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PARTISAN REVIEW
Nietzschean long before he had read Nietzsche. In "The Use and Abuse of
History" Nietzsche says that we seek a past from which we may spring,
rather than that past from which we appear to have derived.
This explains why Yeats's typical attention to a concept or a value dis–
places it and compels it to take part in the action of his own imagination.
In "A General Introduction for My Work" he says that a poet "is never
the bundle of accident and incoherence that si ts down to breakfast; he has
been reborn as an idea, something intended, complete." Evidently, the par–
ticular idea is his own:
A novelist might describe his accidence, his incoherence, he must not;
he is more type than man, more passion than type. He is Lear, Romeo,
Oedipus, Tiresias; he has stepped out of a play, and even the woman
he loves is Rosalind, Cleopatra, never The Dark Lady. He is part of his
own phantasmagoria and we adore him because nature has grown
intelligible, and by so doing a part of our creative power.
Similarly, Yeats was not willing to see history as mere chronology, "the
cracked tune that Chronos sings." He insisted on submitting it to the force
of one's imagination. In his diary of 1930 he wrote, "History is necessity
until it takes fire in someone's head and becomes freedom or virtue." In
"The Celtic Element in Literature," as if he were ready to exchange life
for art, he wrote:
Certainly a thirst for unbounded emotion and a wild melancholy are
troublesome things in the world, and do not make its life more easy
or orderly, but it may be the arts are founded on the life beyond the
world, and that they must cry in the ears of our penury until the world
has been consumed and become a vision.
The problem was not how to consume the world but how to make this
apparently opaque thing appear to be transfigured, become transparent by
virtue of one's imagination.
