The National Library's Yeats exhibition offers a perfect opportunity to reach an understanding of the poet's towering achievements and legacy, writes Eileen Battersby.
His voice drifts out, almost in greeting - that oddly Baroque accent, rolling and sounding vaguely irritated, disconcertingly like a Co Sligo parish priest. But the poet is not delivering a sermon, he is instead intoning his intention to visit a favoured place. "I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,/ And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made:/ Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee,/ And live alone in the bee-loud glade."
The exhibition space at the National Library, Dublin, has been transformed into scenes from the diverse life of William Butler Yeats, reflecting the kaleidoscopic range of cultural and historical references shaping the master who continues to overshadow Irish poetry.
The experience is as all encompassing as is the work. At the entrance, "Verse and Vision", a dramatically lilt installation with seating, sets the mood, offering a continuous recording of at present seven major poems read by several readers including Yeats, Seamus Heaney and an inspired Ulick O'Connor who recites When You Are Old. As the individual texts appear on large screens, other screens become alive with a succession of changing images. Against a backdrop of the voice of poet Paula Meehan reading The Wild Swans at Coole, majestic swans float and flurry, while the exuberance of The Song of Wandering Aengus is brilliantly rendered by 15-year-old schoolgirl Katherine Wade, winner of Yeats Aloud, a poetry reading competition run by the National Library and Poetry Ireland.
From every corner images of the poet at various stages of his earthly journey glance down at the viewer. Aloof, preoccupied, obsessive, equally engaged with destiny and reality, here is Yeats as a young romantic, there is Yeats as an aged dreamer; Yeats as lyric poet and as public poet, as political commentator, as derided mystic and fan of the esoteric, as cultural nationalist, as satirist, elegist, pragmatic theatre manager, tenaciously frustrated lover, risk-taking dramatist, and collector of folklore.
It is an emphatic endorsement of Yeats as the ultimate artistic prism whose influence may be seen in the rhetoric of the early Kinsella but whose astute political consciousness provided an informing, if oblique, legacy for his heirs: Heaney, Mahon and Longley.
Even now, some 67 years after Yeats's death, the claims made on his behalf for the mantle of the greatest English language poet of the 20th century remain irrefutable, despite the respective challenges of Auden, Eliot and Stevens.
Yeats, singular and supreme, the Victorian, who became an Edwardian and stood among the Modernists, was Pound's best man, and he his, lived until a few months before the outbreak of the second World War, his fame secure.
No Irish poet since Swift so defined the nation as did this eccentric, angst-ridden, opinionated Anglo-Irish snob who, reinvigorated at 50 by the Easter Rising, participated in the evolution of modern Ireland, lived in his imagination and remains central to the creation of a native literary tradition.
YEATS WAS BORN in 1865, 13 years after the death of Thomas Moore whose role as national poet he more than filled, to the point of making expression so difficult for the poets who came after him. The National Library of Ireland has the finest Yeats archive in the world extending to more than 2,000 manuscript items. In 1989, the library mounted an exhibition of manuscripts to mark the 50th anniversary of the death of Yeats. More recently, Joyce and Beckett have been celebrated in the library, but with this sophisticated, stylishly presented exhibition, which opened this week, a worthy living memorial has been fashioned. The exhibition succeeds in being chronological as well as thematic and is true to his multi-layered personality and interests.
The exhibition design devised by Sandycove-based Martello Media is informend and subtle, while the wealth of material, particularly the beautiful first editions of Yeats's work, is exciting and requires extensive examination. No one with an interest in this great enigma will - or could - confine themselves to one visit. Fortunately, it is scheduled to run for three years, admission is free and there has never been a better opportunity to reach an understanding of one of the world's finest poets.
In ways the exhibition is structured like a house, a life becomes a home, the various rooms reflecting the interests of a man who never concealed his preoccupation with posterity and his artistic destiny. Thanks to the fact that Yeats was a compulsive letter writer, leaving at least 7,000 missives behind him, and that his family, unlike other literary clans, has been generous and co-operative in allowing full access to a remarkable store of documentary material and memorabilia, a full picture of Yeats emerges.
