| Provincials and Nationals: a Weekend in Canada
with Yeats
by Kevin
McNeilly
John Quinn arranged W.B. Yeats's first so-called "American Tour" of 1903-04 to expose Yeats's poetry and ideas on cultural nationalism to a wider, cosmopolitan audience. The tour was an attempt to garner North American sympathy for the Irish Literary Revival, which consisted for Yeats at that time primarily of his work at the fledgling Abbey Theatre (Krans 3). A promotional coup, the tour not only succeeded in establishing Yeats's reputation as a writer of international stature — as a cosmopolitan figure with a certain "universal" appeal — but it also occasioned the first critical monograph on Yeats, a booklength study by Horatio Sheafe Krans, a professor from New York, in 1904. In effect, Yeats's visit to America established a place for him in both the academic and popular canons. Even if his notions of political and cultural reform did not appeal to all (though his reception, as many have noted, was overwhelmingly positive), Yeats secured for himself over the course of his lectures the status of a major writer. The tour also found Yeats rediscovering and reshaping his own nationalism, as he sought in his lectures — which bore titles such as "Old Ireland — Her Ancient Culture" — to relate his emerging sense of culture and tradition to audiences of a mixed colonial heritage. In fact, gathering from his letters, interviews and from various newspaper reports, we see that Yeats began to find himself caught in something of a double bind, at once the representative of an Old-World nationalistic mythos and the unwilling victim of English imperialistic oppression; that is, he seems to be both a colonial importer to North America of the European cultural hegemony and a rebel in the throes of casting out from himself and his culture a comparable non-native system of values. In particular, Yeats receives a rather contrary set of responses to his ideas of culture and nationalistic politics on the three stops that he made in Canada from December, 1903, to February, 1904. In cultural and literary terms, Canadian writing of this period concerned itself predominantly with questions of nationalism, se1f-justification, and self-definition. Poets such as Archibald Lampman, William Wilfred Campbell and Charles G.D. Roberts engaged in ongoing debates over the Canadian writer's relationship to the "literary centres" of the Old World and of the United States. London and New York represented for many critics, readers and poets the only possible sites of success elsewhere, where a writer may receive what Roberts jokingly calls "honour and profit" beyond the obvious limits of his or her humble, native land ("Canadian Poetry" 80). Yet many like Lampman, Campbell and Roberts sought doggedly to find and to define their own native tradition, a firmly grounded sense of place and an identifiable culture which provided its own intrinsic gauge of artistic and social merit. Speaking in 1933 about "Canadian Poetry in its Relation to the Poetry of England and America," Roberts emphatically asserts the autonomy of "pre war" Canadian verse, arguing that the writing of other post-colonial, commonwealth countries such as Australia, New Zealand and South Africa "has less of a separate corporate existence than ours, has a more decided tendency to look to the mother country for recognition than has ours" ("Canadian Poetry" 80). Roberts cites works by Crawford, Mair, Campbell, Lampman, Scott and Carman, among others, as having attained "an authentic separate existence" from the "splendid parent stem" of English literature, claiming for them a sincerity and an enthusiasm brought about by their devotion to "the Canadian scene and the Canadian atmosphere" (81-82). Roberts wants very much to locate a national character and to describe his own cultural basis as grounded in the landscape and "Nature" of Canada. However, his native stridency is undermined throughout his text by a necessary deferral to the standards of taste and to the canonical authority of the writing of Mother Country. That is, Crawford, Carman, Lampman and the others must be read and judged even by Roberts in relation to their received culture, which is not "native" but largely British and, to a certain extent, American. While repudiating the influences of Tennyson and of Edgar Allen Poe on Carman, he must acknowledge the direct impact of Keats, Wordsworth, Landor, Shelley, Blake and Arnold on most Canadian writers of the period; striving for autonomy, Canadian writing still remains inextricably a "bud" on the great stem of English literature (82). As Claude Bissell has pointed out, the Victorian Canadian poets saw themselves as rivals to their English counterparts, often striving to fill in the empty stage left by the departure of the "Old Masters" like Tennyson and Browning, and taking part in the same, worn cultural debates and poetic challenges (McMullen, Confederation Literature 30-32). Their rapture over native Canadian soil was insufficient to replace the inherited forms and values of the British scene. Thus Roberts and others writing at the time of Yeats's visit were repeatedly faced with an impossible choice. On the one hand, they needed to embrace an autonomous "Nature" for which their European colonial