Defining Beauty: The Paterian Yeats

Abstract

upon two contrary types of individuals, civilizations, and religions. 5 Both Pater and Yeats asserted the iconic power of art as a magical transformer of reality, 6 and it is perhaps only in the question of the finality of art for Yeats, in the eschatological and magical dimension he attributed to it, that his path diverged from Pater's. Yeats's aesthetic theory rests upon a quest for beauty, which is envisaged as a long, painful inner struggle and can be considered an echo of Pater's ekphrasis on Mona Lisa in The Renaissance: 7 What death? What discipline? What bonds no man could unbind, […] What wounds, what bloody press, Dragged into being This loveliness? ("The Only Jealousy of Emer, " VPl 531)

Things, Thoughts, and Walter Pater in "Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen"

“…As Elizabeth Muller has recently argued, Pater's work was a persistent and important influence on Yeats into the middle and latter stages of his career, particularly in terms of the substance of Pater's ideas about the art of Ancient Greece. 12 Accordingly, Pater's writings on Greek sculpture seem to be one of the possible sources for the things and the ideas about those things present in the poem's first stanza. Richard Finneran suggests that: "The bees, also ascribed to Phidias in early printings of the poem, may derive from a reference in Walter Pater's Greek Studies (1895) to 'the golden honeycomb of Daedalus'" (CW1 495)-a possibility then also relayed in A. Norman Jeffares's annotations.…”