WB YEATS: A LIFE by Stephen Coote (Sceptre; #8.99)
The obvious problem of writing a life of someone like WB Yeats - not only a giant in poetry, but a political figure and a philosopher of sorts; a man whose active career was almost as long as his long life; and who struck out in a new direction about once every 10 years - is that there is not one life but several, and the composite portrait of them all is liable to be so blurred as to conceal everything we want to see.
Stephen Coote's attempt (the latest of many, and none of them unreservedly recognised as the standard work) to combine an all-round vision with clarity of focus was damned somewhat with faint praise when it came out last year, but the worst that can be said of it is that it is not brilliant. The cause of this fault lies in the author's presumably deliberate decision not to put forward any all-encompassing argument or judgment about the life and the work, but to provide the reader with the materials of understanding by assiduous research and coherently assembled facts, aspects of biography to which the attitude of some Yeats's earlier and more dazzling biographers has been a little
too cavalier.
There is, I think, a lot to be said for this approach. Yeats's life, with its close engagements with the bloody tumults of twentieth-century Irish history (as a pro-Free Stater during the Irish Civil War he lived in daily danger of being shot by the anti-Treaty forces), its great Dante and Beatrice-scaled love affair with his muse, Maud Gonne, his sometimes alarming political and intellectual eccentricities, and his social connections to three generations of Irish writers, is a story good enough to need very little cooking - and if you want it told clearly and comprehensively, this is the Yeats biography for you.
As for the poetry, this is not intended to be a critical study, but Coote does a quietly effective job of linking its concerns and its changes in style (from Celtic Twilight to High Modernist to folk-traditional to mystical) to events in the poet's own life and in Ireland's - he is especially good on the often undervalued early Celtic Twilight period, which produced some of the most ravishingly beautiful lyrics in all poetry. On politics and philosophy the author is inclined to blandness, and forgives too easily the great man's lapses into fascism and a ridiculous system of metaphysics based upon the phases of the moon. A little levity - something to which Yeats was a complete stranger - would not have gone amiss in this area, nor indeed elsewhere; a giant of Yeats's stature can stand a little irreverence.
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