Patterns of People in the Phases IV

 Creating through Opposition

 (This follows from Patterns of People in the Phases Part I, Part II, Part III.)

Creating from opposition

The nature of artistic creation is, according to the Yeatses' system, affected by the operation of the Faculties, especially the Mask. In terms of the artists' lives more broadly, it is Daimons (or Gatekeepers as they are called in The Trembling of the Veil) that engineer the circumstances for creativity.

[The Daimons] contrived Dante’s banishment, and snatched away his Beatrice, and thrust Villon into the arms of harlots, and sent him to gather cronies at the foot of the gallows, that Dante and Villon might through passion become conjoint to their buried selves, turn all to Mask and Image, and so be phantoms in their own eyes. In great lesser writers like Landor and like Keats we are shown that Image and that Mask as something set apart; Andromeda and her Perseus—though not the sea-dragon—but in a few in whom we recognize supreme masters of tragedy, the whole contest is brought into the circle of their beauty. (Au 273, CW3 217)

 

"Andromeda and her Perseus," without and with sea-dragon...
Edward Burne-Jones, Perseus and Andromeda, 1876. Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide.

Yeats is expressing in semi-public terms for the autobiography the creation of internal Mask and its embodiment as Image in poetry: Andromeda represents the Image of desire, while Perseus is the Mask adopted by the poet. The dragon represents the dark side of life, the recognition of the negative poles, the Body of Fate in terms of the Faculties.

Thus we find Landor’s shepherds and Shelley’s wanderers at Phase 3 opposite the poets’ phase, Byron’s Don Juan and Giaour opposite his phase 19, and Browning’s old hunter talking with gods or king of long ago, almost opposite. For Yeats, the artists need the polar opposite represented by the Mask whether it is the Image, the object of love—Andromeda—or the projected self, the lover—Perseus: for Shelley, Epipsychidion or Venus Urania and Alastor or Athanase. For Yeats, the greatest artists manage to fuse them into something more complete, the circle of beauty. Furthermore they embrace the opposite impulse represented especially by the destructive Body of Fate, the sea-dragon, the recognition that conflict is inherent in the world, which he calls, idiosyncratically, the Vision of Evil. 

[Dante and Villon] The two halves of their nature are so completely joined that they seem to labour for their objects, and yet to desire whatever happens, being at the same instant predestinate and free, creation's very self.... Had not Dante and Villon understood that their fate wrecked what life could not rebuild, had they lacked their Vision of Evil, had they cherished any species of optimism, they could but have found a false beauty, or some momentary instinctive beauty, and suffered no change at all, or but changed as do the wild creatures, or from Devil well to Devil sick, and so round the clock. (Au 273, CW3 217)

Opposition in creation

Yeats also treats his fellow poets as representatives of different attitudes to life, including religion (something he would later do with his two children). There is a draft for the revised version of A Vision in Rapallo Notebook B, where Yeats struggles to express something of this. He talks of two approaches to Christianity, one of which is lyric and associated with Shelley and Keats, while the other is tragic and Dantean.  

I myself seek a symbol that can thrust Christianity back into the crises where it arose, and there display it not as an abstract ideal but united to its opposite, or thrust it forward into the crisis where the actors must change robes & the defeated Tincture triumph in its turn. An abstract ideal is lyrical.
                     VI
An ideal separated from its opposite is lyrical acquires a is lyrical; has a phantastic imobility like that of the Greek figures in Keats Ode & palls upon us po, has a phantastic imobility like that of the gr figures Keats saw upon the Urn & therefore xxx palls upon us, the exceptional moment past; whereas but an idea united to its opposite is tragic & stays always like the poetry of Dante
                    VII
and like the poetry of Dante needs no exceptional moment & always stays like the poetry of Dante. An ideal separated from its opposite is lyrical, & its phantastic imobility palls upon us, but an ideal united to its opposite is tragic & stays always like the poetry of Dante. I am tired of Shellean Christianity.

Rapallo Notebook B, NLI 13,579, [53r–54r]

He appears to reject the lyric form as abstract in favour of a more dramatic approach where the opposing pole brings in conflict. He associates the lyric form with “an ideal separated from its opposite,” something that A Vision deplores, as it is said to “consume itself away” (AVA 134, one of those phrases that Yeats left from the automatic script, partly our of respect for the form of words, and partly uncertain of the full meaning). 

He even goes so far as to compare the lyric mode to “a phantastic immobility like that of the Greek figures in Keats’s Ode” on a Grecian Urn, whereas “an ideal united to its opposite is tragic & stays always like the poetry of Dante.” He closes by saying that he is “tired of Shellean Christianity”—that is, not that Shelley was Christian but the Shelley of the "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty" represents an approach to Christianity as an abstract, unmixed ideal. 

Yeats is writing about religion, but in the aesthetic terms he knows, and there is some implicit belittling of the lyric mode. The later, more succinct redraft in Rapallo A appears to view Shelley’s work as a “song in the air” contrasted with the conflagration of the phoenix and its rebirth. 

An ideal separated from its opposite is lyrical & its fantastic immobility palls upon us but an ideal united to its opposite is tragic & stays always like the poetry of Dante. I am tired of Shellean Christianity—I prefer to any song in the air a Phoenix, that rises twelve times from a body twelve times consumed to ashes.*

Rapallo Notebook A, NLI 13,578, [8r], page numbered 5

Opposition within the creator

Though Shelley and Dante are both representatives of the same Phase 17 as himself, they here represent the two parts of Yeats's creative character, lyric and dramatic. This creation of opposites needs both the polar opposite represented by the Mask, which brings the lyric impulse and aesthetic beauty, but also the opposite impulse represented by Creative Mind, bringing the construction of conceit and universals, and especially Body of Fate, which rounds with the tragic aspect.

It seems all the stranger that Yeats says that the "phantastic imoblity" of the "Ode to a Grecian Urn" "palls upon us," because he opens that same notebook with a description of Rapallo and its bay, comparing the town precisely to the scenes depicted on Keats’s Urn with tender approval. Yet it indicates the tension that Yeats felt and the criticisms directed towards his own practice, that he would express in poems such as “Vacillation” and “The Circus Animals’ Desertion.” However complex it may be, a lyric poem of necessity focuses rather than drawing all in, but many critics have observed how Yeats's poetry resists immobility, often using questions to open the end of poem up, to invite the opposite and avoid any impression of neat conclusion. 

 

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* Yeats complicates the image of the phoenix reborn in fire by bringing in another meaning that he was playing with at this time, where he referred to the twelve "incarnations of Buddha" or avatars of the divine as "twelve Phoenixes." These had been called "Masters" in the automatic script, "Fountains" in AVA, and are not really dealt with in AVB. For this and the material cited above, see my essay "Rapallo Notebooks A and B" in International Yeats Studies 6.