IRELAND'S POET : 'Such Friends: The Work of W.B. Yeats'.

Such Friends: The Work of W.B. Yeats," on view through September 11 at the New York Public Library's Humanities and Social Sciences Library (Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street), considers this greatest of Irish poets by way of his many professional and personal relationships. While such an indirect approach may take the exhibition beyond the reach of the uninitiated, to those who already know and love Yeats, there is much to learn. Within the library's muted marble exhibition hall are gathered 250 books, manuscripts, drawings, and photographs that illuminate both the context and the subtext of Yeats's poetry: his Irish ancestry, his work in the Abbey Theater, his role in the Irish literary renaissance, his fascination with the occult, his many friendships and loves. The exhibition takes its title from the oft-quoted final couplet of "The Municipal Gallery Revisited": "Think where man's glory most begins and ends/And say my glory was I had such friends."

This is a homegrown exhibition, most of its materials drawn from the library's Berg Collection of English and American literature, specifically the papers of the Irish writer and patriot Lady Augusta Gregory, who was a lifelong close friend of Yeats. Not every poet or artist of the twentieth century could support an exhibition based on his or her circle of friends and family, but in this case, the concept is sound. Yeats's private and public lives interpenetrate like the cone-shaped gyres that figure in some of his poems. He drew the themes and images for his poetry from the welter of his experiences with such friends as Maud Gonne, John O'Leary, Olivia Shakespeare, Ezra Pound, J.M. Synge, John Quinn, Lady Gregory, and his father, the painter John Butler Yeats. Accordingly, around nearly every corner in the exhibition, the visitor encounters a familiar face.

The initial sections deal with Yeats's family and early influences. Born in 1865 in Dublin, son of a "brilliant but impractical painter," grandson and great-grandson of rectors of the Church of Ireland, from an early age Willie imbibed myths and fairy tales of the Irish countryside during summers spent at his maternal grandparents' home at Sligo. While the mantle of Irishness he assumed as a young poet surely drew on this early exposure, it was in truth a more calculated decision, arising in part from his association with the political leader John O'Leary, another early influence.

Each section uses a variety of materials to illustrate the breadth of Yeats's engagement with both ideas and people throughout his life. In a letter to O'Leary, the young poet defends his interest in magic and the occult: "The mystical life is the centre of all that I do & all that I think & all that I write....I have always considered my self a voice of what I beleive [sic] to be a greater renaisance [sic]-the revolt of the soul against the intellect-now begining [sic] in the world." (So inconsistent was Yeats's spelling that the curator has placed explanatory notes about it throughout the gallery.) Many of the friends Yeats would celebrate in his poetry are introduced early on: the beautiful Irish patriot Maud Gonne (to whom Yeats proposed five times, unsuccessfully), the loyal and steadfast Lady Gregory, and John Quinn, an Irish-American lawyer and arts patron who was a friend to the poet and his father.

One of my favorite sections details Yeats's work with the Abbey Theatre, which he, Edward Martyn, and Lady Gregory founded in 1904 to produce Irish plays on Irish soil. A small pamphlet titled "Abbey Theatre Endowment Fund" announces a drive to raise five thousand pounds for the theater, to keep it "vigorous, intellectual, and courageous for another half-dozen years." In amusing proximity is a letter from Yeats to the manager of an Abbey touring company: "The Abbey Company is as difficult to manage as a South American republic." (The Abbey was neither the first nor the last nonprofit to experience a disjunction between fund-raising rhetoric and front-line reality.) Many of the theater programs and manuscripts in this section, as elsewhere in the exhibition, are festooned in the margins with wonderful pencil or pen sketches of contemporaries made by Yeats's father or his brother Jack, also an artist. Particularly noteworthy is a pair of sketches of James Joyce, whose famous brushoff of Yeats in 1902 ("I have met you too late. You are too old.") is described here. And there is a caustic letter from Sean O'Casey, who broke irrevocably with Yeats over the Abbey's rejection of O'Casey's play The Silver Tassie: "Does [Yeats] take me to be such a dish of skimmed milk that I would do such a shuffling, lying thing [as withdraw the play]?"

Another small delight is a letter the poet wrote to Lady Gregory from America, where John Quinn arranged a lecture tour for Yeats in 1903-04: "I have been delighted by the big merry priests of Notre Dame-all Irish & proud as lucifer [sic] of their success in getting Jews & nonconformists to come to their college." Also gracing this section is a humorous sketch on a Christmas letter from Jack Yeats to John Quinn, depicting the cravat-clad Yeats declaiming on the Psaltery in "the wild and woolly west," standing at the caboose rail before a group of roughnecks in sombreros and Indian headdresses.

As it progresses, the exhibition traces the increasing vigor and directness of Yeats's poetry as he doffs the mask of attenuated Irish romanticism, in volumes such as Responsibilities and The Wild Swans at Coole, well represented here by manuscripts. The wall panels offer especially helpful background information and explication of the many manuscripts and galleys. "Upheavals," the next-to-last section, neatly captures the relatedness of Yeats's life and work, including under that rubric both his marriage, at the age of fifty-two, to Bertha Georgie Hyde-Lees, and the Easter Rising of 1916. His marriage to the much younger "George," as she preferred, is rightly credited for its immense importance: It gave him a sense of security and abundance, and supplied him with a witty, shrewd, and energetic companion who tended to much of the business side of his life. Nowhere was her shrewdness more apparent than on her honeymoon, when she first "discovered" that she possessed the gift of automatic writing-this access to the spirit world immediately calmed her husband's troubled state of mind about his marriage. The first preserved page of her conversation with the Beyond is on display, round illegible scrawl slanting up the page.

Yeats's poetry improved with the years, and thus a visitor may be inclined to linger over the materials in the exhibition's last section, "Final Works." Along with some wonderful documents relating to The Oxford Book of Modern Verse, which Yeats (infamously) edited, and a moving letter describing the death of Lady Gregory, there is a fascinating group of manuscripts demonstrating the poet's struggle with one of his last poems, "The Circus Animals' Desertion." The collection of heavily marked manuscripts here shows vividly how Yeats worked and reworked the poem's famous final section, deleting lines, shuffling word order, replacing words, setting the poem aside for months, gradually drawing closer to the final version, which concludes:

Now that my ladder's gone,

I must lie down where all the ladders start,

In the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart.

Yeats died in 1939 in the south of France. Because of the wartime blockade, it was not until 1948 that his body was returned to Ireland, where, in a neat twist of circumstance, it was received by government official Sean MacBride-the son of Maud Gonne. The exhibition is ornamented throughout with just such little tidbits, sparks of humor, and small flashes of information that shed light on the complexities of Yeats and his poetry. While it may lack the comprehensiveness to convert nonbelievers, those of us who consider Yeats among the greatest poets of the twentieth century would do well to visit the "municipal gallery" in which "Such Friends" is housed.

Elizabeth Kirkland Cahill is co-author, with Joseph Papp, of Shakespeare Alive!