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One who saw him in action in the Playboy row, Mary Colum, said that she never saw a man fight so hard as Yeats fought, nor one who had so many weapons in his armory.^[44] But by fighting for his work as art and only art, and winning that fight, Yeats began the unmaking of the meanings made out of The Countess Cathleen . The critical tradition that finds in this work only verses, gestures, eternal emotions, and allegories of the spirit begins right here with Yeats's own argument against the nationalists. A play or a poem is not essentially an artifice, and what it stands for is not eternity. In the case of this play, the result of splitting the aesthetic from the political, and the philosophical from the historical, is a general erasure of significance. The meanings Yeats put into the play and provoked around it he himself dispelled.

Yeats was a great genius, and remains one, because of his magisterial ability to create and control the interest of his readers. Some of that management of interest occurs through figures of speech and the hosts of other literary effects within the work, but more of it occurs in the activities of the poet around the work—in manifestoes, charters for committees, newspaper editorials, press releases, prefaces, lists of guarantors, costume designs, actresses, musical interludes, symbolic treatises, folklore collections, and so on. And once he has directed our attention to certain things he says are in the work, and away from others, the ways in which the work is discussed are changed forever. This is the perpetual conundrum of the inside and the outside, one every magician and

[44] Colum, The Life and the Dream (1958; rev. ed., Dublin: Dolmen Press, 1966), 121.

symbolist must master: to make a thing that is nothing in itself signify many things, to make the swan "a concentration of the sky."

An encomium on Yeats in a 1912 work on theatre by Edward Martyn illustrates how much Yeats's work as public figure adds to his stature as phrase-maker. Martyn is trying to understand why his own literary career aborted after The Heather Field was produced on that opening night with The Countess Cathleen , whereas Yeats's dramatic career became so prominent. The decline in his own fortunes must have been especially puzzling to Martyn because his own play received much kinder, if shorter, notices than Yeats's did. Looking at the success of the Abbey from 1904 to 1912 before considering how to take up a new theatrical plan for himself, Martyn apologizes: "I am humbly conscious of my inferiority as an impresario to the two experts [Yeats and Lady Gregory] whose feats I have the temerity to imitate."^[45]Impresario is the correct word for the type of artistic genius Yeats so grandly is. And not only Yeats: if Martyn could not excite interest in his work—through being fashionable, controversial, or somehow relevant—he could not be a good writer. For a work to make an impression, the impresario has to create the ways in which the work is perceived, not simply the work itself, which may well remain invisible until one is taught how to see it.

Indeed, the very materials of the work—the words of the language—always already belong to a polity of discourse about many topics that seem external to the work, and using those words, the writer is performing an act of power over others, defining how they are seen, and how they see themselves, just as in receiving those words from others, the writer is an effect of the way others have constituted a world and him out of words.^[46] From the first word that is written, then,

[45] Denis Gwynn, Edward Martyn and the Irish Revival (London: Jonathan Cape, 1930), 156.

[46] For an excellent discussion of the "polity of discourse," see J. G. A. Pocock, "Verbalizing a Political Act: Toward a Politics of Speech," in Language and Politics , ed. Michael J. Shapiro (New York: New York University Press, 1984), 27–43.

the author enters upon a long conversation that continues until the last word is said, a conversation that is continuous with other acts of language and acts of power in the society. The immense volume, scope, and ambition of Yeats's activities in every aspect of this polity of discourse is one main reason his plays and poems have such great meaning for us.^[47] Discussion of the work of art, in a simple sense, makes the meaning of the work, if not its capacity for meaning.

This conclusion may seem debunking, but that is not my purpose. The public relations work of Yeats had a greater result than raising an audience or increasing sales figures for his books. It made his writing an enduring object of our attention. We may refuse to discuss the work in the terms he proposes, but we shall continue to discuss it. Looking back over the poetry of Yeats some years ago, Denis Donoghue decided with coy judiciousness that there were five or six excellent poems out of the lot; the rest were period pieces, inchoate symbolic ruminations, or exercises in personal mannerism. The reason Yeats had been taken for a great poet on such small achievement, Donoghue said, is that he had mixed his poetry up with a legendary biography (especially the unrequited love for Maud Gonne) and with the history of his nation.^[48] I think Donoghue is right at least in this—Yeats did enhance his poetry by giving it a backdrop of Irish history and a cast of noble-looking figures. But that does not make him less a poet; that makes him a great poet. A jar in Tennessee, a mirror in the roadway, or a swan in the sky: what is in the work comes from what we make of it with what lies around it.

[47] Hilton Edwards, formerly co-director of the Gate Theatre, Dublin, made a similar observation about the Abbey's plays in general: "When you come to think of it the Abbey's reputation . . . has been built up upon, I would say, five plays, and I would have great difficulty finding the fifth. . . . The reputation of the Irish theatre . . . depends more on . . . the brilliance of the various people that have been writing about her than on what the Irish theatre has done" (Journal of Irish Literature , 2, no. 3 [May 1973]: 87).

[48] Donoghue, "The Hard Case of Yeats," New York Review of Books 24, no. 9 (26 May 1977): 3–4. In regard to Yeats's dramatic efforts, Donoghue says, "I cannot see any good reason for staging . . . most of the early plays, which are interesting only to students of Yeats."