heritage had left them unprepared and, literally, unaccustomed — allowing them little or no leeway to develop a distinctively Canadian style or perspective. On the other hand, their only viable strategy for writing was exactly a deferral to that same heritage, in the form of late Victorian decadence and epigonism, which often made them highly cultured aliens in their own homeland. As a "major" writer from across the Atlantic, then, Yeats found in Canada audiences at once sympathetic to his need for national identity and disenchanted by his cultural stature. He was received at Toronto, Kingston and Montreal that winter with both adulation and disapproval, with candid nostalgia and buried hostility. In particular, a weekend visit to Queen's University and to the University of Toronto — from February 12 to 14, 1904— concentrated the doubled responses of Canadian audiences. Newspaper reports and periodical reviews both lavishly praise his work and ideas and snidely reduce him to another snivelling scribbler from the closed literary circles of Great Britain. Clearly, Yeats represents a test-case. His own fervent nationalism stands in contrast to the self-conscious, recalcitrant provincialism of the Canadian literary scene. He stands, as well, as a negative ideal for those Canadian critics and readers he addressed, as the product of a revitalized other tradition in which they can only grudgingly, and at a fair remove, take part. In an unpublished letter to Bliss Carman, scribbled in 1891 on the reverse side of an autograph draft of Yeats's "The Sorrow of Love," Douglas Nadeau, then editor of the Independent, praises John Sherman and Dhova and commends Yeats to Carman as a "risen author." Yeats had, at this point, pub lished only one book of poetry, and was in the process of collecting folk-tales and composing his mystical stories; but he was already being recognized in Canada and elsewhere internationally as an accomplished writer. In his 1930 study of Carman, James Cappon notes the strong kinship of Yeats and Carman's early work, such as Low Tide on Grand Pré, published in 1893 (Cappon 14). Cappon comments on Carman's ideal for poetry:
Those "accounts" certainly included Arthur Symons' The Symbolist Movement in Literature (1899) — an influential work on Yeats as well — and Yeat's own essay, "The Symbolism of Poetry," published in 1900. Cappon's understated reference to the hegemony of British imperialism — his acknowledgement of an "English-speaking world" which sets standards and values — places Carman in the context of a literary imperialism embodied in the "pure" cosmopolitan poetry of the symbolists and of Yeats. Carman, according to Cappon, of necessity imports and modifies his own ideas from mainstream writers "risen" in the English world, such as Yeats. Carman, as Cappon notes in the first sentence of his study, becomes the ambassador to Canada of "modern poetry in the nineties," deferring specifically to outside, old-world tradition and to the "modern" renovations of convention taking place in the literary centres of elsewhere (1). Yeats, for Cappon, "has the powerful support of a well-filled background of national tradition and legend," an indigenous scaffolding which Carman by implication seems to lack (55). Carman accordingly needs to look elsewhere than his homeland for a sense of literary ancestry. In his letters, Carman himself confirms Cappon's assessment. Writing to the poet Louise Guiney in September of 1896, he describes a call paid to Yeats in London in the company of Arthur Symons:
Carman's rush of enthusiasm brings out a string of adjectives and an overwhelming commendation of Yeats as the inspired mystical centre of "this smaller generation" of symbolists, parnassians, and other epigoni among whom Carman clearly numbers himself. A journey to the dark heart of London is necessary for the Canadian poet to find a sense of inspiration and true eloquence. Yeats is Carman's "William Blake" not only because Yeats's mystical doctrines can be connected to those of the Romantic visionary — Carman had read the edition of Blake by Yeats and Edwin Ellis in January of 1892 (Gundy 43) — but also because he embodies a vital link to symbolic and poetic tradition and a sense of cultural wholeness which Carman, in poetry, wants to emulate. As a "risen author," Yeats possesses an intrinsic set of literary values and an "intimate sense of nature" to which Carman, as Cappon argues, can only defer if he is to have any significance for the "English speaking world" beyond the Canadian borders. Any direct link to a Canadian "Nature," unmediated by imported conventions, would, at least in Cappon's terms, be both frustrating and ineffectual as a source of expressive formulas.1 The first stanzas of Carman's "Low Tide on Grand Pré," composed a few years before his reading of Yeats but certainly written under the influence of English aestheticism and Pre-Raphaelitism, demonstrate some effects of this literary imperialism:
