Ulster University



Framing W.B. Yeats and Samuel Beckett: A Comparative Study of How and Why Two Writers Use Fine Art and its Theories in their Texts.PhD Thesis: John Brown Title: Framing W.B. Yeats and Samuel Beckett: A Comparative Study of How and Why TwoWriters Use Fine Art and it's Theories in their Texts.Full Names and Degrees Already Attained:B.A. (Joint Hons.) English Literature and History (Bristol University)M.Sc. Scottish Literature (Edinburgh University)P.G.C.E. (Morray House College, Edinburgh) Thesis Submitted for the Degree of Ph.D. Art and Design (Ulster University) Date of Submission: May 2018 I confirm that the word count for this thesis is less than 100, 000 words.ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS, ABSTRACT, ABBREVIATIONS (Included) NOTE ON ACCESS TO CONTENTS "I hereby declare that with effect from the date on which the thesis is deposited in Research StudentAdministration of Ulster University, I permit1. the Librarian of the University to allow the thesis to be copied in whole or in part withoutreference to me on the understanding that such authority applies to the provision of singlecopies made for study purposes or for inclusion within the stock of another library.Appendix 6 – Notes of Guidance for the Presentation of Theses for Research Degrees562. the thesis to be made available through the Ulster Institutional Repository and/or EThOS underthe terms of the Ulster eTheses Deposit Agreement which I have signed.*IT IS A CONDITION OF USE OF THIS THESIS THAT ANYONE WHO CONSULTS IT MUSTRECOGNISE THAT THE COPYRIGHT RESTS WITH THE AUTHOR AND THAT NO QUOTATIONFROM THE THESIS AND NO INFORMATION DERIVED FROM IT MAY BE PUBLISHED UNLESSTHE SOURCE IS PROPERLY ACKNOWLEDGED"Signed: John Brown AbstractThis thesis is the first detailed comparative study framing how and why fine art and its theories were deployed in the discursive and creative texts of two major Irish writers, W.B. Yeats (1865-1939) and Samuel Beckett (1906-1989). Previous studies have tended to focus on these writers' texts' literary qualities and junctures with history and philosophy: fewer have focused on fine art, and those which do have treated each writer separately. The study's comparative framework rectifies this critical deficit to contribute new knowledge by synthesizing past individual studies and comparing more recently available sources; it also provides a new slant on old knowledge in a new place. The primary focus is on the writers' relations with painting/its theories; this occupies more space, quantitatively and qualitatively, in this study (as in does in the writers' texts), although sculpture, a key consideration for Yeats, and embroidery are also considered. Exploring how and why fine art and its theories shape these two writers' respective ideas, themes, and concepts and use of language, the study's method is comparative: it compares the writers' documented encounters with fine art and citation of its histories/theories in discursive texts in tandem with evaluating how and why fine art theories and images inspire their creative texts; it's method reveals how theory and praxis pressure, complicate and modify each other. The study's conceptual framework suggests how and why enlisting fine art/its theories assisted the writers' oppositional thematics and aesthetics. Yeats's emphasis on transcendence/the eternal and beauty, and Beckett's sponsorship of finitude/doubt and irony, are revealed as reinforced by, and partly built out of, the two writers' divergent responses to fine art theoretical texts, and use of fine art images. The study demonstrates how these diverging positions are responses conditioned by, and filtered via wider, twentieth century intellectual and contextual shifts and embedded in the art history and theory the writers read and use in their texts. The study demonstrates how and why the writers' fascination with seeing fine art, compounded by reading its theories/histories, produced their own essays engaging with it; it evaluates how and why fine art/its theories assist with their themes/aesthetics, provide images for their creative praxis, and supply a focus for self-reflection on the capacities/incapacities of language and literary forms which they engage in, and which conscript (or fail to conscript) fine art images. The thesis is structured in four chapters. The first chapter reveals how and why the writer's readings, and subsequent re-writings, of fine art theory/history, permit them to selectively focus on, and inflect, the themes (identified above), detectable and available in the fine art theories of the "sister arts" and the "separate" arts which they read and cite. Excavating the basis of the writers' theories of fine art/the arts, in their ideas of perception/seeing, seeing and hearing, and their concepts or use images and mediums, the second chapter argues that these assist the two writers to develop oppositional ideas of the power of language/ekphrasis (Yeats) and of the limitations in language which conscript fine art objects and its visual images (Beckett). How and why this impacts on their texts is demonstrated. Comparing how and why the two writers use fine arts/its theories in Irish and European contexts the third chapter links fine art texts and their images with how/why Yeats constructs, represents and criticizes history/nation and how/why Beckett divorces the arts from debilitating nationalism(s) and representations of nation or self. The final chapter evaluates how and why fine art/its theories impact on praxis by examining the writers' framing of portraits, landscapes and interiors/still lifes; it evaluates how/why Yeats enlists the authority/precedents of fine art traditions, to frame and represent ideal subjects and themes in his texts and why/how Beckett orientates texts towards more modern, non-representational paintings and images to put pressure on these subjects and themes and to question the capacities of texts to do so. In evaluating the writers' responses to fine art/its theories, the study argues that fine art/its theories, by proxy, afford opportunities for the writers to reflect on two crucial issues or themes, central in/to their essays and creative praxis. Firstly, fine art/its theories permit Yeats's texts to point to their own capacity to summon an image as object of/for meaningful thought, which an essay may analyse, and a poem grasp, and surpass by using it as a symbol in a unifying text; the power of fine art in Beckett's texts permit them to register reactions to its sensuous, material, silent objects that dismantle thinking and symbols, and disable what language cannot grasp, so it exposes the limitations of what language can do when it distorts the silence and visuality in autonomous images which elude it. Secondly, the thesis demonstrates how and why fine art/its theories provide an opportunity to construct opposing dialectics or thematics in which the fine arts may stand as symbols of tradition, enduring human achievements that transcend time and space or exist as experiential images or objects which disappear in time as they evoke human finitude and failure. Acknowledgements I wish to acknowledge the support and guidance in completing this study of Dr. Alastair Herron and Howard Wright at the Ulster University, Belfast. Many ideas in this study originated in discussions with the Belfast curator Dr. Jamshid Mirfendersky over the last twenty years so the study is deeply in his debt, although I am solely responsible for the views expressed in it. Acknowledgment is due to the professional assistance of librarians at the Ulster University, Queens University McClay Library (The Main Library and Special Collection), Trinity College Library (Special Collections), the National Library of Ireland and the staff at the Model Gallery, Sligo, and the Yeats International Summer School, Sligo. I wish to thank Lena-Eva Karlsson, Nationalmuseum, Stockholm, who supplied information on paintings by Edward Munch in the collection in 1924 (just after W.B. Yeats visited the gallery) and John Minihan for information supplied on photographing Samuel Beckett. I am indebted to George Johnston and Dr. Jamshid Mirfenderesky who read the text and made valuable suggestions.Abbreviations, Short Forms and Citations Principal Published Sources: W.B. YeatsAVBA Vision. (London: Macmillan, 1962).CL1The Collected Letters of W.B. Yeats, Volume I 1865-1895. Ed. John Kelly & Eric Domville. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986).CL2The Collected Letters of W.B. Yeats, Volume II 1896-1900. Ed. Warwick Gould, John Kelly &Deirdre Toomey. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997).CL3The Collected Letters of W.B. Yeats, Volume III: 1901-1904. Ed. John Kelly & Ronald Schuchard. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994).CL4The Collected Letters of W.B. Yeats, Volume IV: 1905-1907. Ed. John Kelly & Ronald Schuchard. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).CL InteLexComplete Unpublished Letters of W.B. Yeats. Ed. John Kelly. (Oxford University Press, InteLex Electronic Version, 2002). Letters cited by Accession number. Co Pl Collected Plays (London: Macmillan and Company, 1960). CW1The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats, Volume I The Poems (1956). Rpt. & Ed. Richard J. Finneran. (New York: Scribner, 1997).CW2 The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats, Volume II The Plays. Ed. David R. Clark & Rosalind E. Clark. (New York: Scribner, 2001). CW3The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats Volume III Autobiographies. Ed. William O’Donnell and Douglas H. Archibald. (New York: Scribner, 1999).CW4The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats, Volume IV Early Essays. Ed. Richard J.Finneran & George Bornstein. (New York: Scribner, 2007). CW5The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats, Volume V Later Essays. Ed. William O’Donnell. (New York: Scribner, 1994). CW6The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats, Volume VI Prefaces and Introductions. Ed. William O’Donnell. (New York: Macmillan, 1989).CW7The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats, Volume VII. Collected Letters to the New Island. Ed. George Bornstein and Hugh Witemeyer. (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1989).CW9The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats, Volume IX Early Articles and Reviews. Ed. J.P. Frayne & Madeleine Marchaterre. (New York: Scribner, 2004). CW10The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats, Volume X Later Articles and Reviews. Ed. Colton Johnson (New York: Scribner, 2010).CW13The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats, Volume XIII A Vision (1925). Rpt. & Ed. Catherine E. Paul & Margaret Mills Harper. (New York: Scribner, 2008). CW14The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats, Volume. XIV A Vision: The Revised 1937 Edition. Ed. Catherine E. Paul. (New York: Scribner, 2014). E & IEssays and Introductions. (London & New York: Macmillan, 1961).EXPExplorations. (New York: Macmillan, 1962)G-YLThe Gonne-Yeats Letters 1893-1938: Always Your Friend. Ed. Anna MacBride White & A. Norman Jeffares. (London: Hutchinson, 1992). JSDJohn Sherman and Dhoya. (1969) Rpt. 1891 edition. Detroit: Wayne State University Press.LAS Theatre Business: The Correspondence of the First Abbey Theatre Directors: W. B. Yeats, Lady Gregory and J.M. Synge. Ed. Ann Saddlemyer. (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1982).LETLetters of W.B. Yeats. Ed. Alan Wade. (London: Hart Davis, 1954) MEMW.B. Yeats, Memoirs, Autobiography – First Draft, Journal. Ed. & transcribed by Denis Donoghue. (London: Macmillan, 1972). MYTHMythologies (London: Macmillan, 1959). References are to the 1962 edition.LDWLetters on Poetry from W.B. Yeats to Dorothy Wellesley. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1940).OBMVOxford Book of Modern Verse, 1892-1935. Ed. W.B. Yeats. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1936).SSThe Senate Speeches of W.B. Yeats. Ed. Donald Pearce. (London: Faber & Faber, 1961.) UP1Uncollected Prose by W.B. Yeats. First Reviews and Articles, 1886-1896. Volume I. Ed. by John. P. Frayne. (London: Macmillan, 1970).UP2Uncollected Prose by W.B. Yeats, Reviews, Articles and Other Miscellaneous Prose, 1897-1839. Volume II. Ed. John P. Frayne & Colton Johnson. (London: Macmillan, 1975). VPThe Variorum Edition of the Poems of W.B. Yeats. Ed. Peter Allt & Russell K. Alspach. (New York: Macmillan, 1957). References are to the sixth printing, 1973. VP1Vision Papers, Volume I. Ed. Steve L. Adams, Barbara J. Frieling & Sandra Sprayberry. (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1992).VP3Vision Papers, Volume III: Sleep & Dream Notebooks, Vision Notebooks 1 & 2, Card File. Ed. Robert Anthony Martinich & Mary J. Harper. (Iowa City: IA, 1992). VSRThe Secret Rose. Stories by William B. Yeats: A Variorum Edition. Ed. Warwick Gould, Phillip L. Marcus & Michael J. Sidnell. (London: Macmillan, 1992).YAYeats Annual. London: Macmillan. (1982-) Cited by year and number. WBYTSMW.B. Yeats and T. Sturge-Moore: Correspondence: 1901-37. Ed. Ursula Bridge. (London: Routledge and Keegan Paul, 1963).Principal Published Sources: Samuel Beckett CISISCompany/Ill Seen Ill Said/Worstward Ho/Stirrings Still. (London: Faber & Faber, 2009). CDW The Complete Dramatic Works. (London: Faber & Faber, 1986).CP The Collected Poems. Ed. Seán Lawlor & John Pilling. (London: Faber & Faber, 2012).CL. SP.Collected Shorter Plays. (London: Faber & Faber, 2006). CSP The Complete Shorter Prose, 1929-1989. Ed. S.E. Gontarksi. (New York: Grove Press, 1995).DISJDisjecta. Ed. Ruby Cohn. (London: John Calder Publishers, 1983).DFMWDream of Fair to Middling Women. [Written 1928-30.] (Dublin: Black Cat Press, 1992).ECEFThe Expelled/ The Calmative/The End/First Love. (London: Faber & Faber, 2009)ELEleuthéria. Trans. from unpublished French text written in 1947 by Michael Brodsky. (New York: Foxrock Inc., 1995).HISHow It Is. Trans. of French edition Comment C'est [1964] into English (London: Faber &Faber, 2009). JOBSJournal of Beckett Studies. (University of Reading, 1976-). Cited by year and number. MPTK More Pricks than Kicks. Rpt. of 1934 edition. (London: Faber & Faber, 2010). MUMurphy. Rpt. of 1938 edition. (London: John Calder Publishers, 1993).PTDProust and Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit. (London: John Calder 1965). PSFCSamuel Beckett: Poems, Short Fiction, Criticism. (New York: Grove Press, 2006). SBL1The Letters of Samuel Beckett, Volume I 1929-1940. Ed. Martha Dow Fehsenfeld, Lois More Overbeck & Dan Gunn. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).SBL2The Letters of Samuel Beckett, Volume II 1941-1956. Ed. George Craig, Martha Dow Fehsenfeld, Dan Gunn & Lois More Overbeck. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).SBL3The Letters of Samuel Beckett, Volume III 1957-1965. Ed. George Craig, Martha Dow Fehsenfeld, Dan Gunn & Lois More Overbeck. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014).SBL4The Letters of Samuel Beckett, Volume IV 1966 - 1989. Ed. George Craig, Martha Dow Fehsenfeld, Dan Gunn & Lois More Overbeck. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016).TRILThe Beckett Trilogy: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable. (London: Picador, 1979). WattWatt. (London: Faber & Faber, 2009). Rpt of English edition, 1953. Persons ReferencedAG=Augusta GregoryJJ= James JoyceAE= George RussellJY=Jack B. YeatsAY=Anne YeatsJQ=John QuinnBB=Barbara BrayKT= Katherine TynanCR=Charles RickettsMG=Maude GonneCS=Cissie SinclairMMH=Mary Manning HoweDW= Dorothy WellesleyOS=Olivia ShakespearECY=Elizabeth Corbet YeatsOW=Oscar WildeESH=Edith Shackleton HealdRG =Robert GregoryFF= Florence FarrSB= Samuel BeckettGD=Georges DuthuitSMY= Susan Mary (Lily) YeatsGR= George RussellTM=Thomas McGreevyGY = Mrs George Yeats (George Hyde-Lees)TSM= Thomas Sturge MooreJBY=John Butler YeatsWBY= W.B. YeatsInstitutions, Museums, Galleries & Manuscript Sources ReferencedBLBritish LibraryDMASDublin Metropolitan Art School.GDGerman Diaries (Samuel Beckett, written 1936-7).HLMGHugh Lane Municipal Gallery, Dublin.HRHRC Harry Ransom Humanities Centre, University of Texas at Austin.NGNational Gallery (London).NGI National Gallery (Ireland).NLINational Library of Ireland.RMLRosenbach Museum and Archive, Philadelphia.TCDTrinity College Dublin.UoRUniversity of Reading.Note on CitationsThe dates for individual poems by W.B.Yeats are cited from The Variorum Edition of the Poems of W.B. Yeats edited byPeter Allt and Russell K. Alspach (1957), the sixth printing, 1973. The dates for Samuel Beckett's texts, unless otherwisestated, refer to their publication in English translation. Spelling and grammar in both writers' letters has not been amendedor corrected. Where relevance dictates and space permits the letter's date and recipient is noted in the in-text citations. CONTENTSIntroduction: Framing the Questions and Methods 111. Key Questions and Methods 132. Previous Studies as Signposts for this Study 143. Conceptual Framework: Transcendence and Doubt 21Chapter 1 The Two Writers' Use of Theories of Relations Between the Arts and Responses to Changing Fine Art Theories, Forms and Contexts261. The Writers' Art Theories Identified, Described and Set in Changing Contexts262. The Writers and "Sister Arts" Theories: from Horace to Leonardo da Vinci323. The Writers and Gotthold Ephraim Lessing's Art Theories in Laoco?n384. The Writers and Modern Art Theories, Contexts and Art Works 42(I)The "Sister Arts" or the "Separate Arts"? 42(ii) The Arts: Symbols of Eternal Truths or Images of Finitude and Doubt? 50(iii) The Arts: Representations of the Real/Ideal or Mis-Representations as Illusion/Failure? 58(iv) The Arts: Traditional Theories and Paintings or Modern Theories and Paintings? 60(v) The Arts: Unity or Disunity? 705. The Writers and the Idea of the Total Artwork75 Chapter 2 The Two Writers' Ideas of Perception, Seeing and Hearing, Images and Mediums 871.Perception/Seeing882. Seeing and Hearing993. Images 1024. Mediums 108Chapter 3 The Writers' Use of Painting in Irish and European Contexts 1231. Religion, Painting, Text. 1272. Sex, Painting, Text. 1363. Politics, Painting, Text. 1434. Money, Painting Text. 156 Chapter 4 The Writers' Framing of Portraits, Place, and Interiors/Still Life 1651. Framing Portraits 1662. Framing Landscapes 1853. Framing the City 198 4. Framing Interiors/Still Lifes 203Conclusion 210Appendices 218Bibliography 222 ILLUSTRATIONSTwo Mediums: Lautgedicht & Lavery 109J.T. Nettleship Refuge (Sketch) 110Master of Tired Eyes Portrait of an Old Lady 112Artists' Designs Submitted for Proposed Irish Coinage 166 Introduction: Framing the Questions and Methods Given Kingsley Amis’s mid-twentieth century stricture that ‘nobody wants any more poems about paintings...or art galleries’ (Amis cited in ed. Enright, 1995, 17), echoed semi-ironically in Edna Longley’s essay ‘No More Poems About Paintings?’ (Longley, 1994, 227-51), it is perhaps unsurprising that relations between Irish literary texts and fine art have not be given the same degree of inter-disciplinary attention in Irish literary studies as have junctures with literary traditions, history or philosophy. Indeed, it may even seem counter-intuitive to undertake a study of relationships between the texts of W.B. Yeats (1865-1939) and Samuel Beckett (1906-1989) and fine art. These Nobel Prize winning, Irish writers, after all, currently engage the popular mind via auditory readings of literary texts. Yeats's populist poem, 'The Lake Isle of Innisfree', attracts hundreds of thousands of internet "hits"; 'All the dead voices' in Beckett's drama, Waiting for Godot, are recycled continuously in theatre or television productions of a play that still hits a contemporary nerve. No doubt, W.B. Yeats and Samuel Beckett are known primarily for poetry and drama as literary writers, not as prose theorists of fine art or paintings deployed in texts. No doubt, as writers from an Irish, Protestant background, which insisted on the Biblical 'word' as primary site of original truth - not the fabricated image as potentially distracting false idol at a remove from the first act of creation by the logos - they might have been pleased at how their auditory word and literary, metaphorical images, not literally, perceptually present as in painting, kept going 'on'. Insofar as W.B. Yeats's happy shepherd claims 'words alone are certain good' (VP, 66), inasmuch as Samuel Beckett's narrator in The Unnamable (1958) claims 'I am words among words, or silence in the midst of silence' (Beckett, 1979, 358), words are a shared preoccupation, a dominant concern, a sine qua non. In short, these writers' words may be an advance warning to those for whom painting and fine art, with their freight of the immediately sensuous, and not words from linguistic disciplines, literary traditions or cognitive fields, are thresholds into the oeuvres. If words and literature are obviously primary for two writers engaged in four literary genres (poetry, drama, fiction and critical essays), then W.B. Yeats's inter-textual assertion to Sean O'Faolain that 'the origins of a poet are... in his own mind & in the past of literature' (CL InteLex #5272) and Beckett's ventriloquized statement in The Unnamable that ‘I’m in words, made of words, others’ words’ (TRIL, 355), or admission in 'From an Abandoned Work' (1957) that 'I love the word, words have been my only loves, not many' (CSP, 162), stake claims that not only are literary genealogies primary, but words secondary allegiance may lie with their own music, or pure music, not painting. After all, W.B. Yeats claimed of ballads that he was writing 'poem after poem, all intended for music' so that they would 'go into the common memory' (LDW, 1940, 148). Beckett's express wish was to listen for dissonance in which words mock words, like 'a whisper of that final music or that silence that underlies all' (DISJ, 172). Hardly surprisingly, a significant strand in the history of studies of both writers suggests literary sound is primary. W.B.Yeats's quest for poetry where 'words obey my call' (VP, 255-6) and Beckett's claim for Eleuthéria noting 'the text as is, the words as is, that's all I know. The rest is Ibsen' (Beckett cited in Oppenheim, 2000, 19 & 193), are readily invoked as critical currency. Thereby specular visions, pre-lingual perceptions, or use of paintings as prototypes to frame worlds become a secondary prospectus, despite Yeats's claims in ‘The Philosophy of Shelley’s Poetry’ (1900) that ‘Wisdom first speaks in images’ (E & I, 95) and Beckett's devaluation of words' sufficiency in claims where 'Every word is a lie' or proposal to write 'a literature of the unword' which invokes seeing, silence and the facticity of painting. From contemporary reviews noting W.B.Yeats's ‘Celtic notes’ and 'musical skill’ by Lionel Johnson (1892) to Edna Longley’s contention (Longley, 2013, 66) that the poetry ‘makes the visual metrical: the carved stone becomes verbal music’, the poet's claim that ‘As I altered my syntax I altered my intellect’ is affirmed (E & I, 530). Thereby relations between text and picture become asymmetric or non-reversible: ‘verbal music’ is not reconverted to marmoreal ‘carved stone’, just as in Mary Bryden's collection of studies of Beckett textual relations are with music, not pictures (Bryden, 1998). Nonetheless, caveats aside, evidence points to two writers immersed in fine art. T.R. Henn (1950, 238) notes Yeats's published writing explicitly names some fifty fine artists, mainly pre-nineteenth century artists. James Knowlson notes Beckett cites seventeen Old Master painters, eighteen if one counts an implicit reference, in three early to mid-life fictions, MPTK, Murphy and Watt (Knowlson & Haynes, 2003, 61-2). Strikingly, W. J. T. Mitchell's iconological study which asks ‘What Do Pictures Want?’, to conclude that images exist in paintings/texts as markers of ‘desire’ (2006), unwittingly recycles Yeats's contention that ‘verbal images’ and sculpture ‘exist to keep our passions alive’ (CW3, 94). Mitchell's idea is that pictures frustrate Freudian ‘desire’ by seduction in longings for the unattainable (he cites Blake’s claim that ‘If any could desire what he is capable of possessing, despair must be his eternal lot’) and by joyfully constituting and controlling desire, from Chaucer’s ‘Wife of Bath’ who pictures this 'maistrye' (mastery) to Gilles Deleuze’s ‘desiring machine’ founded in ascesis (Mitchell, 2006, 28-56 & 63-6). This frustration/gratification, a see-saw in a ‘dialects of desire’, Mitchell avers, is exemplary in Blake’s engravings of Dante’s Divine Comedy, with its entrapping vortex of a Circle of the Lustful/aka The Whirlwind of the Lovers (1827), and The Ancient of Days (1794) whose God, contained in a sphere, orders and controls desire using a compass inscribing a triangular or conical shape on creation. This very dialectic in icons – vortex within which all art and history is patterned and Platonic sphere or 'great wheel' from which these issue - are the key symbols in Yeats's A Vision (CW13, 112-3); this dialectic informs the nest of ‘pictures’ in Yeats's London apartment in Woburn Buildings, his longest occupied abode for twenty two years (1896-1918). The poet John Masefield recorded a fine art inventory of Yeats's ‘sitting room’ at the opening of the twentieth century, later, in 1940:Was there not a large painting of him, done by his father, some forty years before?Later, on that wall, there was the picture of Memory Harbour, painted by his brother. Were there not also bookcases on this wall? [*]... On [another wall]... was there not a big black chalk or pencil drawing of him by his father, the original of the portrait reproduced as a frontispiece to the Poems (of 1899)?[*]... Over the mantelpiece hung a painting by his father illustrating a ballad by Blake, ‘I thought Love lived in the hot sunshine’. There were also these things: Blake’s first Dante engraving, The Whirlwind of Lovers; a little engraving of Blake’s head; a print of Blake’s Ancient of Days; and a little engraving from the Job. There were also two small pastels done by Yeats, of the Lake and hills near Coole; and a beautiful pencil drawing by Mr Cecil French, of a woman holding a rose between her lips. Behind... [a screen of bookshelves] hung Beardsley’s poster for the Florence Farr production of The Land of Heart’s Desire.... [*]To the right of the fireplace... were a large photograph of a woman, and Blake’s seventh Dante engraving, of Dante striking Bocca Degli Abbati’s Head. [*] [*]After 1904-5, he added to the room a big, dark blue lectern, on which his Kelmscott Chaucer stood, between enormous candles in sconces. (Masefield cited in Jeffares, 1990, 144-55) Paragraph breaks [*] This room recreates a gallery-cum-church with its candle-lit pictures, in an apartment where regular literary gatherings or 'at homes' took place, akin to the studio 'at homes' instituted by the poet's own father. Given Yeats's father John Butler Yeats's painting studio devised literary paintings, illustrating Browning or Bible texts from Job, in a place for reading literature to his poet-son, this room with plinth/pulpit designed by the artist Robert Gregory for The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer (1896) - illustrated by Sir Edward Burne-Jones and his ‘most beautiful of all printed books’ in WBY's opinion (CL1, 348 & 348 n.1) - is a reminder of painting's religious and illustrative functions. Illustrated text is surrounded with religious engravings by William Blake; portraits instantiate Yeats's own image. Given Beckett befriended post-1930's Paris based painters, collecting more abstract paintings, 1930-50, and that his DFMW opens with a prefatory quotation from Chaucer to invoke many styles of vision for the 'joye in heven, and peyne in hell' only to add an earthly and resistant - 'But'? - painting appears to fulfil a different role. Yeats's lectern with its image-text of Chaucerian pilgrimage is overlooked by Blake's illustration of a white-bearded God. Beckett's Godot (1954) may be this clichéd visual figure according to his unsure boy-messenger but as Lucky's 'personal God quaquaquaqua with white beard quaquaquaqua outside time'(CDW, 85-6 & 42), he never appears in text or theatre space to verify his Blakean image or Beckettian existence. 1.Key Questions and Methods The central questions in this study are how and why do fine art and its theories impact on these two writers' discursive and creative, published and unpublished, texts. How do the writers' responses to fine art inform how they shape key themes and impact on the literary forms they use? Why do Yeats and Beckett deploy fine art/its theories in their texts? The way in which the two writers refract classical, Renaissance, Enlightenment and modern theories of relations between fine art and texts is the focus of chapter one. Comparing and analysing how the writers' use and cite art theories, it draws on previous research, by Edward O'Shea (1985) and Dirk van Hulle and Mark Nixon (2013) documenting the writers' respective library books (and annotations of these), it demonstrates how and why past art fine art theories, known and read, assist those (re)formulated in the two writers' texts. The way traditional art theories, modified in texts and contexts of more immediate predecessors (Yeats's Walter Pater) and modern art thinkers (Beckett's friend, the art historian, Georges Duthuit), and changing fine art forms which they encountered, help shape and inform these writers' art criticism and creative canon is examined. The question of why the writers use fine art/ its theories is explored to suggest this not only assists central themes (exploring space/time) but is a product of their fascination with how images and another medium impacts on the nature and qualities of language, especially the language of their texts. Do the two writers' theories of art amount to a conception of, or rejection of, the nineteenth century idea of a total artwork encompassing relations between texts, painting and music? Examining this casts light on how they viewed binary relations between painting/texts and theorized or practised drama as a mixed media form. The study asks whether the writers' conceive of the three arts as related-in-difference (as linked/collaborative/equal) or as different-in-relation (as separate arts with different priorities or different weightings in a hierarchical order) and whether this remains consistent in their theories or continues to hold in their praxis. The second chapter examines the writers' art theories, by excavating their basis in ideas of perception/seeing, often essentialised as the sine qua non for making or appreciating painting, and of seeing and hearing, before linking this with their concepts or use of images and mediums (bearing in mind that conception and use may differ). Analyzing the writers' idea of the senses as mechanisms, which impact on the different ways writers see and hear different arts, it argues that this shapes their views of images and mediums, as the study attempts to deepen and amplify understanding of why the two writers theorise the arts, and of how they use shared sources to formulate ideas. How do the writers' concepts of images, crossing art forms as shared property, relate to their concepts of different mediums in which images are instantiated in each art form? The study asks if the writers' respective use of fine art in literary texts enhances their vision's width, in dove-tailing images from one medium into another, or implies the use of a crutch signalling blocked inspiration or the parasitic use of art references and diversionary analogies in lieu of more direct engagements with life? Chapter three revisits how the two writers saw images and mediums, by analyzing how and why they apply and use fine art in their Irish and European contexts. The study posits that fine art images assist texts to press back against, or escape, these contexts as the writers' rubberstamp, critique or circumvent aspects of nationalism(s) or Irish culture in terms of religion, sexuality, politics and economics/money. This analysis draws on scholarly biographies of Yeats and Beckett, Roy Foster's two volume, W.B. Yeats: A Life (1997, 2003), and James Knowlson's Damned to Fame (1996), general histories, Irish/European art theory/history and literature to historically situate and compare the writers' texts. The study's final chapter examines and compares the writer's use of fine art in texts to visually frame people (portrait), place (landscape), interiors and objects (still life) in comparative readings of their texts. This chapter explores how and why they use subjects, lexicons and framing devices from fine art/painting before concluding and summarizing its findings. The title, 'Framing Yeats and Beckett', signals that this study is directed to analyse and compare how two writers saw fine art/its theories and to explore how and why they frame this in texts as key line of inquiry and theme. The primary focus is on relationships with painting: this occupies more space, quantitatively and qualitatively, in the writers' discursive texts and this study, although other categories of fine art, sculpture (cited by Yeats) or embroidery (cited by both writers), are considered. The study's method is comparative: it compares the writer's documented encounters with fine art and citation of its histories/theories in their essays, creative texts, journals and notebooks (a substantial body of evidence); it links this with an exploration of how and why fine art images also inspires their creative texts. The study is also inter-disciplinary: it uses past literary scholarship and fine art histories/theories (as well as general histories and biography/autobiography), to examine, interpret and situate its questions and to posit answers. The analysis of how/why fine art/paintings relate to texts may homogenise the arts (to over shoot differences in their specific mediums), whilst singular literary approaches to an autotelic text may segregate this text into a silo (which restricts or disables readings of what a writer saw and read in fine art/ its theories to use in texts and contexts); so this study uses both literary scholarship and fine art theories/histories to compare how the writers negotiate with these tensions in their own texts where fine art theories/images co-exist within, or alongside, those drawn from literature or direct observation. These differing, even competing, methods are deployed because the two writers anticipate this tension in the dialectics of their essays on the arts' differences-in-relationship (as when Beckett's essays write of painting as a physical object in a different medium which resists the text) or relationships in-differences (as when Yeats's prose stresses image or symbol as origin of shared vision/wisdom in both arts). In framing and comparing how and why the writers' use fine art and its theories in discursive texts (essays, journals, letters, speeches) and how and why they deploy it in their evolving creative praxis (in poems, plays, short prose), the study evaluates how theory is modified and complicated by praxis (and vice-versa). If both writers moved from visual art practise into conscripting fine art for theoretical essays or as inspiration in creative texts - Yeats stopped producing paintings as physical objects after art school (1886) and Beckett, after failing to secure a curators' post in London's National Gallery (1933), left drawings in manuscripts to write and publish texts - then the relationship or slippage between theory and praxis requires an analysis of how these confirm, or depart from, one another. The final chapter suggest how praxis (in the framing portraits, landscapes, cities and objects) is conditioned by theory. The methodology, linking theory and praxis, is deployed because boundaries between the writers' discursive and creative texts are often porous. Theoretic texts suggest the writers were concerned as much with inventing fine art history, barely conformable to mainstream art history/theory but attuned to their own desire to skim its inspiration, its symbols or images, for their own use, for themes in literary texts or for images of how these texts envisage and reflect on their own form. Were one to take Yeats at face value as art historian/theorist, for instance (as A Vision, with its grand sweep of art history appears to demand at times), Greek art, Titian, Blake, Rossetti and Pre-Raphaelitism would dominate the entire history of western fine art/painting; twentieth century visual art would be sidelined. Essays privileging these painters align with a primary desire to skim and rework such inspirational sources and images of beauty and durability into poems or as symbols for poems. Were Beckett's letters and art essays taken as art history, Dutch Old Masters would feature prominently, and Jack Yeats and Bram van Velde would dominate twentieth century painting - not Matisse or Picasso. Essays privileging modern and more abstract painters align with a desire to conscript them as producers of images of human finitude in novels and plays and to reflect on the text's struggle to represent reality. When Georges Duthuit's notes, that 'a painting has value', in a letter to Beckett, 'only by virtue of the state of mind it induces in you, the orientation it gives your thinking, the impulse it drives into your actions' (GD, probably 1948, cited in Oppenheim, 2000, 84), he presupposes his correspondent, will not only conscript paintings to his idea of the arts as impossible, even irrational, failures, in discursive texts, but that he will use paintings as 'impulse' for creative action. The methodology, with its bi-focal emphasis on the writers' theories and praxis, is designed to examine and evaluate how the writers may have both taken fine art/its theories seriously toassist with exploring and constructing major key themes in their texts, to reflect on the nature of their own linguistic forms, and pragmatically, or in passing, to verify a presupposition, or 'find stuff stolen for the sake of a line in a poem' as Ciaran Carson wryly puts it. 2. Previous Studies as Signposts for this Study The vast, growing and global industry of Yeats and Beckett studies and the two writers' canonical status, reinforced by the inception of academic journals, the Yeats Annual (1982) and Journal of Samuel Beckett Studies (1971), prohibit an outline of their entire critical heritage here. General contours in previous studies converge in analysis of literary traditions or sources; they diverge in a secondary focus, more readily examining junctures with (Irish) history/politics in Yeats studies, and contexts in European philosophy and modernist art theory/history in Beckett studies. The placement of Yeats in (Irish) historical or political contexts, and situating of Beckett within European philosophical and visual art currents, create signposts, and suggest cleavages between disciplines have lead to the omission of a detailed comparative study framing how and why Yeats and Beckett enlist fine art/its theories, which this study seeks to address. Given both writers' canonical status surprisingly few studies frame the two writers' texts bi-focally. John Unterecker's Yeats, Joyce, and Beckett (1976), with its triadic focus, concentrates on literary comparisons. Fine art/painting features in G.S. Armstrong's Samuel Beckett, W.B. Yeats & Jack Yeats: Images and Words (1990) and Calvin Bedient (2009) has explored the links between the Yeats' brothers as poet and painter in relation to modernism. These texts concentrate on a single painter. The history of criticism of WBY's oeuvre, for instance, deeply embedded in the context of Anglo-American academies in the twentieth century, and captured in David Pierce's monumental, four volume W.B. Yeats: Critical Assessments (2000), suggests relations with literary, historical and philosophical traditions are priorities (in this order): a few exceptional essays aside, fine art as inspiration is sidelined. Yeats's theory and praxis, in which fine art and poetry's origin and effect are in 'masterful images', but in which poetry speaks for, and masters, these in 'pictured song', in achieved audio-visual form and symbol, anticipates this future reception in Irish, British and American literary/critical milieus where New Criticism became a dominant strain, by the 1950's, in literary studies departments in many universities. Yeats's conscription of painting, sculpture and fine art as embodiment of the text/poem as enduring form, was followed in/by influential texts like W.K. Wimsatt's The Verbal Icon (1954, 231), where poetry is a concrete, aesthetic form, a time defying symbol which goes on delivering aesthetic meaning as 'A verbal composition... supercharged with significance, takes on something like the character of a stone statue or porcelain vase. Through its meaning or meanings the poem is. It has an iconic solidity....The poem has, not an abstractly meant or intended meaning, but a fullness of actually presented meaning'. (Winsatt cited in McConnell, 'Towards A Theology of Poetry: Seamus Heaney's Icons and Sacraments', The Irish Review, 2011: 43; 70-85). Denis Donoghue's map for Irish literary studies in 'Towards A Critical Method: Language As Order' (Studies, 1955: 44; 181-82) implicitly suggests how Yeats achieved canonical status; it recycles Yeats' model for the poem as achieved, finished form as identical with that deployed in literary studies, whereby the poem/sculpture 'create[s] forms, entities, things of order with which to oppose the continual flux, change, transience of life'; form is an externalized desire 'to bring order out of chaos...to halt transience'. The corollary, by implication, is that Beckett's aesthetics/reception as a wreckage of such forms by 'flux' or 'disorder' may be blocked. When a leading Irish literary scholar, Edna Longley (2013), suggests retrospective, modernist critical currents influenced by visuality (existent in literary scholarship from the 1960's) have been backdated to sideline Yeats, she defends his achievement, against this, as one where his texts/poems are valued as the achievement of complete, independent, highly wrought, audio-visual forms within literary traditions. Conversely, Beckett's images of fragmentation and disruption of literary forms in a collage of images running against the literary grain, virtually permanent French/Paris location (1937-89), and engagement with modern painting, made his relations with literary studies in this tradition problematic; it also left his relations with modern and modernist paintings less possible to ignore or marginalise. The assumption that Beckett's literary texts were locatable in visual contexts - from Martin Esslin's influential placement of the writer within a highly visual, European, absurdist or surrealist theatrical contexts, in The Theatre of the Absurd (1962), and his English publisher John Calder's association of Beckett's texts with modern painting and European expressionist painting/theatre, were followed by studies such as Hannah Case Copeland's Art and Artist in the work of Samuel Beckett (1975). These trajectories in Beckett scholarship more readily encompass an interest in the writer's pursuit of fine art. Influential studies, linking Beckett with fine art, followed by James Knowlson (1996), Raymond Federman (2000), Lois Oppenheim (2000) and David Lloyd (2016); Daniel Albright (2003) would note that Beckett often goes 'against the grain of the [literary]medium, to force one medium to assume properties more readily available to some other medium' (Albright, 2003, 9-10). These trends in past scholarship suggest an asymmetry exists in the way the two writers place fine art within literary contexts (Yeats) and within, but contra, literary artefacts (Beckett), which receptions and scholarship identifies and heightens. Past studies have noted Yeats’s oeuvre as inspired by Old Master, Pre-Raphaelite, Irish painting or Greek and classical sculpture; but these studies, by T.R. Henn (1950), Georgio Melchiori (1960), Elizabeth Bergmann Loizeaux (1986) and Karen Brown (2011), originate from within a literary field of interest to look for sources of inspiration for literature within the writer's sourcing or referencing of fine art. More recent studies of Beckett - by Fionnuala Croke (2006), for instance, reverse this order, to suggest the writer is of interest for scholars primarily extending a field of interest in visual art into literature: Croke's book explores Beckett's relationships with galleries and painting, to elucidate the young Beckett's intimate knowledge of Ireland's National Gallery collection from the 1920's, just as a more senior Yeats became a Board Member there (1924-39). G.S. Armstrong (1990) reinforced Beckett's admiration for paintings by Jack Yeats which his letters/articles corroborate. Wider in focus, R. Federman's lecture 'The Imaginary Museum of Samuel Beckett' (2000) contends Beckett alters literary styles and theoretic positions across decades, in parallel with developments in twentieth century European modernist painting/visual art to open up useful, wider, more theoretically speculative territory; Enoch Brater also links Beckett with this matrix in 'From Dada to Didi (2008). If Hannah Case Copeland's Art and the Artist in the works of Samuel Beckett (1975) proved prescient in linking Beckett's theories/use of paintings with highly self-conscious, art conscious texts, in which both arts do not deliver meanings, Beckett's own revelation to Ruby Cohn that he adapted Caspar David Friedrich's painting of Two Men Looking at the Moon to stage the image in Waiting for Godot, encouraged studies directed towards painting/fine art. Following James Knowlson's Damned to Fame (1996), crucial in establishing the writer's immersion in painterly, as well as literary or philosophical images, closer readings of his thinking on the arts were undertaken. Lois Oppenheim's essay collection, Samuel Beckett and the Arts: Music, Visual Arts & Non-Print Media (1999), and study, The Painted Word: Samuel Beckett’s Dialogue with Art (2000), and David Lloyd's Beckett's Thing: Painting and Theatre (2016) confirm paintings as central in Beckett's texts. Oppenheim's The Painted Word, which engages with, and contextualises within art theory, the questions of how and why Beckett engaged with paintings in his essays, to link this with his self-questioning and doubts about the adequacy of both arts to represent experience, is an insightful reading that assists and aligns with this study. These cleavages and shifts are significant in terms of the two writers' receptions and legacies. When the Oxford Anthology of Twentieth-Century British and Irish Poetry (2001) prints twenty three of Yeats's poems in support of his 'towering presence' in the literary canon, it prints three poems by Beckett to suggest his place there as a poet is debatable (ed. Tuma, 2001, xxii-xxiii). When Harrison and Woods's monumental Art in Theory (1992) collects representative essays and texts on visual art and painting in the twentieth century, it includes Beckett's Three Dialogues: Yeats has no place. In Ireland, the RHA followed numerous modern visual artists responses to Beckett with a centennial, I Not I (2006), showing his short film Breathe (directed by Damien Hirst) visualizing 'rubbish', alongside paintings by Philip Guston and Bruce Nauman's video Clown Torture (1987); a rare visual art exhibition of responses to Yeats, marking his centennial, in London's Belgravia Gallery, A Trembling Veil: The Year of Yeats (2015), exhibited three Sligo-based artist's works and Patrick Hall's watercolour of Two Angels (2014), to note Hall's claim that his art was still keeping open 'the doors to transcendence....the cloud of unknowing'. These cleavages in past literacy studies and visual art receptions provide contexts and platforms from which this study launches comparisons of responses by the two writers to paintings/fine art. These cleavages have also meant that no detailed study framing and critically comparing both writers' theorizing of the arts, respective uses of fine art, deployment of paintings as critique of the arts or Irish/European society, or mapping their comparative, respective attitudes to directions fine art and painting took exists. This comparative study situates itself in this inter-disciplinary 'gap'; it attempts to rectify this critical deficit by comparing how and why Yeats and Beckett engage with fine art/its theories and by drawing on scholarship from literary studies and from the field of fine art/its theories. The study's focus, sustained comparative framework and use of these sources rectifies this critical deficit to contribute new knowledge by synthesizing past individual studies and by comparing recently available sources; it provides a new slant on old knowledge in a new place. The study, thereby, envisages not only a general reader interested in these two writers' poetry, plays, and prose and their texts' relationships with past literary traditions but one open to the contention that what these writer saw (in fine art/paintings) may be important, as well as what they read, and that what they read (in fine art theory/history) may inflect what they said. 3. Conceptual Framework: Transcendence and Doubt This study also frames the two writers' responses to fine art within a conceptual framework in which transcendence was superseded by doubt. This framework is deployed because it is invoked by the two writers in responses to the visual arts. Yeats's 'Symbolism in Painting' (1898) claims 'Blake’s pictures and poems, Calvert’s pictures, Rossetti’s pictures, Villiers De l’Isle Adam’s plays... but differ from the religious art of Giotto and his disciples in having accepted all symbolisms... all the Divine Intellect...for the substance of their art'; he posits that 'All Art that is not mere storytelling, or mere portraiture, is symbolic and has the purpose of those symbolic talisman which mediaeval magicians made with complex colours and forms...for it entangles...part of the divine essence...' (E & I, 148-50). Painting is a potential source or parallel for the text in its search of transcendence, eternal 'truth' and 'beauty'. Conversely, Beckett decouples André Masson's painting from 'Kant's cosmological proof of the existence of God'; he notes Van Velde paintings are by one 'who is helpless' in the face of reality who cannot be returned 'to the bosom of St Luke' (DISJ, 141-3). The significance of painting and fine art theory is now oblique, less readily put to work in the text as bolstering any transcendental or religiously orientated belief system. Yeats's themes of 'sanctity and loveliness' (VP, 575-6), his idea that a poet-painter such as Blake 'beat upon the wall / Till truth obeyed his call, or that a painter-poet like Rossetti produces visionary beauty, and his noting of Turner's Golden Bough (CW3, 91) as one of the first paintings to which he responds, instantiate connections with the mythic or eternal as subject. This runs counter to Beckett's claim that there is 'no trace of system anywhere' in the universe (Beckett cited in Hayes and Knowlson, 2003, 18) or that among 'immutable relations between harmoniously perishing terms' one can no longer connect with a phrase like 'the immortality of the soul' (TRIL, 210); it places his texts in contexts more open to fine art as source or expression of finitude or doubt. As T.E. Hulme notes, Yeats is a writer whose symbols 'attempt to bring in an infinity again' (Hulme cited in Longley, 2013, 48-9); as Roy Foster avers, Yeats renews a search for sustaining alternatives to Protestant faith in the transcendent via mysticism and magic (Foster, 1997, 244-5). Edna Longley's Yeatsian poetry 'internalises the religious impulse' to retain residues of faith (Longley, 2013, 49). Conversely Harold Bloom links Beckett's texts with secular 'doubt' in rejecting 'the language of transcendence and the transcendence of language' (Bloom, 1987, 201); Erik Tonning's grim conclusion in 'Beckett, Modernism and Christianity' is that Christianity is 'finished' in Endgame (Tonning in ed., S.E. Gontarski, 2014, 364). The late Yeats's private scepticism in a diary entry (October 1930) noting that 'to-day the man who finds belief in God, in the soul, in immortality, growing and clarifying, is blasphemous' may indicate allergic reactions to Irish, Christian, institutionalized dogmas, but I will suggest the poetry's impulses, even faith, normatively registers in a type of individualistic, semi-religious search for images of immortality and symbolic or transcendent art forms which lift humanity 'out of nature' and time as a key, enduring preoccupation (Diggory, 1983, 97-105). Given that this shifting axis from religious transcendence to secular doubt is significant in both writers' texts and contexts, the study questions how this impacts on the way they process fine art and on subsequent readings of their texts. The study's analysis contends that residues of pre-twentieth century religious certainty, in which painting/fine art are a symbolic carrier of universal truth or beauty, informs Yeats's textual, search for the eternal or permanent; conversely, it will posit that Beckett's texts link these arts with post-romantic texts more predisposed to find doubt, finitude, nothingness and a lack of coherent, philosophical systems as a present and pressing reality in less transcendent arts that succeeded what Hulme termed residual 'hocus-pocus' (Hulme, 2003, 59). Just three years after Yeats was born, Algernon Charles Swinburne anticipated his 'particular study', as Yeats phrased it (E & I, vii), by writing William Blake: A Critical Essay (1868). The study, known to Yeats, claims Blake believed 'scepticism (not sin) is alone damnable, being the one thing barren and damnable'; Blake's image-texts, combining 'lordship of colour and mastery of metre' signify a 'great lyric poet and master of design' whose positive refusal to 'deny the eternally inherent in your soul' is symptomatic of a credo claiming 'do anything but doubt, and you shall not in the end be utterly lost' (Swinburne 1868, 9-110). A decade after Beckett was born, Yeats as self-declared 'last of the Romantics' deploys themes of 'sanctity and loveliness' as a bulwark against 'the coming times' in one poem; he affirms in ‘Art and Ideas’ (1916) that ‘there has been no age before our own wherein the arts have been other than a single authority, a Holy Church of Romance’ (E & I, 153). Michelangelo painting God creating Adam on the Sistine Chapel roof is read as an image of 'supernatural right' and divine creativity. Conversely, Beckett's aphorism that 'nothing is more real than nothing' in Malone Dies (TRIL, 165), deployment of a narrator in Company who ‘first saw the light of day the day Christ died'(CSIS, 9), admiration for paintings of the crucifixion and insistence on the 'sin of having been born' (PTD, 67) as the only real sin, hardly suggest the arts as remedy, salvation or 'Holy Church of Romance'. When Beckett received Arland Ussher's The Age of Shadows in 1938, describing a contemporary world that had 'broken thread after thread' until 'the last thread had snapped' so one was left 'hoping to break one's fall by pulling at one's own garters', Beckett noted he 'liked' the text and its 'image of the long drop and the garters' as 'the best I have seen for a long time' and as preferable to the 'obsolete vitamins of romanticism' (SBL1, 621 & 623, n. 1). From Gabriel Josipovici to Norwegian novelist Karl Ove Knausgaard, successive twentieth century thinkers link the arts' fragmentation of unified narratives from a fixed, singular perspective with departures from faith in divine transcendence or secure authorship. Literature as theorized here, now signals its own subjective, arbitrary, artifice in borrowings and quotes from other disciplines, which subject romanticism (as modified by Yeats) and the sublime (awe or beauty) to irony or retain it as mere trace. By the time, Beckett contributed to Bram van Velde (1960), publishing his own 1949 essay on the painter alongside two other essays he helped translate, doubt registers in this text as the hallmark of authentic paintings and texts about them. Beckett's fellow contributor Jacques Putman asserts that 'doubt, ambiguity, contradictions, are the only proofs of authenticity' in art (Putman in Beckett, Duthuit and Putman, 1960, 42). From James Elkin's On Pictures and the Words That Fail Them (1998) where paintings sceptically resist meanings imposed by the logos to Richard Shiff's Doubt: Theories of Modernism and Postmodernism in the Visual Arts (2008) doubt is often evoked as a key critical tool permeating painting and its past studies. The subjective self, Shiff argues, selects from the flotsam of art theories and narratives, but lacks any objective, logical basis or transcendent foundations so that we become conscious 'that we do not know with certainty what we know; this is the factor of doubt' (Shiff, 2008,29-50). Some seven decades after Yeats's death, two after Beckett's, Karl Ove Knausgaard's novels in dealing with Scandinavian landscapes, note textual inspiration from paintings is no longer dependent on past school, painter, stylistic quality, fixed aesthetically acceptable subject matter or uniform belief system, but on unpredictable, shared sensibilities informed by this paradigm shift:I could stand unmoved in front of fifteen pictures by Monet, and feel the warmth spread through my body in front of a Finnish Impressionist of whom few outside Finland had heard... [and painters] before the 1900s, within the artistic paradigm that always retained some reference to visible reality. Thus there was always a certain objectivity to them.... the world seemed to step forward from the word. When you didn't just see the incomprehensible but came very close to it. Something that didn't speak and that no words could reach, consequently forever out of reach, yet within it, for not only did it surround us, we were ourselves part of it.... [But this world of angels and the]... great beyond... [or the] romantic sublime.... the great, the divine, the solemn, the holy, the beautiful and the true were no longer valid entities but quite the contrary, dubious or even laughable... man took up all the space [in Norwegian art with Munch]... Here we are in a world of images where the expression itself is everything... Art has come to be an unmade bed, a couple of photocopiers in a room, a motorbike in an attic. And art has come to be a spectator of itself... the artist is a performer. That is how it is. Art does not know a beyond, science does not know a beyond, religion does not know a beyond, not any more. Our world isenclosed around itself, enclosed around us and there is no way out of it. Those in this situation who call for more intellectual depth, more spirituality have understood nothing, for the problem is that the intellect has taken over everything. Everything has become intellect, even our bodies, they aren’t bodies anymore, but ideas of bodies, something that is situated in our own heaven of images and conceptions within and above us...we have turned everything into ourselves. (Knausgaard, 2013, 198-202) The divine, sublime or 'beyond' inform, but are superseded by an impasse from which there is 'no way out', as traditional or transcendent painting and a self-reflexive art or text conceptually turns 'everything into ourselves'. Paul de Man, who studied Yeats for his post-doctoral thesis (1966-61), coined the phrase for this context as 'the post Romantic Predicament' (de Man, 2013, 1-10 & 149). If the transcendent 'world [which] seemed to step forward from the word' has tended to become modernist or post-modern 'pictures' symptomatic of a world that 'didn't speak and no words could reach', this shift, I will suggest, demonstrably informs the way Yeats's analysis and use of fine art differs from Beckett's. Yeats links paintings with a milieu and artists who have 'accepted all symbolisms... all the Divine Intellect...for the substance of their art'; in a Beckett text, such as DFMW, paintings are linked with 'silence, communicated by the intervals, not the terms, of the statement...' and lead narrator's to reflect on 'Rembrandt...cupio dissolvi...Horace...' Yeats's 'Lapis Lazuli' phallic sculpture in stone with its Chinese figures whose 'glittering eyes are gay' outstare time and the 'tragic scene' is consonant with a context where texts internalise fine art values as a symbol of eternity. Conversely, Beckett's Happy Days visualizing a character sculpturally sinking and shrinking into a breast-like earth and accompanied by its throwaway song 'When Irish eyes are smiling'(which Beckett contemplated using) is surely more redolent of this post-romantic, far less transcendent world. This shift from conscripting fine art as a symbol of the transcendent/eternal (or as analogue for the text as achieved, enduring form) to a scenario in which fine art/painting registers subjectivity or finitude in a void or chaos (where texts erect ironic or non-relations with enduring form) is periodically invoked as a paradigm in discussing the writers' respective texts and theoretical contexts. The study does so to shed light on junctures between these writers' texts and past art theories, Irish religious contexts and with the way they form views of history and tradition (Yeats) or construct epistemes (or the lack of them) in dealing with humanity/being and modernity (Beckett). The question of how/why these writers' respond to changing forms of fine art, I will argue, sheds light on why/how they engage with life, the eternal and finite, with changing contexts and with the nature and capacities of language. Derek Mahon, Irish successor to both writers, wrote ekphrastic poems about Dutch painting in which painting, even as doubtful or ironic forgery, still constitutes a source of non-materialistic, a-temporal values boosting the poem's awareness of its own visionary process, its capacity to use this 'light to transform the world' (Mahon, 1999, 24) in creating its own transcendent form. Paul Muldoon, however, facing into Knausgaard's situation, suggests that when 'every frame' becomes a 'frieze frame', fodder for image-loop or performance art, a cross-carrying man in '42 Street' knows the word-truth is now just word play and image-relay so that 'the Everlasting Life we bargain for' is 'merely a catch-phrase invented by some record company pooh-bah' and found in 'our last few grains of heroin ash stashed in a well-wrought urn': For now our highest ambitionWas simply to bear the light of day We had once been planning to seize. (Muldoon, 2006b, 106)The balance between treating art and fine art as transcendent and with high seriousness and between treating it with irony and doubt (while still taking it seriously) has subtly altered. How and why, then, do Yeats's and Beckett's texts 'seize' the light from painting/fine art in these different contexts? And what does this reveal about the way they theorize or use fine art to construct relations between the arts, to inform their own discursive or literary forms and to process their views of (eternal) life?Chapter 1 The Two Writers' Use of Theories of Relations Between the Arts and Responses to Changing Fine Art Theories, Forms and Contexts If the two writers' essays suggest how shared engagements with fine art/its theories may be motivated by a fascination with reading past fine art theory/history (significantly present in their libraries) and then citing and re-writing it, and their creative texts suggest a desire to use its images, how do fine art/its theories inform their texts? This chapter argues that comparing these writers' frequent citations past art theorists (Horace, Leonardo da Vinci, Vasari, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing) and more recent predecessors (Yeats's Walter Pater and Beckett's friend, the art historian Georges Duthuit) reveals how they construct their own thinking about fine art and texts from such sources. In questioning why the writers' engage with past fine art/its theories, it argues that this facilitates less disinterested reflections on nature of language, its power/capacities (Yeats) and its limits/failures (Beckett). Fine art/its theories assist a focus on a key dialectic (of the arts as transcending or overcoming space/time, in Yeats, or as temporal failures which disappear in time, in Beckett) as an extension of preoccupations in their creative praxis. In exploring how oppositional ideas (of the "sister arts" and the "separate arts") and the changing art thinking and forms the writers' encountered in more immediate contexts, shape formulations of the fine arts/the arts, as representing an ideal reality or unity (Yeats) or as failures to misrepresent a chaotic reality (Beckett), these arguments are revealed as disputes about the rights and limits of language. In comparing Yeats's and Beckett's use of fine art/its theories, it is argued that Yeats's adoption of past, Classical and Renaissance fine art (as a repository or source of values), permit texts to claim authority from precedent, while citing evidence that Beckett's appreciation of modern painting is linked with his critique of the past, and of the arts as adequate joint sources of value amidst the modern, chaotic and impermanent, which a writer sees and experiences. In exploring how the writers respond to the nineteenth century idea of a total artwork (encompassing relations between texts, painting and music), it is argued that this illuminates the writers' ideas on binary relations between paintings and texts, to reveal Yeats's wish that paintings support traditional, literary narratives/forms and to highlight Beckett's desire that images disrupt or dispute the word's entitlement to do so.1.The Writers' Art Theories Identified, Described and Set in Changing Contexts The two writers' key fine art essays emerged in different eras. The essays reflect different engagements with changing styles of paintings. W.B.Yeats's main essays/discursive texts dealing with fine art/the arts were published over more than forty years (1893-1937). These include a joint 'preface' and commentary in a co-edited, edition of Blake (1893), articles focused on Blake as poet-painter (1890), twin essays on 'Symbolism in Painting' (1898) and 'The Symbolism in Poetry' (1900) and 'Art and Ideas' (1913) which focus on symbolism in both arts. These essays emerge from a late nineteenth century context. A Vision (1925) dovetails literature and painting as part of an idiosyncratic, book length mystical history of the arts. Subsequently a late ‘introduction', for a 1937 edition of Yeats's work, contains thinking on the arts, posthumously published in Essays and Introductions (1961). Beckett's short essays on painting appeared in less than a decade (1945-54). They are situated in a mid-twentieth century context; they examine images in modern painting. The essays are: 'McGreevy on Yeats' (1945); 'La Peinture des Van Velde ou Le Monde èt le Pantalon'['The Painting of the van Veldes, or the World and the Trousers'] (1946); 'Peintres de l’empêchement' ['Painters of the obstacle] (1948); 'Three Dialogues With Georges Duthuit' (1949); 'Henri Hayden, homme-peintre' (written, 1952, published Cahiers d’art, 1955) and 'Hommage à Jack B. Yeats' (1954). The writers' respective essays suggest different foci. Yeats's prose engagement is predominantly with Greek sculpture, Old Master paintings and mimetic-cum-symbolist paintings by Blake and the Pre-Raphaelites whose artworks he owned. Beckett's essays focus is on modern paintings's images, on individual painters whose studios he knew or whose artworks he collected, from Jack Yeats's post-1930's paintings, acquired during their long-term friendship (1930-57) to Bram van Velde's paintings, acquired in the course of another long-term friendship (1937-81), as he met Paris-based artists before and after the Second World War. (For art works owned by the writers see Appendix 3.)These changing eras and the changing nature of painting are reflected, and reflected upon, in the two writers' correspondence and in a shifting emphasis in their fine art essays. Yeats's correspondence - with Lady Gregory (across decades), with other writers and publishers - is essentially literary. If Yeats worked in the British Museum reading room or a London visit found him telling his wife (13 July 1924) that by then he was 'living in Museums - National Gallery, South Kensington, Tate', his social, and intellectual life centred early, and by the 1920's, on Literary Clubs, not galleries (CL InteLex # 4592). Indifferent health in the 1930's meant gallery going and revisiting of municipal galleries, contra the impression of his poem 'The Municipal Gallery Revisited' (1937), tailed off, just as Beckett began exploring modern paintings and studios, a key focus in 'German Diaries' (1936-7). Beckett's gallery-going tailed off too in later years but letters indicate obsessive pursuits of direct encounters with paintings as sensuous objects, lodged indelibly in the memory, especially from the 1930's. The young Yeats as formative art writer was familiar with his father's studio but, as Gould and Toomey point out, even by 1896, 'most of his experience of Pre-Raphaelite painting had been via photography' (MYTH, 403, n.11), with the exception of art exhibited at the Grosvenor Gallery and the New Gallery. Beckett's twenty seven years correspondence with the art critic Thomas McGreevy, Yeats's wife's friend, in ‘talk[ing] pictures’ with an ‘only true confidant’, 1928-45 (SBL1, 246), and with the French art historian/editor Georges Duthuit in ‘the only post I have any wish for’, in 1948-51 as his art writing emerged (SBL2, 232-3), reveal a writer less focused in formative years on 'theatre business, management of men' noted in Yeats's 'The Fascination of What's Difficult' (1910). (VP, 260) Theatre 'business' dominated the decade after the foundation of the Abbey Theatre (1899) for Yeats, the decade into which Beckett was born, often considered crucial for the emergence of modern European painting, before he subsequently lived in Paris, as it became the nerve centre of modern painting by the mid-twentieth century. In short, the paintings and fine art theorists with whom Yeats engaged in talking or corresponding about fine art - his father, Charles Ricketts, William Rothenstein - were immersed in traditional paintings with literary or illustrative functions; Beckett's letters to MacGreevy/Duthuit (1930-50) overlay considerations of Old Master paintings with discussions of modern paintings as more autonomous, material or non-literary objects. Among the first paintings Yeats mentions in 'Reveries Over Childhood and Youth' (1916) as striking is Turner's The Golden Bough. Exhibited in 1834, the painting illustrates Virgil's textual myth in which Deiphobe, the Cumae sibyl or prophetess, holds aloft the bow from the sacred tree as Aeneas's passport to the underworld near Lake Avernus (CW3, 91). The painting links pastoral narrative, symbolic tree and mythic traditions of eternal survival/recurrence as passports still available to literary texts/poetry during World War I. Among the paintings Beckett recalls in the last year of his life (1989), is The Bathers by Lyonel Feininger, hanging above the piano in the collection of his Jewish uncle William Abraham Sinclair in German Kassel in the early 1930's, just before the curtain came down on modernist works and Jewish curators in Nazi Germany (Haynes and Knowlson, 2003, 59). Shortly after encountering the painting, Beckett wrote a famous letter to Axel Kaun (9 July 1937) in which he stated his aim as one where he would tear up the 'veil' of language, to efficiently abuse it, to 'drill hole[s]' through it, until caught up with painting (silence) and music (pure dissonance); he is gratified that the 'fabric of the language has at least become porous...as a consequence of a procedure akin to the technique of Feininger (SBL1, 518-9). Painting in its resistant, non-verbal fabric now weakens linguistic claims, interrogates language and drives it towards silence. MPTK (1934) invokes illustrative painting as outmoded, but available to the text as irony: here ‘the Cumaean Sibyl on a bearing-rein, [is] sniffing the breeze for the Grimm Brothers?’; here past paintings and literary texts (Turner's or Yeats's Sybyl /Golden Bough) conjoint claims to deliver literary beauty or sublime narratives cementing relations between "sister arts" has outlived this use. Before discussing the impact of changing (fine) art theories and art works which impacted on the two writer's creative and discursive texts, I posit three general contentions. Firstly, I contend that the two writers' respective library holdings/reading differ significantly and that this dovetails with their diverging predispositions and approaches to fine art theory/aesthetics. Secondly, I suggest that their starting points or assumptions in fine theory differ radically. Thirdly, I posit that their attitude and approach to fine art/theory evolves and alters through time. The writers' essays on fine art/painting, a significant strand in their output, dovetails with respective library holdings suggestive of immersion in reading art history/theory as well as literary texts, history (Yeats) and philosophy (Beckett). The range and number of books on fine art/painting, however, is as substantial as the frequent citation of fine art/its theories in their art essays and creative texts. Yeats had some one hundred and thirty books or catalogues on fine art (Loizeaux, 2003, 120); Beckett's library underestimates holdings on gallery collections as he gave many art books, guides to traditional galleries and texts on modern painters away (Nixon and Hulle, 219-20). Modern, twentieth century painting and its attendant art theories/history is largely absent, and classical, Renaissance and nineteenth century art texts (Pater, Rossetti) present, in Yeats's library. Hegel is present as art theorist. Just as Yeats collected symbolist visual art by Blake, and owned the more illustrative art works of Jack Yeats and Burne-Jones, so these books implicate an aesthetics extolling the arts on the basis of historical tradition, symbolism and the illustration or creation of real/ideal beauty as a parallel to poetry/literature. Yeats's A Vision outlines a history of the arts, placing writers and painters in historical niches as fine art traditions decline, which has affinities with Hegel's project even if Yeats claimed he was 'Blake's disciple, not Hegel's' (Yeats cited in Diggory, 1983, 163). Fine art texts in Beckett's library under-represent his reading on past or Old Master paintings - Beckett acquainted himself with R.H. Wilenski’s Introduction to Dutch Art (1929), during London years, c.1933 - and do not fully indicate his engagement with modern painting/theory; he notes the Jewish art historian Will Grohmann's study of Kandinsky as excellent art criticism in a 1946 essay; he gifted many catalogues on twentieth century painting. Yeats's acquisition of Kant's Critique of Aesthetic Judgement in a 1911 edition (O'Shea, 1985, 144) left him claiming (1931) that when he spoke of idealist philosophy he thought 'more of Hegel and his successors than Kant' (E & I, 404); Beckett's Wylie claims 'Hegel arrested his development' (MU, 124) and he pledged to 'read nothing and write nothing, unless it is Kant' in 1938 (SBL1, 581). Beckett's library texts implicate essays dealing with modern painters/theories and Kant's contention that aesthetic value judgements of the fine arts are subjective matters of taste, arguable but not sustainable as debate founded on a conceptual or empirical basis, not the placement of painters in an unfolding (Hegelian) history. Beckett's claim that 'the object banishes thought' or that 'To restore silence is the role of objects' (TRIL, 14) echo Kant's Critique of Pure Judgement (1790): 'I must present the object immediately to my feeling of pleasure or displeasure, and that too, without the aid of concepts' (Kant, 2007, 46). The fine art work for Yeats presents and provokes thought and concept; it does not banish these to silence as in Kant-Beckett. The writers' essays on fine art/painting and the arts are underwritten by different starting points or assumptions. Yeats's essays on symbolism and 'Art and Ideas' presuppose theories beginning with the arts - the illuminating power of their visual and poetic symbols to create enduring beauty - to link fine art with texts, concepts and inter-art relations. Texts on painting proceed via statements and explanations. Fine art, analogous to the creative text, is open to, or answers to, the discursive text. Beckett's essays begin with uncertainty, rupture and chaos, with 'being' and being in the world, so the inadequacy of fine art or text in capturing this is pressured from the outset. Synthesis of the arts is assumed to be virtually impossible as theoretical formulations falsify subjective perceptions of chaos/experiences of the real, where objects are presented out of a flux to resist conceptualisation or representation. No general or compartmentalized 'aesthetic' defining the arts or answering questions such as 'What are the arts?' or 'How is writing distinguished from painting?' programmatically emerges, as Lois Oppenheim suggests (2000, 1-13); formulations decompose or become continually revised as questions without answers. Analogies between fine art/painting and texts largely hold for Yeats, but Becket's essays on painting proceed via contradiction, revision, qualification, or negation of questions into non-positions as they turn against systematic theory and the very genre in which they engage. Turning from viewing the arts as creating symbols or concepts to be rationally decoded he states: 'All things artistic are alogical. There are artistic forms which cannot be proven by human knowledge' ['Alles Künterische ist alogisch] (GD, 19 November 1936). The two writers' responses to fine art/paintings evolved and were adjusted over time. If both writers converge in visceral reactions to paintings, they diverge in conceptualizing this response. The Pre-Raphaelite, teenage Yeats who encountered Dante's Dream (1856) in Liverpool's Walker Gallery is 'moved to tears' as 'its colour, its people its romantic architecture...blotted all other pictures away' (CW3, 114). The writer of 'Art and Ideas', in his late forties, claims to have 'learned to think in the midst of the last phase of Pre-Raphaelitism' and he proposes a 'reintegration of the mind, our more profound Pre-Raphaelitism' (CW4, 250). A subjective, submissive, somatic response to painting as sensuous object is replaced by an intelligent, conceptual grasp and use of painting to aid thinking. Yeats's 'introduction' to Blake (1905) notes his predecessor 'came to look upon poetry and art as a language for the utterance of conceptions...thought out more for their visionary truth than for their beauty'; this, Yeats contends, 'made him [Blake and by implication himself] a greater poet and greater artist' (CW6, 84). Beckett's letters record even more acute, visceral responses to paintings, where 'Rembrandt 'takes me by the scruff of the neck' or Jack Yeats left him 'knocked all of a heap' (SBL1, 430 & 636); this synaesthetic norm is stressed as pre-cognitive, elusive to linguistic grasp; the experience of fine art is not so easily open to exegesis in language, to being pigeon-holed, linguistically categorised or conscripted into concepts or thought. As self-taught art theorist and encyclopaedic art reader, Yeats, like Beckett, may have been beset by doubts about art critiques but these largely surface in private letters, not published essays or texts. When Yeats and Robert Gregory encounter Charles Ricketts's studio paintings (1905) he notes artworks by ‘the rarest kind of genius’ but in wondering what his co-visitor, a painter, thinks of them, he doubts any empirical basis for his subjective judgment may be found: 'I don’t suppose they are really as great as I think them. They probably moved me for some personal reason... It may be of course that I have not understood the others...' (CL4, 211). Yeats's description of Jacynth Parson's watercolour illustrations for Blake's Songs of Innocence (1927) noting that 'being no art critic I had not knowledge enough to judge this painting with the precision that gives judgement authority' is a rare, published Kantian moment that is far more common in Beckett's art essays. These essays also shift their emphasis and position. Having implied that antiquated Irish writing might learn from modern images in The Waste Land and Jack Yeats's painting in the 1930's, Beckett art essays (1945-54), in which paintings by friends (Jack B. Yeats and Bram van Velde) are central, increasingly suggest silent appreciation, brevity (the short note replaces the essay) and the frustrating shortcomings of language in dealing with painting become a more marked characteristic by, and after, the 1950's. Eventually ceasing to write art essays, Beckett informed James Lord, who proposed ‘parallels’ between his texts and Giacometti's art in illuminating ‘solitude, alienation and despair', that he ‘never felt that painting or sculpture can express the same things as literature. I don’t see any parallel between the two arts’. (SB cited in Michael Peppiatt, 2010, 168) Texts on paintings as 'assassinations' (DISJ, 7), as products for those seeking to recover ‘some Beckett’ in the text, a refusal to have them republished in the United States in 1974 as 'valueless...and best forgotten'(SBL4, 367 n.1.), a reluctance to republish them in Disjecta (1983) and dismissal of them as ‘mere products of friendly obligation and economic need' all read like deep-seated rejections of a genre with which Yeats persisted. Whether Beckett continued to be inspired by, or to use, visual images in creative texts, even as he abandoned discussion, explanation and analysis of them in art essays, though, raises a different question which this chapter sketches in before it becomes a focus in chapter 4. 