gives him poetic inspiration and intensifies his later ambivalent attitudes toward nationalism He anthologizes and publishes Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry (1888), Irish Fairy Tales (1892), The Countess Kathleen and Various Legends and Lyrics (1892), The Celtic Twilight (1893), and later A Book of Irish Verse (1900) The compilation work he engaged in from the late 1880s to 1890s, depending much upon ancient traditions, oral or recorded, is a form of redemptive ethnography that strove to salvage the lost or vanishing culture He is quite nostalgic for the faded glory of the Celtic culture and endeavors to re-discover it based on a strong fairy-faith and spiritualism Several hundred years of colonization have brought about political violence, ethnic conflicts, and religious disintegration in Ireland Yeats believes that the re-discovery of the folk culture would be the core of the Celtic Revival: “I thought we might bring the halves together if we had a national literature that made Ireland beautiful in memory, and yet had been freed from provincialism by an exacting criticism, a European pose.” (Au 104-05) The “national literature” that he calls for throughout the 1890s would seek its identity not in the European tradition but in Ireland’s own folk tradition; and the fundamental difference between Ireland and the rest of Europe lies in that Ireland was still caught up in an epic era, and that in such an era folk culture forms the basis of a national literature: “All that is greatest in that literature is based upon legend—upon those tales which are made by no one man, but by the nation itself through a slow process of modification and adaptation, to express its loves and its hates, its likes and its dislikes” (UP 273) He associates the early legendary phase of Irish literature with those great cultures—especially Greek and India to indicate that Ireland would also one day discover the same greatness possessed by those who “were little more than folklorists with musical tongues” (UP 284) Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry, along with other collections 108 Zhou Dan in 1890s, includes pieces previously collected by Revivalist historian Standish O’Grady, nationalist John O’Leary, academician Eugene O’ Curry, folklorists and collectors like Patrick Kennedy, T Crofton, Lady Gregory, Sir William and Lady Wilde and Gaelic Leaguers like Douglas Hyde, and some original poetry by Samuel Ferguson, William Allingham, and Yeats himself In the process of compilation, Yeats is situated in the same dilemma as others are while resolving the tension between the urge to present the material faithfully and the impulse to revise and rationalize it But, being different from ethnographers who resolve the tension through line-by-line transliteration, Yeats is searching “Ireland’s proximate past for imaginative literature that was distinctly Irish, uncorrupted by the skepticism and scientism he perceived in England and by English stereotypes of Irishmen, but also a literature of respectable artistic merit” (Castle 54) The literature he aspires to evoke is that “of a class for whom every incident in the old rut of birth, love, pain and death has cropped up unchanged for centuries” (FFT 5), and he hopes to establish a “distinctly Irish” literature away from the influence of British dominance and modern science The “unchanging” nature of the distinctly Irish literature is an escape from temporality and sustains the enduring value of a pristine primitive condition Yeats notices that the preservation and translation shifted both the nature and the function of the original Irish folklore As an Anglo-Irish descendent who does not understand Gaelic, he but seeks to revive the folk traditions for a cultural nationalism In 1893, Yeats published The Celtic Twilight under his own name He goes to the field, collects tales from familiar villagers of County Sligo and County Galway, and produces a kind of “scientific text” that “eventually becomes a privileged element in the potential store of historical memory for the nonliterate society concerned” (Castle 60-61) Although the tales in The Celtic Twilight follow the patterns and structures of Fairy and Folk Tales, it is a hybrid of a primitive folk culture and an W B Yeats and Folk Culture 109 original native work Therefore, it is not a fieldwork which has scientific accuracy of an authentic primitive folklore but something new made out of Yeats’s recasting of the tales he hears, in the process of collection and translation, which enables a metropolitan audience, Anglo-Irish or British, to envision a native Ireland The Celtic Twilight is a grotesque hybrid of stories and essays, with the accurate notation of the folklorist, a work by an imaginative poet Yeats explores the stories with his own supernatural and symbolist ideas, believing that these ideas must be rooted in the “store of historical memory.” What Yeats has collected is not the “genuine” folklores or tales told in Gaelic language but a transfiguration of the original folklore into modern context Although he tries to maintain what O’Shea calls the “generic integrity” (Castle 55) of the tales, a