Carman certainly writes about Canadian history and landscape, but his form and approach — complexly laden with incantatory repetition, a Morris-like archaism, and a Rossetti-like poetical "music" and dreaminess — comes from the same source-tradition as the writing of the early Yeats and the symbolistes of the 'nineties. Carman has for the most part imposed the conventions of European aestheticism and romanticism onto his New-World material. His hybrid poem is a result of the ambivalence in the Canadian literary scene at the time, and demonstrates a writing which feels a certain lack of any native tradition and formal background, and so looks elsewhere — to America and to Britain — for its models, though it seeks fervently to discover and to express some sense of its own geographical and social presence, some sense of land or culture. This doubled need of and antagonism to English tradition is articulated in exchanges between Lampman and Campbell in the Toronto Globe in the early autumn of 1982. Lampman argues that because of its isolation the Canadian literary scene necessarily has some "natural" basis:
Canadian authors, Lampman tells us here, must make the best of their literary community's second-rate, provincial status. His attitude, not without a measure of irony, is nevertheless resigned. He acquiesces to the colonial power of the literary cultural institution, centred in London, which disperses like some huge beneficent open blossom the seeds of its universal wisdom. The main source of stimulation and vitality, England exhilarates Lampman:
Lampman complains that Canadian institutions and journals offer little positive encouragement for the products of their own country, and that writers are forced to look elsewhere, to the "English-speaking" establishment of London, even for a sense of the background from which they are trying to distingnish themselves. Claude Bissell supplies evidence to support Lampman's complaint from the pages of the Week, published from 1883-96, which was a direct offshoot of the Canada First movement of the previous decades. Canadian reviewers, he asserts, railed against the "noxious mixture" of colonialism and sentimental nationalism which permeated popular writing, and preferred the precision, elegance and clarity of writers such as the English aesthete Austin Dobson and the American Oliver Wendell Holmes (McMullen, Confederation Literature 34-35). Indeed, as we have already seen, Carman's visit to Yeats's London confirms much of what Lampman claims. Campbell, on the other hand, has little to say in favour of that establishment, complaining about the ignorance of English writers in affairs of the new world:
Instead of seeing "natural talent" as raw, second-rate and provincial, Campbell reverses the lines of confluence, creating a plethora of new "centres" at the margins of "English-speaking" culture. He writes of resistance and self-reliance rather than deferral, suggesting that if a national tradition is to be uncovered it lies in the outlying regions far removed from the pollinations and influences of the motherland. Campbell and Lampman, in fact, offer polarized responses to English literary imperialism — responses which both were later apt to reverse — and the situation of Canadian writers at the turn of the century lay somewhere indeterminately between the two. Canadians needed to defer to the Old-World centres of cultural activity for their inherited premises and norms. But they also sought to tap into an indigenous sense of place and identity, the marginal sources of "natural talent." They tended to fluctuate between the provincial and the national; they were of uncertain status, unable to free themselves completely from the yoke of English or European influence, and unable as well to express immediately their own sense of place, their culture and their nature. Yeats found himself around the turn of the century in a position similar to those of Campbell and Lampman. He tried to cast off the imperialistic domination of Anglo-European literary culture, to rediscover as a writer his own national roots in Ireland, while at the same time forcing himself to recognize his inextricable ties, as a descendent of Anglo-Irish Protestant stock, to that colonizing tradition. English was still his "mother tongue" (Essays and Introductions 520). In "Ireland and the Arts," a short essay first published in 1901, he claims a measure of success:
The young romantic whom Yeats describes sounds remarkably like the young Carman of Low Tide at Grand Pré. That "new style," rooted in nationality, is what Lampman and Campbell both desire for Canadian writers. Edward Said argues in a Field Day pamphlet on "Yeats and Decolonization" that Yeats works to achieve political liberation through this discovery of a new national mode of writing:
Said goes so far as to suggest that North America was a "site of contention" and of the rediscovery of national roots. What Said does not appear to notice, perhaps for the sake of expediency, is that the literary line to which anglophone North Americans such as Lampman and Campbell belong is not that of the oppressed natives but rather of the descendants of the offshore oppressors. Whereas, from Said's perspective, Yeats can potentially rediscover his roots in the land of his ancestors, to find liberation and authenticity in his own sense of nation, his Canadian counterparts remain irrevocably disconnected from their English sources, which are physically remote from their own "land." English Canadian literature, at this time, is perpetually caught between the native and the imperial, unable simply to embrace either. In a letter to Lady Gregory postmarked January 31, 1904, Yeats mentions his trips to Canada: a lecture in Montreal took place in the week before Christmas, and his weekend in Kingston and Toronto was upcoming. He then reports, in a postscript: "I get immense audiences here" (Wade 429-30). Expecting in the New World for find crowds of rustics and yokels, he records in a letter to his sister Lily on Christmas Day, 1903, that he is pleasantly surprised by the level of cultural awareness, and unwittingly exemplifies the imperialistic assumptions of North American ignorance of which Wilfred Campbell so bitterly complained:
