The greatest?

W. B. Yeats: A Life, II: The Arch-Poet, by R. F. Foster (Oxford, 798 pp., $45)

IS William Butler Yeats Number One? A young professor at Columbia, one of the best lecturers on Shakespeare I ever heard and a man whose opinions I took very seriously, once remarked to me that Yeats was "the best poet in English since Shakespeare." This would mean--going chronologically--that he was better than Donne, Marvell, Milton, Pope, Wordsworth, Keats, Tennyson, and T. S. Eliot. Today's critical consensus on 20th-century poets in English looks something like this: Eliot and Yeats, tied for first; Frost second (not prolific enough after his earlier best stuff); Pound, Stevens, and Auden battling for third. (Of these six, four were American, one Irish, and only one English. For years English poets have resented the outsiders' superiority.)

So the publication of the second and last volume of R. F. Foster's Yeats biography, the whole amounting to some 1,500 pages, has been an eagerly awaited event. And everything about the work is first-rate: the scholarship, the literary criticism, Foster's lucid and civilized style. It is hardly imaginable that there will be a successor.

The 1,500 pages were necessary for completeness, for never has such great work arisen out of a huge pile of such unpromising material: an idiosyncratic, and frankly incredible, cyclical theory of history dictated by his wife, who heard it from Voices (who sound like Vico and Spengler); the 20th-century history of Ireland, a tiny country on the margin of Europe; Yeats's struggles in the third-rate Dublin theater, where his own plays, except for The Words upon the Window Pane, about Swift, do not amount to much; his failed love and courtship of the patriot diva Maud Gonne, who married a Major MacBride instead, killed in the 1916 Easter Rising and immortalized by Yeats as "a drunken vainglorious lout" (ah, what a revenge!); all enlivened by theosophy, seances, and other psychic esoterica. That Yeats was able to do so much with this amalgam of junk and trivia is one of the marvels of the age, and owes everything to his powerful transforming imagination--maybe the best since Shakespeare's, especially considering that many of those earlier poets had more literary civilization immediately behind them. Add to that the fact that, beginning with Crossways (1889), he was a third-rate late Romantic poet, and that around 1910, with the immediate help of Ezra Pound and more generally the new example of modernism, he had to reinvent himself to stride forth as the emerging great modern poet.

What he did, beginning with The Green Helmet (1910), was re-create himself with a Nietzschean and Emersonian act of will and imagination. He projected the little events of recent Irish history against the apocalyptic screen of European history, and, using his cyclical theory of history, presented people he knew as recent versions of the past. Maud Gonne becomes Helen, Major Robert Gregory becomes Sir Philip Sidney and--having died young, as a WWI fighter pilot--the subject of the best elegy in English poetry, Lady Gregory's Coole Park becomes a symbol of "all the beautiful things" that are being swept away by the revolt of the masses, the "swan that drifts upon a darkening flood." The poet who steps forward in 1910 has Homeric tragic stature; well might his Dublin friends have thought,

"Willie, we hardly knew ye." One benefit of the new Yeats's cyclical theory is that it allowed him to re-experience the beginnings of great cycles, as in "Two Songs From a Play":

   I saw a staring virgin stand
   Where holy Dionysus died,
   And tear the heart out of his side,
   And lay the heart upon her hand
   And bear that beating heart away;
   And then did all the Muses sing
   Of Magnus Annus at the spring,
   As though God's death were but a play.

   Another Troy must rise and set,
   Another lineage feed the crow,
   Another Argo's painted prow
   Drive to a flashier bauble yet.
   The Roman Empire stood appalled:
   It dropped the reins of peace and war
   When that fierce virgin and her Star
   Out of the fabulous darkness called.

There you have the whole thing: the great cycles (2,000 years), the rise and fall of Troy, the new Christian era "at the spring," the "fabulous darkness" of Babylon and astrology; and a new Star, the prophetic voice (is "another Argo" the Titanic?).

