I have been puzzled by W.B. Yeats’s abiding interest in the occult in the same way that I am puzzled when an intelligent person asks me what my astrological sign is, but then I come from such a non-religious background (my parents were Northern Irish Communists and could have held party meetings in a Belfast telephone kiosk) that I am puzzled by conventional church-going, as well. Probably not a good person to comment on occultism, in other words, but I did therefore read biographer R.F. Foster's comments on Yeats' occult interests with all the more attention.
Foster is a historian, not a literary critic, and this allows him to view Yeats in the historical context of his time, rather than reading the life on an understanding of the work. It allows Foster, most interestingly, to view Yeats in the context of the decline of a Protestant Irish universe that had seen better days by the time the poet was born in 1865 – and that would see far tougher days thereafter.
His great-grandfather John Yeats, who had been the Church of Ireland Rector of Drumcliff in the early nineteenth century, was far from the poet’s only connection with the part of County Sligo known today as “Yeats Country.” Yeats’s mother Susan Pollexfen came from a well-to-do Protestant Sligo family, as well. The link between the two families was established when Yeats's father attended the same public school as George Pollexfen, Susan’s brother, and then, on a social visit to the Pollexfens in Sligo, met and proposed to Susan. George Pollexfen’s influence over Yeats consisted principally in their shared interest in the occult.
Foster’s historical reading puts Yeats in “...a particular tradition of Irish Protestant interest in the occult, which stretches back through Sheridan Le Fanu and Charles Maturin, took in WBY’s contemporary Bram Stoker, and carried forward to Elizabeth Bowen: all figures from the increasingly marginalized Irish Protestant middle class, from families with strong clerical connections, declining fortunes and a tenuous hold on landed authority.”
Foster goes on to suggest that this interest in the occult – and an allied interest in mysticism as, for example, in the work of Yeats’s contemporary, the Irish Protestant writer George Russell, known as Æ – can be seen as a strategy for coping with contemporary threats – “Catholicism plays a large part in all their fantasies” – and as a search for psychic control even as control was being lost. Occultism as a way of compensating for not being Catholic, in other words, in a confident new Catholic democracy. And as a reaction to the loss of power.
R.F. Foster, W.B. Yeats: A Life (Oxford University Press): Volume I, “The Apprentice Mage,” (1997), covers the period to 1935; Volume II is “The Arch-Poet” (2003).
