Readers who have battled their way through the complexities of `Dialogue of Self and Soul' or `Byzantium' have reason to be grateful for this methodical and deeply engaged study of the Yeatsian sublime, which is clearly the outcome of years of careful thought. A key trope in Enlightenment philosophy, the sublime is the sudden apprehension of extreme beauty, the viewer mixing positive feelings of wonder and negative feelings of terror in almost equal parts.
The task of describing this paradoxical mix and its moral significance has long been the disputed territory of aesthetics. Holdridge painstakingly outlines the differences between Burke's ideas of the negative sublime as a violent disruption of the beauty expressed in the harmony of social order, and Kant's idea that the sublime offers a glimpse of transcendental freedom along the edge of the material world. Yeats's poetry, Holdridge convincingly argues, describes the unstable ground where these two views of the sublime meet. Here his lyrics seek to negotiate the troubled relationship between art, morality and aesthetic judgement that is at the heart of both philosophical enquiries.
The central argument of Those Mingled Seas is "to illustrate the various ways in which Yeats eroticises the idea of the divine". While this study is to be welcomed as the most sustained investigation to date of that central concern with "terrible beauty", Holdridge can be criticised for acclimatising too rapidly to the pure metaphysical air of his enquiry. The one area where Burke and Kant agree in their writings on the sublime is in their use of gendered terminology, summarised here: "the feminine sensible objective and natural realm must be united to the masculine, supersensible, subjective and free realm of the sublime." Inevitably marriage becomes the figure through which this unity is to be achieved, art hence becomes for Yeats, the "most creative, erotic grounds for possible resolution of the aesthetic crisis".
Given Holdridge's adroitness with the ideas of Lyotard, Kristeva and Adorno, it is disappointing that this set of categories becomes the basis for analysis without discussion of the feminist critiques of Enlightenment discourse offered by Michele Le Doeuff and others. In the area of textual criticism, Marjorie Howes's treatment of the role foundational acts of violence play in `Meditations in Time of Civil War' would have been relevant here.
Although Howes's Yeats's Nations is listed in the bibliography, and Elizabeth Butler Cullingford is mentioned passim, Holdridge's discussion of gender would have been enlivened by some initial engagement with Yeats's feminist critics. This single reservation would be a lesser issue if Those Mingled Seas were a lesser book. As it stands, this study will be useful in illuminating the most difficult writings in the Yeats canon, from A Vision to The Winding Stair, since it shows how poetic ideas of the sublime, previously regarded as idiosyncratic, cohere within the mainstream of the Western metaphysical tradition. This book is likely to remain the standard work for many years to come.
Selina Guinness lectures on Irish writing at Dun Laoghaire Institute of Art, Design and Technology