process that subordinated the accuracy in translation to the preservation of the essence of traditional material, his rewritings show his search for an imaginative depiction of Irish folklore which is not a scientific selection of correspondent equivalents but rather a matter of evoking “fair equivalents” governed by an aesthetic or a poet: To me, the ideal folk-lorist is Mr Douglas Hyde A tale told by him is quite as accurate as any “scientific” person’s rendering; but in dialect and so forth he is careful to give us the most quaint, or poetic, or humorous version he has heard I am inclined to think also that some concentration and elaboration of dialect is justified, if only it does not touch the fundamentals of the story It is but a fair equivalent for the gesture and voice of the peasant tale-taller (UP 174) In praising Douglas Hyde who maintains an equivalence between cultural redemption and imaginative creation, Yeats develops an evocative method from his fellow Revivalist to give his reader “the most quaint, or poetic, or humorous version” one has ever heard It would not be the pristine or coarse 110 Zhou Dan “gesture and voice of the peasant tale-taller” but an elevated gesture or language he is willing to offer Meanwhile, the taxonomic system for ordering the materials is similar to those found in the work of Alfred Nutt and others would contradict his condemnation of the purely scientific methods of professionals like Nutt The inconsistency of Yeats’s attitude toward classifying and collecting the materials manifests his social and cultural ambivalence in the 1890s Yet, with the progression of collection, Yeats finds that the subjectivity of a man of letters sometimes takes the upper hand: “In these new chapters, as in the old ones, I have invented nothing but my comments and one or two deceitful sentences that may keep some poor story-teller’s commerce with the devil and his angels, or the like, from being known among his neighbours” (CT 2-3) The absolute objectivity has been abandoned since Yeats is willing to narrow the gap between the observer and the observed Yeats might have realized that his social and cultural identity would undermine his authority as a native folklorist and his ambition to establish a native literary tradition through his ethnographic efforts The engendered confusion about his work of collection is simultaneously intensified by his involvement in occultism and poetry writing II A National Poet For Yeats, folk culture is indispensable for the making of Irish national literature as he underscores its value and centrality: it “ha[d] done more than anything else to create that preoccupation with Irish folklore and legend and epic which is called the Irish literary movement” (UP 368) To collect Irish folklores is a project to resist British colonists and anthropological stereotypes of the Irish peasantry: “[t]he recent revival of Irish literature has been largely W B Yeats and Folk Culture 111 a folklore revival, and awakening of interest in the wisdom and ways of the poor, and in the poems and legends handed down among the cabins” (UP 326) However, he gradually realized that a collection, such as The Celtic Twilight sometimes marks him as an outsider when speaking with the authority of a native He then shifted the focus of his revival work from cultural redemption to imaginative writing of poetry and drama to make them known to the metropolitan audience Folk culture, “the oldest of the aristocracies of thought,” in “the soil where all great art is rooted” (CT 232-33), is the prerequisite of a unified national literature Hence, it serves well his strategy to redeem the “organic vitality” of “a race held together by folk tradition” (Castle 68) and maintains the aristocratic ideals that he aspires to achieve: “We wish to preserve an ancient ideal of life there you will find the folk song, the folk tale, the proverb and the charming manners that come from ancient culture (Mem 116)” The life that Yeats tries to revive is “an ancient ideal of life,” with an aristocratic and ancient culture, and the ideal inhabitants on the isle are “a race of gentlemen, keeping alive the ideals of a great time when men sang the heroic life with drawn swords in their hands” (Mem 113) The convergence of folklore and poetry thus generates a kind of intertextuality, with poem and tale reflecting each other, constituting Yeats’s ethnographic authority as a “national poet.” The ballad, narrative and lyrical, is one of the genres that Yeats prefers to choose in his early poetry He chooses alternatively a rhyming quatrain to rewrite and represent the materials that he collected in the field, as is seen in his first two collections of poetry, Crossways (1889) and The Rose (1893) Also, Yeats tries to put his personae in the Irish context and make them behave like an Irish man or woman, but not an English Then, the poet intentionally sets Cuchulain, Catheleen, Robartes, and Hanrahan as exemplars of the Irish spirit, courageous, extravagantly emotional, and genuinely noble He presents an imaginative version of the Irish past to a wide audience and 112 Zhou Dan inspires young Irish writers and nationalists, as