The essays, review-essays and brief reviews collected here were written over the last half-century and published in various leading publications of their moment. In relationship to Yeats, they trace the dance of contemporary theory-inflected criticism—its practices and personalities (including my own) over that period. For different reasons of space (both of this book and of each short individual piece) a few of them have been dropped. But their significances are either already evident in other longer pieces or are captured throughout in revision.

The major theme of the book is exemplified by Yeats’ “An Irish Airman Foresees His Death.” It is one of four poems he wrote on Major Robert Gregory, the only son of Lady Gregory, Irish poet, dramatist, folklorist and Yeats's long-time patron. The other three poems include “Shepherd and Goatherd;” “In Memory of Major Robert Gregory,” an elegy aspiring to overtop Milton's “Lycidas;” and “Reprisals,” which was first published posthumously, as much about the seemingly endless troubles of Ireland due to British rule and its aftermath, as about a bitter remembrance of Gregory's loss. As it is in the public domain, here is “Irish Airman” entire:

What Yeats identifies in his later work of poetry and visionary imaginings on the tragic human condition (especially in modernity) as “death-in-life” and “life-in-death,” is herein dramatized. The sublime moment of singular, individualizing feeling—“A lonely impulse of delight”—is the dance of death, as Holbein, Strindberg and Freud might envision as represented in their works. All conditions—national, local, global, gender, sexual, medical or what-have-you—pale before what Yeats, as in most of his middle and later poems, puts front and center on the stage of this remarkable poem.

It would be facile to claim, as my title may appear to do, that the momentous transformation in literary studies that Frank Kermode's Romantic Image and Jean-Michael Rabaté's The Future of Theory permit us to reflect critically upon comes down to a mere shift in point of view. More must be involved than a change from a focus on the individual author suffering in isolation to produce his or her radiant work of beauty with an uncanny life all its own, to an investigation of the sublime spectacle of all the minute processes, however identified and analyzed, by which any subject is formed (and deformed) as it deposits its traces in the real or virtual archives of the present moment. Nonetheless, for purposes of initial clarification at least, I think it is accurate to say that a general shift of this sort, from placing the critical perspective on the dancer (so to speak) to placing it on the dance (a shift from aesthetic product to social process), has indeed occurred in the 45 years between the original publication of Frank Kermode's Romantic Image in 1957 and Jean-Michel Rabaté's The Future of Theory in 2002. Ironically or not, the imagery of dancer and dance, so central to Kermode's study (even more so than that of the tree, the obvious symbol of Romantic organicism), does reappear in Rabaté's book, as we shall see, at a crucial moment in its argument.

But before opening my own argument, I want to present the most famous passage celebrating the vision of dancer and dance in modernist literature, the concluding stanza of W. B. Yeats's magisterial meditation on the complex interchanges between life and art, “Among School Children”:

Now is not the occasion to do a complete reading of this visionary scene of dancer and dance, although some interesting unanswered questions about it could be raised: Where do dancer and tree suddenly come from, their having made no earlier appearance in the poem at all?

The second volume of R. F. Foster's biography, W.B. Yeats: A Life: The Arch-Poet, 1915-1939 (the first volume was the award-winning The Apprentice Mage) clearly completes a major achievement in literary biography every bit as masterful and illuminating as Richard Ellmann's life of James Joyce. Despite this obvious achievement, however, I come away from finishing my reading of it disturbed. What disturbs me is not the usual kind of complaint about literary biography, that the biographer has poured so many facts into his text the writer's work has been overwhelmed by the contexts of history and personal life.

Foster has already demonstrated brilliantly in the first volume, and he continues the demonstration here, that he can marshal all the facts and place the work in context and still do justice to its large formal structures and major themes. Although close textual analysis of a specialized kind is apparently not Foster's forte, for purposes of literary biography it is not really necessary, and in fact would just get in the way, stopping the onward dynamic thrust of the story he has to tell.

Basically, that story is how the 52-year-old W. B. Yeats (to whom Foster consistently refers as WBY, for short), on marrying the 24-year-old Georgie Hyde Lees in October 1917 finds not only an erotic and domestic partner, willing to bear him children and run his everyday life more efficiently and sympathetically than anyone else ever could. But he also finds, for the first decade of their marriage at least, an occult muse whose automatic writing, dream-visions and oracular medium-like trances give him, as the spiritual Instructors later claims, “metaphors for poetry,” not to mention the most sustained and successful sexual relationship in his life. Indeed, she gives him, as Foster shows, metaphors for the experience of poetic inspiration and visionary eroticism so powerful and original, whatever their traditional sources, that it could rightly be said that if any person (other than Yeats himself) remakes this once minor figure into the major poet to write English in the last century, it is certainly she.

