The Poetry of Æ by Æ
"The Poetry of Æ by Æ" refers to the work of George Russell, an influential figure in the Irish Renaissance known primarily by his pseudonym "Æ." This moniker originated from a printer's error, leading to a distinction between Russell's practical pursuits and his visionary poetry. His verses, largely published in collections like "Collected Poems" (1913) and "Selected Poems" (1935), often lack direct ties to Ireland's cultural landscape, focusing instead on abstract themes reflective of his Theosophical beliefs. Russell's poetry is described as an expression of his philosophical views, emphasizing concepts like "Love" and "Beauty" in a way that sometimes detracts from concrete imagery and narrative.
Although his work resonated significantly in the 1890s, Russell's influence waned as the Irish literary movement coalesced. His unique approach to spirituality and the otherworldly, alongside his correspondence with contemporaries like W.B. Yeats, shaped his poetic vision, wherein he viewed dreams and visions as vital truths. Despite his skilled metrics, Russell is often regarded more as a Theosophist than a traditional poet, prioritizing abstract expressions over detailed storytelling. As contemporary tastes shift towards more concrete elements in poetry, Russell's work remains notable for its complexity and its role in the philosophical underpinnings of the Irish literary renaissance.
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The Poetry of Æ by Æ
First published:Homeward: Songs by the Way, 1894; The Earth Breath, 1897; The Divine Vision, 1903; Collected Poems, 1913; Selected Poems, 1935
Critical Evaluation:
The pseudonym under which George Russell published his poetry and by which he is known as the central figure in the Irish Renaissance was the accidental result of a printer’s error: “Æ” for “Æon,” the pseudonym Russell used in an early contribution to THE IRISH THEOSOPHIST. His preference for the accidental nom-de-plume indicates the wide gulf between the practical Russell, agricultural reformer, and the visionary Russell, the leading Theosophist of late nineteenth century Dublin. It also shows that his poetry is the instrument of his philosophy.
Almost all of the previously published 188 poems in the COLLECTED POEMS of 1913 had appeared in THE IRISH THEOSOPHIST and few of them or the later poems in the SELECTED POEMS of 1935 show any sign of Russell’s daily work in organization, politics, journalism, or committees. Apart from his play DEIRDRE, published in 1902, there is little sign of Ireland in his poems; had there been he would have found a more obvious niche in the literary history of the Celtic Twilight and the Irish Renaissance, but his contribution there was to assist writers in a practical way and to inspire them theosophically; his poems reached the great world outside Dublin through Theosophist channels, and thus in the 1890’s Russell was more widely known than other Irish writers. When their unity as a movement became recognized, his influence declined.
To summarize Russell’s poems as a hymnal of Theosophy is to abandon critical discussion of them, a difficulty that shadows the few commentaries on his work. The best is still Russell’s own letters which reveal both the personality that played its part in the independence of Eire and the Irish Renaissance, and the visionary, particularly when he corresponded with Yeats. The stimulation provided by the Hermetic Society (without which at least the Celtic Twilight would not have occurred) is important to us as it affected Yeats, but it provided the whole substance of Russell’s work. Both agreed in their dissatisfaction with provincial Ireland’s “religions” of trade and banking and their belief that salvation would come through their different interpretations of such terms as “Holy Ireland.” To Yeats it was holy by reason of its long history and its being his native land; to Russell, as he explained to a friend in 1901, it was just as “holy” as any other land that is a mother land, a source of life. The worst theosophical features of Russell’s verse are that it is all sweet, rarely concrete, and never comic, qualities that were a cause of further disagreement with Yeats.
Yeats in his attempt to recover the heroic Irish past made some degree of acquaintance with it a prerequisite to understanding his poems; but when Russell writes what he calls a “Mayo legend” in verse, “the story of one Caden More,” no one would ever know there was a story in the poem or that its setting need be County Mayo. It begins with “a lonely road through bogland to the lake at Carrowmore” beside which lies someone sleeping. In the draft sent to Yeats in February, 1908, the poet gently rebukes the sleeper for dreaming of his love instead of using the opportunity of the dream to enter the real land of dreams (as it was to Russell); in the published version the speaker is one of the “faery” tribe but the central line in the two poems is identical: “’Tis the beauty of all Beauty that is calling for your love.” The constant celebration of the other world in totally abstract terms debilitates Russell’s poems, but for him it was their only function. The abstract was the place where his visions and his inner life came alive; hence this world was in many ways totally unreal to him. His most serious objection to Yeats is that the latter in his poetry persists in using objects from this so-called real world as active symbols of the other world; Russell subordinates the symbol to the abstraction in his “Symbolism”:
We rise, but by the symbol charioted,
“The seal celestial” is the abstraction “Love” or “Beauty.”
