Yeats’s Mysticism and Nationalism in his Early Years

Yoo, Baekyun 한국예이츠학회 2007 한국예이츠 저널 Vol.27 No.-

The purpose of this paper is to explore the relationship between W.B. Yeats's obsession with mysticism and his nationalism in his early years (1885-1895). My basic argument is that he knocked at the door of mysticism to find a metaphysical symbol with which he could unify politically, religiously, and culturally divided Ireland. In fact, Yeat's turn to mysticism in his early years attracts many scholars's attentions. But a reading of many studies on this topic leads us to believe that Yeats studied mysticism for other purposes. Elizabeth Cullingford and Richard Ellmann argue that Yeats's preoccupation with mysticism was his antipathy to materialism which was prevalent due to the Industrial Revolution. Seamus Dean explains Yeats's interest in mystical and occult traditions as his efforts to establish an Irish cultural identity. Denis Donoghue maintains that Yeats wanted to separate Irishness from Englishness by dedicating himself to the study of mysticism. In addition to these purposes, I believe, one of Yeats's political agenda was to unify various cultural, religious, and political forces of Ireland before the turn of the century. Yeats firmly believed that the identity of the Irish should be based upon intellectual life and spiritual principles which could solve and transcend the cultual, religious, and political discords of Ireland. The spiritual creeds Yeats was looking for should be founded on the common Irish spirit which could appeal to the Irish whether they were Anglo or Gaelic, Protestants or Catholics, or Unionists or Separatists. In other words, spiritual principles should not be confined to one church. In this sense, Yeats’s choice of Indian thought and occultism is suitable because they have universal appeal. Yeats believed that Indian thought would provide Ireland with the common spiritual tradition which predated both Catholicism and Protestantism. Furthermore, the religious concepts of pantheism and mysticism were the very ideas Yeats needed to bring the conflicting religious and political parties into perfect harmony and balance. Namely, Yeats tried to find a metaphysical model for the unity of Catholics and Protestants through the mystical union.

Yeats Matters : Iconic Value and Visibility

Nathan Myers 한국예이츠학회 2015 한국예이츠 저널 Vol.47 No.-

많은 정경화된 문인들과 달리, 윌리엄 버틀러 예이츠는 학자들과 대중매체의 창작인들에게 호기심과 다양한 관점으로서 영속적이다. 예이츠 인용, 언급, 환기는 시간, 장소, 장르를 초월하며, 그 양과 지속성은 예이츠는 영원하다는 것이다. 그의 이름은 권위적이고, 영속적이고, 특이하게 변하는 자산이다; 그의 문학적 특성은 작가들에게 도움과 자료가 된다. 이것은 지난 반세기 동안의 점차 지구화되는, 범국가적 문화의 기억 속에서 예이츠의 뛰어나고 변화무쌍한 지위를 동시에 활용하고, 주장하고, 영속화시키는, 뚜렷하지만, 애매하게 정의된, 역사적으로 대중적이면서도 도회적인, 문학전통과 맥을 같이한다. 세기말 사이드와 키버드의 예이츠의 정치적 면모를 (재)조명함으로써, 리처드 엘만이 조지 예이츠와의 관계를 설명함으로써, TV와 영화 속의 예이츠의 등장을 통해서, 나는 예이츠의 시와 개성이 어떻게 20세기를 넘어서 국가적, 종족적, 사회적 힘에 관한 복잡한 개념들과 얽혀있는지를 탐구한다. Unlike many canonized literary figures, William Butler Yeats endures as a curious and multifarious point of reference for both the academic community and purveyors of more popular media. Yeats allusions, references, and evocations span time, location, and genre, but their volume and consistency clearly indicate that Yeats matters. His name retains an authoritative, enduring, and uniquely protean capital; his literary signature aids the writer and affords resources, aligning it with a distinctive, though vaguely defined, literary tradition, historically popular and urbane, that simultaneously exploits, asserts, and perpetuates Yeats’s eminent and mutable position in the increasingly globalized, transnational cultural memory of the last half century. Through discussions of Richard Ellmann’s relationship with George Yeats, Yeats’s (re)politicization by Said and Kiberd near the end of the century, and Yeats’s appearances in television/film, I explore how Yeats’s poetry and personage have been tangled in complex notions of national, ethnic and social power across the 20th century.