But it is not, of course, Foster's magisterial rehearsal of this familiar story that disturbs me. Nor it is that Foster writes dismissively of Yeats's occult beliefs, for he does not.

Two images or scenes of reading in Yeats’ work haunt me. The first occurs at the conclusion of Ego Dominus Tuus, the poem that Yeats attached to the end of his meditation upon visionary creativity, Per Amica Silentia Luna (1918). Basically, for Yeats, visionary creativity happens to the poet, to him, when an occult experience arises, and he becomes the medium of a long-dead person or of a daimon or daemon—a sort of demi-god, located in ancient hierarchy of beings between the human and the fully divine. The torturous self-divisions of life produce a crisis, which the coming of the ghost or daemon (to simplify things), whose wisdom, if properly evoked by the poet will not so much finally resolve the divisions but instead create a bulwark, what Yeats terms the Mask, a symbolic representation of provisional, ritually evoked unity of being. At the end of this poem, we find the following:

Insofar as a student of Yeats, his scholar–critic–teacher, reads him, he or she fulfills this prayer/prophecy, for Yeats, as he sees it.

The other scene of reading, twenty years later, concludes the poem Lapis Lazuli (1938):

The question of identity is never a purely academic matter. As we see every day, in America's War Against Terrorism, civilizations clash over identity, with great violence. This is especially true in the modern world, in which technology has fostered the power to lay waste to combatants and civilians alike on a massive scale without precedent in human history. How identities are formed, what shapes they take, how they defend themselves once formed and how they change, if they really do, are all questions embedded within a larger philosophical question of identity, particularly with the global advent of modernity, which early in the last century struck the minds of leading Western intellectuals with considerable force. This larger question, traditionally phrased, is: “What is man?” By which, I mean here, what does it mean to say that a person, a culture, a world or a historical period, has an identity? The question of identity is really the question of possessing an essence.

However, that may be in general, W. B. Yeats and Sigmund Freud conceive of human identity as being substantially dependent, for its essence (whatever that may be), upon the operation of a comprehensive and coherent system of symbols whose cultural power they call, respectively, myth or illusion. Although Yeats thinks that all myth is true in some fundamental sense, and Freud thinks that all myths are illusory and so false if pandemic, both agree that the system of interlocking symbols constituting the cultural machinery of a society works by means of great coordinating mythologies, or the manifold illusion to produce and enforce identity. What is striking to both of them about modern society, especially after the First World War, is the absence of any master symbol to stitch together the symbolic strands or to forge, into a significant whole, the chain of elements now making up cultural identity. Not only God, but also every other candidate for the position of master symbol appears outmoded, disposable, if not already disposed. Despite their considerable differences, Yeats the occult intellectual and Freud the Enlightenment enthusiast view this unparalleled situation in human history—in which the totality of a culture's resources to create and sustain identity appears to function without any authoritative central symbol—as apocalyptically dire and potentially destructive of the entire species.

Modern poetic autobiography originated with the Romantics’ desire to overcome that growing fragmentation of human existence that had its most immediate sources in the revolutionary scientific and historical critiques that so indiscriminately leveled every traditional structure and value of the culture. Just as people in ages of faith once turned to the confessional genre to discover the specific providential plan secretly at work in the lives, so, during the nineteenth century especially, poets and prose writers such as Wordsworth, Mill and Carlyle, who increasingly found this option denied to them, resorted to the autobiographical mode to determine if perhaps some imaginative pattern of ultimate meaning—or of personal continuity at least, however baleful—could be discovered beneath the apparently random and contradictory details of their experiences.

In this context the figure of the autobiographer and the image of his work clearly become of central importance. The former emerges in the course of the figure of a man who, suffering from an identity crisis, can be seen as in desperate quest of his very self. His work as a result appears to be the place where he seeks not only to trace but hopefully to prefigure the entire journey, as the symbolic history of his own imaginative survival in a bad time: from the imagination's wondrous if hazardous birth, through its eccentric development and self-conscious passion, to its intermittent pangs of a spiritual rebirth.

Thus, the work's completed narrative form describes a dialectical “progress,” which paradoxically is also a spiraling back from the present beginnings in the identity crisis, through the return to the original sources or first principles of imaginative being, to the point where the figurative repetition of the life's wayward movement begins: with the onset of the identity crisis.