Russell outlines his theosophy to Edward Dowden in a letter of August, 1894, answering the latter’s objections to his abstractions in a review of Russell’s first volume, HOMEWARD: SONGS BY THE WAY. Russell agrees that facts are necessary to the poem and to the mystic, but the less the better; by accumulation they simply oppress the Spirit which should try to free itself of them, as Russell quickly abandons a literal base in his poems. This release is available in language if we realize the spiritual potency of such abstract terms as “Love” and “Beauty.” Despite his competent metrics Russell is not a poet but a Theosophist in verse, prose, and painting. He believed in the increasing presence of the informing Spirit he sometimes called “earth spirit” or “life spirit” or “Oversoul”; the individual soul was in reality a part of that Oversoul, a concept familiar enough in Transcendentalism and expressed in Russell’s “Oversoul,” sometimes titled “Krishna,” with its epigraph from the BHAGAVAD-GITA: “I am Beauty itself among beautiful things.”
The intensity and eccentricity of the spiritual life of this man of affairs, obvious in every poem, can be defined from his letters. He refers in a letter of 1886 to a drawing which came, as did all his drawings and poems, in a vision: “What it means I have not the slightest idea, but of course that does not make any difference.” In writing to Oliver Elton in 1907 he argued from his own experience of dreams that they were meaningful because they bore no relation to what he knew in life; hence, a spirit must be speaking to him, and the work of the Theosophist was to “make this world into the likeness of the kingdom of light.” In most of his verse Russell looks to rejoin the kingdom in space and time, rather than to realize it here. His faith in the movement of light or Truth from the abstract to the actual made him differ from Yeats’s seeing the ideal in the real. It supported Russell in his daily organizational work and it made him the inspiration of the Celtic Twilight as a prophet of the dawning Renaissance, matters accounting for the significance of Theosophy and Russell in the origins of a national literary movement. He could actually see his faith demonstrated, as he reported to Yeats in 1896: “The gods have returned to Erin . . . . They have been seen by several in vision. . . . it has been confirmed from other sources and we are likely to publish it . . . To me enchantment and fairyland are real and no longer dreams.”
He was expert in encouraging visions; he advised Ruth Pitter to close her eyes, darken her mental screen, visualize a gold ring on the black background, slowly enlarge it, and watch the picture taking form in the center of the ring. All his visions were of sweetness and light, and he is properly outraged (in a 1902 letter to Yeats) when a woman in the audience of his play DEIRDRE complained to the newspapers that she could see three “black waves of darkness rolling down over the stage and audience and it made her ill.” His theosophy is summed up in the answer he gave to L. A. G. Strong when the latter asked for “a word of power”; he advised Strong to look for on earth the things he had found in heaven.
Between seeing the vision and finishing the poem there must have been crucial steps in craftsmanship and composition, but Russell’s assertion of continued guidance, or inspiration from the Spirit World represents him simply as the divine instrument and makes it even more difficult to discuss his lyrics in analytic terms.
The versification of Russell’s visions is obviously adequate to his purpose, so much so that further comment would be as fruitful as analyzing the versification of HYMNS ANCIENT AND MODERN; his verse visions conveyed his meaning and a succession of them induces an auto-intoxication that makes the senses swim and probably accounts for the extraordinary vogue of his three early volumes and his COLLECTED POEMS of 1913, a reception not accorded his SELECTED POEMS in 1935. Interest in “Æ” today lies not in the urbanity or melody of his utterance but in the complexity of his guiding concepts; these generally lie outside the poem, as Yeats’s VISION glosses the meaning of his poems, but in some cases can be grasped wholly within the poems, as in the paradoxical “Refuge.” The “refuge” of the “driven fawn” lies on the hunter’s breast; the “fawn” is twilight, the “hunter” night. Many of Russell’s poems celebrate day and twilight when the outlines of the actual become nebulous (indicating the unreal nature of the actual) and the time of day serves as a crossover point between the opposites (real, unreal) that Russell worked in. Contemporary taste in the anthologies favors (besides complex ideas and dawn pictures) those poems in which the objects remain fairly concrete as in “Frolic,” which pictures children and stars at play, rather than the little allegories such as “Three Counsellors.”
We do not care as much as we should for Russell’s undeniably beautiful verse because in the end he thought of it only as his contribution to the cause of Theosophy. He did not have the poet’s dedication to his Muse as Yeats had; as the “Epilogue” to the COLLECTED POEMS shows, all his poetry is ephemeral.