Yeats On the Way to A Transnational Poetics

Kim, Youngmin 한국예이츠학회 2009 한국예이츠 저널 Vol.32 No.-

In A Vision, Yeats provides multiple trans-temporal (crossing different periods in history) and trans-national(crossing different nations) collage of “the glance characteristic of a civilization in its final phase,” and provides different images of eyes for each period. Each of these images is related to a certain point between concernful dealing with the world and the vision of the infinite world. Each image of the gaze characteristic of sculpture represents a civilization, and constitutes a “discontinuous image” which connotes “the symbolic message.” In fact, Yeats reveals each image of the eye as a fragment or stasis of a moment of the spiritual eye, and at the same time as the representation of Yeats's intention to quest for the Unity of Culture, the “vast design” of his transnational poetics. The objective of this paper is to trace the trajectory of Yeats's poetics and rhetoric. My contention is that Yeats reveals his major shift from the poetics to the rhetoric in the midst of the multi-level “twists and turns” which mark an important manifestation of the process of transmigration toward the Unity of Culture, and I argue that Yeats’s quest for the Unity of Culture manifest a transnational poetics. Yeats’s poetic development manifests the on-going process of contestation and fragmentation on the bridge between the poetics and the rhetoric. The bridge is a site of turbulent aporia site in which duplication of contestation creates a simultaneous centripetal and centrifugal movement, comingled with multiplication of fragmentation. Between “Magic” essay and A Vision, there is a missing link to establish the so-called “linguistic turn” in the career of Yeats the transnational poet/theorist. Yeats in his Per Amica Silentia Lunae already conceived the doubling intertext of intentionality as an anchoring center of the breakthrough out of the dilemma of the theory of magic. In fact, what Yeats has done in Per Amica Silentia is to create conflict, tension, and equilibrium between the theory of magic and the theory of the linguistic turn, thereby rupturing the inauthentic theory of correspondence and establishing the foreground of the authentic concept of correspondence in terms of Othering. The Only Jealousy of Emer is the dramatic manifestion of Yeats’s linguistic turn in the speech of the characters in relation to the desire of the Other. My focus here in this play is rather the role of the multiple masks which represent the nature of the Other as well as the process of Othering. The Other has been represented by the multiple characters’ masks such as those of Bricriu (The Figure of Cuchulain), Fand (Woman of the Sidhe), The Ghost of Cuchulain, Emer, Eithne Inguba. As a unified vision of Yeats’s own diachronic and synchronic transnational poetics, A Vision can be seen in terms of Deleuze and Guattari’s “desiring- production.” Opposed to the (negative) Lacanian dialectic of lack and desire, Deleuze and Guattari propose a theory of “desiring-production,” which they define as a “pure multiplicity, that is to say, an affirmation that is irreducible to any sort of unity.” If we re-consider A Vision as a desiring-machine that is connected to other desiring-machines, we deterritorialize the perspective which constructs lack as the centre of subjectivity, thereby reterritorializing subjectivity as a network of multiplicities. The gaze of the writing subjects in A Vision become autonomous, creating automatic writing and automatic speech. Then, A Vision which is given for the metaphors for poetry and poetry achieves its being in language. In short, Yeats has established a transnational poetics which traces its poetics of the Other and Othering back to the poetics and the rhetoric of the linguistic turn, a turn in which poetry exists in language and turned toward an inner reality.