he boasts in “To Ireland in the Coming Times”: Know that I would accounted be True brother of a company That sang, to sweeten Ireland’s wrong, Ballad and story, rann and songs; Nor may I less be counted one With Davis, Mangan, Ferguson, Because to him ponders well, My rhymes more than their rhyming tell Of things discovered in the deep, Where only body’s laid asleep (CP 49) Despite the dreadful situation in Ireland, the poet is still combating the English colonial influence upon the Irish culture and trying to establish the ancient Celtic heroic myth in modern Ireland More importantly, the continual antithesis of the two nationalities pushes him to the two extremities Approaching the 20th century, Yeats became an embittered nationalist, who was disappointed with the political surge in Ireland and devoted himself to the Celtic Revival He is first obsessed with the “romantic movement,” then he associates his artistic taste with poetry writing and realizes that “all the criticism of life known to me was alien and English.” (Au 86) His conscious inheritance of English literary tradition intensely conflicts with the gradual awareness of regaining the Irish identity As observed by Helen Vendler, the sonnet “is one of the two formats (the ballad is the other) that stayed steadily with him all his life” (147) Yeats has used various sonnet forms from “Behold the Man” in 1886 to “High Talk” in 1938; however, his sonnet shows at once his literary allegiance and his nationalist disobedience” (147) The “Irish” sonnets Yeats W B Yeats and Folk Culture 113 wrote are not only in its odd form: the intentional violation of the regulations of the number of lines in douzain or thirteen lines, and the mixture of Petrarchan and Shakespearean rhyme scheme; moreover, he asserts that the European Pegasus, “rejuvenated, is now stabled in Ireland” (Vendler 164) The sonnet-experiments Yeats has done not only demonstrate his defiance to the continental sonnet tradition but also display the unwillingness to obey the regulations of English literary tradition Yeats wishes to awaken the national consciousness of the public and promote the Celtic Revival through his poetic writings He desires to find out “the landscape that is symbolic of some spiritual condition and awakens a hunger” (L 243) through his own work and he endeavors to collect the old Irish folk tales to evoke the old associations or memory of the Irish Thus, the convergence of Irish folk culture and his literary ideals fashioned and re-fashioned traditional materials in his poetry The promotional copy for the 1895 edition of Yeats’s poems demonstrates the hybrid social authority Yeats aspires to achieve: Mr Yeats has written of the beautiful and singular legends of Ireland, not from any archaeological or provincial ambition, but with the desire of moulding the universal substance of poetry into new shapes, and of interpreting, to the best of his power, the spirit of Ireland to itself (L 243) The fitting of “the beautiful and singular legends of Ireland” into “new shapes” implies that Yeats’s ambition is not only to collect them for cultural reservation but to incorporate them into his imaginative writing It interprets the “universal substance of poetry” and expresses the “spirit of Ireland.” III An Esoteric Literature Yeats as a serious folklorist is skeptical of the ethnographical works done 114 Zhou Dan by some other compilers In the introduction to Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry, he criticizes Anglo-Irish compliers, who magnified the stories told by boatman, Carmen, and gentlemen’s servant to fit them in with “the type of a whole nation” and overlooked the “passion,” “gloom,” and “tragedy” of Irish literature The “irresponsible” work they did is to render the stereotype of Irish people as “an ascendant and idle class” pleased (6-7) Yeats, however, determines to “take the populace seriously” and presents them wholly and representatively as he could: “As to my own part in this book, I have tried to make it representative, as far as so few pages would allow, of every kind of Irish folk-faith The reader will perhaps wonder that in all my notes I have not rationalized a single hobgoblin.” (8) With the continual gathering of Irish folklores, Yeats becomes increasingly anxious to interpret Ireland religiously since he was a Protestant mystic: “When reading Irish folk-lore, or listening to Irish peasants telling their tales of magic and fairyism and witchcraft, more and more is one convinced that some clue there must be Even if it is all dreaming, why have they dreamed this particular dream? Clearly the occultist should have his say as well as the folklorist The history of a belief is not enough, one would gladly hear about its cause (UP 130-31)” The “clue” that Yeats finds would be the occult revival of the 1890s, the possible solution to an understanding of the cause and origin of folklore and the “universal mind” of which “the fairies are the lesser spiritual moods” and “wherein every mood is a soul and every thought a body” (UP 247) Irish writers who were encouraged to find inspirations in Irish folklore are also directed to explore the