ABSTRACT
YEATS' next volume of verse, In the Seven Woods, was published in 1903. He tells us, in a note, that he wrote some of the poems in it 'before the big wind of nineteen hundred and three blew down so many trees and troubled the wild creatures, and changed the look of things; and I thought out there a good part of the play [On Baile's Strand] which follows. The first shape came to me in a dream, but it changed much in the making, foreshadowing, it may be, a change that may bring a less dream-burdened will into my verses.' These remarks are not as direct as they sound and Ellmann has shown that there was also a storm in Yeats' mind which blew down a great deal in it and drastically changed 'the look of things'. The event which so powerfully altered Yeats' life was Maud Gonne's marriage to Major John MacBride in February 1903. It is tempting to treat this event as an artistic as well as a personal watershed and there can be no doubt that it fundamentally reshaped the attitudes at work in Yeats' poetry. But the remaking of the poet had begun slightly earlier. In his introduction to the Oxford Book of Modern Verse, Yeats tells us that 'in 1900 everybody got down off his stilts' and while this remark is not true of English poetry as a whole it is reasonably accurate in relation to Yeats himself. A letter to George Russell about May of this year gives a fuller indication of the direction which Yeats' mind was taking:
... vague forms, pictures, scenes, etc. are rather a modern idea of the poetic and I would not want to call up a modern kind of picture. I avoid every kind of word that seems to me either 'poetical' or 'modern' and above
all I avoid suggesting the ghostly (the vague) idea about a god, for it is a modern conception. All ancient vision was definite and precise. (Letters, p.343)
Yeats' critical comments are full of premonitions of later writers who are better known as critics; in this case, 'definite and precise' looks forward to Hulme's observation that 'the great aim of poetry is accurate, precise and definite description'. Clarity of outline is not compulsory for movement out of the twilight, but the point is that Yeats' approach, besides being valid for himself, makes him a pioneer of the modem temper. A letter to Fiona Macleod, written about November 1901, carries this development further and suggests other implications of the new simplicity:
You, as I think, should seek the delights of style in utter simplicity, in a self-effacing rhythm and language; in an expression that is like a tumbler of water rather than like a cup of wine. (Letters, p. 358)
This time the anticipation is of Eliot who in 1933 called for a poetry 'so transparent that in reading it we are intent on what the poem points at and not on the poetry', and who said in 1941 that the great poet in his greatest moments is 'writing transparently so that our attention is directed to the object and not to the medium'. Neither Eliot nor Yeats is wholly in the right here and for Yeats in particular the 'self-effacing rhythm' which he recommends is no great improvement on those 'wavering, meditative organic rhythms' which he is in the process of disowning. As frequently happens, the correct position is the one enunciated by Coleridge.