Yeats’s Rediscovery of India and a Development of Universalism

Yoo, Baekyun 한국예이츠학회 2009 한국예이츠 저널 Vol.32 No.-

In this paper, I argue that W. B. Yeats’s pursuit of universalism was rekindled by his rediscovery of the East through Tagore. Yeats’s political experiences during the 1910s also influenced his fascination with universalism. I will first discuss the significance of Yeats’s fascination with Tagore in relation to his rediscovery of the importance of East, particularly India, not only for spiritual reasons, but also for political reasons. That is, Tagore ultimately gave Yeats an opportunity to see India as a place to reconcile his split allegiance to both Romanticism and nationalism, and to art and politics. The East, for Yeats, is the place to swerve from his Romantic predecessors for political reasons. At this time, a return to East was especially important to him because it also offered a psychological vindication for his political setback—being attacked for his anti-nationalism—during the Playboy riots. That is, the pursuit of Eastern values, particularly Indian values, became his way of fighting colonialism, as well as for finding spiritual wholeness. By the time Yeats returned to the East, Yeats also began to witness the most turbulent and dramatic political events of his life such as the 1916 Easter Rising, the Irish and English War, and the Irish Civil War, which Yeats viewed as the culmination of the hatred between political groups and parties. His rediscovery of Eastern values through Tagore and his political experiences at that time slowly led Yeats to develop a concept of universalism: the unity of East and West. In other words, Yeats’s continuous movement towards universalism during this period was the necessary and inevitable course to deal with his political experiences: his psychological need to purify the bitterness and hatred Irish politics breeds into his mind, and his need to offer a more inclusive political vision to the Irish politicians who fight out of hatred of opposing parties. What Yeats basically wants to do by pursuing universalism is to create a citizen of the universe whose consciousness transcends the distinction between one and many, present and past, and East and West. Poems such as “The Double Vision of Michael Robartes,” “Sailing to Byzantium,” “Among School Children,” and “Byzantium,” written after 1919 express Yeats’s universalist idea of reconciling East and West employing a meditative scheme. It is unmistakable that all three poems encapsulate Yeats’s universal consciousness, but we also see that they are also tinged by Yeats’s skepticism about the transcendental state, as well as about universalism, in one way or another. Yeats’s doubt about universalism betrays his conflicting political agenda: his belief in the Anglo-Irish aristocratic government. Looking at other poems (“The Wild Swans at Cool,” “In Memory of Major Robert Gregory,” “An Irish Airman foresees his Death,” “A Prayer for my Daughter”) published in the same period reveal his covert allegiance to the Anglo-Irish aristocratic tradition.

예이츠의 『매의 우물에서』와 일본의 노(能)

성혜경 한국예이츠학회 2005 한국예이츠 저널 Vol.23 No.-

Yeats held a life-long interest in Japanese culture, and employed the images, knowledge and inspiration he gained from Japan in many of his literary works. On the whole, it was the Japanese literary form that was most significant in his development as a writer. It was through the translations of Ezra Pound and Ernest Fenollosa that Yeats became acquainted with Noh, the medieval Japanese drama. It is generally agreed that Yeats’s encounter with Noh marked a turning point in his career as a dramatist. The Noh led him to create “a form of drama, distinguished, indirect and symbolic...an aristocratic form.” In “Note to At the Hawk’s Well,” Yeats writes: I have found my first model—and in literature, if we would not be parvenus, we must have a model—in the ‘Noh’ stage of aristocratic Japan. From this statement, we can see how significant the Noh-form was to Yeats in his development as a playwright. When Yeats was first introduced to Noh, he immediately perceived affinities with Irish legends and beliefs. The Noh was not something completely new or alien to Yeats. It was the discovery of an ideal, an ideal form for him to express his perennial themes of the tension between the physical and spiritual worlds. Yeats’s Noh-inspired plays are often categorized as “dance plays” and we can see that “dance” was an important symbol which Yeats developed through his experience with Noh. Yeats wrote in his “Introduction” to Certain Noble Plays of Japan that it was a Japanese dancer, Ito Michio, who inspired him to write his new play, At the Hawk’s Well (1916). In Noh, the dance which is usually danced by a supernatural figure, is placed at the centre. Here, the supernatural dominates the stage and the action develops toward a moment of enlightenment. Yeats precisely points out this fact and writes that in his new play, instead of “the players working themselves into a violence of passion...the music, beauty of form and voice all come to climax in pantomimic dance.” However, since Yeats intended Cuchulain as the central figure of At the Hawk’s Well, the theatrical effect of the dance had to differ from that of Noh. Another characteristic of this play is that it dramatizes the ‘transformation’ of the Guardian of the Well, the role which Ito Michio played, through spirit possession. This change in personality is conveyed by means of a change in costume(she throws off her cloak to reveal a dress suggesting a hawk). This is a method resembling ‘monogi(物着),’ one of the most important dramatic conventions of Noh. Yeats explores this device again, in The Only Jealousy of Emer(1919), another dance play modeled on Noh, but this time using different masks to show the change in personality. Yeats’s interest in this motif of spirit possession eventually led him to write The Words Upon the Window-Pane(1930), a play where he dramatizes a seancē. Here, the dramatic tension is concentrated mainly on a supernatural manifestation through the ‘protagonist’ who is a professional spiritual medium. In this paper, I have discussed Yeats’s relationship with Noh through a detailed analysis of At the Hawk’s Well. In this play, we can see many aspects of Noh. The simplified stage, the musicians, the mask, the dance, the use of a square blue cloth to represent a well; these are characteristics reminiscent of Noh. However, we must note that this play was not merely an imitation of Noh but a completely new form of creative writing. Richard Taylor indicates the influence of Yoro, a felicitous Waki-noh, or God Play on this play. A comparison of these two plays reveal that Yeats had no intention of following the Noh paradigms faithfully. However, the inspiration he gained from Noh opened a wide range of dramatic experiments enabling him to write a sequence of dance plays. In later plays such as The Words Upon the Window-Pane and Purgatory, Yeats succeeded in achieving a dramatic effect closer to that of Noh.