The Nobel Medal of solid gold owned by the family and on loan from Sligo Museum and Library is included in the exhibition. Engraved with his name and the date, 1923, the medal depicts a man sitting under a laurel tree who listens to, and writes down, the song of the muse.
When his widow, Georgina Hyde Lees, donated a first edition of his earliest collection, The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems (1889), to the National Library in 1939, it marked the beginning of what has proved to be invaluable source material for scholars and biographers, that is now accessible to the public, much of it through the use of interactive digital touch screens. Also on loan from his son, Michael Yeats, is Sato's sword, a family heirloom presented to Yeats by a young Japanese admirer during the poet's 1920 lecture tour of the US. Another item with a story to tell is the large piece of lapis lazuli, a blue stone, given to him on his 70th birthday by Harry Clifton. Decorated with three figures and a bird, the gift inspired a poem. " . . .Two Chinamen, behind them a third,/ Are carved in lapis lazuli,/ Over them flies a long-legged bird,/ A symbol of longevity;/ The third, doubtless a serving-man,/ Carries a musical instrument." (Lapis Lazuli, from Last Poems 1936-39). A trophy won by the 14 year old Yeats for a half-mile victory, while attending Godolphin School in London, shares cabinet space with his school reports, some of his father's watercolours and a letter written by the poet to his sister, Lily, when he was 11. In it, he describes his attempts to walk on stilts.
In another case, a lifetime later, is a lock of his hair preserved after his death in France in 1939. He was reinterred in Drumcliff graveyard, Co Sligo, in September 1948 where his simple grave bears the epitaph: "Cast a cold eye/ On life, on death./ Horseman, pass by!" (from Under Ben Bulben, Last Poems 1936-39). With the lock of hair are his spectacles and the ring engraved with a butterfly and hawk, which was commissioned by Georgie as a present for Yeats shortly after their marriage in 1917.
Among the room-like spaces is a replication of book-lined shelves, featuring the poet's personal library. The longest of four films directed by Alan Gilsenan, The Mask, exploring Yeats's public activities and continuing legacy, runs for 24 minutes on four spilt-screens. The small chamber has the feel of a spartan monastic study - across the space in a more personalised room, loosely based on the rooms in Woburn Buildings, near London's Euston station, where the poet kept a residence in the years before his marriage. Facsimile copies of pages from the Kelmscott Chaucer, presented to him on his 40th birthday, are displayed on a lectern flanked by two tall candles - imitations of the Paschal candles Yeats favoured and which were visible through his windows as he declaimed his poems to guests during his famous Monday evening gatherings.
Hand-printed on handmade paper by William Morris and illustrated by Edward Burne-Jones, the Kelmscott Chaucer was a limited edition of the works of Chaucer and Yeatshad long-wanted a copy. Beside the Woburn room, is a wall case containing the psaltery, a stringed instrument designed to accompany the chanting delivery favoured by Yeats and his actress friend, Florence Farr, when reciting his verse. Yeats and Farr gave a series of public lectures featuring their style of verse-speaking performances of his work. Yeats, although tone deaf with little interest in music, was acutely aware of the rhythms of poetry.
Another room-like area recreates a theatre backstage complete with costume trunks. It is the Abbey brought to life featuring curtain ropes and posters. On a video screen, another film, Players and Painted Stage, focusing on Yeats and theatre, plays simultaneously.
BACK ACROSS THE exhibition space, is a magical area with a gold chest mounted against the wall. Based on a manuscripts chest owned by Yeats, the chest when opened reveals walls decorated with esoteric and tarot card symbols surrounding a video screen showing the film, The Other World, which looks at Yeats's interest in the esoteric and its importance as a source of inspiration. He entered the Second, or Inner, Order of the Golden Dawn in 1893, having initially joined the occult society in 1890. As with the other films, it runs continuously. Gauzy blue curtains spangled with silver stars frame the chest video, while a small window alcove populated by stone gargoyles evokes Thor Ballylee, the 16th century tower which was home to Yeats in the 1920s.
