Our Greatest Poet-Statesman: Authorized Biography of William Butler Yeats

W. B. YEATS, 1865—1939. ByJoseph Hone.The Macmillan Company.$6.00

MR. HONE’S official biography of Yeats has been awaited with great interest by those many readers of poetry who consider Yeats to have been, in T. S. Eliot’s words, “the greatest poet of our time.” Now that it has appeared (though at a price which even in these days is surely excessive) they will not, on the whole, be disappointed.

Mr. Hone has had a difficult, if fascinating, job. Yeats’s personality had many sides to it, and throughout his life he was involved in all sorts of controversial issues. The problem of the biographer is to make the portrait, true to life, to convey the impression that Yeats was a great poet, and to describe his involvement in literature, occultism, Irish politics, and various philosophical systems as fairly and honestly as possible. Mr. Hone has managed to do all these things well; he writes with an economical and apparently unprejudiced tact, and his biography will be as useful to the student of Yeats’s poetry as it should be interesting to the general reader.

Mr. Hone’s method of presentation is unemphatic, and there are traces in his style of the style of George Moore (whose biography he has also written) as well as of Yeats’s own economy— though Yeats’s prose at its latest and best had a compressed richness that defies imitation. The virtues of Mr. Hone’s unemphatic manner are that it lets the material speak for itself, and that the vivid or humorous episodes come to life with a sly dryness which is more effective than if they were pointed at or exclaimed about as is the fashion in much modern biography. But the method has its disadvantages too. At times we feel, in thinking about Yeats as Mr. Hone presents him, as if both Yeats’s character and his ideas were seen through an Irish mist, instead of being etched in a clear light.

Mr. Hone does not — it was not his intention — offer much criticism of Yeats’s poetry, and where he does, it is not particularly illuminating. But he quotes a good deal of it — as usual, letting his subject speak for himself— and he assumes, wisely enough, some knowledge of it in the reader. One wishes, however, that some of his quotations were not so truncated, for they give a false impression by breaking the rhythms of the poems as a whole.

But in general Mr. Hone has used the material at. his disposal, published and unpublished, with sound judgment, and we have a good picture of Yeats, which was not, as I have said, an easy thing to accomplish. To be sure, there are certain sides of Yeats which are only hinted at rather than described. For one thing we should like to hear more than Mr. Hone tells of Yeats’s activities as a senator. And Mr. Hone does not bring out very clearly the fact that Yeats was, for a long portion of his career, something of a poseur; there was undoubtedly an element of comedy, as George Moore delighted in emphasizing, about his deliberate assumption of the secondary characteristics of genius — the long hair, the romantic expression, the tall candles and the ancient books.

But Mr. Hone is doubtless right not to put much importance on such matters, though they add to the total picture, for the splendid thing about Yeats is that he had, not merely the secondary characteristics of genius, but the primary ones as well. One of the most remarkable things about him, both as man and as poet, was that he kept growing and developing until the day of his death, and Mr. Hone gives us a convincing image of Yeats’s final phase, when all the affectations of his earlier years had disappeared, and his personality, like his poetry, was simple and grand.

Yeats had been through all kinds of experiences; merely to list them gives an indication of the range of his interests: Pre-Raphaelitism, Irish folklore, Maud Gonne, symbolism, spiritualism, Nietzsche, the Abbey Theatre, Irish politics, Ezra Pound, Vico, Berkeley, Swift — the names of movements, of people, of ideas could be extended further still and yet be incomplete. All of them, in one way or another, became a part of Yeats himself and a part of that vigorous and noble style which, even when it had pessimism for its theme, made his poetry clang and sing like no other poetry of its generation. Mr. Hone most appropriately ends his book with a tribute to Yeats from T. S. Eliot, the only contemporary poet who can speak of Yeats as of an equal: “Yeats . . . was one of those few whose history is the history of our own time, who are a part of the consciousness of their age, which cannot be understood without them.”

THEODORE SPENCER