2. The Writers and "Sister Arts" Theories: from Horace to Leonardo da Vinci. Among Yeats's and Beckett's books and citations, Horace, Leonardo da Vinci, Vasari and Gotthold Ephraim Lessing are prominent. Plutarch's "sister arts" theory [AD 46-120] stressing 'poetry is a speaking picture, painting a silent poetry' is cited in variants by Yeats. Yeats had a collection of the writer's texts. Plutarch's theory was reiterated by Horace; Yeats's 'Mad as the Mist and Snow' (1932) looks at bookshelves where 'Horace there by Homer stands, /Plato stands below...' (VP, 523-4). Horace's Ars Poetica [c.19 BCE] claims that the two arts are alike in ‘ut pictura poesis’ (as in painting so in poetry) and 'have ever had equal authority': he claims paintings produce fantastic images or symbols which 'unite a horse's neck to a human head'; his Odes link poetry with monumental sculpture, by analogy, to claim both arts build a monument in bronze. Yeats's twin essays 'The Symbolism in Poetry' and 'Symbolism in Painting' recycle Horace's 'ut pictura poesis': he 'cannot separate painting and literature in this' (UP2, 134); his 'General Introduction' (1937) 'would have all the arts draw together; recover their ancient association, the painter painting what the poet has written, the musician setting the poet’s words to simple airs...'. (E & I, ix). Beckett's Belacqua cites Horace to suggest the arts are related by non-relations, as objects with subjects in the grip of silence and time: 'the one real thing... to be found in the relation... [is] the silence', Beckett writes - 'The experience of the reader shall be between the phrases, in the silence, communicated by the intervals, not the terms, of the statement, between the flowers that cannot coexist...I think now...of a Rembrandt....cupio dissolvi...Horace...' (DFMW, 97). Horace's "sister-arts" tradition based on the arts' commonalty in which Yeats, by 1901, 'cannot now think symbols less than the greatest of all powers' (E & I, 49) is reformulated by Beckett, by 1928-30, so the arts are defined by what they cannot do, by how they cannot 'coexist' as they dissolve in silence and time. Yeats's tendency in theory is to affirm links between poetry/painting as "sister arts" which Beckett tends to negate. Horace's idea of fine art/painting as transcending time, as permanent, and as symbol or parallel for the poem/text (which also does so), is also absorbed differently in the two Irish writers' respective creative texts; it acts as a marker of difference. Horace's painting with its anthropomorphic, superhuman-animal ghosts Yeats's 'The Second Coming' (1920). A Sphinx-like beast with 'the head of a man' on 'a lion's body' is reborn in Bethlehem to replace conventional painterly nativity with a symbol of apocalypse and poetic power (VP, 401-2). Beckett's risibly, sub-human category, the barmaid in Murphy has a 'horse's head on a cow's body'; the Unnamable is a 'broken-down cart-or-bat horse' (TRIL, 293) who refuses to learn that 'Man is a higher animal' but finds himself as a sub-human, temporal, Darwinian species, an amalgam of animal-reptile-worm in 'slime' (TRIL, 273-9 & 335). In 'Sailing to Byzantium' (1928) Yeats equates ancient, fine art/mosaics with the poem's eternal life in posterity as Horace's 'monument of unageing intellect' (VP, 407). Beckett's 'cupio dissolvi' [I want to be dissolved] and evocation of Horace's 'solvitur acris hiems' ['Bitter Winter Melts'], as the ode where 'pale death' destroys pauper's huts ' as it 'does the towers of kings' implicate time as a solvent. In Yeats's poetry his "Tower" is a self-declared, permanent 'symbol' and the eternal, sculpted Byzantine bird is fashioned in durable bronze (VP, 480 & 407) as is 'A Bronze Head' but symbolic birds, favoured by Pre-Raphaelitism and Yeats, have flown from the forest of symbols in Beckett's letters (DISJ, 172).. The decapitated head in Beckett's novel The Unnamable is a bricolage of disposable parts, decomposing near 'buzzing' bluebottles in the abattoir area (TRIL, 301-5). Horace's "sister-arts" tradition, poetry as 'a speaking picture, painting a silent poetry' is the means whereby 'the gazing heart doubles its might' in Yeats's elegy commemorating the painter Robert Gregory (VP, 323-8); The Unnamable is 'blindfold, gagged to the gullet', ironically 'murmuring Shelley, impervious to the shafts' (TRIL, 361).Leonardo da Vinci's Renaissance Treatise on Painting alters classical "sister art" theories to build a platform elevating sight as the noblest sense. Painting as premier art is now singularly capable of realising sights' supreme potential in mimetic effects: If the poet says he can inflame men with love... the painter has the power to do likewise, the more so in that he places before the lover the very effigy of the beloved, and the lover often kisses and speaks to the picture, which he would not do were the same beauties placed before him by the writer. The painter goes even further in affecting the minds of men, by inducing them to fall in love with a painting that does not represent any living woman. (da Vinci, [c. 1487-1504], 1964, 113.) Yeats advised his daughter Anne on going to art college, to 'look at the da Vinci notebooks...I dipped into them a good deal'(CL InteLex, # 7363); multiple citations of da Vinci bear this out. Thomas MacGreevy, friend of both writers, wrote articles on da Vinci's masterpieces (1947-54), produced poems like 'Giaconda', went on 'Leonardo pilgrimages'; he also forwarded his translation of The Method of Leonardo da Vinci (1929) to Beckett (SBL1, 539). Leonardo's fine arts which cause 'a man... [to fall] in love' with representations so real and ideal that the art lover kisses the artwork, so incited to ‘acts of worship' that he must remove the idolatrous object from his house, is thematized in Yeats's 'The Statues' (1939). Greek sculpture's 'daemonic image' drives adolescents from 'solitary beds' to press 'live lips upon a plummet-measured face' before the poem gets a grip on this iconophilia to demonstrate that the poem's or text's knowledge of Pythagorean mathematics and calculations which produce these perfect bodily proportions to avoid the shapelessness of Asiatic Buddhist art ('vague immensities') and 'the formless' or 'filthy modern tide' of modern art, may be rationalised, and made available to text and Irish nation (VP, 610-11). If Leonardo proposes fine art or sculpture as the most powerful scopic, trans-national regime, as monoglot, English speaker, Yeats emphasizes the word's power to use such fine art to create a national and time-transcending, aesthetic symbols by linking the ancient sculpture with that of Cuchulain in Dublin's GPO. Yeats makes sense of his own resistance to the primacy of sight, advocated by da Vinci as instantiated in fine art, by using fine art to institute the primacy of language. The multilingual Beckett, less certain of a limitless, transparent language, who finds Ireland 'so much Gaelic to me' (TRIL, 35), has the short-sighted Neary crash into Cuchulain's sculptural, disrobed buttocks, to reduce the new state's potent, ancient hero to a Victorian, linguistic misfit beside a sculpted 'bum'. Neary's protest that his 'grove' has been 'wiped as a man wipeth a glass', or linguistically censored, is made as he 'turned his cup upside down' (MU, 44). The Biblical reference to God's erasure of 'the line of Samaria, and the plummet of house of Ahab' in which he would 'wipe Jerusalem as a man wipeth a dish, wiping it, and turning it upside down' satirically evokes the very language Yeats's uses to construct heroic Greek sculpture as aesthetic or athletic model for Ireland and points to Irish erasures in arts' censorship. The use of fine art by the two writers in national or historical contexts is explored in chapter 3; here, the point is that Yeats is adapting "sister arts theory" and reconfiguring the idea of the conjoint power of both arts to suggest that the text's virtual image is primary and integral to its supreme scopic achievement; conversely, the so-called permanent achievement or scopic inducements of da Vinci-like sculpture is lost from Neary's sight and in Beckett's texts. Classical and traditional aesthetics are a source of explicit disagreement between Yeats and Beckett. Taken seriously by Yeats, who had only to read Walter Pater's Plato (in 1925) to be reminded of Sappho lines claiming 'the beautiful are good, and the good are beautiful - or will become so' (Yeats cited by Gregory, 1987, 12), such classical ideals are recycled ironically by Beckett's Jacques Moran who hardly finds that 'life is a thing of beauty...a joy forever' (TRIL, 159). Beckett's Trilogy sabotages da Vinci's aesthetics: the worship of a 'Turdy Madonna' revolts from Yeats's suggestion (1919) that ‘When I close my eyes and pronounce the word "Christianity"...I do not see Christ crucified, or the good shepherd from the catacombs, but a father and mother and their children, a picture by Leonardo da Vinci most often' which universalizes the family instinct (CW5, 40). Yeats accommodates this Italian-Irish Pietà; Beckett's Moran marks one of his bachelor 'halts' - Beckett was drawn by the 1920's to sacred paintings of Halts on the Flight out of Egypt such as Rembrandt's as Knowlson has demonstrated (Knowlson, 1996, 77-8) - to follow Pliny, not da Vinci, on the impact of statuary by masturbating in this 'God-forsaken country' full of 'turdy' statues with only God looking on (TRIL, 151-9; Pliny the Elder [77-79AD], 1991, 329). Leonardo's contention that the 'sense of sight to which painting appeals is nobler than the sense of hearing to which poetry appeals’ because ‘the darkness in the mind’s eye in which poetry is born... is inferior to the bodily eye of the painter' is adjusted by Yeats to suggest bodily perception (productive of sculpture/fine art) plus further conception in 'the mind's eye' of the text create an arts' 'unity'. Yeats's texts, in line with Ezra Pound's thinking of Italian Renaissance poetry/fine art, wish for 'the increased power that a god feels in getting into a statue' (Yeats and Pound cited in Diggory, 1983, 52-3). Beckett's 'ill-seen' is 'ill-said': misperception may compound misconception, and produce a 'rupture' where the subject/poet cannot penetrate the object or claim its 'power' for the text. Watt (1953), for instance, undermines the abstract mathematical planning and proportions which permit perfected ageless, humanity to inhabit Renaissance drawing/Greek sculpture as recommended by da Vinci and by Yeats just four years earlier in 'The Statues': who may tell the taleof the old man?weigh absence in a scale?mete want with a span?the sum assessof the world's woes?nothingness in words enclose? (Watt, Addenda, 215)Questions arising from ageing and 'nothingness' oppose Yeats's use of Greek sculpture which is weighed by 'intellect,/...calculation, number, measurement' and which enables the sculptural poem to recreate an embodied, self-contained, lasting presence (VP, 611). 'All the Olympians' as 'a thing never seen again' remain seen, embodied and celebrated in Yeats's poetry (VP, 577-8). Beckett cannot 'weigh', 'mete' or encompass human presence 'with a span' or sculpturally 'enclose' as a 'sum' Yeats's 'plummet measured face'. Yeats's prose, notes the 'imitative energy' of the Renaissance to ask: 'Did not Leonardo da Vinci warn the imaginative man against preoccupations with arts that cannot survive his death?'(CW3, 352 & 180). Such survival requires mimetic measurement to create a fused real/ideal as in Yeats's A Vision which reads the earliest sculptures of Christ as modelled on Alexander the Great, as 'six feet high, perfect physical man' (Yeats, 1974, 273). Beckett's study Proust commends the writer who 'refuse[s] to measure the length and weight of man in terms of his body instead of in terms of his years' (PTD, 12). Just four years after Beckett devised a fictional character caressing 'an unshaven Gioconda smile' and discussed Horace on the aesthetic merits of 'a defective bottom' (DFMW, 96-7) - surely a reminder that Duchamp's Giaconda had sported a moustache bore the title L.H.O.O.Q. (1919), phonetically read in French as 'she has a hot ass' - Yeats chose Walter Pater's text on Leonardo's Giaconda beauty, re-set as a poem, to open his Oxford Book of Modern Verse (OBMV, 1936). Beckett's 'Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit' (1949) insist ‘datum’ in ‘the notebooks of Leonardo’, produce ‘disfazione’ or ruin/destruction; ‘western perspective’ is merely a ‘series of traps for the capture of objects’ (DISJ, 138-147) which hides its own subjective limitations in mimesis. A review of Leonardo's notebooks, published in France as Les Carnets de Leonardo da Vinci (1942) by Maurice Blanchot in Faux Pas (1943), asserts Renaissance art leaves the writer 'in the increasingly ludicrous condition of having nothing to write about, of having no means with which to write, and of being constrained by the utter necessity of having to write it'. Beckett read Blanchot's review to restate both arts' negative capacities in 'Three Dialogues' where painting leads the text to conclude that it may only demonstrate or reveal: 'The expression that there is nothing to express, nothing with which to express, nothing from which to express, no power to express, no desire to express, together with the obligation to express.' (DISJ, 139) The essay also dismisses French painter and sculptor, André Masson's 'extremely intelligence remarks on space' for 'breathing the same possessiveness as the notebooks of Leonardo'. Disabling facere, to make, to favour disfacimento (undoing/dissolution), Beckett weakens Yeats's vocabulary of power to suggest both arts' claims to control space is no longer tenable or in the 'domain of the feasible'. (138-9) This aligns with Beckett's sense of both arts, fine art and text, as weakened by a sense of their finitude in a letter to Duthuit (26 May, 1949); here he notes that for finite humans 'of whom neither the time of the body nor the investment by space are any more to retained than the shades of evening or the beloved face' there is nothing to paint, nothing to paint with' that is not subject to a temporal 'destiny' (SBL2, 156). Fine art and texts about it lack the subject and means to convey an existence invaded by a sense of finitude and pervaded with the 'nothingness' of existence; Yeatsian conceptions of classical or Renaissance sculpture as embodying physically perfect man or as creating powerful ideals defying finitude are dismissed.Yeats and Beckett owned Vasari's Lives of the Painters [1550]. Yeats's claims Michelangelo, Vasari's quintessential artist, left successors like Bevenuto Cellini 'with nothing left to do' (CW3, 130) so the 'Sistine Chapel roof' in one poem bears witness to "man" in/with 'supernatural right' and 'sinew' (1920); 'Long-legged Fly' (1939) applauds God Creating Adam as iconic badge for image-doubling in both art forms (VP, 368 & 617). This product of perfect motor-coordination, 'the old nonchalance of the hand; / Whether we have chosen chisel, pen or brush' (VP, 367) is countered by Beckett's suggestion that Rilke's translation of Michelangelo's idea that the inside of the human hand contains an essential essence is 'Quatsch' [rubbish] (GD, 12 February 1937) and admiration of Rilke's poetry for its 'fidgets' (Beckett cited in Nixon, 2011, 108 & 190). Yeats's defence of Renaissance plastic art skills and anatomical mastery as superior to ‘modern hope’ and a ‘sensitive mind’ is Beckett's target in 'La Peinture'; it parodies a Nazi custodian's claims in a German gallery that modern painting is 'produced by a gang of criminals and incapables. They would not know how to do anything else. They do not know how to draw' (DISJ, 120). Yeats made the identical claim - without irony - looking at Ezra Pound's wife's Cubist drawings (1915) to note he was 'sure her real test would be to paint with very little brushes, & draw neat outlines with a pencil she took half the morning making sharp enough’ (CL InteLex #2574). The abandonment of Vasari's mimesis provokes Yeats's ire but stirs Beckett, in his fragment 'For Avigdor Arikha' (1966), to commend the painter for having identified this problem and for having laid 'Siege...again to the impregnable without. Eye and hand fevering after the unself....Back and forth the gaze beating against the unseeable and unmakeable...Those deep marks to show' (DISJ, 152). A DFTMW [written 1928-30] depicts Belacqua in 'transcendent gloom'. Staring into a German sunset 'like Mr Ruskin in the Sistine, looking for Vega' he only to find stars are 'demented perforations of the night colander' and departed angels and divinities have left 'the invisible rat, fidgeting behind the astral incoherence of the art surface' (DFMW, 16-17); the great art of pre-Medieval and Renaissance Europe hymned by Yeats in A Vision (1925) as one where 'Angelic orders gave a theme to the image-makers' (Yeats, 1974, 283) provides no models of 'coherence'. Michelangelo's Vatican scaffolding is erected to execute paintings so 'that civilisation may not sink' in Yeats (VP, 617). His long-legged fly's acute perception and image-doubling in the painting, are redoubled in a poem whose scopic power sees and metaphorically reframes the painting so ekphrasis becomes a means whereby one art form gives another 'a hand' in picturing the exemplary or ideal and living body. Just before Yeats wrote the poem, Beckett hung a reproduction of Michelangelo's sculpture Il crepuscolo (Dusk) on the Tomb of Lorenzo de Medici beside a Chartres sculpture of 'Père Eternel' above his mantelpiece in Foxrock (SBL1, 306 & 310, n.15). The vision of Yeats's fly, 'scaled up' to augment that of the artist's mind, recreates an 'upward' vision of an icon in religious space as in Blake's Urizen, which Yeats owned as a print, depicting the creation out of chaos of the ordered world and the logos become flesh. Beckett's God the father co-exists beside Michelangelo's tomb; the 'white-bearded', Blakean God referred to in Godot never appears to separate creator from created artwork just as Malone concludes if he could make a 'little creature' in his own image it would be a 'poor thing' which he would 'eat' (TRIL, 207). Watt notes ’the only way one can speak of God is to speak of him as though he were a man...as the only way one can speak of man...is to speak of him as though he were a termite' (64). Man as microscopic mole, termite, worm or reptile is a recurring motif in Beckett's fiction, just as the power of painting or poem to telescope and reproduce images, to 'double' the power of each art and create man in the macroscopic image of near-God, Michelangelo's man and that in Italian Old Masters, is a key trope in Yeats. Only able to find 'the invisible rat' and 'astral incoherence', Belacqua makes do with Dublin's 'arty' set as 'simply Sistine', her ladyship as Michelangelo's 'Cumae Sibyl on a bearing rein, sniffing the breeze for the Grimm brothers?'; her 'hobnailed complexion' is 'so frescosa' she becomes the ironic 'ravished gem of Quattrocento' (MPTK, 34 & 55-6) which Yeats's poems celebrate as an achievement. The Vasari-Michelangelo tradition, upheld by Yeats as model for fine art or text seeking to create the real or ideal, is savaged in Beckett as an illusory quest for both arts. Yeats's 'Long-legged Fly' links clear perception and Vasari's perspective; Beckett's All Strange Away (1963-4) images 'a second in that glare a dying common house fly, then fall the five feet to the dust...'(CSP,172) so that fly and Adam return to dust just as Pozzo's claims that the tramp-like Estragon, who calls himself 'Adam', is 'made in God's image' is laughable; the figure leaving 'the Portrait Gallery' in That Time (1976) is left 'not knowing who you were from Adam' to end in a 'whole place suddenly full of dust' - himself 'gone in no time' in a text repeatedly (re)calling 'time' in this gallery space (CDW, 24, 37 & 391-5). 3.The Writers and Gotthold Ephraim Lessing's Art Theories in Laoco?n.'The rule is this, that succession in time is the province of the poet, coexistence in space that of the artist', Gotthold Lessing claims in Laoco?n: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry (1766). Lessing uses the Greek sculpture to suggest its strength is in occupying visual space, its weakness is in articulating sequential, linguistic narratives that unfold in time, to essentially separate the arts in binary opposition to 'ut pictura poesis' (Lessing, 1962, 109-12). Yeats encountered Laoco?n as replica sculpture, print lithograph and text. Attending Dublin Metropolitan School of Art (1884-86), before it attracted Beckett's Aunt Cissie Sinclair as Orpen's pupil, Yeats enrolled in 'ecclesiastical sculpture'. A plaster cast replica of the Laoco?n sculpture was installed 'in pride of place' there, at the core of his drawing curriculum (Turpin, 1995, 57 & 175-6). Yeats complained to a government Committee of Enquiry (1906) that ceaseless drawing 'from the antique' plaster casts of classical sculptures had been: Boring and destructive of enthusiasm, and all kinds of individuality.... you were in your fourth year before you got into the Life class. You kept working at geometry; you were kept drawing eyes and noses; you were kept working from the antique... [until] whatever individuality you had [was] crushed out... in consequence I have left Art, and taken to Literature. (HMSO, 1906, 60) William Blake's mixed-media engraving Laoco?n (c.1826-27), a critique of Lessing's image-text divisions, surrounding the sculpture's image with text in John Linnell's collection, whichYeats studied for four years (1889-93), was reproduced in the Yeats/Ellis edition of Blake's poems (1893). Yeats's admiration for Blake's manuscript, image-text combinations in 'William Blake and the Divine Comedy' (1897) rejects Lessing's divorce of these arts (E & I, 117); his 'preface' to the poems noting Blake's 'ruins of time build mansions in eternity' and that 'the whole business of man is the arts' (plural) quotes a maxim from Blake's Laoco?n which states 'Israel delivered from Egypt is art delivered from nature and imitation' (CW6, 91). Yeats cites Walter Pater some thirty times in his writing, noting The Renaissance is Oscar Wilde's 'golden book' (CW3, 124). Pater's contention in the book is that if ‘Lessing’s Laoco?n, was a very important contribution’ to art history its binary divisions must be bypassed because it misses the arts' convergence in a similar cause (the delivery of images) and effect (the impact of symbols) in delivering eternal pictures (Pater, 1873, 131-133). The Yeats-Ellis Blake (1893) claims inspired visions permit the soul to come into ‘eternal possession of itself in one single moment’; thereby The Death of Cuchulain (1939) attacks Edgar Degas’s dancers' ‘ugliness’ for submitting to a mere contemporary, temporal pull: ‘I spit upon the dancers painted by Degas. I spit upon their short bodices, their stiff stays, their toes whereon they spin like peg-tops, above all that chambered face. They might have looked timeless, Rameses the Great, but not the chambermaid, that old maid history. I spit! I spit! I spit!’ (Co Pl, 694). Yeats's Owen Ahern must replace such modern ugliness with the study of Sienese painting representing the world as 'revealed to saints' in depicting 'man's reverence before Eternity' (VSR, 152). Just after Beckett's 'Recent Irish Poetry' (1934) dismissed 'Victorian Gael[s]' for pedalling Romantic mythology, he wrote a memo to 'take 1740 as starting point of German classical literature'; he visited Wolfenbüttel, where Lessing worked as a librarian and purchased Lessing's complete works in Brunswick (1936) for annotation (Nixon, 2011, 166; van Hulle & Nixon, 2013, 85-87). Beckett's essay 'La Peinture des van Velde' (1946) ironizes Lessing and Vasari, to undercut art criticism as a genre which misses its intended target in painting to become a means of generalized, self-revealing, pseudo-literary gossip: There are those for general aesthetics, such as Lessing, and it is a lovely/charming game. There are those for anecdotes, such as Vasari and Harper's Magazine.There are those for catalogues raisonnés, such as Smith. There are those who are frankly for unpleasant and senseless gossip. This is the case here. With words we are only storytelling. In the same way thatlexicographers unbutton themselves we betray ourselves all the way to the confessional. (DISJ, 118-9)Beckett, however, also took Lessing seriously. Recording a Munich discussion with Kurt Eggers-Krestner in his 'German Diaries' (March 1937), Beckett recycles the Grohmann/Lessing split in the arts: 'The dissonance that has become the principle & that the word cannot express, because literature can no more escape from chronologies to simultaneities, from nebeneinander [sequential] to miteinander [simultaneous], than [sic] the human voice can sing chords'. He concluded this meant that Joyce's 'Ulysses falsifies the unconscious, or the "monologue intérieur", in so far as it is obliged to express it as teleology' (GD, 26 March 1937). Lessing's insistence on temporal and spatial divisions are invoked to suggest Joyce's sequential text is a 'heroic' experiment which 'falsifies' consciousness and which cannot surmount Lessing's divisions between the arts. Conversely Yeats's mystical writing claims images cross both arts' boundaries. ‘Reality is a timeless and spaceless community of Spirits which perceive each other... [as] thoughts, images, objects of sense... [so that] Time and space are unreal’, Yeats notes (Yeats cited in Ellmann, 1964, 236-7). He records his art school accord with the sculptor John Hughes that 'good art' shakes ' the dust of time from its feet' (EXP, 192-193). To 'translate the words of the poet into form and colour’, Lessing writes, is to mistake painting's remit, the difficult ‘execution' of this in its own medium, for poetry's; conversely 'it is impossible to translate the musical painting heard in the poet’s words' into 'forms and colours in space' because poetry 'articulates sounds in time' (72-109). Yeats's Pateresque advocacy of a 'style that is lyrical and full of colour' short circuit Lessing (CW4, 2007), so poetry may claim rights on fine art but Beckett's 1946 essay on painting notes ‘to write purely visual apperception is to write a phrase devoid of meaning...each time one wants words to do a genuine act of transfer... to express something other than words, they align themselves so as to cancel each other out mutually’ (DISJ, 125). Unlike Lessing, Beckett's emphasis is not on words' superior power/remit; it is on paintings' autonomy, distinct medium and scopic power as irreducible to translation into words. Beckett's 'Hommage à Jack B. Yeats' (1954) summarize these claims. These paintings indicate a ‘High solitary art uniquely self-pervaded...not to be clarified in any other light’ (DISJ, 149). Lessing's binary division of mediums by space/time (noted by Beckett) and Blake/Pater's emphasis on images crossing mediums (noted by Yeats) inform respective formulations of the arts. Yeats's A Vision (1925) links J.M. Synge's 'rhythm and syntax' with Rembrandt's patient 'painting of a lace collar' (CW13, 81) just as Pater links lyric poetry with painting's weave of rhythmic patterns in Titian’s Lace-girl's whose drawn lines and ‘colouring – [is] that weaving...of good threads of light’ (Pater, 1893, 132). Both arts control rhythm, or time, via images in space. In Beckett's Watt, the narrator on Westminster Bridge, site of Romantic, Wordsworthian vista of London which 'stills' the 'mighty heart' (in Blake's 'pulsation of an artery'), finds a character with an expensive watch recording this exact moment before simply dying a week later and he abandons Knott's house with its indecipherable, replaceable paintings when his time is 'at hand' to meet an ape-like Mr Gorman cuddling 'the watch to his ear' as 'a child cringing away from a blow' (Watt, 207). Traditional 'stop watch painting', Georges Duthuit states in Les Fauves, taking up Lessing's debate, use 'yard-stick and plumb line, old criteria' to create fake perspectives fixing objects into an 'ideal point beyond space and time', when in reality they are 'turned...towards the turmoil of light, towards time' and open up 'holes' into an 'abyss' (Duthuit, 1950, 5-20). The Duthuit-Beckett lexicon (Beckett supervised the translation of Duthuit's text), like Lessing's, separate the arts even as it dismisses Lessing's assumption that either art conquers time and space via the 'plummet measured face'. As Beckett's 'La Peinture des van Velde' (1946) ironically states: You are interested in space? Make it crack.You are tormented by time? Let's kill it altogether.Beauty? Man re-united.Goodness? Suffocate.Truth? The fart of the greatest number. (DISJ, 132) Such polarities, though, become more complex in the writers' creative texts. Praxis complicates theory for both writers. The sense that great fine art is eternal and durable, for instance, in Yeats's essay is more pressured in Yeats's poetry's Lapis Lazuli sculpture, full of 'accidental cracks' and 'tormented by time'. Time enters Yeatsian poems of absence, ageing, abandoned loves, frustrating audiences, lost Hugh Lane paintings, the 'death of every brilliant eye' and civilizations/arts replacing defunct predecessors. Yeats's praxis, however, also tends to orientate both arts towards joint thematic statements of triumph - not Beckettian failure - over temporal forces via achieved form and durable images and symbols. Yeats's poem 'The Results of Thought' may serve as one example. Here the poem/text/thought 'straighten[s] out/ Ruin, wreck and wrack' to ask 'What images are these/ That turn dull-eyed away,/ Or shift time's filthy load, /Straighten ancient knees'? or 'What heads shake or nod?' (VP, 505). The implication is that poetry's images' or symbols' purpose is to answer, halt or reverse time's load, not to turn away from this. Such an artistic triumph is impossible for Beckett's Molloy; he finds that 'From things about to disappear I turn away in time' (TRIL, 12). If 'in space, man recognizes his agency and acquisitions' and 'in time man feels his dependency', as Chris Fitter argues (Fitter, 1995, 212), then Yeats's and Beckett's respective responses to past fine art and its theories, help embed these polarities so they remain germane in creative and critical texts. Yeats's late poetry may sing 'amidst uncertainty' (VP, 333-4) and give its 'last kiss to the void' as a 1929 letter puts it (CL InteLex # 5238) to complicate such polarities but the two writers' reformulations of classical art theories suggest such oppositions remain normative and formative in these writers' texts. 4. The Writers and Modern Art Theories, Contexts and Art Works How do modifications of past (fine) art theories by the two writers' more immediate predecessors or contemporaries and encounters with changing fine art forms in their more immediate contexts, shape and inform these two Irish writers' texts? If past fine art and its theories assist Yeats's art essays to link the "sister arts" (to stress their conjoint power) and assist his poetry (to conscript fine arts' images as sources of durable, transcendent symbols conquering space and time which ultimately bolster the rhetorical power of the poem/the text) whereas Beckett tends to enlist painting as a separate art (whose sources, closer to primary, involuntary, retinal images disappearing in time disrupt or weaken texts' linguistic claims to represent, symbolise, preserve or decode unstable, transient or disjunctive images), how are these ideas affirmed or adjusted as the writers encountered more modern art theories, contexts and art works? (I)The "Sister Arts" or the "Separate Arts"? Yeats's mid-to-late nineteenth century art theoretical, English context (post Pre Raphaelitism and through Aestheticism) tended to favour reformulations rather than departures from classic formulations of "sister arts" relations; Beckett's early-to-mid twentieth century milieu, tended to stress painting as an autonomous art, less dependent on literary or textual concerns as new twentieth century art works and schools evolved and emerged. The fine art "authorities" Yeats most often cites in prose, essays and letters - Walter Pater, steeped in Renaissance Old Masters and Charles Ricketts, his self-acknowledged key 'educator' in the arts who attacked Roger Fry's Post-Impressionist Exhibition (1910) in The Morning Post (16 November, 1910) alongside numerous objectors to pure form - were steeped in traditional Old Master and literary or mythological painting; he met painting theorists like Clive Bell or Roger Fry, whose Art (1914) and Vision and Design (1920) respectively orientate painting theory away from literary content towards independent, formal qualities as purified, 'significant form', but Yeats's disinterest in their theories in letters and essays, and retention of represented subjects/objects as key concern in arts' writing, runs counter to Beckett's reading in modernist theories of painting as a discipline more absorbed in itself, its own surface, its own interiority, autonomy and non-compatibility with other arts. When WBY sporadically met William Rothenstein in his London apartment or lunched in the painter's studio (1897) to engage in talk ‘rich in theories of the arts, of poetry, painting and the theatre’, this painter of The Browning Readers (1900) was also a proponent of literary paintings capturing the 'eternal' image and portraits which 'live with and in...[the] subject' - and opponent of Roger Fry's painting as 'significant form' and Cubism as 'mere mannerism'. Conversely, Beckett read Will Grohmann on Expressionism, Herbert Read's Art Now (1933); he supervised the translation of his colleague Georges Duthuit's Les Fauves (1949) before ceasing to write about painting just prior to Clement Greenberg's 'American Type Painting' (1955) enunciated allegiances between formalist art criticism and painterly abstraction as the modernist painting arena shifted from Beckett's Paris to 1950's New York.Yeats's formative art criticism emerged as the joint image-texts of Blake, Pre-Raphaelitism and aestheticism were published or collected by English art institutions. These painters/movements linked the "sister arts". As Stephen Spender notes 'the inspiration of Pre-Raphaelitism was verbal, literary, poetic' in 'subjects and scenery' (Spender, in Sambrook, 1974, 120). As T.F. Ploughman's 'The Aesthetes' (1895) averred - just as Yeats's formative art criticism emerged - 'the keynote of the aestheticism of the future was struck when the Brotherhood insisted upon the intimate relationship of one art with another'. If links between the "sister arts" is a keynote in this late nineteenth context and in Yeats's essays it remained an enduring focus; Yeats's late ‘Introduction’ (1937) still insists on recuperating this milieu in having 'all the arts draw together' to 'recover their ancient association, the painter painting what the poet has written, the musician setting the poet’s words to simple airs, that the horseman and engine driver may sing them at their work' (E & I, ix). This rubric where the arts 'draw together' in shared endeavour or equality, though, obscures an arts' hierarchy where language/poetry has primacy. In Yeats's statement poetry precedes illustrative painting and musical accompaniment; these engage in post hoc responses which, in turn, become available to poetry again. Painting does not establish its own autonomy, engage in non-representation or modern abstraction. Yeats's poem 'Under Ben Bulben' (1939), two years later, rhetorically insists: 'Poet and sculptor do the work, / Nor let the modish painter shirk /What his great forefathers did, /Bring the soul of man to God, / Make him fill the cradles right' (VP, 636-40). Traditional fine art and forefathers' aesthetics fill the new 'cradle' of the poem with real/ideal, representational images. Beckett's mid-twentieth invocation in Paris of 'la societé des peintres moderne....'l'expressionnisme, l'abstraction, le constructivisme, le néoplaticisme et leurs antonymes' in his 1948 essay, 'Peintres de 'l'Empêchement' (DISJ, 134), points to an era of changing schools of modern painting separate from literature or literary illustration in which 'the abstract draws towards itself as a semi-autonomous zone' (Liam Gillick, 2011, cited in ed. Iwona Blazwick, 2015, 60). The obstacle or 'l'Empêchement' to seeing painting is now the tool used to explain it, descriptive or analytical literature or language itself. Beckett's 'Three Dialogues' (1949) dealing with painters of informal abstraction, Tal Coat, André Masson and Bram van Velde, suggest the latter's painting present an 'absence of relation', including a lack of relation with fine art language and its explanations; an earlier note for Geer van Velde's exhibition (1938) claims the artist ‘Believes painting should mind its own business’ (DISJ, 117) which suggests, but does not specify, that painting's business may not be the same as that of literature. 'Gloss?' Beckett asks, though, in his later 'Hommage to Jack. B. Yeats' to specifically answer: 'In images of such breathless immediacy...there is... no room left, for the lenitive of comment' (149). Yeats's rhetoric in his 1939 essay of how painting may be formed by poetry and inform the poem in turn - only a saint, not poet, may be 'Stuck dumb in the simplicity of fire!' in his 1930's poem 'Vacillation' (VP, 502) - give way to Beckett's texts where paintings raise questions or induce silence to problematize these links in what he terms 'an aesthetic of inaudibilities' (DFTMW, 141). Altered theories of image-text relations are reflected in the writers' respective texts. Blake's joint image-texts, central in Yeats's late nineteenth century essays, increasingly met with favourable receptions as visionary in technique and symbolism, in his English context. Swinburne in his William Blake: A Critical Essay (1868), using Alexander Gilchrist's 1863 biography (texts known to Yeats), resuscitates Blake as 'Pictor Ignotus', as an unknown or mad painter (Swinburne, 1868, 108) to grant him his rightful place as great poet/artist; likewise Yeats advocates Blake's image-texts, displaying Blake's etchings in his room, writing essays illustrated with Blake's images and republishing his predecessor's poems. Swinburne's Blake creates 'poetic sketches' imbued with a 'fragrance of sound, a melody of colour' to cure an English malady of separate arts where 'colour and sound never mixed together in the perfect scheme of poetry'; Yeats echoes this "sister arts" phraseology claiming that style should be 'musical and full of colour' (CW4, 5). Yeats also knew Rossetti's paintings (praised in Autobiographies) and Collected Works (1886) pointing to Blake as the great symbolist whose image-texts were becoming institutionally valued, available for study in the British Museum. If past painting permits Rossetti as a poet/artist to walk backwards into tradition - he too cites the institutional or private collections preserving Blake's heritage - as a way of moving forward into the poem, this is a key tenet of Yeats's art essays and implicit procedure in his ekphrastic poems or iconic, Rossetti-type sonnets engaging with past fine art subjects or mythic narratives such as like Leda and the Swan. Aestheticism's affirmation of links between "sister' arts", convincingly demonstrated by Elizabeth Prettejohn (2007), are the innate oxygen of Yeats's Autobiographies. Oscar Wilde's New York lecture, ['The English Renaissance of Art' (1882)], delivered just before Yeats befriended the writer in the late 1880's, contended that paintings and poems, from Blake to Rossetti, created an ideal, timeless beauty by following 'the law of formal harmony' in a 'union of Hellenism, in... its calm possession of beauty, with...the intensified individualism, the passionate colour of the romantic movement' (Wilde, 1909, 109-57). Yeats's 'Four Years: 1887-1891' (1921) cover his association with Wilde and their joint obsession with Walter Pater's Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873) - significantly renamed on re-publication as The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry (1877) - whose mission is 'aesthetic' criticism focused on 'music, poetry, artistic and accomplished forms of human life' (Pater, 1873, preface). If Yeats's late theme in essays where 'all the arts draw together' recycles a truism from this formative milieu, Beckett's attack in the 1940's of Parisian ignorance of contemporary paintings in 'La Peinture' des van Velde' notes the folly of rectifying this by writing art criticism, especially art criticism dependent on Pater's texts as repository of values for thinking about modern painting. Beckett writes: 'But probably you will never know it [painting], unless you become deaf (mute) and forget your letters. And the time will come when, from your visits to the Louvre, because you will only go the Louvre, you will only have memories of time spent there: I spent 3 minutes in front of the smile of Professor Pater, looking at it/him?' (DISJ, 123) Irony undercuts 'Professor Pater' as "sister arts" theorist or guide to the Louvre as the 'only' gallery in this text to suggest a rupture in which 'deafness' to past art theoretical language, which forces painting to become a 'speaking picture', is necessary if one is to actually 'see' modern painting such s van Velde's. This rupture in "sister arts" theory, in image-text relations is echoed in texts on painting/the arts Beckett knew and read. Beckett read and quoted Franz Marc's Aphorisms and admired his paintings in Germany (1937). Marc's contention that modern painting in a 'transitional period without art and religion' had outfaced a suffocating 'world' where 'Every word is leased or invested' by turning to 'new fields...untrodden, unspoken' (Marc cited in Harrison and Wood, 1992, 93 & 159). Painting and 'silence' (the 'unspoken') are linked, as in Beckett's art essays. Bram van Velde's idea that paintings are ‘a proclamation/ that’s denied/as soon as/ it’s made’ - 'I paint to kill off the word' (van Velde cited in Charles Juliet, 2009, 46-48 & 110) align with a position in Beckett's essays on painting. Duthuit's Les Fauves (1949) turns 'from the house of Usher Winckelmann' because non-literary painting now necessitates 'an eternity of departures' for texts facing paintings where narratives have disintegrated. Likewise, Beckett's essay, 'La Peinture', suggests paintings avoid petrifaction by entering a temporal, multiple, flux where language is stonily silent. The essay states: 'Here everything moves, swims, flees, returns, gets undone, redone. Everything ceases, ceaselessly. This looks like the insurrection of molecules, the inside of a stone before it disintegrates. Here is literature' (DISJ, 128). The assertion is ironic, in that literature which follows painting into the 'inside' of a stony silence has approached its own 'disintegration', negation or cessation. An image-text alliance, crucial in Yeats's context, is severed. Beckett's painted image (in Jack B. Yeats) with its 'breathless immediacy' which 'cannot be qualified in any other light' is divorced from language, as in the theatre of Breathe [written in 1969] where a stage 'littered with miscellaneous rubbish' is seen in 'silence', accompanied by 'amplified breathe' over thirty five seconds (CDW, 371) until the light dies. Praxis dovetails with theory. Painting kills the word, but without its oxygen its form approaches a visual installation of 'ruins'. For an ekphrastic poet, or literary follower of Yeats and Horace, like Louis MacNeice, this is the moment 'When books have all seized up like books in the graveyard /And reading and even speaking have been replaced / By other, less difficult media' in a tasteless world where 'wingless birds' cannot fly. For the visual artist/theorist Ad Reinhardt, who drew a diagrammatic tree of 'How to Look At Modern Art in America' (1946), contemporaneous with Beckett's essay, this is the moment of liberation, where modern, abstraction flowers in leaves but dead, severed branches, weighed down by past 'illustration' and 'subject matter' (nudes, landscapes, still lifes) hang over a graveyard where the 'Encyclopaedia Britannica' is buried. Painters and their theoretical orientations in the two writers' circle of family and friends highlight this split between sponsorship of the "sister arts" and the "separate arts" as crucial in their milieus. Claims linking literary texts and illustrative painting were virtually programmed into the Yeats's family DNA. In John Butler Yeats's studio painter and poet-son discussed Shakespeare and Keats; their subsequent letters condemn Cubism and abstraction as remote from life and literature. Yeats's father produced illustrative, literary paintings before portraits; his Self-Portrait at Eighty, intended as definitive, puts paints at his hands and places books around his head. After the poet's infancy in the hinterland of The Germ (1850), the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood’s journal subtitled ‘Monthly Thoughts in Literature, Poetry and Art’, and youthful awareness of a Pre-Raphaelite circle of literary painters in his father's London home, he sustained a poetry/illustration tandem with his brother Jack B. Yeats, from joint image-texts in The Vegetarian (1888) to Cuala Broadsheets, where poems sat alongside regency style drawings. Jack Yeats, during the brothers' closest working association up to the 1930's, illustrated poetry in three series of Broadsheets or Broadsides (1902-3; 1908-15; 1936-7) to primarily create a 'literary universe' (McGuiness, 1992) before producing more modernist paintings in the 1930's when Beckett encountered the art. W.B. Yeats's sister Elizabeth illustrated the poetry in embroidery; both sisters ran Cuala Press to publish illustrated posters and ballads, before the poet's daughter Anne Yeats, designed covers for some eighteen Irish language books (1950-2009). Painters in Beckett's circle pressured these links between the "sister arts". Beckett's long-term friendships with Jack Yeats, 1930-57, Bram van Velde, 1937-81, and Avigdor Arikha, 1956-89, were extended by contacts with the Dutch painter Geer van Velde (met in Paris 1937-8), Marcel Duchamp (a 1930's chess playing companion), Henry Hayden (met during the war) and post-war contacts with Giacometti and Joan Mitchell. These artists made "sister arts" thinking problematic in the wake of Paul Valery's 'apology' for even 'talking about painting' (Valery cited in Aspley, Cowling & Sharatt, 2000, 47). Having engaged in literary illustration, and been voluble about the function of painting in the period when the two Yeats brothers were more closely associated (from the 1880's to the 1920's), Jack Yeats distrusted theorising painting by the 1930's when Beckett befriended and sponsored the paintings. When Roger Fry theorized painting as borrowing past language, Jack Yeats interjected - 'Cezanne, Cezanne, Cezanne, sez you' (JY cited in Arnold, 1998, 270). In Beckett's DFTMW, he satirizes its own procedure of name dropping painters to make the text self-important: 'Our excuse must be that we were once upon a time inclined to fancy ourself as the Cézanne, shall we say, of the printed page...we live and learn' (DFMW, 178). Claiming 'Sligo was my school and the sky above', Jack Yeats produced some 10,000 sketches drawn directly from life in 240 portable sketchbooks (1886-1953) as literary painting increasingly gave way to paintings based on direct perception, imagination and permeated by semi-abstraction. André Masson, discussed in Beckett's 'Three Dialogues', created surrealist sand pictures (1926-7), throwing sand at adhesive on canvas and automatic drawings resisting verbal readings. When W.B. Yeats's A Vision conscripts sand drawings and automatic writing, it is to reshape such accidents into art history just as 'every accidental crack or dent' in 'Lapis Lazuli', in the sculpture, may be read and re-organized into an iconic sonnet. Bram van Velde, Beckett's 'great familiar in work and the impossibility of work', vigilance against language to which he was allergic, was extreme. The painter maintained he could 'never trust to words', that 'there have been too many words already', that 'to see is to be without prior knowledge', that 'in my work, I live my silence', that, as a painter, he was 'never able to speak. Everything I had to say went into my painting'; he averred: 'I was held prisoner by my eye' (van Velde [conversations 1973-6] cited in Juliet, 2009, 104-146). Painting assists an episteme of non-relations between the arts and between the arts and reality: 'It is new', Beckett stated of Bram van Velde's painting (1949) 'because it is the first to repudiate relation in all its forms' (SBL2, introduction, xcii). The Beckettian theme/idea that language must approach seeing and silence - not knowledge and speech - is instantiated in the perspectives of painters he was often drawn to. The two writers' publishing contexts reinforce this rift between the "sister arts" and "separate arts". Some two hundred and fifty of Yeats's poems were published in magazines (1887-1900), largely endorsing "sisterly" links between interpretative texts, poems, and illustrative paintings, before collection in books (Grossman, 1969, 5-8). Yeats's 'Under Ben Bulben's' insisting that 'Calvert and Wilson, Blake and Claude /prepared a rest for the people of God / Palmer's phrase' (VP, 639-40) summarizes a normative function or trajectory in these late nineteenth century English art journals where he was published. The Cuala Press cycles of poster poems/images meant that, as Austin Clarke noted, by the late 1930’s, Yeats's ‘best known lyrics, nicely hand-printed and illustrated, met one’s eye in their small frames in the drawing-room of every house with any pretensions to good taste’. Beckett's idea of the two arts' failures and essential quest to capture a 'vanished object' more readily accommodates and audits a French arts' milieu tending to stress 'visual severance' or 'Bergsonian impressionism' in which the object's 'vital milieu' was one where 'life itself supersedes art' and visual art had primacy/more immediacy in quests/failures to see life or in providing a model for literature whose function, an increasingly Francophile Pound, now claimed was 'to strengthen the perceptual faculties and free them from encumbrance' and their tie with setting 'moods...ideas...conventions' (Sherry & Pound cited in Sherry, 1993, 104-5). Beckett's French publication channels in the 1930's question or rupture links which this English fin de siècle milieu instantiate. Early twentieth century Paris exhibitions, placing paintings outside literary, explanatory contexts and galleries, led George Moore to claim the 'real French academy of the arts' was 'the cafe' (Moore, 1901, 74) so Beckett's observation (1969) that his friend Henri Hayden's painting Notre-Dame de Paris is to be found in the Aux Iles Marquises restaurant is unexceptional even when backdated (SBL4, 152-3). By the time Beckett shared publication with W.B. Yeats in 1930's England in The Criterion (1921-39) its editor, T.S. Eliot, was insisting it remain 'simple and severe in appearance, without illustration' as a 'reaction against romanticism' (Eliot cited in Harding, 2002, 9-10 & 26). Paris-based transition as a key Beckett outlet gave painting parity with texts, its imagist legacies and 'stylistic preference for the image' suggesting the imagination/mind is primarily visual and non-verbal, the image its 'primary pigment' as Dugald McMillan notes (McMillan, 1975, 123). transition's platform for expressionist, surrealist and Dadaist painters and writers included the publication of the 'Poetry is Vertical' manifesto, signed by Beckett and Hans Arp, which turned against 'the renewal of the classical ideal' to favour the image as 'hallucinatory irruption' (McMillan, 1975, 66 & 139). W.B.Yeats's essays on art and poetry assume such a visual 'irruption' requires textual control. Yeats's poem, 'Acre of Grass' (1938), asserts 'picture and book remain' but the Quattrocento’s ‘greater dream’ is preserved in the nineteenth century when the poem claims their joint power: Grant me an old man’s frenzy,Myself must I remakeTill I am Timon and LearOr that William BlakeWho beat upon the wallTill truth obeyed his call.A mind Michael Angelo knewThat can pierce the clouds,Or inspired by frenzyShake the dead in their shrouds;Forgotten else by mankind,An old man’s eagle mind. (VP, 575-6) If the painter's claim in Timon of Athens - a text Yeats is familiar with in his prose - is that ‘A thousand moral paintings I can show / That shall demonstrate these quick blows of Fortune’s / More pregnantly than words’ is akin to da Vinci's, Yeats adjusts this emphasis. Michelangelo's painting's with its perceptual, physical power, is surpassed by the language of the text which is the real locus of meta-physical power. The text draws visionary 'power' from a perceptual "sister art" to confers this on poet/poem which have the perceptual capacity to 'pierce' the clouds' and intellectual faculty or 'eagle mind' to metaphorically 'shake the dead in their shrouds'. Poetry taps seen and unseen. Conversely, Beckett's Molloy, as one of a 'gallery of moribunds', will 'hold aloof from those who pride themselves on their eagle gaze' to live amidst 'doubt and darkness'; inhabiting a Fauvist dawn turning 'a horrible colour' he has 'just enough brain intact to allow you to exalt! And to dread death like regeneration' (TRIL, 112-129). The language of power which links both arts and permits them to represent each other and reality in Yeats's poem has become a lexicon of irony, minimal claims, of seeing as a marker of perceptual survival and doubt, not of intellectual capacity/word-power. (ii) The Arts: Symbols of Eternal Truths or Images of Finitude and Doubt? Yeats's 'A Symbolic Artist and the Coming of Symbolic Art' claims that in texts and paintings 'pattern and rhythm are the roads to open symbolism, and the arts have already become full of pattern and rhythm' (MEM, 283). Yeats links this symbolism with transcendence. 'Symbolism in Painting' notes painting and poetry are 'part of the divine essence' (E & I, 148-9) and 'divine' symbols become a common denominator and symptom of both arts' need to recover lost religious faith. 'Four Years' (1921) states:I am very religious and deprived by Huxley and Tyndall, whom I detested, of the simple-minded religion of my childhood, I had made a new religion, almost an infallible church of poetic tradition, of a fardel of stories, and of personages, and of emotions, inseparable from their first expression, passed on from generation to generation by poets and painters with some help from philosophers and theologians. I wished for a world where I could discover this tradition perpetually...’ (CW3, 115) The idea that relating two images together produces a transcendent symbol is rejected in Beckett's review (1936) of Jack Yeats's novel The Amaranthers: 'There is no symbol. The cream horse that carries Gilfoyle, and the cream coach that carries Gilfoyle are related, not by a rule of three, as two values to a third, but directly, as stages of an image' (DISJ, 90). Stages of an image - not two images which add up to produce a meaningful symbol as a trinity - block routes to the arts' separate or joint delivery of transcendent meaning. Watt states: ‘No symbols where none intended’ (Watt, 223); it denies Yeats’ favourite word purchase. The word, with its compounds, occurs over a thousand times in Yeats's texts to build bridges between the arts in essays on ‘symbolism’ in poetry and painting. Yeats's idea that poetry, calling on fine art, delivers transcendent symbolism contrasts with Beckett's use of the image as marker of finitude and of doubtful, non-relations between the arts. In Yeats's discursive prose in A Vision classical sculptors and Renaissance painters produce enduring symbols. In poetry, such as 'Her Courage' (1917), he claims: 'I have no speech but symbol' (VP, 565-6), before invoking Pater's Giorgione as one of their creators. In one 'vision notebook' (1918) Yeats draws birds as the product of visionary trances to symbolise himself, Maude Gonne, Iseult Gonne and his wife as in illuminated, Gospel manuscripts where birds feature as divine messengers; he recollects his father's encounter with Rossetti, when the painter pointed to a chaffinch claiming that it was his ‘wife’s soul’ to link birds and prophecy, omen and symbol as in Pre-Raphaelite symbolism (VP1, 210 & 450). Beckett's drama '....but the clouds....' borrows a title from Yeats's 'The Tower' (1927), for a death-facing poem where 'The death of friends, or death of every brilliant eye / That made a catch in the breath - Seem but clouds in the sky / When the horizon fades, /And a bird's sleepy cry/ Among the deepening shades (VP, 416). The symbolic 'bird's cry', a still a Yeatsian trace on a fading horizon, yields in Beckett's play to the image of horizonless, formless changing clouds, surrounded by ellipsis or silence which obliterates the bird's cry. When Beckett worked in post-war France with the Red Cross, key perennial symbol in Rosicrucian/Golden Dawn rituals noted in Yeats's Autobiographies, his poem 'Morte de A.D.' for a Red Cross doctor, notes 'My friend dead yesterday the brilliant eye'(CP, 116), but the ur-text's transcendence is swamped or negated amidst the night of 'black sins' and European carnage. The bird's eternal cry as audio-visual symbol from Romantic poetry and Pre-Raphaelite art is now a 'centre' that cannot visually hold. Yeats's poetry dealing with death (often as eternal recurrence where the dead return in the poem) is underpinned in art essays where fine art's preserving, 'porcelain jars' are an ideal traditional, symbol of the durable poem; Beckett's 'wombtomb' in his plays, where one is born instantly subject to death, is visually foregrounded by imaging living humans in decaying burial urns surrounded by dark spaces on stages reminiscent of Dutch spot-lit or nocturnal paintings he admired. Winged angels, central in western painting, as divine messengers of 'annunciation' or death support Yeats's tendency to link both arts with the transcendent. Images of fallen angels in retreat direct Beckett's texts to atheistic doubt. In Yeats's essay on Blake's illustrations of Divine Comedy (Beckett owned Botticelli's illustration of Dante's hell), the painter's angels, present in mystical paintings Yeats knew well by Puvis de Chevannes or George Russell, are available to discursive text. 'A Cradle Song' (1890) notes: 'The angels are stooping / Above your bed' while 'God's laughing in Heaven / To see you so good' (VP, 118); Jack Yeats illustrated the poem in a Christmas card. From H.G Fell’s front cover for Poems (1895), which left Yeats unable to ‘part from it...not reading it but looking at the outside and turning it over and over’, even though he came to ‘hate this expressionless angel’ four years later (CL2, 353-4), to Althea Gyles's designs for Poems (1899), by an artist of ‘sombre, mystical, and weird imaginative power’, transcendent symbolist paintings are embedded in Yeats's texts/milieu. Yeats visited Florence's Duomo (1907) where an angelic chorus by Vasari and Zuccari circle the dome alongside Isaiah, a prophet from Blake's The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, and he noted the secular tourist 'hum' as disturbance in the church. His 'Vacillation' (1932) sustains an angelic allegory, unusual in an increasingly secular 1930's context: The Soul: Seek out reality, leave things that seem.The Heart: What be a singer born and lack a theme?The Soul: Isaiah's Coal, what more can man desire?The Heart: Struck dumb in the simplicity of fire!The Soul: Look on that fire, salvation walks within.The Heart: What theme had Homer but original sin? (VP, 499-503). Facing death, the poem requisitions an iconographic angel (who brings a burning coal to the prophet Isaiah so that the people can 'see' and 'tell' of the vision) and literary Homer (with his 'unchristened heart'). Christian sacred image and Greek myth of 'the fall' compete in a dialectic but their joint offer of 'salvation' is not denied by the 'soul' so that, despite tensions, the two arts are unified so that body and mind come 'open eyed and laughing to the tomb'. Beckett's coeval poem 'Spring Song' [written 1932] 'tread[s] softly' among 'bloated angels' as prostitutes and 'angels [which] sizzle from her scabs'; when they face a death drive ('Thanatos') then if 'angels are on foot let them slink home' (CP, 45-7). The sacred image is in visual retreat. Beckett repeatedly visited Jack Yeats's Dublin studio in the 1930's to claim he found a 'light' there; he dismissed a single meeting with WBY (c. 1932-4) to subsequently claim that the poet 'had went after all the wrong things in Irish life' and that he 'never read much Yeats. Never read much anything' so, perhaps, such divergences over transcendent symbols count. This is disingenuous for it was Yeats's 'Vacillation' Beckett cited just after publication as evidence of a modern poet facing a crisis in which the 'object' has broken down so that 'at the centre there is no theme... And without a theme there can be no poem, as witness the exclamation of Mr Yeats's 'fanatic heart': 'What be a singer born and lack a theme!' (DISJ, 71) Given Yeats's 1930's poetry cast more doubt on transcendent symbols, invoking a Beckettian vocabulary of the 'void' and 'nothingness', and that Beckett subsequently 'regularly' re-read Yeats's poems with 'intense absorption' in the 1960's to claim (December 1971) that 'Only a few, Yeats, Goethe, who lived a long time could go on to [produce valid art which not a 'sin against speechlessness' by]... recourse to known forms and fictions' (Beckett cited in Atik, 2001, 95), a rejection of Yeats's early alliance of painting/text in the interest of angelic transcendence may be posited. For Beckett, for whom 'original sin' is barely redeemable by art in his study of Proust, a Florence trip (1927), two years before Yeats revisited Italy, saw him visit the Uffizi Gallery. He sought out Biblical paintings of humanity abandoned by angels. He focused on Santa Maria Novella's Deluge or Flood and Water's Subsiding (1447-48) by Paolo Uccello depicting a drowned, windblown landscape, a potential prototype of the Endgame scenario; he noted Ghirlandaio's Massacre of the Innocents (c. 1485-90) killed by apocalyptic horsemen which Vasari claimed as the best in this fresco cycle, and Titian's The Penitent Magdalen (c. 1533), a bare-breasted fallen woman (Knowlson, 1996, 74-5). For Yeats, Titian is the admired painter of Ariosto (1508-10) whose Orlando Furioso (1516) was an epic romance in search of a virginal Angelica. This conscription of fine art's symbolic, virginal angel is invalidated in Beckett's DFTMW [written 1932] where amidst 'shades of the dead...in a Limbo purged of desire', the narrator inhabits an 'obscurity, thronged with grey angels' (44). Neither text (Vasari in his 'host's library') nor painting (van Ryn who painted 'the cute little Saint Matthew angel') countermand the Biblical, textual fiat by 'the Pauline God': 'cupio dissolvi' (76 & 138). The 'disintegrating' human tissue lurking 'behind the pictorial pretext threatening to invade pigment and oscuro' lead Belacqua to conclude 'the impression that Aesthetics were a branch of philosophy' is utterly mistaken (47). 'My good angel', Pozzo says of the hapless Lucky 'is killing me' as both wait for the absent Godot (CDW, 34). Fine art's angels and ladders suggest visual oppositions between divine symbols and images of doubt/reality in both writers' texts. Edward Burne-Jones's The Golden Stairs (1880), for which Yeats's associates May Morris and Florence Farr modelled, is noted in A Vision where 'those pure faces crowded....upon the golden stair' indicate a phase of art history when 'thought is disappearing in image' (CW13, 57-8). 'The Moods' (1895) suggest 'angels of more modern day ascending or descending upon their shining ladder' still must 'discover' a 'divine love in sexual passion 'in a fusion of real and ideal made available to literature (E & I, 195). Burne-Jones's painting, donated to London's Tate Gallery (1924) alongside nearly ninety works by the artist (1933) permitted the Tate's Director, Yeats's friend Rothenstein, to term this a 'national possession' whose 'spiritual essence' would return; the British Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin, the painter's nephew, at a Centenary Exhibition (1933) claimed these paintings 'kept open the magic casements of fairy land', that supra-reality in Yeats's poems. In Beckett's Watt, however, coal as a lifeless husk and 'existence off the ladder', amidst a situation where the ladder may even have been 'taken away', are key images; they exist alongside a modern, abstract painting whose meaning cannot be decoded (Watt, 36). Texts for Nothing offer 'all the old noes, dangling in the dark and swaying like a smoking ladder, yes, a new no, that none says twice, whose drop will fall and let me down, shadow and babble, to an absence, less vain than inexistence' (CSP, 147). This ladder's noose descends into 'shadow' or 'absence'; it ascends out of a bunker where a painting faces the walls in Endgame to offer a view of a drowned world. Even in Yeats's bleak 1930's 'The Circus Animals Desertion' the 'ladder' which 'start[s] in the foul rag and bone shop of the heart' still ascends, via 'masterful images', to a 'masterful heaven' on the poem's 'painted stage'. Beckett knew Paul Klee's art and the painter's Angelus Novus led the German-Jewish art historian Will Grohmann whom he met, to later suggest Klee's Unfinished Angel or Forgetful Angel no longer support 'an ascending hierarchical order' because 'the differences between men and angels are not great' (Grohmann 1987, 41). Byzantine art in Yeats's poems pits the 'visible and mortal and what will outlast the body and its time' against each other to insist on 'the importance of soul, the ineffable'; Beckett's attempt to 'eff the ineffable' turns sacred, fine art against Oscar Wilde's supposition that both arts, informed by 'the beauty and necessity for the incarnation of God into man [exist] to help us grasp at the skirts of the infinite'. The angel in sixteenth century sculptures by Adam Kraft (1937) is Beckett's 'express messenger from Irish Hospitals Trust' who has 'written on a surface of doom' (GD, 3 March 1937). Between Yeats's painted angels as symbols and Beckett's images, Walter Benjamin's essay 'Thesis on the Philosophy of History' (written in 1940 after Yeats's death) had read Klee's Angelus Novus as the 'angel of history' expelled from 'translunar paradise' and past religious symbols into contemporary historical 'catastrophe' and 'ruins': This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe that keeps piling ruin upon ruin and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress. (Benjamin, 1968, 257-8)Unlike the secure provenance and providence which saw Yeats's symbolist painting by Burne-Jones become a 'national treasure' ratifying access to 'fairyland', Klee's drawing became part of a European narrative Beckett witnessed unfold in 1930's Germany and wartime France, where painting's survival was tenuous. Paintings as temporal artefacts, prescribed, hidden, dispersed and barely surviving are a recurring concern in Beckett's 'German Diaries'. Klee's watercolour, purchased by Munich-based, Jewish writer Gerschom Scholem, was sold to Walter Benjamin (1921); it was rescued after his suicide by George Bataille, whose writing Beckett knew, hidden during German occupation in Paris's Bibilothèque National, obtained by Theodor Adorno whom Beckett met, and lodged in the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, separated from Klee's angel drawings in Berne, where Beckett viewed Klee's work. Beckett visited Berne for Bram van Velde's exhibition (1958), relieved at not having to discuss Chagall, quintessential painter of Biblical angels, and noting 'forced visits to private collections, too many Klees'; he was 'tired with convivialities and Paul Klees' (SBL3, 147-149). In the interim, his stories submitted for publication (1947) were rejected by the reader for the French, Catholic, conservative publisher Le Seuil, adjudged to have left the 'temptations of angelism' for a 'tortuous tragic art...expressed by filth'. Earlier, Beckett's study of Proust noted that 'the only Paradise, that is not the dream of a madman, [is] the Paradise that has been lost'. This turn from deploying fine art's content as eternal symbol to using its finitude as fabricated or fallen object/image is a tendency in fine art texts known to both writers. Yeats's Pater in 'The School of Giorgioni' notes recent 'scientific criticism' has reassigned attributions to minor painters from 'the school of Giorgioni' but he remains consoled by the survival of the Giorgionesque to note one painting has become the 'subject of a [Rossetti] sonnet', just as Yeats re-uses the painter in 'Her Courage' to evoke Maude Gonne and a 'painter's throng'. Pater's Giorgioni essay claims these 'painted poems' rescue 'exquisite pauses in time, in which arrested thus, we seem to be spectators of all the fullness of things for ever'; they confirm 'the desire to perpetuate...to suspend it [Venetian life] in every particular...for ever? - a desire how bewildering with the question whether there be indeed any place wherein these desirable moments take permanent refuge. Well! In the school of Giorgione you...lie in receptive humour thus for ever, and the satisfying moment is assured' (Pater, 1893, 522-38). No such assurance of an eternally relevant message or unchanging context is guaranteed to painting of classical, divine, mythic or Byzantine painting in Duthuit's correspondence with Beckett or Les Fauves. Les Fauves registers a crisis in a vocabulary of the 'void' and 'abyss', which echoes sporadically in the late 1930's Yeats lexicon, but which becomes amplified in Beckett's mid-century art criticism and emergent French existentialism. Yeats's late attack on the 'safety in derision' in the 'increasing night' still wishes the poem to open on 'apparitions' of 'mystery and fright' (VP, 624); it retains the armature of a transcendent lexicon which James Elkins notes being dismantled by twentieth art theory where terms like 'grace' or 'beauty' 'are hardly ever heard' or heard ironically (Elkins, 1998, 214). Duthuit's fine art and texts register this shift in a text Beckett knew intimately: He [Man] no longer has the slightest desire to go back to these Venuses and Apollos who, with their issue of degenerates... [inhabit] an untrembling eternity which is not of this world, nor of that world, nor of any other world. These marvellous marionettes of the divine commedia dell'arte quickly return to the limbo from which, by a feat of scientific legerdemain, they had supposedly been extricated for good and all. Our stranger to himself has simply found out that if these unequalled paintings and statues deny him the right to move, it's up to him to take it... whether it be... the wharf for passengers to Cytherea...or Jacob's ladder whose summit reaches to heaven. And so he crosses himself and turns away from the house of Usher Winckelmann...There he is alone, very much alone, but fauvism will be his life raft..."...It is possible to sacrifice a complete representation and retain only a line, sufficient to render the object."... these words... carry us back once more to Byzantium, and do not to lock us within the walls of the eternal city, but to throw open its gates...in an eternity of departures...' (80-81). This 'eternity of departures' jettisons fine arts' religious symbolism and Byzantine beliefs topermit the Fauves to only retain its art techniques, its flat areas of colour. Yeats's Byzantineart wishes to retain both the art, 'the artifice', and 'the artifice of eternity', the 'monumentsof unageing intellect'. Beckett's essay 'La Peinture' echoes Duthuit's claims so that paintings are demoted from Yeatsian, eternal symbols to ‘incidental proof of the great positive....time that carts away’ (DISJ, 130). A Beckett letter (1937) debunks paintings' status as being an eternal symbol:...the pictures in the Zwinger are vilely hung and lit... The Vermeer Kupplerin, cowering between a Rembrandt old man and a Bol philosopher and beneath something enormous and dirty by I think Eeckhout, was literally invisible...The Giorgione is in a mess, the whole left leg destroyed by some damn 19th century restorer in the service of a taste offended by the putto with the bird, now painted over with senseless landscape. I saw the X-Ray photograph, which however doesn't show very much. (SBL1, 478) The 'divine' in Giorgioni struggles to survive as one shifts from painting's transcendent subject (in Pater/Yeats) to its finite, physical existence as object subject to insecure provenance/restoration and open to new narratives (Duthuit/Beckett). These preoccupations, informing Beckett's fine art correspondence with MacGreevy and 'German Diaries', become grist to the mill in his unpublished and published dialogues with Duthuit. In 1921 Yeats, having read Hall Caine's Life of Rossetti, abandoned a mooted title of ‘Memory Harbour’ (after his brother Jack’s watercolour) for Autobiographies but kept a section entitled ‘Reveries Over Childhood and Youth’; but he retained a transcendent word applied to Pre-Raphaelitism, a title Rossetti used in his chalk drawing Reverie (1868). Having visited Ida Bienhert’s house in Dresden (1937) with its ‘2 Mondrian and a Kandinsky' Beckett sarcastically noted their 'organics aid her meditations, if they do not go with the furniture’ (GD, 7 February 1937). These shifts from religious reverie to secular doubt, mirrored in fine art thinking and the wider intellectual milieu, inform the writers' textual engagements. The shift in which the human figure or landscape in fine art is a subject reflecting divine inspiration or beauty (as in Yeats's Greek sculpture or Pre-Raphaelitism) to one where the human figure is in a 'mess' amidst a 'senseless landscape' (as in Beckett's Giorgioni) permeates their discursive prose and poems or novels. Yeats's Byzantine poem envisages humanity/the poet still inhabiting the world of Judeo-Biblical prophets as Greek sages standing in the holy fire of mosaics and fine art; Beckett's Murphy finds Miss Carridge's much vaunted 'Doric pelvis' as illusory as her belief in 'the immortal soul' (MU, 83). Beckett's 'German Diaries' suggest that after Caspar David Friedrich the 'only kind of romantic still tolerable [is] the bémolisé' [the minor key] (GD, 14 February 1937), a residue of the sublime just as First Love notes cemetery sculptures such as 'Groves, grottoes, artificial lakes with swans, offer consolation to the inconsolable' (Beckett cited in Nixon, 2011, 115). The consolations of Yeats's 'wild swans', sculptural, mythic Leda or commemorative monument are problematic. 'Three Dialogues' engage with the ruins of Renaissance paintings, where symbols are severed from images and images severed from beliefs just as Duthuit's Les Fauves attacks agreed ideals of the semi-divine in Greek and Renaissance traditions as a 'fake narrative of infallibility' or 'phantasmagoric unity': it spurns aesthetics based on beauty, truth, unity, or mimesis found in Balzac or Canaletto celebrated by Yeats; art is now based on doubt and separation from 'antique débris' and fake 'great records of dead civilisations' in which artists become 'hired wreckers...of our Parthenon' which Yeats's poems like 'The Tower' condemn as iconoclasm. (iii) The Arts: Representations of the Real/Ideal or Mis-Representations as Illusion/Failure? Paintings, Yeats contends, offer moments when 'the visible world' may 'completely vanish' and the 'world summoned up by the symbol take its place’ (CW3, 162). Whilst Yeats rails against realism, admired paintings which perform this function are seldom divorced from traditional perspectives and connections to the "real". 