In the new cities of the late nineteenth century, “the poet’s livelihood depended on the new, mass marketplace in order to sell his poems.” Yeats, despite attempts to circumvent this reality (attempting at first, in Ireland, to sell through a community of known subscribers), has a keen and pragmatic sense of its demands and a developed market competence. If he was identified by contemporaries as a myopic mystic, he was also recognized as a ‘shrewd businessman’ (Bertrand Russell’s words).
As has been said of Baudelaire, “In his attempts to compete in the literary marketplace, where poetry was an especially vulnerable commodity, he had to distinguish his own work from that of other poets.” In order to do so he needs a ‘trademark’, a reproducible poetic ‘signature’ which will act as a kind of patent for his work, a safeguard of his intellectual property. Yeats’s signature or trademark is ‘Irishness’, as he makes clear in various letters – to Katherine Tynan, and here, to Elizabeth White:
You will find it a good thing to make verses on Irish legends and places and so forth. It helps originality and makes one’s verses sincere, and gives one less numerous competitors.
‘Originality’ refers not to some auratic uniqueness in time and place. It means something like a patent, conferring market advantage. Likewise with ‘sincerity’, another mere ingredient or effect. Yeats’s poetic commodities are to bear the signature of ‘Irishness’. Place names and mythemes are the appropriate ‘exotic’ trademarks.
As well sidestepping competition, Yeats’s use of Irish mythemes represents an ingenious attempt, from the inside, the outmaneuver the very logic and ‘time’ of competition, in which “Products must stay up to date, or the competitive edge will be lost – which is to say they are caught up in the logic of fashion.’ Yeats is prepared to try out the latest poetic fashions – Pre-Raphaelite languor with its confiscation of medieval surfaces, desacralised and airbrushed with momentary desire. But such things are no sooner declared New than they are consigned to obsolescence. Instead, Yeats will seek his advantage by reaching back into the already long ‘outmoded’ Irish past. In poems printed in London magazines, like the Savoy, ancient Irish signs are presented as if they were the very latest thing. This use of the very old as the ‘latest’, profitably re-functioned within a metropolitan commodity culture, is crystallized by Yeats himself, when he speaks of a ‘Celtic Phantasmagoria’:
.. the whole hurly-burly of legends – Cuchulain fighting the sea for two days until the waves pass over him and he dies, Caolte storming the palace of the Gods, Oisin seeking in vain for three hundred years.. are all a portion of that great Celtic phantasmagoria whose meaning no man has discovered…
‘Phantasmagoria’ is a term from the world of high capitalism and its advertising spectaculars, from the Great Exhibition: “The word phantasmagoria.. was used as the name of one of the many machines of illusion concocted by the nineteenth century. It worked by projecting slides from behind a translucent screen to viewers on the other side.” And so ‘Celtic Phantasmagoria’ is a curious but revealing term, as though these Gaelic mythemes, heavy with time, carried over by and in the thickness of tradition, are instead merely images projected on a screen, thrown out carelessly by some magic lantern, and, loosed of their temporal depth and context, poesy’s disembodied toys.
(Quotes are from Dialectics of Seeing by Susan Buck-Morss, unless otherwise stated.)