THE multi hued and modern nature of Yeats's life and continues to guarantee his status as the focus of a spectrum of literary criticism. So rigorously has he been ticked off by some feminist thinkers, however, one could be forgiven for dismissing him as a chauvinist Victorian prude who became a dirty old man in later life.
Yet anyone who has read his wise and irreverent "Crazy Jane" poems must know better: "Love has pitched his mansion in/The place of excrement;/For nothing can be sole or whole/That has not been rent." Yeats, the expert wearer of masks, chose to speak in the voice of an earthy, sexually liberated female persona that is far removed from the Victorian vision of the pure and passive feminine ideal.
In this lucid, balanced and affectionate book, the eminent Yeatsian, Professor Elizabeth Butler Cullingford, distinguishes Yeats from the "gynephobes and pornographers" (among whose ranks we find Padraic Pearse and the Marquis de Sade) and claims him as a man who was deeply sympathetic to women: in favour of contraception, divorce women's right to work outside the home, women's autonomous expression of sexual desire; and respectful of women's powers of intuition, spirituality and compassion.
Professor Cullingford sees Yeats as more than usually able to empathise with the marginalised status of women because he came from an oppressed colonised country and he favoured the mystery of occultism over the patriarchal logic of science.
She concentrates on his love poetry because it reflects the shifting balance of power between men and women in his lifetime. Yeats himself admitted that often, when he set out to write a poem, it ended up becoming a love poem, even if he had not anticipated that it would do so. In many of his poems, love poetry became a way of writing about nationalism as well as about the loved one (usually Maud Gonne). Cullingford concludes that his love poetry is therefore a central and crucial part of his oeuvre.
Yeats adapted traditional genres used by Western writers of love poetry to suit his own purposes, with the result that he did not fall into the time worn habit of adoring yet objectifying the loved one so that she has no perceived life of her own. Cullingford gives the example of the carpe diem form (modelled on the works of Horace, Catullus and Ovid), where immediate sexual enjoyment is urged in terms that "devalue the object of desire", as evidenced in a poem by Herrick: "Then be not coy/but use your time;/And while you may, goe marry:/For having lost but once your, prime,/You may forever tarry". In such poems, "woman's only function is to please physically and to procreate" while by contrast "loss of manly beauty does not mean loss of manly function". In "When You are Old" Yeats shows no such "sexual bullying": Maud Gonne will age "whether or not she requites his love" and Yeats still celebrates the individual and autonomous beauty of her form and of her soul.
Cullingford is particularly interesting on Yeats's use of the ballad form: "The ballad helps Yeats to reinflect the canon of Western male love poetry by presenting it from the woman's point of view". She notes that by choosing the oral, feminine, ballad form that celebrates love's roving wildness, Yeats "constructs the erotic as a site of popular resistance that was to culminate in Crazy Jane's defiance of the Irish Episcopate."
Cullingford subjects Yeats both as man and poet to a series of tortuous and often wearyingly hair splitting feminist arguments. For example, at the end of his life he liked to speak of himself as androgynous: Cullingford lists the various definitions of this word and whether, according to today's feminists, androgyny is a worthy state to pursue.
She wades bravely in to the debate over "Leda and the Swan feminists have attacked this poem as pornographic in its apparent glamorising of rape and bestiality. Cullingford is of the more enlightened school which recognises the poem's deeper complexity: she reminds the reader that the poem was written as one of Yeats's challenges to the crippling Church driven censorship of the Twenties, and that it foreshadows the coming totalitarianism of the Thirties. Apart from this, she points out the poem's determination to describe, with observant detail, the terrifying "power differential" between rapist and victim, and the fact that "Leda has been both physically and emotionally used, objectified and discarded."
In certain respects, Yeats is seen to fall down badly in his treatment of women, particularly his insistence on the importance of a woman's beauty rather than her activities. This is clear in his poem "In Memory of Eva Gore Booth and Con Markievicz".
"This elegises not two sisters in the fullness of their intellectual and political commitment, one working with her companion Esther Roper for suffrage and the rights of trade unionists, the other a nationalist revolutionary, Minister for Labour in the first Dail, and President of Cumann na mBan; but the apolitical Ascendency `girls' they once were, both beautiful, one `a gazelle'." Yeats is guilty of double standards, says Cullingford: he does not think that men mighty spoil the beauty by having opinions.
Going back to examine Yeats's early drafts, the book offers fascinating insights into the process by which Yeats refined and compressed his work. Professor Cullingford's extensive and relaxed scholarship is also evident in her sourcing of many of Yeats's ideas and references in work of various other artists and writers. This can be disillusioning, as despite his distinctive lyrical gifts, Yeats borrowed heavily from others. The immortal phrase "terrible beauty" was actually coined by Sheridan Le Fanu in his long poem "The Legend of the Glaive". Worse, most of "Cathleen ni Houlihan" was actually written by Lady Gregory; and George Yeats was largely responsible for "A Vision".
Despite this poaching from others - and his brief, naive interest in fascistic theories of eugenics - Yeats emerges from this book more or less unscathed by the fierce torch of contemporary feminist opinion. We are left with an endearing portrait of the Nobel Prizewinner, in his youth personified by Maud Gonne as the mother of "our children" (she was the "Father" of the love poems he wrote for her; jealous that he was giving birth to other children - his plays - with a rival "Father", Lady Gregory).
In the tussle between feminine emotion and masculine reason, argues Cullingford, Yeats plumped for the former every time: "I must lie down where all the ladders start,/In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.