The importance of the visual arts in the esthetic of W. B. Yeats.

Abstract

Yeats's interest in the visual arts was not just an early phase, ending when he left art school, but rather a lifetime concern that affected him in many ways. Not only did artists and art critics have a shaping effect on his esthetic, but paintings and sculptures and their creators provided him with scenes and symbols for his poetry. Sometimes these references are unacknowledged--Yeats's letters indicate that "On Those Who Hated 'The Playboy of the Western World, ' 1907, " for instance, presents a scene from a painting by Charles Ricketts, although there is nothing in any version of the poem itself to indicate the relationship--but several poems do directly refer to a painting or sculpture. These art works served as alembics through which Yeats's ideas passed before emerging as finished poems: as he said to artist Cecil Salkell, "Your picture made the thing clear." Chapter One of this paper describes the backgrounds of Yeats's involvement with the visual arts, especially the effect upon his esthetic of his tendency to react against the changes in style of his painter-father, J. B. Yeats.

Chapter Two attempts a summary of W. B. Yeats's essays about the visual arts, which present his standards of evaluation. Crucial to this esthetic is the necessity for an interrelationship of poetry and painting; it is on this basis that Yeats analyzes his own writing career in the 1913 essay, "Art and Ideas." Painters, sculptors, and art critics were influences through their writing as well as their painting; Yeats divides his career into periods according to the dominance of one or another artist or critic's esthetic theories. Chapter Three deals with the first of these, the Pre-Raphaelites and Blake. The Pre-Raphaelites' "literary" paintings pervade Yeats's early poems in scene--landscape, persons, composition--and theme. The love poems especially reflect this style, and it is likely that the background of the form is Rossetti's "Sonnets for Pictures." Blake and his followers, Samuel Palmer and Edward Calvert, on the other hand, were more important in the break between early and mid-career for Yeats: Blake primarily as an esthetician, Palmer and Calvert in their contribution to imagery and style, especially the use of pastoral and the development of the elegy. Part of this influence came through Yeats's reading of Blake's Descriptive Catalogue and Palmer's Life and Letters. Chapter Four analyzes the effect upon the middle period in Yeats's career of the "Aesthetic school, " dominated by Walter Pater. The tendency derived from Pater to "purify" the arts of reference to each other shows in the absence of overt use of the visual arts in the poems Yeats wrote at the first of the century. He had read The Renaissance, Marius the Epicurean, and Greek Studies; the effect of these books appears primarily in his drama. Chapter Five portrays the artists whom Yeats saw as an alternative both to the Decadence and to the violence of modern art as it appears in the work of Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis, and the Vorticists: Charles Ricketts and T. S. Moore. Ricketts' Pages on Art details his conservative esthetic, called by Yeats "our more profound Pre-Raphaelitism." The interaction of the arts was a basic principle, and Yeats's poems reflect this by an increasing frequency of reference to the visual arts, culminating in Yeats's masterpiece in the Rossettian mode, "Lapis Lazuli."