One of the more remarked but less closely pondered aspects of American critical theory over the last four or so decades is the persistent centrality of Yeats to its development. I can think of no other modern literary figure, with the possible exceptions of Stevens or Joyce, whose work has been so seminally influential. The major critical movements from the 1940s to the 1970s—New Criticism, archetypal and phenomenological criticism, and a variety of post-structuralist discourses (revisionary psychoanalytic criticism, dialectical hermeneutics and deconstruction) all owe a considerable debt to Yeats. Whether as sublime master of the concrete universal, demonic adversary of genuine Romantic visionaries, or seductive forerunner of the vertiginous interplay of self-subverting tropes, Yeats has repeatedly appeared as a representative case in point.

Belated ironic modernist or last decadent romantic: the course of Yeats’ reputation has run between these extreme positions. But in the different quests to know their own Yeats for theoretical purposes, his American metacritics, insofar as they appear to have even partially succeeded in this endeavor, have suffered strange fates. Their imaginations, whether they are of the systematic kind or not, have been brought face to face with the poverty of their own inventiveness, in a manner that resembles nothing so much as the climactic expressions of those few more sensitive protagonists in Joyce's Dubliners. As they finally confront the deadly if curiously alluring work of the spiritual paralysis then afflicting Irish culture, they become affecting instances of what they dread to behold all around them—transparent figures of paralysis fixed fast in a profound and permanent attitude of imaginative defeat, caught within the prison of the very discourses their author has devised for their epiphanic educations in the (admittedly bitter) self-knowledge of internal exile. For, in attempting to comprehend and use Yeats, his American theoretical heirs conceive designs that paralyze their imaginative developments, even as they disseminate and so perpetuate the error of proposing such undertakings as exemplary. Rather than authoring Yeats, then, their chosen poet has authored and—paradoxically if not perversely—authorized them.

The definition of high modernism informing this essay takes as its familiar historical basis the period roughly beginning in 1910 and ending in 1930. This 20-year period is admittedly rough, marked at its opening by the death of Edward VII and at its close by the full onset of the first worldwide Depression, and haunted by the violent specters of the Great War. Its seeds clearly start to grow earlier, whether one takes the 1890s of the aesthetes and Decadents or, even earlier, the revolutionary era of Romanticism. So too with the other temporal marker 1930, given that what we now call late modernism or proto-postmodernism is soon enough emerging, displaying as many confusing similarities as differences. By focusing on literary modernism largely in the Anglo-American tradition, which benefits from its position in the imperialist network, my hypothesis tightens the parameters further. What about other modernisms, or the other arts, painting and music especially? I will address the latter a bit later in this essay.

I focus more closely on literary modernism here because as modernism emerges its essential elements appear more distinctly and, for my purposes, more relevantly, with respect to a long-term project on Yeats. Getting modernism and Yeats right for this project's sake, however, is not simply a professional or personal goal. It is also a critical intellectual effort to demonstrate how in a time rife with violence, radical skepticism about liberal democracy, terrorisms of various sorts and demagoguery and irresponsibility in the extreme, art, politics and spiritual or metaphysical beliefs may work together in ways that are for us still humanely instructive and humanly formative. Facile dismissals of certain artists or works and what their life projects disclose should thereby be harder to make as we learn to appreciate and understand, after careful reading as well as judge fairly or condemn where truly warranted. The violently reductive critical judgment, hastily and carelessly made, may not be a terrorist bomb, but it can have long-term consequences, intended or not, which distort and inhibit the critic's humanity and eventually that of the larger society. We need no more additions to any modern moment's debasement.

The features of modernism then, whether within this particular frame or a wider, more global and seemingly more diverse context, are for the most part, primarily four. These are: (1) a formal aesthetic of ironic self-reflection;

The following essay–review seeks to outline a problem—the failure of contemporary critical discourse to address in a sustained and serious way the various global phenomena gathered under the term religion—and a possible analytic solution, which is the elaboration of an approach out of the Lacanian conception of “the Real.” Such an approach to religion would begin to speak, in the case of Yeats, the topic of my next book, of the unorthodox occult subject of religion, but on a basis of critical intimacy rather than distance.

Introduction: Working Assumptions

My work has taken a strange yet not unexpected turn. As the title of this unconventional review essay may suggest, it has recently centered, if that is the word, on strands of discourses—literary, scientific and psychoanalytic—which have one thing in common that I now understand has been my critical focus from the beginning of my career: visionary language and its cultural effects, particularly its promise, to the visionary thinker, of becoming divine, in the form of symbolic immortality. That Professor O’Hara finally understands what he has been doing, however, is not necessarily of interest even to a small public.