Yeats has his notions of cultural centredness rearranged. He had, after all, sought for years a place in the London literary establishment and was now finding in America that England was not necessarily the be-all and end-all of cultured life. He seems, in effect, to prove Campbell's assertion that the centre has shifted away. His "immense" audiences must certainly have felt the "exhilaration" reserved for representatives of the great English tradition, envoys from the centre, but, as Krans points out, public interest focused intently on Yeats as a rebel and an Irish nationalist, as a breakaway from the mainstream of English convention. Krans's tone itself is rather benign and institutionally moderated:
If Yeats acted as an envoy of offshore cultural success to the North American backwater, he also epitomized for his New-World audiences the result of careful tactics of resistance, independence and recentring. Shortly before Yeats departed for Kingston and Toronto, John Quinn wrote to him summing up the tour so far: "It has all been a big success" (Himber 58). That success, that hugely positive reception, resulted directly from his "assured" position as an emerging nationalist. With a sense of new-found acceptance and cultural awareness in his mind, Yeats departed for the universities of southern Ontario from New York on Friday, February 12, 1904. He arrived in Kingston late in the day, and mounted the lecture platform of Convocation Hall at Queen's, accompanied by various government officials and university dignitaries, in the early evening. He was introduced by James Cappon as a fine orator, "of the highest and most refined type" as the British Daily Whig reported the next day, and then proceeded to speak extempore for about two and a half hours, on topics ranging from Irish folklore to the revival of the national theatre in Dublin. In another letter to Lily, dated January 2, 1904, Yeats describes his oratorical methods:
Queen's fell into the smaller category. The rhetorical flourishes of his "big" successes in America would be toned down for his Canadian hearers, structured in a more casual fashion, like the courtier's sprezzatura. In tone and style, Yeats acts as an imperial envoy, bearing special imported knowledge and cultural habit. Nevertheless, Yeats did not fail to impress his Kingston crowd, nor did he seem to lack a certain polish. The Queen's Journal reports that he "fairly charmed his audience by the refined music of his voice" (36). And the British Daily Whig printed the next day an enthusiastic summary, subtitled "An Uplifting Lecture," which ran almost two columns. The tone of the review, as its first paragraph indicates, is rather wistful and overdone:
The anonymous reviewer, as the verbless rush of sentences indicates, feels transported to Ireland itself, to relive with Yeats a newly rediscovered poetic centredness. Yeats's "democracy," a term later hated by him, is more of a domestic than a political order, as he glances back to a time of an assured territoriality. Like Yeats, the reviewer would have us resist the merciless onslaught of Anglocentric culture, but writes not so much as a Canadian colonial as a citizen of Ireland, merely another of those offshore sources of "pollination" and stimulation. The reviewer substitutes, in effect, one colonial power for another. The lecture "transported the hearers to the country of real romance where 'they' reveal themselves to their own. Knowledge, self-possession and understanding are the properties of an edenic, non-English elsewhere. The reviewers attitudes are deeply provincial; self and citizenship are authenticated only by a shifted deferral; but the liberation and the self-confidence which Yeats demonstrates offer no real escape for the reviewer from the colonial cultural yoke. The inverted commas around the pronoun with which the reviewer designates fellow "transported" Canadians — " 'they' " — somewhat ominously point toward a communal emptiness, a lack of self-contained national identity and an incapacity for any "real" self-determination. Provincial isolation can also result in an acute snobbery, a conservative adherence to Old-World values, and in an almost perverse loyalty to all things English and a replication of the British establishment's value and assumptions (v. Ashcroft et al. 18). Although Cappon publicly lauded Yeats that Friday evening in 1904, there are other indications that he did not think so highly of the "new school" of Irish writing Yeats represented. A staunch Carlylean, Cappon reportedly felt that the "new Celtic group," along with a menagerie of "free