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PARTISAN REVIEW
THE DEEDS AND DREAMS OF YEATS
THE LEITERS OF W. B. YEATS. Edited by Allon Wode. Mocmillon. $9.50.
For a man who lived a long time and was very active and
ambitious, Yeats was unusually fortunate in his friends. Those in whom
he was not so fortunate, who became his enemies, he mostly managed
to outlive. "I did hate leaving the last word to George Moore," he
wrote in a letter of 1927. And now after his own death he continues
to be lucky in the same way. The editor of this monumental collection
of Yeats's letters was a member of the poet's London circle, an actor
and a director of plays. He is also something that few such survivors of
old times and intimates of great men ever are, a scholar. With patient
labor he has assembled letters enough to fill some nine hundred pages.
He has transcribed Yeats's wretched handwriting when that has been
necessary, has figured out approximate dates where dates are missing,
has written a commentary summarizing the events of Yeats's life from
period to period, and-best of all-has identified the many obscure or
semi-obscure persons addressed or alluded to in the letters. Who was
Althea Gyles, of whom Yeats reports that "she brought a prosperous
love-affair to an end by reading Browning to the poor man in the middle
of the night"? Mr. Wade will tell you, and with just the right amount
of detail.
To
be
sure, the volume is not so complete as its title and its huge
bulk make you think it is. For one reason or another, Yeats's corres–
pondence with several people of capital importance in his life-his wife,
Maud Gonne, John Synge, Ezra Pound, Gordon Craig-had to be left
out of the collection or be feebly represented in it. It is still a collection
of great fascination and importance. Although some of the best things
Yeats said in his letters have been used
in
the books about him published
by Joseph Hone, Richard Ellmann and others having access to his papers,
those things often sound better in context. And of course it is context
of the general as well as the specific kind which this volume supplies
so richly. More than half a century of the poet's life is here in his own
words, and with it much of the life of poetry itself from William Morris
to W. H. Auden.
If
the ways of praising Yeats have grown dull with
use and so have almost ceased to seem actively true, this book should
help to renew them.
In themselves, however, his letters are not specially exhilarating.
A few of them are that, in particular the later ones; and he is livelier
with some of his correspondents than with others. Despite the fine re-