My newfound self-understanding was preceded by only several months after the events of September 11, 2001. My primary working assumption nowadays is that the World Trade Center catastrophe made visible and underscored in an unforgettable manner what has been emerging for some time: not a new world order but a new dark ages. In saying this, I do not assume that any side in the continuing political and military struggles represents civilization. In fact, I assume that all parties to the new global conflict are representatives of a new terror, a new terror that, ironically enough, demonstrates the greatest continuity in human history, that of religious vision. Our species may or may not constitute the earth as an ascetic planet, but it surely has made it and will continue to make it, now with an awful vengeance, an unearthly realm.

My corollary assumption, therefore, is that the Enlightenment with all its critical posts and modernities is over. I know that such an apocalyptic perspective is easily derided as irrational. But in light of the last century and a half of history, the most rational conclusion would seem to be precisely that reason, as theorized in the Enlightenment and after, simply does not exist.

The Helm Information Critical Assessments of Writers in English, under the general editorship of Graham Clarke, is an invaluable aid to scholarship. For writers such as Henry James and George Eliot, the Brontë Sisters and D. H. Lawrence, this series generously makes available truly representative samples of contemporaneous reviews of writer's major works, as well as a wide range of general assessments and critical views up to the present moment. Today's scholars can discover in these finely edited, exquisitely handsome volumes, not only the histories of critical debates for their chosen writers, but they can also recognize the recurrent features of the writers’ oeuvres that have characteristically defined the object of study. I myself—selection entry number “305” in Volume 4—have found that what I think of as the divisions of Yeats studies have appeared and re-appeared insistently from the earliest reviews and commentaries right up to the latest studies. Such remarkable continuity makes one think that, despite their differences, all the generations of critics are addressing the same realities.

The primary division concerns the scholarly conflict about the state of the corpus. Next, there is the division in the field occasioned by the critical discussions about the status of Yeats’ occult system of belief. These divisions between matters of textual analysis (and construal) and critical judgments on the nature and value of Yeats’ religious worldview lead rather naturally to yet another divisive issue, the more speculative theoretical question of Yeats's identity—as a person, as a writer, and as a citizen influential in the formation of modern Ireland.

Yeats, as we know, was a constant reviser of his texts throughout his career. When he collected work in book form not only did he usually revise the individual texts therein many times over but also he would create ever-new arrangements for them that would vary from the first sometimes to all later editions. The first appearance of a poem, and the volume in which it was initially collected, would equally become material for subsequent acts of imaginative creation of increasingly powerful and also chronologically distorting symbolic and mythic patterns. For textual scholars and literary biographers or historians, the question of the “best” version of a poem or a volume is not necessarily answered by determining, when possible, Yeats’ so-called “final intention.” The question is, quite simply: “best” for what and whose purposes?

Five recent contributions to Yeats studies—Finneran's new edition of The Poems, Jeffares's New Commentary keyed to this edition, the second volume of the Yeats Annual (also edited by Finneran), Steinman's Yeats's Heroic Figures and the late Paul de Man's The Rhetoric of Romanticism (nearly half of which treats Yeats and his traditions in some form)—all make provocative reading. Finneran and Jeffares, for example, are locked in an intellectually fierce, if politely staged, scholarly debate over the appropriate ordering of Yeats’ poems. Finneran favors the division of the poems into lyrical, narrative and dramatic sections perpetuated by the previous, so-called “Definitive” edition of the Collected Poems. Jeffares prefers a strictly chronological ordering that would begin with The Wandering of Oisin and include narrative and dramatic poems interspersed among the famous lyrics according to the actual shape of the career.

Yeats himself, of course, was of two minds on the matter, wanting separate editions of his work: both a multivolume limited edition deluxe for the initiated, and for the “people,” a single volume edition arranged as Finneran has for the most part arranged things. Finneran has included many uncollected poems and poems only available in the Variorum edition of the poetry; most of these would not be to Yeats's liking here, one suspects, since they are indeed quite minor. To Finneran's credit, however, he has also restored what became Last Poems to the order Yeats originally intended, having the career close not with “Under Ben Bulben” and its heroic pose but with “Politics” and its rueful lament for an old man's lost opportunities for youthful passion. This debate between Jeffares and Finneran has the effect of making one reconsider Yeats and the shape of his career and try out both possible versions: Yeats as master-maker of lyric volumes and Yeats in the process of slowly, painfully progressing to that status, with many wayward side trips into such things as The Shadowy Waters and its many rewritings. Such controversy can only help stimulate new studies of the poetry informed by ever finer scholarly discriminations. But for a more detailed account of this debate and other related matters of textual analysis, see Finneran's Editing Yeats's Poems.

Even Steinman's Yeats's Heroic Figures and the second volume of Yeats Annual contribute to these delightful revisionary prospects. I say “even” because the habitual expectation we have concerning strictly scholarly studies is of rigorous dullness.