versists, symbolists, imagists, . . . and Russian novelists," were "of unclassical derivation, ethically arid, artistically null" (Wallace 88). Even in his study of Carman, published in 1930, he displays no familiarity with Yeats's work after 1905, and denigrates him as an "interesting mystic" in whose quaint folk tales he cannot help but sense "a touch of blague" (Cappon 54-55). Cappon's blasé, wordly-wise style seems to come from the stuffy, insulated drawing-rooms of highbrow London described by Wilfred Campbell. Cappon defers through mimicry to the status quo of his mother country across the ocean. He reaches, in effect, the endpoint of colonized culture ironically portrayed in the Globe by Lampman, which recognizes only those cultural elements linked directly to the offshore English centre. This loyalist snobbery was by no means limited to imported intellectuals such as Cappon (who had arrived in Canada after an Oxford education to teach at Queen's in 1888). Pockets of literary jingoism survived in the popular media, and Yeats's tour was by no means immune to its critical effects. Following a December announcement that Yeats would soon arrive in Toronto to lecture on "Poetry in the Old Time and New," a caustic column appeared in "The Library Table" of the Toronto Globe on January 30, 1904, two weeks before Yeats was due to arrive. The piece, by L.B. Durand, is blatantly Anglocentric, using for its basis the very London journal Campbell despised as the seat of literary provincialism, and which was the organ of a society of imperial privilege which Yeats, in his later years, even accepted an invitation to join:
The text of Yeats's famous lyric follows. Durand defers parenthetically, seemingly with a casual confident wave of the hand, to London's scene as the measure of literary greatness. Poetic greatness, let alone being even the least bit "poetic," depends on an imperialistic violence; the disorderly, native, primitive and imaginative forms of Irish writing must be hammered and welded into a recognizable shape, forced to conform to London standards, in order to be of any significance at all. To be "melodious" in this case means to be mastered by and reformed in the images of the brokers of colonial power, to be an acceptable reflection of their hegemony in the outlying lands. To the Toronto reviewer, Yeats represents a distasteful, somewhat threatening barbarism because he refuses to accept that hegemony, preferring his native roughness. Yeats must be dismissed by those of good taste because, in his weltering primitivism, he calls upon his readers and listeners to break off their enslavement to the motherland. Nevertheless that dependence, in the case of Durand's Canada, appears to be a crucial cultural prop, a keystone which if removed could result in complete collapse. For unlike Yeats, the English Canadian population has no other recourse for cultural authenticity. Durand of the Globe expresses reactionary sentiments, but they spring from a recognition of the necessity of deferral to what he knows as Canadian cultural values. But Yeats provoked a positive reaction as well, and his poetic nationalism pointed to something other than a lack or a deferral at the heart of the culture of his Canadian audiences. The responses to his lecture at the University of Toronto reveal ideas of cultural interaction which are more pluralistic than provincial. Yeats lectured at the University's Chemical Building on the afternoon of Saturday, February 13, having travelled by train from Kingston that morning. His lecture — again extemporaneous — lasted on this occasion for an hour and a half and, on the basis of reviews in the Globe and the Star the following Monday, consisted of much the same material as his lecture at Queen's. Yeats emphasized the failure of written culture, of books, and talked about an Irish grass-roots literary nationalism which looks for the origins of national and culture in the oral traditions of "the people" so closely tied to land and locale. Citing medieval Irish and English ballads as examples of forgotten values, he claimed, according to the Globe, "to be nothing more than a man of convictions trying to persuade other people to believe as he does." His convictions, however, place his Canadian audience in something of a double bind. On the one hand, he resists the hegemony of English imperialism, and points toward a viable national liberation. On the other hand, his values themselves are still part of the Old World, the offshore "elsewhere," which still offers no native substitute to the Canadian provincial: the Anglocentric, after all, remains a subdivision of the Eurocentric, along with the "real romance" of Ireland. For Yeats's Canadian audience, accepting his beliefs and convictions at face value means little more then choosing what seems to be the lesser of two evils. The Globe, however, does report a curious introduction to Yeats's lecture by President Loudon of the University, in which new terms of nationality are innocuously introduced. Loudon expresses his nationalistic self-deprecation:
