Yeats and the Drama of Sacred Space

Book excerpt: In recent years Yeats scholarship has been, to a large extent, historically-based in emphasis. Much has been gained from this emphasis, if we consider the refinement of critical awareness resulting from a better understanding of the intricate relationship between the poet and his times. However, the present author feels that an exclusive adherence to this approach impacts negatively on our ability to appreciate and understand Yeatsian creativity from within the internally located imperatives of creativity itself, as opposed to our understanding it on the basis of aesthetically constitutive socio-historical forces operative from without. He feels a need to relocate the study of Yeats in the work and thought of the poet himself, to focus again on the poet’s own myth-making. To this end Nicholas Meihuizen examines this myth-making as it relates to certain archetypal figures, places, and structures. The figures in question are the antagonist and goddess, embodiments of conflict and feminine forces in Yeats, and they participate in a lively drama within the places and shapes considered sacred by the poet: places such as the Sligo district and Byzantium; shapes such as the circling gyres of his system. The book should be interesting and valuable to students and scholars of varying degrees of acquaintance with the poet. To long-time Yeatsians it offers fresh perspectives onto important works and preoccupations. To new students it offers a means of exploring wide-ranging material within a few central, interrelated frames, a means that mirrors Yeats’s own commitment to unity in diversity.