'The Happiest of the Poets' (1902) links Rossetti's paintings' and their 'cry of the flesh' with William Morris's poetry as the 'story' of 'the happiness that is always half of the body' (E & I, 53-6). Painting and literature fuse real and ideal just as in Burne-Jones's well-publicised testimony at the 'Whistler-Ruskin Trial' (1878) against Whistler's painterly abstraction he also cited Titian's painting (favoured by Yeats) as an 'arrangement of flesh and blood' to affirm Pre-Raphaelitism's passionate depictions of real and ideal, imaginary people (Burne-Jones cited in Prettejohn, 2007, 188). Yeats's letters to his father link ‘imitation in poetry’ and painting (1916) to suggest their rhythms and lines replicate patterns existent in nature/reality: these create 'natural' not 'abstract' symbols because 'Rhythm implies a living body a breast to rise & fall or limbs that dance while the Abstract [is] incompatible with life' (Yeats cited in Fletcher, 1987, 174). Just as Yeats's father (1916) claimed in a letter to his son that Michelangelo 'beat the ancients because of the palpitating quality of his marble flesh' (JBY, 1944, 217) so the poet's portraits assume both arts' traditional methods transparently capture a real/ideal reality. ‘I have tried for more self-portraiture.... to make my work convincing with a speech so natural and dramatic that the hearer would feel the presence of a man thinking and feeling’, WBY writes of his texts (LET, 583). The two sides of the symbol, mimetic/human and imagined/divine, are envisaged as "natural", inseparable; the tendency is to assume that skills in fine art, using lines and perspective, replicate the way nature or people embody such patterns, and are perceived to via "natural" language and transparent "perspective". As El Lissitsky's 'A and Pangeometry' (1925) notes, Renaissance painting's perspective became so naturalised it was commonly assumed that its 'perspective representation of space is unequivocal and obvious', as much an innately natural, as a constructed, way of seeing (Lissitsky cited in Harrison and Wood, 1992, 318). When Yeats states that he 'can imagine an Aran Islander who had strayed into the Luxembourg Gallery turning bewildered from Impressionist or Post-Impressionist, but lingering at Moreau's Jason' he comes close to this idea that realist and symbolist paintings are natural to the way the world actually is both seen and represented (CW3, 248). The mimetic in fine art traditions, as much natural as constructed, is therefore closer to a better way of seeing and constructing the real/ideal in painting or text than any drift towards abstraction or the non-representational which loosens links with life or reality. Conversely Duthuit's Les Fauves resists stable perspective (hymned by Alberti) as an artificial, historically inherited, art technique producing the illusory, not the retinal and "seen". The Sistine Chapel painting is 'fake relief'; Renaissance painting's cherubims are illusory triumphs over space, a conjuring trick by 'playboys' offered by 'a few dauntless brush-strokes'. Mimesis has ‘shackled space bowed beneath the axe of time’ to create its fake ‘ideal world’ (Duthuit, 1950, 78-81). This relativist idea of perspective as a construct, even a faked construct, informs Beckett's 'Three Dialogues'; it contends Renaissance painters, surveying ‘the world with the eyes of building contractors’, have left realism weary of ‘doing a little better the same old thing’ on a ‘tired’ or ‘same old road’ (DISJ, 139). For Beckett, Mantegna's paintings' mastery of perspective (often linked with Brunelleschi's building/surveying achievements) makes it 'hard not to go and hang yourself'. The black joke is against painting as surveying, traditionally carried out by 'rope-stretchers' using a standard length rope (J.F. Paulson cited in Ingoldby, 2007, 159). Yeats's Nobel Prize speech in ‘The Bounty of Sweden' (1925) praises Ingres as one of the ‘Administrators of tradition’ who seem ‘to copy everything, but in reality copy nothing' in 'a method as adaptable as that box of Renaissance bricks’. If there is a gap between the 'seen' and the 'represented' in visual art, traditional mimetic devices bridging that gap to permit each artist to create an ideal is being celebrated. For Beckett copying reality in ‘tiling, flagstones rather, black and white, with long Mantegna-style foreshortenings, that would draw moans from you’ is just an admirably skilful hoax. Painting's realism, sometimes theoretically attacked but implicitly present in Yeats's assumptions and in traditions he favours, assists symbolism but is denied purchase by Beckett as 'tired' or illusory. These polarised ideas of painting as a powerful, representative regime capturing the ideal/real or as a failure to depict the subject or 'being' which eludes arbitrary representative methods or distortions, I suggest, crucially impacts on the two writers' creative praxis when it comes to depicting national regimes and people, landscapes and objects. (iv) The Arts: Traditional Theories and Paintings or Modern Theories and Paintings? If Yeats conscripts traditional fine art/painting, so that the text may present itself as absorbing and inflecting past, solid values to create new or unified poems or art essays (by acknowledging or eliding visual debts), Beckett enlists new fine art/painting to permit painting and text/poem to present itself as rupturing past values to critique or cast doubt on the past/tradition as enduring, authentic repository of unchanging values. Yeats's essays, from the 1890's, hymn nineteenth century English paintings entering the mainstream; these precede 1930's negative assessments of transient, contemporary schools of modern painting, post Pre-Raphaelitism and Impressionism, which succeed each other with bewildering rapidity. 'No school of painting outlasts its founders', Yeats laments (CW3, 243), implicating tradition and durability as criterion which befit his own ageing. Beckett's vitriolic essays and 'Three Dialogues' lament how the appreciation of past art of the academy/the Louvre has abetted public ignorance of Bram van Velde's modern painting which has unshackled allegiance to past realist and symbolist traditions. Yeats's aesthetic is one where fine art is tested by time so that modernist painting is found wanting in durability. Beckett's modern painting tends to be sold short by those using tradition and durability as exclusive or fixed yardsticks inadequate to new, less permanent, modern ways of seeing. These differing conscriptions of traditional and modern paintings/theories create differing aesthetics and values in the two writers' texts. When Yeats wrote the 'Municipal Gallery', as paean to traditional Irish portraiture, his accompanying banquet speech promised he would turn to the modern. ‘The next time I go [to the gallery]. I shall stand once more in veneration before the work of the great Frenchmen.... – In those rooms...I saw Ireland in spiritual freedom, and the Corots, the Rodins, the Rousseaus were the visiting gods’, Yeats stated. If modern French paintings were absent from the gallery (when the poem was written), the promise to revisit them, positively, was not kept. Applying literary tradition to painting, Yeats's late essays sideline Manet (and T.S. Eliot) in the canon to downgrade 'originality' of style as sole yardstick - an important yardstick in modernist art theory until the mid-twentieth century; his OBMV ‘introduction’ links Manet and Eliot to critique grey, monotonous, heterogeneous realism devoid of ideals. When Beckett claims Jack Yeats's paintings 'were wonderful. He used to say that he was completely impervious to influence. I think he thought he was the only painter. He said all the painting must have some 'ginger of life' in it...' he sidelines dead 'antiquarian' Irish poetry and traditions, to sponsor the imperative to 'make it new' as a touchstone painting has produced for fine art and text. Given Beckett's intolerance of derivative literary writing, he is remarkably averse to detecting potential debts to tradition or painterly influences like Kokoschka, with whom Jack Yeats corresponded, in these paintings 'not to be qualified in any other light'. Given Yeats's suspicion of claims for modern styles of originality in literature, he is remarkably loath to place Manet as traditionally skilled painter alongside Hugh Lane's Old Masters. Sponsorship of tradition and modernity in painting operates, thereby, as self-confirming criteria permeating the writers' texts when they come to espouse values or evaluate other arts. The two writers' treatment of fine art, past and present, as source of traditional or modern values is strikingly different. The closest Yeats comes to affirming modern painting - aside from his praise for Charles Ricketts, Althea Gyles and T. Sturge Moore as inheritors of past visual art traditions - is in sponsoring Pre-Raphaelitism. Autobiographies depict a teenage poet, 'in all things Pre-Raphaelite', adopting this movement as Dublin art-student in revolt against dead academic drawings made from Greek plaster-casts who longs 'for pattern, for Pre-Raphaelitism, for an art allied to poetry' (CW3, 114 & 91). Autobiographies account of Pre-Raphaelitism, as avant-garde producing 'no great...picture after 1870', as unfavoured by London's Royal Academy, as adopted in his father's Dublin studio before 'the academy was still unbroken' during his childhood (in the 1870's), as informing a literary scene in the Rhymers' Club (1890-96) where 'All were Pre-Raphaelite' and 'Rossetti was a subconscious influence, and perhaps the most powerful of all', is a product of hindsight, presented largely as foresight (CW3, 235 & 149). The retrospective account (1916-22) is of a movement in its heyday before his birth (1865) and already rubber-stamped by key art institutions. Indeed, Yeats's formative fine art writing coincides with Rossetti's first memorial exhibitions (1882-3), the National Gallery's pre-1900's Pre-Raphaelite acquisitions and the Tate Gallery's acquisition (1908) of Frank Huddleston Potter’s Little Doormouse that ‘hung in our house for years’ as he puts it. Liverpool’s Walker Gallery display of a replica of Rossetti’s Dante’s Dream (1856), acquired 1871, permits Yeats to visit the gallery with Maude Gonne and find a symbolist painting whose 'romantic architecture... blotted all other pictures away’ (CW3, 114). The painting, illustrating Dante, which 'blots' other paintings away, make a sub-text virtually explicit. Painterly canons are built by illustrations of literary texts, affirmed by discursive texts and institutions; these 'blot' other narratives 'away'. So Yeats's embrace of radical painting, is less radical, with hindsight already available, than appears; a hyperbolic repackaging of tradition in painting as part of the 'shock value' of the new, as prophetic, is simply useful when promoting paintings signals traditional literary values and foresight in the text. Conversely, Beckett's sponsorship of modern, dissonant, non-literary images in paintings with 'outsider' status in essays becomes a means of critiquing residual arts' values in supporting the new in opposition to tradition. Yeats's artistic circle's paintings were institutionally assimilated and textually ratified faster (in relation to his texts) than Beckett's avant-garde, outsider painter-friends' artworks, of more debatable status at the time his texts were written. Yeats's texts/paintings reinforce one another as answering to tradition; Beckett's texts' self-questioning runs up against the grain of the academic and academy. Yeats's description of his painter-father's career registers disappointments at his father's failure to complete paintings or become an economic success; but under his auspices these artworks entered John Quinn's, Lady Gregory's and Irish National Gallery collections during the painter's and poet's lifetimes. Even a minor painter in the early family circle, John Trivett Nettleship, whom Yeats met (c.1887-91), despite derivative, sub-Blakean illustrative drawings, was exhibited regularly in the Royal Academy (1874-91) and RHA in Dublin. Publishing books on Browning and landscape painters, Nettleship's animal pictures gained popular and textual recognition in the Art Review (1890) - an outlet whose immediate closure Yeats regretted because he hoped to place an article on Nettleship there; they found their way into Yeats's oeuvre as illustration and ekphrasis, even if the drawings seem to have largely been collected by the painter's family rather than art institutions. Writers, not painters, tend to feature in Yeats's 'tragic generation' like Lionel Johnson haunted by his own poem's 'The Dark Angel' which Yeats quotes (CW3, 411). Painters whom Beckett knew, such as Simon Federman, Jewish-French painter and father of future Beckett critic, did not survive Auschwitz, and those who did frequently met with tardy, late, textual recognition or institutional ratification. Henri Hayden began achieving recognition in the 1950's after a long career but Beckett had to support his widow after his death (SBL2, 704). Geer van Velde's paintings, exhibited at Guggenheim Jeune, London (1938) at Beckett's instigation, were probably purchased by the gallery's funder Peggy Guggenheim under assumed names to avoid a non-selling exhibition (SBL1, 627, n.1). Beckett's essay on the van Velde's notes the paintings are not known in Paris despite their having worked there for twenty and sixteen years, respectively. The essay's acidity about the puerility of art criticism is proportional to a viewer ignorance it assumes in its readership and which it despairs of rectifying (DISJ, 127). 'Three Dialogues' is art criticism with a less institutionally secure or appreciative base than Yeats's. Duthuit even rejected the 'dialogue', in which Beckett put words in his mouth, later as pretentious or esoteric rhetoric as he increasingly lionised Matisse, mentioned by Beckett en route to lionising Bram van Velde. Steven Connor describes this art criticism as a 'poisoned belle-lettrism, a connoisseurship turned convulsively and self-mutilating on itself'. Bram van Velde noted, in outsider years as early as 1927-29, that his work had to rely on 'inner strength' to produce painting 'bearing no relation to what is called reality, but represent[ing] the most intense analysis of aspect through sensation' so that 'one's work does not come through reason'. This self-sponsorship of a-logical, outsider art - disconnected from the other arts and institutional ratification - is echoed in Beckett's texts. Ezra Pound's claim (1915) that 'It is an excellent and honourable thing to be condemned in company with Cezanne and Picasso' or boast that he met 'Picasso for the first time' in Paris (1921), just as he sought out Beckett there twice, are not found as aspirations in Yeats's texts. (Pound cited in ed. Rachewiltz, Moody & Moody, 2010, 340) In fact, Yeats's diary (1930) rebuffs ‘Pound’s conception of excellence, like that of all revolutionary schools' as 'something so international that it is abstract and outside life’, to imply the concrete, traditional and national are better yardsticks for both arts. (EXP, 274) Having advised an aspiring poet, Henry Meade (1908) to 'go to older models...go to the Elizabethans. Practically all modern models are dangerous' (CL InteLex # 894), Yeats's 'Three Monuments' hymn traditional public sculpture even as 'Three Movements' (1932) equates Surrealist nightmares with modern abandonment of tradition: 'Shakespearean fish swam the sea, far away from land; /Romantic fish swam in nets coming to the hand; /What are all those fish that lie gasping on the strand? (VP, 485-92) Those beached, dying, strange fish, might well be from Cubist, abstract or Surrealist paintings from which traditional, natural, representational life is being drained. If Irish painting in the first half of the twentieth century seldom followed Pound's imperative to 'make it new', in styles retrospectively absorbed from Paris, its titles hailing the 'first' to denote authenticity of subject, from John Lavery’s The First Flight to Dublin (c. 1925) and Jack Yeats's The New Road (1944) to James Dixon’s series of painterly ‘firsts’, welcoming tractor, motor-boat and helicopter to Tory Island, oppose Yeats's adoption of the 'last' as the best radical prototype. Yeats is a self-professed 'last of the romantics'; Greek Olympians in a portrait/poem is a 'thing never seen again'. As Ronald Bush (1997) suggests, Yeats’s 1929 notebook reads as a repository of increasing anti-modern sentiment: ‘We even more than E[l]iot, require tradition...I feel as neither E[l]iot nor Ezra do the need of old forms, old situations that...I may escape from skepticism...The ‘modern’ man is a term invented by modern poetry to dignify our skepticism.’ 'Modern Poetry: A Broadcast' (1936) hymns an alliance between poetry/ painting because it 'was in the very nature of poetry to look back...’ just as Charles Ricketts's woodcuts 'prolonged the inspiration of Rossetti, whose painting mirrored the rich colouring of Delacroix’, so 'style should be proud of its ancestry... an ostentatious originality was out of place whether in the arts or in good manners’ (CW5, 92). Yeats's Greek sculpture resists a ‘filthy modern tide’ and 'formlessness' (VP, 610-11); his dismissal of art where 'Mirror on mirror mirrored is all the show’ disapproves of modern versions of realism without any counter endorsement of Baudrillard's post-modernist images as radically abstract, simulations ceaselessly recycling or quoting other images as 'simalacrum' (Baudrillard, 1988, 143-7). Yeats's singular, mimetic, 'plummet-measured face' combining real and ideal, referent and sign, redouble a search in classical or Renaissance art traditions/images as valuable sources for departures into originality; abstract ideas/symbols whereby ‘our thoughts [are filled] with the essences of things, and not with things’ require concrete images (‘The nightingale will refuse the thorn and so remain among images instead of passing to ideas’) and the sources for this mimetic and symbolic natural subject are not found in modern, abstract artforms but in direct observation and observation of past arts' traditions (CW13, 67). So if Yeats's poetic images as semi-religious symbols share affinities with Kandinsky's On the Spiritual in Art and Painting in Particular (1912), he stops short of conscripting painterly 'abstraction' for texts. Yeats's arts 'draw together' as do Kandinsky's arts which 'have never in recent times been closer to one another...’ because ‘religion, science and morality are shaken’ in a ‘vibration’ registering in ‘literature, music and art' where this 'spiritual change becomes noticeable in real form’ (Kandinsky, 1982, 145-62). Kandinsky's arts as ‘Spiritual transformation’ also know ‘neither time nor space’ so poet, painter and Symbolist may plug into past traditions. However, Yeats's poetic claim that ‘All those abstractions that you fancied were / From the great treatise of Parmenides /All, all those gyres and cubes and midnight things /Are but a new expression of her [his wife’s] body...’ retreats away from modern symbolism into a symbolism underpinned by traditional figuration/mimesis (VP, 469). Kandinsky's texts, through painting's geometry and colour symbolism, lead to claims where painting's abstraction means ‘there will always remain something extra [in painting] that cannot be exhausted by words’ (191 & 62). Yeats in 1937 asserts the counter-claim: ‘it is our first business to paint or describe, desirable people, places, states of mind' and thereby avoid those 'radical critics [who] encourage our painters to decorate the walls with those cubes, triangles, ovoids, that are all stiff under the touch, or with gods and goddesses, distorted by Rubenesque exaggeration, dulled by hard doll-like faces that they may chill desire' (E & I, x). Mimetic and figurative as ideal symbol are retained; abstract 'significant form' alone, pace Bell, Fry or Kandinsky, are denied purchase as a divorce of content and form. If Yeats's poetry's mock-destructive or apocalyptic phraseology - ‘We the great gazebo built / They convicted us of guilt / Bid me strike a match and blow’ or the lexicon of ‘send war in our time' - is reminiscent of the 'Futurist Manifesto' (1913), published just before he met Marinetti in his London flat (1914) where the Italian ‘recited his Motor-car’ text, Yeats's proposals are ironic. The poetry is not a visual art manifesto for the wreckage of the Neo-Classical. Yeats criticises Wyndham Lewis (April 1929) for his 'mechanical images' to suggest 'mechanism unites itself in my mind with so much in contemporary painting and sculpture...we are caught in a kind of steel trap' (CL InteLex # 5239). The identification (1913) of 'all good art' with 'the Victory of Samothrace...or the young horsemen on the Parthenon...' which 'shrinks from what Blake calls mathematical form' (E & I, 355) and Marinetti's Futurist Manifesto (Le Figaro, 1909), celebrating the horsepower of 'a roaring motorcar...far more beautiful than the Winged Victory of Samothrace' (Marinetti, 2006, 11-17), share a gestural language flirting with violence; but Yeats's reverence for tradition and Marinetti's renunciation oppose one another. Marinetti's equating of art with a frenetic, deathly car ride into a 'mother of a ditch, brimful with muddy water' where one 'relished... strength-giving sludge that reminded me so much of the saintly black breasts of my Sudanese nurse' only finds its analogue in symbolist, figurative painting Yeats admired in having a 'photograph of a picture by Gauguin' hanging over his 'breakfast table' where 'the spectacle of Polynesian girls crowned with lilies...[gave him] religious ideas' (E & I, 346-55). Futurist 'ditches' and iconoclastic 'Turdy Madonna's' are Beckett's Molloy's destinations, not Yeats's. Beckett, after all, translated Apollinaire's 'Zone' a poem 'weary of living in Roman antiquity and Greek' which embraces Parisian modernity where 'Here even the motor-cars looks antique'(CP, 45). In facing ultimate destruction, death, Yeats's epitaph, carved on stone, requires the traditional, sculptural 'cast' of horse/horseman to 'Cast a cold eye, /On life, on death' and 'pass by!, to outride or transcend death in the style of 'those riders upon the Parthenon' he noted, who 'had all the world's power in their moving bodies'.. Beckett, interested in graveyards (Irish Greystones, German Altona, Ohlsdorf, Tangier's cemeteries) with their visual reminders of temporality - the 'classico-romantic scene[s]' full of 'the livery of death' with a 'failing' sun and 'mountains Uccello behind the headstones' (MPTK, 1934) - notes how Belacqua, bicycling past a van and a 'hoss' shiting on the road, amidst 'eyes cast down'; he rejects 'Greek and Roman reasons...metaphysical, aesthetic, erotic...' to botch a mock-joint-suicide planned 'out of the Harlot's Progress' when his girlfriend will also cease as the 'Happy Infanta! Painted by Velasquez' to leave his epitaph as a car 'number-plate' inscribed with 'TEMPORARILY SANE' (DFTMW, 17; MPTK, 83-89). Lest we miss the ironic use of past fine art, as commemoration of glory for posterity, Beckett insists Belacqua in death cannot compose himself into the prone, sculptural model of knight/horseman because his 'hands pious on the sternum were unseemly, defunct crusader, absolved from polite campaign'. Belacqua's end converts Yeats's symbolic horse from fine art and past texts, into images of a bicycling knight whose epitaph will be a car 'number-plate', just as Beckett's letters ironically use 'rose grey nags' as an image for own Citro?n 2CV (deux chevaux).In Stone Cottage winters (1913-16), spent with Ezra Pound as he co-founded Vorticism with Wyndham Lewis (1914), Yeats developed a harder, spare style, but Pound's sponsorship of Vorticism and sculptures by Gaudier-Brzeska, as an 'accurate representation of 'the present condition of things' and Jacob Epstein (Pound cited in Carpenter, 1988, 216), whom T.S. Eliot found 'one of the more interesting of the radicals' in London Cubist circles (Eliot, 2015;1; 1164), did not convert Yeats into a Vorticist or modernist who enlisted such fine art in texts. Yeats disparages (1916) 'Wyndham Lewis’s Cubist pictures' for 'an element corresponding to rhetoric arising from his confusion of the abstract with the rhythmical. Rhythm implies a living body a breast to rise & fall or limbs that dance while the Abstract [is] incompatible with life. The cubist is abstract'; this contrasts with his embrace of "natural" symbolism found in 'Japanese paintings... [which] delight in form, repeated yet varied, in curious patterns of lines' which 'are certainly not imitation' but natural symbols. The assumption is that nature or the body, via traditional mimesis and symbolism, are "natural" and supernatural conjoint signs, virtually transparent in traditional interpretations, whereas the abstract in modern fine art is a ruptured, arbitrary construction elusive to linguistic meaning and representation. "Natural" and traditional fine art, in opposition to modern painting, underscore differences in the way the two Irish writers imagine and construct creative texts. Yeats's ‘The Second Coming’ (1920), for instance, evokes 'gyres' or a broken circle but does not turn to the abstract painting of a broken circle displayed in Beckett's Watt as precedent or model. The poem turns to the traditional emblematic figure and bird in medieval falconry as controlled, centrifugal form in a poem resisting the modern as abstract, formless or centripetal, as resisting the broken circle which appears as a subject and source of mystery in the painting Beckett inserts in Watt. Yeats's poem states: Turning and turning in the widening gyreThe falcon cannot hear the falconer;Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhereThe ceremony of innocence is drowned;The best lack all conviction, while the worstAre full of passionate intensity. (VP, 401-402) The modern falcon's sight (and by extension sight in painting) has lost its radar; out of control so it cannot hear (the falconer/poet). The traditional “natural” order, imaged elsewhere as a circle in which the ‘Primum Mobile that fashioned us / Has made the very owls in circles move’ (VP, 423), is disrupted by the centripetal, modern falcon breaking free from the centrifugal control of the medieval falconer’s lease. The traditional sonnet form is endangered by this visual 'vortex'; it is aborted and then re-started in search of a ‘centre’ that ‘will hold’ in the poem as Seamus Deane points out. Yeats's 'The Second Coming' turns a benign first annunciation, the nativity as painterly/textual and traditional image of Christ-child, into a horrific ‘second coming’ of a sculptural, Sphinx-like beast beyond the text's control. If Yeats was imaginatively drawn to such human-animal amalgams (theorised in Horace's centaurs and found in British Museum sculptures or in art works from Moreau to Dulac he knew), this beast's ‘blank’ and ‘pitiless’ gaze and ‘slow thighs’, awakened from ‘twenty stony centuries of sleep’ suggest the traditional and mythic become distorted by modernity into the horrific, devoid of 'conviction'. The result is that both arts' traditions are drowned in a vortex and uncontrollable spillage of reds ('the blood-dimmed tide is loosed'). Such anarchy, evocative of the Russian Revolution (Malevich) and the first Vorticist Blast (1914), the 'new Futurist, Cubist, Imagiste Quarterly' which Pound hailed as a ‘great MAGENTA cover’d opusculus’ is abhorrent. Inside Blast, Pound's ‘Vortex’ essay more positively claimed: ‘All experience rushes into this vortex... All the energized past...All the past that is vital, all the past that is capable of living into the future, is pregnant in the vortex, NOW’. (Pound cited in Carpenter, 1988, 245) Visually, the journal Blast sported a red cover with words typographically dropping down a diagonal so that ‘the centre’ as horizontal type did not 'hold' in this spillage of red. The poem's sub-text is a fascinated disapproval of Vorticism as wreckage of medieval falcon and symbolist tradition, producing a new form that 'cannot hold'. Beckett's assertion to Lawrence Harvey (1962) that words are a 'form of complacency' like 'trying to build a snowman with dust; nothing holds together' (Beckett cited in Knowlson & Haynes, 2003, 49) note such collapsing ideas/forms, but imagine modernity as a broken, experience where words and sculpted snowman cannot hold as a necessity. MPTK's evokes a character as a 'Brancusi bird' only to reveal she neither exists as such in real life or text where Brancusi's sculpture Bird in Space (1928) is 'foundering' (MPTK, 33). When Yeats visited John Quinn’s New York apartment (1920) he dismissed Brancusi in this collection, where Bird in Space arrived three years later, turning 'all the Brancusi's over, or face down, on sofas and cushions’ because ‘All those ovoids – those smooth, curved surfaces, and rounded figures, with their egg-shaped heads – seemed to put him off' as "featureless" according to his wife; she suggested Yeats used such geometric terms with ‘a certain amount of humour – which you earnest Americans never seem to catch’(GHL cited in Saddlemyer, 2002, 121, 250 & 723 n. 125). Pound's regret that ‘[F]ew plastic artists have been strong enough to depend on form alone, dispensing with the stimulus or support of a literary content’ (Pound, 1991; 5, 217) and citation of Vorticist sculptures as exemplary pure form is a credo Yeats's 'A Bronze Head' (1939) rejects. As figurative elegy inspired by Lawrence Campbell's traditional sculpture of Madame Maud Gonne McBride (1933) it suggests the arts' as 'human, superhuman' resist 'decline and fall' (a phrase redolent of the end of classical civilisation) via 'form all full' (VP, 618-9). The poem's rhyme-royal (an eight-line Renaissance form whose scheme is abababcc) builds a plinth-like structure for its traditional mimetic/symbolic 'bronze head' in the final couplet as Helen Vendler (Vendler, 2007, 258-64) points out. Pythagorean geometry in 'The Statues' is the groundwork/grid, surpassed when Phidias, 'Greater than Pythagoras', uses the 'mallet or a chisel' to model these 'calculations' into 'flesh'. Conversely, Beckett's Pythagoras's 'lovely chain-chant solo of cause and effect' (DFTMW, 10) suggest a logical distortion of irrationality at the outset while Murphy finds it a 'mere phrase' to consider 'the Phidias and Scopas of fatigue' (MU, 133). Beckett's 'Three Dialogues' note painting's history as 'attempts to escape from this sense of failure' may only now proceed 'with a kind of Pythagorean terror, as though the irrationality of pi were an offence against the deity, not to mention its creature' (DISJ, 145). In Trilogy Pythagoras ironically originates the music of the spheres in a universe with 'no trace of system anywhere' as Beckett puts it (Beckett cited in Haynes & Knowlson, 2003, 18). Conversely, Yeats's father’s earliest figurative sketches drawn over mathematical equations in an algebra book (Pyle, 1997, 10), and his poet-son's 'The Statues' with its 'plummet-measured' face, suggest recourse to traditional proportions, renewal of neo-Classicism and the measured, exalted Hellenistic body, is admirable in past and present art works. Yeats's poem's shares E.H. Gombrich's idea that traditional 'algebraic formula' (Gombrich quotes Auden) are a type of schemata or geometric plan/model from which the actual drawing/sculpture fusing real/ideal emerge (Gombrich, 1960, 146-7). Conversely, Beckett's invocation of the human body as 'nothing' or 'zero' shares affinities with Kazimir Malevich's insistence that art achieves 'nothing', its goal 'nothingness' in which as artist 'I transformed myself into the zero of forms and came out of 0 - 1' (Malevich cited in Groys, 2016, 90). Beckett's Neary finds the 'face' or 'system of faces' inseparable from 'the big blooming buzzing confusion'; the Irish sculptural Cuchulain's buttocks offer geometry as a joke proving that ‘there is no triangle, however obtruse, but the circumference of some circle passes through its wretched vertices’ (MU, 6). Yeats's conclusion to one play turns to the mythic and sculptural figure of Cuchulain by Sheppard to assert that there is 'no body like his body' of 'modern woman borne' (Co Pl, 705). Beckett's playful mockery revives Joyce's joke against Stephen Dedalus 'taking' of the sculpture of the Venus of Praxiteles in the Museum as serious aesthetic model of contemplative 'stasis' via Lynch's irreverent claim that he 'taken' this literally and inscribed his name 'in pencil' on her backside. In Yeats, originality is born from copying past models, as in Gombrich; in Beckett modernity is born from ironic inscriptions in which the body exists amidst confusion. Few poets, in fact, for whom the claim 'modern' has been made have engaged with past fine art and disengaging with modern galleries and paintings as does Yeats. Paris and New York, the centres of modern fine art, were visited by both writers. In seven visits to Paris, sometimes for durations of a week or so (1894-1938), Yeats cancelled lunch with Rodin (1908), celebrated the Gustave Moreau Museum and Louvre (1908) and became a convert to David, Ingres and Titian; he avoided contemporary studios and exhibitions which Beckett frequented from the 1930's. Yeats's lengthy stays in the Cote d'Azur in Cannes/Rapallo visits (1927-39) reveal no interest in Matisse (living more or less permanently in nearby Nice, 1917-54); he saw an exhibition in Menton by Gwen de Galienne (1938) who painted foxhunters and created figurative bronzes. Beckett's 'Three Dialogues' are an inter-art conversation with Matisse's son-in-law and he notes Pierre Schneider, an authority on Matisse, was 'worked up' about 'The Sources of the XXth Century: The Arts in Europe 1884-1919' in the Musée d'Art Moderne (1960-61) which he found 'extraordinary' (SBL3, 371). Encompassing an interest in modernity and tradition the elderly Beckett noted (1977): 'Hear good accounts of Derain show [Grand Palais]. Beaubourg proper mass meeting [the just opened Georges-Pompidou Centre]. While the Louvre totters for want of funds' (SBL4, 453). Yeats's four visits to the USA (1903-4, 1911, 1920, 1932-33), approximately a year's residency in total, saw him noting a shared 'table of values' based on William Morris: he praised the 'marble Greek theatre at Berkeley' where he read Petrarch (1903-4) and belatedly visited the Met. in New York and Jack Yeats's exhibition at the Museum of Irish Art, two days later, on his last visit; during Beckett's single visit of less than a month (1964) he visited MOMA and the Met., although his focus was on seventeenth century Dutch collections. (v) The Arts: Unity or Disunity?In Yeats's 'Four Years' the arts' depictions of an ideal/real subject creates 'unity of being'. 'Ireland After Parnell' avers that 'there could be no aim for poet or artist except expression of "Unity of Being"' (CW3, 200). Rejecting 'the followers of Huxley, Tyndall, Carolus Duran, and Bastien-Lepage' who assert 'the unimportance of subject whether in art or literature' or 'the independence of the arts from one another' Yeats delights in every age where poet and artist confined themselves gladly to some inherited subject-matter known to the whole people, for I thought that in man and race alike there is something called ‘Unity of Being’, using that term as Dante used it when he compared beauty in the Convito to a perfectly proportioned human body. My father, from whom I had learned the term, preferred a comparison to a musical instrument so strung that if we touch a string all the strings murmur faintly. (CW3, 164)This 'unity of being' unites writer/painter, creating an ideal likeness of the perfected symbol of the human body (a 'unity of image'), and 'the whole people', who recognise the subject represented and medium used in shared understanding. Yeats's OBMV introduction (1936) underpins this idea of unity/'unity of being' to suggest these are found when poetry's ‘form must be full, sphere like, single' and a product of the poet’s ‘control of plastic material’ (CW5, 193). His 'Great Wheel' as 'The Principal Symbol' in A Vision and key to 'ultimate reality' nominates this 'phaseless sphere' (Yeats, 1974, 67, 187 & 193) as the great meta-image which pictures how epochs of time producing fine art/literature (diagrammatically represented as moving cones or spheres), find their ultimate origin and end, resolved and synthesized into this stable symbol of unity grasped by the text. If fine art's geometrically perfect sphere or circle is conscripted by Yeats as symbol for the unified poem, his attribution of these, as spiritual images, to sources found in ancient Egypt and in the 'ovoids of bright steel /Hammered and polished by Brancusi’s hand' in The Words Upon the Window Pane (EXP, 363) is less typical than his tendency to cite traditional, not modern, fine art and nature as source and resource for his symbol of unity in/for poems. The winding spool or gyres wound into a 'ball' or sphere as perfect form in Blake - whose 'Jerusalem' claims, ‘I give you the end of a golden string, /Only wind it into a ball: /It will lead you in at Heaven’s gate, / Built in Jerusalem’s wall’ (Blake, 2009, 11) - are found in a poem Yeats cites (1904) before linking modern arts' failure with its incapacity to believe in 'unseen reality' available via visible, transcendent symbols; he invokes Blake's aphorism that one can see in nature that 'If the sun and moon would doubt,/they'd immediately go out' (CW8, 71-2). "Nature" and fine art/craft provide models for poetry that unifies both in its own form, seamlessly. Seamless embroidery (as in Morrisite craft and Pre-Raphaelite painting), apart from one poem engaging in the 'enterprise of walking naked', is a key, recurrent meta-symbol for poetry in his theory and praxis. Poetry's transcendent revelation of a unified, perfected, other world lying behind the 'veil' of this one (The Trembling of the Veil), hard graft in an embroidery unifying sound/vision ('Adam's Curse') and end in unified form (as it knits 'the heavens embroidered cloths' together out of the 'rags' of experience) are a nexus. Yeats's nightmares of fragmented form are the Comte de Lautréamont's famous image for Surrealism as 'the chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissecting table' and in dreams he was ‘haunted by a sewing machine, that clicked and shone...' (Yeats cited in Foster, 1997, 141); Beckett's 'Return to the Vestry' chants, 'Drown the Singer / I've done with stitch anguish' to find 'beauty in a corporation bucket' (CP, 245-6). In Beckett's 'La Peinture des Van Velde ou Le Monde èt le Pantalon', painting is imaged as a process whereby God, as artist/tailor, makes a hash of knitting the world or art into unity, just as Endgame's black joke against the text's unified form is one where God makes a 'mess of the seat...hash of the crutch...balls of the fly....[and] ballockses the buttonholes' - which would have taken a tailor six months, not six days, to do. (CDW, 102) Beckett dismisses Victorian poetry like Tennyson's as 'pretty embroideries' to envisage language as ‘a veil... [which] must be torn apart order to get at the things (or the nothingness) behind it’ by drilling through its ‘material surface’ (SBL1, 518-9). The fine art/craft image borrowed for the idea of unified traditional form is now inadequate to the experience of a fragmented 'nothingness'. As Julie Bates points out (Bates, 2017, 200-46), Beckett, in the last year of his life, quoted Yeats's 'Sailing to Byzantium', approved of his portrait of 'old age' as fragility and 'but a paltry thing,/a tattered coat upon a stick' rejected its symbolic transformation of 'rags' into symbols for the 'soul [which] clap[s] its hand[s] and sings'. Yeats's geometric images as meta-symbols for unified form in A Vision (1937) suggest ‘stylistic arrangements of experience [are] comparable to the cubes in the drawing of Wyndham Lewis and to the ovoids in the sculpture of Brancusi’ (CW14, 24-25) but Vorticist terminology is simply theoretically convenient, in describing poetry's perfect form. Vorticist art works do not appear in actual poems which draw on fine art inspirations from ancient Greek sculpture or Moreau's symbolism ('The Statues'/'Leda'), old Chinese sculpture ('Lapis Lazuli') or traditional fine art, 'A Bronze Head'/Edmund Dulac's centaur and nineteenth century painting. In 1928 Yeats asked: 'What is the Sphere? What are the Gyres? Antiquity had both symbols.' (CL InteLex, #5127) Ancient text, as Arkins suggests (Arkins, 1990, 92), and ancient text illustrated by past sculpture or symbolist painting and figurative art, are invoked more often as source or model for poetic unity by Yeats than modern, geometric painting or sculpture. When Yeats cites Brancusi as theoretic model for unified form or for 'stylistic arrangements of experience', as Edna Longley points out, 'stylistic arrangements of experience' are not identical with actual poetic 'style' (2013, 44). Just as, when working on A Vision in 1925, Yeats claimed his great wheel 'would take in the whole of the British Museum' (CW13, introduction, xlii), so his circle or sphere as meta-symbol in ‘Supernatural Songs’ (1934) for unified form/content in the poem is tracked back to sources in traditional visual arts: There all the barrel hoops are knit,There all the serpent tails are bit,There all the gyres converge in one,There all the planets drop in the Sun. (VP, 557)Yeats's circle (as meta-symbol for poetry's unity) has affinities with Kandinsky's cosmic symbol, the circle as 'a precise but inexhaustible variable' and 'the synthesis of the greatest oppositions' (Kandinsky cited in Hahl-Koch, 1984, 284 & 289), but the poem insists on priming its symbolic pump in tracing its 'unity' back to inspiration in traditional fine art. Divine cooper (from art and craft), Ouroboros (from Celtic art), abstract gyres (from Vico-cum-decorative spiral on High Cross or in automatic script), and symbolic planets (from astrological or cosmological chart), trace the symbol backwards, not forwards into modern painting. When 'Art and Ideas' bemoans that 'in the visual arts, indeed, the '"fall of man into his own circumference" seems at an end' (E & I, 354) it is the Renaissance image of Vitruvian man at the circle's centre which appears as source of value and unity. If Hegel and Yeats share a pessimism in which fine art images or objects no longer provide shared, transcendent meta-symbols, the modern poem/text that turns subjectively inwards to find its unity is compensation. In Beckett's theoretical and creative texts this situation creates an insurmountable problem for which a return to symbolism, or symbols of unity, provides only ironic answers. Just as Beckett's essays on painting do not posit that paintings/texts seamlessly unite form and content, in his fictional DFTMW Belacqua contends that 'The only unity in this story is, please God, an involuntary unity' (DFTMW, 132). The novel's composite portraits, splicing and reassembling the human body in grotesque fragments drawn from 'odds and ends of pigment that happened to be left over' satirizes such a 'snivelling miracle of your belly-cum-bum totalities' (DFMW, 68 &78). Yeats's divine cooper becomes Beckett's Mr Cooper, a perfect container for too much alcohol in Murphy. Perfect spheres, circles and geometry as symbols of unity are ironized. Murphy knows the astrologer Suk's drawings of 'syzygy' (alignments of sun and moon) only afford a vista where one dies below a 'skylight, open to no stars' (MU, 141). Murphy's head, as 'hollow sphere', is an image undercut by a disordered life in a text visualizing systems of 'celestial bodies' circling as merely making Suk a 'turnover' and as a 'pain in the balls' (MU, 63 & 50). Yeatsian astrological charts of planets and spheres as perfect symbol of unity for the arts/life are shredded: 'Between him and his stars no doubt there was correspondence, but not in Suk's sense. They were his stars, he was the prior system. He had been projected... magnified and clarified into his own meaning. But it was his meaning. The moon in the serpent was no more than image...' (104). Malone (phonetically close to alone), does not know whether he is looking at actual planets circling the earth or at a Tintoretto painting of the Milky Way; he has no recourse to painting or astrological chart as a source of unity or a means that will enable him to decode why these have ruptured the text, or provide answers as to where he is, or why he is there.The text as a unified by symbolism drawn from fine art, or by any inherent properties in the language of the text itself, are Beckettian targets. Just as Beckett dismissed 'recent Irish poetry' as mystical Celticism (DISJ, 70-76), so the visual motifs or sacred symbolism of spirals/spheres in ancient text or modern painting are reduced to ironic images defacing, not unifying, the text. Derivative writing that ‘stinks’ is ejaculated sperm or involuntary turd curled, as in Celtic ornament, ‘twice round the pan and pointed at both ends...its spiral on my soilman’s shovel’ (SBL1, 159 & 497, 81-2). When Beckett's Belacqua fires up 'cylinders in his mind' or Malone uses drawing pencils to have 'little fun and games with the cones and cylinders' (TRIL, 206) the visual, Cezanne-like geometry which had currency and clout in fine art writing, points to a text becoming deliberately solipsistic, not to one creating a unified type of picturing/painting. Molloy finds his circular sphincter or 'arse-hole' as an 'eyesore' is 'the symbol of those [symbols] passed over in silence' (TRIL, 73). Yeats's spirals and gyres - spiral stair and dead butterflies - are re-spun in a DFTMW where a butterfly 'inscribed above on the eternal toilet roll, was to pern in gyre' in a text where forced writing is 'scribbling bad spirals' (DFMW, 129 & 124). Beckett's Molloy moves in 'spirals' as a blind 'worm' (TRIL, 63) on this 'muckball' or 'earthball', ironically lost in a forest 'describing a circle, or less than a circle, or more than a circle, so great was the resemblance' (TRIL, 63, 69 & 77); the 'big ball of tangled string' carried by his son to 'Hole' (131) is lost: it does not lead to Blake's 'Heaven's gate' or to Yeatsian lyric thread weaving a coherent artwork; he ends wondering whether he should 'approve of the Italian cobbler Lovat who, having cut off his own testicles, crucified himself?' (131 & 145). Old Master symbolism (Yeats's circle) becomes an image of 'balls' as self-castration; the spiral/gyre (so ingrained in Celtic art) does not unify, but unravels. When Beckett's late short prose revisit darker, circular and cylindrical monads which imprison subject and text in self-enclosed, claustrophobic geometric forms, these share imaginative territory with the plastic, sculpted 'Edifices' and monads Jean Dubuffet described or constructed (1968) as windowless and furniture-less (Dubuffet, 1968, 8-24). Bleak images, these structures imprison man in a drawn structure - not erased but foregrounded as in Giacometti's drawing - to suggest a link with a Cold War world with bunkers, which deny Yeats's windows and Yeats's/Dubuffet's comforts of spiral stairs. The image cannot climb upwards towards the light or reflect on its own attainment as meta-symbol of unity. In late poems treading a corkscrew ‘winding stair’ in a Norman Tower which Yeats 'declare[d]' his 'symbol' (VP, 480), or those where Cuchulain stitches and unwinds threads from a spool for a purgatorial shroud, the visual image from architecture/embroidery, becomes a meta-symbol for how the poem may knit or unify 'life-in-death' and 'death-in-life'. This meta-symbol for eternal return unravels into an image of life-in-death in Beckett's Murphy. Here, the protagonist's trousers present 'a corkscrew effect [which] betrayed their fatigue' and he dies in a lunatic asylum within sight of a 'bandage-winding department' (MU, 45 & 95) beside round-eyed patients like Mr. Endon who see little or nothing, not even the final disappearing 'kite' that escapes its spool of thread and disappears. Beckett's quotation of Democritus's 'Rien n'est plus réel que rien' [nothing is more real than nothing] in conversation with Patrick Bowles (SB cited in Knowlson and Knowlson, 2006, 9) suggest a writer whose experience or idea of the atomised void was hardly likely to lead to concepts of the arts based on their unity of form or purpose. Fragmented space escapes 'marble love-potions and your frozen fugues', settled, unified forms, in MPTK (78) as humanity's end is atomization in dust; the final Yeatsian epitaph, which must be carved on stone and evoke the sculptural horseman for a lasting and unified monument, is the means by which humanity resist such futility and fragmentation, via fine art/poem. These opposing ideas of unity/disunity and the writers' citation of all three arts (painting, music and texts) raise the question of how they respond to the idea of 'the total artwork' as a nineteenth century legacy of which they were aware. 5. The Writers and the Idea of the Total Artwork If both Irish writers' cite all three arts, do they posit a Gesamtkunstwerk or 'total work ofart' akin to Wagner's idea in his treatise 'The Artwork of the Future' (1849-50) where operais a 'great United Art-work [which]...must gather up each branch of art both to use as a means, and in some sense, to undo it for the common aim of all'? (Wagner, 1993, 69-214)If Wagner's 'fusion of all forms of art under a common idea' retained a 'strange hold over the imagination' as Téodor de Wyzema pointed out in 'Wagnerian Art: Painting' (1895) (de Wyzema cited in Harrison and Wood, 1998, 471 & 1004), this synthesis of the arts as aspiration is noted by both writers. Both writers cite Wagner and their responses to his idea of the 'total artwork' (encompassing relations between texts, painting and music) casts light on how they conceive of binary relations between texts and paintings and whether they construct a hierarchy favouring any one art. Yeats lists (1898) 'Wagner’s dramas, Keats’ odes, Blake’s pictures and poems' amongst those artworks that have 'accepted all symbolisms... all the Divine Intellect...for the substance of their art' (E & I, 149). He read, with approval, Oswald Spengler's The Decline of the West which contended that 'What is practised as art to-day - be it music after Wagner or painting after Cezanne... - is impotence and falsehood' (Spengler, 1926, 291-4). Beckett's Belacqua definition of Wagner as 'a roaring meg against melancholy' for characters who do not know who Wagner is (DFTMW, 38), the writer's claim that opera is 'a hideous corruption' (PTD), that he would write a poem that was 'not Wagner, not clouds on wheels' (in a 1932 letter) and dismissals of Wagnerism to Avigdor Arikha in embracing an aesthetic where 'less is more' hardly suggest support for Wagner as Chris Ackerley points out. Molloy ends in 'Wagnerian parody' (Ackerley and Gontarski, 620). Unable to hear Wagner's 'forest murmurs', Molloy replies like Siegfried to a distant gong on a bicycle horn. Pater, as arts' writer favoured by Yeats, in The Renaissance notes 'distinct' differences in the arts as 'the sensuous material of each art brings with it a special phase or quality of beauty, untranslatable into the forms of any other' before delivering an essential Wagnerian message. Separate artforms' limits are transcended when they 'lend each other new forces': ...although each art has thus its own specific order of impressions, and an untranslatable charm, and a just apprehension of the ultimate differences of the arts is the beginning of aesthetic criticism; yet... in its special mode of handling, its given material, each art may be observed to pass into the condition of some other art, by what German critics term anAnders-streben, a partial alienation from its own limitations, by which the arts are able, not indeed to supply the place of each other, but reciprocally to lend each other new forces. Yeats's art essays echo Pater to posit that all three arts have individual positive qualities, that they are positively related and that they have powerful capacities to transcend their individual limits. Wagnerian transcendence of each art's limits, via symbolism, is a recurring theme in Yeats's prose. In an early poetic manuscript (1887), Yeats notes ‘talent perceives Difference/Genius unity’ (CL1, 226, n.4). His Blake essay (1897) quotes his predecessor's claim of a 'covenant' in which '"painting, poetry and music...conversing with Paradise' make these arts available to represent 'the shapes of beauty haunting our moments of inspiration' (E & I, 117). A lecture on the painter George Watts (1906) stresses ‘all the arts were fundamentally one art, and that was true of one art was, if properly understood, true of them all’ (UP2, 343). In their catholicity, in 'Art and Ideas' (1913), the arts come under one single roof: 'the arts have [never] been other than a single authority, a Holy Church of Romance’. Yeats's theorising of the "total artwork", granting the arts' parity or subsuming literature within an umbrella category of 'art', however, is so tempered with the idea of poetry's primacy (it produces its own internal music and virtual picturing) so that the "total artwork", in terms of its self-sufficiency, pre-imminence, range and positive capacities, tends to become poetry itself. The literary essay theorising and conceptualizing relations between the arts (in a way that music and painting, devoid of language, do not) runs poetry a close second for Yeats. Thereby, in an arts' hierarchy, based on each art's capabilities, poetry or the essay on the other arts emerge as the key disciplines. For Beckett, more theoretically attuned to Duthuit than Pater, the three arts have individual negative capacities, are negatively related and do not transcend their individual internal features or separate mediums/limits. In 'La Peinture', Beckett uses the term 'artist' as umbrella category encompassing poet, musician, painter and philosopher but he does so to ironize the arts' separate and conjoint powers as negative capabilities (DISJ, 132). When Beckett defines painting as silent, material, physical object in pursuit of a vanished object in 'Peintres de l‘Empêchement' (DISJ, 136) or posits music as abstract, sequential, dependent on silences between dissonance or atomised notes (DFTMW, 138), and suggests that literature cannot attain the silence of painting or abstraction of music, he disables traditional, stereotypical, positive definitions of the individual arts as a basis for equating them or for synthesizing an idea of the arts as offering each other mutual assistance or for erecting a hierarchy of the arts. Beckett's arts are essentially different, negatively related. The arts' separate incapacities to represent reality and falsification of chaos (failed pretensions to which literature, with its claims to systematize thought and erect meanings in the void, is especially prone) block erections of a general theory of the arts as 'total artwork' or positive synthesis in which they metaphorically transcend lack and limits. 'If we can't keep our genres more or less distinct, or extricate them from confusion that has them where they are, we might as well go home and lie down', Beckett stated in 1957 (Beckett cited in Ruby Cohn, 1980, 207). Just as Les Fauves (1949) stresses painting's autonomy and resistance to language, not its potential role in a total artwork, Beckett also claims of Bram van Velde's painting that 'It is new', in one letter to Duthuit in the same year, 'because it is the first to repudiate relation in all its forms' (SBL2, introduction, xcii). If both writers' letters and essays record acute perceptual responses to painting and music, Yeats often attempts to relate one art to another (by analogy) whereas Beckett's letters' visceral reactions are so synaesthetic that each art becomes imbricated in another until they become impossible to rationally disentangle or synthesize. Paintings' generation of physical 'palpitations' and conceptual incoherence suggest affinities with Kandinsky's arts which provoke: 'Clashing discords, loss of equilibrium, - principles overthrown, unexpected drumbeats, great questionings, apparently purposeless strivings, stress and longing (apparently torn apart), chains and fetters broken (which had united many), opposites and contradictions?—?this is our harmony' (Kandinsky, 1994, 193). Yeats's 'tumult of images' lead to Beckettian responses to arts as inextricable and inexplicable. A Beethoven concert is 'dry & finickety… Ludwig never so Rembrandtesque' (SBL1, 260); Mozart’s Figaro is ‘Watteau enough to be not the least Watteau...more puerile’ (Beckett cited in Knowlson, 1996, 253); while Jack B. Yeats’s painting is ‘Watteau put in bust and urns’ (SBL1, 535). Leibniz is ‘a great cod, but full of splendid little pictures’; Schopenhauer is ‘a window opened on a fug’; while Kant and Heraclitus are ‘vinegar and nitre’ (SBL1, 172, 550 & 368, n.8). A novel is an a toilet roll installation ‘on rice paper wound about a spool and perforated every six inches...the length of each chapter carefully calculated to suit with the average free motion’; a ‘disinterested... poem’ or ‘prayer’ is a ‘kite’, its tail and canvas on grass or in air; while linoleum morphs into ‘Braque seen from a great distance’ or Gertrude Stein’s prose is ‘a procedure... akin to the technique of Feininger’ (SBL1, 383, 274, 220 & 519). The painter Giorgione enters the eye ‘like Joyce’s Parnell spit’, while Emil Nolde’s Christ Among the Children requires hours of looking so as to be played ‘over & over much like the record of a quartet’ (SBL1, 444 & 391-2, n. 12). Beckett’s describes MPTK (1934) as a blend of ‘Grock, Dante, Chaucer, Bernard de Mandeville and Uccello’ (SBL1, 208). This scrambling of the arts prevents compartmentalisation as artificial or stable conceptual response; so ‘perhaps’, one of Beckett’s favourite words, one has to admit, with Paul Muldoon, that there is no ‘clear autobahn through Beckett’s work’ where one art form, pace Joyce, is ‘Bethicket’ in another (Muldoon cited in Zvi & Moorjani, 2008, 7).When the two writers explore the idea of the "total artwork" by turning to focus on the other arts' relations with music they expose differing conceptions of relations between texts and paintings. Yeats and Beckett wrote articles about painting, not pure music, so relations with pure music become secondary to relations between texts/paintings in their published output, although their competence and immersion in pure music as a separate art differed. Yeats was tone deaf, despite his ear for poetry's rhythms and rhymes; Beckett played piano at the painter Avigdor Arikha's Paris home in the 1950's with a competent ear. The writers' visited identical haunts for differing art purposes. Yeats visited Dublin's Ely Place with George Russell to paint the walls with Golden Dawn symbols and Hugh Lane's 'wonderful house in Cheyne Walk, full of pictures representing great wealth' (1910) (CL InteLex #1332) located on the street where Rossetti had lived; Beckett visited Dublin's Ely Place's school for language and music and Cheyne Walk Gardens (1935) to play piano duets with Hester Dowden. In theory Yeats, periodically, conscripts music and its auditory structures as an ally of poetry or literature (with its music and rhythm) so the poem in which ballad/song or song are a key feature is vindicated; in theory and discursive Beckett emphasizes music's autonomy and pure sounds (lacking meanings to which the text aspires) so the poem or novel as 'composition' may borrow these features to run against the grain of creative texts aspirations to deliver meaning in language. Both writers modify Pater's claim that pure music is the key analogy unlocking the arts's aspirations and relations in theory and praxis. (Pater, incidentally, might be also said to belie theory in praxis, in theoretically claiming music is the premier art in a praxis focused on discussing links between painting and literature.) Pater's most famous contention is that all three arts as transcendent totality aspire to 'the condition of music'. Strikingly, for all of Yeats's frequent citations of Pater, he cites this dictum only once (1915-16) to claim that the arts must ‘recognise... change as the painters did' in painting for new secular locations so that ‘Our lyrical and our narrative poetry alike have used their freedom and have approached nearer, as Pater said all the arts would if they were able, to "the condition of music" (Yeats cited in Foster, 2003, 42). Yeats's 'The Symbolism of Poetry' recycles the Pre-Raphaelite adage and Pater's trope to suggest the arts produce a unity/harmony ‘...when sound, and colour, and form are in a musical relation, a beautiful relation to one another, [so that] they become as it were one sound, one colour, one form, and evoke an emotion that is made out of their distinct evocations and yet is one emotion...’ (E & I, 157). Style, as already noted, is 'style that is musical and full of colour' - but these are attributes of literature/poetry, not peculiar to music per se, which the text may borrow for its analogies or parallels. In Beckett's impasse, where one art is not commensurate with another, music and its dissonance produce words which mock words (negative relations) like 'a whisper of that final music or that silence that underlies all'. Just as music (and paintings) may be explained or articulated into meaning in order to stress that language is positively 'voluble' and has power in Yeats's texts, so music (and painting) reveal that language is far too voluble in failing to deal with the reality of 'that silence... that underlines all' in Beckett's. In essays, then, Yeats prioritizes literary music, not pure music as a separate discipline, to magnify the text's power and point to poetry's. 'Literature and the Living Voice' (Samhain, 1906) even rejects pure 'music' as key aspiration for the arts and key analogy for explaining relations between them. The poet 'see[s] nothing in the world but the arts', Yeats claims - but 'I have but one art, that of speech, and my feeling for music dissociated from speech is very slight...I do not judge his [i.e. the musician's] art for any purpose but my own...until it has become intellectual enough to be the vehicle of a Shelley or a Keats' (EXP, 208 & 218). 'Discoveries' (1906) is emphatic: 'Walter Pater says music is the type of all the arts...I... am all for the man who... uses all means of persuasion - stories, laughter, tears, and but so much as he can discover on the wings of words. I would even avoid the conversation of lovers of music, who would draw us into the impersonal land of colour and sound...Music is the most impersonal of things, and words the most personal, and that is why musicians do not like words' (E & I, 267-268). Poetry is word-tune, not pure-music. A Vision prioritises literature/poetry as key disciplines with their own internal musical and pictorial qualities; painting, not Pater's music, becomes the key analogy linking the two arts. A Vision equates J.M. Synge's 'rhythm and syntax' with Rembrandt's patient 'painting of a lace collar' so that Pater's musical analogy is now put use to transfer and claim music's rhythmic power for poetry/painting until their dual relations becomes the key relation. The slippage in Pater, between arts which aspire to become music in theory and a practise in which he writes texts conscripting painting as a key discipline becomes a characteristic of Yeatsian texts. In Yeats's prose texts poetry/theatre as vision require painting as ally to inspire its virtual image and illustrate its end product but poetry also supplies its own auditory structures, so pure music is neither essential nor necessary for its production and delivery. As 'Symbolism in Painting' notes, ‘the patterns of the artist are but the monotonous flash woven to take the eyes in a subtler enchantment’; the visual rhythms of poetry and painting create a symbol which ‘entangles, in complex colours and forms, a part of the Divine Essence’ (E & I, 148-50). Yeats's 1937 proposal that 'desire', as common link between the arts, might be a fit topic for a radio debate with the artist Edmund Dulac (1937) demonstrates how this works (E & I, ix). 'That it is not the duty of the artist to paint beautiful women and beautiful places is nonsense', Yeats states to conclude: 'That the exclusion of sex appeal from poetry, painting and sculpture is nonsense (are films alone to impose their ideal upon the sexual instinct? That, on the contrary, all arts are the expression of desire – exciting desirable life, exulting desirable death. That all the arts must be united again, painting and literature, poetry and music. Bless synthesis; damn Whistler and his five o’clock.' A triadic relation between all three arts is invoked only to 'damn' Whistler's 'Ten O'Clock Lecture' (1885) which linked (abstract) painting and music to sever their relations from literature. For Yeats, poetry as vision requires painting is reinstated as key ally to inspire its virtual image or illustrate its end product; painting's autonomy, pace Whistler, is rejected and any independent entente between music/painting resisted, lest poetry be cut off and severed from painting as a key support for literature. Beckett uses music to frame relations between the arts and between texts and paintings differently. In a 1964 interview Beckett appears to suggest the two non-literary modern arts' abstract qualities are potential signposts for language/literature: 'I think that I have perhaps freed myself from certain formal concepts. Perhaps, like the composer Sch?nberg or the painter Kandinsky, I have turned towards an abstract language. Unlike them, however, I have tried to concretize the abstraction?—?not to give it yet another formal context.' Potential arts' relations in which pure music and painting offer pointers to texts are suggested, then negated; literature must acknowledge its limits and 'concretize the abstraction' of the two other disciplines. Pater's key obstacle to 'aesthetic' unity between the arts - 'to define beauty, not in the most abstract but in the most concrete terms possible, [requires the writer] to find, not its universal formula, but the formula which expresses most adequately this or that special manifestation of it' - which his texts aims to surmount become insurmountable for Beckett. Beckett's praise for the 'intimate and ineffable nature' of music as a separate discipline turns against its use for total absorption in a total artwork: 'by definition, opera is a hideous corruption of this most immaterial of all the arts: the words of a libretto are to the musical phrase that they particularize what the Vend?me column, for example, is to the ideal perpendicular' (PDT, 92). 'Sanies II', in a version MacGreevy owned, puts arts' relations firmly in their place as images un-focus and chords are broken: 'this clonic world / all these phantoms shuddering out of focus / it is better to close the eyes / all the chords of the earth broken like a bad pianist's.' (CP, 248)If Yeats invokes a key alliance between literature and painting, sometimes extended to include music, to elevate the power of literature, Beckett more often invokes pure music in theory and in practice to permit it to intrude on, or disrupt, texts. Beckett's description of Beethoven's Seventh Symphony ('big black silences...[in] dizzying path of sounds linking unfathomable maws of silence') echoes that of Krapp's Last Tape ('des explosions suives des silences') but it is contrary aspiration to muteness in both arts and the failure of literature to deliver unified meaning (it is explosive/ fragmentary) which is being stressed. After the radio play Words and Music (1962) was set to music, Beckett's claim that 'Music always wins' does not suggest music is an aspiration literature may actually fulfil: in fact, it simply exposes literature (and its pact with meaning) as pushing limits whereby pure music, introduced to texts/theatre, may competitively expose language's pretensions in capturing meaninglessness. Yeats's near-nonsensical ballad refrain in 'The Pilgrim' where 'all I have to say / Is fol de rol de rolly o' reach a limit in allowing pure sound to dominate meaning/image, whilst deploying an innate feature of the traditional ballad's verbal ornamentation before pictures assist narrative/meaning. Beckett's interjection of a Dada-type score for a symphony of croaking, repeated frog sounds in Watt derails the text's pretensions to erect meanings. Just as Kandinsky's On the Spiritual in Art notes the ‘manifold repetition of a word... makes it lose its external sense as a name...the object is forgotten, and only the pure sound of the word remains’ (Kandinsky, 1982, 147), so Beckett, thereby, uses pure music and abstract painting to disrupt the creative text in his praxis. The poem 'What is the word' posits the logos as 'folly': here picturing is a need the text cannot realize (''glimpse - / seem to glimpse - / folly for to need to seem to glimpse'); here additive musical is an overture from which the text retreats in a Joycean diminuendo ('folly for to need to glimpse afaint afar away over there / what - / what is the word -). (CP, 228-9) The arts' separate incapacities as 'folly' render the total artwork a 'folly' or at best a negative sum total.When a DFTMW arranges characters in the twelve notes of musical scale and states 'we could write a little book that would be purely melodic', the proposal to write in a Yeatsian style that is 'musical and full of colour' is ironic, associated with textual 'flottements', disintegration. Beethoven's musical 'cenotaphs of indivisibility' in Beckett's DFMW are 'not a possibility for the literary writer' as Knowlson and Pilling (1979, 247) suggest. 'Attunement', 'difficult music' and Beethoven, or 'figure' and ground' and Rembrandt merely leave Celia still 'splattered with words' (MU, 12 & 27). In Not I (1973) a visually isolated mouth produces 'unintelligible' music, in broken syntax and paratactic images, in a spot-lit focus illuminating the tongue's 'contortions' (CDW, 379). This dissonant, non-relation between literature and music/painting, is Yeats's target in 'Music and Poetry' (1937) in which pure music (or image), shorn from sung lyric or linguistic meaning, is attacked: 'Music that wants of us nothing but images that suggest sound, cannot be our music; and bad poetry...does that... such music can but dislocate, wherever there is syntax and elaborate rhythm'; music concerts have 'masticated...[poets's] well-made words...turning them into spittle'. Poetry as song needs 'no accompaniment, because where words are an object... the musician who claims to translate the emotion of the poet into another vehicle is a liar' (CW6, 191-3). This is Beckett's point about words - 'Every word is a lie', Beckett informed Gottfried Büttner in 1967 (Büttner, 1984, 27).- and about painting and music: The Unnamable's narrator with his 'speech-parched voice' that 'fill[s] with spittle' is imaged becoming 'a vast cretinous mouth...slobbering'; his previous incarnation, Molloy, seeks respite from words and their 'falsetto of reason' at camp fires, redolent of paintings of The Flight Into Egypt, which prove temporary (TRIL, 284, 359 & 99). Respite in pure sound ('parched' music) and silence (temporary painting) reveal the text's neediness to conscript other arts which in turn fail to offer lasting consolations or concepts. When narrative aspires to pure sound it becomes imbricated in images/textual meanings; when it seeks to become pure image it becomes imbricated in sound/textual meanings. Individual incapacities and fissures between all three arts are revealed. Beckett's art essays, unlike Yeats's, as this study has contended, conscript abstract painting, from Mondrian to van Velde, just as his creative texts conscript a-tonal or non-music, reminiscent of John Cage's 4'33" (1952), a non-composition of four minutes and thirty-three seconds of silence, where art turns from answering the world to questioning its own (in)capacity. In Watt a painting, a modern 'composition' (as in the titles of Bram van Velde's paintings) or abstract canvas of a broken circle which cannot be interpreted sits alongside a mock-realist portrait of a pianist by Art Conn Connery to target the concept of a total artwork (Watt, 109-10). Two non-linguistic arts conspire against the text, the supposedly realist painting as much as the abstract one: Second picture in Erskine's room, representing gentleman seated at piano, full length, receding profile right, naked save for stave-paper resting on lap. With his right hand he sustains a chord which Watt has no difficulty in identifying as that of C major... On muscles of brawny neck, arm, torso, abdomen, loin, thigh and calf, standing out in cords in stress of effort, Mr O'Connery had lavished all the resources of Jesuit tactility. Beads of sweat that would have done credit to Heem...The right nipple, from which sprang a long red solitary hair, was in a manifest state of tumescence, a charming touch. The bust was bowed over the keyboard and the face...wore expression of man about to be delivered... of particularly hard stool... illustrating the extraordinary effect produced on musical nature by faint cacophony of remote harmonics stealing over dying accord......prominent portions of facies (Latin word, meaning face) seemed not improbable. (Latin quote.) (219-20) Converting Renaissance style portrait into Jan de Heem's still life (which often symbolised decay or death), converting 'chord' into 'cord', piano 'stool' into excrement, 'face' into 'facies', the total artwork becomes an endless, disintegrating chase. The text on a painting of music only registers a 'remote harmonics stealing over dying accord'. Music, painting, and text collude to reveal their own artificiality, the limits of analogies and puns; the total artwork is imagined, at its basest level, as a constipated human being.In the practice of drama as potentially 'total artwork' more porous to the two other non-literary arts both writers may be inspired by paintings or introduce musical compositions. The hawk-figure in a winged costume in Yeats's Noh drama is redolent of eastern, symbolist painting and Caspar David Friedrich's painting was inspirational for Waiting for Godot; Yeats introduces Elgar in his play, Diarmuid and Grania, Beckett The Merry Widow in Happy Days. These are exceptions, though, and neither painting nor music as separate forms is as essential or necessary as textual image and word sound. Poetry spoken in the theatre is ‘the nearest of all arts to eternity’, Yeats asserts in one article (1896) (E & I, 199): it is found in the ‘rudiments of music – music as it was in early Greece’ (CL3, 42) but this is essentially word-music - ‘little tunes... in words; every word... its own tune' (CL2, 124, n. 5). Likewise, if a ‘theatre of art’ requires conscripting painter-friends to design sets, painting's function is secondary and supportive for Yeats; it provides ‘grave and decorative’ or illustrative, symbolic backdrops ‘subordinate’ to words (CW8, 150). The ‘art of making a succession of pictures’ foregrounding actor and language should not, Yeats insists, be overwhelmed by 'flashy landscape-painting', a 'trade' not an 'art' presenting ‘an alien interest’ (E & I, 100). Yeats's replacement of painted stage sets with lighted sets permitting spectators to watch framed, heroic figuration, ‘people wandering on the edge of eternity' and claims that this produced gains in placing real light, real perspective and action in alignment, not painting out of line with the lighting (UP2, 399), suggest his key interest is not in painting as a separate artform per se. Painting may supply virtual inspiration or images for the theatrical text or assist in positioning sculptural heads or arranging tableaux on the stage or help as secondary, even potentially limited, effect to support actor and text (E & I, 101). Painting may frame character against a minimal backdrop (as did his father's portraits); but when modern lighting becomes available it becomes disposable. If Beckett witnessed Yeats's sparse stage and suggested in notebooks for That Time that 'To the objection that the visual component too small, out of all proportion with aural, answer: make it smaller on the principle that less is more', his visual stage is even more minimal and severe (TN, 1999, 360). Bare stage and lit silhouette in Beckett's Rough for Theatre II may strive for the Yeatsian effect of highlighting 'character isolated by a deed' but the proposed deed is suicide: visual minimalism and spotlight are directed on to the less heroic or enabling capacity of act or word. Yeats's 1899 declaration, however, that ‘The more the poet describes the less the painter should paint’ does anticipate the conversion of Waiting for Godot from text to minimal stage image (1951) by a half-century although Godot's stage is emptied of symbolism and drained entirely of Yeatsian 'grave or decorative scenery'. Beckett's emphatic rejection of Nicholas de Sta?l's designs for the theatre set in Godot explicitly attacks cooperation between literal use of painting and text as "sister arts" in plays:Frankly, I’m totally opposed to Sta?l’s ideas for the set... He sees the whole thing with a painter’s eye. For me that is aestheticism. They have turned ballet and theatre into a branch of painting, and done them a great deal of harm, I think. It is Wagnerism. I do not believe in collaborations between embellishments. That is Protestantism if you like, we are what we are. The setting has to come out of the text without adding to it... In Godot it is a sky that is a sky only in name... Nothing, it expresses nothing, it is an opaque no one bothers to question anymore. Any formal specificity becomes impossible. If it is really essential to know where they are (and in my view the text makes it clear enough), let the words look after that... by means of labels... Indigence, we can never say it enough, and decidedly, painting is incapable of that. (SB to GD, 3 January 1951, SBL2, 218-19) The total artwork runs aground as either theoretically desirable or literal possibility. 'C'est du Wagnérisme', Beckett writes to Duthuit, 'Moi je ne crois pas à la collaboration des arts, je veux un theatre réduit à ses propres moyens' [That's Wagnerism. I don't believe in art synthesis: I want a theatre thrown back on its own resources]. Given that Beckett visualised stage-sets inspired by painting - in the 1950's he came to hate cluttered stage sets as much as a 'Salvator Rosa landscape' (Knowlson, 1996, 417) - his disposal of stage sets for the word-image is decisive here. 