The poetry gives authority to the otherwise dubious theory of history. Yeats's "The Second Coming" (this time of barbarism) is one of our most quoted poems because it is a great poem that is also topical, the medieval falconer of cultural synthesis giving way to chaos, and the god-man to god-beast:

   Turning and turning in the widening gyre
   The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
   Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold;
   Mere anarchy is loosed upon the
      world ...
   But anarchy is weak, and cannot last:

   ... somewhere in sands of the desert
   A shape with lion body and the head of a
      man,
   A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
   Is moving its slow thighs, while all about
      it
   Reel shadows of indignant desert birds.

The morning paper? That appeared in Michael Robartes and the Dancer (1921). At the end of "The Waste Land" (1922) the voice says, "These fragments I have shored against my ruins." Eliot will go on a Dantean quest toward God; Yeats's answer is his poetry. He once said, at the height of his powers, that he wrote poems like lighting one cigarette from another. In one of his greatest, "Among School Children" (1928), he--a "sixty-year-old smiling public man" (a senator)--for a moment thinks he sees Helen/Maud Gonne in a little girl:

   I dream of a Ledaean body ...
   I look upon one child or t'other there
   And wonder if she stood so at that age--
   For even daughters of the swan can
      share
   Something of every paddler's
      heritage--
   And had that colour upon cheek or hair,
   And thereupon my heart is driven wild:
   She stands before me as a living child.

At the end of this poem, we get something like an answer to "The Second Coming":

   Labour is blossoming or dancing where
   The body is not bruised to pleasure
      soul.
   Nor beauty born out of its own despair ...
   O chestnut-tree, great-rooted blossomer,
   Are you the leaf, the blossom or the
      bole?
   O body swayed to music, O brightening
      glance,
   How can we know the dancer from the
      dance?

That is pure Nietzsche. God being dead, the self is a work of art, the closer to heroic perfection the better: Nietzsche's Ubermensch as not the Storm Trooper but Beethoven and Goethe (though Nietzsche generally preferred French culture).

We see Yeats's self-invention "recorded" or imagined in the poem that stands as a preface to the 1914 volume Responsibilities:

   Pardon, old fathers, if you still remain
   Somewhere in ear-shot for the story's
      end,
   Old Dublin merchant 'free of the ten and
      four'
   Or trading out of Galway into Spain ...
   Pardon that for a barren passion's sake,
   Although I have come close on forty-nine,
   I have no child, I have nothing but a
      book,
   Nothing but that to prove your blood and
      mine.

Between 1914 and his death in 1939 that would be some book: beauty, love, history, defiance, hatred of liberalism (he called it Whiggery), the passing of the great estates, the alliance of artist and aristocracy in form and beauty. There would come a son, a daughter, and "A Prayer for My Daughter":

   Once more the storm is howling, and
      half hid
   Under this cradle-hood and coverlid
   My child sleeps on....
   And for an hour I have walked and
      prayed
   Because of the great gloom that is in my
      mind....

That is the Shakespearian tragic storm out of Macbeth, Othello, and Lear, calmed in The Tempest by music, dance, marriage, by repentance and, symbolically, the sacraments. So, in the tragic storm out of the 20th century, it is ceremony Yeats prays for:

   An intellectual hatred is the worst,
   So let her think opinions are
      accursed....
   And may her bridegroom bring her to
      a house
   Where all's accustomed, ceremonious;
   For arrogance and hatred are the wares
   Peddled in the thoroughfares.
   How but in custom and ceremony
   Are innocence and beauty born?
   Ceremony's a name for the rich horn,
   And custom for the spreading laurel
      tree.

If you asked Nietzsche, "What is truth?" he would answer, "I dance," and so he did, through the entire history of Western philosophy. Or, as Yeats says, "How can we know the dancer from the dance?" His book, as I say, was some book. And, you know, maybe this guy was the best poet since Shakespeare. In any case, the great poet here has the biography he deserves: The specialist will cherish it, and the general reader can use Foster's index along with the table of contents of a collected Yeats to find the excellent commentaries.