On the Idealized Landscape in Early Yeats

Literary landscape usually reflects its creator’s ideology. Yeats’s idealized landscape in his early poetry, on the one hand, attempted to elevate colonial Irish national culture and resist British colonialist culture; on the other hand, it happened to coincide with British colonialist cultural stereotyped constructs of Irish culture and even with British colonialist thought, thus indicating his ambiguous attitude toward the two cultures. The complexity and contradiction in Yeats’s ideology conveyed by his idealized landscape originated from some profound historical and cultural background as well.


Introduction
Due critical attention has not been given to the idealized landscape in the early poetry (Note 1) of the Irish poet W. B. Yeats (1865Yeats ( -1939)).Among the published works, only those of Ellmann and de Man at an early time respectively approach the landscape in Yeats's poetry.In The Identity of Yeats, Ellmann discusses the definition and function of landscape in early Yeats, and in addition points out that the landscape in Yeats changes with the change of Yeats's style (1954, p. 14, p. 121, p. 146).While de Man in his essay Symbolic Landscape in Wordsworth and Yeats analyzes the differences of the symbolic landscape exemplified in the mature poetry of the two poets (1984, pp. 125-143).However, both of them seldom touch upon the ideology embodied in Yeats's landscape.This essay aims to analyze the ideology embodied in Yeats's idealized landscape of his early poetry and probe into the reason for the complexity and contradiction in his early ideology.

Yeats and Landscape
The origin of the English word "landscape"can be traced back to the Dutch word "landschap"of the sixteenth-century Germanic language.In its source language, the word originally designated an area, or region, or a tract of land; in its target language, influenced by the Dutch painting, it was translated as a painting describing inland scenery instead of seascape or a portrait.Thus, it became a painting term whose primary subject matter was natural scenery.But Olwig points out that this translation can be misleading.He interprets the cultural and political elements behind the"natural scenery"and argues that"these paintings usually depicted life in countries filled with culture", and that their subject matter is thus "closer to the meaning of landscape as a polity's area of activity, as in the term'political landscape '" (2002, p. xxv).After eighteenth century, the meaning of "landscape" was closely related to "gardening".With the emergence of all kinds of new inter-disciplinary subjects related to landscape, the cultural landscape in addition to natural landscape has drawn more and more critical attention (Baldwin et al., 2006, p. 135).Cultural landscape not only embodies the culture of mankind but also is an ideological concept.Cosgrove argues that it"represents a way in which certain classes of people have signified themselves and their world through their imagined relationship with nature, and through which they have underlined and communicated their own social role and that of others with respect to external nature" (1998, p. 15).Due to the participation of mankind, the research of cultural landscape cannot be conducted without a survey of the history and society of mankind.
Western literature boasts of a long tradition of landscape writing which dates back to ancient Greek, Roman literature and The Bible.Literary landscape not just means natural scenery.Like painting, it is a process of "presentation"rather than "representation", because the artists are bound to "modify" and "re-express" what they see during their creation.In the same sense, like paint of artists, words of writers can only "approximate what the scene is like, but they cannot reproduce it", and therefore this newly "presented"landscape is better understood as "something newly created" (Siddall, 2009, pp. 8-9).This landscape with its creator's feelings and creation is "evocative"rather than "literal".What's more, it "like music liberates feelings and dreams rather than stimulates observation" (Berenson, 1953, p. 100).Literary landscape tends to reflect its creator's ideology through its evocation.
