ABSTRACT

IN A Packet for Ezra Pound Yeats informs us with disarming candour that his poetry has 'gained in self-possession and power'. 'I owe this change', he continues, 'to an incredible experience'. and goes on to add that four days after his marriage his wife attempted automatic writing. What she took down was so profound and exciting that Yeats was prepared to devote the rest of his life 'to explaining and piecing together those scattered sentences'. But the spirits, with a wisdom denied to some literary critics, informed him that this was unnecessary. 'We have come to give you metaphors for poetry.' Those who are not prepared to take poetry as seriously as Yeats have seized on this remark as evidence of the essential triviality of the 'System', 1 but to Yeats himself, who had cast his life into his rhymes, the strange designs which the communicators dictated and the frustrators confused were the climax of a thirty-year search for synthesis.