Yeats was a magician, preoccupied by death and symbols, the afterlife and eternal youth. His quest possesses that magnificent desperation shared by the equally defiant Picasso.
Halfway down the exhibition space is a giant book, a copy of the 1928 edition of The Tower. It is fabric and replicates the cover of this first British edition of The Tower as designed by Thomas Sturge Moore, a friend and collaborator of Yeats. The book design shows the tower reflected in water and Sturge Moore was to base the design of The Winding Stair (1933) on the interior of the tower . The "inside" of the giant book is a large colour-coded diagram showing the care with which Yeats approached the arrangement of his poems. It is replicated on an accompanying interactive touch screen allowing visitors to call up different stages of composition of a particular poem - from manuscript draft to initial periodical publication and then on to collection in volume form. Among the highlights of this interactive is a detailed analysis of Sailing To Byzantium.
There are 11 manuscript display cases containing drafts and typescripts of many if his most famous poems - including Easter 1916, Sailing to Byzantium, The Stolen Child, The Circus Animals Desertion, Among Schoolchildren, The Fisherman, The Second Coming, Leda and The Swam, In Memory of Eva Gore Booth and Con Markiewicz - each poem may be studied in detail by using the touch screen accompanying each case. There are also drafts of some of his plays, including The Countess Cathleen and At The Hawk's Well.
BRITISH POET AND visionary William Blake (1757-1827) was a major influence for Yeats. A facsimile of Yeats's heavily annotated copy of Blake's The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (c.1790-93), dating from when he was preparing a co-edition with Edwin Ellis of the works of William Blake, is included. The three-volume edition of Blake was published in 1893 and is on display.
Yeats was interested in books as design objects and he worked with several key designers including Althea Gyles, who designed the cover for The Secret Rose (1897) and for his Collected Poems. Artist Norah McGuinness was another collaborator. The poet's sense of the visual and of design is everywhere. He was as concerned with the physical look of a book as he was with the content. Every Cuala Press edition of his own work became an endurance test for his long-suffering sisters as the poet fussed and fretted.
The poet's family, friends and contemporaries: Maud Gonne - ever the necessary muse whose dramatic pastel of her daughter Iseult as a Pre-Raphalite girl, as is her protrait of a somber Yeats - Augusta Gregory, George Russell, Synge, Shaw, Eliot and Pound exert strong presences throughout the exhibition. A large chart plots the lines of descent of the Yeats and Pollexfen lineage.
If the exhibition is dominated by the face of Yeats, others also look out at the viewer. Yeats's father, John B Yeats, is represented by his self-portrait painted in New York shortly before his death. There are reproductions of several of his portraits of his poet son. The industrious sisters, Lily and Lolly, are well represented by book jackets from the Cuala Press and the small Albion printing press they used when making greeting cards. His famous younger brother, artist Jack B Yeats, is glimpsed at through a detail from his painting Memory Harbour (1900), which features as a large backdrop to a section on the places where the poet lived.
Visitors may be surprised by two medium sized pastels, one of Coole Park, the other of Coole Park library, painted by the poet and suggesting more than amateur flair. As a young man Yeats trained at the Metropolitan School of Art in Dublin, now the National College of Art and Design.
Throughout the exhibition there is an overwhelming awareness of the sheer intellectual energy, curiosity and passion that shaped the Victorian world of Yeats and his associates. William Butler Yeats bequeathed an astonishing legacy, visit this exhibit and experience it.
- The Life and Works of William Butler Yeats at the National Library, Dublin, runs until 2009. WB Yeats: Works & Days is published by the National Library (€15) www.nli.ie