The early poetry of Yeats is rich in landscape which is not only related to tradition, but also shows how he develops his concept of landscape.In his Autobiography, Yeats clearly shows his early attitude to landscape, "It is a natural conviction for a painter's son to believe that there may be a landscape that is symbolic of some spiritual condition and awakens a hunger such as cats feel for valerian" (1987, p. 48).Besides, Yeats also regards that "a writer will indeed take what is most creative out of himself, not from observation, but experience, yet he must master a definite language, a definite symbolism of incident and scene" (1973, p. 160).Obviously, at the very beginning of his creation, Yeats seeks a symbolic poetic landscape for his feelings.However, his landscape in his early poetry once was quite imitative of the dead Arcady and exotic ancient India exemplified in Crossways.In his Autobiography, Yeats revealed that he had begun to write poetry in imitation of Shelley and Edmund Spenser; and that The Island of Statues was an arcadian play in imitation of Edmund Spenser (1987, p. 43, p. 61).But he soon realized the dissociation from reality of his landscape and subject in his works.Just as the title of his collection of poems Crossways shows, he was at crossways, hesitating about his poetic subject and landscape.The disappointment thus felt about his poetic landscape drove him to change his concept about it.
Yeats's change of landscape is from "landscapes of art" to "landscapes of nature".He emphasizes in one of his letters to his friend that"all poetry should have a local habitation when at all possible", and that "we should make poems on the familiar landscapes we love, not the strange and rare and glittering scenes we wonder at; these latter are the landscapes of art, [not] the range of nature" (1954, p. 120, p. 99).Obviously, landscapes of art, like Arcady and ancient India, are the external picturesque landscapes that are different from those inner landscapes evocative of his personal feelings, that is, those landscapes of nature Yeats emphasizes.More specifically, those landscapes of nature refer to the Irish western countryside represented by Yeats's hometown Sligo.By landscape, as Ellmann indicates, Yeats "meant more than a collection of inanimate natural objects"belonging to natural landscape, but more close to cultural landscape exemplified by "local customs, local characters, local songs and stories and local expressions" (1954, p. 14).The change of Yeats's concept of poetic landscape and his subjects leads to the change of his identity.Yeats once said that"from the moment I began The Wanderings of Oisin … I believe, my subject matter became Irish" (cited in Jeffares, 1984, p. 3) and that "I could not now write of any other country but Ireland, for my style has been shaped by the subjects I have worked on" (1961, p. 208).Since then, Yeats attempted to remove the external landscape that was isolated from reality in his poetry and focus on the idealized national inner landscape.Yeats thus turned to be a national poet and got more and more involved into the nationalist cultural movement that was on its rise.The change of Yeats could not be fulfilled without the due influence and guidance from the former Fenian leader and also a cultural nationalist John O'Leary.
Since 1885, O'Leary had become Yeats's political mentor and literary patron as Yeats admitted, "It was through the old Fenian leader John O'Leary I found my theme" (1961, p. 510).First of all, O'Leary let Yeats get acquainted with Irish history, legends and folk literature translated into English by Yeats's predecessors.Besides, he then particularly encouraged Yeats to cultivate a unity of national culture in imitation of the Irish patriotic poetry written in English.This kind of patriotic poetry dates from a sentimental political tradition initiated by the Irish poet Thomas Moore in the early nineteenth century that greatly influenced "Young Ireland" (Note 2) movement.Deane analyzes Moore's poetry which exploited the traditional topos of the ruin in a landscape to give it a specifically Irish political overtone and to breed out of this a specifically Irish form of nostalgia.This nostalgia, Deane argues, was consistently directed towards a past so deeply buried that it was not recoverable except as sentiment (1985, p. 14).Yeats disagreed with the political propaganda in this patriotic poetry because he regarded as always that true art could not be reduced to a tool for political propaganda.Moreover, he was more actively against the radical political nationalism resorting to violence.In contrast to Moore's landscape full of his sentimentalism and political elements, Yeats idealized his favorite landscape of his hometown Sligo to convey his own national sentiment and consciousness.But Moore's sentimental political tradition sought after the Irish past, which coincided with the cultural nationalist movement trying to excavate the long forgotten Gaelic literature and revive Irish culture.This benefited Yeats greatly as a cultural nationalist.In fact, the national cultural consciousness O'Leary tried to help develop in Yeats was just an inheritance and continuance of the Celtic Revival (1780-1880) led once by Moore with "a search for Unity of Culture" as its objective.
Although Yeats insisted on the principle of separation between art and politics, at a crucial historical moment for the rising nationalism and a fledging future country, Yeats had to admit that though we tried to have nothing to do with politics, everything we did was dominated by the political situation (1975, p. 455).Therefore, the ideology embodied in the landscape of his early poetry is quite self-evident.For Yeats, the cultural movement he was involved into was "a means of reviving and ennobling the race and of saving Ireland from the vulgarity and materialism of nineteenth-century England" (Loftus, 1964, p. 7).Furthermore, this Irish revival was "a movement towards the colony and away from the mother-country, a replacement of 'Englishness'by 'Irishness'" (Deane, 1985, p. 48).With this ideology in mind, Yeats attempted to elevate colonial Irish national culture and resist British colonialist culture through resorting to his idealized Irish landscape.

Yeats's Idealized Landscape and His Ideology
In his early poetry, Yeats idealized the native Irish natural and cultural landscape in order to achieve his objective for the cultural nationalist movement.However, there was a dual character in his ideology: On the one hand, it attempted to revive and enhance Irish national culture and resist British colonialist culture; on the other hand, it happened to coincide with British colonialist cultural stereotyped constructs of Irish culture and even with British colonialist thought.
British colonialists with their so-called superiority tended to construct Ireland as the other: uncivilized wilderness ready for civilization.By contrast, Yeats depicted with idealization a beautiful, harmonious and mysterious Ireland characterized by its natural landscape and its fairyland from the folk literature.This idealization not only showed to the world a peculiar native culture different from that of Britain, but also at the same time excavated and enhanced Irish national culture which was in danger of being perished by British cultural assimilation.The Stolen Child is just an early poem with Sligo countryside as its background, which describes vividly the pictorial scenes of the native countryside and the carefree life of the fairies as well.However, with his usual sharp contrast, Yeats reveals the life of the worldly people which is "full of troubles/ And is anxious in its sleep", and thus he satirizes colonialism that brings misery to the local people.Through the refrain,

Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild With a faery, hand in hand, For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.(1997, pp. 16-17) Yeats shows his identity as a national poet, calling upon Irish people to be away from the big cities assimilated by colonialist culture and come to the countryside in the west with a view to accessing the authentic native culture so as to strengthen their ties with their own culture.
In The Lake Isle of Innisfree, Yeats idealizes the pleasant natural scenes of the lake from his hometown and expresses his feelings of homesickness for his hometown and his wish for the recovery of his homeland.At the very first line of the poem, Yeats cites the story of the prodigal son fromThe Bible (Luke 15: 11-32) to express his longing for back home.Then, he idealizes the lake isle as a locus amoenus/pleasance in the tradition of ideal landscape from European pastoral poetry.It is "a beautiful, shaded natural site.Its minimum ingredients comprise a tree (or several trees), a meadow, and a spring or brook.Birdsong and flowers may be added.The most elaborate examples also add a breeze".Besides, the charms of landscape are distributed first among the five senses and then among the four elements.(Curtius, 1953, p.195, p.198) Yeats's Innisfree basically has all these ingredients, and in fact Ellmann analyzes how Yeats marshals the elements in his poetry in general.(1954: 29-38) It is also quite obvious in this poem: in the first stanza, "clay and wattles"represent earth; "water"is mentioned in the third stanza; air and fire are merged organically into the second stanza respectively as, "veils of the morning", "a glimmer", and "a purple glow", And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow, Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings; There midnight's all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow, And evening full of the linnet's wings.(1997, p. 35) The delightful garden park is a fertile blend of the four elements.In contrast, a wild wasteland is characterized by infertility resulting from the dominance of one element (Olwig, 2002, p. 131).Accordingly, the lake isle in Yeats's imagination is a fertile garden with the four elements marshalling harmoniously together.This simple, peaceful and harmonious pastoral world makes a sharp contrast with the London street where Yeats stands.There is nothing but monotony and it is an epitome of modern technology and urban industrial civilization characterized by its "roadway"and "pavements grey"which simply disgust Yeats.In addition, Yeats imagines himself like Thoreau living independently there and constructing his own living space, which corresponds with the "third nature"brought forth by Said (1994, pp. 225-226).This special imaginary space is both a potential resistance against the act of geographical violence of the imperialism, and an expression of the colonial writers' desire to recover their homeland.Analyzed from this perspective, it is no wonder that Yeats's early poetry is rich with Irish local place names.