'Theatereality', Ruby Cohn's description (Cohn, 1980, 30-1), as painting's inspirational presence, but literal absence, and reality as threadbare language, underpins this mock-Protestant turn in which word is world. Beckett's rejection of 'Wagnerism' in backdrops parallels Yeats's rejection of ‘filling the stage with landscapes...like the landscapes of Mr. Leader’ and characters ‘happily inspired like persons in popular German pictures’ for Kincora (1904) but Yeats's retention of ‘the sort of tree one finds in Japanese prints’ as symbol is unlike Giacometti's emaciated, modernist, non-functioning, non-symbolist tree in Godot. If Williams Morris’s textual, decorative image of ‘the Dry Tree, the image of the ruined land, [which] becomes green’ is borrowed for The Well at World's End (E & I, 54) and if dark Romantic landscape paintings of Caspar David Friedrich and Yeats's 'boughs long stripped by the wind' from At the Hawk's Well are borrowed in Godot (Katherine Worth, 1999, 131), the latter's substitution of painterly Romanticism with threadbare textual and visual realism is more brutally reductive. Visual understatement, 'lessness', not rhetorical symbolism is the purpose of the tree sprouting minimal foliage in Godot's Act II as 'one the few things that do happen' in the play. The Beckett/Giacommetti sculpted tree with single leaf makes the tree more barren and bare than if it had none, visually pointing to its loss, not gain in growth in the text. Beckett even informed the director Jerzy Krecz?mar of the Warsaw production (1957) — “The tree is perfect (perhaps a few leaves too many in the second act!)” — even that mustn’t be overstated.Yeats's image of a theatre where people are 'wandering on the edge of eternity' (E & I, 101)or of poetry where the 'Mind moved yet seemed to stop /As 'twere a spinning top' (VP, 382384) evokes oppositional tensions between textual mobility and painterly stasis resolved viaa synthesis. Narrative movement and still image add up, or become resolved into a composite, distilled transcendent moment or symbol. The 'image is dialects at a standstill' as Walter Benjamin puts it (Benjamin, 2002, 462-3). The Beckettian image is less stable than the Yeatsian symbol; it presents this tension between stillness (fine art) and movement (narrative movement) as a tension it experiences but cannot resolve. Beckett's viewing of a great range of Kandinsky's works in Iva Bienhert's collection (1937) demonstrates how this irresolvable tension between the disruptive image and narrative assist this tension. He not only ironizes the use of these painting's for spiritual meditation, but praises the fluid, temporal, energetic, concrete shapes of Kandinsky's Dreamy Improvisation (1913) over settled, static, pre-determined geometric symbols in the painter's Bauhaus watercolours (1922-33), which he ignored, and small abstract works in Halle (1937), which he criticised (GD, January 23, 1937). Grohmann, Beckett's 'charming art historian...with to his credit books and catalogues of Klee and Kandinsky and Baumesiter and others' (SBL 1, 478), in his catalogue Die Sammlung Ida Bienert Dresden (1933), which Bienhert gave Beckett, claimed this was 'one of his [Kandinsky's] mightiest pictures' where 'the tension lies between rest and movement'. Yeats's 'The Statues' admires the conversion of Greek geometry into perfect sculpture as textual, stable monument; Beckett's drawn geometric diagrams for plays chart paths of patterned movement for actors locked in a confined space as mobile sculptures, in line with his reading of Kandinsky's painting.If Romanticism offered opportunities to unify narrative movement and painterly stasis in symbols of the transcendent moment - as in Pater or in Yeats's print of Blake's Urizen where the divinity 'wavers on the edge of infinity' and stops to look down and create an ordered visual world from the void - in Godot, Beckett's two outsiders, inspired by Romantic painting, look up at the moon, wait beside a graveyard and Giacometti's tree and hover by a non-transcendent, temporal abyss. Synthesis between fine art's stasis and narrative movement, between the arts, is frustrated. The play refuses to create an ordered, unified world or total artwork in which one medium empowers another despite drawing on painting for an inspirational image. The play concludes with language proposing temporal movement ('Shall we go? Yes let's go') which visual stage directions countermand in a temporary tableaux '[They do not move]'. The wind in the reeds, as audio-visual image of transcendent inspiration from Yeats, is heard but mistaken for a God-like presence; a supposedly, white bearded Blakean figure from traditional paintings is evoked as a past symbol which the text cannot retrieve. The Yeatsian moment of transcendence in which symbols from one art enable another to move and 'go on' staged and denied; Lessing-like divisions and tensions between temporal, narrative movement in the text and a spatial stasis in the tableaux are reiterated to disable both into interminable 'waiting'. The Yeatsian conversion of what is "seen" or "unseen", in fine art and life, into a synthesis or symbol that can be "said" (the wind among the reeds) only creates tensions and contradictions between images possibly "seen" and doubtfully "said" in Beckett's texts - and this process of seeing, hearing, registering images and using mediums is the focus of the next chapter.Chapter 2 The Two Writers' Ideas of Perception, Seeing and Hearing, Images and MediumsIf the two writers reframe past fine art theories dealing with relations between the arts, how do their ideas of perception/seeing, of seeing and hearing, and concepts or use of images and mediums inform how, and why, they do so? Yeats, this chapter argues, is predisposed towards theories which begin with the arts (especially poetry as an achieved and concentrated form) and presuppose the power or capacity of language. Fine art is seen, heard, read, and conceptually decoded or interpreted to aid thinking, yield knowledge or meanings in essays; in poems (connecting seeing and hearing), images - and fine art images - are transformed into durable meta-symbols in/for poems, as they reflect on the way they unify and transcend the senses. Beckett is far more predisposed to theories driven by experiences in the senses, or ideas of the senses, which presuppose the limits and incapacities of language. What is seen poorly in (fine art) images, which appear and disappear in the retina (and literally do not speak), and disjunctions or ruptures between seeing/hearing as poor perceptions compound misconceptions, form no basis for secure knowledge or reading meaning into fine art images in essays; in creative works where the 'ill seen' is 'ill said' , the way the arts transform finite, temporal images into durable symbols, distorts actual perceptual experience of a chaotic reality (in which images refuse this fake, fixed stability) so when language translates images (from fine art to text, from one medium into another) what is lost or distorted in translation is highlighted. Comparing and evaluating how the two writers respond to the way images cross - or fail to cross - from one medium into another, it is argued that Yeats emphasizes the ekphrastic power of the text to interpret, transform and integrate fine art images into textual symbols, whereas Beckett points to its failures, incapacities and distortions, to what is being lost by squeezing the silent, autonomous fine art object into speech for which it is ill-suited. The two writers' theorising of the arts begin with diverging assumptions. Yeats's A Vision, for instance, cites and links previous fine art works and literature as exemplary models of perfection/unity; he does so by using diagrams to 'picture' how these arts may be seen and read; an old book with information on ancient, nomadic drawings on sand, is brought by a Pre-Raphaelite to the poet, who then edits, interprets and decodes it. Yeats's diagrams in the book of spirals or cones, 'symbolical of time - subjectivity - Berkeley's stream of ideas' (Yeats, 1974, 70), which unfolds change and instability must be contained within an even greater meta-symbol - the lasting, stable 'sphere' or 'Great Wheel' from which all art works issue and end, which represents how time, may be enfolded into an eternal or archetypal order when past fine art is knit into the perfect text/poem. Past fine art enables the viewer to see or glimpse reality; the text/literature enable one to see, read, and represent this as part of an durable, eternal order. In Beckett's 'Les Deux Besions' he draws a star (similar to Yeats's diagram of inter-penetrating cones/spheres) to illustrate that the arts originate from two experienced or perceptual 'needs' - a need to see, which produces the frustration of having seen, a chaotic reality. In 'La Peinture des van Velde' two impairments prevent two kinds of painter from being able to see, grasp or represent objects in paintings: 'One will say: I cannot see the object to represent it, because it is what it is. The other: I cannot see the object to represent it, because I am what I am.' (DISJ, 136) If the object can be neither seen, nor represented in paint, the implication is that the text's retrieval or use of object or painting is illusory. 1.Perception/Seeing Some literary scholars and iconologists warn against taking literal perception too literally. Insisting that what a writer or painter sees is secondary to what they select and interpret in the mind's eye, they argue that the resultant artwork supersedes dependence on the retina in its imaginative ordering and form. Richard Ellmann warns that linking James Joyce's literally poor eyesight with increased aural qualities in texts is a simplistic 'insult to the creative imagination' (Ellmann, 1959, 716). W.J.T. Mitchell argues that essentializing seeing as a necessary or sufficient condition for appreciating painting is simplistic: the innocent eye can be "blind" but a literally blind person who knows what to "look" for conceptually may "see" a painting with more clarity than a sighted person (Mitchell, 1987, 116-118). Given W.B. Yeats's myopia and Samuel Beckett's cataracts meant seeing letters and paintings in their early middle-age became difficult, how do they formulate or by-pass literal problems of seeing? Does imaginative picturing and mental conceptualization compensate for literally poor retinal perception or does it compound or increase conceptual problems when it comes to "seeing" fine art and describing or using its images in texts? Yeats, I argue, proposes poor physical perception, which made reading and writing of texts and viewing of fine art difficult for him, may be bypassed or surpassed by/in poetry's 'pictured song'; Beckett's drives a wedge between 'picturing' and 'song' to suggest the innate blindness in perception and silence of visual objects make the 'ill seen' the 'ill said'. W.B. Yeats's myopia and astigmatism in his late twenties meant he viewed The Land of Heart’s Desire in ‘a dimming mist’. His perceptual difficulty becomes the essential problem of Margaret Mary Ryan’s poetry in Songs of Remembrance (1889) which is ‘too subjective and sad’ and 'like looking through a window pane on which one has breathed’ (CL1, 200). The 'introduction' to Poems of William Blake (revised 1905) applauds Blake's conversion of images to 'symbolize the senses'; the senses are rarely essentialised as obstacle even if a poem on Blake's Edward III acknowledges times when 'touch, and sight, and sound, and smell, / That sing and dance round Reason's fine-wrought throne, / Shall flee away, and leave him all forlorn -' (CW6, 86). Poor eyesight and subjective insight in Beckett's Murphy, though, only leaves its protagonist in such a vague state that the 'Blake League was utterly mistaken' in taking him for any kind of acolyte of the master 'come to life'; near-sighted Neary crashes into Cuchulain's sculpture in Dublin's for a view of its buttocks devoid of any vision of transcendent meaning (MU, 44 & 28). In Yeats poetry, the blind poet Milton, and Milton as etched in an engraving by Samuel Palmer, become a joint emblem: actual eye (Palmer as visual artist via Blake) and 'inner eye' (Milton as blind writer via Yeats) bridge a potential gap between literal seeing and imaginatively seeing, via the text. Blind poets recur in Yeats's poems and prose - Homer, Milton and Raftery - to suggest that the textual imagination overcomes literal, perceptual difficulties. Yeats's owned editions of Milton illustrated by Blake and by Ricketts; his annotations of Sampson Agonistes and other Poems (1899) stress the lines 'Bosomed high in tufted trees/Where perhaps some beauty lies,/The cynosure of neighbouring eyes' (O'Shea, 1985,175). Beckett's copy of Paradise Lost led him to note (1955) that he could not 'get a verse of Milton out of my mind: "Insuperable height of loftiest shade"'(Nixon and Hulle, 2013, 29). Yeats's phrase in which the poetry 'call[s] to the eye of mind' an image (Co Pl, 208) or 'summon[s]' images 'before the mind's eye' (MYTH, 345) are countered by Beckett's 'void at the centre of sight'. The brain-directed eye in Yeats's poems (the 'Yellow-eyed hawk of the mind' as 'The Hawk' has it), registers fine art to use it to create stable poetic forms ordered by the imagination; Beckettian characters, such as Murphy, have 'dilated' pupils which register a 'permanent lack of light' (MU, 140) and his body and the novel are fragmenting in time. The eye-directed brain registering random, involuntary images and ceaselessly responding, in a reflex action, to stimuli which summon or direct it are in 'Company': 'There is of course the eye....The globe. All pupil. Staring up. Hooded. Bared. Hooded again. Bared again.' (CISIS, 12) Beckett's literally, near-blind writer is unable to see clearly and seeks a 'contour' which faintly recedes or which 'one glance dispels' (CISIS, 17-21); those unable to 'look away' - the viewer of, or writer on, paintings - are vouchsafed a brief vision amidst 'insuperable...shade'. Word-power and the imaginative capture of a stable object, and objects in fine art, is rendered problematic. In his forties, just before ‘letter writing [became] nearly impossible’, Yeats jettisoned an aesthetic of high colour/hazy impressions for 'the firm and determinate outline' found in Blake's image-texts. Blake, despite 'the blind men and women about him' pursues inner visions in illuminated manuscripts to 'mount by poetry, music and art' into a supremely imaginative realm, transcending direct observation to realise his 'greatest' works; these include illustrations of Robert Blair's poem The Grave (1743) for an 1808 edition. 'These are much less illustrations of Blair than expressions of his own moods and visions', Yeats argues; lamentably, the publisher Cromeck employed a designer/engraver who followed 'the fashionable school of "blots and blurs", of soft shadows and broken lights, and not one from the unfashionable school of "firm and determinate outline" to which Blake belongs (CW6, 80 & 96-7). Drama is now perceived as ‘manful energy... clear outline, instead of those outlines of lyric poetry that are blurred with desire and vague regret’ (EXP, 254-255). An aesthetic of representational clarity, not subjective impressionistic images is favoured. In 1901 Yeats exhorted the artist Horton to avoid blurred, symbolic visions; he recommended Fiona MacLeod as antidote, a writer who ‘make[s] everything very hard and clear...'(CL3, 105 & 125). Clear imaginative vision replaces blurred, actual vision as compensation. Whilst Blake's clear cut symbolic drawings or Jack B. Yeats's clear woodblock style are obvious models for this aesthetic, Yeats's point is that poetry, conscripting painting, may rely on inner, clarified vision to shape its form and exceed weak perceptions. An essay is revealing entitled: 'Why the Blind Man in Ancient Times was Made a Poet' (CW4, 202-3). After 1900 Yeats repeatedly insisted earlier lyrics were ‘unmanly' in dwelling 'in a region of brooding emotions full of fleshly waters and vapours', in a 'country of shadows & hollow images'. The antidote is to 'never let the children of vague desire breathe upon... [the will] nor the waters of sentiment rust the terrible mirror of its blade...Let us have no emotions, however absurd, in which there is not an athletic joy’ (CL3, introduction, xlix & 576-578). The poetry replaces 'melting hues' and places where 'vapour vapour chased' in 'The Wanderings of Osin' (1889) or Impressionistic depictions of 'a thin grey man half lost in gathering light' or sense that 'We left no traces /On Munster grass and Connemara skies' with firmly outlined images, in line with Blake's art, as 'In Memory' (1916) 'because the mountain grass / Cannot but keep the form / Where the mountain hare has lain'(VP, 13, 39,102, 130 & 536-7). 'Her Vision in the Wood' imagines 'bodies from a picture or a coin' advocating graphic clarity (VP, 536-7) in line with texts he owned of symbols on ancient coins. In excluding modern writers from his OBMV (1936) as 'goldsmiths working with a glass screwed into one eye', unlike poets such as himself and Dorothy Wellesley who 'stride ahead of the crowd, its swordsmen, its jugglers looking to right and left' (CW5, 181-203; LDW, 64.), Yeats eradicates poor eyesight and substitutes inner athletic, vision for this. The painter William Rothenstein noted Yeats replaced perception with conception on country walks where he looked at little and 'had no eye...he seemed to keep his eyes on the ground', even as he recorded the poet's belief in 'miraculous' inner visions to claim mere 'illusions' come 'through our feeble senses of sight'. The mind-directed eye in Yeats, which controls inner 'vision' to shape paintings into texts, is replaced in Beckett with the weakened, retinal eye directed by sensory motor-perceptions of images which the mind struggles to order or control. Jasper Johns noted Beckett could barely see images he produced in illustrating Fizzles (Johns, 1996, 153). ‘Lifelong myopia’ and poor lateral vision, acute by the late 1930's, led Beckett to examine Van Gogh and Bonnard’s paintings in post-war exhibitions (1947) so closely at the l’Orangerie des Tuileries and Louvre that gallery guards forbade him to do so (Bair, 1978, 585 & 360-61; Oppenheim, 2000, 145). Cataracts left him viewing a Whistler exhibition in Berlin's Nationalgalerie (1969) to note: 'through the mist like it very much' (SBL4, 183). Beckett's Ill Seen, Ill Said links poor "seeing" and "saying"'. The inner eye, the 'eye having no need of light to see', compounds the retina's problems (CISIS, 45). There is 'less seen and seeing when with words than with not' in Worstward Ho (CISIS, 99). Retinal difficulties and obstacles compound conceptual uncertainty so that to see artworks is not the same as to say what is seen in them. 'Recent Irish Poetry' notes that in Thomas MacGreevy's pictorial poetry, in which looking and painting are implicated, it is 'the act and not the object of perception that matters' to imply this may not produce well-crafted sonnet forms under the 'influence of Rossetti' (DISJ, 74).Poor ophthalmological perception and modernist, non-representational painting, where the object disappears, are linked in Beckett's art essays and novels, but divorced as hated abstractions which fail inner vision and a symbolist aesthetic by Yeats in his essays on fine art and in poems. The object/person which eludes direct perception and aesthetic object which occludes clear, mirroring relations with the world is central in Beckett's art writing. The 'void at the centre of sight' where objects elude perception and images recede, vanish or resist representation in the 'great' paintings of Bram van Velde in 'Peintres de l'Empêchement' is commended (DISJ, 136). Hard, clear graphic outlines in Otto Gabriel's 'appalling' paintings, 'flat and Greek vasey' (GD, 17 March 1937), are rejected before Beckett sponsors writing as a 'vaguening technique' to suggest art jettison any Cartesian aesthetic of the 'clear and distinct'; literary style should approach an impoverished, non-compensatory actual vision of penury or silence. 'True art', Beckett averred 'has nothing to do with the Cartesian "clear and distinct"' (Beckett cited in Knowlson, 1996, 122). Yeats's summoning to the 'eye of mind' of fine art leads 'Leda and the Swan' to ask of its female subject, did 'she put on his knowledge with his power?' Fine art with clarity is "seen" as potential route to textual 'power' and 'knowledge' as in 'The Statues' where vague Buddhist sculptures have only 'empty eyeballs' whereby 'knowledge increases unreality'; when Beckett's Venerilla asks the reader to 'hold on while she summoned to the eye of mind' she is trying to recall - but cannot - a woman's dress; the flippant, intertextual irony is directed at Yeats's grand certainty of sight-assisted, inner vision (DFTMW, 205). No one in Yeats's poetry or drama wears spectacles. Beckett's immobilised narrators require telescopes, magnifiers, lens, mirrors, and spectacles (every ophthalmic aid Dutch art had to offer); but framing devices (windows, key-holes, shutters) and obstacles render these of doubtful use. Seeing remains indispensable in creating paintings for Beckett, but texts corroborating or decoding what this seen image is or means compound mis-perception with mis-conception. For Yeats the 'vague' is negative. His portrait of Douglas Hyde notes, disapprovingly, the ‘vague serious eyes' (Autobiographies cited in CL4, 391, n.3); Ernest Dowson is ‘lax in body, vague in attitude’ (CW5, 101). 'Vague' distances poet from poor eyesight/Impressionism. Beckett's blurred forms, erasures and weakening of narratives from fixed perspectives in Trilogy imply modernist, non-representational paintings approach a more unstable condition of subjective being/perception which traditional, realist art obscures in fake assertion of mastery and control of space and its forms. Molloy's damaged retina leave him seeking 'a form fading amongst forms'; he sees heads in paintings as 'veiled'; he misjudges 'the distance separating me from the outer world'. In Trilogy, where the narrator's sees 'Two shapes then, oblong like man, [which] entered into collision before me', the fiction perceptions approximate veiled, abstract painting (TRIL, 272). When Yeats's 'wild swans', precisely numbered as fifty nine, fade into the horizon they will alight elsewhere and 'delight' another's eyes in a stable image, much like a limited edition print might extend the life of poem/swan (VP, 322-3). Beckett's narrators' weep and his marginalia to Maurice Scève's love poems translates 'Mes yeulx pleurantz employment leur deffence' as 'MY EYES DEFEND THEMSELVES BY WEEPING' (Hulle & Nixon, 2013, 46). In Yeats's 'Lapis Lazuli' the sculpture depicts subjects as clear-eyed Shakespearean actors who do not break up their lines to weep' (VP, 565-7); like the ancient stone sculptures in A Vision with 'drilled eyeballs'(CW13, 166) these 'Chinamen...stare' through 'ancient, glittering eyes [which are] are gay'. Yeats and Beckett read Henri Bergson and the Irish philosopher George Berkeley. A shared focus in these writers' texts is the link between subjective perceptions and the formation of ideas/knowledge. Yeats's annotations of Bergson's Matter and Memory (1919) record that the 'senses limit perception' (O'Shea, 1985, 19-21); in A Vision (1937) the 'imagination must substitute some new image' for the 'object seized by fate'. In processing Berkeley Yeats questions whether 'percipere [is] supreme over esse': 'God appointed Berkeley, that proved all things a dream,/ That this pragmatical preposterous pig of a world, its farrow that so solid seem/ Must vanish on the instant if the mind but change its theme'(VP, 481). The mind's capacity enables it to imaginatively summon, shape or dismiss perceptual images via artworks; the emphasis is not on the retina's involuntary impulses. Beckett studied under the Bergson scholar Arthur Aston Luce (1923-7), taught Bergson at Trinity (1931) and his lectures (1931), recorded in student notes, stress perceptual consciousness as an inescapable bedrock where objects present themselves, un-interpreted out of a continuous flux (Uhlmann, 2006, 28-31). The nature of perception creates problems for any visual and textual extraction and re-presentation of objects in which artforms freeze and falsify experience in a flux. Early works register Bergson (1929-36), as Manfred Milz notes, in alignment with Kandinsky's use of the thinker to suggest painting and music are synaesthetically close to perceptions of an inseparable, durational flow. The lectures link perceptual images and 'impatience with [the] patient fabricated order of Romantics and Naturalists' who falsify this non-relational flow. Implicitly, the conceptual, ordered, stable symbols in Yeats's texts, which replace the 'object seized by fate', is critiqued as falsifying perception by 'fabrication' (lies?) in artworks. Having read Berkeley at the instigation of Yeats's biographer Joseph Hone, Beckett annotated Berkeley's A New Theory of Vision in a 1926 edition (Hulle & Nixon, 2013, 133-137) He inflects Berkeley to link distrust of the senses with human ignorance in creative works. Berkeley's 'being is perception' ('Esse est percipi'), quoted in Film comes with a disclaimer: 'No truth value attaches to above, regarded as merely of structural and dramatic convenience'. Perception may be deception. Film opens and closes with a close up of the eye: it reveals O (Object) in flight from E (Eye) and other eyes of animals, God, the mirror, the window to suggest an inescapable 'agony of perceivedness' produces being seen without seeing (O) and seeing without being seen (E as camera/viewer) (CDW, 325). Film's subject attempts to escape the 'agony' of being perceived, to turn seeing as affirmation into not being seen/non-being; Yeats's Byzantine poem's 'fury' at 'Dying into a dance, / An agony of trance' mediates, or displaces, this physical agony meta-physically via past fine art; it sees into the holy fire of Byzantine mosaics where actual or perceptual flames, via arts' immunity, 'cannot singe a sleeve'. The passing, perceptual image in the seen fine art is subsumed, or surpassed, by the imagined symbol in the text; it transcends the mere world of the finite, temporal senses. 'Hodos Chameliontos' is Yeats's region where flowing, heterogeneous, undifferentiated, Bergsonian perceptions denote a place of hellish disorientation; here 'image called up image in an endless procession, and I could not choose among them with any confidence; and when I did choose, the image lost its intensity, or changed into some other image' (Yeats cited in Craig, 1982, 219). T.S. Eliot's imagistic, synchronous 'heap of broken images' in 'The Waste Land' or 'pungent sauces, multiple variety / In a wilderness of mirrors' in 'Gerontion' (Eliot, 2015, 1; 31-35) are critiqued as an unstable, montage leaving the word 'unable to speak'(CW5, 181-204). Eliot, praised by Beckett and linked with modern painting's perceptions, is demoted as falling short of a filtered, ordered transformation of visual perception into a unified narrative form. This poetry of synchronous, unlinked, perceptual images is critiqued in the 'introduction', and minimally represented, in Yeats's OBMV. In 'The Image' (1956) where Beckett claims 'it's done, I've done the image' the image is inseparably part of the 'offal of experience' and Texts for Nothing (1950-52) note the 'eye ravening patient in the vulture face, perhaps its carrion time' (CSP, 168 & 262 n.6). This image, integral to experience in a cave like den where 'the cold is eating me', may be akin to Yeats's bleak cave in ‘Meru’ (1934), where images are ‘manifold illusion’ and man’s ‘glory and his monuments are gone’(VP, 562-33), but amidst the obliteration of Himalayan snow and this 'desolation of reality', Yeats's fine art loss is calculated: 'Egypt and Greece, good-bye, and good-bye, Rome!’. Bergson's perception, for Beckett, suggests 'intuition can achieve a total vision that intelligence can't' to leave the 'inadequacy of the word to translated impressions'. In Beckett's DFTMW tonally successive music (Beethoven) and densely indivisible painting/silence (Rembrandt) disrupt the text's linked syntax and cognitive ordering of meaning, to suggest these non-literary arts are perhaps nearer to the senses' experiences of the flux: ...into the body of the musical statement he incorporates a punctuation of dehiscence, flottements, the coherence gone to pieces, the continuity bitched to hell because the units of continuity have abdicated their unity, they have gone multiple, they fall apart, the notes fly about, a blizzard of electrons; and then vespertine compositions eaten away with terrible silences, a music one and indivisible only at the cost of as bloody a labour as any known to man … (DFTMW cited in Beckett, 1983, 49-50). In Yeats's A Vision, Rembrandt's paintings produce stable patterns in lace akin to rhythms in Synge's prose but in Beckett's text the sister arts' perceptual immediacy creates an audio-visual, Bergsonian 'blizzard' of disintegration. Pound, who termed Yeats a 'romanticist, symbolist, occultist', asked 'Is Mr Yeats an Imagiste?' and replied: 'No, Mr Yeats is a symbolist...' and, in turn, Yeats's Packet for Ezra Pound noted his 'art is the opposite of mine' and his 'criticism commends what I most condemn' (Yeats cited in Longley, 2013, 92-94 & 58). When Yeats's OBMV fleshes out these objections they are based on the type of disjunctive, non-sequential images that disrupt literary narrative which this study suggests often characterise Beckett's texts as well as Imagism. If 'German Diaries' note ‘perception is opinion’, already apperception, Beckett still holds that ‘direct optical experience’ indicates authenticity in painting (GD, 23 & 26 March 1937). In Karl Ballmer’s German studio (1936) the painting Kopf in Rot/Head in Red reminds Beckett of Picasso and Goethe and his own poem about the vulture but he notes: Transparent figures before landscapes ...Wonderful red Frauenkopf, skull earth sea & sky... Would not occur to me to call this painting abstract. A metaphysical concrete... Fully aposteriori painting. Object not exploited to illustrate an idea as in as in sayLéger or Baumeister, but primary. The communication is exhausted by the opticalexperience that is its motive & content. Anything further is by the way. Thus Leibnitz, monadolgie, Vulture, are by the way. Extraordinary stillness. His concern with Renaissance tradition. (GD, 26 November 1936) Paintings and texts prioritising direct 'concrete' perception or involuntary images - Bergson or Proust - assist Beckett's formation of an 'atomic language' in which, as Deleuze suggests, 'enumeration replaces propositions' and the 'pure image, unsullied, that is nothing but image' escapes rationalization. William Carlos Williams's famous formulation for the poem as 'no ideas but in things' loses its 'but', so things as retinal images do not securely lead to representations or ideas of them in painting or poem or texts they inspire. This disorderly, perceptual Yeatsian 'foul rag and bone shop' is one from which ‘apperception purement visuelle’, a ‘sudden visual grasp’ or ‘a shot of the eye’ in 'La Peinture van Velde' (DISJ, 156-7) create a powerful stimulus which one can neither escape nor shape into the orderly symbols of the poem/text; so both arts must answer to a perceptual, chaotic reality rather than to previous arts' traditions of stable forms. In 1921 Yeats asked his sister Elizabeth if her manuals teaching children to paint flowers 'with a single stroke of a brush' might be applied to teaching 'a series of lines' in children's 'first writing book[s]?' (CL InteLex #3847). Relations between perception and drawing in these art manuals are bridged by an insistence that 'imitating' a likeness is a product of direct observation and use of her text's drawing methods, its grids drawn on paper, its sketches as exemplars for copying outlines, its drawing schemas. These manuals assume nature presents unmediated patterns for direct seeing and copying; the art manual/text is used in cross-checks which precede or follow drawings' representations. Strikingly, Yeats refers to a manuscript drafts of ideas for poems' as a 'sketch' (Yeats cited in Bradford, 1965, 3-17) and John Sherman, in his early novel, carries sketch book drawings using these traditional Renaissance schema, the figure placed in a preliminary geometric grid, to instigate the sketch and correct the final drawing (JSD, 85). Yeats suggests copying of nature to fit past painting/literary models or schema is useful but falls short of inner vision; it puts Blake in the hands of Titian and '"Venetian and Flemish demons"' leaving his own 'imagination "weakened" and "darkened" and requires 'appropriate execution flowing from the vision itself' (1897). Yeats extrapolates a parallel for both arts: if 'we "make our soul" out of some one of the great poets' as 'in books he [Blake] wrote before he became a prophet' we fall 'into a lesser order, or out of Mr Whistler's pictures, while we amuse ourselves, or, at best, make a poorer sort of soul, by listening to sermons...'(E & I, 111-12 & 118). Direct perception of patterns in nature, converted by imagination, must use and correct past schema and exemplar, to produce recognisable symbols and forms in visual art and in text. The two arts' imagined visionary symbols free the artwork from enslavement to perception and imitation of nature or copying of past artworks. The adage that there are 'no ideas but in things' or the perception of things is adjusted to suggest there are no ideas but in artworks. In Beckett's Ill Seen, Ill Said perception of nature is perception of an unsystematic 'mess' while symbolism distorts actual perceptions by imposing an artificial order via the arts: 'And such the farrago from eye to mind. For it to make what sad sense of it may. No matter now... Such equal liars both' (CISIS, 66). Fine art is a product of a need to see, driven by a need for knowledge as an ontological condition it only frustrates in its process; for Yeats as MacNeice argued, 'formalizing activity' and 'thought' are linked, and art forms are a way of knowing (MacNeice, 1941, 157). In Beckett's texts a deeper wedge is driven between perceptual experience and knowledge/artform. Winnie in Happy Days quotes Yeats's 'I call to the eye of the mind' (from At the Hawks' Well) but in the play her body cannot even rotate to see what lies immediately behind her as it sinks like sculpture into the earth. Knowledge and form run aground. Perception of fine art and life in Beckett undercut the arts' claims to the romantic lexicon of visionary truth or beauty found in Yeats. ‘Neither beauty nor truth, alright,’ Beckett writes to Georges Duthuit in 1949, ‘these are catchall concepts, but more of a self-the rest relation... which now seeks other respondents, and does not find them, despite deliberate airs of capharnaum, void and periclitation’ (Beckett cited in Oppenheim, 2000, 88). In Beckett's Proust, perception and involuntary memory are 'explosive' qualities revealing how objects in the visual field resist the arts' symbolism to become part of a 'non-logical statement of phenomena...before they have been distorted into intelligibility' (PDT, 33 & 80). This gulf between perceptions of reality and failed representations of it in paintings of great immediacy may be felt as less wide than the gulf between perception and indirect images in texts - thereby paintings inspire images in creative texts - but neither painterly nor linguistic regimes permit thought or discursive text to paper over the irrationality in which perceptual images differ from those produced in both artforms. These differences between seeing and both arts lead Yeats's texts to suggest that seeing can be integrated and stabilized into the painting or poem's achieved form but when Beckett commends Thomas MacGreevy's book on Jack Yeats (1938) it is for having 'provided a clue' to 'the kind of people who in the phrase of Bergson can't be happy till they have 'solidified the flowing', i.e., to most people'; here he is critiquing the idea that seeing and painting provide secure routes into ways of knowing and texts (SBL1, 599). Beckett is echoed in his painter-friend Avigdor Arikha's claim that 'When I draw or paint, the essential thing is not to know what I do, or else I cannot come to what I see'.Watt demonstrates how seeing disrupts agreement about meaning in life and fine art. A joint committee where a 'multitude of looks go astray' produce non-congruent, non-compatible individual perceptions; one person's perceptions are not linguistically reducible to that of another person (Watt, 150). Perception as singular, blocks joint agreement on meaning. This impacts on how paintings and texts about paintings are read. Mr Gorman, is not seeing what the others in the committee are seeing, nor is he looking at a potential 'picture' seen by the author in the text: And so they stayed a little while, Mr Case and Mr Nolan looking at Mr Gorman,and Mr Gorman looking straight before him, at nothing in particular, though the sky falling to the hills, and the hills falling to the plain, made as pretty a picture, in the early morning light, as a man could hope to meet with, in a day's march. (214)This novel's composition (1941-44), after German troops marched into Paris and sent Beckett into hiding with Jack B. Yeats painting A Morning, suggests that this 'picture' of 'morning light' is overlooked by Gorman. Gorman/Goering/German are phonetically close, and Goering appears in Molloy (TRIL, 132) and as a butt in 'German Diaries' where he only sees Germany in terms of crude, raw materials even as paintings are removed and denied viewing. In the historic crisis of 'Easter 1916' Yeats splits perceptions: the Dubliner's 'vivid faces' seen amongst 'grey' solid Georgian houses cannot see, or foresee, imminent historical eruption on the poem's horizon (VP, 391-4). The sculpturally heroic stone (fine art) and 'stone' hearts (petrifaction/death by history) dialectically oppose a living perceptual stream but the oxymoronic refrain/image suggests a 'terrible beauty is born' to synthesize what is seen and conceived. In Godot a 'labouring woman' who 'straddles the grave' exists: but the still-born image is born dying - it is not dying to be born or re-born as symbol. As in Watt's final multiple frames, cross-cutting images of multiple, irreconcilable perceptions, deny joint agreement in producing or reading symbols of perceptions in paintings or texts. Blindness, mis-perception and mis-conception are not just a psychological product of a 'self-unseeing' in Beckett; they are built into human physiology. Humanity has neither perfect eyesight nor eyes in the back of its head; physical obstacles or innate, affective disconnections disable conjoint assumptions. Malone can 'only see, what appears in front of me,...only see what appears close beside me, what I best see I see ill' (TRIL, 272). The narrators' subjectivity, grounded in near-blindness, is compounded by what is 'ill' seen from clouded windows and restricted spaces so he/we are unsure whether he is seeing trompe l'oeil paintings or windows to the stars. In Godot's dialogues the boy, seen twice by Estragon, claims he has only been there once as messenger of Godot who is never seen. Beckettian tragi-comedy denies a totally shared ekphrasis. Paintings cannot speak a verifiable word unlike Yeats's Blake who launches the poem where 'truth' will 'obey' words' 'call'. In Yeats sight assists poetry and painting to create images corroborating relationships-in-difference between the arts. Beckett emphasises differences-in-relations. In Yeats's play On Baile's Strand (1902) a blind poet assists sighted King; in The Cat and the Moon (1926) a blind man carries a lame man on his shoulders in which claims to 'see it all' become a metaphoric possibility as it does for Yeats's Tiresias ‘maimed in eye and ear’ (Co Pl, 482 & 485). As in ekphrasis, the imagined sum is greater than the physiological weakness of the separate, impaired, perceptual parts. Both the actual impossibility of seeing, for the blind, and 'the impossibility of not looking', for the sighted (Peggy Phelan's phrase), is dramatised in Godot. Vladimir's 'You can't stop looking' meets Estragon's response - 'True' - but this produces non-agreement about what is seen even in colours or ownership of boots which may be black, brown, green or grey (CDW, 63). Yeats claims when he says ''white' or 'purple' in an ordinary line of poetry' and adds 'obvious intellectual symbols [such] as a cross or a crown of thorns' he can 'think of purity and sovereignty' and attain an 'indefinable wisdom' (E & I, 161). In Beckett's play, actual blindness and seeing may produce savage indifference, not wisdom, in which the afflicted torture one another; seeing and blindness are not the means whereby Yeatsian inner vision permits the gazing heart, via both arts, to 'double' its might. Beckett's critique of Yeats was that he was 'looking' for the wrong things but his own texts enact the problems of the process of looking: the actress Lisa Dwan described performing Not I as an experience where 'first I'm blindfolded, then I put my head in a vice'. W.J.T. Mitchell's contends, in Iconology (1987), that paintings are no more grounded in perceptions than texts. A conceptually knowledgeable blind person may see more than the sighted in a painting. Yeats's positive, humanist reading of the sister arts' capacities to deliver mental images and concepts endorses this idea. Beckett's texts dispute or reject it. Mitchell brackets a gap between seeing a painting and conceiving of it. The power of the interpretative text is inserted as bridge. The text disputes the claim that painting's economy involves actual seeing; linguistic description, textual decoding, deliver over the image, which transcends any shortfall or limitations in the senses. Semiotics or iconology master seeing. 'Master[ing]' another language Beckett suggests, however, is merely mastering 'another silence' - 'Like a deaf man investing his substance in Schallplatten [gramophone records], or a blind man with a Leica' (GD, 18 October 1936, cited in Abbott, 1996, xi). Mitchell's idea that the blind man help the deaf man understand a different art form essentially re-works Plutarch's painting as 'dumb poetry' and poetry as 'blind painting' in which the two arts triumph over what each one 'lacks' and this finds kinship in Yeats's texts; in Beckett's texts, however, it is replaced by the negative idea that deafness and blindness are not easily surmounted and transformed by each separate art in an exercise of joint co-operation. 2. Seeing and Hearing How are seeing and hearing related in texts and explorations of paintings by these twowriters? Poetry, as audio-visual collaboration, is central in Yeats. Deirdre claims thatwhat is ‘gathered’ through the ‘eyes and ears.../is crying out for speech’ (Co Pl, 182). TheTower states: Never had I more Excited, passionate, fantastical Imagination, nor an ear or eyeThat more expected the impossible – (VP, 409) Eye and ear collaborate, seek ‘unity of being’, and find, or create it, in poetry. In Crossways (1889) Yeats's happy shepherd claims Virgil’s ‘woods of Arcady are dead’, as ‘grey truth is now her painted toy’ (echoing Pater), but ‘Anashuya and Vijaya’ still deploy stars as symbolist decor in Romanticism’s paintings (‘O sigh and shake your blue apparel !’) and enlist the music of the spheres (‘O sing and raise your rapturous carol...’) (VP, 64-6 & 72). ‘The Double Vision of Michael Robartes’ dances between sculptures of Buddha and Sphinx to declare ‘eye and ear silence the mind / With the minute particulars of mankind’ (VP, 382-4). Disconnections, not unity, between eye and ear, in Beckett's writing prioritize a subjective being/body struggling to process images, over a focus on paintings/texts as achieved audio-visual forms. The ‘void at the centre of sight’ and ‘folly’ that is ‘the word’ render the survival and the meaning of both visual and literary artworks suspect (CP, 228). In philosophical terms, this body's finitude produces a tenuous phenomenology and weakened epistemology. Late Yeats shares this Beckettian vocabulary of the 'void', but his poems normatively ensure 'picture and book remain' as priority. Yeats's 'Per Amica Silentia' (1917) notes: 'I shall find the dark grown luminous, the void fruitful when I understand I have nothing, that the ringers in the tower have appointed for the hymen of the soul a passing bell' (MYTH, 332). The void is 'fruitful' - aural and luminous - not empty, not 'nothing'. Yeats's death-facing, final poem in 'The Winding Stair' declares it 'must' still sing, in visualizing the 'dust', so aural rhyme remains: 'Pray I will and sing I must, /And yet I weep - Oedipus' child /Descends into loveless dust' (VP, 540). Whoroscope (1930), Beckett’s first published poem on Descartes, blocks this secure foundational basis for knowledge or unified artforms in both senses. In the poem rhyme and reason, seeing and hearing, are disjunctive. The philosopher, eating embryonic chicken and egg aborts sight and sound of any first cause (CP, 40-43). The philosopher's ‘lens’ or ‘scope’ only sees shadowy Neo-Platonic ‘cave-phantoms’. The poem's ‘canvas’ evokes Franz Hall (who painted Descartes's portrait) but instructs him to ‘wait’ outside while the philosopher’s ‘bitter steps’ walk towards a ‘starless inscrutable hour’. From Descartes’s rationalistic ‘cogito, ergo sum’ (I think therefore I am), and Saint Augustine’s scholastic ‘si fallor, sum’ (Even if I am mistaken I exist), Beckett extracts ‘Fallor, ergo sum’ (I err therefore I am). The audio-visual underwrites error in hearing (texts), seeing (paintings) and in thought. In Malone Dies (1956) the near deaf, partially blind, narrator is on a ‘long blind road’: neither painterly windows (which may be trompe l’oeil) nor narrative sounds fix his being (ontology) or supply a bedrock of knowledge (epistemology); he is left ‘not knowing what it is I do, nor who I am, nor where I am' (TRIL, 167 & 207). The protagonist in The Unnamable is an 'ear' on an empty 'tympanum' full of 'vibrating' voices, a torso-less sculptural head in a glass jar; the Chinese sculptural figures in Yeats's 'Lapis Lazuli' sculpture see and hear to make sense with their senses, unlike Beckett's surreal sculpture of misaligned ears and eyes. Beckett's disruption of eye/ear and rupture in text/image relations, negate the arts' joint capacity to refer to reality or to each other. This non-affirmative strategy echoes Magritte's mixed media art works like Ceci n'est pas une pipe. The Unnamable’s narrator forgets ‘all the words they showed me... lists with images opposite.... nameless images.... imageless names, those windows I should perhaps rather call doors’. What remains is a ‘blind voice’ not knowing ‘what it’s looking for’ (TRIL, 375-342). Beckett's first volume of poems, Echo’s Bones, whose title from Ovid’s Metamorphosis, evokes a myth disconnecting eye and ear. Echo’s aural amplification, as a ‘voice only/For the bones are turned to stone’, accompanies her visual reduction, as she wastes away until ‘no one sees her now.../But all may hear her’. Narcissus cannot see or hear her. He is deaf and 'watching his image in the Stygian water’ (Ovid, 1995, 69-73). As in Watt the aural (a piano unable to be tuned by the blind) and visual (an abstract painting which cannot be securely decoded by the sighted) do not yield secure meanings. The protagonist, in search of Knott, enters a Bergsonian nightmare where ‘Ears, eyes, failing now also’ generate a language which starts running backwards like an image in reverse in a mirror, as two shady dwarfs called Art and Con (a play on the Irish painter Art Conn O'Leary) feed the novel's dogs (Watt, 140, 85 & 126). ‘Man makes a superman/Mirror-resembling dream’, Yeats's poetry declares (VP, 415), and Phidias's sculpture give ‘women dreams and dream their looking glass' (VP, 610); but the supreme fine art of the ancient sculptor Callimachus (VP, 565) surpasses this ‘vegetable glass of nature’ and mimesis by making a symbolic 'lamp' (not mirror) as its emblem - just as poetry surpasses visual mimesis when its inner vision is a fire, lamp or brazier, a product of eye and ear. Yeats's critique of Pater's texts where ‘the soul becomes a mirror and not a brazier’ (CW3, 352), point to their shortfall as relying on eyes and paintings alone. Mirror-experiments where Watt and Knott's mirroring movements produce a text that runs backwards as if read as a mirror-image do not occur in Yeats. When Yeats viewed his Shadowy Waters as 'looking at a picture reversed as in a looking glass’ (1905) he revised a faulty text (CL4, 133). In Yeats's poetry, interior light is aurally provided by Shelley, and visually by Samuel Palmer's engraving of a 'lonely light', which accompanies the candle-lit writer alone as 'prince' in his Norman Tower at night. When Beckett cited Apollinaire's prison poem 'A la Santé' where the day ends with 'lighting / A lamp in prison /And I am alone with you / beautiful light of reason' the trapped illumination of the lamp is a reminder that Beckett also literally used mirrors to signal to prisoners from his Paris window in a variant form of imprisoned, limited communication. Yeats's objection to mirroring realism, however, is that not that it is unnecessary to see accurately, but that it has replaced the artist's God-like powers of inner visions of immortality to transform what is seen into poetry or an art form; Beckett's Godot, in which Pozzo claims that Estragon is mirrored as one 'of the same species as Pozzo! Made in God's image' (CDW, 24-25), ironizes the mirror and fire in which the divine potter recreates his own image as trope; Estragon is neither a realist image of God in the mirror nor a divine symbol staking God-like, creative powers to replicate the deity in a human or super-human shape. Yeats's claim in one poem that poetry aims to 'escape' any 'defiling and disfigured shape' given to one which the self does not produce deploys a trope implicitly concurring with Joyce's idea that merely replicating reality in 'Irish art' is to use the ‘cracked looking glass of a servant’ (Joyce, 1922, 7). Beckett's Murphy's ill-luck in London bedsits begins with 'a fall' which 'cracked the mirror set in the landing' (MU, 21). However, when Yeats's poetry goes to the hazel wood with 'a fire in his head', seeking inner vision, it seeks a meta-symbol for its own process akin to The Man Who taught Blake Painting in his Dreams (c.1891), a Blakean work probably by the engraver John Linnell depicting a fiery tree in the centre of the forehead. In one essay Yeats invokes a time 'when all the arts play like children about the one chimney' (E & I, 355). In the poetry, fire must remain in the hands of ancient Byzantine smithy workers and mosaic makers who create bronze bird or sages, not Irish arsonists given to hearing mere rhetoric (not poetry), as in the ironic demand to 'Bid me strike a match and blow', in a poem lamenting the destruction of Irish gazebos or 'Big House', which leaves Greek and Irish art as burnt stump. Burnt stump, fading fires and 'embers' are quintessential Beckettian images redolent of paintings of the Flight Into Egypt and dark Dutch interiors with minimal or intermittent light which he admired. Perceptual images of spaces and places dominated by darkness recur in his creative texts. If 'fire' sets Krapp's vision alight when he seeks 'the light of understanding and the fire', this is found by a deeper, more 'unshatterable association' with 'the dark' he has 'always struggled to keep under' (CDW, 220). This is recorded 'against the day when my work will be done' - and the Biblical phrase is evocative not only of Anglican hymns of evening such as 'Now the day is over, night is drawing nigh' - but of dark, Biblical, lunar Dutch landscapes and interiors in which minimal light emphasizes what How It Is terms 'the impenetrable dark' (HII, 7). Company begins: 'A voice comes to one in the dark. Imagine.' In this chaotic darkness, with minimal firelight in both the painting and text, however, one is uncertain of what is seen or heard. Mere unreal illusions (taken as seeing and mirroring reality) and hallucinations (taken as seeing/hearing, and then transforming or illuminating this reality when the mind is on fire with inner visions) may be all the arts are capable of - mere delusionary images which order this chaotic darkness into forms or art forms which, in perceptual actuality, it refuses. 3. ImagesThe two writer's different ideas of images, received by retina and ear, mean they conceive of images in paintings and texts differently. Yeats's theory that ‘Wisdom first speaks in images’ is endorsed by Forgael, as poet's persona in The Shadowy Waters (1906), who claims poetry's mental images remodel reality into symbols of transcendence: ‘there's a torch inside my head / That makes all clear’, so ‘when the light is gone / I have but images, analogies, / The mystic bread, the sacramental wine, / The red rose’ on ‘the two shafts of the cross’; these, as in ‘ancient’ allegories, are ‘mixed into one joy’(Co Pl, 152). Yeats mentions 'images that fresh images beget' (Bergson's stream of perceptual images akin to Beckett's 'stages of the images') and archetypal images (lodged in/donated by the Anima Mundi or eternal memory bank) whose 'open' connotations trigger a 'tumult' of associated images which 'pass before you linked by certain associations...'; but the key images are those shaped by visual art and then gathered up by poetry into enduring, denotative symbols as 'monuments of unageing intellect'. In Yeats's texts, the potential polysemy/multivalency in painting or poetry using 'All sounds, all colours, all forms...because of long association, [to] evoke indefinable yet precise emotions' require images to travel from being perceptual, open and associative, from painting into poetry, so 'speaking images' may become a 'precise' symbol carrying 'precise' thoughts and emotions. Ezra Pound's contention in the Fortnightly Review (1 September 1914), that 'the image is not an idea. It is a radiant node or cluster...a VORTEX, from which, and into which, ideas are constantly rushing', is similar to the Yeatsian image which lies dormant, as a ready-made gift in the Great Memory awaiting discovery and use in Yeats's prose writings; but Yeats in theory, and especially in poetry which proposes its own power, creates and suggests images as stable, conceptual, textual emblems through which the text directs precise ideas rather than infinite associations. Ezra Pound's 'Imagist' policy statement (1913), eliding differences between perceptual images and those in different art mediums, claims 'An "Image" is that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time... [to present] a freedom from time and space...which we experience in the greatest work of art' (Pound cited in Jones, 1972, 130). The grandeur of the statement (sweeping differences between perceptual, painterly and poetic images away) may be akin to Yeats in theoretical mode as he generalizes to obliterate differences between the "sister arts". But it was Yeats' practice as poet that Pound later evoked to insist (1923): 'I think Hueffer [Ford Maddox Ford] goes wrong because he bases his criticism on the eye, and almost solely on the eye. Nearly everything he says applies to things seen’; he adds 'there is a quality that Yeats calls "intensity"' - namely the 'musical properties of verse, quantity, stress, syncopation, etc., etc.'. If the image in Yeats is a variant form of a magical symbol producing what Cairns Craig terms a 'transcendental conception of a truth beyond language', texts are required to explicate its meaning. Yeats describes drawing images/symbols on card, meditating on these with George Pollexfen; afterwards they cross-checked to see if these signs telepathically conveyed a message, to see if the image yielded explicable, convergent meanings in language. Image as icon required text as iconology. Yeats's "Great Memory" envisages the imagination encountering images elusive to linguistic meaning: it moves 'before a half-faded curtain embroidered...with holy letters and images of so great antiquity that nobody can tell what god or goddess they would commend to an unfading memory'('What is Popular Poetry?, 1901). However, in 'Art and Ideas' (1913), he also insists one seek 'some symbolic language reaching far into the past...' which requires the text narrow down endless, possible interpretations so that 'I might not be alone amid the obscure impressions of the senses'(E & I, 6 & 349). The essay suggests ‘absorption in fragmentary sensuous beauty or detachable ideas' deprives 'us of the power to mould vast material into a single image’ (E & I, 353-4). Yeats's art image, then is neither pure aestheticism (sensuous image without concept) nor mere concept (detached from sensuous form); it runs counter to Imagist ideas of the image as an 'irruption' which the text cannot control and counter to any modernist emphasis on the singular importance of medium or concept (idea separable from medium) as detached from one another. Yeats demands poetry (and painting with its sensuous image) have an ‘architectural unity’ and ‘symbolic importance’ to oppose modern poems of jump-cuts between images ‘where the verses might be arranged in any order, like shot poured out of a bag’; images as symbols remain intellectual work-horses carrying ideas in both artforms but these ideas are best specified in textual narratives, not as isolated images. The modernist counter-case is voiced in Beckett's essay on Joyce where he suggests this 'writing is not about something; it is that something itself' (DISJ, 27). The image-text, as stream of consciousness and image jump-cuts, make a bid to become a form of experienced reality in itself, not a meaningful, symbolic re-presentation of it. Non-linguistic, visual images which crystallize immanence more powerfully than worded images frequently attract Beckett. He stated (2001): 'Thus the image of a knife is more accurate than the word knife...."knife" has no meaning, it's a blurred image. You have to say "butcher's knife", "kitchen knife" "a knife to cut the bread" so that the word takes some kind of meaning. But when it is shown, you see at once what kind of knife it is: the image is then stronger than the word' (Beckett cited in Haynes & Knowlson, 2003, 49). Objects' powerful visuality, silence and instant availability to the eye, mean their additional enumeration and naming (their call for interpretations and translations into language) is as much an indicator of language's inadequate grasp and incompetence in representing objects, as of its supreme power as a tool for social communication, when compared with the speed and immediacy in which the eye involuntarily sees the object/image it also may fail to understand.Hardly surprisingly, images from paintings are reconfigured in these writers' texts differently. Yeats's poem 'On A Painting of a Black Centaur by Edmund Dulac', described by T.R. Henn (1950, 257) as 'started in relation to Dulac's picture but... altered to correspond to a picture of Cecil Salkeld's', reflects on the process of image transfer. The poem remodels both paintings: it posits half-man, half-horse as symbol of both arts' imaginary vigilance which leave a print or imprint. The centaur's 'hooves have stamped on the black margin of the wood, / Even where horrible green parrots call and swing' (VP, 442). The shaped art symbol, not perceptual image in the flux (as in an earlier poem where 'A parrot rages upon a tree, /Raging at his own image in the enamelled sea') nor conceptual, philosophical image (those watchers drunkenly asleep in 'the mad abstract dark' of a Platonic cave) is required to overcome these separate limitations. The centaur/poem creates, embodies or unifies perception and conception; apart from the centaur 'there is none fit to keep a watch and keep / Unwearied eyes upon those horrible green birds' (VP, 77). Parrots, as semi-human birds drawn in Beckett's manuscripts, appear in his texts. In Murphy an imagined Old Master portrait painting (where the parrot symbolised the annunciation or holy word) is deployed to suggest Neary has the 'look of Luke's portrait of Matthew, with the angel perched like a parrot on his shoulder' (MU, 121). The link between perception, painted image and textual explication are disrupted to make the decoding of meaning problematic. The short-sighted writer (Beckett) creates a short-sighted narrator (Neary) who has the look of Matthew (another writer) as painted by another painter/writer (St Luke) in an imaginary painting. Neither painting nor text offer a secure way of seeing an impression of reality being 'stamped' into an art work; a chain of arbitrary images parrot one another in a recursive circle. The imaginary text, on an imaginary painting, advertises its artifice as 'that something itself' in pursuit of elusive experiential images. Beckett's wedge between retinal images, fine art images and those in interpretative texts erode claims for the arts' transcendence or mirroring of reality in symbols. Murphy may envisage his mind as a 'hollow sphere' and imagine it contains the 'fine essence of a smothered divinity' (a geometric image akin to much in early modernist painting) but his non-symbolic body as a 'missile without provenance or target' leaves him with no supernatural message or stable, semantic meaning (MU, 63-6). Image as meaningful symbol in both arts is rendered ironic. In How It Is the image is in constant retreat or flight from art: it is 'an image in its discontinuity of the journeys of which it is the sum made up of stages and of halts and of those stages of which the journey is the sum'; it moves with 'the slowness of our procession from left to right in the dark the mud'. ('Halts' recalls 'stages of the images' in word associated in Beckett's letters with paintings of 'Halts', especially by Rembrandt.) The seen human image/reptile can only be read on a page as temporal trace on mud 'in the dark' (HII, 109). Compare Yeats's A Vision which conserves and preserves ancient drawings in sand and astrological spheres to invest in the concept that these images (perceptual or painterly) may become diagrammatic illustrations of ideas interpreted and preserved in the text. ‘Had some Florentine Platonist read Botticelli Porphyry’s On the Cave of the Nymphs?' Yeats asks, 'For I seem to recognise it in that curious cave...in his ‘nativity’ in the National Gallery’ (CW13, 168). Beckett's hollow spheres and human reptiles on a page of mud are born to founder in brief 'halts' or passing, perceptual traces which leave a far less enduring symbolic, humanist or meta-physical imprint in either painting or text. If the early Yeats's lexicon links images of 'plasticity' with meaning or power, the late poetry is beset by more Beckettian doubt about images as lasting symbols which overcome the 'void' as potential reality. Beckett's Unnamable scatters past fictions and 'lies' as 'miscreated puppets'(TRIL, 298), which Yeats's stage-designer Gordon Craig set much store by as theatrical symbols, just as Yeats's Mabel Beardsley, facing death in 'Upon a Dying Lady' (1917) turns the 'dolls faces to the walls' (VP, 366-7). These little sculpted gifts the artist Charles Ricketts made and 'dressed like people out of her brother's drawings' no longer offer sufficient Platonic comfort to either writer or artist. Yeats's poetry increasingly ‘sings amidst uncertainty’ (MYTH, 333-4). ‘Sailing to Byzantium’ (1928) asserts that the poet, with the aid of skilled artists as joint image-makers, trump philosopher so that the ‘painter, the worker in mosaic, the worker in gold and silver’ are those to whom ‘the supernatural' descends 'nearer...than to Plotinus even’ in Yeats's gloss (CW13, 158). But if fine art's crafted golden bird is gathered up into the text to symbolise an ‘artifice of eternity’, the succeeding companion poem, 'Byzantium' (1929) where ‘images... fresh images beget’ and 'float' and 'flit' redoubles doubt as one art borrows images from another. Phidias's eternal, golden bird in ‘changeless metal’ is replaced by temporal dolphins; they traverse the 'gong-tormented sea', ambivalent symbols of death/resurrection on Roman sarcophagi Yeats knew from the Victoria and Albert Museum's plaster casts. Byzantine or ancient art is now as much a source of images in flux as of art's permanent symbols. Yeats's 'The Tower' (written 1925) hopes to ‘unsphere / the spirit of Plato’ and find ‘The abstract joy, / The half-read wisdom of daemonic images’ will ‘suffice the ageing man as once the growing boy’. Amidst doubt about 'mere images', the two art forms attempt to redouble their 'might': He has found, after the manner of his kind,Mere images; chosen the place to live inBecause, it may be, of the candle-lightFrom the far tower where Milton’s PlatonistSat late, or Shelley’s visionary prince:The lonely light that Samuel Palmer engraved,An image of mysterious wisdom won by toil;And now he seeks in book or manuscriptWhat he shall never find. (VP, 415 & 417-427)The triumph of ekphrasis as 'mysterious wisdom won by toil', aided and abetted by the poetry or Shelley and past engravings of Blake's disciple Samuel Palmer, has produced the image as suffice (enough) but not supra, super-natural or meta-physical symbol; uncertainty or pessimism about the image's transcendent capacities to become a symbol which carries enduring ‘truth content’ is evident; these images from the two arts are found ‘by a lonely light’ and ‘found, after the manner of his kind’ by one likely to seek such 'wisdom' or reality in images which 'he shall never find'. The 'image' hovers between being a product of doubt/solipsism and certainty/wisdom. Drafts of 'The Statues' suppress such doubts and questions. 'What were those images?' is replaced by rhetorical certainty ('Pythagoras planned it') but an unpublished late poem (1938) associates 'nothing' and 'nowhere' with art and textual images. The poem asks: 'What is the explanation of it all? / What does it look like to a learned man? Nothings in nothings whirled.../From nowhere into nowhere nothing's run.' Arts' whirling gyres, its images, as in The Unnamable, cast less light: 'Going nowhere, coming from nowhere, Malone passes', Beckett writes, noting 'notions of forbears, of houses where lamps are lit at night'; but these lights, as in Yeats's Palmer's prints or Beckett's Dutch spotlit paintings, do not mean 'all is clear'; these 'lights...I do not require to mean anything' (TRIL, 269). Ideas (Greek eidos, to see) and visible image as artefact (eikon or likeness) increasingly bring Yeats into a recursive, circular chain, pinpointed in Plato's Cratylus in which representations (words and images) are illusory but manifest a Beckettian human need to say what is seen. Yeats's painter-father's quip, 'You want to be a philosopher, Willie, and are only a poet’ (JBY cited in Kiberd, 1995, 311-313) may lie behind late reformulations of images in ‘On the Boiler’ (1939) or the over-systematic use of traditional painting and literature's images as part of a grand, unfolding pattern in A Vision - but this is now known through ‘personal experience’ and via art practice as, per the philosopher Giambattista Vico, Yeats affirms that ‘we can know nothing...that we have not made’ (CL InteLex #5026). The image is losing its gloss as empirical symbol; its origin and end, its teleology, is in what is made in an artwork by the self. Yeats's late poetry vacillates between the image as solipsistic product of an ageing body facing death with uncertainty and the image as permanent, transcendent form in poetry. Journal entries (1929) agree 'with Ezra [Pound] in his dislike of the word belief' but still record an un-Poundian 'need of old forms...[so], I may escape from scepticism' (Yeats cited in Diggory, 1983, 51 & 103). ‘News for the Delphic Oracle’ (1939), as response to Poussin’s Acis and Galatea (c.1628-9) in Ireland’s National Gallery, finds the painting's old form as much a source of ‘intolerable music’ as 'monument' of 'unageing intellect' (VP, 611-612). Pan is reduced to a pandemonium in which even the afterlife becomes a world reduced to physical and brutal copulation far bleaker than Louis MacNeice’s description of the painting (1926) as ‘golden tea without milk’. 'Day after day', in A Vision, the poet sits 'turning a symbol over in my mind,...testing my convictions' to find 'the convictions of a lifetime melt' even as he persists in 'draw[ing] myself up into the symbol and it seems as if I should know all if I could but banish such memories and find everything in the symbol'. Letters to Sturge Moore, by the late 1920's, echo a Beckettian lexicon to note: 'I can no more expect you to acknowledge virtue in Hegel than Pound to acknowledge it in Tennyson...I give up your ebullient generation...We free ourselves from obsession that we may be nothing. The last kiss is given to the void' (CL InteLex # 5238). A late letter (1939) defending image and poem links these with the singularly lived truth of bodily experience (akin to Beckettian being) to echo the Pre-Socratic Xenophanes: ‘When I try to put all into a phrase I say, “Man can embody truth, but he cannot know it.” I must embody it in the completion of my life. The abstract is not life and everywhere draws out its contradictions. You can refute Hegel but not the Saint or the Song of Sixpence...’ (CL InteLex # 7362). For Yeats as a 'fully-paid up Hegelian', in Paul Muldoon's words (Muldoon cited in ed. Brearton & Longley, 2012, 143), for whom poetic images are structured in thesis, anti-thesis and synthesis, these are significant admissions. The Greek body as source of intellectual and sculpted power and athleticism now faces its own seen/felt decline. As Yeats wrote his epitaph ('Under Ben Bulben') he noted Rilke's images seek escape from 'mass death' to suggest there is another type of death, in which 'all sensuous images are dissolved [and] we meet true death.... [which] suggests to me Blake's design (among others that he did for Blairs grave I think) of the soul & the body embracing. All men with subjective natures move towards a possible ecstasy all with objective natures towards a possible wisdom' (CL InteLex #7312). Death into a Blakean image as 'ecstasy' or 'wisdom' is not imaged in Beckett's extinction of physical finality, as 'ashes in urn n? 21501 in the basement of Père Lachaise Columbarium'(SBL4, 513). Indeed, continued investment in images suggests, as Yeats's fellow art student George Russell puts it, that the poet continues to use ‘pictures’ because ‘a picture unlike a logical proposition cannot be refuted’ as a means of ‘building a gorgeous intellectual structure on the strength of sundry visions’ (Russell cited in Ellmann, 1948, 56). The later Yeats though, as Sean O’Faolain noted, who ‘loved Blake and Shelley, who detested Sergeant and admired Whistler... has always been seeking a unifying image, and bewails the fraying asunder of life before the fraying of the intellect’. If ‘Man is in love and love what vanishes, / What more is there to say?’, though, as late Yeats' poems asks, they still wish to go on seeing and saying more even as they vacillate (VP, 428-33). Such vacillation over images registers in ‘Among School Children’ (1927) where ‘Plato thought nature but a spume that plays/Upon a ghostly paradigm of things’; ideal/metaphysical and earthly images are pictured as dubious. Just as in Byzantium the image rides in the ‘unstructurable’ flux between ghosts and sea waves so the ‘Quattrocento image’ may have 'taken a mess of shadows for its meat’, ideals sought by mothers and nuns who ‘worship images’, may be falling for these as ‘self-born mockers of man’s enterprise’(VP, 433-6). Where an early Yeats play asserts that ‘where there is nothing there is God’, late poems suggest a more wrecked romanticism where ‘the deep truth is imageless’ as Harold Bloom (1970, 394) puts it. Sculpture in 'Lapis Lazuli'(1938), however, still provides a stable spatial, numeric order in which corrosive forces - 'Every discolouration of the stone / Every accidental crack or dent /seems a water-course or an avalanche' - are absorbed by art that inscribes its own patterns until its Chinese subjects outstare tragedy (VP, 565-7). As in Jack Yeats's play The Deathly Terrace 'Time has no meaning for me. I'm embedded in time and floating in eternity. I have seen the Peruvians in pigtails and the Chinese in kilts'(Jack Yeats, 1991, 13) so fissured sculpture, even if less assured of eternal permanence, still weathers well for posterity. Yeats's sculptural image is more resistant to time than Beckett's instantly corroded public sculpture in Murphy or the human-sculptural disintegration in Worstward Ho (1983):Say better worse now all gone save trunks from now. Legless plodding on. Nothing from pelvis down. From napes up. Topless baseless hindtrunks. Legless plodding on. Left right unreceding on. (CSIS, 101)As with the terminology in Ill Seen, Ill Said, straddling fine art and textual crucifixion, this is an image of 'deposition done' (CSIS, 76). Yeatsian antimony, in which sculpture/art represent life-after-death, meet a Beckettian oxymoron where death-in-life occurs at its inception, in which the image is 'still born' and travelling to a terminus. In a text on Greek sculpture, which Yeats owned by Adolf Furtw?ngler, the art historian's central urge is to reattach separated body parts of truncated, ancient Greek sculpture, to reconstruct Ozymandias into a unified body so that art history and text are made whole, unified to resist time (Furtw?ngler, 1893, 4). Such salvaging of images in Beckett produces surviving ruins: his sculptural figures are 'All gnawing to be naught. Never to be naught' in a text about them that is left to 'Stare undimmed. That words had dimmed' (CSIS, 103 & 99). Yeats's fine art image/sculpture as 'discoloured' but with 'glittering eyes', as an enduring symbol, becomes an 'undimmed' perceptual image in Beckett that is 'dimmed' by time and words.4. MediumsEkphrasis privileges language and literary medium, not paint in a visual one. By translating fine art as a perceptual/physical object into linguistic description, interpretation, meaning, context or concept, ekphrasis absorbs a visual image into a textual image. This direction in translation amplifies the language of the writer's text as the most powerful absorbent and consuming medium of the image. Conversely, read texts translated into spatial or radial mediums or into shapes viewed on, not behind, the page, move in the reverse direction. Texts as spatial mediums - Apollinaire's concrete poetry of typed shapes as calligrammes - as well as Cubist paintings such as collages (which absorb textual fragments for visual purposes) or conceptual artworks, which inter-mix mediums in 'a post-medium world' - all suggest ways in which visuality may drain power from the text when it is converted from a primarily read, to a seen, medium. Yeats remains ekphrastic. The sensuous medium of two of John Lavery's paintings in 'The Municipal Gallery Revisited' is translated and subsumed under one summarizing tag as 'Hazel Lavery living or dying'. Yeatsian texts do not translate in the reverse visual direction into physical shapes or material typefaces seeking attention in their own right to weaken the read word's power to carry the virtual image. Conversely, Beckett's ekphrasis often weakens the text's power by revealing how it fails to translate fine art's separate, literal or sensuous images; Beckett sometimes engages in experiments converting read 'type' into a semi-visual medium or a form that 'play[s] in space' to use Foucault's term for calligrammes. (Foucault cited in Kearney and Rasmussen, 2001, 376). Beckett prints rows of the same word repeated in Waiting for Godot - 'Bye. Bye. Bye.' is repeated fourteen times - until it is Two Mediums: Lautgedicht & Lavery 3769179146685117837886814 Man Ray, Lautgedicht (1924) John Lavery, Mrs Lavery Sketching (1910) Oil on Canvas. 203.2 cm x 99 cm Dublin City Gallery: The Hugh Laneseen as pattern (or heard as musical note), as much as read. Watt reverses word or sentence order so the text, if read in the normal horizontal sequence (left to right, top to bottom) makes no sense; seen, or scanned vertically (bottom to top, right to left), its syntax is coherent even if its meaning is still in doubt. The eye sees twice, once in a reading, denying meaning; then in a viewing, scanning upwards and backwards, until some doubtful meaning emerges, as it might when a painting is viewed as hung vertically. These procedures suggest affinities with Man Ray's Lautgedict (1924), translating a poem into a physical shape of oblong colour blocks (the artist sent a note, signed with others, to Beckett from the London Surrealist exhibition,1936). Man Ray's visual or conceptual image eradicates what lies behind or below the typed surface of the poem so that intellectually complex readings or meanings are lost or exhausted in a moment; the gain is perceptual, in seeing instantly what is on the page.If 'ekphrasis' translates a fine art medium into a textual one, Yeats's adage is that ‘the morethe poet describes, the less should the painter paint'; unlike Beckett's down-sizing of type in his book with Jasper Johns, ekphrastic poetry fulsomely expands into the fine art territory upon which its relies. Yeats's early ekphrasis emulates and tries to beat visual art at its own game; the poetry describes pictured space at which the medium of painting excels. Imaginative failure to invent a virtual image is solved by using the crutch of an already existing drawing and then attaching a moralising, illustrative label to, or in lieu of, the lost physical object. ‘On Mr. Nettleship’s Picture at the Royal Hibernian Academy’ (1886) directs us to a drawing in an Irish gallery; it transcribes the drawing's spatial relations as description. The poem borrows Blake’s tiger, as Nettleship did in his own drawing practice, tames it out of ‘fearful symmetry’ and Blake's text into a lion whose ‘musical cry’ amidst ‘the fire [that] sweeps round /Re-shining in his eyes’, to demonstrate how, in a label, ‘He, the eternal, works His will’ (VP, 688-689). This 'hardly fearful symmetry' meant the poem did not make the cut in future Yeats' collections. The lion's cry, 'mad with the touch of the unknown' sub-textually reveals how the drawing is frustrating translation from an 'unknown' visual medium into an auditory textual one, where the book may be 'touched' (enabled or, colloquially, made mad). Yeats's own 1929 credo that 'The origins of a poet are not in that which he has cast off because it is not himself but in his own mind & in the past of literature' (CL InteLex, # 5272) critique his own ekphrasis here. The inter-textual, Blakean echo dominates to 'cast' off poem and previous medium upon which it is too parasitic.313690117475On Mr Nettleship's Picture at the Royal Hibernian Academy Above, saliva dripping from his jaws,The Lion, the world's great solitary, bendsLowly the head of his magnificenceAnd roars, mad with the touch of the unknownNot as he shakes the forest; but a cryLow, long and musical. A dew-drop hungBright on a grass blade's under side, might hear,Nor tremble to its fall. The fire sweeps roundRe-shining in its eyes. So ever movesThe flaming circle of the outer Law,Nor heeds the old, dim protest and the cryThe orb of the most inner living heartGives forth. He, the Eternal, works his will.W.B. Yeats, Dublin University Review (1886) J.T. Nettleship Refuge. Sketch Exhibited Royal Hibernian Academy (1886) Courtesy: Art Supplement to the Dublin University Review (March 1886) Yeats's late 'Municipal Gallery Revisited' also translates and obliterates paintings' sensuousness into the abstractive or descriptive 'captions' of the literary medium. The paintings' surfaces, material textures, complex spatial relations, are substituted with descriptive labels, as paintings become virtually 'titles' to perform narrative, literary duties. The 'entitling' text, virtually a gallery catalogue of 'legends' bolsters claims that the poets have 'invented' Ireland to supplant the actual paintings and painters who provide the Irish subject matter and platform for these claims. Biography and history (personal and national) displace paintings as a medium. The poem's sitters are ‘entitled’ (by proper name or ennobled, in some cases, by birth and social rank): the poet's own name underwrites the poetry collection and the painters’ signatures, names, professional qualifications and titles of paintings and donors (highly visible and inscribed on the actual gilt frames of these portraits) are erased; the word 'modern' is also erased from the gallery's title. If poetry about a painting may be as valid as writing about any object in the visual field - Louis MacNeice's study of Yeats claims Rilke's poetry 'about works of art...' arise because they are 'as real to him as people or physical experiences' - MacNeice (1941,119) also suggests this 'double remove' possibly 'obscures the [poem's] current from life'. Fine art use runs a double danger in this gallery poem. Firstly, the paintings appear so well known to the poet that deciphering their exact detail gives way to their use as symbolic models, as shorthand for picturing heroic Ireland. Secondly, the paintings, possibly unknown to the reader of the text, give rise to the difficulty of imagining a specific visual object outwith the reader's own perceptual experience but located exclusively within the enclosure of the gallery/poem. If the MacNeice critique applies to Yeats's dependent, parasitic description of Nettleship and Municipal Gallery artworks, poems like 'Lapis Lazuli' (1938) draw on the two arts' 'mediums' and properties to more effectively absorb them both into language. Replicating, or rather enumerating, the Eastern sculpture's perceptual, spatial order in visual shorthand ('Two Chinamen, behind them a third, / Are carved in 'Lapis Lazuli') and precisely engaging with its visual qualities in detail ('Every discolouration of the stone / Every accidental crack or dent'), the poem imaginatively discards a Chinese poem inscribed on the back of the sculpture and transfers a bird seen there to its front, to imaginatively translate fine art into a connection with tragedy and life. The poem moves from renouncing gaiety in the face of tragedy ("sister arts" have left 'hysterical' people 'sick of the palette and fiddle-bow') to weaving its own 'mournful melodies' which 'play' towards seeing 'ancient, glittering eyes' as 'gay'. Rhyme knits an imaginary unity between seen and heard. The sculpture's subjects, which trigger the poem, are perceptually seen/ literally described before being symbolically seen beyond its existence or remit as fine art as ambiguous models of survival. The poem is a paean to the reasons why civilisations produce both "sister arts" to perennially resist time/death; it does not require the fine art model to be perceptually present as medium, because it has used its literal, visual potential to imagine its symbolic potential as both vision and sound in the poem so as to extend or shape or (after) life in another medium. Conversely, in MPTK, Beckett's parade of linguistic translations of paintings deliberately prolong an exercise ironically demonstrating the futile absurdity of literally translating paintings into a weakened language which cannot represent what is seen by what is heard. Describing a painting by the Master of Tired Eyes, Beckett parodies ekphrasis. The 1002107349The one deplorable feature of her get up, as apprehended byBelacqua in his hasty survey, was the footwear- the cruel straight outsizes of the suffragette or welfare worker....She was of more than average height and well in flesh. She might might be past middle-age. But her face, ah her face, was what Belacqua had rather refer to as her countenance, it was so full of light....Brimful of light and serene,serenissime, it bore no trace of suffering, and in this alone it might be said to be a notable face. Yet like tormented faces that he had seen, like the face in the National Gallery in Merrion Square by the Master of Tired Eyes, it seemed to have come a long way and subtend and infinitely narrow angle of affliction, as eyes focus a star. The features were null, only luminous, impassive and secure, petrified in radiance, or words to that effect, for the reader is requested to take notice that this sweet style is Belacqua's. An act of expression, he said, a wreathing or wrinkling, could only have had the effect of a dimmer switch on Master of Tired Eyes Portrait of an Old Ladya headlight. The implications of this triumphant figure, the just (fl.c. 1540) Courtesy: NGIand the unjust, etc., are better foregone. Samuel Beckett, MPTK (1934)prose draws attention to the way it is using, even abusing, the painting to portray a modern subject by reverting back to anachronistic language giving this face a past 'countenance'. Extending the painting's frame (which is waist up) downwards (shoes up), the text points to non-relations between disciplines. Translation as stylistic exercise and parasitic raid by the text is foregrounded as futile. The text tells us its 'face' (its type-face) has 'come along way' from its location in the National Gallery; the 'expression' (in text/on painted face) has the effect of a 'dimmer switch'. Reading this expression is 'better foregone'. Likewise the 'cull' of a Perugino painting in 'Ding-Dong' mocks ekphrastic relations and linguistic power. This text requests that those 'in the least curious to know what she looked like at the time in which we have chosen to cull her we venture to refer to the Magdalene in the Perugino Pietà in the National Gallery of Dublin'; there the reader will find, as viewer, a mismatch between even the hair colour in the painting and text. The text has left something behind which it cannot translate and a footnote has a swipe at the gallery to also note 'the glittering vitrine behind which the canvas cowers, can only be apprehended in sections' so that patience is required to 'elicit a total statement approximating to the intention of the painter', so the gallery frustrates the text in its 'full statement'. This non-congruence between mediums echoes Wittgenstein's contention that despite our wish that paintings or pictures 'tell' us something they remain autotelic: '"What the picture tells me is itself." Painting consists in its own hermetic structure, its own silent lines and colours.' (Wittgenstein, 1953, 522-3) Yeats's ekphrasis permits both arts to converge on the image as homeomorphic so it may be taken from one medium (fine art), and metaphorically stretched into another (the poem/text), and read. Beckett's mismatched mediums suggest such translations produce literal distortions, non-relations as one art compounds another's ineptitude. Yeats 'lineaments' as face is a functioning archaism: both arts' transparencies permit their subject to reveal its biography, to tell its history in visual and audio-visual forms. Beckett's 'countenance' as face points to translation as anachronism: changes from one medium to another and shifts in time produce distortions and 'tired eyes'. In Beckett's Eleuthéria when the 'Glazier' asks for translation to produce pictorial transparency it produces slippage: 'Define yourself, there. It is time you defined yourself a little. You are around like a sort of...ooze [suintement]. Like a sanies, there. Take on a little contour for the love of God.' But Krap refuses to take shape other than as a 'sanies', a weeping wound, and claims he is 'nothing'; the Glazier concludes he is part of text where 'All that is nothing but words' (EL, 81-2). Mediums constitute the subject, block translations: both mediums do not present a subject through a transparent window and when the subject is re-presented by translating one opaque medium into another they encounter difficulties which point to the near impossibility of the task. If Yeats's ekphrasis has affinities with W.J.T. Mitchell's idea that "sister arts" theory 'crave unity, analogy, harmony, universality' between the arts (Mitchell, 1987, 157), the poet's claims are often more circumspect than Ezra Pound's idea (1908) that poetry's 'ultimate' attainment is literally 'To paint the thing as I see it' (Pound cited in Jones, 1972, 16). For all Yeats's pan-arts theory, each medium still requires separate, specific skills in practise - which makes the text's skill in translating images between them more valuable. When Yeats invokes mediums his primary emphasis is on situating an ars poetica within a cognitive, linguistic discipline: texts claim he owes his 'soul to Shakespeare, to Spencer and to Blake, perhaps to William Morris, and to the English language in which I think, speak and write' (E & I, 519). When Yeats visited the painter Charles Ricketts (1921) for a symbolist book cover design he found 'Very technical painter's talk' there left him bored (CL InteLex # 3908); the visualisation of his text as book cover/graphic symbol, not painting's autonomy, was his key interest. Indeed, when the mystical-Christian, Golden Dawn, visual artist William Horton left his own medium (drawing) for texts an eighteen year friendship with Yeats (1895-1919) ended. Yeats introduced Horton’s A Book of Images (1898), noting its ‘excellent’ drawings illustrating nursery rhymes in The Grig’s Book (1900) as 'mastery over a medium over that exact form of colour and line'; the artist's excursion into poetry left him exasperated: ‘You are not a poet... you have not the instrument', Yeats insisted - ‘You are an artist – in these very verses you are trying to make pictures as an artist makes them. Take up your drawing again...’ (CL3, 105-6 & 92). Horton must acquire mastery over the ‘tecnical [sic] difficulties of art’ peculiar to drawing alone. When Yeats reprinted ‘Symbolism in Painting’ in Ideas of Good and Evil (1903) he excluded Horton to brutally inform him that his even his drawings were far from ‘mature and elaborate talents like Mr Whistler’s and Mr Ricketts’. Yeats's awareness of the distinct economy of differing demands made by the separate mediums of fine art and literature runs alongside an alertness to the way fine art images transfer into texts; he frequently appears far less interested in painting as a separate medium producing images beyond any literary/conceptual use. In 'Yeats as a Painter Saw Him' (1940), William Rothenstein claimed Yeats 'was not in fact sensitive to form or to colour. He was too easily impressed by work which showed a superficial appearance of romance or mysticism. The drawings of Blake and Rossetti, of Beardsley and Ricketts appealed to him, and from Ricketts and his father he had learnt much. But it was the inventive quality of his talk that appealed to me, rather than his views on the arts.' (Rothenstein in ed. Gwynn, 1940, 38-39). Beckett's focus on the medium from which the image is culled, produced a sensitivity to painting as autonomous discipline with its own technical problems and a hyper-sensitivity to the text as intervention or distortion. Henri Hayden suggested the writer 'immediately saw everything correctly, especially as far as design was concerned...he paid great heed to the formal problems involved in his own work, such as sentence-construction and composition. He made the same approach to painting. Whenever anything was wrong or superfluous he noticed it immediately and exactly...he perceived what the painter unconsciously introduced into his painting - he felt it.'(Hayden cited in Knowlson, 1971, 55) When Avigdor Arikha planned to mix 'paintings and drawings' in a Paris exhibition in the Centre National d'Arte Contemporain (6 March 1979) Beckett suggested that this 'seems risky...all right as an idea, but not in plastic terms' (SBL4, 154). If elements in Imagism's practice in poems such as Pound's 'Station in the Metro' using white space to separate concrete images, suggest a poetry opting for synchronous images or 'visual values', Yeats's absorption of paintings into traditional poetic and linguistic, narrative structures precludes translating texts into such visual experiments. Joyce and Eliot are criticised for 'breaking up the logical processes of thought' in disjunctive 'chance' images placing the 'gas works' alongside mythic images as part of 'an exhaustion of the Renaissance' (CW13, 175). 'The Tragic Generation' (1922), two years before Man Ray's image, notes a German poet Dauthendey in Paris (1894) writing 'poems... without verbs... He wishes for an art where all things are immovable, as though the clouds should be made of marble' to imply this may be interesting but it is an impossibility (CW3, 265). Beckett's Malone finds 'the subject falls far from the verb and the object lands somewhere in the void' so neither medium offers a secure refuge for subject/object (TRIL, 215). Yeats's portrait in 'In Memory of Constance Gore-Booth' and landscape in 'The Wild Swans at Coole' may withhold 'verbs' to frame a still picture but the poem pushes on into connective syntax and narrative, into verbs; punctuation is not replaced with 'space'. Beckett's manuscript in 'Bing' (later 'Ping') where 'All the verbs have died' as he noted in 1966 (SBL4, 35) is a reminder that Malone, who frames his window as a painting, wishes to 'put the index on the subject and the little finger on the verb'(TRIL, 177), suggestive of a writer experimenting with texts to oust verbs for painting's 'subject' and 'noun' so that literature runs against its own grain and syntax. 'Ping' (1967) states: All known all white bare white body fixed one yard legs joined like sewn. Light heat whitefloor one square yard never seen. White walls one yard by two white ceiling one square yard never seen. Bare white body fixed only the eyes only just.... Traces blurs signs no meaning light grey almost white. Bare white body fixed white on white invisible. Brief murmurs only just almost never all known.... Legs joined like sewn heels together right angle. Traces alone unover... Light heat white walls shining white one yard by two. Bare white body fixed one yard ping fixed elsewhere.(CSP, 193-4)Neither painting as medium, nor text translating it by suppressing verbs, trap the 'invisible' subject which remains 'fixed...elsewhere'; the intrusion of painterly picturing is deployed to reveal the text's failures ('never' and 'no' are reiterated) as it erases or blocks picturing. Yeats's ekphrastic translation transfers an imaginary, animated cry from the lion (from picture to poem); the 'brief murmurs' in Beckett's text's are virtually lost amidst visual specifications and measurements which construct and cancel what is 'never seen' until it must be left 'elsewhere'. If Yeats's Hazel Lavery is 'living and dying' in one text (but cannot do both in the same painting) one may cross-check Yeats's original model in the painting with its eye colour and sewn dress; Beckett's 'Ping' is 'bare', minimal, dying and its notional painting and body remain 'fixed elsewhere'. Yeats's poem is a précis of two paintings; Beckett's text cannot take a single subject out of one medium and translate it into another. The reversal of ekphrasis, translations of textual mediums to visual formats feature more in Beckett's than Yeats's oeuvre. Visually, the frog song in Watt parallels Man Rays's 'Lautegedict', even if onomatopoeia and sound preserve a weakened remnant of linguistic meaning so that font is not entirely converted and formatted into coloured oblong bars:Krak!_____________________Krek!_________Krek!_________Krik!______Krik!______Krik!___Krak!___________________________krek!____________Krek!___Krik!______Krik!______Krik!Krak!_________________________________Krek!_______________Krik!______Krik!______ (Watt, 117). In Yeats's poetic texts literary genres, not other mediums, determine poem length or shape (in ballads, sonnets and other forms) and textual images slot into rhetorical, connective syntax and aural structures to suggest a belief in the text's referential power to mirror reality or transcendently recreate it. Texts re-present paintings but do not seek to translate themselves into visual objects by running in the reverse direction. Yeats's literary fiat that 'As I altered my syntax, so I altered my intellect' (E & I, 530) links language and thinking to normative procedures of reading driven by the glue of syntax; this prevents words literally drifting into visual isolation, as in Pound's 'The Station in the Metro' or pure visual/musical arrangements, as in Watt. Beckett tells us Watt 'spoke also with scant regard for grammar, for syntax' so 'Proper names....from his discourse... emerged, palms, atolls at long intervals...' (133). The score linked to pure sound (in bars not words) and images as isolated 'atolls' (disconnected from rhetorical meaning) as variant of a 'lautgedicht' are not integral to Yeats's ballad tradition where rhyme, refrain and quatrain carry syntax, sound, and thought, which, in turn, determines literary shape. Whilst Yeats's Blake essay claims, pace Samuel Palmer, that 'we must not start with the medium, but think always on excess and only use medium to make excess more abundantly excessive' and find 'delight through the whole range of art', his poetry insists that 'picture and book remain' as literally separated mediums metaphorically linked by images (E & I, 123). Disciplinary boundaries do not dissolve literally. Illuminated manuscripts or engravings (Blake), concrete poetry (Apollinaire), intertwined words and images (Frank O'Hara and Larry Rivers poems-lithographic in Stones, 1959), painting and poetry practised as separate and conjoint disciplines (Rossetti), poetry with synchronous woodcuts (John Montague's Rough Field) are not in Yeats's collected, published oeuvre. Collaborative image-texts produced via sustained, discursive engagement with an artist in which texts and visual forms are modified in two-way traffic on the same site/page are not pursued. Broadsheets, embroidery, illustrations by Norah McGuiness (recommended to the publisher Macmillan in 1926 as illustrator of poems in the Byzantine-style wall-pictures), old-style fonts chosen for Cuala Press limited, signed editions follow poems. Traditional Cuala fonts are chosen for "readability", not as typographical, experiment, as in Futurist publications like Blast. If one of Yeats's letters regrets how texts, unlike handwritten manuscripts (or mixed-media works by Blake), make 'the mistake of standardizing life' in their tendency to 'alter what had been infinitely abundant in variation' so that 'now all was type' (CL InteLex #3710 & # 3993) the regret did not produce visual and typographical experiments in published texts. In Beckett's Murphy, however, typography is played with visually. The text threatens to introduce 'music, MUSIC, MUSIC', to playfully produce a 'typographical scream, if the gentle compositor would be so friendly' (MU, 132). The text, visually arranged in two columns, constructs Celia's portrait to ironically draw attention to the way words do not translate into "picturing" in paint:AgeUnimportantHeadSmall and RoundEyesGreenComplexionWhiteHair YellowFeaturesMobile Neck13 3/4 "s (MU, 10)The spatial, white gap connects and separates the two disciplines. Textual nouns order a painting as photo-fit; adjectives try to comply and produce a small, round white head with yellow hair, before age ('unimportant') or features ('mobile') elude capture or realism. Futurist poetry's experimental templates in new typographical lay-outs (White, 1990, 128-9 & 186-7), the Surrealist Manifesto's attack on realistic portraiture as puerile, and Merleau-Ponty's claims that ‘Language does not presuppose its table of correspondences... It’s opaqueness, its obstinate reference to itself and its turning and folding back upon itself are precisely what make it a spiritual power...something like a universe...' (Merleau-Ponty 1968, 80), align with Beckett's text whose language is both visual and opaque. Molloy sometimes foregrounds the text as arbitrary, non-transparent, material font/type, as in Man Ray: ‘you would do better, at least no worse, to obliterate texts than to blacken margins, to fill in the holes of words till all is black and the whole ghastly business looks like what it is, senseless, speechless, issueless misery’ (TRIL, 14). A character in 'A Wet Night' equates 'appearing embarrassed' with 'appearing in italics' which suggests 'shape' informs readings (MPTK, 69). Malone Dies threatens to revert back to an exercise book 'ruled in squares' with 'symbols and diagrams' by a narrator/artist who 'drew a line no, I did not even draw a line, and I wrote...' and who wishes to tell us 'the colour of the cover' (TRIL, 192). If Beckett pushes the read medium towards a visual or seen one, to suggest mediums may be more porous than their traditional separation suggests, he simultaneously frustrates the idea that this amounts to meaningful translation across mediums. In The Unnamable a solid arrangement of continuous text is reminiscent of paintings's unbroken, dense material surface. The Trilogy alternates between foregrounding text as a visual, opaque, graphic shape (suggesting meaning is a surplus illusion) and restoring the text's transparency, in re-booting metaphoric images referring to objects or a reality behind the text so that picturing and narrative become unstable. In Not I the three dots as ellipsis visually dominate the page splitting text into image chunks. Comment C'est eradicates punctuation to increase blank spaces between paragraphs/lines ('les blanc sont les trous'); this multivalent text is broken up by blank (blanc/white) spaces as the visual erases or silences words. Paratactic 'Blanks for when words gone' are foregrounded in Worstward Ho (CISIS, 99).and Watt. Post-war experiments enlarging the visual role of punctuation marks in relation to language ('Alone!' or 'Less!'), or texts broken up into short sentences grasped visually as repeated patterns (in 'Imagination, Dead Imagine') on a page where white space becomes more prominent, suggest typographical strategies which have affinities with modernist, experimental, graphic design practised in arts' periodicals produced in European capitals like Paris, more often than in Yeats's London or Dublin. The strategy (in which prose occupies the visually reduced space more usually associated with poetry) suggests a writer balancing visual presence/ linguistic absence to underscore a thematics of 'silence' that lies behind or within language's arrangements and fonts. As Daniel Albright notes, Beckett often goes 'against the grain of the medium, to force one medium to assume properties more readily available to some other medium' (Albright, 2003, 9-10). Obliterations, destructions, erasures, distressing, blackening, veiling - Beckett's lexicon metaphorically threatens to translate text into Man Ray's pictogram or grapheme, or even to destroy it. This procedure, however, is never entirely, literally enacted: the inclusion of a music score, a bill of itemised expenses, a 'ticket to the end of the line' in Watt (143 & 212) or Malone's retention of an 'age-yellowed newspaper', taper and chamber pot metaphorically adopt Cubist 'collage' materials and cut and paste these images into the text to temporarily disrupt read material but the text goes on being linguistically written and read around these disruptive nodes (TRIL, 181). Beckett's visual-conceptual strategies in texts suggests affinities with Duchamp's methods in taking a 'ready-made' mass produced medium - in Beckett's case language - and translating it into a visual medium/context so it disrupts traditional readings. Duchamp's ready-made, visual urinal with a signature ("Mutt"), new linguistic label ("fountain") and new location/context (in a gallery, not factory) permit "art" to ironize its own traditional forms and conceptually reflect on itself. Substitutions of a highly, wrought fine art form with chosen, ready-made to subvert past definitions of art as an individual, formal, crafted object suggest such affinities; Molloy goes back to 'the same hole' which 'oozes urine', which mass produces characters ('there were three, no four, Molloy's') in a text suggesting that if these are 'subject to variation' this may be often largely irrelevant (TRIL, 73-5 & 106). Malone finds 'the forms are many in which the unchanging seeks relief from its formlessness' (TRIL, 121) - and his chamber pot is a key one. A Beckett letter (1983) records 'the artificial anus' in Paris's Musée Dupuytren with Duchampian humour (SBL4, 615). The Unnamable's threat to 'let down my trousers and shit stories on them, stories, photographs, records...' or Malone's ploy to empty a chamber pot on the floor of his small cubic space, are scatological threats to translate text into urine or ordure attuned to, or predictive of, conceptual strategies in the visual arts. Equating texts with the most basic mediums - saliva or semen, waste products of mouth, anus and penis, decomposing human or waste[d] forms - Beckett weakens ideas of ekphrastic power. This anticipates Arthur Danto's claims that conceptual art's anxious objects prove 'there is no special way works of art have to be' and Yve-Alain Bois's and Rosalind Krauss's theories of the 'informe' or 'formless' as an alternative strain in modernist art opposing the idea of pure form in their Centre George Pompidou exhibition L'Informe: Mode d'emploi (1996) and text Formless: A User's Guide' (1997). Very different fine art mediums are invoked in the two Irish writers' texts as they reflect on their own nature or process. Yeats's poetry images its own capacity to build a metaphoric, finished, lasting monument in marble, or bronze as prescribed by Horace; Beckett invokes perishable materials or unshaped visual mediums as a process to dissolve the text's power. In Yeats's texts, words create form as mould, cast or drawing, using pen, chisel or brush: poetry is work made in stone, marble, bronze, gold, silver using mediums like wax or resin; smithy, forge or easel are used and perspectival devices, the collar bone of a hare, the needle’s eye or plummet-measure, alongside palette mixtures (pearl-pale, dove grey) and tones (tinctures, hues); these create drawing, picture, engraving, monument, mosaic or statue. Words are ‘plastic’ or ‘marmorean'; the writer 'dig(s) the stone for our statue' (EXP, 254). Ireland as ‘molten wax’ is imprinted in a written mould. This image for art, with roots in Greek philosophy/art, suggest poetry gives material a 'signet' (image and signature) when it ‘gain(s)... control of plastic material, a power of emotional construction, [which] Pound has always lacked’ (CW5, 195 & 401). Phidias's skill in handling ‘marble as if it were bronze’ is noted by poetry seeking a ‘Marmorean muse’ (CW5, 4). Compare The Unnamable's mixed-media, sculptural head in perishable materials, as the novel passes 'from unmixing joy to the sullen fixity of marble via the most characteristic shades of disenchantment' (TRIL, 333). Yeats's ‘Bronze Head’ honouring Maude Gonne stresses she is ‘no daughter of the iron times’, and Goethe’s search for 'that unity Dante compared to a perfectly proportioned body’ uses the wrong material for ‘knowing nothing of white heat he sought truth in cold iron’ (CW5, 179) while Samuel Butler, being no goldsmith, offers ‘metropolitan lead and solder’ (CW3, 222). Beckett's 'raid on the inarticulate' uses fine art mediums and tools akin to T.S. Eliot's 'shabby equipment always deteriorating' (Eliot, 1969, 182; Eliot cited in Nixon, 2011, 37). Malone's Venus pencil is worn down to a stub in making the text. Making a replica 'key' in Watt to enter rooms with paintings demonstrates that even if 'an impression could be taken, in wax, or plaster, or putty, or butter...possession of the key could not be obtained, even for a moment' (Watt, 108). In a DFTMW Belacqua's fine art mediums and forms made in 'temper and fresco, in oil and miniature on wood and stones and canvas, tarsia and tinted wood for stories, etching with iron and printing with copper, the enamel of the goldsmith...stories and waterpassions on earthen jars' are noted as 'all this lapidary catlap' and 'marble-love potions' which produce 'the snivelling miracle of your belly-cum-bum totatilities and realities' made by the 'slip of a hairy hand' (78). How It Is registers words as a malfunctioning medium: wax impressions give way to bodily collisions which imprint wounds on another body. The narrator's body is exhausted in auditory panting (not painting) among 'scraps' of a broken bricolage or collage: 'Words quaqua then in me when the panting stops bits and scraps a murmur this old life same old words same old scraps millions of times each time the first how it was before Pim... how it is how it will be...' (HII, 133). Words attempt to dictate what, who, when and whom the narrator is, but cannot say why he is, or picture what he is outside of this language trap where he 'obeys' their call. The text, borrowing fine art medium/language to suggest its durability and ekphrastic power, its 'totalities and realities', is undercut. When Yeats literally saw his own books as visual artefacts/art objects, he demanded his publisher supply ‘gold’ covers for The Wind among the Reeds (1898), not the ‘simply ugly’ yellow forwarded in which ‘the gold of verse of any kind of importance’ had been replaced by ‘the kind of common stuff on the cover that you put on a novel’ (CL2, 279-280); when Beckett's requested that Echo’s Bones was ‘not covered in the canary of your prospectus’ he requested it be changed 'to PUTTY’ (Beckett cited in Bair, 1990, 206). If Yeats recommended that Norah McGuiness illustrate his poetry in book form and Beckett permitted fine or visual artists to illustrate or interpret his texts in celebrated, limited edition livre d'artiste, neither writer, strictly speaking, worked directly and collaboratively with visual artists to produce texts or exhibitions. (Beckett's and Giacometti's sculpting of a famous tree, jointly created, for the performance of Godot in the theatre was a practical, atypical collaboration.) These image-texts are post-hoc responses to work already written or published. Beckett's generosity in permitting high-profile visual artists to illustrate or freely interpret his texts should not be confused with "collaboration". As Lois Oppenheim notes these ‘worded image/imaged word[s]' illustrating pre-existent texts were usually seen by the author after the artworks were completed (Oppenheim, 2000, 185-86). If Beckett played with the idea that literature/type had visual or metaphoric qualities, there were limits when it came to literally translating, radically altering or rendering the text into a visual medium in which its integrity was degraded or lost. When the sculptor Bernard Meadows converted Molloy into an art object in Gallerie Givaudan, Paris (1965), where Beckett noted Duchamp's ready-mades had been exhibited, its mounted 'booklets of text' in accordion-like, loose pages in folders, placed in a box with etchings, so they might be read in any order by the reader/viewer meet with Beckett's disapproval. He noted: 'Molloy reduced to a jumble of loose pages and the collapsible object which when assembled has the form of a stairy support on which segments of the text can be hung or draped according to the fancy of the hypocrite lecteur. Don't ask me what the idea is. To make a ceremonial of reading perhaps'. Wrecking the medium's boundaries had created a 'jumble' (that recalls 'The Waste Land') but Beckett also generously permitted texts to be translated into art books by artists, such as Jasper Johns who worked on 'Fizzles', with great freedom. Beckett informed Johns: Quantitative disproportion between image and word in favour of the former does not worry me at all, indeed I would welcome it. To blow up type simply in order to occupy space seems very wrong to me and literally to interfere with the reading process. This is surely the main and almost invariable defect of illustrated editions and it would be a relief if we could avoid it here, that is respect the non-image nature of the text, not ask of it what it can't give and leave the bulk of the book as space to you. (SBL4, 363) Text remains an independent, read medium down-sized to grant John's a visual autonomyand latitude in his own medium but, in Yeatsian terms, 'picture and book remain'. Both writers' most successful attempts to use fine art or translate its medium into poetic arenas differ. When Beckett invokes painting directly in early poems like 'Sanies I', this bicycling poem changes gear, rapidly through three art forms in which literature (Chaucerian knight or ritter), music (a sonata) and painting (Botticelli) create a 'pestled' synaesthetic, a near hysterical turbulence in which none of the art forms become a stable medium with a fixed subject - all the livelong way this day of sweet showers from Portrane on the seashoreDonabate sad swans of Turvey Swordspounding along in three ratios like a sonatalike a Ritter with pommeled scrotum atra cura on the step Botticelli from the fork down pestling the transmission (CP, 12)The poem as a pedantic cross-breed peddles its art learning and namechecking too hard. Avoiding Yeats's early failure in ekphrasis as mere description, it produces a different kind of failure in parading mixed metaphors from the two non-liteary arts in a 'loutishness of learning' as Beckett termed it. Beckett's notebooks 'pommelled' with painters' names do not necessarily translate into poems. A later solution in 'Brief Dream', in which both "sister arts" form a more ghostly, residua or negative presence, require neither musical nor painterly name-dropping to face finitude/tragedy. The short poem evokes and denies pictorial space ('no matter where') and narrative time ('no matter when') with an abstract, musical concision: Go end thereOne fine dayWhere never till thenTill as much as to sayNo matter whereNo matter when. (CP, 224)Conversely, in Yeats's successful ekphrasis - described in the 'Lapis Lazuli' sculpture or Byzantine poems - the retention, adjustment and re-imagining of an actual or named artwork provides a solid platform from which the poem translates its realism into poetic symbolism, to create its 'symbol of longevity'. In 'Brief Dream' perceptual and visual influences suggest fine art influence being assimilated but dissolved, like salt in water, to leave ghostly traces or abstract images in quietist, negative affirmations which suggest non-relations between the both arts' mediums. The poem's 'go' ends in 'no': human, and both arts', endings converge in a unity of dissolution. In Yeats's 'Lapis Lazuli' both arts are more physically present in the named sculpture so fine art operates as inspiration, and then functions as thematic illustration. Given Yeats links seeing, seeing and hearing, and textual images, descriptions of fine art images in texts underline words' unrivalled, expansive power in absorbing, encoding and decoding fine art's mediums: the text can see, hear and articulate what fine art is and does; it can re-illustrate the fine art even more powerfully in linguistic form and language. Given Beckett disrupts links between seeing, seeing/hearing and textual images, descriptions of painting's images suggest words fail to fully translate or absorb fine art's mediums and reveal the limitations in language itself. The text cannot totally effectively see, hear or articulate what each separate art does, nor reduce one art to the other's terms. How then do the writers' use fine art/its theories to see, say or read their Irish and European contexts? Chapter 3 The Writers' Use of Painting in Irish and European ContextsHow, and why, do W.B. Yeats and Samuel Beckett use fine art/painting and its theories to engage with their respective Irish and European contexts? The proposition has already been made that Yeats is drawn to ideas linking fine art and texts, as "sister arts" creating durable or ideal/real symbols and 'unity', and as representative regimes which imitate and remake reality so that what is seen may be said and conceptualized. How and why, then, does Yeats use painting/fine art as a filter to see and say what is seen in his Irish/English contexts? The contention has been made that Beckett posits non-relations between the arts, which are non-commensurate with each other and fail to represent "being", reality/chaos, so texts engage with subjective images rather than objective or durable symbols. How and why, then, do Beckett's texts engage - or disengage - with fine art images and how does this shape their encounters with his Irish and European contexts? W.B. Yeats's poetry's encounter with 'great hatred, little room' in Ireland, which 'maimed us from the start' (VP, 506), uses a spatial metaphor of constriction/claustrophobia, which suggests a semi-detached sense of injury and belonging. As an Irish middle-class Protestant or 'inner émigré', his life was split between London and Dublin, with summers spent writing in the west of Ireland. Yeats's 'Remorse for Intemperate Speech' (1932) addresses Irish contextual space (shared by 'us' as reader, viewer and poet/poem); just after the poem was written Beckett settled, more or less permanently, in France in the late 1930's. Yeats had advised Synge to leave France (1896), to find his subject in Ireland's Arran Islands (CW3, 262), and his attack on constricted, Irish mis-readings of Synge's drama contrasts with his assertion of a "natural" Irish capacity, to read French painting whereby one can 'imagine an Arran Islander straying into the Luxembourg Gallery to turning bewildered from Impressionist or Post-Impressionist but lingering at Moreau's Jason' (CW3, 248). What is seen "naturally" by Irish eyes is freed from Parisian artificial constrictions and taste for modern paintings as a regime failing to represent or symbolise a 'seen' or recognisable and shared perceptual reality. Infrequently returning to Ireland after the death of his mother (1950) and brother (1954), Beckett's self-exile induced his cousin to evoke a more extreme variant of Yeats's claustrophobic image. 'Living in Ireland was confinement for Sam', Morris Sinclair stated: 'He came up against the Irish censorship. He could not swim in the Irish literary scene or in Free State politics the way W.B. Yeats did...But the big city, the larger horizon, offered the freedom of comparative anonymity... and stimulation instead of Dublin oppression, jealousy, intrigue and gossip' (Sinclair cited Knowlson, 1996, 274). Whilst the push of Irish philistine audiences produces claustrophobia, so that Yeats's own 'fanatic heart' rails against limitations on 'liberal speech', Ireland as national project also exerts the pull of opportunity requiring fine art assist reconstruction. Yeats refers to his search for 'Unity of Image...in national literature' as a search for 'an originating symbol', not an Impressionist image which he associates with early poems (CW3, 210). Beckett's texts as more off-shore accounts by an expatriate - a Protestant in Ireland, an Irish man in London, a French resistance member in German occupied France - conscript painting in Irish and European contexts but they often use fine art as a means to erase Ireland - 'Eire or whatever that place is called now' as Beckett termed it in 1956 (Beckett cited in Morin, 15) - or to mount even more scathingly detached, radical critiques of any regime, national or otherwise, imposing rules or censorship on the arts. Just after Irish independence, Yeats found, or Irish society found for him, symbolic, public fine art roles. Already a high profile public campaigner for Dublin's Hugh Lane Gallery, Yeats as Irish Senator (1922-8) became a spokesperson on the arts, chair of a coin committee commissioning artists to design the Irish currency (1926-8) and Board Member of Ireland's National Gallery (1924-39). Beckett disappeared into less public roles with less 'representational' Irish weight. In 'Peintres de l‘Empêchement' (1948) Beckett asks: 'What is it that remains of the representational if it is the object‘s nature to withdraw from representation? What remains to represent are the conditions of this withdrawal.'DISJ, 136) How then do these writers' texts use fine art/painting to respond to, or withdraw from, aspects of religion, sex, money and politics in Irish and European contexts? Yeats's 'Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen' (1921) registers the Irish War of Independence in another claustrophobic image which leaves 'weasels fighting in a hole' (VP, 429); during the Civil War, with the National Gallery closed, Yeats turned (1923) towards his Anglo-Norman keep in 'The Tower', not only as poetic 'symbol' but as literal repository for painting and craft. When history impinges on the tower as visual, poetic or national symbol, the claustrophobic image returns: 'We are closed in, the key is turned /On our uncertainty' (VP, 428). Irish iconoclasm in the poem is linked with the wreckage of ancient Greek sculpture, 'the ornamental bronze and stone' and 'ancient image made of olive wood' and 'Phidias' famous ivories /And all the golden grasshoppers and bees'; Ireland, bereft of such arts, only leaves 'common things' to be 'pitched about'. In Ireland, as in Greece, fine art and ekphrasis are necessary for national reconstruction; hence, in 'The Municipal Gallery Revisited' (1937), in post-independence Ireland, the antidote for this claustrophobia/wreckage is found via an audio-visual tour from Dublin's civic Hugh Lane Gallery to the Anglo-Irish gallery of Coole where 'no fox can foul the lair the badgers swept' (VP, 603). For Beckett's Watt, in Knott's big house, surrounded with barbed wire during this Second War novel, a replica key cannot be made to open interior doors into rooms with paintings. Confined, anonymous spaces in 'no-man's land' in essays and plays suggest an existential state of being, irregardless of where (geographically) or when (historically) the cell or monad is placed. Irish expropriation of the arts' images in censorship may exacerbate Beckett's counter appropriation of images of flight, 'negation', absence or 'discarnation'. Fine art may assists a virulent critique of Ireland in Beckett's early work, but an increasing erasure of Ireland in manuscript revisions of later texts also implies that painting/fine art help erect more anonymous spaces, imaginary 'elsewheres' or 'ruins true refugee long last'. The writer finds in virtual image and text 'home yet again,...that old past ever new' (CSP, 197 & 141) but, as Beckett puts it, 'What counts is the spirit.[...] I cannot see it historically' - 'History, for me, it's a black-out'; his admired artists, Joyce and Jack Yeats, contra MacGreevy's conscription of Yeats as the great Irish painter, are repositioned in European contexts (DISJ, 19-35 & 95-98). Connections to (Irish) history as 'nightmare' (Joyce), 'narcotic' (Walter Benjamin) or 'antonym' for modernism' (Paul de Man) are dismantled from an elsewhere, which divorces both arts from stifling, literal, national contexts and claims more readily than in Yeats's semi-detached texts. W.B. Yeats's 'Estrangement: Extracts from a Diary kept in 1909' laments the lack of 'ideals' and 'aesthetic culture' in Ireland but insists that the arts function as national remedy (CW3, 352). 'No art can conquer the people alone', Yeats writes, because 'the people are conquered by an ideal of life upheld by authority. As this ideal is rediscovered, the arts, music and poetry, painting and literature, will draw closer together' (CW3, 362-3). 'National institutions to reverence', Yeats argues, are an integral to this project of bildung; the arts which create a more 'complex mass of images, something like an architect's model', not a 'mass of obvious images' act as a national leaven, an alternative authority. A journal entry (1910) allocates the role of creating a nation to artists: A nation can only be created in the deepest thoughts of its deepest minds... who have first made themselves fundamental and profound and then realized themselves in art. In this way they rouse into national action the governing minds of their [time]... [and] create national character. (MEM, 248) Yeats's 'Ireland and the Arts' in the United Irishman (31 August 1901) modifies a previous art school credo (1885) 'that art is tribeless, nationless, a blossom gathered in No Man's land': Ireland must 'recreate the ancient arts... as they were understood...in every ancient land; as they were understood when they moved a whole people'. Here John Hughes creates sculptures of Aengus and Etain, to supersede Orpheus and Eurydice, so the fine arts come uncomfortably close to serving a utilitarian form of Irish national propaganda, a 'pictured song' of Irish history as one poem has it - not a Beckettian engagement with paintings/ texts existing in 'no-man's land' (DISJ, 70). 'As I writer I have no feeling of any national attachment', Beckett informed his Hungarian publisher (1964) whilst approving of his plays publication in British or, if it came down to a choice based on language, French anthologies. Yeats's Autobiographies claims: ‘Nations, races, and individual men are unified by an image, or bundle of related images, symbolical or evocative of the state of mind which is, of all states of mind not impossible'. Thereby Yeats argues: 'we [in Ireland] might be the first in Europe to seek unity as deliberately as it had been sought by theologian, poet, sculptor, architect, from the eleventh to the thirteenth century’ (Yeats cited in Foster, 2003,180). Yeats's 'Mourn - And Then Onward!' (1891) depicts the dead Parnell as Moses liberating the chosen people in an exodus from Egyptian (English) bondage as he 'guides ye from the tomb'; the Irish leader is Biblically and visually reborn as 'a tall pillar, burning /Before us in the gloom!' (VP, 737). Given Yeats was studying Blake's image-texts at this time to propose, dubiously, that this admired predecessor was descended from an Irish grandfather from Rathmines (Yeats and Ellis, 1893, 3), Blake's up-lifting Flight Into Egypt (1799), depicting a future Messiah reborn and accompanied by angels and light - an artwork cited in Gilchrist's Life of Blake (1863, II, 208) which Yeats and Ellis cite frequently - may ghost the poem where Parnell as Irish Messiah is reborn and 'laboured on' to bring light to Ireland. Beckett's view of Rembrandt’s camp-fire scene, Rest on the Flight into Egypt (1647) in Ireland’s National Gallery in the 1920's as ‘astonishing’ does not lead its use as historic analogue for Irish independence or return to a homeland. The painting, whose thematics are exile and infant survival from genocide, appears in novels (TRIL, 61) to support texts whose essential message is exile and isolation, not rebirth. Three years later Yeats's 'A Nativity' evokes painters to suggest Mary, provided with 'drapery' by Delacroix and a 'waterproof' ceiling by Landor, has found a home for the Virgin birth in which she looks 'terror-struck' and full of 'mercy' (VP, 625); as in painterly nativity so in the historic Easter Rising, Irish historical death and re-birth create a 'terrible beauty' in its tomb-womb; the massacre of the innocents and flight into Egypt tend to be a Beckettian starting point in the 'womb-tomb' where being born in itself may be a sin. The expatriate Murphy in London/'Tyburnia', born to experience 'real alienation', unlike the Irish poet Ticklepenny, and eviction from rat-infested lodgings, is pictured as the infant-Christ with ‘clenched fists and rigid upturned face of the Child in a Giovanni Bellini Circumcision, waiting to feel the knife’ and a textual Christ for whom 'It is finished' (MU, 11, 109, 141 & 44). The thematics of rebirth - the potential for self, poem, and nation to be reborn via fine art form a matrix in Yeats's texts - and his Magi seek a painted nativity for a 'second coming'; birth in exile as vulnerability, suffering or infanticide prompt Beckett in London (1935) to inform the Irish MacGreevy that he is drawn to ‘two Rests on the Flight’ by the School of Joachim Patinir (c.1480-1524) in the National Gallery (SBL1, 250-1). A year later Emile Nolde's Christ and the Children/Christus und die Kinder in Hamburg with its ‘clots of yellow infants’ with 'lovely eyes' amongst ‘black and beards of Apostles’ draws Beckett into feeling ‘at once on terms with the picture’ (GD, 19 November, 1936). The idea of the image or "phantasia" in Zeno (334-262 BC) as deep personal impression or wound made on/by the body akin to that of 'a signet ring in wax' in Beckett (Uhlmann, 2006, 129-145) is commandeered for Yeats' Abbey Theatre as national theatre of regeneration because 'The country... in its first plastic state... takes the mark of every strong finger' (1905). In Beckett's Trilogy, deracinated, Irish-named characters are 'nothing more than a lump of melting wax' (TRIL, 45) huddled around camp-fires in dark Rembrandtesque landscapes; those imprinting violent impressions on each other in What Where, where Bam and Bim torture Bom, do so in a more placeless space, far from neutral Ireland in a historical context where European Fascism unfolded. Fine art analogies in the two writers' texts implicate differing contexts, but how and why does fine art assist in dealing with these contexts in terms of religion, sex, politics and money? 1. Religion, Painting, Text. National unity in early twentieth century Ireland was imbricated in iconography and texts. Truism it may be, to suggest Irish religions created polarised imaginative formations - Catholicism deploying painterly icons and symbols signalling adherence to collective spiritual meanings and ideals, Protestantism gravitating towards textual Biblical imagery whose meaning was open to individual interpretation - but this cliché exists because it contains significant elements of truth. Seamus Heaney's 'The Other Side' depicts these polarised formations: a Protestant, Biblical farmstead, governed by the 'rule of the book' produces a 'brain... [like] a whitewashed kitchen / hung with texts' (Heaney, 1988, 60); a Catholic kitchen is dominated by the rosary and a 'little shrine picture...the three patron saints of Ireland on it... and little ornamental medallions with motifs of round towers and Celtic crosses. A tiny red glass on the mantelpiece kept lit for the Sacred Heart'(Heaney quoted in O'Driscoll, 2008, 11-12). Backdating these binary icons hardly distorts barely altered contexts. Yeats's Irish Fairy Tales knows Biddy Hart's hearth-side in the 1890's has one painting - 'only that little picture of St Patrick over the fireplace' (Yeats, 1892, 1 & 15). Beckett's Bill Lambert's house, recalled in the 1950's, has only one sculpture: 'a crucifix hanging by a nail' on the chimney-piece (TRIL, 196). As Roy Foster's 'Protestant Magic: W.B. Yeats and the Spell of Irish History' (1989) notes, in Yeats's texts this binary opposition is superseded by critique and a Protestant, pluralist, secular mysticism which fuses inherited image and new textual icons, aiming for Irish synthesis (Foster, 1993, 83-105). In Beckett's texts, icons and the language of transcendence meet a mock-"Protestant" rejection of Nicholas de Stael's painterly sets for Godot and the 'bleak low-church altars' in the plays - Declan Kiberd's phrase (Kiberd, 1985, 124) - appear as virtually empty images with Biblical or textual traces of Irish, religious significance. Yeats's late Victorian, middle class milieu and Beckett's early twentieth century context were underwritten by Irish Protestantism, traditionally informed far more by Biblical texts than by religious paintings. This fissured religious context, a historical inheritance in which Ireland's Bible Wars (in the 1830's) and Evangelical Revival met with Catholic proselytism, in the form of an unprecedented late-Victorian phase of church building accommodating paintings and iconic sculpture, meant the two writers were especially sensitive to polarities in Christian textual and visual icons. Yeats cites or echoes the Bible some two hundred and sixty five times in poems with a largely non-ironic purpose, so distinctions between the word as divine and the divine word, as artifice or image of eternity, blur (Purdy, 1994, 25); Beckett, who received a Sunday school Bible in childhood distributed by the Association for Promoting Christian Knowledge, before owning multiple Bibles in different languages (Nixon and Hulle, 2013, 172-5), makes profuse intertextual use of the Bible for 'broadly literary, philosophical or ironic' purposes. Both writer's process and audit Irish religious visual iconography in fine art alongside, or in, the text, differently. The proliferation in Irish Victorian sculpture yards, ecclesiastical shops and salesrooms selling Catholic icons, which saw Peter Murphy’s Irish Depot and Catholic Depository in Liverpool supplying Ireland with counter-reformation iconography for veneration in 1907, would not only dominate Irish hearths, firesides and hearts but permeate (Protestant) texts. The Depot sold ‘Prayer Books, Beads, Statues, Holy water Fonts, Scapulars, medallions... oleographs...pictures, views, etc., jewellery, ornament, Blackthorns... a large selection of Gaelic books and Irish manufactured stationery’ (Foster, 2014, 164). Lady Gregory's Journals note Lady Lavery at a theatre rehearsal (1916) as 'beautiful as a Madonna in cloth of gold sitting in a shrine' with 'Mrs Sandy kneeling in an illuminated missal page'(Gregory, 1978, 20-21); Yeats notes his art school friend and sculptor John Hughes 'doing a fine Madonna for Loughrea'(CL InteLex # 1015). Ecclesiastical sculptural yards and salesrooms boomed in the Victorian period with premises from Glasnevin (Farell & Son, opened 1835) to the marble merchant and sculpture business run by James Pearse (1850-1916), father of Padraic Pearse, to the Ecclesiastical Warehouse in Derry selling original and reproduced Catholic sculpture and icons (Carpenter & Murphy, 2015, 434). Beckett's Belacqua's life is lived between 'monumental sculptors' in Pearse Street and Glasnevin before internment in a 'classico romantic' cemetery (MPTK, 34, 115 & 180). Molloy satirizes an economy in Ballyba built on converting bog oak into 'rosaries and other knick-knacks such as 'Martha's Madonna' (TRIL, 124). Just as Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Grey textually registers moral decline in a decaying painting and transubstantial rescue via the 'bread of angels' in Catholic church iconography, paintings of Gerard Dillon's London home in the 1950's place a Gauguin-style nude alongside an Irish Madonna in a multi-framed interior. Sacred and secular impulses compete in Irish texts and paintings to register highly religious contexts, as noted by Gesa Elsbeth Thiessen in Theology and Modern Irish Art (1999). These contexts pressure images. John Lavery's painting gift, Daylight Raid from My Studio Window (1917), relocated to the context of Belfast Municipal Gallery (1929), required the painter to hide the icon of Virgin Mary behind an over-painted black-out blind in the Biblical north. This religious and visual iconology embedded in the writers' contexts (often shared) registers differently in their texts. When Yeats's contemporary, Aleister Crowley's 'In the Woods with Shelley' notes that 'Life is a closed book behind - Shelley an open before me', a dialectic in which a lapsed Protestant supplements lost textual faith with a synthesis of Catholic iconology, occult or Golden Dawn books (as in George Pollexfen notebooks) in the late nineteenth century comes into play. Yeats's 'Religious Belief Necessary to Symbolic Art' in Discoveries (1906) notes his early attraction to Shelley: [...] I lacked something to compensate my imagination for geographical and historical reality, for the testimony of our ordinary senses, and found myself wishing for and trying to imagine [....] a crowd of believers who could put into all those strange sights the strength of their beliefs and the rare testimony of their visions...I would have had Shelley a sectary that his revelation might display the only sufficient evidence of religion, miracle. All symbolic art should arise out of a real belief and that it cannot do so in this age proves that this age is a road and not a resting place for the imaginative arts. (E & I, 294) Protestant 'testimony' recruits ' believers' via visual 'revelation' to supplement its 'lack'. Shelley, as seeker of images, finds these not in the meaningless 'ebb and flow in the world' but in 'that far household where the undying gods await all whose souls have become simple as flame, whose bodies have become quiet as an agate lamp'(E & I, 95). The 'agate lamp', perhaps, filters literary response via a votive product akin to those found in Peter Murphy's Catholic warehouse and in Walter Pater's response to paintings. Yeats's poetry accommodates Protestant text as vision and appropriates Catholic iconography as image in vacillations between appreciation and attack on kitsch. In 'Beautiful Lofty Things', Yeats's father condemns Ireland's fake 'plaster casts saints' to replace them with 'Olympians' as sculpted icons. Attack on kitsch is the keynote. Yeats's pluralist poetry also vows to ‘make ... [his own] soul’ and ‘prepare’ his ‘peace / With learned Italian things and the proud stones of Greece’ (VP, 415-416). Catholic rubric and Greek plastic art are accommodated. 'The Theatre, the Pulpit and the Newspapers: The Irish Dramatic Movement’ (1903) attacks the priesthood which has 'all mankind painted with a halo or with horns' in stereotypical ‘wooden images’ of ‘lifeless wood’; it requires Yeats's own iconoclastic ‘silver hammer’ to destroy ‘personifications of an average’ (EXP, 119-121). When The Countess Cathleen in 1899, however, depicted a peasant deliberately demolishing a religious icon, in a move remote from John Lavery’s conversion of his wife into ecclesiastical sculpture for The Madonna of the Lakes (1913), Yeats met with such a ferocious clerical critique that he altered iconoclasm into placatory accident (CL2,379, n.2). If he later drew extensively on Lavery's iconic Irish portraits, however, Yeats did not recycle the painter's Cardinal Logue (1920) who objected to the play. As an Irish-based writer, Yeats did not portray a priest leaving mass, 'shat on, from above, by dove, in the eye', as in Beckett's Watt, where an 'asexual' figure may be a priest or nun, whose 'arms did not end at the hands, but continued...to near the ground' (Watt, 76 & 195). The caricature reduces sacred vicar to Darwinian monkey. Visual critique is often tempered by textual caution in Yeats's letters to accommodate the Catholic Church's power as art commissioners. When Dun Emer received commissions for embroidered ecclesiastical banners with Irish Saints for St. Brendan’s Cathedral in Loughrea (1901), designed by Jack Yeats, George Russell and embroidered by Lily Yeats, WBY advised they produce ‘reverent’ images; he cultivated the commissioner, Father Jeremiah O’Donovan, providing him with art introductions in London to Selwyn Image, future Slade Professor of Art at Oxford, 1910-16 (CL3, 57, 112 n.1 & 646 n.1). Duplicitous fairies in The Land of Heart's Desire desecrate the crucifix in a cottage interior as ‘that ugly thing on the black cross’ to offer a 'land of heart's desire' outside, where Mary may be lured away from good Father Hart (Co Pl, 65). Textual fairies offer magical landscape vistas in fictive drama, as in traditional nineteenth century Irish paintings: they - not Irish peasants - as iconoclastic 'come away' from text into context as more elusive target. Subtler allusions and subversions of religious icons infiltrate Yeats's poems. ‘Prayer for My Daughter’ replaces prayer book with a poem hoping his daughter will avoid male worship akin to that of Botticelli’s Venus, ‘that great Queen, that rose out of the spray’. 'Rose' and 'spray' are phonetically close to 'rosary'. Her attainment of ‘radical innocence’ as ‘spreading laurel’, a Roman icon for nobility/victory, was unobjectionable in an Irish context (VP, 403-406). Flickering altar light, akin to the ‘hard gem like flame’ Pater suggests characterises painting or poetry, illuminate the bejewelled, Pre-Raphaelite/George Russell type of fairy landscapes in the early poems. Reliquary or scapular as ‘casket of gold’ is invoked when 'The Lover Tells of the Rose in His Heart' in 1892 (VP, 142-3) to secularize Sean Keating’s later stereotypical Scapular Virgin (1948) in Balinteer seminary. When Beckett locks 'apostolic spit' and 'Mantegna's/butchery' into a 'Casket of Pralinen' it is a harder hitting image in/of a 'dissipated' love poem (CP, 235-7). Yeats's ‘Bronze Head’ of Maude Gonne, 'no dark tomb-haunter once', places the sculpture by Lawrence Campbell ‘Here right at the entrance’ of the gallery; she quietly commandeers the site of Marian icon or font (VP, 618). Beckett frames the Smeraldina, Renaissance-style, as 'the living spit... of Madonna Lucrezia del Fede' who would, more ironically, make 'Pope John Kissmine' think of a 'Puerpetually Succourbursting Lady' (DFMW, 69). Ancient Egyptian and Greek art in Yeats's Mythologies permit claims that the poet has ‘not found... tradition in the Catholic Church’ but in one ‘more universal and more ancient’ (MYTH, 368-9). As Le Corbusier notes in 'Plagiarism. Folk Culture' (1925), the rise of western museums full of 'bric-a-brac' offer potential synthesis of ancient and new material objects, 'Japonaiserie of all kinds' with 'a sentimental and devotional hubbub, quite ersatz... as we move bathing us in P-o-e-t-r-y....' (Corbusier, 1998, 27-28). Beckett's protagonist in Murphy opts for his own inner vision, contra any religious impulse sought at the 'Harpy Tomb' even if it is 'much less corrupt than anything on view in the BM [British Museum]'(MU, 56) - Yeats's favoured London writing place, which he connects with ancient religious sculpture. Religious fine art artefacts and icons enter poetic structures differently. Yeats's 'Veronica's Napkin' (1932) retains a residue of sacred content from the symbol as means to meditate on, or mediate between, heaven and earth - as it did in medieval manuscripts, Renaissance paintings and Rossetti's Veronica Veronese (1872), with its poem in the painting's frame linking her music and birdsong with 'the dawn of mystic creation'. Astrological or astronomical beauty and pattern are not divorced from sacred shroud with the pattern of Christ's face and suffering in Yeats's poem. 'Veronica's napkin' is an integral part of The Heavenly Circuit; Berenice's Hair; Tent-pole of Eden; the tent's drapery; Symbolical glory of the earth and air!The father and his angelic hierarchyas 'Some found a different pole, and where it stood / A pattern on a napkin dipped in blood (VP, 483). Protestant 'glory' and 'tentpole' and the Catholic 'drapery' of Veronica in the sacred iconic 'napkin' fuse; the poem knits religious lexicon and sacred icon to restitch a potential gap between secular and transcendent. ‘Veronica’s Napkin’ - Veronica literally as ‘true icon’ - was drawn on the back of a painting in Dublin’s National Gallery where Yeats was Board Member; it is retained as potent symbol recuperating heavenly beauty and earthly suffering and stitching both together. Beckett's 'Enueg II', written in 1931, atomises 'Veronica' as icon into decomposing image. Repetitions and textual, auditory echoes barely hold disruptive and disjunctive, 'jump cuts' in images and syntax together so the sacred symbol becomes an unstable image: world world worldand the face gravecloud against the eveningde mortiturus nihil nisiand the face crumbling shylytoo late to darken the skyblushing away into the eveningshouldering away like a gaffeveronica mundiveronica mundagive us a wipe for the love of Christ! (CP, 9) Latin even-chant accompanies the icon's erasure alongside the "street speak" of 'give us a wipe for the love of Christ'. Beckett's icon is a 'face crumbling shyly' into the evening like a 'gaffe' (blunder or 'gaf' as fishing hook). 'Veronica' as 'true icon' is removed from behind protective glass, breaking the rules for sacred or gallery space in this tactile, sacrilegious 'wipe'. Less symbol of 'glory' (Yeats), more image hovering between a 'grave' (engraving/death) and 'gaf' (mistake), it is part of 'a spiral momentum of abject futility', as Alan Gillis (2005, 128) notes. Sacred 'veronica' is left 'mundi' (worldly) and wiped 'munda' (clean); it is removed from its sacred location and disconnected from 'anima mundi', the 'great memory' as eternal repository of symbols in Yeats. After the poem appeared in transition (1936), Beckett informed MacGreevy he intended to create a 'Jesus in farto' to 'disinfect' this image by recomposing it in a text written on toilet roll in '1000 wipes of clean fun', available in 'Boots' (the Chemist) in 'Braille' as 'All Sturm and no Drang' (SBL1, 383 & 361). After desecrating past German painting, Beckett notes, in passing, a primitive painting of 'Veronica's sudarium' acquired by the Irish National Gallery that year by its Director, George Furlong, whose acquisitions and displays he did not rate (SBL1, introduction, xcii). Later in Endgame, which opens with handkerchief revealing a face in distress and closes by hiding the face, the sudarium or sweat cloth is drained of religious symbolism and meaning as real not sacred sweat cloth. Irish Catholic iconography and fine art is implicated in both writers' early fiction. In Yeats's novel John Sherman (1891) the protagonist's desertion of Mary Carton from a Sligo rectory for a London Pre-Raphaelite, whose ‘bright’, ‘Belladona’ eyes look out of his very letters, leaves a trail of destroyed love letters/texts; she seduces his high-church friend, who mistakes her for a ‘photograph of Raphael’s Madonna... hung over the mantelpiece’. Having mistaken her true ‘chaotic colours [which are those] the mystic Blake imagined upon the scaled serpent in Eden’, Sherman is restored to Mary amidst ‘parish announcements’ on the vicarage mantelpiece, her love as assured as ‘the mother for the child at the breast’ (JSD, 66, 67, 99 & 111). Beckett's impious Belacqua ponders Dante's pun, 'Qui vive la pietà quand'è ben morta', but his Italian language teacher knows the phrase, evoking the living-death of pity/the Pietà, may not be 'necessary' or possible to 'translate' (MPTK, 11-12). Walter Pater's Pietà linked poetry with ‘pity’ and Yeats's contention that the ‘holy family’, depicted by artists like Leonardo da Vinci, gave shape to the family instincts of western Christendom, ghost his novel's maternal Irish Marian image, legion in Irish art and churches (CW5, 40 & 314, n. 35). Yeats's Protestant pluralism often seeks accommodation with Catholic iconology, although just as Beckett's Molloy seeks the 'Madonna of pregnant women' or rather 'pregnant married women' (TRIL, 160), Yeats also bullishly pointed out to the Christian Brothers that Protestant Incarnation mattered as much as Catholic Immaculate Conception (1925) because 'We grew up with the Bible; the Mother of God is no Catholic possession; she is part of our imagination'(UP2, 463-4) before a Pateresque style, identified with the creation of ‘feminine souls’ (CW3, 352), yielded to images in late poems of Greek, athletic, singular, sculpture. Sounding more critical, secular notes, bred from an 'accusing eye' which also 'thurst[s] for accusation' against 'All that was said in Ireland [which] is a lie' (VP, 542), late poems like ‘Among School Children’ suggest mothers or nuns who idealise children or holy icon, in idolatry of images, are worshipping those ‘self-born mockers of man's enterprise' (VP, 445) in a less transcendent world. Beckett's early enterprise in reworking a German expressionist painting by Ewald Dülberg, friend of his art collector Uncle Boss whom he visited in German Kassel, mounts a more scathing attack on the Last Supper. Proliferating on Irish Catholic altar fronts, reliefs and objects from the mid-nineteenth century, the traditional style and devotional content of the image was highly visible in Ireland. Yeats commends Titian as painter of Supper at Emmaus (c. 1540) which he saw in the Irish National Gallery after its purchase in 1870 (CW3, 115). The Capuchin Annual (1930-77) and Father Matthew Record (1908-67), for which MacGreevy wrote, 'maintained a brief for promoting religious art in keeping with church teaching' via this type of painting, as did Dublin's Academy of Christian Art (1929-46); so when Beckett turns to this modern painting, Abendmahl (now lost), which appears in Casket of Pralinen for the Daughter of a Dissipated Mandarin he is stepping outside or over traditional and revered Irish boundaries. A DFTMW recalls the painting as livid in the restless yellow light, its thirteen flattened flagrant egg-heads gathered round the tempter and his sop and the traitor and his bourse. The tempter and the traitor and the Judendbund of eleven. John the Divine was the green egg at the head of the board. What acharming undershot purity of expression to be sure! He would ask for a toad to eat in a minute. (DFMW, 77) As Protestant iconoclasm, this use of the painting anticipates the atheistic Jacques Moran's taking of the eucharist as a 'pain killer' which brings no 'relief' when he ignores Father Ambrose's warning to refrain from 'profane comparisons' (TRIL, 92-4). Beckett's fine art burlesque sometimes reads like highly self-aware desecration as a form of inverted appreciation. 'German Diaries' criticise Friedrich Schiller's Maria Stuart with Mortimer's conversion speech to note this form of critique 'could only have come from the miserable Protestant idea of Roman Catholicism as a welter of the fine arts' (GD, 6 January 1937). Beckett's texts, however, register a seriously tough resistance to theocratic and national manipulations of iconography, dangerous in Catholic Ireland (to his own banned texts) and lethal in Nazi Germany (for censored paintings). Da Vinci's Last Supper, central emblem in Irish iconology, devotional focus for stained glass artist and Catholic convert Evie Hone, key symbol 'at the core of the faith' re-enacting the 'celebration of the eucharist at mass' and the institution of the priesthood (sacrosanct in Bishop Joseph Duffy's recent condemnation of any offensive visual use), and central Biblical symbol for the Irish Protestant communion, was virtually off limits as satire for every Irish denomination - but not in Beckett's texts. Beckett's atheistic, antagonism towards Christian iconography permeates subversions of Christian images/texts into a 'via negativa' in plays and novels as Eric Tonning's 'Beckett Modernism and Christianity' suggests (Tonning in ed. Gontarski, 2014, 353-69). Just as Watt textually satirises an editor of 'the popular catholic monthly' who sets readers tasks like - 'Rearrange the fifteen letters of the Holy Family to form a question and answer.' (Watt, 21), so Bram van Velde's paintings as expressing 'nothing' and 'non-relations' may be invoked to demonstrate that his 'past, his better prospects, and a Pietà with a double virgin mother, naturally leaves me a cold as Malone' (SBL2, 141). Thereby Beckett denies painting its Irish devotional role as 'picture carried with singing into the temple' (Hewitt, 1991, 60) or as prop for sacred or transcendent Irish theology or teleology. 'German Diaries' attacks theocracies. The 'holy terms: Fuhrer, Movement, Blood and Soil, Freedom and Honour must not be given over to the babble of the fraudsters who seek to make a business out of the worldview of National Socialism' (GD, 28 October 1936). Given Irish 1920's tendencies to resist painterly modernism (in critiques of Marian icons executed in this style by Manie Jellett alongside praise for Harry Clarke's traditional stained glass Blessed Virgin of Glory, 1923, in St Joseph's Terenure) and a 1930's Irish milieu dominated by censorship and religious conservatism, which 'favoured Catholic canons, heroic mythology and conservative treatment of rural life', Beckett's use of paintings challenge such religious formations and aesthetic traditions, radically resisting insular, Irish repressive norms. Spiritual images of motherland (Ireland) or fatherland (Germany) as theocratic or national substitutions which pass for a 'worldview' are a target in plays like Nacht und Tr?ume. As Hersh Zeifman's essay on 'Religious Imagery in the Plays of Samuel Beckett' contends, the play's images of 'religious density', its visions of angels, Christ and virgin, are staged to reveal a painterly hand coming from above a dreamer bearing a cup (chalice?) and cloth to wipe his brow (Veronica's handkerchief?), only to cut off such sources of succour (Zeifman in Cohn, 1975, 94). The Stations of the Cross, in which Saint Veronica was often central in alleviating Christ's suffering, direct Watt to the house of Knot where he suffers without resurrection. Godot's central image, a visual Giacometti tree amidst the text, has close visual affinities with Protestant tracts displaying the "old rugged cross" but the symbol is drained of iconological meaning and denied Yeatsian-Rosicrucian decoration, with roses as emblems of suffering, desire or beauty. Beckett's tree tempts symbolism to undercut its growth in bearing minimal growth. In Yeats's A Vision, two interpenetrating gyres/triangles, redolent of hermetic, sacred symbols such as Solomon's Seal, order the movement of art and history; Beckett's 'Les Deux Besoins' deploys two triangles, highly redolent of the Star of David in 1930's Germany, plotted on an axis in which art is generated by the earthly, perceptual need to see 'chaos'. (See chapter 2) Poetry or painting, as 'priestly' users of sacramental symbols for desire and death, create differing tropes. Before Jack Yeats's oil painting of The Parish Priest became one of twelve iconic figures in George A. Birmingham's Irishmen All (1913), WBY penned a pro-clerical poem 'The Ballad of Father Gilligan' (1890) (VP,132-3), and later lines like 'So get you gone Von Hügel, though with blessings on your head' (VP, 503) sound priestly. The poet's claim that George Russell’s ‘portrait of the priest’ in the Irish Homestead (22 January 1898) is one his 'best portraits’ (CL2, 187-88) is coterminous with his stated belief that the 'arts' should shoulder 'burdens that have fallen from the shoulders of the priests’. Foregrounded in Jack Yeats's Memory Harbour, dominant in Gerard Dillon's 1950's The Confessional, the 'priest of the eternal imagination', textually adopted by Joyce in his Portrait of the Artist, which Yeats read and admired, was a potent surrogate for poet/artist. Seamus Heaney's twenty-first century interviews still conflate poetic calling and 'priesty' vocation (Heaney cited in Brown, 2002, 82-3). Poet, priest and artist dispense sacramental prayer and image as icon. Beckett's prayer in Endgame, asserting with deliberate illogicality that God is a 'bastard' who 'doesn't exist' (CDW, 119), only superseded earlier claims that a German Brücke-style portrait by Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, marks authentic art in which 'the art (picture) that is a prayer sets up prayer, releases prayer in the onlooker' (GD, 17 November 1936). The residual power of this image - Beckett was first photographed at prayer in a home containing a reproduction Albrecht Dürer's etching of Praying Hands - meant the adult writer kept a postcard reproduction of Dürer image inside his copy of Homer, the writer whom Yeats had termed 'unchristened'. Yeats's 'Art and Ideas' (1916) notes 'works of art are always begotten by previous works ofart, and every masterpiece becomes the Abraham of a chosen people' before tempering the Biblical image by claiming 'all our art has its image in the Mass that would lack authority were it not descended from savage ceremonies' (E & I, 352). When T.E. Hulme noted poetry was ‘a visual, concrete language’ in a ‘Lecture on Modern Poetry’ (1907), he suggested Romanticism survived as a conduit for ‘spilt religion’; he contended Yeats attempted 'to ennoble his craft by strenuously believing in supernatural world, race-memory, magic, and saying that symbols can recall these where prose couldn’t' as 'an attempt to bring in infinity again’ (Hulme, 1998, 71 & 57). The artist delivering epiphanies as transubstantiation is a central image in Pater’s Marius the Epicurean (1885) - a foundational text for Yeats also found in Joyce's Trieste library - whose ‘procession consisted of the priests in long white vestments...each bearing, exposed aloft, one of the sacred symbols of Isis...among them the votive ship itself, carved and gilt...’ (Pater, 1885, 1, 107). Yeats, inaugurated into the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn (1890) in a painter's studio, described himself (1891) as a 'churchless mystic' (CL1, 255) and his ‘processional order’ is led by Old Masters like Titian/Ariosto (E & I, 191); mundane modernists, Manet and T.S. Eliot, are excluded because, as Yeats's OMBV puts it, they have 'left the procession’ (OMBV, xxi-xxii). Beckett's 'Return to the Vestry' 'mock[s] a duller impurity' in which 'the deaf conceited lecherous laypriest' has removed his braces' for love making, just as in transition (1949), translating Stéphane Mallarmé's '?douard Manet', Beckett's painter has his 'eye,....new, set on things...the immediate freshness of meeting' which leaves a non-transcendent 'limpid vision...haunted with dark, the new and French masterpiece' (CP, 245-6 & 136). Yeats's awareness of the fine arts' potential function in creating shared icons in the new Free State blunts their use in potentially virulent religious critique. As Roy Foster suggests, the poetry celebrating the art of medieval 'Byzantium', a synthesis of Christian-Hebraic and Greek traditions, is glossed in prose as occurring at a time when ‘language’ has become an ‘instrument of controversy... grown abstract’ in order to permit a convenient post-dating of this art back into an earlier Byzantium of visual purity. Yeats alters the chronology of art history so his text can claim Byzantine influence permeates Irish history to help produce the Book of Kells. (Foster, 2003, 326-8). Religious art, as potential critique of modern nationalism, becomes precursor of national art treasure. Beckett's letters and diaries do not register sustained engagement with Byzantine church art but, as Mary Bryden notes in 'The Beckettian Bestiary', Thomas MacGreevy's essays like 'The Catholic Element of Work in Progress' note sacrilegious elements in The Book of Kells, which depicts two rats tearing the Host/the Body of Christ from each other, and these are recycled in Watt. Mounting a Darwinian attack on conservative Irish theologies, the narrator feels closest to God when he feeds young rats to their parents. A DFTMW notes that in 'A low capital in the crypt of the Basilica Saint Sernin in the most beautiful city of Toulouse is carved to represent a rat gnawing into a globe' (DFMW, 9). Theological sabotage, not nation building via religious iconology, informs Beckett's use of the sacred, Irish illuminated manuscript (Bryden, 2013, 44). 