We can note here the acquiescence resignedly described by Lampman; to be a "poet" one must be in touch with the "old legends" of the Old World or one must be a native. The reviewer here, echoing Loudon, even uses the same image as Lampman, of the flower of European culture disseminating its vital seeds across North America. What differs in this account of Yeats's impact from the snobbism of Cappon and Durand and from the resignation of Lampman is its tone. The introduction is not snide but affirmative, and not fearful or ceremonious but welcoming. Here, for the first time in his visit, the audience is given a double nationality: "Irish-Americans" and "Irish-Canadians." A pluralism is introduced into the notion of national identity, a reconfiguration which involves at once a deferral to offshore origins and a recognition of newness, of a location-specific "natural" character or talent. That is, although immigrant Canadian culture cannot sever completely its ties to Old-World centres, it need not be a poor provincial parody — irreverent and faithless — of those offshore centres, nor merely reinforce imperialistic hegemonies. What President Loudon jokingly and perhaps inadvertently suggests is not a loyalist nostalgia but a new ethnic awareness, a pluralizing and a localizing of North American cultural identities; the descendants of immigrant Irish people are not "degenerate Irishmen," hopeless provincials, but "Irish-Canadians," finding their nationalities not so much in a unified, land-centred cultural ideology as in a doubling or a recognition of one's own ethnic particularity within a wide, diverse mosaic. Irish-Canadians, listening to Yeats, do not lack a social identity so much as contribute their distinct sense of an offshore heritage to a multifaceted national picture. Canadian culture, in this sense, is hybridized, installed with a "double vision" (Ashcroft et al. 34). In their study of Franz Kafka, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari attempt to define what they call a "minor" literature, a mode of political writing which does not merely call for a new territoriality, in the way that Said would have Yeats make a new nationality and totalizing mythology to replace older, colonial hegemonies. Rather, they suggest that such "minor" writing deterritorializes itself completely, pluralizing its perspectives and embracing the doubled status of the ethnic minority — like the Anglo-Irish or the Irish-Canadian, at once native and foreign. Deleuze and Guattari would make all "good" writers minority writers:
This is precisely the problem faced by poets such as Carman, Lampman and Campbell: how, as members of an immigrant culture, to ground themselves, to render the "major" figures of their offshore heritiage — that "major" London-centred language — their own, applicable to their immediate geography and society.2 That is, as well, precisely the problem faced by Yeats, as the insufficiency of his best romantic mythologizing, despite his expectations and ideals, becomes increasingly apparent. He must account for his in-between status as an English-speaking Irishman, something of a foreigner to his own native traditions, who cannot embrace simply or directly the "real romance" of his country. Deleuze and Guattari oppose the new territoriality" described by Said as endemic to Yeats's poetry with a doubled, deterritorialized sense of identity — without totality, based on self-conscious economies of remaking and open-ended desire.3 This recognition of multiplicity and minority is not simply a change of names, but a fundamental ideological shift, a movement to embrace a conceptual framework which posits difference — individual, social or cultural — as the basic condition of existence: an ontological pluralism. Balachandra Rajan argues convincingly for such a pluralism at the heart of Yeats's poetics (Bornstein 88). We can, in fact, demonstrate a direct link between this pluralistic poetics and the emerging concept of a pluralized nationality. In a given lyric poem, in this case one composed on a train in Canada during his visit that winter, Yeats both affirms the Old-World myths of national identity and deterritorializes himself by self-consciously dismantling those very master-myths. "Old Memory" sets forth a contradic tion between idealistic monism and critical self-consciousness on both a poetic and a socio-political level. In a letter from Minnesota, dated January 21, 1904, Yeats relates to Lady Gregory that he had composed and submitted a poem to an anthology, Wayfarer's Lane:
Allan Wade confirms that the poem was "Old Memory," which after 1906 was published as part of In the Seven Woods. The lyric can certainly be read in the context of the doubled nationalistic perspective of his reception in Canada. Yeats was returning from his lecture in Montreal, which sets the date of composition at December 20, 1903. The poem questions Yeats's own nationalistic motivations in the wake of Maud Gonne's marriage earlier that year to Major John McBride:
