The Autodidactic Imagination: Yeats and Others

Dowden gave me some of the little poems of Yeats to read: it is twilight stuff, vague and unsubstantial. I couldn’t read them. Poor fellow! He is autodidaktos. He never worked under a master.”  (Mahaffy)

As ever, this great autodidact [Yeats] was immersed in those arcane magical studies which, for all their silliness, fed his imagination and his writings. "A poetic life in letters," Irish Times, October 11, 1997

There is at least a chapter and more probably a book to be written on W.B.Yeats and the autodidactic imagination. Yeats. Along with Blake, and a number of others is of course one of the great autodidacts of literature written in English.

What, though, is an autodidact, and how is autodidacticism a cast of mind, a structure of thinking and feeling, beyond rather than simply learning for oneself what others acquire from a master and institutionally?

The work of Pierre Bourdieu, albeit written in the very specific context of 20^th century French culture, is useful here. The autodidact is one with a peculiar and oblique relationship to “legitimate culture” and the official channels of its acquisition and transmission. The autodidact has either been excluded from that culture and its channels, or for some reason chosen alternative channels and contents. Bourdieu defines at least two kinds of autodidact: the figure totally excluded from cultural acquisition until a relatively late age, who then sets about learning with ardent and compensatory zeal. His respect for ‘canonical knowledge' is exaggerated – perhaps veering toward parody - and he is ‘given away’ by this over reverence. There is a second kind who, deterred or excluded from the echelons of “official knowledge,” is pushed into areas “disclaimed and abandoned by the official education system” – the occult for example, or various heretical and “secret” counternarratives to official knowledge. This typically involves clubs and institutions other than those legitimated by the state and not traditionally recognized as markers of class distinction.

The early Yeats is certainly closer to the second kind of autodidact. Having firstly been shut out from the Trinity College education re rigeur for a certain class of Anglo-Irish family, he pursues occult and hermetic “knowledge” in the “alternative university” of the secret society. On the other hand, he acquires his knowledge of literature and history through (at the time marginal) organizations such as the Young Ireland Societies, Fenian groups, the Bohemian Dublin of the Contemporary Club, the counter-nationalism of a William Morris, and, in general, the emergent debating forums of cultural nationalism.

Emerging cultural nationalism is crucial here. For whereas in another context, ‘areas disclaimed or abandoned by official culture’ could only mean the cranky and eccentric, marginal and lonely pursuits; in Ireland, there is a whole ‘counter-cultural movement’ based around neglected popular forms, and the resurrection of these as important and valid forms of knowledge.

It is from the point of view of these contexts of counter-cultural knowledge -nationalist cells and secret societies - that Yeats makes his attacks on official and authorized forms (eg Trinity College).

Because these counter-cultural forms – again, whether nationalist or hermetic - involve also the disavowal of official authority, of sanctioned forms, they are also characterized by the attempt to create new authority from scratch, or by the claim to discover ‘deeper’ or more ‘original’ authorities deep within the national or occult “traditions”. In this sense, two of the early Yeats’s most passionate attachments, nationalism and the occult, have a similar structure, a comparable set of concerns.