2. Sex, Painting, Text. Fine art images of the naked body are assimilated in these two writers' texts differently. Yeats was aware that nudity by-passed Irish Victorian censorship as Greek classical sculptural cast in Dublin's museums and in DMS art classes in the 1880's, where students were denied life models until their final year, before Orpen later provided these, 'impossible' to find in Dublin but 'brought' from London (Beatrice Glenavy quoted in Upstone, 2005, 27). When Yeats conducted a clandestine affair with Mabel Dickinson, daughter of a Dublin Professor of Theology, in 1908 he encoded sexual desire by writing to her about the effect neo-classical nudes in the Louvre had on him since he had met her (Foster, 1997, 384). Yeats's father may have written highly erotic letters, mentally undressing Rosa Butt - but he painted her heavily clad in black (1900) just as Terence de Veer White claimed Jack Yeats had 'no desire to paint even an academic nude' as a 'masculine Irishman'. WBY's lyric poems, like Pre-Raphaelite painting and those made within his family circle, do not disrobe the female body. George Moore's Paris stay (1873-80) and response to Degas's nudes as 'un frisson nouveau' (1886) - and Degas's conclusion that the Irish writer had 'come over here' to 'learn to draw from the nude' but would 'return to your own country neither fish nor fowl' - suggests a fissure between Irish and French painting milieus after the 1880's as Yeats's and Beckett's texts emerged. Frank, secular, realistic depictions of the nude - by Manet, Toulouse Lautrec, Degas, Bonnard, Matisse and Picasso in Beckett's France - are only minimally present in Irish fine art surveys and mainstream histories of this period by Kennedy (1991), Walker (1997), Barber (2013), Figgis (2014) and Jane Fenlon et al (2016). Sculptural depictions of the female Erin, post-1850, for the Irish or public art market, unlike those for the English or Anglo-Irish market, were fully clad (Carpenter and Murphy, 2015, 442). Orpen's The English Nude (1900) put on her clothes for his Young Ireland: Grace Gifford (c. 1907) (Upstone, 2005, 25 &71). When Yeats's American-Irish sponsor and fine art collector John Quinn, who moved in conservative Irish-American Catholic circles, contended that Joyce's Ulysses was published in a magazine that was a 'sewer' of 'common stench and filth' he was morally squeamish about a Parisian milieu in which Beckett, far more casually, noted for an Irish correspondent, by the 1960's, that the artist Avigdor Arikha was going to his studio to 'croquer [sketch] the nude'(SBL4, 69). Yeats's caution in depicting the naked body in lyric poems or in describing embodied female sexuality in paintings predates the Irish Censorship Act (1929) targeting 'indecency'. A matrix of Victorian self-censorship, Edwardian prudery and Coole good manners, perhaps, largely silence his engagement with nudity in both arts. Yeats's essay on Blake in the Savoy, a magazine which did depict 'the sexualised body', dragged Yeats into complaints to The Daily Chronicle (1896) against W.H. Smith’s booksellers for banning the publication, after mistaking his Blake illustration for an ‘indecent’ picture by Beardsley (CL2, 84 n. 2; 40 n.1 & 719-25). The Wilde trials of that year may have helped shape Yeatsian caution. When Lady Gregory depicted women ‘with their breasts uncovered’ in Cuchulain of Muirthemne, Yeats warned that this was a ‘really serious’ error: ‘you will have quoted against you with some justice the old saying that a nude statue is if you put a stocking on it... become ‘improper’ (CL3, 163-5). Beckett's appreciation of Titian's bare-breasted Magdalene and view, by the 1960's, of Dante's Purgatory as delivering 'moral shit about immodest Florentine women' - Dante's pilgrim notes 'it should be forbidden to the brazen women of Florence to go showing the breasts with the pap' - reflect a different sensibility and era (SBL4, 126-7 & 127, n3). Wylie in Murphy, galvanised by Miss Counihan's 'bust' as 'All centre and no circumference', plies a joke against Catholic, scholastic definitions of God using abstraction (MU, 38); the clichéd Irish impression, in a 1937 Dublin trial, that Beckett was a 'bawd and blasphemer' from Paris' was hardly allayed by his text where the prostitute Celia and Murphy pose naked on a rocking chair and Neary emerges from bed 'more naked than the day I was born' in front of Miss Counihan who emerges from a thicket of painterly references with her 'high buttocks and low breasts' looking 'on for anything' (MU, 5, 86, 119 & 123). Nudity in painting, as affront to Irish censorship and moral squeamishness, are used by Beckett in his novel. Trilogy would go on to graphically depict vaginas, male members, toe-nails and rumps despite - or to spite - the fact that 'they were extraordinarily reserved, in my part of the world, about everything connected with sexual matters' although 'things may have changed since my time' (TRIL, 55). Yeats's introduction to Gregory's bowdlerized text of the play (1902), nearly fifty years previously, is still cautious, given the context in which Hugh Lane acquired John Lavery’s La dame aux Perles (1901), and then Puvis de Chavannes’s bare-breasted La Toilette/A Maid Combing a Woman’s Hair (1878-83) for Dublin's art collection a few years later. Yeats's claim (1909) that he saw 'that the literary element in painting, the moral element in poetry, are the means whereby the two arts are accepted into the social order' depart from his 1890's aestheticism severing paintings/texts symbolizing passionate life from moral content or allegory (CW3, 361-2). Yeats's interpretation of Tintoretto’s Origin of the Milky Way (1580) in London's National Gallery, early in the twentieth century, in which milk spills from Juno's breast to form the Milky Way, notes ‘the great men of the Renaissance looked at the world with eyes like his' and with 'minds... always in exaltation...'; the painting's subject is safely mythological and Yeats also criticized it as 'allegory' (E & I, 279 & 148). Beckett's Murphy, later, ironizes such 'celestial prescriptions' to take Juno's breasts, not stars, literally in a bar scene where porter pours and froths and 'Then the nip, and Tintoretto's Origin of the Milky Way'. Yeats's Greek mythic painting of marmoreal planets are fodder for an Irish marmorean bar cartoon. Beckett's Anne's 'splendid bosom, white and fat and elastic' (Watt, 91) is inconceivable as description of either a fictional character or painting in Yeats's poetry. Yeats's Autobiographies, peppered with Pre-Raphaelite paintings, omits Holman Hunt and his iconic The Awakening Conscience (1853-4), a moral allegory warning against sexual intimacy depicting a young girl rising in alarm from the lap of a piano playing seducer. If texts separate painting from moral purpose early on, a fear of images of female sexuality or impropriety haunt Yeats's avowedly liberal stance. In 1891, Yeats commends Allingham's Irish poem The Music Master (1855); its woodcut illustrations by Rossetti and Millais (CW6, 68) depict the chaste love of Milly and a piano teacher in a text where Arthur Hughes's illustration kept their love at a safe, unconsummated, chaste distance (Allingham, 1855, 104, illus.). In 1904 Dublin lectures, linked with Hugh Lane's Impressionist Exhibition, when Moore hymned Manet's 'genius' in breaking moral boundaries to depict modern women in modern paintings which highlighted dated Irish admiration for the 'meagre thighs of dying saints', Yeats's companion lecture attacked Moore to find these modern works revealed perception (not vision) in ‘too great a respect for outer appearance’ and he was horrified at the appearance of reports that the Abbey's stage-manager and J.M. Synge had girls on their knee on an Abbey Theatre tour (1906). ‘Belfast has no chance of getting anything from him [HL]', Yeats noted (November 1913), having ' refused a painting of a mother & child because they couldn’t see the wedding ring' (CL InteLex #2281). Althea Gyles, who illustrated his 1890's books is pilloried (1936) by recycling a variant of Holman Hunt's image as moral complaint. Gyles has abandoned ‘years of victorious prudery' in 'pouring out tea with his [Leonard Smithers's] arm around her waist’ as she sits on the knee of his former publisher, now an '“erotomaniac”' who perpetrates a ‘lascivious monstrous imagery’ (CW3, 306); Smithers turns up later in prose perspiring and cranking up 'the handle of a hurdy gurdy piano' (CW3, 253). Yeats's 'Down by the Salley Gardens’ skims a folk song; it omits a verse of the song where a girl sits on the singer's knee plied with liquor. Yeats's art student hatred of a Manet-style picture at the Hibernian Academy, probably Manet's ‘Les Bockeuses’ pastel drawing of two 'cocottes with yellow faces' drinking beer in a public cafe, made him ‘miserable for days’ as an image typifying ‘no man I could have wished to be, no woman I could have loved’ (CW3, 92). This is an Irish, conservative "take" (in 1916) on a subject Baudelaire's 'The Painter of Modern Life' (1863) greets with 'joy' in Constantin Guy's Parisian drawings of courtesans in cosmetics, costumes and 'wanton beauty' under a 'sulphur-yellow' light in bars a half-century earlier (Baudelaire, 1986, 9 & 36). Jack Yeats's Irish woman in a pub in A Window in Kinsale (1925) hides her face behind opaque glass and despite W.B.Yeats's simultaneous amplification of a liberal, Protestant pluralist perspective in ‘shaking a sack of wet sand’ (Irish politics) or arguing with the Irish Catholic hierarchy (‘quarrelling with icebergs in warm water’) stops short of using paintings to openly sabotage Irish sexual conservatism (which he shares in significant measure); hence Yeats resorts to pouring some of his frustrations into an anonymous manifesto, To-Morrow (August 1924) (UP2, 483). Exploiting the gap between the state's theocratic, denial of the sexual body and open display of nudity in the National Gallery this manifesto asserts: ‘We are Catholics’ and as heirs to a Papal tradition of commissioning ‘orthodox’ art by Michelangelo, supported by the Vatican, we also support ‘the reconciliation of Galilee and Parnassus’ in depictions combining ‘the lust of the goat, the whole handiwork of God, the horn of his abundance’ (Yeats, cited from a draft in Foster, 2003, 269). Adopting the pose of Catholic, liberal insider, a trenchant critique turns past Papal art collections against an illiberal, Free State censorship of nude bodies which it sponsors in art galleries. The critique is telling - and tellingly anonymous. Yeats's A Vision (1925) uses fine art in a more open attack in an esoteric book which had a limited audience/circulation. Proclaiming Blake an artist ‘begotten in the Sistine chapel’ who presents ‘the human form' in 'vigorous...symbolical representation of the sexual organs’, it redeploys fine art again as critique of Irish theocratic censorship. Whilst Yeats attacked the proposed Irish Censorship Act in The Spectator (September 1928) for suppressing the history of art from Giotto to Titian as 'an art of the body' and dangerous bestowal on the police of the ‘right to seize in a picture-dealer’s shop' paintings deemed 'indecent' by even Etty or Leighton or to 'fine or imprison the exhibitor’, and whilst he recorded police objections to traditional paintings like ‘The Bath of Psyche’, his own textual images of sexuality remained less explicit, exempt from censorship (UP2, 481-2; Yeats cited in Foster, 2003, 375-6). ‘A Stick of Incense’ (1939), in which Christ's phallic finger pleasures Mary in the guise of a stick of incense, arrives late (VP, 619) to intersect with Beckett’s sacrilegious conversion of Perugino’s Pietà in Dublin’s National Gallery into ‘a lovely cheery Xist [Christ] full of sperm & the woman touching his thighs and mourning his jewels’ in 1936 (SBL1, 358 & SBL2, 375). Yeats's portraiture of the nude cannily accommodates Ireland. A lyric poetry displaces realism and female nudity to call up Greek sculpture (largely male) or to implicitly reference clothed, Pre-Raphaelite female models who sublimate sexuality or eroticism as religious ecstasy. Oliver Sheppard's GPO Cuchulain, Celtic Revival style sculpture, sponsored by de Valera as commemoration, has its 'face' and 'lineaments' noted by Yeats and heroically survives to buttress the state; it is disrobed in Murphy in its unheroic, naked, buttocks just as religious pretext in Perugino's painting is revealed as hiding its real motive and content as the body and sex. Irish representations of nudity (in drawings by women in Yeats's contemporary circle, like Constance Markievicz, or in Irish paintings by Orpen) are virtually textually absent in Yeats. Lyrics and prose, like Dante Gabriel Rossetti's paintings, hymn an idealised female beauty, prior to the disruptive, immodest ‘Crazy Jane’ sequence embodying an old man's 'lust and rage' and transferring this to an androgynous female body. Just as the clearly focused sculptural nudity in the foreground of Sean Keating’s Reflection in a Mirror (c.1906), when it threatens to take actual warm, human form in flesh in a mirror becomes blurred, so Yeats tends to withdraw from the flesh in lyric poems. In his ‘Crazy Jane’ sequence she does confront the bishop (1933) with the existence of her sexual body four years after the Irish the Censorship Act (1929), in a sequence Beckett admired and learned by heart, and its images, share affinities with his scatology or Courbet's explicit painting of female genitalia in L'origin du Monde (1866); the poem makes Swiftian claims that 'Fair and foul are near of kin' when 'Love has pitched his mansion in /the place of excrement'(VP, 513). Irish censorship had kept 'fair' from 'foul' representations but Beckett's private noting that Yeats's play The Resurrection was 'what Yeats, greatly daring, can compose in the way of blasphemy', in a 1934 essay attacking 'senators' seeking to make this legislation 'orduretight', is hardly complimentary to Yeats's defence of the arts or the fine arts of the body. Beckett's painting in Watt of a naked piano player who requires stave paper to hide his manhood like a fig leaf is a satire of censorship and images such as Holman Hunt's (Watt, 43-6). Mary, in the novel, with her protuberant 'abdomen' eats so much that the disgusted narrator vows he 'shall arise, no, I am not seated, and then I shall go' but sits on Mrs Gorman's knee to desecrate the Pieta, to ironize Yeats's escape to Innisfree (of which Beckett had a recording). Here 'from time to time, hosting his weary head' he kisses 'Mrs Gorman on or about the mouth, before crumpling back into his post-crucified position' as the lovers shift their weight so as not to sully 'a flower so fair, so rare, so sweet, so frail' (Watt, 120-1). Sacred painterly iconography, denying real sexuality, and Yeats's poem are twin targets. Beckett, unlike Yeats, directly suffered from the Irish Censorship Act (1929), prohibiting some 1,200 books (1930-37) on pornographic grounds and banning literature promoting contraception. Whilst censorship was a European phenomenon, its especial Irish focus (in the 1920's and 1930's) on prescribing the 'indecency' of the sexual body as visual or textual threat to national or Catholic purity - unlike French censorship, historically directed against politically seditious literature and drawing, or laxer English censorship that saw some 70% of books banned in Ireland reviewed in The Times and marketed as 'banned in Ireland' - produced contextual responses to fine art and the naked body inflected differently in the two writers' texts.The ageing Yeats's The Herne's Egg visualizes copulation between Attracta and the heron god in a mix of graphically explicit detail of animal copulation and ejaculation ('I shoot into my joy') via a type of distancing, mythological filter implicating past fine art, such as that by Gustav Moreau which handled such subjects in 'Leda and The Swan'. This canny compound of testing boundaries and temporizing compliance in de Valera's Ireland, where 'painting and sculpture' were seen as 'likely to corrupt faith and morals', meant Yeats was quietly relieved when the Abbey Theatre dropped the play for performance. In Beckett's Murphy, in the Pieta-type sex scene, the 'phrase is chosen with care, lest the filthy censors should lack an occasion to commit their filthy synecdoche' as Miss Counihan places herself on Wylie's knee; the text notes this is not 'set in Wynn's Hotel lest an action for libel should lie' (MU, 69). When the Abbey Theatre's State subsidy brought with it a government appointed director-cum-censor Richard Hayes (1934), the script of Cormac O'Daly's play The Silver Jubilee depicting an unmarried Mary impregnated by a member of the Catholic Young Men's Association was compliantly cut to remove potentially offensive references to the immaculate conception - a context against which Beckett's London-published novel rails in its use of fine art. Beckett's L'expulsé (France, 1947) notes, with a backward glance at Ireland, that the 'kiss is in its last throes in the bedroom and the steam room...soon artificial insemination will replace the sweet exploits of coition, blowjobs and cuddles will only exist in the music of Chopin'. Religious paintings and pianos play different roles or tunes in both writers' work. Yeats's first ekphrastic poems, caption a Victorian illustration In Church, reproduced in The Girl’s Own Paper (1889), depicting a lady and two charming daughters in bonnets to suggest there is a ‘prayer for every falling tear, / In the holy church of God’ (VP, 735-6). Yeats's contention that modern, Impressionist paintings shown in Dublin (1904) are surpassed by ‘the greatest art [which] symbolises not those things we have observed so much as those things that we have experienced' aligns with his suggestion that 'the imaginary saint or lover moves us most deeply... when he awakens within us for an instant our own heroism, our own sanctity, our own desire’ (EXP, 196). If this is modified by the later poetry's 'desecration and the lover's night' (1934), female beauty in Yeats is often idealised and dressed so he notes ‘Rossetti went to early Italian painting, to Holy Families and choirs of angels, that he might learn how to express an emotion that had its roots in sexual desire and in the delight of his generation in fine clothes and in beautiful rooms’ (EXP, 211). This iconology of female sanctity, suffused with religious uplift and delight in many mansions' 'beautiful rooms', has a symbolic, religious-political function in Ireland, which Yeats adapts to suggest Irish religion, needs but little modification, via fine art/text, to accommodate such complimentary desires or liberal urges. If Manet's Olympia (1863) laid down a marker as modernist painting, privileging form over content, its blatant nudity if not 'nakedness' as content stirs residual, Irish, male sexual anxiety in Yeats's response to it. Beckett criticized Manet's 'snapshot puerilities' and realism to praise Cezanne's 'dynamic' landscapes (SBL1, 223), but Yeats's objection to Manet in general, and Olympia in particular, is based on the painting's explicit or ugly content - it was attacked by some French contemporaries as depicting sub-human monkeys - and its disruption of his symbolist, semi-religious aesthetic in its language. Viewing Olympia in a Paris gallery in 1906 Yeats noted: I saw the Olympia of Manet at the Luxembourg and watched it without hostility indeed, but as I might some incomparable talker whose precision of gesture gave me pleasure, though I did not understand his language. I returned to it again and again at intervals of years, saying to myself, “Some day I will understand”; and yet it was not until Sir Hugh Lane brought the Eva Gonzales to Dublin, and I had said to myself, “How perfectly that woman is realised as distinct from all other women that have lived or shall live,” that I understood I was carrying on in my own mind [the] quarrel between a tragedian and a comedian. Yeats does not 'look' at, but 'watches', Olympia. His verb ('watch') connotes exercising 'caution' (she or the painter may talk in a foreign 'language) and remaining alert to religious observance (watch night) or law breaking (night watch). Yeats finds Manet's painterly aesthetic, where realism and comedy, inferior genres, belittle ideal beauty and tragedy as superior Renaissance - and by extension - more serious Irish values; the painting proves 'hostile' to such traditional aesthetics, tinged with traditional moral/sexual values. Manet's remodelling of Titian's Venus of Urbino (1538), as prostitute and variant of Beckett's Titian's bare breasted Magdalene on this site which Yeats's Irish poetry claims is exemplary of Italian arts' patronage, is read by Yeats as a form of cynicism. The painting falls short of imaging the body as religious aspiration, aesthetic ideal or national ideology which a text might conscript. In 1935 Yeats contrasted Coole's Old Masters with Tulira Castle's collection of ‘Degas, Monet, Corot, Utamaro’ and copies of Saint Chrysostom and ‘monk-like bedrooms’ which make ‘abstinence easy by making life hateful’ (CW3, 290). Non-idealised nudes in Degas reveal, for Yeats, ‘the strongly marked shoulder-blades of a dancing-girl, robbing her of voluptuous charm’ to suggest ‘cynicism is the only sublimity’ in paintings whose ‘almost abstract pattern' create 'beautiful women...[which] do not stir our Western senses’ (CW3, 290). Painted, clad, ideal bodily beauty is a route to desired spirituality, to unity. Beckett's precise female anatomy in MPTK, 'flesh and bones' in a backless gown call to 'the eye of mind' (a recycling of Yeats's phrase) the Alba's bare shoulder blades 'well-defined,...[in] a fine free ball-and-socket notion', so Belacqua hopes their 'cross-potent...a bird crucified on a wall' will be covered in ecclesiastical scarlet to help him suppress desire and comply with mock self-censorship (MPTK,48). Beckett is comically exposing the gap between expressed puritanical desire to cloth the female body and the wish to see it revealed. More socially secure by the 1930's, Yeats re-runs an account of an earlier clash between cosmopolitan George Moore (aware of contemporary French painting) and a Galway priest (‘supposed to know about Greek art’) who hymns ‘Greek purity’ in covering the female form while leaving ‘the male form uncovered’ - to which Moore pertinently asks if the priest considers that ‘the female form is inherently more indecent than the male?’. Moore mounts, but Yeats retrospectively recollects the challenge to the clergy and their impositions on Irish painterly/textual mores. Yeats's lyrics tend to imply that idealised woman in paint (tragic or religious) is a symbol worthy of passion, not the "real" female as painted, Impressionist modern product of ugly realism and moral inferiority. Idealism and beauty generate desire. A Vision notes that if ‘God...[is] conceived of as something outside man and man’s handiwork' then it becomes 'idolatry to worship that which Phidias and Scopas made’ (CW13, 154); fine art and lyric poem as devotion to women/nation offer potentially tragic and heroic allegiance. In one poem the lover (modelled on Olivia Shakespear) who 'looked in my heart one day/And saw your image was there’ (i.e. that of Maude Gonne/Ireland) leaves 'weeping'; in the prose Custa Ben Luka abandons his lover to search for an imaginary ideal mistress in Persian painting but loses his real lover. (VP, 152) Such cautionary tales of a vacillating pursuit of ideals or false idols - women or nations who may let one down - is not as far removed from Holman Hunt's morality painting as Yeats's early aesthetic statements suggest. Holman Hunt is not a painter to whom Beckett refers but his 1960's view of Dante's Purgatory as delivering 'moral shit about immodest Florentine women' hardly suggests much sympathy for a type of idealised or Pre-Raphaelite painting which only reveals Belacqua's puritanical, iconophobic desire to cover up female nudity he really wishes to see revealed. 3. Politics, Painting, Text. Thomas Davis's ‘Hints from Irish Historical Painting’ (1841) proposed Irish nation building enlist painting because ‘art is biography, history and topography, taught through the eye’ before his essay in The Nation (1843) tempered this ambition to note, 'We have Irish artists, but no Irish, no national art'. Yeats shares Davis's ambition but when he compiled a “top thirty” list of Irish books for Dublin’s Daily Express (1895) "Irish Painting" was absent. Less oversight, than lack of "national" painting category, outside of newspapers, Yeats's list reinforces the absence or unavailability, in his own library, of pre-twentieth century texts on Irish painting. Yeats's letters, essays and senate speeches seek to align the terms 'Irish' and 'painting' or 'art', even to coin the idea of 'Irish painting' but the poetry draws on Greek, Egyptian, Italian, English nineteenth century art or Mesopotamian sand drawings - not "Irish painting" - with the exception of the Black Centaur (partly inspired by Cecil Salkeld); the late "Municipal Gallery" poem leans heavily and questionable on conscripting Lavery (Belfast born and associated with the Glasgow school) as Irish painter amongst more readily available models in the new state and its galleries in the 1930's. If the founding of new, nineteenth century Irish art institutions as colonial-native "hybrids"- the Royal Irish Academy or Royal Hibernian Academy (1823) - or "purists" - the Irish Fine Art Society (1886) or Dublin Sketching Club (1886) - reflect fusions of colonialism and a quickened nationalist impulse, this also permeates Yeats's poem. The poem praises gallery founder and patron Hugh Lane, London art dealer, as 'onlie begetter' of all 'these' paintings, and Lady Gregory's Coole as art repository is the place where 'No fox can foul the badger's layer'; it borrows Shakespeare's and Spencer's Elizabethan colonial phrases to implicate Irish painting in its Anglo-Irish, historical legacies, even as it promulgates a recognisable "Irish" category or destiny for a text describing fine art. This separatist category, "Irish painting", however, owes much to Yeats's Literary Revival as by-product. Yeats's associate Edward Martyn produced Art in Ireland (1902). Editing Samhain (1901-8), Yeats not only promoted Irish theatre as textual product - but as product of actors and directors in Robert Gregory's drawings of Sarah Allgood and his father's reproduced painting of Alice Horniman, a form of advert that sat alongside one for "Kennedy's Bread" from Dublin and an Irish exhibition of Sketches of the West of Ireland by Jack Yeats (Samhain, October 1901). When Yeats's friend, the art collector and venture capitalist Hugh Lane, mounted the first Exhibition of Works by Irish Painters (1904) in London's Guildhall Art Gallery (1904), to promote and define "Irish painting", his exhibition catalogue borrowed Literary Revival rhetoric and Yeats's "sister arts" thinking: ‘There is something of common race instinct in the work of all original Irish writers of to-day and, it can hardly be absent in their sister art’ the catalogue asserts. The Scottish Art Journal (1888), just after Yeats left art school in Dublin, though, was dubious: it stated that 'art conditions in Ireland are at a low ebb'. The Art Journal (1904), pointed out that Lane's exhibition of Irish painting by John Butler Yeats and William Orpen, included French Impressionists and Glasgow school painters, Lavery, Henry and Roche which only demonstrated 'that there is today no Irish school of pictorial art, no national movement'. The "Irish" exhibition, though, was a literal coup d'etat for the rubric of Irish art as separate national category and it attracted 73,000 people, including W.B. Yeats. The fact that Yeats became a player within the Irish literary, fine arts and political scene in shaping these junctures in the first three decades of the twentieth century, while Beckett as outsider migrated in and out of Ireland from the 1920's as one of a Protestant diaspora, impacted on their use of fine art and its juncture with nationalism(s). If WBY hoped painting would produce an 'Irish school of painting' akin to the writers of the Literary Revival (as William Rothenstein contended), the proposition, potentially courting a reductive, Thomas Davis type of propaganda advertising 'Irishry' and shorn of all aesthetics, was tempered by suggestions that painting, as a far more ideal form of super-politics, like poetry, might follow Blake's adage that 'Empire follows Art & Not Vice Versa as Englishmen suppose'. On the opening of the Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery (1908) Yeats tried to pack it with Lane supporters to demonstrate to the Dublin Corporation that it could be left free of their influence and prevent its control by 'a bad patriotic painter'. Yeats was not exempt from Beckett's anti-nationalist claustrophobia - a 1906 outburst claims he would ‘be found some morning knocking loudly on the door of the Richmond Asylum asking, What is Nationality? What is a Nationalist? And do two Nationalists make one Nationality? It’s the straight road to lunacy trying to talk to these people’ (CL InteLex #1169) - but the Hugh Lane campaign afforded opportunities for national rhetoric which he toned up, and Beckett toned down in supporting Jack B. Yeats as a European modernist even as he dismissed Irish painting as product or general category. The Hugh Lane campaign for a modern Irish gallery throws these cleavages between the writers' engagements with painting as "Irish" or national into relief. Beckett's idea of painting's fundamental claims as irrational statements of being, not as Irish national 'property', is revealed in correspondence and notebooks. Yeats sometimes played the Irish national card and his letters suggest economic self-interest, indebtedness and loyalty to friends, public display of patriotic credentials and a desire to be seen acting as a mover and shaker in influential art/political circles were implicated in a complex mix of motives. When the Irish Big House and its fine art tradition, which nurtured Hugh Lane and Yeats and which feature in his poems, are reconfigured as the anonymous Big House of Knott with its paintings in Beckett's 1940's Watt, the paintings in Beckett's house hold no "nationally" secure meaning. The house is surrounded with wartime, barbed wire; two dwarfs Con and Art - 'Black Velvet Connery, product of the great Chinnery-Slattery tradition', aka the Irish painter James Arthur O'Connery who painted romantic landscapes - control famished dogs, those animals which feature strongly in Beckett's Dutch art but which defile Yeats's 'beautiful lofty things' in one of his earlier poems. Yeats's 'Municipal Gallery Revisited' seeks new civic gallery and old Big House as centres that will 'hold' for the Irish nation, even as it posits that poetry has invented this nascent state as a subject for paintings whose mythic portraits it now re-enlists for its foundational national myth. W.B. Yeats's long term commitment to an Irish painting campaign to found a modern, civic, art collection and municipal art gallery in Dublin saw him, as he put it in 1926, 'Hugh Laneing in some form or another' across four decades (CL InteLex #4933). He supported raising subscriptions to augment the collection for the gallery's opening (1908); after Lane's death (1915), when the London National Gallery and Dublin disputed legal ownership of the paintings, he lobbied the arts-cum-political establishments of both nations, repeatedly writing newspaper articles to promote Irish ownership of the paintings; he ghost wrote a pamphlet for Lady Gregory - Sir Hugh Lane’s French Pictures (1917). 'The Municipal Gallery Revisited' (1937) is a coda of commitment to an Irish painting cause. A Dublin City Council leaflet, ‘William Butler Yeats and the Dublin City Gallery’ (2015), claims the poet, 'wholeheartedly committed' to 'Hugh Lane and the campaign for a Modern Art Gallery', expressed this by writing 'at least six poems' over thirty years. Commitment to Lane’s cause is indisputable. The poems, however, from ‘The Gift/ To A Wealthy Man who promised a Second Subscription to the Dublin Municipal Gallery if it were proved the people wanted Pictures’ (1913) to ‘The Municipal Gallery Revisited’ (1937) are long on Irish art rhetoric and short on the modern European painting's content. Only in the latter poem, in ?amon de Valera's era with the gallery opened in secure premises, does Yeats deal exclusively with modern Irish paintings' content. The poems promote supporters of the gallery campaign (Lane and Gregory), denounce Dublin apathy (as a ‘blind and ignorant town’) and attack the indifference of potential leading sponsors (Lord Ardilaun). The content and style of the thirty nine modern French paintings at the core of the dispute go missing; Irish cultural, national politics and paintings take their place. Yeats's Hugh Lane poetry rhymes ‘draw’ with ‘law’ to suggest English claims to the paintings based on legality are weaker than Ireland's legal and moral right to them as patriotic act. Yeats's Lane campaign reveals commitment to Irish display and ownership of paintings, not to modern European painting per se. True, Yeats pushed for displaying contemporary art in Dublin's Daily Express (1898) claiming ‘Our National Gallery...can never compensate the student for the absence of good contemporary pictures', from which students might learn to express certain emotions 'peculiar' to their own era (CL2, 269-271), a critique echoed by George Russell in Dublin's Daily Express (September 1898) where Dublin fails to educate 'students and public alike’ via metropolitan galleries like those in England. Dublin sponsored painterly modernity, though, may be deceptive. The loan exhibition was defended by George Russell as poetic paintings of 'reveries of the soul' which augment 'spiritual characteristics peculiar to the Celtic imagination' to produce a national art' (GR cited in Marta Herrero, 2007, 40.). John Hughes, attending a meeting in Walter Osborne's studio (1901) noted, for Sarah Purser, that Russell had 'spoken eloquently on Nationality in Art (you agree with him)' even as Hughes thought this 'National Distinctiveness in Art' was 'all imagination' (Hughes, January 1902, cited in John O'Grady, 1996, 94-95) and Russell later attacked Manie Jellett's Cubist exhibition, despite their traditional subject matter, in depictions of the Madonna, as 'aesthetic bacteria' by a 'late victim to Cubism in some sub-section of this artistic malaria'. As early as 1915 painters in Beckett's Paris circle, such as Henri Hayden were 'absorbing' Cubism, Picasso and Braque for still lifes in what the painter termed 'a spirit of creative synthesis'. Personal debts and national kudus, more than modern, painterly aesthetics, are embroiled in Yeats's gallery campaign. The Dublin exhibition of Nathaniel Hone and J.B. Yeats, organised by Sarah Purser in the Royal Society of Antiquaries (1901), produced commissions for John Butler from Hugh Lane, for portraits of notable Irish figures for his collection/a proposed National Portrait Gallery - ‘a great piece of luck for our father’ as Yeats put it (CL3, 564-565) and 'the seeds of an Irish genuine art' according to Edward Martyn; Lady Gregory, WBY's sponsor, related to Lane, collected Yeats's father's art. Given Yeats’s student dislike of Manet-inspired realism, which still only yields an ‘incomplete pleasure’ in the 1930's compared with ‘the vivid colour and light of Rousseau and Courbet’ (OBMV in CW5, 191) - Lane’s purchase (1906) of the painter’s Eva Gonzalès (1870) is unlikely to have enthralled him. Given Yeats 'spits' at Degas’s dancers, Lane’s acquisition (1912) of his Bains de Mer (c. 1868-77) hardly inspired him either. Public, Irish patriotic platforms and significant journalistic and political contacts in the art world, more than modern paintings, appear in the poet's letters to suggest sufficient motivation for this Irish art campaign. By 1928, Lady Gregory had de Valera committed to the gallery as an expression in 'architecture and in its content' of 'that love for the arts which has ever been a characteristic of the Gael’ (De Valera cited in Foster, 2003, 302). As approval of Irish (owned) art became virtually identical with, or identified with, love of Ireland, politician and poet also came close to sharing this platform in this fine art campaign. As Foster notes Yeats had expressed ambitions to become an Irish Minister for the Fine Arts.Yeats's and Beckett's views of paintings as national property reveal polarities. Yeats's linkage of fine art with Irish nation (in speeches, articles and letters) and the absence, or periodic negation of the link in Beckett's letters and essays which denies this narrative purchase, produces an asymmetry in any comparative account. As the Anglo-phobic political climate of the new Irish state sharpened a politics in which Irish painting or Irish owned painting became a national litmus test, Yeats, in his public role as senator, found playing to a national gallery hard to resist. In senatorial speeches, Yeats insists that if a proposed British Empire Exhibition (1924) takes place, Irish painters, if included, exhibit in a separate room, not as ‘British artists’ (SS, 59-60), just as Thomas MacGreevy's suggested young Irish artists 'learn to tear away the layers of English humbug that lie between us and clear artistic vision' (1923-4) and that the National Gallery even remove some colonially tainted English painters to replace them with Irish paintings by James Barry and George Barrett. Father Senan Moynihan, a Jack Yeats supporter, noted the painter was 'a great artist (even though he was a Protestant)'. Deep currents of national, 'even' sectarian, opinions surely pressured WBY (as marginal Irish Protestant and insider or public servant) to conscript paintings for Ireland as nation even as the younger Beckett migrated from Trinity into France, London, and a nomadic, unemployed existence in Germany, and then France. Tate Gallery expansion into a new wing (1925), as the Irish government moved towards restoring Charlemont House (1928) as rival home for Lane’s bequest, afforded an opportunity for Senator Yeats to link painting and nation. Having estimating that this ‘most important collection of French pictures outside Luxembourg’ had a monetary value, put at ‘?75,000’ (c. 1911) and tourist-cum-cultural value as a ‘unique possession’, Yeats linked this ‘property’, now 'worth some ?2,000,000', with the ‘possession of the implements of national culture’ (SS, 46-49 & 118-23); he exposed ‘the Forty Thieves... [who]... say they had a right to their treasure because they had been to the trouble of digging a cavern to contain it’ as English robbers of Irish-owned art. Given Beckett's stress on paintings' personal, non-monetary, non-national value - his attempt to borrow ?30 for Jack Yeats's painting A Morning as 'coveted' is exceptional (SBL1, 303-4 & 315, n. 6) and pursuit, via Jack Yeats's sponsorship, of the post of assistant at the National Gallery in London, as Dublin's Municipal Gallery opened (1933) - the writers' different "takes" on paintings as national or personal assets is striking. Beckett's 'What a Misfortune' in MPTK (1934) notes guests absconding a Dublin wedding seek refuge in the newly opened Municipal Gallery to reach 'Capella Lane, superb cenotheca, in Charlemont House. Nobody would ever think of looking for them there'. In this scene, the aesthete, Belacqua, with his 'veronica' (true icon) has simply 'gone west' (MPTK, 140). If W.B. Yeats's art criticism complicates Daniel Corkery's 'holy trinity of religion, nationalism and land', which underpinned MacGreevy's belief 'in companionship, in patriotism, in religion, which is to say in love from its simplest to its most exalted forms', Beckett weakens painting's links with kin, land and religion to circumvent such national claims. After Yeats's visit to Stockholm's National Museum Gallery (1923), he commended nineteenth century Scandinavian Romantics and Swedish Impressionists for their 'intellectual awakening' of unified attachment to their land; Swedish Impression with its 'far stronger feeling for particular places' is favoured over French Impressionism and Monet's 'scientific studies' in Poplars (1891) whose subject is just 'light'. Yeats praised nineteenth century European Symbolist painters of transcendent worlds from Blake to Puvis de Chavannes but ignored modern Symbolists like Edvard Munch whose paintings and prints were well represented there and in private Stockholm collections (CW3, 403-4). When Beckett visited German Halle to view paintings by Munch, or Hamburg to view the painter's ‘exquisite’ Three Women Standing on a Bridge (c. 1900) in the 1930's he did so before the word 'scream' became a personal cry found echoed in fine art (GD, 22 November 1936) and his drama. As Yeats moved towards writing the 'Municipal Gallery Revisited' as a paean to Irish painting, in assisting poetry with images of the nation, Beckett was expressing disdain in letters for the Irish National Gallery's 'lavatory green print room', bad lighting and poor displays compounded by its director George Furlong (1937) (SBL1, 496). Beckett was attacking Irish displays of painting from a non-national or multi-national European perspective; Yeats was using the monetary and national value of Lane's paintings to link this with demands for Irish ownership or to suggest painters had supplied poets with a national image they had already created.In 'The Municipal Gallery Revisited', Yeats's politics of painting require poetry/text to liberate Irish owned paintings' latent political potential. The poem's two central claims, that this is 'an Ireland /The poets have imagined' (which the painters have made or illustrated) and that the poet's 'glory was I had such friends', erase the painters' signatures, names and qualifications inscribed on plaques in the actual paintings's gilt frames; it replaces this with the poetry's claim to own and consecrate the secular and religious power of these paintings as symbolic, national capital. As Pierre Bourdieu notes: 'For the author, the critic, the art dealer, the publisher, the only legitimate accumulation consists in making a name for oneself, a known, recognized name, a capital of consecration implying a power to consecrate objects (with a trademark or signature) or persons (through publication, exhibition, etc.) and therefore to give value, and to appropriate the profits from this operation' (Bourdieu, 1993, 75). The poem has this personal and national economy in its sights. Beckett shied away from Bourdieu's view of paintings/texts as personal or national cultural capital. His Proust (1931) approves of an art of solitude, uses a pictorial language to equate friendship with 'face values', and concern with surface 'personality' and a 'rejection of friendship' as artistic 'necessity' (PTD, 63-4); he read Giorgioni's Self-Portrait (c.1510) in a 1936 letter as admirable, non-public, reticence excavated in paintings where 'all its unsaid must be his' (Beckett cited in Nixon, 2011, 144). Yeats's poem insists on integrating the Anglo-Irish nobility in portraiture in the old ‘Venetian way’ as historically relevant in the new Irish state. A lexicon of ‘nobility’ and portraiture come close. ‘Augusta Gregory’, subject of one portrait, has her Latinate name repeated three times until, descended from Imperial Rome, she sits ‘augustly’ alongside Lady Lavery, as writer and painter (VP, 602). These are portraits by and of Yeats’s Irish writer-friends who rub shoulders with important Irish statesmen - not Mancini’s, not Lavery’s, not portraits by painters as objects. The portraits 'titles' are catalogued and allocated by the poem. And the poem's portraits ask the reader to equate noble physiognomy and noble history - ‘Ireland’s history in their lineaments trace’ - as reflected ‘glory’. When John Hewitt later turned to the more dispossessed Irish face, and its 'veins' like those of 'pebble' which 'encapsulate' fissures left by 'disastrous' tides of 'history' (Hewitt, 1991, 205), his picturing of 'any' Irish face registering tides of migration appears - much as Beckett's own geologically fissured face would in later photographs. Maude Gonne’s daughter, Iseult, shrewdly pointed out Senator Yeats ‘had this love of titles’ and kin connections, and as the poet, who once received a book of drawings, readily admitted to a fellow artist Robert Gregory (1909), he was simply capable of forgetting the artist's name (CL InteLex #1091). When Sean Keating, a teacher at the DMS, noted the literary revival had not lifted the boats of Irish painting to conclude a Frenchman might learn 'the story of his country through his eyes' but an Irish person could not even 'name six Irish artists... unless he was a highbrow or a dealer' in a country with 'an inferiority complex', he was simply voicing a view that, in terms of Irish nationalism, Yeats and literature had not so much created, as pre-empted or stolen, painting's clothes. In using painting as politics to build a nascent state, the 'Municipal Gallery Revisited' echoes an agenda expressed as the ‘daily making to ourselves [of] a contemporary history... [in which we] act heroically, suffer manfully, and do those deeds which, in pictures and by poems, deserve to be recorded'. The poem's hinterland, economically shaped via aristocratic or Irish-American support for Irish art and by the poet's own peculiar mix of art's patronage as benevolent Fascist leadership and reconciliatory Anglo-Irish politics of pluralism, largely disappears. If Yeats had been instrumental in selling Irish portraits to the American collector John Quinn (in the early 1900's), followed by poetry manuscripts, the national return came, when Quinn's collection of Yeats's father’s portraits of O’Leary, the poet, and Douglas Hyde, were bought by philanthropic Irish-Americans after his death and returned to Ireland's National Gallery (1925) where served as a Board member. When WBY was personally and financially honoured at an Irish Academy Dinner, attended by Irish-American benefactors who awarded him some $6000 (1937), it was here, 'overwhelmed by emotion' at having visited the Municipal Gallery, that his speech, printed as pamphlet for these American subscribers, announced his intention to write the poem about 'pictures painted by men, now dead, who were once my friends' (Yeats cited in Foster, 2003, 596-7). The poem's paintings, 'pilgrims at the waterside' and 'revolutionary soldier kneeling to be blessed' or 'Abbott or Archbishop with an upraised hand /Blessing the Tricolour', alongside Michael Collins, Casement and Griffiths legitimise, in painterly set pieces, Irish heroes, theocratic state, gallery, art collector, collection and writer as one culturally rich bundle of national capital. The poet's speech/pamphlet, more fulsomely acknowledges painters' national purpose to suggest 'Ireland [is] seen because of the magnificent vitality of her painters, in the glory of her passions' - before being re-seen in the 'pictured song' of the poem.The poem thereby confers authority on paintings as sacred icons in a 'hallowed place' and on their subjects as political icons in civic space. Painting's authority ultimately lies within the poem; it assigns painting its value in building Irish myth and history and reframes nation. The economic cost of the paintings acquired by Hugh Lane, their potential use as state critique and personal Irish-American subvention disappear; the poem moves from spectatorship/indebtedness to ownership of the means of production. If the poem permits individual paintings to be archived as "Irish art" and confers kudos on the collector/gallery, it also redistributes authority to itself; it re-classifies and reconstructs the paintings into an Irish national narrative. The gallery as 'hallowed place' comes close - as in Dublin phonetics - to 'hollow' place. This idealised Ireland and 'the making of ourselves' for others' consumption - principally, perhaps, those inhabitants of the Waldorf Astoria whom Jack B. Yeats, on his only American visit (1904), criticised as 'the all too rich...in gowns sugared over with diamonds' and satirically sketched in his 'Rubber Neck Parade' - reveal WBY's desire to use paintings to integrate, even ingratiate, himself within a circle of American art benefactors and politicians in the Irish state whose aims were congruent. Yeats's speech for the Americans noting he has been 'restored' by the paintings to his Irish 'fellow workers' shuttles from fine art metaphor into one where he personally contributes to the production of Irish 'capital': he is 'restored' and art 'workers' replenish his 'store'. Personal and national aggrandizement permit the poem to peddle a version of a unitary, Irish national history in which Yeats's antennae for the abuse of painting by national politics and poetry is turned off. Compare Louis MacNeice's Autumn Journal's (1939) sceptical unpacking and dismantling of this juncture as Irish politics and sectarian bunting overtake Yeats's 'ambush' by images from painting: 'Scholars and saints my eye, the land of ambush,/Purblind manifestos', MacNeice writes, as past heroic, national portraits - the triumvirate in Yeats's poem - become defunct consolations to be deconstructed: 'Griffith, Connolly, Collins, where have they brought us?' MacNeice, with hindsight, asks. Likewise, in the European context - in Spain where 'peeling posters from the last elections' amidst 'ruin' leave a 'haunted' population circling the Prado while inside 'half/-wit princes looked from the canvas they paid for' - Goya's 'laugh' points to political corruption, not nation-building (MacNeice, 2007, 112-50). Beckett, in June 1939, also noted he would like to see the Prado's paintings, removed to Geneva for safe-keeping during the war; but he supposes Franco will now be 'howling' to have them back 'along with the rest' to augment national treasure (SBL1, 660). Yeats's Irish gallery archive is fitted out for absorption in the literary canon and re-framed as integral to a national narrative; thereby, the poem closes off other readings so this archive does not deprive 'us of our continuities' or dissipate 'temporal identity in which we are pleased to look at ourselves when we wish to exorcise the discontinuities of history' or to break 'the thread of transcendental teleologies' as Foucault puts it. Beckett assumes this thread linking painting with transcendence, and any national transcendence, has been broken in 1930's Europe.Painting, then, is national history and biography writ large in Yeats's poem. Paintings' are selected to demonstrate how a Literary Revival produces national images which paintings illustrate. Paintings' provenance is constructed, interpreted and conserved to exclude artworks, non-conformable to this narrative and to prevent other subjective, possible interpretations. Pro-Treaty paintings lionising the founders of the new Irish state and Yeats's friends are central. The poem's personal pronoun - a pronoun much distrusted by Beckett - has all the "possessiveness" of showmanship appropriate for dealing with non-Cubist paintings from a singular perspective; it cuts Modernist multiple narratives down to size. Lavery's iconic painting, Love of Ireland (1922), ushers the assassinated leader Michael Collins into the state's afterlife - he was described by the painter at his lying-in-state as like ‘Napoleon in marble as he lay in his uniform... the lips appearing to move at times' (Lavery cited in McConkey, 1993, 159). Collins supplants his ex-colleague and diehard Republican Harry Boland, whose funeral Jack Butler Yeats’s commemorated (The Funeral of Harry Boland, 1922) in the same year from a perspective within a mourning crowd (Barber, 2013, 49). As beneficiary of the Anglo-Irish Treaty (1922), W.B. Yeats includes the portrait of hard-line opponent, and executioner of anti-treaty Republicans, Kevin O'Higgins in the pantheon with little scruple. The ‘ambush' by 'images of thirty years’ may allude to Sean Keating, art teacher at Yeats's DMS (1919-27), but his machismo Republican paintings, like Men of the West, stage an essentialist, heroic, Irishness, conformable to an iconology of a new state whose bank-notes gave currency to a female equivalent in Lady Lavery (1927) as Kathleen ní Houlihan dressed as Irish colleen. ‘Living and dying’ in her husband's portrait she gains currency and added cachet in the poem. As supplier of five or six portraits, of some twelve to thirteen alluded to, John Lavery as quintessential Anglo-Irish, pro-Treaty portrait painter, enables Yeats's Irish project. Later, John Hewitt's 'The Municipal Gallery Revisited, October 1954' subjected this political portraiture to a sceptical Beckettian temporal reading, so its 'one triumphant hour' in the limelight crumbles under 'immense' and 'creeping haircracks of indifference' (Hewitt, 2007, 47-48). Time is already rewriting painting's pretensions to preserve Irish national or political icons. If Jack B. Yeats's 1920's paintings depict Irish historical events from the Republican perspectives of those viewing Boland's funeral or Republican prisoners, Beckett conversely suppresses these paintings' Irish claims, voiced by MacGreevy, to focus on later expressionist, less representational paintings. The Jack Yeats, amidst political pressures of 1922, who linked painting with national symbols - 'when painting takes its rightful place, it [ie. Ireland] will be a free nation...the roots of art must be the country of the artist, and no man can have two countries', is not the Jack Yeats of 1929, who claims a 'painting is not a vehicle for anything but itself'. It is this latter Jack Yeats whom Beckett conscripts in texts. Just as painting permits WBY, as Protestant Irishman to display insider Irish credentials, at a premium in the 1920's, Jack Yeats's post-1930's painting permit Beckett to claim, on aesthetic grounds, a European painter who may be relocated to an offshore account. In the 1930's as Yeats hailed Sir Hugh Lane as creator or curator of Dublin's Municipal Gallery, Beckett was noting the way European galleries' poor curatorship, display, restoration, hanging, lighting and bureaucratic care for paintings were often little better than in Ireland. W.B.Yeats's 'glory' in having 'such friends' in portraits preserved in an Irish modern gallery contrast with Beckett's disgust, just six years earlier, directed at the Irish National Gallery's care for the Perugino Pietà, ‘Rottenly hung in rotten light behind this thick shop window, so that a total view is impossible, and full of grotesque amendments’ alongside paintings ‘buried behind a formidable barrage of shining glass’ (SBL1, 100). Contemporary Irish painting cuts little ice in Beckett's letters. Recording the RHA annual, group exhibitions as having ‘Nothing there’ (1933) or as ‘incredibly awful’ (1937) (SBL1, 159 & 497), he claims in 1931 that 'Orpen’s Ptarmigan & Wash House [are] nearly as bad as Keating'(SBL1, 100); Maurice J. MacGonigal is damned in 1934 with faint praise as ‘one of the least stultified of the younger Dublin decorators’ (SBL1, 222-3); Irish painting, the post-1920's Jack B. Yeats aside, is a backwater, no basis for any Irish national monopoly in Beckett's letters. In MacGreevy's writing, French, Spanish and Italian artworks provide ideal national models for Irish painting, shorn from English models as 'the worst of all tradition in painting' as well as those depicting 'dead Dutch boors and dead English gentlemen...[which] tell us nothing about art'. MacGreevy's Irish-centred, theocratic, national typology in 'Irish Historical Painting' (1946) seeks models purified from Protestantism, 'inimical to the plastic arts' because it 'hated art and the life of the senses everywhere', to enable Irish painting and nation; Beckett's list of admired, painters cross national frontiers, and omit 'nationality' as criterion of quality . MacGreevy's new painting vision, a historic return to an Ireland re-integrated in an old Catholic European alliance united against English colonial oppression and Dutch art, runs counter to Beckett's use of painting. Jack Yeats, as MacGreevy's cutting edge candidate to represent 'a genuinely Irish school of painters', helps re-allocate to Irish art and art writing a devotional, consecrated, and national purpose in his monograph, Jack B. Yeats (1945). Beckett's scathing review of 'McGreevy on Yeats' in the Irish Times (4 August, 1945) stakes the counter-claim: 'The national aspects of Mr Yeats's genius have, I think, been overstated, and for motives not always remarkable for their aesthetic purity'; displacing Irish nationalist claims ‘on aesthetic grounds’, Beckett claims this ‘painter, qua painter’ must sit ‘with the great of our time, Kandinsky and Klee, Ballmer and Bram van Velde, Rouault and Braque’ and not as the painter of 'the local accident' (DISJ, 95-97). Beckett's placement of Jack Yeats amidst European artists, not Irish viewers, may be driven by his sense of Ireland as a visually philistine place; after all he noted, for MacGreevy in the 1930's his ‘own chronic inability to understand as member of any proposition a phrase like “the Irish people” or to imagine that it ever gave a fart in its corduroys for any form of art whatsoever... or that it will ever care, if it ever knows, any more than the Bog of Allen will ever care or know, that there was once a painter in Ireland called Jack Butler Yeats’ (SBL1, 167 & 598-600). As David Lloyd argues, Jack Yeats's painting is defended by Beckett, against MacGreevy, to prevent its reduction to a translucent national symbol and to fortify the writer's text's resistance to a national aesthetic. Beckett's hyper-critical alertness to junctures between painting and nation, is surely informed by an aggrieved experience of German galleries under Nazi and National Socialist control as a self-exiled "Irishman". German Diaries record Old Masters decaying in galleries like the Zwinger, paintings poorly restored or dispersed as part of a broken sequence and new modernist works banned as degenerate, their textual advocacy by modern Jewish scholars prescribed by a rising Nazi party. Beckett's focus is less on painting's availability to the text to enable national literature, but on its physical qualities and tenuous survival amidst dispersed kin. Yeats's poetry links medieval, imperial, heraldic falcon that 'perns in a gyre' to centripetally spin out of control as 'mere anarchy...is loosed on the world' before his poetry adopts a refrain of 'Drown all the dogs' to 'justify' all those that have 'marched the night long' (VP, 546). Beckett's Big House in Watt leaves famished dogs ('con' and 'art') outside and paintings inside with insecure tenure or 'a day's march' away. Even the 'fat June butterfly', not Yeatsian falcon, which 'pern[s] in a gyre' in MPTK becomes an image in a Jan van Huysum's painting, placed 'on the box' in the funeral poem 'Malacoda' to recall a tradition, whereby reproductions of the Dutch painter were often placed on coffins (CP, 21). Paintings are subject to irrational, impoverished or disjunctive narratives, not easily conscripted to nationalism(s) built from traditional patronage systems. In Watt Beckett asks: ‘...was the picture a fixed and stable member of the edifice...or was it simply a manner of paradigm, here to-day and gone to-morrow, a term in a series...? A moment’s reflection satisfied Watt... that it would not remain long in the house, and that it was one of a series’ (Watt, 111). Painting under the Imperial Eagle (stamped on buildings containing Nazi sponsored German art) are no longer a means whereby the 'gazing heart doubles her might' or securely assists national or political regeneration. 'German Diaries' register an acute 1930's rupture in which old master traditions and modern painting are sacrificed to national politics and Nazi regime. Beckett later revisited Berlin's newly opened Neue Nationalgalerie (1968) to reflect (1969) that, having known the Kronprinzenpalais art collection thirty years earlier, on which this collection drew, that it was 'poor compared to what was...[there] before the war and either looted by the Nazi as degenerate or lost during the war, but superbly presented' (SBL4, 171-2). 'German Diaries' consider a top-down link between arts patronage and national unity/economics, from within the damaging field of Nazi operations. Propagandist abuses of paintings and texts create large scale national nightmares by sacrificing individual artists and humane/artistic values to concepts contained in catchphrases like the 'national soul' or 'unity' or 'historical necessity or 'Germany destiny' for which Beckett displays contempt. Noting how the national regime has deprived Dresden Jewish curators like Will Grohmann of job and income, noting Friedrich Stieve's German history as 'Just the kind that I do not want' with its 'unity of the German Schiksal [destiny] made manifest. Tod u. Teufel. [damn]', Beckett points to the instrumental conscription of photography, edited narratives of painting, as aligning with Goering's utilitarian, reductive, propagandist radio broadcasts; these are: 'Very traditional. Colonies, raw materials, fats' (GD, 28 October 1936). The Munich gallery, the Haus der deutschen kunst, bearing an inscription of Hitler's adage and patronage, 'Klein Volk lebt lager als die Dokumente seiner Kultur' [No people lives longer than the documents of its culture'] wryly reveal the potential '[p]leasant possibilities of application' (GD, 10 March 1937). When WBY's 1920's senate speeches advocate protecting Irish historic monuments as cultural assets, they do so as Anglo-Irish houses were burned, as he attended Irish National Gallery board meetings, and discussed Edward Martyn's Tulira Castle paintings being left to the nation as Martyn approached death heirless (1923) or as Coole was sold. Yeats saw an Irish national crisis dismantle and re-allocate a painting heritage. It was a painting heritage, which the Anglo-Irish and Big House had played a part in creating and conserving, just as they had a national literature, in Yeats's view. When Beckett 'craw[led] home by Jungiusstr. [...] past Jüudischer Friedhof [Jewish cemetery] (a desolation, cf. Rusdael's Judenkirchof in Zwinger [Dresden art museum], which I wonder if by now burnt', he saw an arts' infrastructure of Jewish curators and modern painting facing 'authored' or authoritative texts of National Socialism and facing obliteration. In 'La Peinture des van Veldes', written after the war, Beckett equates textual claims imposing meanings or 'false-authority' on paintings with Fascism: 'Do not approach abstract art', Beckett states, in an ironic health warning parodying that voiced by an official German art gallery curator noted in his 'German Diaries' earlier: 'it is produced by a gang of criminals and incapables. They would not know how to do anything else. They do not know how to draw' (DISJ, 120). ‘Painting which distorts,’ he adds for good measure is ‘the refuge of all failures’. Failure as personal task and frustration of representation subverts a Yeatsian political demand that paintings 'represent us' in this European - not Irish-British, Empire Exhibition - context. As paintings authenticate the Beckettian discursive text as 'failure' so they echo a position adopted in creative texts like Worstward Ho: 'Ever tried, ever failed. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.' (CISIS, 81) Post-nationalist, post-religious, Beckett's painting critique is from a European post-war perspective where national claims lie in ruins, not as testimony to Yeatsian 'glory' in having 'such friends' in the 1930's. Beckett states: Does it matter that Elshimer, even in Italy, painted Germans, or that [] in Norway or wherever it was, painted Norway or wherever it was? What can possibly matter iswhat's painted, or whether it is painted with sympathy, or loathing or indifference?...That [Jack B. Yeats's] manner of doing so is peculiarly Irish, whatever that means, is no doubt of interest, but of scant interest beside the matter done. There are no stones like the Cloyne stones, and few books. No Yeatsian Irish historic site ('Cloyne stones'), nor Literary Revival (in those 'few books')support claims that Jack B. Yeats is a great painter: 'The artist who stakes his being is fromnowhere, has no kith', Beckett writes in 'Hommage à Jack B. Yeats' (1954) for a retrospectiveParis exhibition. Beckett reiterates this point to reject Thomas MacGreevy's contextualisingof this painting as spiritual affirmations of Catholic Augustinian 'truth' or visualisation of Irishnational spirit; this is a ‘High solitary art uniquely self-pervaded, one with its wellhead in ahiddenmost spirit, not to be clarified in any other light’(DISJ, 149). 4. Money, Painting Text. If Yeats tends to endorse and Beckett tends to reject paintings as national/political property in Irish and European contexts, neither writer develops a fully fledged, theoretical analysis or critique of how galleries or the fine art infrastructure, as system, is underpinned by an exchange of money, where economics links art production, collection and consumption. This economy, however, is present and implicit in their texts. Ezra Pound's 'The Renaissance' essays (1915) radical argument that 'the arts are noble only as they meet the needs of the poor' or attacks in 'Art and Luxury' (1920) on fine art as a 'luxury-trade' in which Picasso succumbs to 'the mark of the shop' (Pound cited in Beasley, 2007, 136-7 & 168), do not feature in Yeats's texts, although Pound's more conservative strain of hymning Renaissance patronage of the arts in the Cantos does align with much in Yeats's thinking. Informed by visits to Italian churches in Ravenna and Urbino with Lady Gregory (1907), Yeats's model for arts patronage is essentially Renaissance based. Lord Ardilaun's failure to donate money to buy paintings for Hugh Lane's art gallery, in taking a cue from ignorant, democratic Irish opinion, is both a personal failure in generosity, and systemic failure in a fine art's system now taking far too much account of democratic, ignorant opinions on fine art. 'What cared Duke Ercole.../What the onion-sellers thought or did...?' Yeats asks in 'Responsibilities' (VP, 287); it is 'Delight in art whose end is peace', which sees Italy 'draw' on 'logic and on natural law/By sucking on the dugs of Greece', that features as a model epitomised by Hugh Lane who 'gave, not what they would, /But the right twigs for an eagle's nest!' (VP, 287-288). A combination of knowledge of past fine art and economic means/will to support its production and feather the gallery 'nest' is invoked. This imperial eagle whose 'lidless eyes' love the sun, filtered from heraldry/taxidermy, two popular art forms amongst the Irish aristocracy after 1600 and not from the German Imperial badge stamped on Germany's 1930's galleries visited by Beckett, inform this Anglo-Irish vision. Yeats targets 'the daily spite of this unmannerly town' (Dublin) in 'The People' (1916) as detrimental to arts' appreciation, production or collection. Beckett quotes Malraux in Murphy but paintings' use in selective national narratives under malicious state censorship or curatorial mis-direction or incompetence do not lead him to propose a Futurist erasure of art gallery or museum or erection of Malraux's virtual museum or gallery without walls. National interests, consigning modern German paintings to a ‘black list’ as ‘Entarte Kunst’ (Degenerate Art) or use of them instrumentally as ‘Grosse Deutsche Kunstaustellung’ (Nazi approved art) are criticised by Beckett; his commendation of Berlin's public gallery for 'superb' 1960's displays suggest implicit approval of civic, democratic economic, care for fine art (not Yeatsian aristocratic sponsorship), although no explicit, detailed programme of national or public ownership of painting/fine art emerges in Beckett's texts and letters. In 'The People' Yeats notes the poet's 'longing' to occupy his rightful place in the Italian sun alongside arts' producers and patrons. For Yeats, Renaissance Italy provides a model for the production, patronage and appreciation of fine art and literature: it is hereWhere everyday my footfall should have litIn the green shadow of Ferrara Wall;Or climbed among the images of the past - The unperturbed and courtly images -Evening and morning the steep street of UrbinoTo where the Duchess and her people talked... (VP, 352) As in senate speeches (1923-5), where Lane lifted 'the trade of picture dealing into the realm of art’ with ‘the magnificence of the Medici’ (SS, 46 & 123), the poem idealises the Duchess's charmed circle. Poet and patron have access to 'courtly images' in an arts' economic system idealized as open, even the specific means of purchase and ownership of these images in fine art is elided. Yeats's arts' system is, at the very least however, implicitly modelled on aristocratic patronage in Ravenna; this, as well as his ineffectual opposition to Irish arts' censorship, are targets in Beckett's MPTK (1934). Here 'two banned novelists' and a 'Professor of Bullscrit and Comparative Ovoidology' court the 'arty' Countess of Parabimbi: 'Ravenna!' exclaimed the Countess, memory tugging at her carefully cultivated heartstrings, 'Did I hear someone say Ravenna?'; 'Do I know Ravenna!' exclaimed the Parambimbi. Sure I know Ravenna. A sweet and noble city' (MPTK, 55 & 59- 60). Yeats's 'noble city' of fine art and its patronage is subjected to irony. The key role played by the Irish aristocracy as fine art patrons with economic clout is highlighted in Yeats's letters where he seeks their political support for Hugh Lane's painting campaign. Yeats's cultivation of Lady Londonderry, in London lunches and visits (1923-4), so that she formed an organising committee (1926) on behalf of Hugh Lane's paintings, contrasts with the Belfast fine art curator, John Hewitt's berating of ‘her ladyship’ for failing to leave Mountstewart estate or provide a ‘word of apology’ for not keep an keeping an Ulster Museum appointment (c.1934) to buy Grace Henry’s painting at the gallery (Hewitt, 2013, 74-76). 'The strawberry & cream regimen’, as Yeats's painter-father put it (cited in Foster, 1997, 188), or the world of ‘obsolete bravado, an insidious bonhomie and a way with horses’, as Louis MacNeice perceived it (MacNeice, 1941, 105), reveal Yeats as poet amongst aristocrats, both apparently able to dispense with the monetary value of 'paintings'. Yeats's prose and Autobiographies imply poet/painter have talent and time to make pictures and poems, just as the aristocrat has the finance to buy, and the time and knowledge, to appreciate them. As early as 1901 Yeats's 'Ireland and the Arts' derided an Irish consumerist middle-class soiled by the 'mere business of living, of making money' who 'buy a picture... [which]...generally shows a long-current idea', but forget it instantly 'when its moment is over' - unlike the poet who knows 'every masterpiece becomes the Abraham of a chosen people' (E & I, 203 & 352). Yeats's wily business sense, in selling manuscripts or his father's paintings to John Quinn, and bourgeois 'greasy till', as mechanism by which paintings end up in national collections, are elided. Paintings fit spiritual, not economic, categories. This slippage, however, is implicated in Yeats's poetic texts. Yeats's poem's criticism of Lord Ardilaun's failure to donate money to purchase paintings for the Irish gallery and Jack Yeats's drawing of The Country-shop (c 1912), completed just before the poem, depicting an old woman facing a shopkeeper and ledger recording debts she looks unable to pay, both target Ireland's 'greasy till'. The poem, however, rebukes an aristocratic, potential fine art patron who is unwilling to spend money buying paintings for an Irish gallery; the drawing satirizes economic conditions which permit the elderly Irish woman, unable to foot the bill for basics, to appear under the sign of 'the harp'. The idea that fine art/painting might be a luxury, material product tends to disappears in Yeats's poem, as does the fact that had the old lady in the drawing settled her bill with the 'greasy till', a quarter of a century later, she would have used the very Irish coins which W.B.Yeats, as chair of the Irish Coin Committee (1926-8), commissioned artists to design, and then paid them in. Sovereigns, not just as images of Yeats as King Goll by his father, but as money circulate in Yeats's poems. He wrote 'Brown Penny'; his minting of 'silver apples of the moon, the golden apples of the sun', suggest an attraction to the shape and metallic surfaces of coins by a writer who owned books on ancient coin designs and mysticism. Conversely, Beckett's Irish expatriates, like Murphy, eek out meagre sovereigns and pennies in London; they know 'time as money' is 'highly prized in business circles' but live on biscuits in public parks under public monuments (MU, 43). The hardly sovereign subject, Malone becomes bedridden, removed from economic systems, not paid in sovereigns, as he hopes, for his manuscript of doodles, unlike the visual artists (often friends) whom Yeats would commission to design the Irish coinage and whom he paid in coinage. Beckett's characters lack either the means or inclination to trade in even the most populist forms of fine art. Molloy (1950) collects foreign stamps with their miniscule pictures, not coins, and the book's 'blind paralytic' Irish beggar circles the 'bars' of columns outside the Bank of Ireland on a wheelchair (MPTK, 34). Beckett's Alba pays 'little' heed to 'the royal and fragile tuppenny fare' the Dublin tram has 'in 'keeping', more concerned that it looks like a 'Cézanne monster' (DFMW, 167); the swami in Murphy sells drawn horoscopes for a meagre 'sixpence' alongside an Irish poet 'Ticklepenny' (MU, 17). Winnie in Happy Days, wondering 'what treasures' are in her 'bag' and thinking of 'when I was young and foolish' (lines from Yeats's 'Salley Gardens') finds it offers 'no change' or 'Never any change' (CDW, 152 & 158); amidst 'tuppeny aches' she sinks like sculpture without Yeatsian currency into the earth (SBL4, 343). In Jack B. Yeats’s sketch he aligns the shopkeeper’s head and harp and banishes rural Ireland to a small cottage framed in a high mirror. The poor woman looks at till and ledger (recording her debt), appears under coiled nooses of rope, but a swashbuckling, piratical figure at the bar signals indifference and romance co-exist in Ireland. Irish shopocracy and those hoarding 'Biddy's halfpennies', rather than donating them to the cause of Irish art or concerning themselves with Irish romantic history, are targets in WBY's 'September 1913': What need you, being come to sense But fumble in a greasy till And add the half pence to the pence And prayer to shivering prayer, until You have dried the marrow from the bone;For men were born to pray and save;Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone.It’s with O’Leary in his grave. O'Leary (painted by Yeats's father) is dead; heroic, romantic Irish figures (the pirate under the ropes in Irish shop) have ‘gone about the world like wind’ because for them 'the hangman’s rope was spun, /And what, God help us could they save?'. O'Leary, romance and Irish paintings are not 'saved' (rescued/redeemed/prayed for) in neglectful Ireland as they are in the poem; but the poem's hidden economy also suggests the necessity to save (to save money to buy pictures which Ardilaun has neglected) disappears as vulgarity. Money, adding 'half pence to the pence', and romance (intertwined in Jack Yeats's drawing) are divorced. The inseparability of money and ownership in the art market economy, however, is so entrenched, it barely requires statement in Beckett's Disjecta: 'But we begin to weary of it, do we not? The realization that art has always been bourgeois, though it may dull our pain...is finally of scant interest' (DISJ, 143-4). In Beckett's text authentic painting is linked with 'penury' to define the aesthetic object and the authentic artist's life is usually also a form of 'failure' or 'failing well' outside the art system. The critique, however, is also without remedy; good painting's outsider status in hard economic systems, which inevitably fail art and artist, is a given, and 'of scant interest'. As Irish senator, Yeats's chairmanship of the Irish five-man Coinage Committee saw him commissioning artists to submit designs for the new state's coinage and Ireland's tills. When the French Mint in Paris in 1949, two decades later, discussed minting medals of writers by artists, Beckett wrote incredulously to Duthuit: 'Is it true that Masson and Giacometti have started making medals of Malraux and Sartre respectively?' (SBL4, 163) He questions artists's blatant conversion of writers into coinage, into pure symbols of economics and state iconology. Creating national cultural property, however, as a source of ‘intellectual pride’ was good for Ireland, Yeats informed Lord Beaverbrook (1927), because ‘If we do not give Ireland intellectual pride in this generation...it will grow into some kind of papistical potato-digging republic, in fact if not in name, a mischief to itself and its neighbours' (Yeats, cited in Roy Foster 2003, 331). Yeats as Anglo-Irish coin commissioner, not Irish-American curator of paintings, is speaking here. As with Sir Walter Scott's texts, after the Act of Union advocating the retention of Scottish, alongside English, banknotes (1826) a century earlier, Yeats adroitly plays to two-nations. The clear design of the Irish coinage will symbolise economic stability and continuity underpinned by fine artists and Artists' Designs Submitted for Proposed Irish Coinage 2041034128896462915135255 291465170180 Designs Submitted by Carl Milles (above left) and Albert Power (Rejected) Designs Submitted by Percy Metcalfe (Chosen and modified for aesthetic and minting reasons)their art. Yeats's Irish Coinage: What We Did or Tried to Do (1928) uses symbolism (horse and cow) as continuity indicating the on-going, traditional stability of landed wealth (the visually reassuring message of business as usual is present in these emblems of this 'horse- riding, salmon-fishing, cattle-raising country’ designed by ‘our friends’); this runs alongside the promotion of Irish independence in the coins' obverse content as harp and textual style as Celticised text (Yeats, 1928, 161 & 163-4). Yeats's account reveals his attempt to fuse a pragmatic symbolism, equating what is valued economically and nationally, with the graphic clarity and clearly defined outlines of a symbolist aesthetic, appropriated for the basic units and building blocks of the economic system (Yeats, 1928, 161-167).As Irish independence presented WBY with the opportunity to enlist artists in designing the very medium in which they were paid he outlined the project to his English artist-friend Dulac: Every coin will have a harp on one side but we can put what we like on the other. I am pressing on the committee certain simple symbols which all can understandas expressions of national products – say a horse, a bull, a barley sheaf, a salmon, a fox or hare & a grey hound. Somebody else urges symbols of industries, but we have so few industries & doubt the decorative value of a porter bottle....We will probably only insist on their being simple – emblems or symbols & not pictures. (Yeats cited in Foster, 2003, 333).No Beckettian pub 'bottles, representing centuries of loving research' (MPTK, 36), no Guinness barges with 'empty barrels' watched by Malone, no beer bottles collected in Krapp's Last Tape, no urban, industrial symbols of modern Irish trade/economics appear on Yeats's Irish coins. A bridge between past fine art symbols of animals, illustrated in the books on ancient coins Yeats owned, and those literally present in the Irish economy (cattle or horses literally purchased at market and virtually purchased in equestrian paintings for the Big House - so prevalent that the Yeats's family friend and painter Sarah Purser defensively admitted, 'I am not ashamed at not knowing the points of a horse, but then I don't accept the post of supplying mounts for the cavalry') (Purser cited in O'Grady, 1996, 94) is built by Yeats. Thereby, the fine arts and artist- friends, whom Yeats commissioned to design the coinage, are woven seamlessly into the Irish art market, its economics, its infrastructure. The Irish state coinage, whose design Yeats oversaw, and whose graphic fine art symbols of animals he put in Irish pockets and tills (1928-2002), endorses Irish economic system (trading in horses, cows, salmon, pigs and hens as staple of the Irish economy) and fine arts system of economics (in which Yeats as senator and chairman of the Coin Committee commissioned and paid visual artists in the currency they designed). In Beckett's texts this linkage is pressured or broken. Beckett slaughters, in his Trilogy, virtually every Irish agricultural animal on Yeats's coinage: cows and horses, hens and pigs, mules and rabbits, are creatures without symbolic say in their own meaningless suffering (TRIL, 124, 161, 184, 194 & 197). If the Yeatsian horse is his quintessential meta-symbol (for poetry/fine art and in an epitaph where poet and sculptor produce his 'cast') which also doubles as economic symbol (endorsing the system in which fine artist and poet-commissioner are paid), Beckett's 'Nous n'avons pas recontré beaucoup d'animaux' [we did not meet many animals] in Mercier et Camier (1946) ironically undercuts the conscription of fine art and texts into this cash nexus. Yeats's domesticated animals (horse, bull, cow, pig) and economically less useful, vermin species (monkeys, rats, flies, insects and worms), whose symbolism is numismatically and symbolically null for Yeats, are only integrated into systems of meaningless suffering. The novel's creatures, 'eyes, averted from light, filled with unspeakable bewilderment and distress' bear silent witness to human cruelty, not benevolent symbolism or economic wealth. Molloy flees a landscape with 'quadrupeds everywhere' (Ireland?) to morph into another narrator whose disintegrating sculptural head decays as vegetable matter attracting flies and 'casts a cold eye' on a 'horse's rump, at the moment when the tail rises' in trying to 'finish dying'; he/it looks at a 'pupiless', sculptural bust of Emile Decroix, 'the hippophagist' or horse-meat eater in Paris's abattoir area (TRIL, 29, 300-305 & 318). The sinuous, form of the horse, designed for Yeats's coinage as symbol of Irish fine art, fine art as integral part of the economy and for poetry itself, is now replaced by a horse-meat eater and relocated to Parisian shambles; sculpture and novel share territory with Eli Lottar who, in the company of André Masson (whom Beckett knew and wrote about), photographed abattoir carcases, published with a text by Bataille claiming these photographs instantiated links between the guillotine and art museum. The Beckettian bestiary sacrifices national and economic symbolism to visualise animal suffering. Poetry as Yeatsian form for which 'ancient salt is best packing' is preserved in its traditional fine art form as sacred fish on coins - just as Yeats's Irish family business was in shipping fish(CW5, 213). When Beckett's 'German Diaries' note 'sausages in Bierstube HH [Heil Hitler without ceasing...]' (cited in Lubrich & Northcott, 2010, 153) before a post-war essay on the van Velde's paintings suggests 'There is no painting. There are only paintings. These not being sausages are neither good nor bad' (DISJ, 123), the idea is that the packaging of fine art forms, butchered and forced into an 'enforced shape' is sold short, by national or economic diktat. Art is not preserved and sold as symbolic fish on coin or via text. Poetry as 'preserved fish' is a visual image needing little iconographical explanation for its sale in the context of Irish Friday markets or miraculous parables illustrated in Irish church windows. Indeed, when the fictive interrogator in Three Dialogues demands Beckett 'make some kind of connected statement' on painting he suggests it is better if he left the 'dock' and 'simply went away' to end confessing: 'Yes, Yes, I am mistaken, I am mistaken'. Perhaps tight-lipped silence in post-occupied France where coinage, or authorship, of images could have a high cost is understandable. Beckett's twice repeated, concluding 'yes' may carry a trace from the last, Irish-Jewish soliloquy in Ulysses (Joyce, 1922, 732) affirming the text's capacity to say 'yes' to Molly Bloom as its 'Andalusian rose' (visual symbol of beauty and Ireland in Yeats); but in Beckett's essay saying 'yes' becomes a dangerous 'mistake' when it comes to claiming authority over painting in a dialogue turned interrogation. These two writers' responses to fine art and contexts surely produced differing legacies. Whether Yeats's rhetoric in the Hugh Lane campaign hastened the Municipal Gallery's foundation or antagonised Irish and English opponents is debatable but his long-term lobbying surely assisted Thomas MacGreevy's cause in becoming Director of Ireland's National Gallery (1950-63). Conservative, Catholic, a safe pair of hands, MacGreevy oversaw the gallery's evolution from George Moore's 'most perfect image of the Sahara' where 'now and then one sees a human being hurry by like a Bedouin on the horizon...no one goes there except when it rains' in 1905 (Moore cited in Crookshank and Glin, 2002, 3-4) to a place of lectures, postcards of paintings, and an annual footfall rising from 40,664 (1950) to 55,125 (1963). Yeats's art politics and Irish ekphrasis, in which two minority arts seek a "double" audience, adumbrated an Irish and international trend in painting-cum-poetry publications. Paul Durcan's Crazy About Women: Poems About Paintings (1991) drew some 40,000 to an exhibition selling some 20,000 copies of the book after which the Irish National Gallery began attracting one million plus visitors every year. Yeats's ekphrasis signposted a path towards Durcan's contentions that poetry's response to painting is 'as reciprocal as it is inevitable', that ‘Art is not a prison with poetry in one cell, picture-making another cell’, even if he wryly noted, increasing numbers of 'punters' simply now eat 'an awful lot of coleslaw' in the National Gallery cafe (Durcan, 1991, x-xi & 138-9). Future anthologies such as A Conversation Piece: Poetry and Art (2002), by the Ulster Museum, and Lines of Vision (2014), by the National Gallery, poetry in 'museum mode', have prototypes in Yeats's gallery poetry. Sean Keating's early twentieth century complaint that Ireland could not tell its 'story' via painting/fine art is surely more contested as a result. Given Beckett remained among 1950's Parisians meeting 'directors of galleries and expiring gunmen all rusty bullets and Black and Tan scars' recalling in That Time (1976) a 'you' who 'went in out of the rain... in the Portrait Gallery in off the street out of the cold and rain' to see 'a vast oil black with age and dirt someone famous in his time...' (CDW, 388-95), paintings performed different political, contextual functions in his texts. 