Collected Letters

Shortly after the death of Algernon Swinburne in April Yeats announced to his sister that he was now 'King of the Cats'.

Volume II: 1896-1900

Yet, as the letters in this volume demonstrate, although widely recognized as the leading poet in English, he was far less sure of himself than this triumphant boast suggests. Indeed, this volume tracks Yeats's unrelenting but often agonised attempts to redefine his positon as a poet in a time of aesthetic and personal transition and uncertainty, struggling, as he put it, to fashion 'an art of my own day' and amid 'doubtings, shrinkings, hatreds, reconciliations'. His letters about the eight-volume Collected Works , completed in these years, show him attempting to get his 'general personality' into his readers' minds, but always as 'a preliminary to new work'.

What constituted 'personality', general or otherwise, was a contested area and in letter after letter he hammers out its relationship to 'character' in a debate which was to convert him from a late Romantic into an early Modernist. If many letters are concerned with the revision and reappraisal of old work, more reveal the insistent, and often frustrating, attempts to find new expression, particularly in the writing of The Player Queen , a process which, as he told a correspondent, convinced him that no fixed identity was possible.

Developments in his personal life contributed to the sense of uncertainty and transition. In the spring of he began an affair with a new mistress, Mabel Dickinson, but ironically we find this rekindling and intensifying his feelings for his old love Maud Gonne, and for the first time they came close to a physical relationship, although she insisted that their 'spiritual marriage' would be purer if unconsummated. But the return to mystical sublimation was, after nearly twenty years of courtship, no longer satisfying to him; the situation, as he confessed in a letter, had set his 'nerves tight as a violin string but not one that makes sweet music'.

More discordant music came from the Abbey Theatre. Early in the Fay brothers, founder members and mainstays of the Company resigned, and for a time it seemed that the whole project might come to an end. Over the next three years, as his correspondence eloquently reports, Yeats worked tirelessly to make sure this did not happen, encouraging new actors and playwrights, overseeing the evolution of a repertory structure, taking rehearsals often for weeks on end, battling with Fays for their misuse of the Irish National Theatre's name in America, mediating in the quarrels of the players, deflecting where he could the cantankerousness of the Theatre's patron, Annie Horniman, and, on her withdrawal of her subsidies, helping Lady Gregory in fund-raising, and in a final successful bid to renew the Abbey's patent.

His exertions in the Theatre were much increased by the terminal illness of his friend and colleague John Synge which, he confesses, 'for the first time in my life made death a reality to me'. The serious illness of Lady Gregory brought home to him his dependence on her and the ambience of her house, Coole Park; the massive mental breakdown of his companion Arthur Symons broke a remaining tie with the s and the passing of his uncle and fellow occultist, George Pollexfen, severed his major link with Sligo.

But, if these old relationships altered or disappeared, new ones were forged. Ezra Pound at last succeeded in meeting him and began encouraging him in his quest for 'an art of my own day', while Yeats himself fostered the talents of younger writers, notably the playwrights Lennox Robinson, T. John Ervine, and Lord Dunsany.

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By the end of the period, Yeats, who we see brought to edge of a nervous breakdown in , and defying the Establishment in producing Shaw's Blanco Posnet , became a man of affairs: The recasting of The Golden Helmet , first produced in the early months of his volume, as The Green Helmet of two years later, indicates how the discussions and soul-searching disclosed by his letters had begun to bear fruit. Less now a play satirizing Irish divisions and jealousies than a celebration of Nietzschean tragic joy and Castiglionean sprezzatura, it indicates the qualities Yeats had learned to prize over the intervening three years.

If the point of historical criticism is to get at the simple sense of the text, then the question must be raised: Just what text are we speaking about?

Is it a letter considered on its own or a letter as part of a collection? The canonical shaping of the correspondence is not limited to what the final collection looked like.

Collected Letters

The editing of these letters had begun long before. They were already being assembled in the first century as a collection of texts that could be called scripture 2 Peter 3: Modern interpreters have spilled much ink over the problem of the particularity of the Pauline correspondence. What, we might ask, can a modern reader learn from an ancient letter sent to Galatia that deals with issues that are unique to that community?

The particularity of the epistles is, as Nils Dahl famously remarked, a challenge for those who want to read them as Sacred Scripture.

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As Childs notes, this problem was not lost on the early Church as it shaped the letters for a broader readership. Other points in the correspondence indicate the letters circulated were not understood as limited to specific problems within a given congregation 1 Thess. The most important interpretive decisions by the shapers of the canon were the decisions to put the Letter to the Romans at the head of the collection and the pastorals at its close.

Romans is the least particularistic of the letters addressed to specific congregations. Moreover, the letter treats in a nearly encyclopedic fashion most of the major theological issues that are found scattered among the various other letters. For those who assembled the collection as a whole, this letter became the best way to introduce it. The role that Romans plays in orienting the reader is evident in the way Childs handles a number of interpretive challenges in the Pauline corpus.

Consider, for example, how law and faith are addressed in Galatians and Romans.

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Galatians treats Jewish law in an almost stridently negative fashion, while Romans is much more positive. Rather than presenting the law as a problem, the central concern has shifted to the ontological status of sin as a power. Law, according to Romans, is good in and of itself but does not provide a sufficient solution to the problems occasioned by the fall. Canonical reading does not imply harmonization; tensions must be left in place.

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The issue, Childs contends, is paying close attention to the broader theological plane that Romans provides and seeing how it can subsume the more pointedly negative construal of Galatians into a larger synthetic whole. The pastoral letters have proved controversial for modern interpreters. Childs argues that neither of these positions is tenable.

Ironically, he finds a middle way between these two extremes in recent German Catholic scholarship. What is at issue is the manner in which the Pauline teaching was handed on: