364
My rhymes more than their rhyming tell
Of the dim visions old and deep,
That God gives unto man in sleep.
For round about my table go
The magical powers to and fro.
PARTISAN REVIEW
It follows that Yeats must assert that Ireland was a nation to the extent
of its cultural difference from England. If England was, as Yeats thought,
rotten with positivism and industrialism, Ireland must be-and especially
the West of Ireland-an antinomian culture, a place of villages and town–
lands, mindful of ancient lore and natural magic. He must find in the West
sufficient reasons, aesthetic and spiritual, for rejecting the lure of mod–
ernism. In "Literature and the Living Voice" he wrote:
Irish poetry and Irish stories were made to be spoken or sung, while
English literature, alone of great literatures, because the newest of
them all, has all but completely shaped itself in the printing-press. In
Ireland to-day the old world that sang and listened is, it may be for the
last time in Europe, face to face with the world that reads and writes,
and their antagonism is always present under some name or other in
Irish imagination and intellect.
Those reflections justified Yeats's recourse to the theater. "Wherever the
old imaginative life lingers," he said, "it must be stirred to more life, or at
the worst, kept alive, and in Ireland this is the work, it may be, of the Gaelic
movement." By the Gaelic movement I think he meant to include what
he later called the Celtic Renaissance.
But Yeats's boldest gesture, I have come to think, was to join his work
as a cultural nationalist with that of European Symbolism and the occult.
By that designation I mean to include not only Mallarme and the other
poets and dramatists presented in Arthur Symons's
The Symbolist Movement
in Literature
but the whole neo-Platonic tradition with Blake as its great–
est adept. Symons wrote of Symbolism that it is "a literature in which the
visible world is no longer a reality, and the unseen world no longer a
dream." It may seem a wild project to act upon that emphasis while con–
juring a race to come forth as a nation and to take its place in history. But
Yeats did not want Ireland to become a nation like any other. In "The
Celtic Element in Literature" he makes the antithetical nature of his
desire quite clear. Taking up the theme where he thought Renan and
Arnold had left it, he did not engage with Arnold's talk of race and nation,
