Yeats Summer School: WB Yeats came close to nervous collapse a number of times in his life, Patrick Crotty, professor of Irish and Scottish literature at the University of Aberdeen, told the international summer school in Sligo yesterday.
Prof Crotty said that this had been demonstrated by Terence Brown and other biographers.
"By the time he published The Wind Among the Reeds at the end of the 1890s, however, he had given ample evidence of the strength of mind that was to carry him through crisis after crisis over the next four decades and the mental fragility adumbrated in the Goll poem 15 years earlier was clearly a thing of the past," he added.
He said the contents of the 1899 volume were composed at the time of his closest association with the Rhymers' Club. The contrast between his indomitable sense of purpose and the vulnerability of his English and Scottish companions at the Cheshire Cheese could not have been greater.
"It is impossible to think of him falling to his death off a bar stool like Lionel Johnson or wading into the sea to shoot himself, as John Davidson did in Cornwall in 1909," Prof Crotty said.
In his talk entitled "Yeats and Madness", Prof Crotty said his concern was with Yeats's poetry rather than his condition of mind.
The terms "madness" and "mad" featured centrally in the rhetoric of the poet's earlier and later verse, though they were largely absent from his poetry in the first three decades of the 20th century, he added.
"Broadly speaking, it can be said that madness is identified with the collapse of the personality into incoherence in the earlier work, while it has a somewhat more benign signification in the later, where it is associated with the fine, knowing anger that distinguishes Yeats's variously figured beggars and visionaries from habitues of the workaday bourgeois world," he said. It was said of the insane, frequently by themselves, that they "hear voices". He said in ancient times insanity was understood in terms of possession by spirits. Yeats's early poetry drew its protagonists from among those The Rose of Battle identified as the "sad, the lonely, the insatiable", and they were to a notable extent haunted by voices and even to some degree possessed by spirits.
Prof Crotty said he did not wish to push the argument for the possible mental health implications of the characteristic rhetoric of The Wind Among the Reeds too far, or indeed very far at all. However, there was one poem from the collection which could confidently be spoken of in relation to insanity. When the lyric now known as The Song of Wandering Aengus first appeared in The Sketch on August 4th, 1897, it did so under the title A Mad Song. He added that the new title given to the poem did not entirely remove connotations of the original one, as in Hiberno-English usage "wandering" was as frequently a mental as a physical activity.