occult, because, as Philip Marcus puts, all “point toward the same conclusion: the spiritual, the visionary, the occult are fit subjects of concern for Irish writers because they are essentially related to the true Celtic nature”(Castle 59) Yeats wishes to regain a more universal mythic consciousness to bridge the gap between the protestant mythic poet and the modern Catholic peasants because of the class and religious W B Yeats and Folk Culture 115 differences He desires an elite “esoteric” literature and makes “an honest attempt toward that aristocratic esoteric Irish literature, which has been my chief ambition We have a literature for the people but nothing yet for the few” (L 286) Although Yeats is inclined to posit a more universal mystic consciousness, a literature for “the few,” is in accord with his stand as an Anglo-Irish Revivalist different from the Ascendancy ruling class and the middle-class Catholic nationalism Thus, Yeats collects the folklores first, attributes the cause and origin to the occultism and endeavors to establish an esoteric and universal literature for both the elite Anglo-Irish and the Catholic peasants to reconcile the religious and political conflicts and finally achieves the “Unity of Culture.” One of his most striking symbols in his poems, “the rose upon the rood” originates from the mark of the Rosicrucian Society founded in the 15th century in Germany, indicating a mysterious combination of love and sacrifice in a perfect realm of the soul It also alludes to Jesus Christ’s crucifixion In “To the Rose Upon the Rood of Time,” Yeats begins with the most important figures in the ancient Celtic myth: Cuchulain, the Druid, and Fergus, once heroes of the country, who are now immortal in Irish history He draws on the spectacular image of the “proud and sad” rose under the “boughs of love and hate,” which blends the complicated emotions of his longing for a goddess and her great passion for the nation: Red Rose, proud Rose, sad Rose of all my days! Come near me, while I sing the ancient ways: Cuchulain battling with the bitter tide; The Druid, grey, wood-nurtured, quiet-eyed, Who cast round Fergus dreams, and ruin untold; And thine own sadness, whereof stars, grown old In dancing silver-sandalled on the sea, Sing in their high and lonely melody 116 Zhou Dan Come near, that no more blinded by man’s fate, I find under the boughs of love and hate, In all poor foolish things that live a day, Eternal Beauty wandering on her way (CP 31) The “Eternal Beauty,” the goddess, “wandering on her way” is searching an outlet for modern Ireland “[W]andering” implies the painful experience that the goddess would have “on her way.” The “heavy mortal hopes,” originally the “craving of the common things,” push them to “toil,” then “pass” transiently So, the poet tries to listen to the “strange things” and learn “a tongue men not know” with the goddess in the celestial world of immortality Yeats repeatedly prays to the rose to “come near” to the terrestrial world The symbolic meaning of the rose is achieved With the help of the goddess, the next cycle begins anew: And God would bid His warfare cease, Saying all things were well; And softly make a rosy peace, A peace of Heaven and Hell (CP 37) What Yeats desires is an ancient culture of aristocracy, and his idea of a sacred and magic Ireland in the future is supported by Maud Gonne, who encourages the poet to seek for the Ireland that is “powerfully alive and invisibly peopled.” (Mem 125) The convergence of folklore and poetry makes Yeats’s writings distinct from other ethnographers and poets He wishes to establish “Unity of Culture,” the mythical ancient and aristocratic culture to help the northern Catholic Church to be united with the southern Protestant ascendancy Yeats, as embittered nationalist devoted to the Celtic Revival, revives the ancient Gaelic heroes, such as Cuchulain, Catheleen, Robartes, and Hanrahan in his poetry, with the magic power of folk culture, to change the W B Yeats and Folk Culture 117 dreadful situation in Ireland Works cited Castle, George Modernism and the Celtic Revival Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001 Piece, David Yeats’s Worlds: Ireland, England and the Poetic Imagination New Haven: Yale UP, 1995 Vendler, Helen Our Secret Discipline, Yeats and Lyric Form Cambridge: Belknap of Harvard UP, 2007 Yeats, William Butler Autobiographies New York: Scribner, 1999 (Au) _ Essays and Introductions London: Macmillan, 1961 (E&I) _ Explorations London: Macmillan, 1962 (Ex) _ Memoirs Ed Denis Donoghue London: Macmillan, 1972 (Mem) _ The Collected Poems of W B Yeats New York: Macmillan, 1959 (CP) _ The Collected Letters of W B Yeats, Vol I Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988 (L) _ The Celtic Twilight Cabin John, Maryland: Wildside Press, 2005 (CT) _ Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry London: the Walter Scott Publishing Co., Ltd, 1888 (FFT) _ Unpublished Prose by W B Yeats Ed John P Frayne London: Macmillan, 1970 (UP) Manuscript peer-review process: receipt acknowledged: Dec 17, 2018 peer-reviewed: Feb 11, 2019 revision received: Apr 15, 2019 publication approved: Apr 22, 2019