Knowledge and Embodiment in Yeats

then some rather bland news about a visit to the dentist.2 Three months later, in his last published letter, Yeats wrote to Lady Elizabeth Pelham, When I try to all into a phrase I say, 'Man can embody truth but he cannot know it.' I must embody it in the completion of my The abstract is not life and everywhere draws out its contradictions. You can refute Hegel but not the Saint or the Song of Sixpence ... .3 The most prominent word common to both these passages is all, and Yeats is hardly exaggerating when he uses that inclusive term. Both quotes are far-reaching in their implications. Taken together, they imply all of Yeat's major poetry. The first quote contains a slight variation on that statement from Heraclitus of which Yeats was so fond: Immortal mortal immortals, living the other's death, dying the other's life. In his variation, Yeats substitutes beings or persons for immortals and mortals, a substitution which paves the way for that phrase into which Yeats wanted to put all-Man can embody truth but he cannot know it. Taken out of context, that phrase, asserting as it does the impossibility of man's ever knowing the truth, would seem bleak indeed. But if we see Yeats's phrase in the light of Heraclitus, we can see the implied inverse of the

Hermeneutics and Narrative Identity · Irish and British Studies · Joseph Conrad and Literature · Psychology