Yeats and His "Masks"

The spinning coin of Yeats’s poetics bears his personal profile on one side and his self-projection on the other. His poetry of “personal utterance” thus avoids personalized subjectivity by exploiting the notion of the self and anti-self, as he categorizes those supposedly antithetical profiles in his theory of the mask. Yeats adapts persona and mask to prevent the “accidence” of his personal life from distracting from his calculated “personal utterance” in print, and thereby creates associated fables of his mythology of self, supported by heroicized masks of his Abbey Theater and his recurrent and visionary company.

Yeats parades relatives, friends, writers, public figures, legendary heroes, and occultists across his painted stage, and since they embody values that closely reflect his own, he enhances his own values whenever he idealizes or apotheosizes theirs. He populates his poems with these laureate figures, and then alludes to them in other poems as archetypal figures for ideas, qualities, or traits. In sum, he transmutes the subjects of his reveries and encomiums into symbols of his own mythology.

To escape subjectivity and sentiment, Yeats interweaves his reveries and recollections with strands of classical myth, Irish legend, contemporary cultural issues, or cycles of history, and thus constructs, as John Untermeyer recounts in A Readers Guide to W. B. Years (1959), an exterior, objective frame of reference. Helen, Troy, Pegasus, Sidney, Aengus, Cuchulain, and Duke Ercole serve as handy but dim archival allusions.

Yeats’s masks project appearances—images—of a public rather than an interior self. Donning these public images provides a protective coloration: an introspective esthete shuffles into a schoolroom wearing a smiling public face in “Among School Children,” or a mythological poet impersonates a vengeful Gaelic warrior in the Cuchulain poems and plays. Masks furnish a façade for what Sidney calls poetry’s “true feigning.”

Although he sometimes overplays that strategy, Yeats knows that “true feigning” in the sense of speaking as someone other than himself, as in the Crazy Jane poems, disinhibits his magisterial tour-conducting manner and frees him for a fly fisherman’s freckled yawp. Putting on a painted face, Yeats says in his Autobiography, frees the poet from personal memory and from the “terrors of judgment” (340). It is child-like in that it can ignore reality and entertain infinite possibilities without qualm. The stage-face disguises the limited, fallible personality and liberates the imagination from the personality’s mundane moorings.

Yeats’s mask as anti-self buffers his self-image. As a poetic device and psychological defense mechanism, the mask projects an alternative aspect of the self rather than an opposite, in contrast with the shadow, the repressed unconscious and unwelcome self at the heart of C. G. Jung’s analytic psychology. Yeats’s notions of a mask, his astrological characterology in A Vision, and his goal of a unified self parallels Jung’s personality theories about psychic resolution in ways that warrant further study.

Since Yeats defines the mask as an opposite of self, the theory rationalizes his social behavior more than it elucidates his poems. The theory of the mask, in fact, explains the personality mechanism in A Vision—astrological wheels, gyres, and recycled time—more that it explains his accomplished lyrics. Rhetorical analysis, using the conventional concepts of persona, aesthetic distance, tone, and point of view, suffices. “Persona” means mask. By extension, it means the image of a writer—the public persona of William Yeats or a Robert Frost or a Papa Hemingway. Thus Richard Ellmann, one of the foremost Yeats scholars, cross-indexes mask with “pose” in Yeats: The Man and the Masks, and Hazard Adams in The Book of Yeats’s Poems interprets the mask as a means the making life artfully real. The poetic device is self-evident in poems like “The Mask,” “The Fisherman,” “Ego Dominus Tuus,” “The Gyres, “and “Supernatural Songs.” In truth, a dramatic mask, which served as megaphone in the Greek amphitheaters, is merely a mouthpiece: the poetry is in the ventriloquism.


drbill 1/2/07