There is no need to justify the *thinking* publication of a
special issue devoted to William Butler Yeats. His poetry
is so obviously "universal" that any magazine which takes
literature seriously, even a magazine like *The Southern
Review* which has a special interest in a special regional
program, may without apology give itself up to a consideration
of him. What may be/easily overlooked is the relation of
the career of Yeats to a definitely *Southern American regional*
program. Yeats's career is *instructive* in these terms, and
there is a very important sense in which Yeats himself may
*xha* be regarded as a modern regionalist.

Mr. Donald Davidson, in the XXXXXXXXXXXX Summer Issue
somewhat audaciously
of 1940appropriated Thomas Hardy for regionalism:
general
"The truth is that his (Hardy's)/affiliation with the frontier
humorists of the Old Southwest is a good deal more discernible
than his affiliation with Victorian romantic-realists or with
*French naturalists*. It is an organic affiliation, not a literary
attachment, because the Southwestern humorists drew their art,
such as it was, from the same kind of source that Hardy used,
and wrote (when they had to write) under the same embarrassment.
If Hardy's distant seventeenth-century progenitor had migrated
to America at the time of the Monmouth Rebellion--as some of
his progenitor's relatives and many of his neighbors did, in
all *haste*, migrate, then Thomas Hardy might easily have been
accused of pessimism, though he might, to be sure, have
caused eyebrows to life in Boston."

The case of William Butler Yeats would have to be stated
*hi*
in somewhat *xha* different terms, though one may note that *the*
constant problem, from *The Wanderings of Otsin* to the "Crazy

2

Jane" songs, was the problem of assimilating to his art the folk material of his native land. But with Yeats, far more than Hardy, the *regina* specifically regional problem was the definition of and defense of a- *une* was to be achieved only in terms of the other --a primitive, traditional, engulfing religious culture against the/commercialism of a politically and economically dominant neighbor. It would be easy, perhaps all too easy, to set up a set of parallels between Yeats's Ireland and the modern Souths; New York would stand for London, Gettysburg for the Battle of the Boyne, *themselves* and *the South* for the Southern share-cropper, *themselves* and *the North* for the impoverished Irish tenant, and the plantation for the Big House (which is the term that Louis is the term that MacNeice uses, and which, by the way, Uncle Remus used too.)

*The parallelism*

Such a parallelism seems at first glance plausible, but the editors have no wish to insist upon it. Certainly, they lack the special knowledge of Ireland necessary to maintain it. The parallels may be of the most superficial nature; in any case, their existence, if they exist, have to be weighed against the multitude of discrepancies between Ireland and the late Confederacy which certainly exist.

But the Southern writer, whether or not he answers to Mr. Schwartz's specifications for the ideal critic of Yeats, is in a peculiarly advantageous position to understand some of the statements which Yeats utters in his autobiographies and essays -- such a statement, for instance, as that Ireland produces literature but does not read literature. In 1936 Yeats remarks somewhere that for twenty-five years he Instructed his publisher not to send his books to Dublin for review. He is able to