In Fundamental Agreement: Yeats and Wyndham Lewis

Abstract

TWO MEN COULD HARDLY BE MORE DIFFERENT in style and ethos than Wyndham Lewis and W. B. Yeats. Yeats’s feudalistic Irish Nationalism, mysticism and eccentric historicism are the antithesis of the younger painter-writer’s cosmopolitan internationalism, anti-historicism and mechano-morphic vision of humanity. On closer inspection, Yeats and Lewis prove to have a surprising amount in common. The cultural vision of both extended way beyond Europe and they shared the view that a willed struggle with a contradictory version of the self was the basis of achievement in the arts. Each valued his apparent opposite at crucial moments. When Yeats was studying philosophy in the years following publication of the first version of A Vision , he suggested that the editor of The Enemy should read Plato’s Theaetetus— advice that Lewis apparently took. 1 Yeats, in his turn, learnt from Lewis. Time and Western Man was one of the volumes the poet ‘defied the doctors’ by reading: ‘Tell Wyndham Lewis … that I am in all essentials his most humble and admiring disciple’, Yeats wrote to Olivia Shakespear in December 1927 (L 733–4). These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

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