What Yeats Looks for: Perfection of A Life or Art

Young Suck Rhee 한국예이츠학회 2022 한국예이츠 저널 Vol.67 No.-

이 논문은 먼저 2권의 주요 저서를 다루는데 한권은 R.F. 포스터의 예 이츠 전기이고 다른 한권은 데이비드 피어스의 우수한 저술로 학술적이고 미학적으로 아름답지만 하나의 질문을 던지고 싶다. 이 책들의 목적이 무엇인가? 예이츠는 정말로 인생을 아니면 예술을 완성하고자한 것인가? 우리에게 지금 예이츠의 인생과/혹은 작 품에 대해 자신의 목소리를 낼 수 있는 학자, 전기작가, 시인이 많다. 그중 가장 탁월 한 학자로서 리처드 엘만은 예이츠와 그의 작품 두 가지 다 들여다 볼 수 있을 뿐 아 니라 그이 작품을 느낄 수도 있는 전기작가이다. 사학자로서 R.F. 포스터의 시선은 예 이츠가 인생에서 무엇을 하는 지를 보도록 우리의 눈을 열어준다. T.R. 헨의 방법은 시인 예이츠와 시를 멀리가지 않고 직접 다룬다. 다른 전기작가들과 학자들의 작품도 위의 저자들만큼 중요하다. 이 논문은 필요에 따라 자신의 글에 맞게 예이츠의 시를 편집하는 학자들도 다루는 데, 그들 중 일부는, 그러나, 자신의 목적에 맞춰서 예이츠 의 시들을 휘거나 자르기를 한다. 물론 그들은 이것이 예이츠와 그의 시에 얼마나 독 이 되는 지를 인지하지 못하는 것 같고 나는 이것을 지적한다. 본 논문의 목적은, 그 러나, 이러한 전기나 저술을 판단하기보다는 예이츠의 작품의 진면목을 되찾아주고 싶 은 것이다. 현대시인으로서의 예이츠를 오해하거나 현대시인으로의 예이츠를 “마지막 낭만주의자”(예이츠 자신이 만든 말)라고 칭하면서 과소평가하고 있기 때문이다. This essay furst attempts to study in the main two major publications: one is R.F. Foster’s great biographical work and the other David Pierce’s good book, which is scholarly and looks beautiful as well, and then will ask a question: what’s the purpose of these books? What does Yeats really look for: perfection of a life or art? We now have excellent biographical and critical works of Yeats and his work. We have scholars and biographers and poets that could have their say in the matter of Yeats’s life and/or work. Of them, Richard Ellmann seems to be the strongest biographer scholar who could both look into Yeats and his work, and feel what Yeats’s work is; R.F. Foster’s unique eye as a historian helps our eye look into what Yeats has done in his life; T.R. Henn’s approach, for example, seems straightforward as he deals with Yeats as poet and with his poems in depth without going astray very much. Other biographers and scholars have works as valuable as the three above. I would also like to deal with some scholars writing and editing Yeats’s poems as their needs arise. Some, however, seem to have bent and cut Yeats’s poems to fit them into their purposes, without knowing what harm this could do Yeats and his poetry, which. I would point to. My aim here is not that I serve as a judge of their work, but would like to put Yeats’s work into a proper dimension. Yeats as Modern poet seems to have been misunderstood or underestimated as Modern poet, when we label him as a Last Romantic, the term Yeats himself has first coined.

