The importance of W.B. Yeats for Heaney’s poetics is great, as Heaney and many others have noted. In addition to this influence of the earlier Irish poet and playwright upon the latter, 'influence' of Heaney upon Yeats also occurs, in the sense that understanding of Yeats, including his position in Irish literary history, has shifted in the wake of strong readings by Heaney. Intertextuality, that is, the interplay between various texts and how they are read, moves in multiple directions, sometimes simultaneously. This chapter proposes a way of looking at both poets through the lens of the other, concluding with a reading of interflowing relationships between two sets of poems: 'The Cold Heaven' (Yeats) and 'Lightenings i' (Heaney), and 'Postscript' (Heaney) and 'The Wild Swans at Coole' (Yeats).

Anne Enright's 2007 novel The Gathering appeared on the English-language literary scene like a new relative at a family reunion, entering a book market full of witness or survivor narratives and best-selling memoirs of painful childhoods. At first glance, the novel seems a near relation to these accounts. Its first-person narrator, Veronica Hegarty, tells the story of her beloved, ruined brother Liam. He has committed suicide by walking into the sea off the coast of England, and she is very nearly undone herself as she arranges the big family funeral, including engaging with her ten remaining siblings, and lives through the months immediately afterward. At the heart of the story are rising questions about sexual abuse that may have occurred when she and Liam were children, and a family's collusion with powerlessness.

The novel dramatizes a situation of what clinical literature calls post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), using a narrator in contemporary time to bring into language a prelinguistic experience buried in her past. This narrator, who will fill her narratives with what she knows to be misinformation as she tries out different optional story lines, and who clearly does not recognize all her biases or blindnesses, is nevertheless utterly reliable in that she explores honestly the emotional truths of each stage of her growth in understanding. She continuously re-casts her tale as the characters and events tangle and elude her, searching for a narrative framework that can accommodate her changing awareness. The novel is less about what happened than that people crucial to her life have colluded in various ways, with varying levels of active involvement, even across generations, to create great damage. Taking place during a five-month period, the narrator describes the process of coming to terms with her own trauma and that of her family. Liam, the family scapegoat and her own psychic double, takes with him her protection against the skeletons in her family's closet, and she has begun a dangerous emotional journey.

In the autumn of 1917, after years of frustration in both romantic and religious questing, Yeats found a good measure of fulfillment in both realms. He gave up hope of marrying either Maud Gonne MacBride, the woman whom he had desired, of whom he had despaired, and about whom he had made love poetry for decades, or her daughter Iseult Gonne, the subject of a messy emotional interlude that had begun the previous year. A quick turn led Yeats to Georgie, or George, Hyde Lees, a young member of his English set, who had been interested when the poet had approached her several years earlier, and she now returned the attention. The two were well matched in intelligence and strength of will, as well as artistic and spiritual inclinations, though the age diff erence was sharp. By 1917, she was ready to commitherself to a risky chance at happiness with a husband who seemed challenging enough to suit; he was convinced that an annus mirabilis was in his stars, if he could but grasp it. They both may have been right: as it happened, challenge, revelation, and a measure of happiness were both finally at hand.

After initial difficulties that threatened to destroy the new marriage along with the psychic well-being of both partners, by the end of the year all seemed thrillingly well. The turn came in the midst of a traumatic honeymoon, when Yeats was physically ill and near emotional breakdown, caused in large part by the sense thathe had made a potentially ruinous mistake. During the crisis, George Yeats tried and succeeded in producing automatic writing, a type of mediumship well known in spiritualist circles, in which the writer touches a pen to a sheet of paper and empties her mind as if she were engaging in formal meditation. Inexplicably, sometimes the pen moves. This is the moment of mystery, the moment that, in retrospect as well as on the immediate occasion, may provoke either ridicule or true belief. It has done both as the tale of the automatic writing has been told and retold in Yeats studies.

Suppose, by some miracle or other, the essence of Yeats could be expressed in an image or figure. If by a further miracle we could ask him, Yeats would doubtless approve of such a speculative project, which would fit with his famous notion that a poet “is never the bundle of accident and incoherence that sits down to breakfast; he has been reborn as an idea, something intended, complete” (E&I 509). It would make sense for this idea to be imaginary rather than denotative, since Yeats's work from start to finish suggests the pre-eminence of what can be envisioned over what can be rationally explained. In a letter written a few weeks before his death, Yeats sounded a note of finality: “It seems to me that I have found what I wanted. When I try to put all into a phrase I say, 'Man can embody truth but he cannot know it'” (L 922). Thus, as he had asserted several years earlier, in an essay on Shelley's Prometheus Unbound, “the ultimate reality is not thought, for thought cannot create but 'can only perceive'”; rather, “the created world is a stream of images in the human mind” (E&I 419). A human being who embodied truth would also, presumably, take the form of an image or symbol. Yeats arrived early at this fundamentally religious conviction and kept it throughout his long and much changing career. Another essay on Shelley, written over three decades before the one quoted above, makes the connection between image and the soul clearly. Shelley, Yeats writes, “could hardly have helped perceiving that an image that has transcended particular time and place becomes a symbol, passes beyond death, as it were, and becomes a living soul” (E&I 80). Not only are people expressible through images; symbols, like emotions and ideas, may be vitalized into living beings, if of a sort that transcend mortal comprehension. Yeats regularly intertwines art and what might for lack of a better term be called religion in just such outlandishly direct ways.