In addition, Yeats also sings high praises for the Eden from the Celtic folk myth: "Country of the Young,"a literal translation of the Irish term"Tir-nan-Og"."The Land of Youth" in The Wanderings of Oisin is just such an example.In the first line of the poem He thinks of his Past Greatness when a Part of the Constellations of Heaven, Yeats mentions Country of the Young, and in his notes to the poem he explains that "'The Country of the Young' is a name in the Celtic poetry for the country of the gods and of the happy dead" (1957, p. 177).In his another poem The Happy Townland, Yeats describes it in great detail, Boughs have their fruit and blossom At all times of the year; Rivers are running over With red beer and brown beer.

An old man plays the bagpipes
In a golden and silver wood; Queens, their eyes blue like the ice, Are dancing in a crowd.(1997, p. 83) This idealized landscape displays a beautiful, rich, simple and happy Irish image with local people, fairies and nature in perfect harmony, which is in striking contrast with colonialist cultural stereotyped constructs of Ireland.
Though the idealized constructs of the Irish natural landscape in early Yeats was helpful in elevating national culture and resisting colonialist culture, it sometimes happened to coincide with colonialist cultural strategies.Yeats created mainly imaginary "Celtic Twilight"poetry during the early period, with a vague and dreamy keynote: a confusing and troubling worldly world and an intriguing and visionary fairyland and ideal world.This also betrays such traces of imitation from foreign cultures in early Yeats as British Romanticism, Pre-Raphaelite escapism and aestheticism, and Indian mysticism.Yeats's poetic constructs of Irishness also encountered disputes from native critics,"Yeats's supposedly Irish inspiration found its basis in a pseudo-Oriental dream-world, far removed from anything properly called Celtic, and based on 'much mutual borrowing and uninspired imitation'" (cited in Foster, 2001, p. 90).Due to its mistiness and mysticism, this kind of "dream-world"turned Ireland into a new other for colonialist imagination and inspection.
Besides the Irish natural landscape, Yeats also idealized the cultural landscape represented by Celtic peasants and by such Irish characters as legendary nobles and warriors sung by local ballads.For a long time, in colonialist constructs, the image of Ireland and its people had been stereotyped and even demonized.The characters of Irish people were labeled as being lazy, rude, tricky and vicious, and Irish nation wild, cruel and corrupt like beasts.Thus, in their eyes, Ireland needed civilization and reasonable ruling.However, Yeats gives a vivid description of a group of legendary Irish nobles and warriors including poet and warrior Oisin, leader of heroes King Goll, poet and leader of heroes Fergus and warrior Cuchulain, who are all national heroes and pride because of their wisdom and valiancy.But different from the historical heroes praised by the patriotic national poets who were also Yeats's predecessors, Yeats's heroes lack a strong sense of contemporaneity, and are multifaceted.They usually end their story as failed questers or with madness.The image of losers or lunatics not only happens to coincide with colonialist misrepresentations of Irish people as an unreasonable nation unable to govern themselves, but also seems to justify the British rule in Ireland.
