Volume 51, Number 3 · February 26, 2004
The Rescue of W.B. Yeats
By John Banville
W.B. Yeats: A Life II: The Arch-Poet 1915–1939
by R.F. Foster
Oxford University Press, 798 pp., $45.00
The story of W.B. Yeats's life, Roy Foster observes, 'raises immediate and pressing questions about the relationship between everyday life and creative work.' In fact, the poet's biography is an overwhelming refutation of his insistence that 'The intellect of man is forced to choose/Perfection of the life, or of the work,' since he both lived magnificently and produced one of the greatest bodies of poetic work of the modern age. Of course, the dictum is flawed anyway, perfection being beyond the intellect of man, yet the lines persuade nevertheless, as so often in Yeats, by the force of their rhetoric and the harshness of their music. What the poet carried over from the mistiness of the early, Celtic Twilight years into the ebullience and transcendent plain-spokenness of his final period, the period covered in Foster's second and final volume of the Life, was a calculated disregard for the merely actual. He knew the necessity for myth, and where he could not find myth preexisting, he invented.
Review, 3155 words
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