예이츠 시에 나타난 분노의 역설

조미나 한국예이츠학회 2003 한국예이츠 저널 Vol.19 No.-

W. B. Yeats poetic purpose is to advocate to Sophia who is suffering in the world with mankind as a hidden God and the feminine principle in Christian Gnostic myth. He searched for two of Sophia’s aspects: Mother and Daughter Sophia. Yeats believed that Mother Sophia abodes in heaven. On the other hand, Daughter Sophia is suffering in the world, and he thought himself as a chosen man of the sole priest for Daughter Sophia. Yeats tried to dedicate his life for Daughter Sophia from his early rose poetry. The immortal rose is a symbol of Helen of Troy or Countess Cathleen who sacrificed her life for rescuing her people’s souls. Yeats also waited for the time of the recovery of Sophia’s glory again. The decided time is coming to follow the theory of the Gyres in A Vision. After dominating the masculine gyre for 2000 years, the androcentric society will disappear by returning to the feminine gyre. Yeats thought the new age would be dominated by Sophia who was not only feminine but androgynous. Yeats also called the new age a ‘rosy peace’ which is a symbol of ’Unity of Being’ and the immortal world. Yeats was eager to search for achieving ‘Unity of Being’ by uniting with Sophia. As he got older, he was a passionate old man who still indulged in Sophia. Yeats believed in Sophia as a hidden and defeated god. But when decided time comes, Sophia will be recovered her glory. In “The second coming,” Sophia as an androgynous god, is symbolized by the sphinx. Yeats often used to the sphinx image to explain Sophia. Especially, the sphinx is identified with the Judge of the Last Judgement. It is important to the symbol of Sphinx’s eyes; ‘a blank and pitiless as the sun.’ The sun symbolizes God’s fury of the Last Judgement as well as the unchangeable supernatural world. Sphinx’s eyes of the sun image are compared with the cat’s eyes of the moon. The moon is a symbol of the wheel of reincarnation and mortal world. In A Vision, the moon has 28 aspects as a symbol of the wheel of reincarnation. Sophia has controlled the souls after death by following the rules of the moon’s 28 aspects. Yeats symbolized Sophia as the Judge of all souls by portraying her as a ‘cook.’ On the contrary, when the sphinx comes, there will be no more the moon’s changeable aspects in the world. Therefore, although the sphinx looks like an evil image, it is only a symbol of Sophia. Yeats always wanted to be Sophia’s sole priest. So he was a Christian Gnostic priest just as W. Blake. In fact, he identified with Ribh who was his poetic hero as well as the Christian Gnostic priest. God’s fury and the rough sphinx image are paradoxical symbols of the God’s glory and the age of the rosy peace. The sphinx’s ‘pitiless eye’ is connected with the horseman’s ‘cold eye’ on his epitaph. The ‘cold eye’ is symbolized to achieve Yeats’s final poetic purpose, ‘Unity of Being.’ That is, the symbol suggested that Yeats would be a Daimon after his death.

영국 모더니스트로서 예이츠의 탄생: W. E. 헨리의 『내셔널 옵저버』와 19세기말 영국 문학장

윤미선 ( Misun Yun ) 영미문학연구회 2018 영미문학연구 Vol.34 No.-

I attempt in this paper to reveal the profound influence the poet, critic, and editor William Ernest Henley (1849-1903) had on William Butler Yeats in the building of Yeats’s identity as an English Modernist. Yeats himself resisted acknowledging this influence in his Memoirs (1915-16) and Autobiographies (1927). This denial was part of Yeats’s myth-making of the Decadent poets of the Rhymers’ Club, which was necessary to develop further his own myth as a mature Modernist who had overcome the Rhymers’ solipsistic, jejune aestheticism. It was actually Henley’s ‘counter-aestheticism’ that provided logic for Yeats in his vision that mature art should not be in pursuit of mere beauty but power. By focusing on the critical weekly National Observer (1888-1897), which was first founded as the Scots Observer in Edinburgh and which Henley edited, I show that the ‘counter-aestheticism’ it promulgated in its ‘Literary’ section was intertwined with the ‘new’ Conservative elitism of its imperialist ‘Political’ section. This alloy formed the ground against which Yeats debuted in the British literary field; most of Yeats’s poems and prose works collected in Poems (1895) and in Celtic Twilight (1893) first appeared in that weekly. Through this weekly, Yeats was made an ‘Irish’ and Celtic poet whose poems could exemplify the ‘manly’ atavism which Henley saw as key to reviving the pan-‘English’ nation that was suffering from aesthetic and political decadence. The staunch Tory position of Henley as an opponent of Irish Home Rule remained a burden on Yeats so that Yeats would define the role of Henley as a mere editor of the journals where he happened to publish his works. The ‘masculine’ vitalist poetics of Henley’s own literary output, which emphasized the creative energy of poetical form and language, was, however, preserved in Yeats’s poems and ideas. Yeats’s poems in The Rose (1893), first published in the National Observer, receive special attention in relation to Henley’s The Song of Sword, and Other Verses (1892), which is noteworthy for its evolutionist sensibility of destruction and creation as well as its powerful images.

