ABSTRACT
In her book Eli{abethan and Metaphysical Imagery, Miss Rosemond Tuve has praised many aspects of Yeats' style as traditional: in particular his adherence to decorum, to the division between the <high, middle, and low styles': and in a footnote so comprehensive .as to require quotation, 'One could not find better Elizabethan examples of decorum justly and delicately maintained in the character of images, and 'governing': absence or presence of tropes; their complexity, logical tautness, or emotional reach; amplifying or diminishing suggestions through epithet or detail; brevity of expansion; amount and character of rhetorical ornament; all adjusted by syntactical or metrical means, to tone: l This aristocracy of style was wholly conscious,2 and developed with his training: it is often lacking in the early period. Yeats' impatience with the early work, the continuous revision, suggest a high and fastidious taste. Perhaps it is to this that MacNeice referred when he spoke of him as 'using words with the precision of a dandy'. 3 Against it we may set Yeats' own statement: '1 have before me an ideal expression in which all that 1 have, clay and spirit alike, assist; it is as though 1 most approximate towards that expression when 1 carry with me the greatest possible amount of hereditary thought and feeling, even national and family hatred and pride:·
One aspect of the traditional style was Yeats' fondness for the 'magnificence' of proper names and for enriched strongly-cadenced phrases. His ear delights in sonorities: Plotinus, Phidias, Salamis, Empedocles; Rhadamanthus, Smaragdine, Mareotic.5 He lingers on, tastes, whole cadenced phrases and heavily-evocative names:
Troy passed away in one high funeral gleam, And Usna's children died. Doomed like Odysseus and the wandering ships, And proud as Priam murdered with his peers. Men that had fought at Aughrim and the Boyne.