There is also a dual character in Yeats's idealized imagination of Celtic peasants.For a long time, British colonialist discourse had been satirizing and defaming the image of Irish peasants as a changing alienated other: from a comic and drunken buffoon to a primitive Frankenstein or peasant Caliban.Yeats, however, through a comparison between the two peoples reversed this colonialist unfair binary characterization.Recalling his four-year (1887-1891) sojourn in London, Yeats once said, "In London I saw nothing good … Certain old women's faces filled me with horror: the fat blotched faces, rising above double chins, of women who have drunk too much beer and eaten much meat.In Dublin I had often seen old women walking with erect heads and gaunt bodies, talking to themselves with loud voices, mad with drink and poverty, but they were different, they belonged to romance."(1987, p. 104) In Yeats's characterization, British people become a fallen nation bound by materialism, while Irish people though poor are spirited and vigorous.Furthermore, the Irish people are immune to material temptation and thus superior to their counterparts spiritually and morally.Celtic peasants accordingly embody the essential elements of Irishness: poverty, primitiveness, imagination, romance and nobility.Such early Yeats's poems as The Meditation of the Old Fisherman and The Song of the Old Mother are typical examples that characterize this peasant image.Without doubt, this characterization is a resistance against Englishness represented by its modern technology, industrialization, materialism and secular spirit.But on the other hand it also reveals Yeats's colonial mentality because his characterization implies his confirmation of the economic status of the peasants: It is just the poverty due to the exploitation and pressure they are subjected to that gives them their nobility.This also equals that Yeats approves the reasonable existence of British colonialism in Ireland.However, according to Irish history, Yeats's idealized Celtic "noble savage" is far from the realistic Irish peasants.With the rising tide of the Irish national liberation movement and the falling tide of the British colonial power, Irish peasants regained their land and they either became small farmers with their own property, or swarmed into big cities as petit or middle bourgeoisie.Yeats's improper imagination of Celtic peasants is met with much criticism.Howes (1996, p. 33) argues that a close examination of Yeats's peasant suggests that it brought him into greater harmony with the deep structures of colonial thought.

A Critical Approach to Yeats's Complex Ideology
From the above analysis, a complex and even contradictory ideology embodied in the idealized landscape of Yeats's early poetry can be detected.What caused the complexity and contradiction in his ideology turns to be a subject worthwhile for further study.The author argues that this is due to Yeats's peculiar cultural identity and cultural appeal influenced by a profound historical and cultural background as well.
Yeats's cultural identity is a mixed one, which originates from his special national identity as a colonial writer.Yeats's ancestor was a British merchant of middle class origin.After immigration to Ireland, Yeats's ancestors acquired certain lands for Yeats family through their marriage with noble families.Since then the Yeats family gradually had settled down and merged into the class of Anglo-Irish Ascendancy that claimed to believe in Protestantism and be loyal to the King of Great Britain.As descendants and agents of the British colonialists, the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy depended on the protection of the British colonial power for rights and privilege.During the eighteenth century, the rule of Anglo-Irish Ascendancy reached its climax in Ireland.However, at the end of the nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth century, its power gradually declined.As the hyphen in the middle shows, the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy is endowed with a mixed cultural identity and unstable privilege.Since this privileged class had settled down in Ireland for generations and blended in with the local culture, they were no longer pure British citizens, but they were not native Irish either with their difference of national background, language and belief.They, therefore, became mixed British Irishmen between two cultures.Yeats's early creation coincided with the decline of Anglo-Irish Ascendancy, and he himself could not get rid of his mixed cultural identity.Influenced by his family background, Yeats received formal British education and traditional culture during his childhood, but his early experience in his mother's hometown the Irish western countryside acquainted him with the local culture, which made him fascinated about the local natural and cultural landscapes, and gradually strengthened his sense of Irish national consciousness.