Korean Poetry Through W. B. Yeats: Kim Chunsoo and Kim Jonggil

Young Suck Rhee 한국예이츠학회 2008 한국예이츠 저널 Vol.30 No.-

The paper searches parallels between English and Korean poetry as represented by Kim Chunsoo and Kim Jonggil, two of modern and contemporary poets in relation to W. B. Yeats. It clarifies the validity of such a comparative study by showing the interrelationship in the visual art, for it is there physically to see, as exemplified by the giving and receiving of Picasso and Matisse through their works. Even though it is not that easy in poetry, it is nevertheless possible to relate such relationship in it. Yeats has been a great influence on English and American poets; and a large number of researches and studies have been done. But Yeats has not been compared with Korean poets, in part because Korean and English are totally different languages. But as this study has shown, this kind of study could give benefits to both scholars and writers as well. This paper selects two of Kim Chunsoo’s early poems to compare with Yeats’s parallels. The fact is, Yeats’s poems seem to have had influence on the early Kim. Kim's poetry is different, though. What we could benefit from this study is that Korean poets need not worry about influences from great foreign poets. Understanding foreign language poetry helps Korean poets enrich their own poetry by learning what their true self is, what language Korean is; Kim must have learned that from reading Yeats. The paper takes and analyzes Kim Jonggil in relation with Yeats. Kim Jonggil is different from Kim Chunsoo; Kim Jonggil teaches Yeats and other poets in English. But what interests me is he is far different from other Korean poets. He seems to have transcended foreign influences, not to mention that he has outgrown Yeats and other English poets. Two of Kim’s poems are elaborated in relation with Yeats’s. I deal with Kim’s supreme poem with one of Yeats’s best. Kim’s quality compares well with Yeats’s, but his poetry itself is different from Yeats’s.

시인의 아내 조지 예이츠

윤정묵 한국예이츠학회 2009 한국예이츠 저널 Vol.32 No.-

This paper is an attempt to understand George Yeats: who she was, how she lived, and what kind of relationship she had with the poet W. B. Yeats. Based on the recent biographical and critical studies of Elizabeth Butler Cullingford, Brenda Maddox, Ann Saddlemyer, and Margaret Mills Harper, the present writer tries to show that George Yeats was not only the devoted wife of W. B. Yeats and mother of their two children, but also the poet's literary and spiritual collaborator. The first introductory part of the paper deals with George Yeats's life until she married W. B. Yeats. Her birth and education, the first meeting with W. B. Yeats, and the establishing of a close relationship which, strengthened by common interest in occultism, led to their marriage in October 1917, are briefly surveyed. The paper then discusses the problem which arose from Yeats's unresolved sexual love for Iseult Gonne, and shows how George Yeats solved it by trying the automatic script at their honeymoon hotel. The automatic script, which saved George and W. B. Yeats at the critical moment, and dominated the early years of their married life, is mainly discussed in the next part of the paper. The paper first describes how it started, and then discusses the main issues related to it: why George did it, and whether it was her hoax, a joint self-deception, or daimonic intervention (Saddlemye xix), and how it affected W. B. Yeats's life and work. In order to see how W. B. Yeats expressed his feeling and thought about the automatic script in his poems, the writer of the paper reads Solomon to Sheba, Solomon and the Witch, and The Gift of Harun Al-Rashid. The last part of the paper deals with George Yeats's life after the automatic script and the sleeps ended in summer 1922. Unlike the exciting and sexually intimate life of early five years, the later long years of her married life were very tiring and problem-ridden. The paper discusses the major problems she had to face as wife of the great poet and mother of two children, and describes how she lived through it with self-possession, with generosity, with something like nobility (Elllmann xxviii).