BOO KS
III
ethic. Among the scrappy dreamers and "penitent frivolous" whom he
describes as haunting Madame Blavatsky and the Golden Dawn group,
he alone was to achieve, in his way, the transmutation of metals and
the elixir of life.
But to his faith in the single soul was added an appreciation of the
part of outward action. He had a conception of the poet's role in the
world. What this was he suggests to John Quinn: "K eats's lines telling
how Homer left great verses to a little clan seem(ed) to my imagination
when I was a boy a description of the happiest fate that could come to
a poet." This appears always to have remained his idea of the happy
fate, and no doubt it was one which he shared with K eats, Goethe,
Whitman and others who have sought ideal audiences within the hetero–
geneous populations of modern nations. For Yeats the conviction that
he had a little clan was some time in materializing. H e might help to
organize the Rhymers Club in the 'nineties but that was not it ; and
the absence in him of any strong sense of an audience helps to account
for the tremulous vagueness of his early verse. In proportion as he de–
veloped that sense, felt around him the "hearers and hearteners" of his
work, he developed the
viva voce
quality, the manipulation of tone, the
effect of address or stance, which animate his mature work. But just
as he had to learn to write the "great verses," so he had to recruit the
little clan to go with them. Actually there were many clans, ranging
from his fellow occultists of the Golden Dawn to the audiences of the
Abbey Theatre; and when he had despaired of tangible audiences he
sought their Platonic counterpart in some ideal Byzantium of the past
or simply among the self-delighting people of whatever time or place.
He carried his dream into his cosmopolitan old age, determined to the
last that he should know his audience, should feel it to be made up of
men and women like himself. "It is time that I wrote my will: I choose
upstanding men," he wrote in the great concluding passage of "The
Tower." It is hard to think of another modern poet who would venture
to cast his supreme thought in this testamentary form, or who, having
ventured it, could carry it off with Yeats's poise.
His was a poise born of conviction and based on effort.
If
anyone
is left in the world who supposes that Yeats practiced in his life only the
"wasteful virtues" he praised in his poetry, these letters will unde–
ceive him. They show how firmly he occupied that twilight realm be–
tween dreaming and doing which h e celebrated in all his poetry-the
realm where anything is possible.
F. W. Dupee