Mixed cultural identity made Yeats have access to and take in a dual cultural tradition, which at the same time cultivated his complex ideology.Like so many other colonial writers, Yeats was faced with a similar awkward cultural situation.As Boehmer (2005, p. 111) contends that they were"positioned between diametrically different cultural worlds"and "able to borrow from several traditions, yet belonged to no one".This mixed cultural identity crossing two cultural boundaries made Yeats unable to become either a pure British poet to follow British culture, or a pure Irish patriotic poet propagandizing Irish culture and resolutely resisting British culture.Instead, he took a seemingly contradictory neutral side, just as Said (1994, p. 220) in Culture and Imperialism states that by virtue of Ireland's colonial status, Yeats also naturally belongs to the cultural domain: cultural dependency and antagonism together.Antagonism means opposing colonialist stereotypes and definitions and transgressing the boundaries of colonialist discourses, while dependency means borrowing the ideological, linguistic, and textual forms of the colonial power.Clearly, with its complexity and contradiction, the duality of his ideology becomes self evident.
Yeats's peculiar cultural identity determines his cultural appeal, which also plays a decisive role in his ideology.Yeats's mixed cultural identity once aroused great disputes in Ireland.Some narrow-minded and radical nationalists among the Irish mainstream Catholic bourgeoisie tended to define Irish national identity according to the Irish language and Catholic belief.Apparently, this definition standard would exclude the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy including Yeats, who spoke English and believed in Protestantism, from the Irish future political and cultural landscape, and thus reduce them to outsiders of a new country.The new country would be dominated by the newly rising Irish Catholic bourgeoisie, who, once as the oppressed and ruled class, had a natural hatred against the ruling Anglo-Irish Ascendancy.Facing this perilous situation, Yeats inherited the concept of cultural integration advocated once by Anglo-Irish elites.He hoped that a unified culture could be achieved by way of a revival of Irish culture so as to combine Irish Catholicism and Protestantism, and that Irish national identity could be defined via unified culture and history regardless of different national backgrounds and religious beliefs.Only in this way could the marginalized Anglo-Irish Ascendancy equally blend in with the new nation.Obviously, different definition standards of national identity imply distinct kinds of ideology and cultural appeal from two sides.
Yeats, together with other Anglo-Irish elites, once played an active role in the Irish nationalist movement, but limited by his mixed identity and class, he gradually betrayed his aristocratic tendency, which was different from the mainstream ideology.The controversies and even riots caused by Yeats's and Synge's plays among the Irish audience were just a case in point.Yeats and Synge among others gradually cut themselves off from the Irish common people, and in their characterization of them, they usually misunderstood or distorted their culture, especially their belief.Besides, in the idealized society constructed by Yeats, there were forever the peasants, aristocrats and poets at the center of the stage, while the newly rising Catholic bourgeoisie were excluded by his aristocratic prejudice, because Yeats thought, "That very class who seemed so ready to bend to the powers of others, men who had risen above the traditions of the countryman, without learning those of cultivated life or even educating themselves, and who because of their poverty, their ignorance, their superstitious piety, are much subject to all kinds of fear."(1961, p. 260) By contrast, in Yeats's constructed ideal society: The peasant ideal represented the humble life of service; the aristocratic ideal represented the nobler life of wealth and art and rule; poets/artists were supported by the aristocracy and provided with as well the quality of human nobility that informed all great art, and they combined the form of the aristocracy with the sensibility of the peasant (Loftus, 1964, pp. 54-60).However, all the harmonious and attractive appearance covers the aristocratic exploitation and oppression of the peasant.Yeats's marginalized Anglo-Irish aristocratic ideology corresponds with his idealized constructs of Irish landscape, and further reveals the root cause of his potential colonial mentality.

Conclusion
Yeats is praised by Said (1994, p. 220) as an "indisputably great national poet," because he"during a period of anti-imperialist resistance articulates the experiences, the aspirations, and the restorative vision of a people suffering under the domination of an offshore power."Thisgenerally acknowledges Yeats's historical role in the process of Irish de-colonization.But Yeats's duality in his ideology can be drawn from a detailed study of his idealized landscape in his early poetry: his resistance against colonialist culture and advocation of national culture in contrast with his approval of colonial thought.This testifies the mixed cultural identity and marginalized cultural appeal of the colonial writers exert a significant influence on their complex ideology.