BOOKS
POET AND MYSTIFIER
YEATS: THE MAN AND THE MASKS.
By
Richord Ellmonn. Mocmillon.
$5.00.
Let us admit that few writers of our time offer more handi–
caps to the biographer than Yeats. For fifty years he was a public figure
as familiar to every educated reader in the English-speaking world as
any statesman or general. But more than that he was a public figure with
comparatively few reticences of the usual kind. There are the successive
volumes of the
Autobiography,
with their detailed family history, inti–
mate records of childhood and youth, self-analyses. What is here not
actually divulged about the deeper conflicts of his personality can usually
be read between the lines. And of course there is the poetry itself, espe–
cially that written during his final phase, certainly as "personal" poetry,
in what is sometimes considered the bad sense of the word, as any that
we have known. All poetry is inevitably personal; but few poets in
English since Byron (Whitman, Lawrence, perhaps) have grounded their
subjects
so frankly on actual personal experiences, creating a mythology
out of friendships, love relationships, even the physiological changes of
the body. The result of all this is our feeling that we know so much
about his life and temperament as to render the labor of his biogra–
phers largely superfluous. This does not happen to
be
true, for example,
for Joyce, Valery, or Eliot.
On the next to last page of his book Mr. EHmann says of Yeats,
"If
he puts on a mask, he informs the world and eventually justifies
himself by finding that everyone has done likewise. In this he is the
opposite of Whitman who practiced the utmost concealment while he
pretended to be outspoken. Yeats cannot keep a secret. He is never an
individualist like Blake, developing by himself and to a considerable
extent for himself; he has always an audience in mind, writes to
be
understood, and wants approbation." Why, we are immediately tempted
to inquire,
if
Yeats himself is continually doffing his mask, write a book
about him with the sub-title "The Man and the Masks"? Why run the
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