The rhythmical violence emerging in these lines — the odd blunder and thud of uneven measure and distended stress characteristic of the "plain speech" of his late poetry — indicates a voice in the throes of self-remaking, of stylistic change. We can hear in this middle-period lyric the early evidence of Yeats's "powerful and passionate syntax," the torsion of beat and period. Yeats is in the process of renovating his own poetics, moving away from idealization to a harder, more engaged poetry. More importantly, the poem also encodes a critical self-consciousness. It consists of an ironic frame, a commentary which surrounds the voice of the "real romance" of love and nationality at the poem's centre. Maud Gonne, like a queen of Irish legend (and thus, for Yeats, a figure of native tradition), could bring about a "new age" for Ireland, a new self-affirming cultural identity. But her strength, Yeats asserts, is only half hers, and consists also in the "clear words" of his poetry, as he kneads "in the dough" of her political and cultural image, reshaping through his writing the raw materials of her fierceness, loftiness and kindness. Poetry becomes the formal vehicle of raw nationalism and of cultural awakening. No "new age" can come without first a poetical cultural revolution. And this is exactly the message delivered by Yeats both at Kingston and Toronto. However, as Norman Jeffares notes, when Yeats kneads "in the dough" he means also to draw Maud Gonne away from her nationalistic pursuits and more fully under the formal yoke of his poetic idealism (Yeats's Poems 526). The poem itself recalls the failure of Yeats's marriage proposals, an intended matrimony not only of Willie and Maud but also of poetry and nation. "Who would have thought," he asks, "It all . . . would come to naught?" This assignation and despair seem rather out of keeping with the fervent "preaching" of his lecture tour; and he certainly does claim to have found a potential union of culture and nationality through poetry (v. Essays and Introductions 203). Moreover, the poem itself does not renounce national pursuits, permitting the poet to escape into his own irrelevant ethereal ideals, which would be a self-deluding effort at best. Those ideals themselves, set off in the poem by quotation marks and distanced in time through the memory, may "come to nothing," but the poem consists of much more than a failed idealization. Yeats calls upon his romantic images self-consciously, ironically, recognizing full well that "romantic Ireland" is now dead and gone. He does not renounce his labour to weld nation and poem so much as foreground its perpetual insufficiency. To despair or to be nihilistic is poetically useless: one might as well blame the wind for blowing. The poet still calls upon his "old memory" at the end of day, and still looks back somewhat nostalgically to his deluding poetic ideal, acknowl edging the necessity of desire as well as its inconclusiveness, and chastising himself for his own blindness. The image of "children who have strayed" with whom the lyric closes does not call forth a condescending paternalism that Yeats feels for Maud Gonne, so much as indict his own ideals as childish (Cf. Adams 82). Yeats's poem does not close down in resignation but opens up a doubled perspective, at once positive and self-depreciating, "poetic" and critical. It is appropriate, then, to note the Canadian context of the poem's composition because of this ontological and cultural decentring. Yeats finds an audience in Canada not because he imports a nostalgia for lost nationality nor because he provides the means either to recover a native tradition or to defer to the glories of empire. Rather, the pluralism and deterritorialization which inform his work of this period — an embrace of certain "true" contraries, the oppositions of ideal and critical orders — find a social or political counterpart at the time in the state of Canadian literary nationality. Yeats touches briefly, for a weekend or so, on a crucial ambivalence at the core of Canadian literary endeavour, a tension between monolithic nationality and the hybridized mosaic of a pluralistic culture (v. Ashcroft et al. 36). Yeats serves as something of a test case, a figure in whom those struggling for identity in the post-colonial world can find an ally. Notes
In an article on female emigration to Canada, D.M.R. Bentley uses these same terms from Deleuze and Guattari to explain why Canadian writing was unable simply to sever all ties with the mother country and to set about establishing an indigenous literature and culture. The movement from centre to periphery engenders a need to explain life on the periphery to those at the centre which is characteristic of all minor emerging or deterritorialized literatures. Importantly, these ties can never be completely severed, but rather force those at the periphery to create a doubled or pluralized response to nation and culture (v. McMullen, Re(Dis)Covering Our Foremothers 93, 118-119).[back] Louis Renza criticizes Deleuze and Guattari for their canonization of "minor" literature, their rather insidiously maintained dependence on the existence of other "major" works, and their inability to account for the ambiguous status of minor writers who in fact desire to be "reterritorialized" and to find a national "identity." Not all minor writers display a complete resistance to totality. Nevertheless, the self-conscious and revisionary impulse of their critique of post-colonial literature remains, even for Renza, valid and important (29-38).[back] Works Cited Adams, Hazard. The Book of Yeats's Poems. Tallahasse: Florida UP, 1990. Ashcroft, Bill, Griffeth, Gareth and
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