'The Municipal Gallery' places Yeats among Irish portrait painters in an Irish gallery where poets (by implication himself) invented Ireland and his 'glory' is in having such 'friends'. Beckett's play places him as outsider in a London's Portrait Gallery, in which photographers were donating his portrait as an absent 'you'. Beckett's engagement with Ireland as a place producing poor contemporary painting and 'deadening politics' assist a 'metaphysics of absence'; Ireland and its painting, perhaps, negatively help shape a writer seeking the 'absolute sovereignty of the subject' but finding, in terms of paintings and texts, it is always found in disjunctive images - and elsewhere. Beckett's fine art, divorced from national project (in line with disjunctive, elliptical, non-synchronous images and use of painting's images in creative texts), disrupts framing personal and national 'his-tory' as a continuous identity-forming narrative. The two writers' differing uses of fine art in texts and national contexts may have impacted on their subsequent receptions. Yeats is usually central, and Beckett minimally present or absence, in subsequent Irish landmark poetry anthologies by Irish editors. In visual arts' surveys or landmark anthologies of European visual arts theories, covering the nineteenth century (eg. Thomas Crow et al, 1994), Yeats is minimally present and in those covering the twentieth century (eg Harrison and Wood, 2003), he is absent; the latter reprints a substantial extract from Beckett's 'Three Dialogues'. Chapter 4 The Writers' Framing of Portraits, Place, and Interiors/Still LifeIf Yeats and Beckett cite fine art theory, and filter responses to the arts, language, life, and contexts via fine art/paintings, how do their texts frame subjects - people (portrait), place (landscape and city) and objects (still life)? Why do they draw on fine art/painterly frameworks and content to do so? In answering these questions, it is argued that the two writers' theoretical use of fine art art/its theories help reinforce their creative praxis when it comes to representing (or failing to represent) people, places and objects. Yeats's idea that past fine art traditions support the text's power to create a fusion of real/idealized pictures and its capacity to produce finished, 'unified' forms which resist the ruins of time is realized and embedded in his poetry; Beckett's idea that fine art points to the text's incapacities, as it struggles amidst fragmented images and broken forms is instantiated in his creative texts. Segregating the two writers' texts into painterly genres, based on subject matter/content, is revealing. Yeats's essays claim fit 'subject matter' and content is important for poetry. The poetry's titles suggest portraiture predominates. There is 'The Fiddler of Dooney', 'The Magi', 'The Fisherman', 'Father and Child', 'Roger Casement' and 'Parnell'. Named Irish landscapes matter too, as in 'The Lake Isle of Innisfree', 'Stream and Sun at Glendalough', 'Under Ben Bulben', and symbolic or generic landscapes feature, as in 'The Cold Heaven' or 'The Two Trees'. No city is named in a Yeats's poetry's title. Still life appears as minor concern in 'A Coat' and 'My Table'. The contours of a traditional hierarchy of painterly genres in which historic, mythic portraits/subjects were favoured over emerging landscape and still life is still discernible. Given painterly genres became more imbricated after Cubism in terms of subject matter - Beckett owned a Bram van Velde Untitled Composition 1937 intermixing semi-abstract portraiture, landscape and still life - his frequently untitled poems, recycling the first line as "makeshift" title or afterthought, reflect this shift. Yeats's 'The Wild Swans at Coole' frames an Irish pastoral landscape (not Beckett's Dieppe or Paris street), where October trees are in their 'beauty' at twilight and water mirrors a 'still sky', before the poem excavates a mental interior where landscape is processed to symbolise an encounter with beauty that will alter with age and viewer. Beckett's 'The Vulture' drags his 'hunger through the sky/of my skull shell of sky and earth' (CP, 5); it collapses interior-exterior landscape boundaries at the outset, just as a late letter describes a child's drawing as 'sealandskyscape' (SBL4,375). Figurative paintings form in Malone’s mind (‘And the figures then marshalling in his mind thronged it with colours and with forms’) but dissolve as textual failures (‘What tedium’). Landscape tries to assist narrative setting (‘Sapo loved nature, took an interest’) but this strained mode of painterly realism is broken off as artificial (‘This is awful.’). The novel is left with a meagre interior/ still-life in which Malone's chamber pot becomes unreal as he repeats its name (TRIL, 165-75) just as 'Three Dialogues' note 'fruits on plates' now create 'increasing anxiety' about failed relations between an actual object and one in a painting/text (DISJ, 145). Invocation and dissolution of these painterly genres occur in the writer's respective texts. 1. Framing PortraitsW.B. Yeats's claim in the OBMV (1936) that ‘a work of art can have but one subject’ (CW5, 181-203), a portrayed person/personality, and selection of Pater’s ‘Mona Lisa’, celebrating Leonardo da Vinci's painting as the anthology's first poem, support his father's idea that 'In every picture, in every poem, there must be somewhere exact portraiture - otherwise there is no work of art' (JBY letter to WBY, 7 September 1914, JBY, 1944, 134). Childhood discussions with his father, of Raphael and portraiture (CW3, 81), admiration for Blake's figurative works (CW6, 93), for 'Rossetti's Annunciation' and his Girlhood of Mary, Virgin (E & I, 147), Dante’s Dream' or 'four of five Rossetti's where there are several figures engaged in some dramatic action' (E & I, vii) and Michelangelo's ‘profane perfection of mankind’ (VP, 639), suggest traditional figuration, as a symbol of bodily strength or beauty, is central. These reinforce Michael Robartes's claims that 'All thought becomes an image and the soul /Becomes a body', and Owen Aherne's reply that ‘All dreams of the soul / End in a beautiful man’s or woman’s body’ (VP, 374). Human and divine, female beauty passionately perceived or male athleticism and heroism as admirable, are a key matrix. Beckett's Proust (1930), however, argues that such idealized or real human presence in artworks is illusory, a 'retrospective' construction not 'permanent reality' because 'the subject has died - and perhaps many times - along the way' (PTD, 14). John Butler Yeats's art school training informed his credo that ‘all art begins in portraiture’ (JBY, 1944, 192). Portrait and poem are a confluence where the voice of 'the whole man' is found and 'the personality is knit' (JBY cited in Levine, 1983, 14-16). WBY echoes this credo (1916): ‘I could not compose anything but a portrait and even to-day I constantly see people as a portrait-painter, posing them in the mind’s eye before such-and-such a background’ (CW3, 92). Portraiture provides knowledge of the self (autobiography) and 'some other self' (biography) via the 'imitative energy' of the Renaissance (MEM, 159-60). But if WBY, at art school in Dublin, like William Orpen, began drawing' all the ears, eyes, noses that they possessed' from classical busts (Orpen, cited in Turpin, 1995, 177), Beckett at Portora began executing merciless cartoons of a teacher in exercise books (Cronin, 1999, 45). WBY's sketch, Head of a Boy (1887) combines ‘fifteenth century prototypes’ with ‘nineteenth-century pleasure in colour’ (Pyle 1997, 152); Beckett's cartoon habit endured in manuscripts of Murphy and Watt, extensively decorated texts with caricaturing doodles of human, human-animal heads, not Romanticism's prototypes and Renaissance humanism. Beckett's father turns the pages of Punch' in Company (CISIS, 25) - over a thousand drawings by Jack Yeats appeared there (Pyle, 1970, 120); but when WBY recounts a novelist snatching his 'copy of the Savoy', pointing to Aubrey Beardsley's The Barber as 'bad drawing' and recommending he 'admire the Punch cartoons of Mr Linley Sambourne', the cartoon is surplus to literary requirement (CW3, 250). Watt's comic laughter's apex is 'the risus purus, the laugh laughing at the laugh' (Watt, 40), a good definition of a self-aware cartoon, not a Yeatsian portrait of his 'tragic generation'. Yeats's visual 'charicatures' [sic] are reserved for private letters which hit targets or punish modern art: a public exception is made for George Moore, whose interest in modern art permits Yeats to convert him into a primitive sculpture amongst French art students as ‘a man carved out of a turnip, looking out of astonished eyes’ (CW3, 302). When Yeats, in his mid-fifties, regrets focusing on Pre-Raphaelite portraiture in his twenties prevented him from learning from Herbert Horne's 1908 study of the Italian Renaissance, he refers to the writer of 'the one standard work on Botticelli' (CW3, 149-50). Beckett, who owned Botticelli's illustrations of Dante's hell (downgraded by Yeats to praise Blake's), punctures Belacqua's aesthetic pretensions to obsessively convert every woman into an ideal Botticelli portrait, via grotesque cartoons. Belacqua assures the Alba that he ‘did not propose to Blake her, did not propose to Hieronymus Bosch her’ but after visiting a brothel, where a reproduced Botticelli hangs on the wall, this is precisely what he does. His portrait of the Smeraldina-Rima notes: '... her body was all wrong, the peacock’s claws...Poppata, big breach, Botticelli thighs, knock-knees, ankles all fat nodules, wobbly, mamose, slobbery-blubbery, bubbubbubbub, a real button-bursting Weib, ripe’ (DFTMW, 15). A grotesque caricature undercuts idealized aestheticism ('peacock's claws') and Botticelli-like beauty; emerald isle is found scrambled in Smeradina's name and her cartoon's "speech bubble" ('bubbubbubbub') replaces Yeats's 'dream of fair women' with a far more 'fair to middling' one. Beckett's manuscript cartoons reinforce textual portraits of the malfunctioning human-animal body to oppose Yeats's poetic portraiture. A portrait-poem by Yeats frames Eva and Constance Gore Booth in western light by a window in Lissadell, evoking a John Lavery like beauty and Japonisme: the 'two girls in silk kimonos' are 'both beautiful, one a gazelle', before a 'raving Autumn shears' this down in tragic old age (VP, 475-6). Beckett's Frica's ‘horse face’ is as a ‘throttled gazelle’ whose hair is pulled back so tightly that ‘to close her eyes became a problem’. Comic lines are etched into a cartoon: ‘She had frowned to pencil her eyebrows, so now she had four’ (MPTK, 55). Yeats's tragic 'gazelle' is 'sheared' into caricature in Watt. Ernest Louit, west of Ireland researcher into 'The Mathematical Intuitions of the Visicelts' accompanies the 'mental' Mr Nackybal with his 'squint' and 'ano-scrutal' scratching as 'A Gazelle! A sheep! An Old Sheep!' (Watt, 146 & 156-60). In Molloy, the protagonist places himself in an Old Master painting such as Flight out of Egypt to realise that what really 'inhabited me, my caricature of the same...the man of flesh and blood [is] somewhere awaiting me' (TRIL, 61 & 106). Mimetic portrait as Yeats's embodied, ideal symbol is illusory. Caricature, as remnant, is required by the text. Enlistments of 'low' and 'high' fine art portraits elevate, or debunk, the self/humanity in these writers' texts. A Vision (1925) pictures Yeats as author, and serious writer on the arts, via Edmund Dulac's frontispiece of a fake Dürer-style woodcut of an Anglo-Norman figure, Giraldus Cambrensis. Beckett proposes a reproduced photograph of a German cartoon of two chimpanzees playing chess as book cover for Murphy (TRIL, between 192-93). Only Irish royalty play chess in Yeats's plays. If Yeats probably knew Sarah Purser's oil portrait of Maude Gonne (c. 1888) clasping a monkey - he refers to a Purser portrait of her 'in conscious imitation of the frontispiece of a book by Marie Bashkertseff' made by a 'not very interesting talent' (MEM, 43-44) - he did know Blake's Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790) where a false angel leads the author from church into 'a deep pit' of 'monkeys, baboons, and all of that species chained' who mate and devour each other in images of 'lost time'. This Darwinian nightmare, in The Celtic Twilight (1893), produces an ‘immense’ black pit on whose ‘parapet sat innumerable apes eating precious stones’ in a ‘Celtic hell, my own hell, the hell of the artist’. In a letter (1895) the imagined ‘face of the monkey’ represents the ‘mocking pretence of wisdom...the symbol of the end of the glory & triumph of the world, of all the life of desire & hope’ in a universe where ‘the shadow of the quest of the ideal, has passed away & the merely human soul dies’ (CL1, 468, n.2). Beckett admired Dürer, but he also had a copy of Darwin by 1932 (SBL1, 111) and he had read Wolfgang K?hler's accounts of laboratory experiments in The Mentality of Apes (1925) in the mid-1930's. So a sub-scientific, not Blakean, visual image opens How It Is. Here a human-animal-reptile in the mud, emerges in a 'vast stretch of time...not all a selection natural order' (HII, 3). Portraits of missing links, apart from the nightmare beast of 'The Second Coming', do not feature in Yeats's texts. WBY came to his father's portraits of himself early, as a pre-lingual self. Here he features as a young, lyric poet/reader and dramatic King Goll, playing a harp. These portraits create templates anticipating a poetry alternating between a lyric, direct or masked 'I', and a dramatic, non-quotidian self, in multiple masks. T.S. Eliot's act of ‘preparing a face to meet the faces that you meet’, in paint, assists poetry and plays at the outset. A ‘Checklist of “Portraits of W.B. Yeats”’ (1985), incomplete, lists 129 portraits or sketches – some 50 by his father and 7 by his brother Jack - but only lists 39 photographs; 40 images of Beckett, mainly post-1960, are lodged in the National Portrait Gallery collection, predominantly photographic images. If the poet, as Yeats claims, is ‘never the bundle of accident and incoherence that sits down to breakfast; he has been re-born as an idea, something intended, complete’ (E & I, 509), his father's portraiture assists this construction by focusing on a well dressed, public figure associated with books to elide components in Sarah Purser's Le petit déjeuner (1891), T.S. Eliot's 'rattling breakfast plates in basement kitchens' (2015, 21) and Jack Yeats's The Breakfast Room (1944). Photographs of Beckett, beside coffee cups or bins where an 'inner being' is more exposed, are not in the typology of painted images Yeats uses to present himself as poet and this unified self-presentation is central in poems/texts. In 'Vacillation' (1932), when Yeats sits in a modern, Edward Hopper type, London cafe, a verbal analogue for John Minihan's iconic photography of Beckett in Paris, the poem leaves a foregrounded 'empty cup/on the marble table top' for an inner vision of a 'rivery field' as poet/poem 'play a predestined part', not measuring out life 'in coffee spoons', but in a self transformed into Homer delivering a final blessing as a Greek priest near a marble altar: 'So get you gone, Von Hügel, though with blessing on your head' (VP, 499-503). The self is self-possessed, created in language/paint; it is not captured as subject in a "more realist" medium like photography over which it has no control. WBY's texts link 'self-portraiture' with making 'my work convincing with a speech so natural and dramatic that the hearer would feel the presence of a man thinking and feeling’ (LET, 583); they remove this self from a photographic realism he despised, even if occasional "studio shots" were useful for publicity. Yeats controlled the commissioning, commodification and content of these self-portraits, using painters he knew and trusted for images reproduced in texts. Images of this ideal self were adroitly negotiated with art collectors (Lady Gregory and John Quinn), who purchased painter's portraits, before publishers were directed to use reproductions of these in texts. In Memoirs the adoption of the ‘mask’, as a product of ‘style’ and ‘personality’ producing ‘unity of being’, adopts John Butler Yeats’s phraseology for painting. The adage, ‘If we cannot imagine ourselves as different from what we are, and assume that second self, we cannot impose a discipline upon ourselves, though we may accept one from others’, asserts poetry's rights on the image/mask begins where portrait painting leaves off. Poetry requires multiple revisions to deliver a re-made self as the ‘finished man among his enemies’; it surpasses the unfinished portraits WBY's father produced, which Yeats bemoans in his prose. Beckett's 'Perhaps I shall not have time to finish' or 'On the other hand perhaps I shall finish too soon...That does not matter either' (TRIL, 166) are dispensed with. Beckett's From an Abandoned Work or Comment C'est (phonetically commencer, to begin) implies art and artforms are continuously abandoned, constantly begun again, never finished. But from Yeats's letters, authorising distribution of his father’s sketch as “publicity shot” in 1888 (CL1, 60), to those in his forties documenting portraits commissioned for the Collected Works (1908), he prioritizes the painted self as analogue for finished 'authorised' form. This romantic, portrait style was chosen for Collected Works to license the image and canoniseYeats. A portrait by Augustus John (1907) for the frontispiece, in which Yeats feared he appeared as 'an unshaven, drunken bar-tender' in 'tinker language', was quietly dropped by publisher and poet. Conversely, Beckett's Krapp could be read as liberating the Augustus John portrait, which Yeats represses as version of self; the ageing figure with 'Disordered grey hair. Unshaven' among beer bottles has spent '40 per cent' of his life in 'licensed premises' (CDW, 215-18). Yeats's chosen painted self-portraiture reinforces the poet's persona in poems. The poems imply a standing, active actor who projects his voice ('I will rise and go...'), a priest who dispenses blessings or curses as 'words obey' his 'call' or a judge who commands ('I summon...'). Photographs of Beckett reveal hands conducting plays as musical language, or a seated writer about to vacate the moment (the cigarette put out, the bins abandoned), just as the figure in Stirrings Still has ‘sat at his table head on hands [as he] saw himself rise and go’ (CSP, 259); he will 'say I'm a body...as required' or appear as seated court scribe with quill in Texts for Nothing (1950-52), telling himself ‘don’t forget the question mark’ or that 'I'm going to rise and go' (CSP, 109 & 120). These variants of an ageing self, only able to inhabit the postures of language or the posture of Rodin’s Thinker or Brancusi's portrait of Joyce as question mark, contrast with Yeats's poetry's highly self-conscious, younger theatrical self, which painters helped construct; portrait painting and photography not only interpret, but assist, contrasting thematics in texts. Yeats 'When You Are Old and Grey' [my emphasis] transfers old age from speaker to subject for a poetry which images a 'Self born, born anew?' as antidote to later poems' 'lust' and 'rage' of old age; actual portrait supports poetry's face-lift and in 1926 when WBY was fifty seven, he proposed the inclusion of a 'pen and ink drawing' of himself 'aged 21' by JBY and Charles Shannon's portrait of 1907 in an edition of Autobiographies. (CL InteLex #4866). The fissured, realist face in photographs of Beckett announce the face as register of age/mortality, which late prose and plays like Krapp's Last Tape thematize. Yeats's A Vision rejects Rodin’s The Eternal Idol as ‘that kneeling man...in humble adoration’; the text seeks ‘revelation’ that comes when ‘athlete and sage are merged' as in 'the earliest sculpted image of Christ... copied from that of the Apotheosis of Alexander the Great...perfect physical man' where 'the same impulse will create the Galilean revelation and deify Roman Emperors whose sculptured heads will be surrounded by the solar disk. Upon the throne and upon the cross alike the myth becomes a biography’ (CW13, 55 & 154). In Godot, Lucky's speech mocks 'the strides of physical culture the practice of sports such as tennis football running cycling swimming...camogie' (CDW, 44) to replace WBYs' Tailteann Games, the art of the Greek gymnasium/sculpture and Jack Yeats's Liffey Swim with human decrepitude and sculpted immobility.JBY's contention to his son (1899), that photography, not drawing, was 'better liked by the stupid people' and killing his livelihood (JBY, 1944, 57) is echoed in A Vision where 'The Will looks into a painted picture. The picture is that which is chosen, while the photograph is heterogeneous. The photograph is fated, because by fate is understood that which comes from without, whereas the mask is predestined' (CW13, 15-16). Photography, not painting, encapsulates the iconic images of Beckett as writer-cum-public celebrity in Paris cafes, London bars or beside theatre bins, in photographs set up for, rather than by, an essentially shy writer who also 'knew exactly why' a specific location had been chosen, and who sometimes 'directed the whole scene', as if wishing the picture to say 'This is who I am' (Minihan cited in Appendix 5). Beckett, however, did not engage in taking photographic self-portraits (unlike Philip Larkin), and his texts discard or destroy photographs as sites of illusory self-presence in a constructed, temporal medium. If Yeats's letters reveal his wish to remain within a stable, traditional painterly genre, attached to self-presentations of a romantic poet (connected with control over literary images/narratives), the absence, trace, loss of subject, as object in photographic images less attached to a discrete discipline, suggest a Beckettian, temporal self confronting the camera, while narrators like O, protagonist of Film, tear up a print on the wall of 'the face of God the father', and thirteen photographs from a folder (including one of 'little girl's face'), to imaginatively contravene Roland Barthe's dictum that photographic subjects such a mother are sacrosanct in retaining emotional attachments. Yeats's visual survival (as painted self), and Beckett's disappearing photographed self/objects (Malone's own past photograph of himself may be of an ass), dovetail with the writer's respective thematics. Yeats's poetry aims for stable, multiple images of the self/others as constructed in painted and literary forms which last in the memory; Beckett, repeatedly photographed in this more disposable medium, for the instant 'memento mori' amidst 'time's relentless melt' (Susan Sontag cited in Mirzoeff, 1999, 73) or 'death-trap in a flash' in Clive James words (James, 2003, 66-9), frequently draw the reader's attention to the passing, or brief moment in which the text reveals its own mechanical construction or brevity as it struggles to capture a disappearing or ageing self in revolt against a frozen form or illusory presence. Opposing currents in early twentieth century painting, in which 'channels of the avant-garde' that ran to Paris (where Cubist portraiture produced a more elusive human presence, where medium matters as much as individuated sitter) met countering calls for a return to objectivity and a Neo-Classical order, register with both writers. Yeats's father finds 'interest in his sitter his chief, his sole inspiration’ to eschew ‘excess of means of expression over the content’ as ‘vulgarity’; he specialised in painterly 'busts' capturing sitters' personalities (JBY, 1944, 100). 'Admired above all men' by the teenage poet, even after his father 'threw' him 'against a picture with such violence that he broke the glass with the back of my head’, WBY's defines portraiture as a ‘realistic thing identified with realistic feeling after which and because of which arises the edifice of beauty’ (CW5, 226; MEM, 19). Autobiographies construct such portraits: Henley, his ‘heavy figure and powerful head, the disordered hair standing upright, his short irregular beard and moustache’; William Morris with his ‘grave wide-open eyes’ like Titian’s Ariosto (CW3, 121 & 132). This type of portraiture is doubted by Beckett (1934): 'Perhaps it is the one bright spot in a mechanistic age – the deanthropomorphizations of the artist. Even the portrait beginning to be dehumanised as the individual feels himself moreand more hermetic & alone & his neighbour a coagulum as alien as protoplast or God, incapable of loving or hating anyone but himself or of being loved or hated by anyone but himself (SBL1, 222-3). Portraiture which affirms recognition of shared human values (love/friendship) as its primary theme becomes secondary to a 'hermetic' medium which seals the un-self into its fabric, leaving a type of essential self in the condition of being alone, beyond mediums. Fine art's portraiture clarifies these differences for both writers in their texts. Yeats's ‘Beautiful Lofty Things’ (1938) borrows portrait tradition, responds to the call to Neoclassical order (as still available to romanticism and symbolism), to portraiture as a form of acknowledging 'recognition'. The poem is a form of recognition, like its fine art prototype, a mimetic identification of real presence; it is also a form of re-cognition (a thought-out acknowledgment of the subject's merit). Thereby, Yeats's poem depicts his father, alongside adopted writing fathers (John O’Leary/Standish O’Grady) and two women who painted to index the subjects' personalities, individual nobility and beauty, as manifestations of personality which add up to the collective ideal of 'Olympians'. The poem stages itself as painting/fine art: Beautiful lofty things; O’Leary’s noble head;My father upon the Abbey stage, before him a raging crowd;‘This Land of Saints,’ and then as the applause died out, ‘Of plaster saints’; his beautiful mischievous head thrown back.Standish O’Grady supporting himself between the tablesSpeaking to a drunken audience high nonsensical words;Augusta Gregory seated at her great ormolu table, Her eightieth winter approaching:‘Yesterday he threatened my life, I told him nightly from six to seven I sat at this table,The blinds drawn up’; Maude Gonne at Howth station waiting a train,Pallas Athene in that straight back and arrogant head:All the Olympians: a thing never known again (VP, 577-8). Creating individual portraits from intimate sittings, framed and recast in memory, Yeats's poem conscripts past fine art to create the type of 'Olympian' heroism/ beauty Beckett ironizes in Belacqua's 'Olympian fancies' or Thelma bboggs legendary ugliness, so unforgettable 'which is more than can be said for, say, the Venus Callipyge' (MPTK, 111); the Irish 'Ticklepenny' poet of Murphy is 'an Olympian sot' (MU, 53). 'Who are your patrons? Greeks? Kings? Lovers?' Belacqua asks; he replies that recycling Greek sculpture as lasting mythic ideal is deluded: 'You can keep your George Bernard Pygmalion' (DFTMW, 78-9). Yeats's poem colonises Greek sculpture and portrait painting's methods to reject Théophile Gautier's (1836) idea that paintings with 'a hand placed in a certain way...an inclination of the head...a contrast of characters between different groups, form what we call an idea in painting' entirely distinct from 'an idea in literature'. As in Frederick Leighton's paintings, cited in Yeats's prose, Greek literary and sculptural forms are available to romantic paintings of contemporary subjects such as Helen of Troy (1965), and to the text. Swinburne's lament at the passing of Greek, pagan gods - 'O Gods dethroned and deceased, cast forth, wiped out in a day!' in a world 'grown grey' and conquered by Judeo-Christianity ('Hymn to Proserpine') may be echoed; but the poem replaces (Irish) plaster cast 'saint' with enduring Greek heroes in line with a world 'known again' at Coole. Had the poem's assassin missed Lady Gregory as portrait at the window with his snap-shot he would literally have hit a life-size sculpture of Andromeda behind her 'ormolu desk' (Lady Gregory, 1972, photograph, 128-129). As in 'On the Boiler' noting 'moments' when the poet is 'certain that art must once again accept those Greek proportions which carry into plastic art the Pythagorean numbers, those faces which are divine because all there is empty and measured' (CW5, 220-252), Apollonian heroism in Irish theatre, or the beauty of Pallas Athene in Howth train station, are found in Irish gallery and poetic agora. Compare Krapp's Last Tape where, after mocking 'statistics' of a wasted youth in the pub, the play asks of a lover, Peggy Sinclair, painted in green by Karl Leyhausen in Beckett's Uncle's art collection in Kassel: 'What remains of that misery? A girl in a shabby green coat, on a railway station platform? No?' (CDW, 218). In a later interview, Beckett as self-described 'non-knower, a non-can-er' stated: 'The other type of artist - the Apollonian - is absolutely foreign to me'. If JBY's portraits of isolated heads are often without background objects or symbolic props, WBY's poems contextualise character in place, in Abbey Theatre or Coole Park. The frozen moment as heroic is restored to history as in state portraiture. Shorn of Beckett's 'theatre of such ignominy' (TRIL, 103), the subjects' faces are a locus of personality, seat of thought or expressive window to the soul, a defiant record in history. Yeats's 'The Circus Animals Desertion' notes 'Character isolated by a deed / To engross the present and dominate memory' as recipe for poetic portraiture in which the artist stakes, and subject takes, a place in shared history. When Beckett theorises Jack Yeats's portraiture as 'isolated' being, elusive as stable character or subject, he replaces potential "existence" in history with being as a 'notation' in paint which can neither 'trudge' out of the medium into history nor entirely escape the unreal stasis of paint/text: 'The being in the street, when it happens in the room, the being in the room, when it happens in the street, the turning to gaze from land to sea, from sea to land, the backs to one another and the eyes abandoning, the man alone trudging in the sand, the man alone thinking (thinking!) in his box – these are characteristic notations having reference' (DISJ, 97).This collapse of stable perspective, interior/exterior, or subject/object divisions, permeates early modern European painting and poems. Rilke notes 'electric street cars rage through my room with ringing fury'; Alfred Lichtenstein's 'Punckt' has 'The empty sirens flow blazing / through [my] guttering/extinguished head' and 'Eyes collapse/implode' (Butler, 1934, 134 & 177-8). The stable 'reference' point created by text-painting engaged in portraiture is not "real" - people are temporal and not stabilized in paint/charcoal outlines - so Beckettian 'man', as a being, is essentially 'alone trudging in the sand'. Beckett's Watt reveals portraiture as this process, which eludes its stable, final construction or aim of 'recognition' in fine art/text, via movement. 'Here he moved, to and fro, from the door to the window, from the window to the door; from the window to the door, from the door to the window...'(Watt, 176). As in the multiplying, moving lines of Giacometti's, Avigdor Arikha's and Hayter's portraiture, artists in Beckett's circle, words criss-cross the page as the elusive 'sitter' refuses to 'sit'. Changing appearances thwart drawing schemas as a basis for constructing a stable likeness: For one day, Mr Knott would be tall, fat, pale and dark, and then next, thin, small, flushed and fair, and the next sturdy, middle-sized, yellow and ginger, and then next small, fat, pale and fair, and the next sturdy, middle-sized, flushed, thin and ginger, and the next tall, yellow, dark and sturdy... (Watt, 181). Watt and Knott, take Klee's line 'for a walk', or rather, take words for a walk until they refuse those traditional settled lines of drawing schemas in Yeats's sister's books. Yeats's singularly 'pale' Pre-Raphaelite colour becomes 'pale' and 'flushed' to evoke and cancel a method in Fauvism; words as medium draw attention to their own difficulty in referring to subjects or creating portraits of 'Beautiful Lofty Things'. If traditional portraiture can be read as totemic, product of a genetic urge to reproduce a likeness as a ‘real presence’, or as a record of temporal change, of what has decomposed and disappeared, then Yeats' admiration for Titian/Italian Renaissance portraits, and Beckett's gravitation towards Rembrandt/Northern European painting, crucially assists their texts to read how art and life demarcate this difference. Yeats's admiration for Titian's Portrait of a Man/ Ariosto (ca. 1512) is of a portrait in 'theatrical mode' (Michael Fried's phrase) which engages with a Renaissance courtier whose virile, heroic, sprezzatura registers in the golden glow on his skin as he leans on a parapet (Fried cited in Harry Berger, 2000, 13 & 465-73); Yeats laments that Rembrandt's portraits have 'death already in their faces' (CL InteLex #7312), even as he tends to avoid Northern European Old Masters (linked with Synge) to suggest that they 'pity the ugly and sentimentalise the beautiful' (CW13, 62). He notes 'Italy excelled in painting, England in poetry, Germany in music' (EXP, 297). Conversely, Beckett's admiration for Titian's Penitent Magdalen (c.1533), for Rembrandt's Self-Portrait as Democritus (ca. 1669), and tendency to sponsor nocturnal, melancholic, Northern European masters (his 'Brower, dear Brower['s]' peasants, GD, 5 February 1937) and Rembrandt's decomposing beings, align with a thematics in which art/life is measured by death and found wanting.Yeats's sponsorship of fine art as product of a genetic, urge to produce and reproduce a likeness as ‘real presence’ is echoed in his adoption of elegy, eulogy, epistle and epitaph as key poetic genres which also perform this function. Autobiographies recalls portraits of Pollexfen ancestors ‘under their powdered curling wigs’ (CW3, 50-52) in the Sligo family home which, as in poems, 'shake the dead in their shrouds'; after JBY's death (1922), Yeats literally installed his father's self-portrait 'behind' him in his Merrion Square study so his children would inherit it (CL InteLex # 4090). Beckett's 'philoprogenitive bump' (SBL4, 535-6), the bump in phrenology which contains 'the instinct of love for one's offspring', in the late short prose of Company is dissolved as a sculptural portrait of father and son fragments and recedes. Death and age are Yeatsian themes but modes like elegy, in ‘In Memory of Alfred Pollexfen' (1917), are portraits reclaiming kin as genetic refusal of death which 'form' resists. The poem asks ‘Where have they laid the sailor John?’; but it refuses to supply the rhyming, partner-word (his Uncle is dead - ‘gone’); other relatives' portraits step, as they do in John Butler's portraiture, to preserve the family against becoming 'nobody in a great throng'. Late poems with 'increasing specificity' name 'friends, acquaintances and relatives' as Perloff asserts. JBY's claim (cited in White, 1972, 21-22) that portrait painting ‘must preserve feeling’ and character because it is ‘largely a genius for friendship’ is the 'Municipal Gallery' poem's adage; portraits reveal man's ‘glory most begins and ends’ in having ‘such friends’ which, in pre-1950's Irish usage, included kin. When ‘the well-known faces are all gone' Yeats's poem about pensioners claims, 'the fret is on me’ (VP, 318); when Magi in 'stiff painted clothes... /Appear and disappear...With their ancient faces like rain-beaten stones' they become 'pale' and 'dissatisfied' by erasure. Painted/textual portrait are twinned as bulwarks against dissolution. If Louis Aragon predicted portraiture, 'as essentially realist genre', would survive modernism, even if it could 'scarcely be accommodated by modern theories which condemn realism’ (Aragon, 1981, 57), Yeats backs such resistance. Beckett's Moran's face, aligned with a strand in modern paintings, disappears into style and substance, and fragments into a trace. The face becomes a hollow globe with eyes as 'wounds' (not windows to the soul), barely locatable as a type, let alone an individual self in a water-based medium:And then I saw a little globe swaying up slowly from the depths, through the quiet water, smooth at first, and scarcely paler than its escorting ripples, then little by little a face, with holes for the eyes and mouth and other wounds, and nothing to show if it was a man's face or a woman's face, a young face or an old face, or if its calm too was not an effect of the water trembling between it and light. (TRIL, 137)The narcissistic moment as one of self-recognition and survival is denied purchase in the image/text. The unstable image is 'trembling', making recognition of the post-Cubist subject elusive, spectral or secondary to the medium. As The Unnamable puts it: for 'these nameless images I have, these imageless names [...] how can they represent a life...blank words, but I use them...'. This virtually erased self, existing in near silence 'murmurous with muted lamentation, panting and exhaling of impossible sorrow [...] as of one buried before his time', aligns with the self theorised, after Auschwitz, by Adorno or Giorgio Agamben's figure 'staring into the unsaying' (1995, 32-33). Human deportees were the literal subject of drawings by Beckett's painter-friend Avigdor Arikha who described these images as 'something which is not' so 'An image is something resembling something resembling something else. Not a revealer but a reminder...'. 'Only dead faces laugh', one Yeats play asserts; but death-mask or elegy seek embodiment until absence becomes presence as in the 'Municipal Gallery' where Michael Collins death-mask reappears via painting into poem. If traditional portraiture underwrites a conservative, hierarchical order in Western Europe, Yeats inflects, and Beckett rejects, this use of the genre. Hereditary monarchs (mythic Irish Kings and Queens), nobility (Lady Gregory/ painted ‘duchesses’), military leaders (a drawing of Frank Fay as Cuchulain placed in Beltaine/Major Gregory in the poetry), honorific clerics (Swift/‘Abbot or Archbishop’), a burgher elite (art-dealer Lane/Pollexfen traders), past politicians (Parnell or mezzotints and engravings ‘of Pitt, Fox, Lord Wellesley, Palmerstone and Gladstone, [and] many that I have forgotten’ at Coole) (CW3, 292) and modern politicians (Pearce and Connolly), who give way to honorific writers or painters (Synge and 'portraits of my fellow workers'), all feature in Yeats. The two writer's responses to painted portraits refract differing attitudes to class. WBY's fear that Augustus John's portrait made him a ‘tinker’ and ‘bar-tender’, subjects in Jack Yeats's 'The Tinker's Encampment' or 'The Poteen Makers', align with his rejection of Bastien Lepage’s painting of a 'clownish peasant' (CW3, 121), his view of Dublin drinkers with ‘fat blotched faces’ as akin to those ‘Da Vinci had drawn’ to instil ‘horror’ (CW3, 140-1), and claim that Degas’s dancers are 'ugly' as ‘chambermaids’ (Co Pl, 694). Painting those 'whose throats abhor the stiff foolishness of collars', as self-proclaimed subjects (1905) in portraits of small boxing halls in English cities (JY, 1991, 46), Jack Yeats levelled such class barriers but WBY's poetry is more aligned with his father's portraiture of those with status, inflected to include those with talent/merit. Beckett's Trilogy, as Geneviève Bonnefoi, a French Director in a Centre for Contemporary Art, noted early on, deploys a visual typology of distressed, badly dressed 'caricature(s) of what was once a man’ (Bonnefoi cited in Graver & Federman, 1979, 139-40). 'The Fiddler of Dooney' or 'The Fisherman', Yeatsian exceptions entitling the lowly, are not Beckettian portraits of the nameless, unnameable or numbered (as in the titles of modern paintings), the jobless or mentally ill. Godot may adapt the visual framing of David Caspar Friedrich's romantic painting; but it adopts the virtually classless subjects of Jack B. Yeats's Corner Boys, which Beckett owned, in dress, distress or undress. Jack Yeats skims ballad sheets for painting titles. One is entitled 'Left, Left / We Left Our Name / On the Road / On the Road / On the Famous Road / On the Famous Road / On the Famous Road / Of Fame'. WBY's Blueshirt ‘Marching Songs’ looks far "right" to ‘all that’s finished’ by ‘the captains that govern mankind’ in the 1930's (VP, 614-5). Grandeur and conservative hauteur interweave in the portrait poem set in Lissadell to infuse a complex beauty and poise where portraiture combines great delicacy and aristocratic pretensions but the tragedy of the poem is that in life (not in the portrait), the women have politically betrayed their high-born class.In using fine art to construct portraits of women the two writers differ. Early Yeats texts, adopt Pre-Raphaelitism, in theory and poetic practice, as romantic frame and filter, to pay tribute to women, to idealize female beauty or connote fright (incomplete) of the powerful, female gaze, so that lyric poem (or past painting) become a form of tribute or love gift; increasingly, however, texts turn from this position, imbricated in the stance of the abject viewer/consumer, immobilised or seduced by images, towards an emphasis on their own production and 'mastery' over such images and materials (as/in Greek sculpture), which they convert into powerful, durable, symbols, even if doubts periodically surface that the idea of absorbing images into a unified, powerful text may also may be an illusory pursuit. Beckett debunks the artifice of romance/idealization, in past fine art portraits of women (and men), from the outset, so the text turns away from the image/genre of the love lyric/loved portrait as a possibility that it, or reality, may realize or fulfil; the power of the gaze or the image, however, to immobilise, disrupt or fragment the text remains as a potent reminder that what men and women see and make (in portraying themselves/each other) is temporal, even delusional, and on the way to dissolution and ruin. In an early portrait of Yeats, by his father, just after the poet turned twenty, he resembles the pastor’s dreamy, visionary son in Rossetti’s Maids of Elfen-Mere (1855), which WBY admired. The subject/poet sits in abject reverie before three idealised women and, as in Pre-Raphaelite portraiture like Rossetti's Astarte Syriaca (1875-77) which Yeats admired in Manchester City Gallery, the perspective forces subject and viewer to kneel, as before an icon. Unlike poems directed to public rhetoric, this posture is adopted in early lyrics describing women, the central subject in Pre-Raphaelite painting, in which the early Yeats's circle was immersed. In the Maude Gonne poems, supplication spreads the embroidered cloths of heaven under the muse or loved one's feet; a late poem's refrain insists ‘Tall dames go walking in grass green Avalon’, that Pre-Raphaelite terminus Yeats's defends in prose by using Mrs Patrick Campbell's art collection - which included Edward Burne-Jones's iconic The Last Sleep of Arthur Avalon (1881-1896) - to trounce one critic's modern preference for 'a Post-Impressionist picture of a fat, flushed woman lying naked upon a Turkey carpet’ (CW5, 5 & 182, n.2). In ‘Broken Dreams’ Gonne's grey hair and ‘small hands' are 'not beautiful’ but realist flaws are foils offset her ‘perfect’ visual harmony even if chasing a likeness injects a modern, futile note in which words move (as in Beckett's Watt) chasing an illusory portrait between the renewing 'grave' (engraving) and life where ‘From dream to dream and rhyme to rhyme I have ranged / In rambling talk with an image of air: Vague memories, nothing but memories’ (VP, 355-7). Pre-Raphaelite, female portraiture is often underwritten by co-opting traditional, co-existing female stereotypes - of the destructive, aristocratic, seductress and Virgin/ideal - and Yeats finds in Rossetti's paintings of 'a woman’s face,’ the 'moment of intensity when the ecstasy of the lover and of the saint are alike' (E & I, 53). Autobiographies recall the Rhymers' Club found women 'romantic and mysterious' at a 'shrine' where they remembered 'the Lilith and the Sibylla Palmifera of Rossetti’ (CW3, 234). For Yeats, Burne-Jones’s figures are ‘good housewives; they sit often at the embroidery frame, and they have wisdom in flocks and herds and they are before all fruitful mothers’; conversely, Rossetti’s Venus Verticordia (1864-68) or Helen of Troy (1863) seduce the viewer. This bifurcated, painted duality enters Yeats's love lyrics. 'Solomon and Sheba' exploits the idea of the wise wife of the wise king; the destructive lover, with her Cupid’s arrow in Rossetti's Helen - described in a text on the reverse of this painting as a ’destroyer of men destroyer of ships, destroyer of cities’ - who fondles an incendiary flaming torch in a pendant while Troy burns in the background is a potent image skimmed for 'No Second Troy' Here, female beauty 'like a tightened bow', leads the poet to ask: 'Why, what could she have done, being what she is /Was there another Troy for her to burn? (VP, 256-7) Yeats and Gonne had viewed Rossetti's Astarte Syriaca (1887), a Venus with two torch bearers, her ‘sweet ministers’, in Manchester and the picture frame's sonnet proclaimed it had merged the real Jane Morris with an ideal, 'the original of those heads by M.A. [Michelangelo] which are portraits of you' (Rossetti cited in (ed.) Doughty & Wahl (1967), 1120-2). Painting and poem align in connecting idealised female portraiture with beauty and tragedy; but the fear lurking within the text - of Maude Gonne's, or female incendiary politics - fails to materialise as a reality or substance, beyond the painterly inspiration. Yeats's early love lyrics, in fact, are too reliant on Pre-Raphaelitism's idealised portraits whose symbolic weight as painted "beauties" is scarcely carried by flimsy textual embodiment. Parasitic on a sensuous 'type' of superlative Pre-Raphaelite beauty, the hyperbolic effect is disproportionate to any specified cause. The mawkish 'pearl-pale, high-born lady' on a horse with a 'sunset' on her 'lips', 'citron colour in her hair', whose 'white vesture flowed,/ And with the glimmering crimson glowed / Of many a figured embroidery… (VP, 3-4) is Pre-Raphaelitism's, not Yeats's, finest hour. Elaborately embroidered detail and colour, the most un-reproducible aspects of this painting genre, resist the poem's pastiche, but the desire to perfect women cosmetically persists in a late poem like 'A Woman Young and Old' where the poet darkens the eye 'lashes' and makes the 'eyes more bright' to look for the perfect 'face' he 'had/before the world was made' (VP, 531-2). Yeats's portraits of Maude Gonne suffer from drawing on Pre-Raphaelite central casting. Entering Autobiographies where ‘her complexion was luminous, like that of apple-blossom through which the light falls... her standing that first day by a great heap of such blossoms in the window’, she becomes a facsimile of Rossetti’s A Vision of Fiammetta (1878), framed similarly. ‘The Arrow’ idealises her as ‘Tall and noble but with a face and bosom /Delicate in colour as apple blossom’ (VP, 199). Beckett's portraits of females attack such idealized portraiture, turning Pre-Raphaelite-type framing devices and symbols against the subject. In Trilogy Moll, even in a photograph or 'daguerreotype', does not reveal her 'buck-teeth'; the 'traces' of flowers on 'trellis' framing her cannot even be assuredly identified as 'roses' (TRIL, 256). Beckett's potentially symbolic Irish heroine, the Smeraldina is no Maude Gonne accompanied by Pre-Raphaelite birds; she is ironically re-framed as the ‘sweetest little Pisanello of a birdface ever’ (MPTK, 267-8). Amidst much framing of female portraits, using Old Masters in Beckett's texts, it is difficult to cite any shorn of the irony he extends to male portraits. When Yeats's rejects Degas's Dancers foreshortening of their legs as an 'ugly', 'cynical' portrait crippling women, one recalls that Molloy, with his 'sick' legs, or one leg, jutting out at an odd angle likes 'negation, its relentless definition of man' (TRIL, 34 & 38). Ethereal and red-haired, Rossetti's depiction of Boccaccio’s dying muse is barely altered by Yeats: the painter's sonnets, known to Yeats and inscribed in the picture frame, note that 'Gloom-girt ‘mid Spring flushed apple-growth she stands... / Along her arm the sundered bloom falls sheer/In separate petals, each like a tear...'. Unlike ‘Solomon and the Witch’, where ‘the cockerel / [which] crew from a blossoming apple bough’ finds ‘the bride-bed brings despair,/ For each an imagined image brings/And finds a real image there’, this is shelf-bought ekphrasis without a trace of Beckettian irony. In Beckett's Trilogy, female and male portraiture seek neither a stable reality or ideal. The female Lousse, whose 'flatness' and 'hairy face' may mean she is 'a man...or at least an androgyne', tries to spy on Molloy, frequently covered with 'muck' and drawn to rubbish dumps, by framing him 'through the little chink among the leaves' (50-3). Such portraits of current and past "loves", Molloy concludes, may be entirely symptomatic of a human tendency to succumb to imaginary hallucinations or 'idyll[s]' of 'short duration', amidst a reality in which suffering, not a fake portrait of love, is the only reality (TRIL, 50-54). Yeats's The Speckled Bird, in which the narrator seeks ‘not for a woman, who would have bound his soul to definite hopes and dreams, but for that absolute of emotions, as it is in eternity, and which [we] seek and find for a moment in the paintings of the old [and] modern Pre-Raphaelites...and which we seek and do not find in the bed of love.’ (Yeats, 2002, 139) reflect on his own search for perfected images in paintings which escape from a reality that falls short of romance. This novel's parasitic aesthetic of undigested painterly influences, however, is surpassed in the best early poems, when they assimilate and digest such influences to create complex images, or suggest that the search for a unity of the imagined female/beloved and reality may be expressed or found in/by painting and poem. In ‘The Song of Wandering Aengus’, a complex portraiture refuses a singular Pre-Raphaelite image. The poet in the hazel wood ‘when moth-like stars were flickering out’ (as in George Wilson’s painting of Shelley’s Alastor in the woods with a single white moth fluttering at his shoulder) seeks the ‘glimmering girl with apple blossoms in her hair’ (Rossetti) in a luminous landscape (redolent of George Russell); but the portraiture morphs in time to the poem's assonantal music, as the girl flits between two - not a single painterly - light source. Moving between the 'golden apples of the sun' and 'silver apples of the moon', the girl eludes painted models in a symbolist poem as composite of inner vision and the necessity to find in reality an adequate image of beauty which answers to, or satisfies, the 'fire in the head'. A central scenario in Yeats's lyrics is the iconophobic moment where Fand 'lost the world for Emer and a kiss' (VP 164). 'Do we not seek our dissolution upon her lips?' Yeats asked of fair women (Yeats cited in Foster, 2003, 67-68) - which parallels Pre-Raphaelite portraiture's key moment, as in Rossetti’s Bocca Baciati / Lips That Have been Kissed (1859). The moment is crucial in multiple fine art images of Salomé, which Yeats knew intimately, and which drew on the Biblical account of the dancer who caused the prophet's beheading. The fear of losing one's head by succumbing to the female portrait/gaze is linked by Yeats with Beardsley's decapitation in The Climax (1894), the 'only' beautiful Beardsley drawing, and an image of ‘sex sublimated’ (CW3, 255). An essay on Shelley (1932) claims the ‘Salome drawings’ are ‘dark, destructive, indefinite’; they represent ‘fear of sex and death’ (CW5, 119). Whilst Beckett dismissed Mallarmé's Salomé as 'Jesuitical poetry'(SBL2, 134-5), he saw Caravaggio’s Beheading of St John the Baptist (1608) in Malta (1972) as ‘a great painting, truly tremendous’ and acknowledged it as the inspiration for the image of the decapitated, female head in Not I (1973). The fine art image of Salomé, a quintessential image of female power/cruelty, inspires Yeats (who greatly admired Moreau, who painted Salomé) and the female gaze which petrifies, in the Salomé fine art tradition, is a key image in ‘The Island of the Statues” (1885) and later poems depicting the inhuman, politicised Maude Gonne as a ‘stone doll’. The female gaze, which inflicts cruel wounds on the lover or turns him to stone, however, is overcome in texts redirecting their gaze back, and then imaging their own rhetorical power to sculpt and restore the prophet's, and other, decapitated head and set them back on plinths, a repeated image in Yeats's theatre-gallery. Just as Adolf Furtw?ngler’s Masterpieces of Greek Sculpture (which Yeats read 1920-25), separated casts of heads, are restored to the body/torso, to create ‘unity of being’ (Furtw?ngler, 1893,4), so late Yeatsian texts equate their own process with knitting body/mind back together into a unified form. In A Vision, Salomé represents the ultimate image of ‘the moment before revelation’ (CW14, 154); after revelation, in Yeats's late poems, such as 'A Bronze Head', the poem is solidified into sculpture, as a trope for the text's power to 'recast', control and unify the image. In the poem Maude's Gonne's 'vision of terror' which 'casts out / All that is not itself' (poet and poems lacking her direct political commitment?) is recast by the sculpture/poem to 'save' their noble subject from 'massacre' at the hands of 'this foul world'. When the poem refers to Gonne's 'form all full', it redirects us to Yeats's image for the ideal poem; when it suggests 'a sterner eye looked through her eye' it redirects us to the scopic power of the poem as a sculptural product. So when Yeats's proposes ‘some Herodiade of our theatre, dancing seemingly alone in her narrow moving luminous circle’, as an image of Irish, national theatre (CW14, 154), he ascribes to the poet's image the power to dance and entrance, to unify or unite the dancer, within the form of the poem/artwork itself, as the ultimate way in which the 'dancer' becomes the 'dance'.Beckett's Not I (1973) subverts this painterly tradition. The female head, not the prophet's, is visualized severed. Punished 'for some sin or other' but 'disconnected' so she 'never got the message' and 'couldn't make the sound out', this head is left with memories of past tears that come between her and her hand (now absent) to leave 'prayer unanswered'; her audio-visual image fades into the dark (CDW, 376-383). Prayer is unanswered, prophecy denied and severed, female head and voice deny any restoration of the Biblical, male, word. The play, where fine art supports a picturing of 'castration' and anti-love', suspends the image of woman and text between Hélène Cixous's 'two horrifying myths; between the Medusa and the abyss'. If the image is not severed from the 'Medussa effect' (Mitchell, 1994, 171-77), where a petrified (female) gaze is turned back on the viewer with redoubled power, it externalises inner being (male and female) as powerless in suffering and this is audited by a figure, 'sex undetermined' (CDW, 376). The Yeatsian painted woman who petrifies and immobilises man to 'come between him and the deed of his hand' (VP, 141) is now a disembodied, visual image, without hands, as female bodily and intellectual power (she 'could not remember...off hand...vain reasonings') and the male power of the text to create or control the image ('not knowing what...what she was') implode. The text, full of fragmented images and ellipsis demonstrates its own incapacity to achieve a unity or mastery over the images spewing from its mouth. The decapitation ('whole body gone...just the mouth') is an image of irrationally and power akin to Yeats's fear of ancient sculptures, where 'swallows' build 'nests in the stone mouths of immense images carved by nobody knows who’ (EXP, 7), an image fearing sculpted heads, whose maker cannot be known and whose mouth is so stuffed it cannot speak of its own ruin. If Salomé and Yeats's early Pre-Raphaelite, romantic heroines suggest Yeats's potentially tragic or fatal attraction to powerful female icons/symbols, over which text's seek rhetorical mastery, Beckett's engagement with this type of image provide text's with ironic predicaments, filtered through a post-romantic sensibility. As young Manfred or Shelley’s ‘Prince Athanase with his solitary lamp’, the young Yeats describes his search for a female counterpart ‘modelled on those in my favourite poets... lawless women without homes and without children’ or an Ophelia ‘drifting in a boat along some slow moving river between great trees’, an image whose variants exist in paintings WBY knew. In Beckett's Krapp’s Last Tape (1958), this Pre-Raphaelite beauty closes her eyes on a drifting boat amidst the 'glare' of a foundering portrait of suppressed male impotence and female blindness which block routes seeing or using painting/text as love tokens:-upper lake with the punt, bathed off the bank, then pushed out into the stream and drifted. She lay stretched out on the floorboards with her hands under her head and her eyes closed. Sun blazing down, bit of a breeze, water nice and lively. I noticed a scratch on her thigh...I said again I thought it was hopeless and no good going on and she agreed, without opening her eyes. I asked her to look at me and after a few moments – [Pause] – after a few moments she did, but the eyes just slits, because of the glare. I bent over her to get them in the shadow and they opened. [Pause. Low.] Let me in. [Pause.] We drifted in among the flags and stuck. The way they went down, sighing before the stem! I lay across her with my face in her breasts and my hand on her. We lay there without moving. But under us all moved, and moved us, gently, up and down, and from side to side. (CDW, 221) Beckett’s 'breeze' among broken 'flags' that go 'down' weaken Yeats's 'wind among the reeds' - 'Ah Pah! The wind in the reeds', Estragon says in Waiting for Godot (CDW, 21) when Vladimir mistakes this wind for the arrival of Godot - and, by extension, the Yeatsianmoment of transcendent inspiration. The heightened moment of Romanticism, when the subject attains unity with nature in poetic form, by being 'rolled round in earth's diurnal course', is disrupted by the 'glare' and rocking boat. The heroine with a 'scratch of her thighs' and water that is 'nice and lively' ironize this painterly/poetic momentas stable or eternal. As in a DFTMW, when the novel's couple 'loll' among 'reeds and rushes', the text notes the 'ark and mercy seat have sunk, the Shekinah [the settled dwelling] has fizzled out, the Cherubim are drowning' (DFTMW, 187). When Althea Gyles illustrated the cover for Yeats's Wind Among the Reeds (1899), the reeds as unbroken forms bend in an upward, interwoven, symmetrical arch, symbolically redolent of Celtic art or Japanese art's symbols of the eternal. Krapp records this past encounter, where reeds as broken forms 'went down sighing before the stem', as an image recorded by 'that stupid bastard I took myself for thirty years ago' who is now in 'viduity' (widowed) or 'vidua' (a weaver-bird) but whose tapes and 'spools' lie in disorder on the stage floor (CDW, 215-23). 2. Framing Landscapes As with portraits, the two writers' landscapes conscript differing painting traditions and construe the texts' power to capture landscapes differently. 'It is a natural conviction for a painter's son to believe that there may be a landscape that is symbolical of some spiritual condition', Yeats's Autobiographies note (Yeats cited in Loizeaux, 2003, 40). Poetry, Yeats informs his father (1913), attempts to realize 'ecstatic emotion symbolized in a definite imaginative region' (LET, 583). Yeats's landscapes open up personal memory and shared ground, in which past paintings offer routes into (Irish) spiritual territory, mythology and history. Texts evoke past, non-Irish realist and symbolist painting and Irish western, picturesque, pastoral landscapes, named and claimed as personal topography and/or national territory, as place. Beckett's landscapes, after early site specific depictions of the Irish, eastern seaboard and urban Dublin, increasingly resist claims of specific recognition or affirmation; they increasingly visualize space over place. Texts deploy Dutch Old Masters or modern paintings as models to frame depersonalised landscapes which resist being named, claimed or humanised in personal or kin connections or as symbols of beauty or nation. 'Some peace' is imagined found in Yeats's restorative 'Lake Isle of Innisfree'. Beckett's explosive 'to hell with all this fucking scenery' (TRIL, 254), as fictive characters travel to depopulated isles to kill one another, rejects landscape as picturesque or source of solace or romance; the 'fate of place' as local, actual, material or imaginary topoi in modern French philosophy, as Edward Casey pointed out, was to become an 'underworld' subsumed or appropriated in more abstracted 'space' [as in painting] which might be, as Jean Luc-Nancy put it, be 'here or there, selfsame with somewhere' (Casey and Nancy cited in ed. Casey, 1998, 339). Given Yeats's early experience of Sligo and the rural Irish west, this territory is visually mined, mimetically and idealistically, as product of direct observation (for its personal connections and picturesque beauty) in poetry conscripting its mythic potential and history via language and place-name nomenclature. Poetic pictorial 'titles' frame specific sites as they did in nineteenth century topographical paintings. Small pools scarce hold a star in 'hills above Glen-Car’ (VP, 88) alongside 'sands of Lissadell’, the 'hill of Lugnagall’, 'Munster grass and Connemara skies' and ‘lonely Echtge of the streams’ (VP, 127-128 & 203). The 'winds [which] have bundled the clouds high over Knocknarea' (VP, 207), in an Irish pastoral heartland where Yeats said he ‘buried... [his] mouth and raised over it a cairn - of clouds’ (CL1, 98), prefigure Paul Henry’s towering, western cumulus - although Yeats's recital of 'Innisfree' at a Lunn Travel Company lecture in Switzerland (1925) ‘with an air of suppressed loathing’ (Yeats cited Foster, 2003, 303) suggests an uneasiness with poetic landscape as pictured tourism. The microcosm of plant, animal life and light in Coole's seven woods from Shan-walla and its ‘willow-bordered pond’ to Pairc-na-Lee, 'Where hazel and ash and privet blind the paths’ (VP, 217-8), are akin to intimately drawn botanical illustrations, unlike Beckett's Molloy's sense of visual 'namelessness' where the 'larch tree' is the only one he can 'identify with any certainty' (TRIL, 30 & 35), where even the distinctive 'willow' can scarcely be identified in the minimalist landscape of Godot; it leaves Estragon wishing Vladimir would stop 'talk[ing]...about scenery' and 'look at this muckheap' - 'You and your landscapes' he adds in a furious swipe at the painterly genre as a means of identifying the self or locking it into a specific or symbolic scenery of romance (CDW, 57). Yeats's essay on Allingham’s Ballyshannon poems (1888) notes locales where ‘roads became a portion of your life forever’. Intimately known by those who ‘loved with a sense of possession even the roadside bushes’, this painted Irish landscape, in a practice Yeats saw constructed at Coole in his brothers', fathers', Lady Gregory's or Robert Gregory's drawings, is linked with a primal site hoarding shared memory. Jack Yeats claimed his work had 'somewhere in it a thought of Sligo' (JY cited in Arnold, 1998, x) and his Memory Harbour (1900), depicting the fishing village clustered around the harbour at Rosses Point, gifted to his brother (c.1901), performs this function in WBY's text: When I look at my brother's picture, Memory Harbour - houses and anchored ship and distant lighthouse all set close together as in some old map - I recognize in the blue coated man with the mass of white shirt the pilot I went fishing with, and I am full of disquiet and excitement, and I am melancholy because I have not made more and better verses. I have walked on Sinbad's shore and never shall another's hit my fancy. (CW3, 72)Realist painting and text/poem, as locus for personal memory and symbol of shared romance, have their value intensified by ‘hatred of London’ and Impressionism (in vogue when WBY was a Dublin student); homesick longing for a ‘sod of earth from some field I knew, something of Sligo to hold in my hand’ propels a ‘race instinct’ to connect locality, personality and nationality as ‘Irish subject-matter’ of deep attachment, at a time when ‘my country had not been born at all’ (CW3, 31). Beckett's Molloy merely notes the 'strangled creek' of Ballyba, its 'grey tides' of stagnant 'leaden water' and 'wet sands' akin to Blackpool, as a temporary tourist trap for 'unromantic people'; the narrator, whose 'sense of identity was wrapped in a namelessness often hard to penetrate', seeks other less 'compassionate sewers' in a 'placeless' landscape (TRIL, 123, 30 & 19). The landscape as pretext for 'a long face', as symbol of (Irish) nationality or home, or nostalgia for the Yeatsian 'sod' becomes 'artificially' created landscapes. Texts for Nothing 1 declares: 'I'll describe the place, that's unimportant. The top, very flat, of a mountain, no, a hill, but so wild, enough' (CSP, 100). Yeats's poetry's specific, Irish landscapes are not just direct observation of nature (the squirrel at Kyle na No or pool above Glen Carr aside) but views of cultivated territory, fields with houses, named locales staked out by history, owned and framed. These landscapes align with genres of nineteenth century topographical painting and drawing, which formed the core of Big House art collections, to which Lady Gregory and Robert Gregory added in drawing historical houses in the landscape, just as the imaginary Innisfree is resettled quickly with a planter's cabin, bean-rows and bees. When this pastoral landscape was hailed by 1940's American agrarian poets as an image of unity between humanity and landscape/nature, of 'the concrete relation to life undiluted by calculation and abstraction' by Allen Tate, the identification elides landscape as Simon Schama's 'work of the mind. Its memory... built up as much from strata of memory as from layers of rock' (Schama, 1995, back cover). Fine art/poetry add to, even create, the 'cultivated' landscape in Yeats's depictions of the big house amidst planted woodlands - he executed a pastel of Coole House and sketched its environs and trees with George Russell - and the poetry of mythic Ireland, seen in pre-plantation stones of Knocknarea or Queen Maeve's stones, via lore or folktale or ordinance survey sketch, occupy a close geographical proximity in poems, as they did in the pictured space from the Sligo home, Big House window or Coole's art collection.Beckett's Arsene in Watt notebooks satirizes this naming, historicising and ownership of landscape in past paintings/texts. Arsene, 'digging' into landscape, seeks an impossible, inhuman geological bedrock, demythologized stone that does not belong to Queen Maeve or High Cross but to a pre-human, non-national order. '"Never mind that now" cried Arsene. "Dig! Delve! Deeper! Deeper! The Cambrian! The uterine! The pre-Uterine!". The pre-uterine" we said. "No, that reminds us of the rocks at Greystones."' Arsene echoes Beckett's reading of Cezanne's dehumanized landscapes, where the rocks of Mont St Victoire connote a reality that turns away from human concerns as 'an unapproachable alien arrangement of atoms' (SBL1, 233); it echoes a refusal to conscript Jack Yeats's post-1930's landscapes for Irish historical or national memory. Landscape, read as petrified geology/painting rather than as history/text, more effectively divorces and distances the self from a familiarized place to blocks its use as symbol of personal memory or national connection. Unlike traditional, Irish topographical paintings which turn Giants' Causeway or Rock of Cashel from geological site into recognisable, visited historic or sacred site, Molloy's landscapes leave a protagonist decomposing and sucking stones (TRIL, 25 & 64). Rocks in painting or landscape - which vouchsafe Yeats a sacral vision of unity with the Rock of Cashel or named places for narrating a bog drowning in late poems - surface in Beckett's 1930's letters as responses to Cezanne's petrified landscapes, which offer dystopian 'images little suited to my situation' as the disintegrating Molloy puts it (TRIL, 75). In Beckett's 'Serena II' Ireland's 'Croagh Patrick wanted Hindu to spite the pilgrims' and to leave 'knees of stones' (CP, 246-8). Such stones dominate the anonymous, placeless landscapes in Beckett's short, late prose, to suggest visuality, art and human presence are a brief or eradicable trace. In Molloy, landscape offers 'no fatherland' for a protagonist who 'couldn't dig' with a spade in a locale that is 'so much Gaelic to me' (TRIL, 35) so one might be 'in China' or in a painting of Egypt at times (TRIL, 35, 25 & 61). The novel, pace Beckett's reading of Jack Yeats's landscapes, evokes and depersonalizes Irish landscape. Here roads are walked by disconnected strangers who exchange little conversation; they turn towards a distant sea in the east, and do not have a terminus in Sinbad's land or haven in 'Memory Harbour'. Irish boglands, potential poetic repository for Irish visual, sacral, excavations and connectivity (as in the Dinnseanchas tradition or Seamus Heaney's responses to T.P. Flanagan's paintings or P.V. Glob's archaeological photographs of bog burials), offer 'inferior turf or scraps of bog-oak used for making amulets...rosaries and other knick-knacks'. Place names become generic - 'Ballyba', 'Ballybaba' - and degenerate - 'hole'; visual treasures become the Turdy Madonna (TRIL, 35, 48 & 124). This landscape of de-sanctification or killing in Trilogy suggests Ireland is no special place requiring literal picturing in painting or text. The earth and sky, Molloy avers, mean 'regions do not suddenly end...but gradually merge into one another' to form an unframed, non-national 'world' landscape, 'unordered and unbordered'. Yeats's Robert Gregory's landscape paintings and life is attached to regional landscape - 'My country is Kiltartan Cross'; Beckett seeks the 'tumult' of European clouds which Yeats's links with the painter's death (VP, 328). The unease in Jack Yeats's resistance (1936-8) to MacGreevy's labelling him as 'more Irish than the Irish painter' and insistence that the painting entered a 'spirit land' to only belong 'among those who have elected to step upon the slippery clouds' (JY cited in Arnold, 1998, 280) finds its darker echo in Beckett. 'Landscape of a dream of integration', as in paintings in the Louvre, are tiresome in Beckett's opening vista in a DFMW so 'the only perspective worth stating is the site of the unknotting'; the book closes by insisting 'Landscape in Ireland' is where 'our national visibility' disappears in 'incontinent skies' and concludes: 'Don't cod yourself. Those are clouds that you see, are your own nostalgia' (DFMW, 13 & 240). Beckett's eastern, urbanised Irish seaboard opposes Yeats's western landscape as primal site of vision or purity and fine art sources informing these respective visions differ. Yeatsian epiphany in landscape happens in a liminal twilight, before the late poetry of the shades; it synthesizes oppositions (dawn/ dusk, sunlight/moonlight, midnight/noon, fire/ice, gold/silver) to seek a stable pictured moment akin to nineteenth century Romantic or Symbolist paintings. The 'silver apples of the moon' and 'golden apples of the sun', in poem/symbolist painting, exist beyond light pollution. Malone's place is one where 'The night is strewn with absurd lights, the stars, the beacons, the buoys, the lights of the earth and in the hills the faint fires of the blazing gorse' (TRIL, 263). Beckett’s famous epiphany, in his mother’s bedroom, is fictionalised and set on this eastern coast in Krapp’s Last Tape. Darker, dimmer, more threatening black expanses of Dutch nocturnal landscapes, inspire this coastal landscape where a personal, felt darkness threatens to extinguish light outside the safety of 'Memory Harbour': The vision at last. This I fancy is what I have to record this evening, against the day when my work will be done... What I suddenly saw then was this... the miracle... the fire that set it alight... great granite rocks the foam flying up in the light of the lighthouse and the wind-gauge spinning like a propeller, clear to me at last that the dark I have always struggled to keep under is in reality my most - ...unshatterable association... (CDW, 220) Given Beckett's letters (1931) image melancholic stasis as a ‘dead spot’, 'a carrefour [crossroads] of memories...moulin à larmes [tearmill]’ (cited in Nixon, 2011, 44) and annotation (1934-5) of R.H. Wilenski’s Dutch Painting (1929) which claims these nocturnal landscapes are ‘no longer a backcloth' but 'a boundless and eternal mystery' in 'fragments' which are 'emotive' and unknowable via rational or 'geometric symbols' (Wilenski, 1945, 96), given his pursuit of dark spot lit paintings by Adam Elsheimer in the 1930's - Elsheimer’s ‘exquisite’ depictions of dark and boundless space, of ‘water and woods’ he ‘kept seeing’ in his imagination (1935) and he claimed ‘Elsheimer is the man’ (1937) after seeing his night-time Flight into Egypt’ (SBL1, 338 & 376) - this Irish pier and lighthouse convert painterly Dutch windmill into a spinning Irish wind-gauge. Painting assists a direct vision of Ireland converted to one of inner darkness. Endgame's plea that ‘You cried for night; it falls: now cry in darkness’, a rare instance in Beckett when 'time is over' (CDW, 133) may echo a cri de coeur from St. John of the Cross, Schopenhauer or Blaise Pascal’s Pensées with its dark ‘eternal silence’ of night where man has lost God (Pascal, 1670, 73-82) but the philosophical image is assisted by Dutch painting's dark 'tableaus' as inspirations comingle in landscapes of extinguished light. From the first ‘mural glen’ and 'oily sea' (VP, 49) in The Wanderings of Oisin (1899) to The Shadowy Waters (1906), Yeats's pastoral landscapes are reconstructed from memory and non-Irish painting traditions. Yeats lived at least half of his life in London, so these poetic Irish landscapes fill an experiential gap by calling up nineteenth century pastoral, symbolic, romantic, or magical styles from painting to apply these to Ireland in poetry. Visionary fairyland (George Russell's canvases), highly coloured dream-worlds (Pre-Raphaelite palettes), mythic Ireland (faux medieval Morrisian tapestries and tableaux) co-exist with specified places or liminal locales, rendered more mysterious by symbolism than by mimetic or Impressionist styles. Grey tonalities are redolent of Whistler but modern paintings are less invoked than past painterly styles of clearly outlined symbols pace Blake and Jack Yeats's woodcut style in Broadsheet illustrations, 1902-3. Theorising landscape, as ideal synthesis of symbols for aesthetic beauty and mythic Irish unity which ‘marries... [people] to rock and hill’ (CW3, 167), Yeats's “wording” of landscape with Irish place or mythic names also attempts to visually ‘seal with the right image the soft wax [of Ireland] before it began to harden’ (CW3, 104). Beckett's Molloy's protagonist resists such 'lousy unconquerable genes'; as 'melting wax' he seeks to literally merge into rock and be un-seen as stone (TRIL, 75, 19 & 12). Beckett's early prose and poetry frame a recognisable, named Dublin cityscape using modern painterly references and expressionist-cum-Fauvist colour. Named streets, 'livid' canals with 'grey donkeys' (CP, 6-8), 'Cezanne monster' trams (DFTMW, 167), a polluted Liffey with 'blotches of doomed yellow' and 'vigilant gulls in the grey spew of the sewer' amidst nursing homes and lunatic asylums, Evening Herald and Bovril signs, prevail. MPTK's s 'knee-and elbow position on the pavement' (Beckett cited in O'Brien, 1986, 195), as vantage point, unlike Yeats's 'pavement grey', does not yield to Innisfree or Coole lake; 'Donabate sad swans of Turvey Swords' (CP,12) replace 'wild' swans at Coole. These landscapes, mobile and harried, are intercut with splintered visions drained of pictorial Romanticism. WBY's consoling "natural" trees at Coole are suburban larches connoting 'pain drawn like a cork' (CP,12). At Dublin's Parnell Bridge a 'barge' is 'dying': canal water does not 'lap' but ripples in 'weals'; Fauvist colour infects plant life as wounded, bleeding or diseased 'rafflesia'. Yeats's western landscape 'where midnight's all a glimmer and noon's a purple glow' amidst 'lapping water' (Ireland heightened by Pre-Raphaelite colour into harmony) is replaced by a Dublin canal lock as 'foaming cloister' to reveal 'a travesty of champaign .../and the stillborn evening turning a filthy green/manuring the night fungus'; an 'ink of pestilence' prevents landscape functioning as consolation and the inflamed, highly coloured Liffey and 'black west' disappearing and 'throttled with clouds' is redolent of the churned up impasto of Jack Yeats (CP, 6-7). W.B. Yeats's landscape may deny solace, as in 'The Sorrow of Love' where a moonlit 'brawling of a sparrow in the eaves' (VP, 119) troubles the Romantic search for solace but Malone's 'chatter of sparrows at dawn' triggers an inner desire to count in a 'Dead world, airless, watertight' (TRIL, 185). Yeats's early poetic landscapes often replace mimetic particularity with glowing supernatural, transformations and suggest George Russell's visionary canvases as inspiration for conversions of Ireland into a numinous world supporting visions of gem-like radiance. In The Celtic Twilight (1893) the poet is painter/visionary in the A.E. mould. The writer ‘delights in strong effects of colour; spirits who have upon their heads...feathers of peacocks; a phantom reaching from a swirl of flame towards a star; a spirit passing with a globe of iridescent crystal’ (Yeats, 1893, 20). A.E. illustrated Yeats’s Dhoya depicting a landscape glowing like precious stone; Yeats's ‘The Eaters of Precious Stones’ capture a landscape where gems ‘glittered green and crimson’; The Secret Rose (1897) has Ireland ‘carved of precious stones’ and Sleuth Wood is 'cut out of green beryl', its waters shining 'like pale opal’ (MYTH, 100 & 175). Painters of supernatural fairies by moonlit lakes known to Yeats - Puvis de Chavannes or Odile Redon - probably help support such landscape visions, when, as Russell puts it, ‘the heart of the hills... opened' and one found 'ponderous mountains piled above the palaces of light, and the winds were sparkling and diamond clear, yet full of colour as an opal, as they glittered...’ (Russell cited in Summerfield, 1975, 12-13). The poetry of Irish fairyland from ‘The Stolen Child’ (1889) to ‘The Song of Wandering Aengus’ (1897), capturing ‘all that could be painted upon canvas, or put into stories to make one’s hair stand up’(CW5, 49), and its heightened colour and enamelled brilliance also draw on a Pre-Raphaelite palette as Terence Brown notes. In these western landscapes the mimetic - Louis MacNeice's 'white Tintoretto clouds' and 'grain of passing emerald light' and 'broken bog with its veins of amber water' (MacNeice,2007, 263 & 265) - yield to the supernatural, to highly coloured precious ground symbolic of a place where visionary forms are found. If Yeats poems, like ‘The Song of Wandering Aengus’, call up glowing, crystalline, landscapes lit in a supernatural light, to echo George Russell's paintings 'peopled with radiant spirit-beings caught in a moment of light-hearted blitheness in some dappled natural setting such as a lake, a seashore, or a forest’ (Kuch, 1986, 62-3), the poetry increasingly abandons this painterly genre. Eliot contended Yeats's landscapes were a product of 'crystalgazing and hermetic writings' (Eliot, 1934, 44) which 'fabricate an individual religion' but Yeats also critically records Russell’s art school drawings from inner visions ‘without research into the natural form’ dispense with sketches from reality so fellow-art student's noted this was ‘too easy, a great deal too easy!” For with brush and pencil he was too coherent’ (CW3, 196). Blake's harder edged line, or Synge's ‘The Passing of the Shee’, subtitled ‘After looking at one of A.E.’s pictures’, which bids ‘adieu’ to fairyland where 'The poets played.../ To learn their ecstasy’(Synge cited in Pierce, 2000, III; 15-16) become an antidote after 1900 in depictions of a more realist Beckettian ‘ditch’: so ‘We’ll stretch in Red Dan Sally’s Ditch/ And drink in Tubber Fair' as one poem has it. The early poetry's flashes of visual accuracy, its stars like ‘bubbles in a frozen pond’, often swamped by ‘ruby’ meteors or ‘moonlit vapours’ pace Russell (VP, 88 & 601-2), yield to a more critical wind - Beckett's 'cang' - that troubles the ‘old brown thorn-trees [which] break in two over Cummen Strand' in a search for 'images' which ‘Recognize the five [senses] /That make the Muses sing’ or which capture ‘the form/Where the mountain hare has lain’(VP, 350 & 477-479). Russell's fairyland is increasingly abandoned even if Ireland's topographical specificity is never as erased as it is in Beckett's later texts. Yeats's early landscapes also suggest images of Chaucerian pilgrimage, found in his prose, are interwoven with William Morris’s Arthurian knights/tapestries to infuse locales inhabited by Oisin’s Irish horse riders with reverie and desire (CW3, 166-167). Poem as locale infused with mythic history as 'great tapestry' picturing place is a metaphor Yeats favours (E & I, 513). Ireland becomes a site for hounds and luminal deer fleetingly framed between trees in a ‘woven world-forgotten isle’, a medieval Morrisian tapestry where 'Time can never mar a lover's vows /Under that woven changeless roof of boughs' (VP, 126). This poetic landscape alleviates Romantic poetry’s essential inner condition, that of ‘solitude and distance and fear of the world’ as Seamus Heaney puts it, by combining Russell's fairyland with Edward Burne-Jones’s Pre-Raphaelite painting as the creation of ‘a beautiful romantic dream of something that never was, never will be – in light better than any light that ever shone – in a land no one can define, or remember, only desire – and the forms divinely beautiful’ (Burne-Jones cited in Wood, 1981, 119). Past painting assuages specific Irish historic grievances to sweeten historic losses or Ireland’s ‘wrong’. Pre-Raphaelite or Morrisian modes re-settle males back into a mythic-pagan, sub-Arthurian landscapes as chivalric knights. Women inhabit medieval Catholic Christendom, a pre-colonial, pre-Reformation landscape where Cathleen ní Hoolihan exists ‘purer than a tall candle before the holy rood’; as in plays, she withstands a despicable, English secular seducer offering a materialist ‘pot of broth’. Pre-Raphaelitism's medievalism permits Yeats - much as Lady Gregory (1978, 49) noted it prompted William Morris to visit Burne-Jones's studio and strut in armour - to indulge in Arthurian wish fulfilments. Just as Walter Scott's post Act of Union Scottish novels preserve painterly images romanticising Jacobinism and the lost cause of House of Stuart, from a safe distance accommodating Anglo-Scots political realities - Yeats's father read Scott to him as a boy (CW3, 68) and he re-read Ivanhoe in his mid-fifties - so Pre-Raphaelitism permits a pre-Act of Union, pre-Christian, virtuous and noble Ireland to exist where dragons (or England) are slain but no actual, contemporary, political killing is involved. After studio visits to Jack B. Yeats (1930-36), Beckett suggested these landscapes conveyed ‘the inorganism of the organic – all his people are mineral in the end... pure inorganic juxtapositions...’; he read Paul Cezanne's London exhibition (1934) as ‘landscape with personality a la rigeur’ but ‘incommensurable with all human expressions whatsoever...it has no communications to make’ akin to ‘anthropomorphised landscape’ by Avercamp or nature ‘in travail’ by Corot (SBL1, 222-7). This non-relational landscape, erasing connections to Irish topography and heroic action is clarified in creative texts. The ‘absence of a rapport’ in Cezanne’s landscapes or Jack Yeats's painting which may ‘turn away from the visible without it being of consequence’ (DISJ, 149) registers in poems like 'Neither' (1976): To and fro in shadow from inner to outer shadowFrom impenetrable self to impenetrable unself by way of neither. ‘Self’ and ‘unself’, individual/national subject and object in the landscape are ‘impenetrable’ and movement ‘to and fro… by way of neither’ ends in an ‘unspeakable home’ or ‘the space that intervenes’ (CP, 258). As in Beckett's reading of painting the text seeks non-personal, non-Irish, non-national space. Molloy's landscape, redolent in content, framing and colour of Jack Yeats's post-1930's painting strike a similar note of alienation, a petrifaction heightened by the text: ....I saw A and C going slowly towards each other, unconscious of what they were doing.... The road, hard and white, rose and fell... they... halted, face to face, as in the country, on a deserted road, two wayfaring strangers will... They turned towards the sea which, far in the east, beyond the fields, loomed high in the waning sky. Then each went on his way... C on by ways he seemed hardly to know... like someone trying to fix landmarks in his mind... The treacherous hills where he fearfully ventured...no doubt only known to him from far... the plain, the sea, and then these self-same hills... indigo in places... hidden valleys that the eye divines from sudden shifts of colour and then from other signs, for which there are no words, nor even thoughts.... He hadn't seen me. I was perched higher... against the rock the same colour as myself, that is grey. The rock he probably saw... (TRIL, 10-12).Figures labelled anonymously 'A' or 'C', as in old woodcuts, are erased out of these legible contours. The potential symbolism of an identifiable figure/landscape based on clear spatial, distinctions etched between figure and ground yields to a temporal process in which figures fragment, ground envelopes and colour breaks down line. The stable, painted moment, an imagined merger or symbolic unity with landscape (the Romantic sublime) becomes one where narrator/ figures are suffocated by landscape into anonymity as part of mineral process of breakdown. Yeats's ‘In Memory of Major Robert Gregory’?(1918) invokes painting as sister ‘discipline’, in gazing on the Irish pastoral landscape enables reflections on Gregory as soldier, horseman and painter - a type of Renaissance man rooted in landscape killed in an air crash in the First World War:We dreamed a great painter had been bornTo cold Clare rock and Galway rock and thorn,To that stern colour and that delicate lineThat are our secret disciplineWherein the gazing heart doubles her might. (VP, 326) As creator of pictorial images with 'vast austere rhythms' (Yeats's words), as preserver of nineteenth century pastoral painting, as prospective heir of the big house and its art, Gregory's nineteenth century painting style of pastoral realism and symbolism is borrowed to permit both landscape arts, poetry and painting, to ‘double’ their ‘might’: For all things the delighted eye now seesWere loved by him: the old storm broken treesThat cast their shadows upon road and bridge;The tower set on the stream’s edge;The ford where drinking cattle make a stirNightly, and startled by that soundThe water-hen must change her ground;He might have been your heartiest welcomer. (VP, 326) The poem is not just a transcription a Gregory-type painting, which Yeats found ‘full of airy distinction’ and thwarted potential but the cattle at the ford - as in Constable’s Hay Wain and medieval Norman Tower (painted by Gregory for the poet) - are, quintessentially, romanticism's key subjects. John Ruskin's drawing manual, recommended artist's seek 'picturesque material...in the top of an old tower', illustrated in his diagram of a mouldering Norman-style tower (Ruskin, 1857, 163-5); style/content as 'the woods of arcady' suggest the realism/idealism of Samuel Palmer's etching of The Lonely Tower to which Yeats refers in A Vision and a later poem. Written four years after John Quinn displayed Jack Yeats's art in the New York Armoury International Exhibition of Modern Art (1913) and before MacGreevy's poem 'De Civite Hominum' depicted a warplane crashing in flames over the trenches as 'A Matisse ensemble' (MacGreevy in ed. Dawe, 2008, 90-91), Yeats's poem turns away from modern models in fine art for landscape poetry. If modernity ruffles the water, startles water-hen or snaps old broken trees, John Lavery's or Paul Nash’s central image in war paintings of broken trees is decentred. Pastoral Irish landscape renews itself. The natural order is restored as stable image and Romantic ‘value’. The aesthetic is informed not only by reading Plautinus (after 1914) where the soul finds permanent ease in the natural world (Arkins, 1990, 53) but by Yeats's idea that 'A man of letters may perhaps find...in old Chinese painting, in the woodcuts and etchings of Calvert and Palmer, in Blake’s woodcuts to Thornton’s Virgil, in the landscape background of Mr Ricketts’ ‘Wise and Foolish Virgins’, something that he does not find in the great modern masters, and that he cares for deeply’ (UP2, 430). Beckett's spring/autumn landscape in Watt plangently celebrates 'the larch turning green every year a week....the children walking in the dead leaves' before noting the 'the whole bloody business starting all over again' (Watt, 38-9) until such yearning becomes an 'ironic Arcadianism' akin to Gerhard Richter claim of his post-war pastoral paintings like Landscape near Hubbelrath (1969), recycling subjects from Caspar David Friedrich, that these forms of 'yearning' and irony were 'motivated by the dream of classical order and a pristine world - by nostalgia... [so that] the anachronism in them takes on a subversive and contemporary quality' (Richter, 1995, 98).Landscapes with trees, are central in Yeats's Blakean poems like 'The Two Trees' (1892) with its symbolic 'holy tree' that 'grows in thine own heart' and a cabbalist rose-tree, drawn by Althea Gyles, appeared on the cover of The Secret Rose (1897). Virginia Woolf (cited in Foster, 2003, 413) noted Yeats, in 1930, was ‘a solid wedge of oak’, someone living in the ‘centre of an immensely intricate briar bush... [where] every twig was real to him’ and poems like 'In the Seven Woods' bear her out, describing mimetically, seven different tree microclimates although trees may also symbolize religions and suggest the Greek Church, ‘a triangle like all true religion’, which sits alongside Catholicism, ‘a bramble-bush’, and Protestantism as ‘a broomstick’ in the prose (CW3, 157). When Beckett contended Giacometti's frequently mistook art's minor problem as a 'struggle to do what he knew was impossible; the creation of an illusion as real as reality itself' for its major problem, to represent this as a 'problem' without 'solution', he illuminates a process in which they co-sculpted, overnight, an emaciated, two metre tall, plaster tree for Waiting for Godot so as to 'make it sparser, smaller, the branches thinner' (Beckett cited in Lord, 1996, 289), neither mimetic nor symbolic. Ironic, replacing a previous tree made from coat hangers wrapped in tissue, this tree advertises its own failure to present Yeatsian landscape as reality or represent it as symbol, even as denuded Protestant 'broomstick'. Given Mondrian's paintings's evolution from Yeatsian, realist trees (1890's) and semi-abstract, symbolic trees (1908-11) to their disappearance into abstract, city grids (in the 1930's and 40's) Yeats's retention in late poems of his 'great rooted blossomer' as part mimetic/part symbol reveal a line into abstract, painterly landscapes he was not prepared to cross. Godot's mechanical tree, Murphy's final union with theatre plumbing, Beckett's use of quotation from Yeats in Happy Days seen as using 'just bits of pipe I happen to have with me' (SBL4, 291), all suggest Daniel Albright's (2003, 8) 'Neoplasticist Beckett whose canon evolves like Mondrian's' has substance. Like his staged tree, withholding a mimetic or symbolic landscape, characters in Quad, lit by different coloured lights, walk in a patterned, abstract grid; this lit 'boogie-woogee' rectangle visualizes a landscape that is nowhere except in the staged text. 'At the present moment, after a long period during which the arts had put aside almost every thing but imitation, there is a tendency to overemphasize patterns, and a too great anxiety to see that those patterns themselves have novelty’, Yeats asserts in 1916 contra Pound/Cubism (CL InteLex # 2880); routes towards the visual patterns in Quad are blocked. 'No painting is 'more replete' than Mondrian's Beckett's 'Three Dialogues' assert. In a draft review of MacGreevy's monograph on Jack Yeats, Beckett rejects modern painting's significance as depicting an actual Irish landscape to approvingly echo Kandinsky's ?ber das Geistige in der Kunst; suggesting painting as abstraction is akin to a discovery of a concrete inner reality, Beckett states: 'Since all is mind, inextricably, the eye, the hand, the brush, the site, the earth, the sky and the po [sic] on the dresser, let it be mind' (Beckett, TCD MS 9072, f. 13). In Molloy landscape is noted as 'treacherous' (TRIL, 11), a painted landscape incapable of offering realism or a 'truncated Symbolist aesthetics' (Robinson, 1985, 75). When JBY suggested his son would 'give tongue to the sea cliffs' of Sligo (CW3, 52), he predicted a poetry of affective claims on Irish landscape in mimetic and symbolic poems. In this poetry actual stones become portals to myths and places and connect with personal experience and historical memory: swans are 'lovers' in cold/Companionable streams'; a water-hen is 'your heartiest welcomer' (VP, 333 & 326). Beckett's Trilogy personifies landscape but if its 'arse' may end in 'Australia' or ground is figured as ‘the face of wind-swept wastes’, connectivity is disrupted. Atomised, dehumanized landscapes redolent of readings of Cezanne and Jack Yeats as creating a ‘new balance between the landscape and figure’, an ‘association and spartness [for apartness]' where neither is ‘subdued’ to the other (SBL1, 598-600) is engaged. In 'La falaise' [The Cliff], written for the painter Bram van Velde’s exhibition (1975), figuration/landscape fuse in an abstract text/imaginary painting which cannot be framed in reality or by either art. Symbolic birds (gone) leave the skull as figurative, 'mortal' trace and inanimate part of the landscape so neither skull nor cliff/landscape can be 'known', framed or represented from detached mimetic or symbolic perspectives: Window between sky and earth nowhere known. Opening on a colourless cliff. The crestescapes the eye wherever set. The base as well. Framed by two sections of sky forever white. Any hint in the sky at a land’s end? The yonder ether? Of sea birds no trace. Or too pale to show. And then what proof of a face? None that the eye can find wherever set. It gives up and then the bedlam head takes over. At long last looms the shadow of a ledge. Patience it will be enlivened with mortal remains. A whole skull emerges in the end. One from among those such residua evince. Still attempting to sink back its coronal into the rock. The old stare half showing within the orbits. At times the cliff vanishes. Then off the eye flies to the whiteness verge upon verge. Or thence away from it all. (CSP, 257) Yeats's father's echoing Wordsworthian cliff return poet's and painter's call as perceived andsonic object; Beckett's cliff is an ‘empêchement’ (obstacle) which hinders vision and resistsbeing framing by eye, text or canvas. The inner eye which resurrects landscape as a 'Cold Heaven' - the symbolic and mimetic wintry landscape where Yeats 'saw the cold and rook-delighting heaven /That seemed as though ice burned and was but the more ice' (VP, 316) to stage a clash of contrary symbols in a landscape 'riddled with light' where past Ghosts return into a 'stricken' consciousness - face a 'synaptic chasm' in Beckett's Golgotha, the place of the skull. Beckett's cliff, shorn of detail, colour and impossible to frame between ‘two skies’ registers the ‘deep-seated invisibility of exterior things’ which Beckett's art's essay attributes to Bram van Velde's abstract paintings (DISJ, 118-32). Old Masters' skull as memento mori is re-configured as ghostly, semi-abstract trace, elusive to consciousness, bone vacated by brain on death. Later, Beckett claimed (1985) that in Jack B. Yeats's studio forty years earlier the painter's suggestion that his paintings had become 'less conscious' had registered with him as 'lightening bolts' (Beckett cited in Armstrong 2003, 33). Such ‘abstraction’ is imaged in Yeats’s OBMV (1936) as art's death or demise. Here Eliot’s ‘Whispers of Immortality’ (1918) reveal ‘No contact possible to flesh / Allayed the fever of the bone’ akin to a 'velvet mole' seeking ‘disembodied bones’ as ‘essential form’. Yeats cites a recent painting by a ‘well-known woman painter’ who ‘drew my house’ but ‘reduced the trees to skeletons as though it were mid-winter, in pursuit of “essential form”’ in a mistaken modern pursuit of art as ‘horror of life, horror of death’ (CW5, 190). The skull as essential form, where human bone and landscape meet, and the mind as a 'mole' or underground rodent 'Still gnawing my way to scant light without' (SBL4, lxxiv & 353) are core images for Beckett of where humanity and landscape meet and late landscapes, described as 'frescoes of the skull' (Knowlson & Pilling, 1980), are part of a project signalled as early as 'Echo's Bones'. These petrified landscapes of dried bones suggest a visual imagination more aligned with Eliot's disjunctive Waste Land than Yeats's Irish, 'mural glen'.3.Framing the City'Mural glen', not metropolis, is key subject in Yeats's poetry. Poems' 'titles' name people (portraits) and places (landscapes), not cities. Paintings of the city inspire Ezra Pound's essays on Wyndham Lewis's drawings and Leger's paintings; they do not inspire Yeats in essays, even though he knew London and Dublin well, visited Paris and toured American cities. The OBMV links Manet and Eliot to criticize grey, monotonous, heterogeneous realism typified by city art which leaves Yeats unable to 'endure the grey middle-tint' (CW5,191) which became an increasing signature of a real consciousness of reality in Beckett's creative texts. For Yeats such painting/poetry where ‘The morning comes to consciousness' in 'the sawdust trampled street / With all its muddy feet that press / To early coffee stands...’ falls short; its democratic footprint, replaces traditional art print, where Dulac's centaur has 'stamped' its hoof print near the woods. 'The most revolutionary man in poetry during my life-time, though his revolution was stylistic alone', Yeats asserts in 'A Broadcast', 'was T.S. Eliot'; significant form, divorced from content, and a style of disjunctive, juxtaposed images of metropolitan subject matter, inform Yeats's critique: No romantic word or sound, nothing reminiscent, nothing in the least like the painting of Ricketts could be permitted henceforth. Poetry must resemble prose, and both must accept the vocabulary of their time; nor must there be any special subject-matter. Tristram and Iseult were not a more suitable theme than Paddington Railway Station. The past had deceived us: let us accept the worthless present.’ (CW5, 95)The railway station, 'special subject matter' in Monet or Frith's painting and W.H. Auden's'Night Mail', highly visible in Imagism, or present in Euston station, outside Yeats's door, or a'stamped' Italian 'rail pass' Ezra Pound carried, are part of the 'worthless', non-pastoralpresent. Nineteenth century "pastoral" poetry, like Wordsworth's, detours to celebrate London's wharf and skyline, its 'ships, towers, domes, temples and theatres' in 'Composed Upon Westminster Bridge'. Yeats's poetry's ships sail back to the fine art city of ancient Byzantium, whose 'domes' replace London's 'spires'; its symbolic Norman tower is set amidst fields in western Ireland in a landscape evoking Samuel Palmer's pastoral prints; its 'temples' are from ancient Sparta in A Vision; its theatre on Abbey Street, Dublin, opens on vistas of ancient Japan or Ireland. Beckett's poems' Fauvist-cum-Expressionist, Liffey deepening a 'clot of anger' prefigures, the Thames in Murphy where ‘all life is figure and ground’ on London’s Embankment as ‘artists of every kind, writers... painters and decorators, sculptors and statuaries' pass in ‘schools and singly...up and down’ and a prostitute under the sign of the 'lucky' colour lemon leaves the protagonist's ‘yellow all revived’; here indifferent barges ply a modernist river ‘heaped high with waste paper of many colours’ (MU, 6, 12-13 & 23). German Expressionist paintings (with their high colouring) and drawings and etchings with their highly coloured fascination with metropolitan alienation and prostitution align with Beckett's city texts but these painting analogues do not exist in Yeats's texts: the 'vivid faces' of 'Easter 1916' are not 'livid' in visual colour, nor 'sickly' as Baudelaire's beggar girl with her wooden clogs and stockings full of holes; the rising disturbs the pastoral landscape's 'natural' order far more than Dublin's Liffey or urban structure. The demand that modern poetry engage with the city in order to be modern is rebuffed in Louis MacNeice's defence of Yeats's poetry where quality of style, not quantity of urban content, matters. Intriguingly, MacNeice's own poetry's engages with the industrial city as quintessential landscape which Yeats, in the Daily Express (1898), attacks in rebuffing John Eglinton’s demand for a contemporary poetry of the ‘“Kinematograph, the bicycle, electric tramcars, labour saving machines, labour saving contrivances etc.”; these are 'realistic enough,’ Yeats suggests but the ‘ideal harmony’ or 'transcendent realities' in 'creating poetry, painting and music', are not to be found in urban consciousness or use of city as subject (CL2, 295-96). The contemporary is temporary. Yeats's list suggests the city leaves the unheard word swamped by visual signs (he notes London streets 'greatly improved by the darkness. Not one lighted advertisement of Bovril') whereas Beckett's Belacqua sitting under Dublin's sculpture of Thomas Moore finds solace in irony there - under 'the big Bovril sign... Bovril into Salome...and Tommy Moore there with his head on his shoulders' (DFMW, 200). Yeats's A Vision critiques Rodin - Arthur Symons's quintessential modern sculptor and ‘visionary’ who uncovers ‘truth’ in his essay 'Rodin' (Fortnightly Review, June 1902) - as making his Gates of Hell ‘out of fragments...that he found unable to hold together’ - ‘the hell of Baudelaire not of Dante’(CW13, 174). City sculptor and city poet (T.S. Eliot and Joyce) ‘break up the logical processes of thought by flooding them with associated ideas or words that seem to drift into the mind by chance’ to produce images of ‘a man fishing behind a gas works, the vulgarity of a single Dublin day prolonged...’ alongside ‘the Fisher King, Ulysses’; these disjunctive images are disparaged as akin to making a 'dish... from what is found in the pantry and the cook will not open her book’ (CW13, 211-3). Unified form, not fragmented city content, registering as collaged images, matter in both poetry and painting. Significant strands in modern painting and early twentieth century poetry, representing the urban or evoking modern materials, separate Yeats's poetry from this art and urban readers' direct experience so poems and art essays put a premium on what has to be imagined in/from previous art traditions or experienced in non-urban locales. Populist cinema or sporting arena, from Beckettian borrowings of Chaplin to Jack Yeats's East End boxing matches (1903-5), the poetry of what is seen or 'lost in the lights of a greyhound track' (O'Callaghan, 1999, 42) or pictured in greyhound races (by the contemporary Irish painter Michael McGuinness's canvases) are denied. Conscripting Samuel Palmer's engraved moonlight over cornfields and the medieval, symbolic tower in the Irish west, the texts leave a 'familiar' but lost moon to Malone in London where he asks '...what have the stars to do with the city?' (TRIL, 170). Irish pub, a locus in Beckett's short stories and Jack Yeats's painting, is replaced by cottage hearth or country house with its great windows, as in John Lavery. 'On the Boiler' (1939) attacks ‘new art’ because ‘unlike ancient art, it is urban’ to cite 'the modern town’ as a place where thought/ meditation are impossible amidst ‘mechanical routine’ and 'romantic subject matter’ is erased (CW5, 220-252). The shattered, desiccated, or nervously exhausted urban experience amidst city flux, which modernist painting and Beckett's Murphy registers, is missing in Yeats's poetry. In theorising these objects of modernity out of both arts, Yeats denies himself a potential repository of urban images which his readers experienced and knew from other poetry and painting. Perhaps, then, the poetry's conscription of Greek fine art and past painting, as image repository for the slow accretion of tradition, conscripted for an aesthetics which opposes the city, speed and finitude may well put pressure on its future audience as historical distance and footnotes lengthen. The pastoral, Connemara, fisherman, Yeats creates as ideal audience of his poetry's landscape ('A man who does not exist/A man who is but a dream'), must stand in for the desensitized urban viewer, who does. The view of Dublin's cityscape and Liffey from (near) O'Connell Street's Bridge, however, is probably known to many readers of Yeats and Beckett or viewers of Jack Yeats's paintings. W.B.Yeats's adage that ‘vice does not destroy genius but that the heterogeneous does’ mobilises an anger at this modern cityscape framed in his 'General Introduction for my Work' (1937): When I stand upon O’Connell Bridge in the half-light and notice that discordant architecture, all those electric signs, where modern heterogeneity has taken physical form, a vague hatred comes up out of my own dark and I am certain that wherever in Europe there are minds strong enough to lead others the same vague hatred rises. In four or five or in less generations this hatred will have issued in violence and imposed some kind of rule of kindred. I cannot know the nature of that rule, for its opposite fills the light; all I can do to bring it nearer is to intensify my hatred. I am no nationalist, except in Ireland for passing reasons. State and Nation are the work of the intellect, and when you consider what comes before and after them they are, as Victor Hugo said of something or other, not worth the blade of grass God gives for the nest of the linnet. (E & I, 526)As disappointed patriot and architectural traditionalist, whose sense of proportion andgrace is linked to Norman castle or Georgian Big House, as polemicist who found Lutyens'sdesigns for Hugh Lane gallery 'beautiful', but which Dublin rejected, Yeats implicitly lamentsDublin's visual breakdown of a past, uniform Georgian architecture. The hint that other'strong' minds intent on leadership might redress such urban breakdown through violencealso implicate a return to a type of Neo-Classical order Mussolini favoured, although Yeats'sfinal turn is towards the natural landscape and the linnet's nest building, as symbolic of old,art instincts reminiscent of AE's or Hugh Lane's faith in 'the right twigs for an eagle's nest'which have gone missing.Jack Yeats's The Liffey Swim (1923) from a nearby location a decade earlier, screens off a hated railway bridge behind Georgian arches of O’Connell Street bridge, just after his Modern Aspects of Irish Art (1922) proposed an anti-modern, anti-international Ireland devoid of ‘the foolish civilisation of the cities and the love of money for the sake of money’. If the root of every art must be 'in the country of the artist' so that 'we must not look to London or Paris for a pace maker’, in Jack Yeats's early 1920's thinking, where painting must ‘take its rightful place...in a free nation’, these credos, echoing his brother's early programme for poetry, do not exclude modern style as means and city as subject in later paintings (JY cited in Arnold 1998, 206). Skimming Joyce’s 'Anna Livia Plurabelle', supplied by Thomas MacGreevy by the end of the 1920’s, the painter who found this ‘very lovely and wonderful and it makes me proud and happy to see the semblances between this writing and my painting’, his novel, The Amaranthers, a year before his brother's 'General Introduction', revisits the urban Liffey he painted. Borrowing interior monologue (modernism) for a prose infused with romanticism and expressionism deployed in his Liffey Swim painting he writes: ...in a moment he longed for his bridge and the sky over it and away from it. He crossed the Irish Sea once more. He stood and looked up the river, the same sun time as when he first stood there, and he felt there, fanned out within the reach of a long arm, stood all the round towers, the green hills, the mountains, the monuments, the little lakes, the little colleens by the lakes, the sea bays, the sea islands, the lake islands, the fiddles, the dancing floors, the shamrocks of the fields, the leaping salmon in the rivers... He could have taken a train away into that heaving place of his own heart, but he wavered. A motor-'bus came by with names on its sides...he turned into a cinema. (JY, 1991, 109) 'Linnet' or 'leaping salmon' and 'lake isles' offer a way out of the Dublin cityscape, a connection in which the urban vista and cityscape give way to the countryside as 'the place of his own heart'; the prose however, 'wavers' as the returned exile also confronts the motor bus and ushers himself into an urban cinema. Having depicted 'lying on O'Connell Bridge / goggling at the tulips of the evening / the green tulips / shining round the corner like an anthrax / shinning on Guinness's barges' in poetry (CP, 9) Beckett's DFTMW places the protagonist on the nearby Liffey's Metal Bridge which his prose notes as a place for 'beggars': There the wind was big and he was wise who stirred not at all, came not abroad. The man, Nemo to be precise, was on his bridge, curved over the western parapet. High over the black water he leaned out, he let fall a foaming spit, it fell plumb to the top left of the arch, thenwas scattered, by the Wild West Wind. He moved off left to the end of the bridge, he lapsed down blankly on the quay where the bus rank is, he set off sullenly, his head sullenly, clot of anger, skewered aloft, strangled in the cang of the wind, biting like a dog against his chastisement. (DFMW, 55)The 'Wild West Wind', from upriver in Jack Yeats's painting and 'clot of anger' in WBY's perceptual experience of the city, produce no escape to 'lake islands' or a pastoral, national field of 'shamrocks'. The 'cang' of the city wind bites and produces visual 'spit' as broken form - Yeats's 'spit' was directed at Degas's dancers as ugly form in modern paintings - just as the text compares a painterly likeness to ' the living spit' (DFTMW, 68) and Beckett's letters image Giorgioni's painting as 'Joyce's Parnell spit' and his own poems as 'one long spittle' (SBL1, 444 & 159). Vasari's contention that a great artist might order and 'discover, on walls upon which sick people spat, fantastic cities and extraordinary landscapes' (Vasari cited in Fitter, 1995, 213, n.271) is countered by this spittle-form as 'scattered' by city wind and river. As in Bataille's Documents, a dictionary ironizing art terms, just a few years earlier, noting 'Spittle: Mouth Water' means this word is 'not open to allegory' but 'lowers the mouth - the visible sign of intelligence - to the level of the most shameful organs', the term-image is associated with a formless modernity and the city (Bataille, 1929, 381-2). In MPTK's Beckett, just over a decade after the Jack B. Yeats Liffey painting, notes from the site nearby that from which the painting was constructed: '"This is where I stand" said the little creature, with a sigh that made Hairy look nervously round for prisons and palaces, "and watch the Liffey swim"'. This same city spot, then, fosters Jack Yeats's celebratory painting, Yeats's longing for the form of the linnet's nest and Beckett's 'spit' as a visual reaction and art form.4. Framing Interiors/Still LifesIf the interior and still life (and its objects) in Yeats's texts are conscripted as spiritual symbols of Ireland and of the power of poetry to tap their numinous potential, these are deployed in Beckett's texts as unstable images of disconnection from literal, or symbolic, Irish house and these ownerless objects, resist representations and transformations into timeless symbols. The still life does not especially feature in paintings Yeats or his family/circle (such John Butler Yeats or Charles Ricketts) referred to or produced. Yeats's father dismissed ‘people who are only interested in things’ while ‘Shakespeare, your mother and I like to talk about people’ (JBY, 1944, 91-92), just as Gotthold Lessing's demanded poetry deal in heroic actions, not mere ‘barren descriptions of material objects’ (Lessing, 1766, 109). Yeats's 'The Apparitions' noting that 'Fifteen apparitions have I seen; The worst a coat upon a coat-hanger' (VP, 624) echo a traditional hierarchy of painting genres in which still lifes' objects, divorced from people, are more inherently lacking in symbolic interest or numinous purpose. It is a minor form in his poems. Yeats' poem ‘The Stolen Child’ abandons ‘kettle on the hob’ and ‘oatmeal chest’ for the enchanted fairy landscape outside just as ‘The Old Age of Queen Maeve’ (1893) leaves ‘the painted house’ to follow Aengus outside to uproot Bual’s ‘earthy house’ (VP, 88 & 184-187). In Beckett's Paris circle painters like Henri Hayden produced abstract or Cubist still lifes and the way clothes take a ghostly imprint from the human body registers in Beckett's texts, just as, when Avigdor Arikha produced five aquatints for Beckett's Au Loin un oiseau (1973), the writer chose a coat (connoting the absent human figure) as a type of still life basis for one of these. Beckett's song, 'Mr Man and a bun' in Watt, notes 'all the buns are done/and everyone is gone/ home to oblivion' to conclude that 'Bun is such a sad word, is it not? And man is not much better is it?' (Watt, 28). Differences between the edible object (still life) and man (portrait) as material object bound for 'oblivion' are negligible. Some five years after W.B. Yeats's advised Katherine Tynan to ‘remember [that] by being as Irish as you will you will be the more origonal [sic] and true to your self and in the long run more interesting even to English readers’ (CL1, 35), he textually painted an Irish cottage interior in Irish Fairy Tales (1892). This interior, depicting Old Biddy Hart’s hearth side, is coterminous with engravings of cottage interiors produced for English magazines; it prefigures the first colour tinted Irish tourist postcards like ‘Fireplace and Dresser in an Irish Cabin’ (c.1908): ...under her brown-thatched roof tufted with yellow stone-crop... [where they]... sat by the turf fire eating her griddle cake in her cottage on the slopes of Ben Bulben... her face glowing in the firelight as she bent over the griddle or stirred the turf... where all is so homely under her wood rafters and her thatched ceiling covered with white-washed canvas. We have pictures and books to help us imagine a splendid fairy world of gold and silver, of crowns and marvellous draperies; but she has only that little picture of St Patrick over the fireplace, the bright-coloured crockery on the dresser, and the sheets of ballads stuffed by her young daughter behind the stone dog on the mantelpiece. (Yeats, 1892, introduction, 1 & 15) This western 'homely' interior aligns with paintings representing Irish interiors economic, self-sufficiency and imaginative plenitude as symbolic of a national purity which resists excessive English urban, material corruption even as it elides actual Irish poverty (Kinmonth, 2006, 66). Yeats knew painters like Walter Osborne - his A Galway Cottage (c.1893) is in this genre - and his depiction eschews the alternative, pictorially bleak, realist documentation of impoverished Irish interiors in his brother's Sketches of Life in the West of Ireland (1899) which coexist with more western, pastoral romances. Yeats's textual "paintings" (as in Aloysius O'Kelly's Mass in a Connemara Cottage, c.1883) function as a repository of access to spiritual values, not as economic barometers of scarcity; the interior avoids excessive luxury, but posits self-sufficiency in fire, hearth and food. Biddy Hart's cottage interior points to an Irish Spartan order, homely stability and religious icons, its roof a 'canvas' housing history; the room is a launch pad for Irish western folk lore, but its bi-focal creator also has one eye on ‘exhibit[ing] the Irish mind in London’, in having ‘joined the tourist movement’ to produce images 'for commercial consumption', as Standish O'Grady cruelly noted. Beckett's interior in Malone Dies, despite the protagonist's Irish-sounding name, is more subject to time than (Irish) history in the interior as isolation "unit" or Old Dutch master:Sapo remained alone, by the window, the bowl of goat's milk on the table before him, forgotten. It was summer. The room was dark in spite of the door and window open on the great outer light. Through these narrow openings, far apart, the light poured, lit up a little space, then died, undiffused. It had no steadfastness, no assurance of lasting as long as the day lasted. But it entered at every moment, devoured by the dark... the room grew darker and darker until nothing in it was visible any more. For the dark had triumphed. And the ticking of the invisible alarm-clock, was as the voice of that silence which, like the dark, would one day triumph too. And then all would be still and dark and all things at rest for ever at last. (TRIL, 174-186) The interior's light without 'steadfastness', its relentless clock, echo the writer's attempt to 'express the nothing....in gathering thinglessness, towards it'. The Irish painter Gerard Dillon claimed the Irish west was a 'great strange land of wonder' and 'the place for a painter' so one might 'live there forever'; Beckett's Sapo inhabits an interior where ' all would be still and dark and all things at rest for ever at last'. The interior has intimations of mortality, its darkness redolent of Old Dutch masters like Brower's where peasants and isolated figures commune with themselves, alone. If there is a latent politics and economics in still life and its objects in paintings and texts (where objects connote ownership of luxury or lack of it) these are nearer the surface in Yeats's texts. The early, radical Yeats, noted in United Ireland that Irish legends, set ‘before us a table spread with strange Gaelic fruits' so that 'makers of song and story shall draw food for their souls’ (CL1, 338-340) and critiqued the materialism of the Anglo-Irish Big House table in The Countess Cathleen via 'The dishes standing on the polished wood / In the wax candle-light' as symbols of materialist 'hard' headedness (Co Pl, 6), even as lavish feats in ancient Irish regal banqueting halls in plays symbolise Irish generosity. But if the early Yeats envisaged the British Empire as a ‘painted and flaunting materialism’, the late Yeats of 'The Tower', in less radical mode, recycles Mrs French’s Anglo-Irish dinner-table joke in which an ‘insolent’ farmer’s ears are clipped by a servant and ‘brought... in a little covered dish’, even as he suggests muses ‘go pack’ when one is reduced to ‘deal[ing] / In abstract things' or 'derided by /A sort of battered kettle at the heel’ (VP, 409-11). Linguistic and political power may use, but need not acknowledge, its basis in mere material still life objects, when these objects are conscripted as symbols for his Irish poetry's own power, not dependency on the material comforts of the Big House.Beckett's tendency to sever interiors and objects from specific, literal Irish geographic or historical locations may implicate this presence, as absence, and as failure to provide a secure "home" for the writer/text. If poverty is taken as read in Beckett's bare interiors - in Murphy's or Malone's bleak rooms (as in Dutch portraiture of the lower classes by Brower which Beckett admired), it takes a highly selective reading of Endgame to squeeze its interior into a decolonized set near coastal 'Kov' (Cobh, as Irish emigrant departure point) with an empty post-famine larder and protagonist asked to take care of a starving child. The earlier Murphy, though, with its specific London Irish interiors in boarding houses are bleak enough to induce Irish expatriate inhabitants to imagine their linoleum is like Braque seen from 'a distance' or put down a fellow Irish poet as just a 'pot poet' (MU, 51). The dark room in A Piece of Monologue's (1979), as site where past photographs of those once loved are torn up, carries an implicit sense of the virulence of a deracinated writer from the Irish diaspora abroad in the Thatcher-Haughey era:Born dead of night... In the room dark gaining. Till faint light from standard light. Wickturned low... Faint light in room.... None from window... Pictures of...he all but said loved ones. Unframed. Unglazed. Pinned to the wall with drawing-pins... Ripped off and torn to shreds... Thousand shreds under the bed with the dust and spiders.... (CDW, 425-6) Wicklow, 'wick turned low', and (Irish?) kin-portraits are coming unstuck from a settled interior's walls.Beckett's very un-Joycean resistance, though, to detailed reconstruction of Irish interiors from memory is suggested by his response to a book of photographs (1987) repatriating his texts back into Irish landscapes and interiors; he replied to a congratulatory note from Bertie Ahern (future Taoiseach), thanking him but wryly suggesting he had 'long felt the 'want'' of such Irish support for a 'long' time (SBL4, 686). Aware of the symbolic charge in Irish still life objects as nature mort in political symbolism - as in Yeats's play where the material pot of broth symbioses English materialism rejected by the spiritually principled, Irish poet on hunger strike - Beckett debunks such blatant usage in noting the hunger-striking mayor of Cork 'probably' drunk 'sweetened' water occasionally (TRIL, 251) - but such usage is atypical. The interior of Endgame (probably inspired by Uccello's flood) is really directed against the use of such symbols to denote paintings and text's capacities to capture anything more than their own temporal destruction. The interior's painting faces the wall as Hamm claims a 'painter - and engraver' he knew was 'appalled' by contemplating the 'sails of the herring fleet!' and All that loveliness' for 'all he had seen was ashes' (CDW, 108). The recurrent Yeatsian painted ship as trope or meta-symbol for Irish poetry itself - as in 'Sailing to Byzantium' - is now 'all for nothing'; Hamm laughs at the idea that this painting might 'mean something'. Yeats's conclusion to A Vision, after all, uses boats he repeatedly spots in paintings to suggest those trawling with 'herring fishers' in a 'luminous sea' is 'a dominant image' which remains with the poet as symbol for his own craft of catching fish and salting them into poetic form for the dinner table. Beckett may not have read the text, but he knew Yeats's poems where things 'out of perfection' sail on to a 'swelling canvas' operated as a symbol of Irish poetry's own powers. If James Joyce admired the 'splendour' of Dutch realist paintings (1903) and produced an aesthetic theory in Portrait of the Artist (1914) based on the potential of ordinary still life objects to liberate epiphanies in which 'the whatness of a thing' or 'soul of the commonest object seems to us radiant' so that a basket might exemplify art's 'wholeness, harmony and radiance' (Joyce cited in Ellmann, 1959, 83), neither Yeats nor Beckett approach still life in this way. In Yeats's poems flowers such as the rose (venerated as symbol of beauty in Joyce and in the visual arts of aestheticism, Pre-Raphaelitism and hermetic visual traditions he knew) remain vase-less (to resist a realist strain in Joyce) but serve as a perennial symbol of beauty/suffering (as in Blake's image-texts) inflected to represent and symbolise Ireland and poetry. Yeats's 'The Rose' (1892) with its 'Red rose, proud rose, sad rose of all my days!' that helps him 'sing the ancient ways' (VP, 100), note to 'Aedh Hears the Song of the Sedge' (VP, 811) claiming the 'rose has been for many centuries a symbol of spiritual love and supreme beauty' and use of Sturge Moore's rose as graphic Golden Dawn emblem on the cover of Per Amica Silentia Lunae (1917) is satirized as a way of converting such objects into symbols in Beckett's still lifes. Flowers in Beckett's textual still lifes physically decompose and when Jack Yeats tied a paper rose to his easel and vowed his work should be 'sub rosa' (1936) to swap the figurative ‘living ginger’ for a ‘new subject’ in a series of rose paintings, Beckett admired these paintings of a dying flower as literal decompositions (JY cited in Arnold, 1998, 278 & White, 1971, 14). Flowers in a Husymans canvas are placed in a coffin, not vase, in a Beckett poem; roses and flowers are erased from Malone's wallpaper to leave his chamber pot as object and focus (TRIL, 205). Beckett's copy of Journal de Jules Renard notes the writer's admiration for hyacinths, as a flower that does not need love (not as Eliot's religious symbol) and his First Love insists on its literal, non-symbolic, decomposition in a still life: One day I asked her to bring me a hyacinth, live, in a pot. She brought it and put it on the mantelpiece, now the only place in the room to put things, unless you put them on the floor. Not a day passed without my looking at it. At first all went well, it even put forth a bloom or two, then it gave up and was soon no more than a limp stem hung with limp leaves. The bulb, half-clear of the clay as though in search of oxygen, smelt foul. She wanted to remove it, but I told her to leave it. (ECEF, 77) As with the removable 'pot' or chamber pot in Watt or Malone Dies (close to the eating one) the visual object connotes human waste and temporality; it resists numinous conscription (as in Derek Mahon's 'constant readiness to discern the halo round a frying pan' in Dutch painting) (Mahon, 1999, 105) and symbolism (as in Beckett's Proust which notes: 'The mortal microcosm cannot forgive the relative immortality of the macrocosm. The whisky bears a grudge against the decanter') (PTD, 21-2). The way paintings visual still lifes resist language and texts in Beckett would create a template for successors like Mahon. Still life objects in Yeats's poetry suggest a resistance of realist dispersals into mundane, material objects - ‘this small slate-coloured bag of dreams’ into which Fergus the Druid may be changed will mean he just ends as ‘nothing, being all’ while plays wish their materiality to give way to their symbolic halo: a single ‘ray of sunlight on a pewter vessel’ in The Unicorn from the Stars (Co Pl, 329) triggers a mystical trance. The material object is pretext for the essence of an idea, the real ‘kernel of the nut, the pip of the orange’ as one letter puts it (CL4, 307). The text which tries to symbolise itself in Beckett's study of Proust as 'the heart of the cauliflower, the ideal core of the onion' or the world in a 'nutshell' merely adds 'nux vomica to an aperitif of metaphors' (PTD, 29). When Yeats insists that the poet is 'never the bundle of accident and incoherence that sits down to breakfast' (CW5, 204), he excludes Beckettian pots, Joycean 'breakfast things on the humpy tray' in 'gelid light' (Joyce 1922, 3 & 53) or the rattling breakfast basement plates in T.S. Eliot (untransfomed into poetic symbols) as fit subject matter for poetry. 'Kitchen gabble' is frowned upon in texts as signalling a desire for merely 'selecting among... images' those 'satisfy[ing] a hunger grown out of conceit with daily diet' (Per Amica Silentia Lunae, CW5, 31-2). The young Yeats who passed his ‘hands over the glass cases' in Dublin's Museum, to feel the 'odic force' flow from objects (Foster,1997,49-50) or whose séances had tables laden with candles, flowers, apples, roses heather and incense (at the disposal of a spiritual, not material, medium) produced ‘The Sorcerers’ who lay out ritualistic, still life objects like ‘a brass dish of burning herbs, a large bowl, a skull covered with painted symbols, two crossed daggers...' as supernatural talisman (Yeats, 1893, 63). Even the late 'All Souls Night' with its ‘long glasses brimming with muscatel’ (still life variants of Yeats's gyres) prefigure "supernatural" ghosts unwinding ‘mummy cloths’ who reveal that ‘No living man can drink from the whole wine’ (VP, 470-474). Given that the mundane, depersonalized, synthetic materials of Cubist still life led Jacques Rancière to contend that both modern art and realist novel break traditional representative regimes because 'there is no longer any boundary separating what belongs to the realm of art from what belongs to the realm of everyday life' (Rancière, 2011, 69), Yeats's rejection of such an aesthetic and Beckett's use of it are revealing. Yeats's late poem, 'Circus Animals Desertion’ (1939), has poetry climbing out of its perceptual, impure origins amongst 'Old kettles, old bottles, a broken can' in the 'foul rag and bone shop of the heart (VP, 630). Beckett's Malone's inventory traps his existence among such found objects - a chamber pot and eating dish in the half-light - and his fondest objects (such as his pencil for producing the text) may wear out, get lost or not even belong to him. Yeats's inventory places, on the poet's table, Sato's crafted Japanese silver sword, bronze lamp or golden candle light conscripting a style of Renaissance still life as allegory for their owner's and art's power. When Yeats's 'The Moods' (1893) claims 'Time drops in decay, / like a candle burnt out' (MYTH, 357), the temporal image of the mere still life object is converted into a symbol of how poetry defeats time. As Terence Diggory notes of this tableau: 'The symbolist retreats not in fear but in contempt of the temporal existence that obscures the truth of eternity' (Diggory, 1983, 167). Whilst Beckett admired Proust's conjuring of an 'entire structure' from the involuntary memory of a madeleine and the 'relief and colour...of a cup's inscrutable banality' (PTD, 34-5), such objects become elusive in his reading of paintings and in his texts. 'La Peinture' claims Bram van Velde's 'tableaux', Geer van Velde's 'momento mori', Braque's 'plastic meditations' and painterly schools from realists to Expressionists leave an unanswerable question: 'What remains if the essence of the object is to elude representation? Beckett asks. 'There remain to be represented', he answers, 'the conditions of that elusion.' (DISJ, 118-32) As futile object Beckett's pot is neither Yeats's 'porcelain jars', symbol for poetry, nor Wallace Steven's 'jar' in Harmonium (1923) which takes 'dominion everywhere' (Stevens, 2015, 81). The shards and shreds and objects Malone retains only permit him to talk with his 'mind wandering, far from here, among its ruins' (TRIL, 199). ConclusionThis study frames and compares how and why W.B. Yeats and Samuel Beckett engage with fine art/its theories in discursive and creative texts to reveal how two writers', fascinated with fine art images, encompass this within their textual practice. The study documents how painted images were readily available in their family circles (Yeats's father and Beckett's aunt Cissie were painters), accessible via friendships (Yeats's Charles Ricketts was his 'mentor' in the arts/Beckett's 'great familiar' was the painter Bram van Velde), and known through studio or gallery contacts (Yeats's involvement with Hugh Lane and his Dublin gallery/Beckett's association with Peggy Guggenheim/her London Guggenheim). The writers' attraction to fine art/paintings, predisposition to sensuous objects with a strking image which they collected, is demonstrated (via evidence in their letters, diaries and Yeats's Autobiographies); their libraries attest to a wish to also process what they saw, by reading fine art history/theory, a desire nurtured by friendships with those writing it (Yeats's Pre-Raphaelite circle of art historians and Beckett's Thomas MacGreevy and Georges Duthuit). Thereby, the writers' own essays, citing and re-writing what they saw and read, emerge as a product of fascination with fine art they saw, compounded by shared interests in art theory and history. Crucially, though, as writers of poems and plays, alert to visual images, Yeats and Beckett looked to fine art/its theories, because this facilitated a self-interested desire to conscript its symbols and images to explore key themes. Fine art also permitted reflections on nature of language, and self-reflection on language's power and capacities (Yeats) and its limits and failures (Beckett). The study concludes by summarising a fundamental difference between how and why the two writers use fine art/its theories. The power of fine art in Yeats's texts lies in its capacity to summon an image as object of/for meaningful thought, which an essay may analyse, and a poem grasp, and then surpass by using it as a symbol in/for a unifying text; the power of fine art in Beckett's texts permit them to register reactions to fine art as sensuous, material, silent objects that dismantle thinking and symbols, and disable what language cannot grasp, so it exposes the limitations of what language can do when it distorts the silence and visuality in autonomous images which elude it. The study's conceptual framework suggests how enlisting fine art/its theories assisted the writers' oppositional thematics and aesthetics. Yeats's emphasis on transcendence, durability and beauty, and Beckett's sponsorship of doubt, finitude and irony, are revealed as reinforced by, and partly built out of, the two writers' divergent responses to fine art's theoretical texts, and use of its images. The study demonstrates how these diverging positions are not just a matter of different predispositions, but responses conditioned by, and filtered via wider, twentieth century intellectual and contextual shifts - from transcendence to doubt, and from aesthetics based on beauty to one orientated towards irony. These themes/shifts, permeating art history and theory the writers read, assist both writers because they wish to inflect these themes in essays and creative texts. The "sister arts" (poetry and painting) which overcome space/time as durable symbols of human achievement and tradition is argued to be a key theme in Yeats's essay and poems; the "separate arts", as temporal, finite failures which disappear in time (because our experience/perceptions of them is framed by finitude) is central in Beckett's discursive and creative texts. The study demonstrates how the writers' respective readings and subsequent re-writings of fine art history, permit them to selectively detect, focus on, and use these themes, detectable and available in the fine art theories they read and cite. The study deduces that shifts from "sister arts" thinking/practice, in Yeats's milieu, permeated by Pre-Raphaelitism and aestheticism in the 1890's, to "separate arts" thinking/practice, in Beckett's Germany/Paris, with the emergence of more autonomous paintings, 1900-1930's, inform theories the writers' read, the way they re-read past theories, the fine art they encountered, and their respective thinking about fine art as 'literary' or as 'autonomous'. Fine art theories assist the writers to construe ideas of relations/non-relations between the arts, while its images assist them to situate and develop their own praxis in relation to past and contemporary traditions. The study demonstrates how Yeats's adoption of past, Classical and Renaissance fine art/its theories (as a repository or source of values), permeate and permit his own texts to claim authority from precedent, while citing evidence that Beckett's appreciation of past and modern painting is framed within his critique of the past, and of the arts as adequate joint sources of value amidst the modern, chaotic and impermanent, which a writer sees and experiences. The study proposes that Yeats is drawn to fine art/its theories as offering potent analogies or illustrations and arguments for his discursive texts, as well as providing visual inspirations and symbols for poems; shortfalls in art theory, and the silence in painted images in another medium, permit Beckett's essays to suggest texts on fine art reveal their own subjective limits, self-interest and misinterpretations (their failures to represent the absent material object), even as these visual objects inspire and disrupt literary narratives and a plenitude of meanings in essays and creative works. In framing the writers' evolving responses to fine art/its theories, the study evaluates how the writers' theory and praxis are imbricated, to condition or pressure one another. Theoretically speaking, the study distinguishes between Yeats, as normatively motivated by linking fine art images with an enduring poetry's symbols/forms, and Beckett, as seeking to link fine art with finite, retinal images or ruins that 'disappear in time'; it argues that these readings and use of fine art originate in different perspectives of how the arts and humanity last in the arts or disintegrate in reality/time. The study reveals how theory is complicated by praxis, as both writers encounter slippages and create counter currents to argue with themselves, as literary texts and life modify such themes and concepts. In poems, Yeats's crumbling sculpture ('Lapis Lazuli') pressures his theory of the arts' durability, while Beckett's recurring visual ruins rise perpetually in Trilogy, to complicate normative thematics in essays on fine art. The study argues, though, that fine art/its theories are normatively conscripted for opposing aesthetics or thematics based on respective ideas of durability and finitude thematized in their creative texts. Yeats's attraction to Titian portraits and Italian Renaissance portrait traditions of the noble subject which endures, and Beckett's fascination with Rembrandt and painting in/after northern European and Dutch traditions (depicting more lowly versions of man decomposing or dwarfed by dark nocturnal landscapes), instantiate crucial divisions between the two writers' preferences and use of painting. Chris Fitter's contention that these different painting traditions reveal that 'in space, man recognizes his agency and acquisitions' and 'in time man feels his dependency' (Fitter, 1995, 212), summarises why and how these differing subjects, styles and thematics in fine art hit different nerves with the two writers. In framing the writers' diverging responses to fine art/its theories, the study argues that the fine arts, by proxy, afford opportunities to reflect on the power/incapacity of language and offer templates of literary texts as unified or fissured by images. The study reveals that a key reason for Yeats's conscription of fine arts' images is that these offer inspirational sources for mimetic and ideal images, readily made over into durable symbols in/for the text. Yeats's attraction to "sister arts" theories in which 'all the arts draw together' proves useful in essays, which identify and explicate traditional fine art's key images, even as they demonstrate their own rhetoric power to interpret and extract meanings from these. Language, thereby, is foregrounded as the most powerful communicative and conceptual tool for interpreting fine art and its ideas. In Yeats's praxis, poetry is posited as the linguistic tool, par excellence, for transforming these fine art's images into concentrated symbols, seen and heard, read and unified in an audio-visual form. The fine art image/subject or technique is even conscripted as meta-symbol to permit the poem to reflect on its own linguistic power to reframe, represent, synthesize and unify the painted image. Conversely, the study argues that a key reason for Beckett's enlistment of paintings is because they are a source closer to experiential, involuntary, retinal images, which elusively erupt and disappear in time amidst a chaotic reality. Painting's 'stages of the image', which resist being made over into durable symbols, permit his texts to point to how paintings, in their silent autonomy, deny linguistic analysis in the discursive essay, and reveal its ironic misuse and distortion in creative texts. Beckett's theoretic attraction to ideas of the "separate arts" (post-Lessing), in which mediums crucially determine the nature of images, permit discursive essays on paintings to point to how their own explanations limit or distort fine art images. Elusive, finite, embedded in silent, material objects, the painted image in Beckett's essays disputes and weakens linguistic claims to represent, symbolise, preserve or decode its unstable, transient or disjunctive nature. Thereby, creative texts using (fine art) images do so to reveal ruptures in seeing, hearing and saying, which reveal what Yeatsian ekphrasis is not translating or cannot translate (the actual process of seeing and the seen object/painting); the visual is given reign to fragment or disrupt narratives and unified literary forms. Yeats's still life 'porcelain jars', used as symbol for poetry, suggests how both forms (poem/artwork) preserve and unify literary/fine arts traditions; Beckett's burial urn of Murphy's spilled ashes on the pub floor and ashen faced humans decomposing in displaced urns as bins are staged as images that fragment texts and 'disappear in time'. Opposing thematics and ideas of form, of the arts' transcendence/achieved forms (Yeats) and of their finitude/waste (Beckett) are, thereby, instantiated. The way in which Yeats and Beckett use fine arts/its theories in Irish and European contexts - Yeats's 'Unity of Image...in national literature' as a search for 'an originating symbol', sourced in tradition/history (by 'poet, sculptor, architect, from the eleventh to the thirteenth century’) and Beckett's divorce of Jack Yeats/modern painting from representational and national regime(s) - is revealed as a function of different desires to link fine art/texts with representing history/nations (Yeats) or to divorce the arts from these debilitating, harmful associations (Beckett). The study argues that Yeats co-opts fine art, as representational or mimetic regime, associated with 'unity' or 'character', to assist with a process of national reconstruction - notwithstanding its use to critique Irish nation - more readily than Beckett does, in his use of modern painting to assist the idea of individual deracination or to mount more virulent critiques of Irish religion, sexual mores and politics. Yeats's use of fine art instrumentally and historically, as well as aesthetically, to create and critique images of the Irish nation contrasts with Beckett's use of visual art images aesthetically to suggest the arts require freedom from restrictive nationalism(s) as core requirement. The study evaluates the writers' framing of portraits, landscapes and interiors/still lifes to suggest how and why praxis follows key trajectories in the writers' theories of fine art. Yeats's portraiture assists the creation of subjects, who symbolize noble action and female beauty, as texts conscript Greek sculpture and Pre-Raphaelite painting models and aesthetics. Tradition, observable recognition of individual personality/ accomplishment and enduring symbols of nobility or nation, are thereby valued and preserved by textual, as well as fine art, portraiture. Beckett's portraits, in which nobility or beauty, Irish or otherwise, are not salient features of humanity, frequently ironize this 'high art' via grotesque cartoons; critiques of past tradition, of (Renaissance) humanism/fine art, which presume portraits create or preserve an enduring or noble human presence, are mounted as illusory pursuits for both arts. Yeats's western, pastoral, Irish landscapes conscript realist/symbolist painting traditions, to picture and name shared, personal or national territory and history where a past Eden offers future potential; Beckett's dystopian landscapes using both past and modern painting, in which the city is initially present as modern subject (as site of expressionist alienation or deracination), give way to more anonymous, abstract, geometric and constricting spaces, where the fabric of paint or language as opaque and ruptured draws attention to itself. The painted place helps to Yeats to connect affectively, and to claim, landscape/memory/nation, for the text; painted space, assists Beckett to instil a sense that "man" is seen to be essentially alone, subject, not agent, of mediums. Increasingly, in Beckett's creative texts, spaces replace places to block purchase on a shared site that is named, framed, claimed, humanised or nationalized in Yeats's poetry, in alignment with abstract and semi-abstract paintings he engages with in art essays. How Yeats embeds durable mythic or transcendent images from past fine art, of Salomé or Greek and Irish public sculpture, within texts, and how Beckett's fine arts face finitude and doubt, and disrupt texts, reflects how the two writers evaluate and value tradition/traditional art and modernity/modern art. Yeats's London (and poetry) is improved by the presence of traditional sculpture and absence of 'lighted advertisement[s] of Bovril' (CL InteLex #2522); Beckett's Belacqua sits under Dublin's sculpture of Thomas Moore to find, ironically, that 'There were signs on all hands. There was the big Bovril sign to begin with, flaring beyond the green' - 'Bovril into Salome...and Tommy Moore there with his head on his shoulders' (DFTMW, 33 & 43). The three, former theological virtues, represented in the colours of the sign, are altered in the text to 'Doubt, despair and scrounging' (Caselli, 2005, 62), as an ironic, sad, but necessary, corrective of past or unified transcendental worlds where the visual symbol and logos delivered 'signs'. Yeats's Phidias and Cuchulain sculptures illuminate the durability of what is valuable in civilisations and the formal ordering of experience into art so texts claim, by analogy, to represent permanent sculptural form. Beckett's Texts for Nothing (1950-2) ignores London's Eros sculpture to recall 'news in slow letters of light, above Piccadilly Circus, in the fog?' which suggests 'words can be blotted and the mad thoughts they invent, the nostalgia for that slime where the eternal breathed and his son wrote, long after, with divine idiotic finger'(CSP, 122-4). Flashing neon signs now surround past sculpture in a modern, speechless agora, much as the art performer now carries his own sculpted cross in an ironic, secular text which 'must endure the light', in Paul Muldoon's poetry of New York. In a letter to the (Dublin) Daily Express (1898), Yeats attacks John Eglinton's view that 'if the transcendent realities do not exist in the normal human consciousness they do not exist in "poetry, painting and music' or at all", to invoke arts which retain a 'spiritual force' (CL2, 295-6). When, however, Yeats conscripts fine art images, those 1890s angels drawn from Burne-Jones or Blake, as messengers of eternal life, it is to demonstrate the power of the logos to conscript the image into symbol in a unified poem. Beckett's angelic messengers (noted in German medieval sculptures), bring messages of doom from hospitals in the 1930's, and desert the Sistine Chapel to leave novels with 'the invisible rat, fidgeting behind the astral incoherence of the art surface' (DFMW, 16-17). Shared fine art referents diverge. Yeats suggests both arts preserve a residual, enduring religious impulse and beauty which Beckett cites, with irony, because these are subject to ruin and death. Italo Calvino's core dialectic in literature, as 'the continuity of life, the inevitably of death', in a novel where angels of 'perfect apocrypha' who are a 'sect of nihilist followers of the Archon of Shadow' now rob 'true texts' of past transcendence and unified narratives/forms, point to an essential difference between the two writers use of fine art which this study reveals and thematizes (Calvino, 1982, 141, 104 & 204). The thesis also identifies a cleavage between literary studies, after the 1950s, and Irish literary heirs who frame Yeats's practice as designed to create poetic forms uniting sound and vision, and modern/modernist perspectives (pronounced within visual art theory), noting Beckett's use of fragmented or collaged images to disrupt unified literary texts, and this still ramifies. Paul Muldoon's admiration for Yeats's intricate, unified 'formal methods' and assault on Beckett's poetry, with its 'arbitrary', disruptive, line-breaks in thrall to 'Irish modernism', and Louis MacNeice's proposal that lost belief in a transcendental order does not require language/unified poetic form become devalued (in an attack on Martin Esslin's defence of Beckett's absurdist theatre) reveal such cleavages. Conversely, Marlene Dumas's rejection of making 'symbolic' paintings as 'cowardice', eschewal of having 'a big angel on my grave / like in a Caravaggio painting' and wish to have 'my ashes in a jam jar' as 'more mobile' in 'Measuring Your Own Grave' (Dumas, 2008, 161 & 194) invokes visual art's project as one that must respond to Beckettian bodily ruin/collapse and suggest this fragmentation in paintings' own subject, content and form. There is scope here for further studies of how/why other fine arts components in the writers' texts - their use of colour (as symbol/non-symbol) and key fine recurrent fine art images (Yeats's circles, ships, embroidery, lamps and horses/Beckett's spirals, shipwrecks, unstitched fabric and donkeys) - register, or do not feature, in subsequent receptions by poets and visual arts. This lies beyond the scope of this study. When the art theorist Boris Groys contends Benjamin's Angelus Novus posits that 'if God is dead, the material world becomes indestructible', because such destruction is only 'partially successful... [and] leaves ruins, traces, vestiges behind' (Groys, 2016, 35), he invokes a key symbol/image which fascinates both Irish writers. In Yeats's theory, in his 'preface' to The Works of William Blake (1893), he recycles his predecessor's claim that 'the ruins of time build mansions in eternity', when 'the whole business of man is the arts' (plural); in his poetic praxis, 'Lapis Lazuli' sees a sculpture 'crack' in ruins but imagines 'All things fall and are built again' (VP, 565-7) in/by the poem, and 'The Tower' sees a disintegrating body and tower in ruins but imagines rebuilding its heavenward stair from the 'proud stones' and past fine art of Italy and Greece, in which poetry (unifying both arts) reconstructs a 'Translunar paradise' to resist death/temporal ruin. In Beckett's art essays no art theory or language of appreciation saves Bram van Velde's paintings from becoming ‘proof positive' of 'time that carts away’; in his novels' praxis, in Trilogy, contemporary visual ruins may be seen but not reconstructed by either belief in a transcendent order or by a unified literary form that mirrors or grasps their origin, content or meaning within its own structure. Beckett's Trilogy requires the contemporary visual image as parallel for the text as ruins, not a process of Yeatsian reconstruction whereby fine art is converted into finished, literary form, and this study stresses that this remains the key oppositional, dialectic in the two writers' texts: the thing in ruins, I don’t know what it is, what it was, nor whether it is not less a question of ruins than the indestructible chaos of timeless things, if that is the right expression. It is in any case a place devoid of mystery, deserted by magic, because devoid of mystery. And if I do not go there gladly, I go perhaps more gladly there than anywhere else, astonished and at peace, I nearly said as in a dream, but no, no....These things, what things, come from where, made of what? (TRIL, 38) For Yeats, both arts remain markers of civilisation's conquest of doubt and temporal ruins but poetry is the primary, key site for preserving this 'mystery' and 'magic'; here, the way the world is seen assists the way it is read - in poetry that suggests its own coherent, unified permanent form unlocks the potential in visual art or ruins. Beckett's Molloy's art object as a 'thing in ruins' or visual 'trace' shred traditions or materials as ungraspable and unreadable ('come from where, made of what?'), at a site devoid of 'mystery' and bereft of 'magic' where decomposing detritus provides no secure basis for renovation into artworks with ordered, formal, timeless properties. In Yeats's landscape, fine art is rescued from ruin and perennially reconstructed in texts. In Beckett's 'drosscape', images and text perpetually 'rise into ruin'. This dialectic is one where fine art and images are delivered over to the poem so as to represent 'the continuity in life' (Yeats) and where fine art and images signal 'the inevitability of death' (Beckett). In Yeats's landscapes the 'human form divine' has an enduring residual presence and fine art traditions are preserved and instantiated in poetry's own triumphant form as it seeks to reclimb what Michael Longley terms Angel Hill; in Beckett's texts humanity exists in a space, where one is alone and mortality and future antiquity has already arrived now, or is arriving fast; this space in fine art and text is one where, fine art angels are 'mute' and where, fine art and text connote their own minimal survival in a space where, as Jean Luc-Nancy puts it, 'the divine has deserted the temples' (Nancy sited in Casey, 1998, 340).AppendicesAppendix 1. W.B. Yeats's and Samuel Beckett's Books On Fine Art.Edward O'Shea's A Descriptive Catalog of W.B. Yeats's Library (1985) and Dirk van Hulle and Mark Nixon Samuel Beckett's Library (2013) provide invaluable documentation indicating the extent of the two writer's differing collections and annotations of books in general and books on the visual arts in particular. Visual art books in Yeats's library collection tend to suggest a concentration on ancient Egyptian, Greek and Roman and Renaissance Italian art, supplemented by texts on nineteenth century English art (Blake and the Pre-Raphaelites). There are titles on ancient Buddhist, Chinese and Japanese art and books on Ireland's National Gallery as well as illustrated catalogues of the Municipal Gallery of Modern Art (Dublin), published in 1908 and 1933, and the memoir of its founder, Hugh Lane: His life and achievement (1924) are present as reminders that Yeats became heavily involved in this gallery campaign. Texts on modern fine art/painting are largely absent. Exceptions include books on Augustus John, who etched and painted WBY's portrait, Milan ?urcin's Ivan Mestrovic (1919) and Hamilton Easter Field's The Arts (1921) featuring paintings which Yeats's American friend, the major art collector John Quinn, lent to an exhibition in the Metropolitan Museum in New York. The latter includes reproductions of Redon, Derain, Picasso and Gauguin. The fine art titles suggest an interest in art history focused on past, traditional painting and sculpture. These books include E.A. Budge's British Museum. A guide to the First and Second Egyptian Rooms (1904) on mummification and funeral rites (recurrent in poems) and Adolf Furtw?ngler’s Masterpieces of Greek Sculpture (1893) describing re-unifying broken figurative sculptures whose parts have been separated (read 1920-25) and Eugénie Strong’s lectures in Apotheosis and Afterlife (1915) detailing Roman ‘sepulchral imagery’ (such as swans on sarcophagi which are activated as motifs in poems). Byzantine art, the crux of two key later "art" poems, is represented by O. M. Dalton's Byzantine Art and Archaeology, early Christian art/architecture is present in Josef Strzygowski's Origin of Christian Church Art (1923); Italian Renaissance art is covered in histories by Vasari, Pater and John Addington Symonds's A Short History of the Renaissance in Italy (1893). Nineteenth century English symbolist painting/engraving is represented by books on Edward Calvert and Samuel Palmer and William Blake (1902) with 'all his woodcuts photographically reproduced in facsimile', introduced by Laurence Binyon and edited by T. Sturge Moore (both friends). Nineteenth century fine art titles on Pre-Raphaelite painting include Percy H. Bate's The English Pre-Raphaelite Painters (1899), H. C. Marillier's Dante Gabriel Rossetti, An illustrated memorial of his life and art (1899) and Hall Caine's Life of Rossetti which WBY read in 1921. The poet retained past journals and publications where poems appeared with illustrations by his brother Jack B. Yeats. Samuel Beckett's ownership and reading of fine art books is under-represented by his library because there are significant absences of books he read and knew in this field and gifted. These include books on/by Jack B. Yeats which he reviewed, R.H. Wilenski’s Introduction to Dutch Art (1929) on spotlight effects in painting (read and annotated during London years, c.1933), Karl Scheffler's German Painters and Artists of the Nineteenth Century (1911), which he read in 1936, and the German-Jewish art historian Will Grohmann's catalogue on Ida Bienhardt's modern expressionist collection, Die Sammlung Ida Bienert Dresden (1933), which Bienert gave Beckett, by the writer who was dismissed as art curator by the Nazis and who later opposed Strzygowski's racial theories. Beckett read Herbert Read's Art Now (1933), Max Sauerlandt‘s Die Kunst der letzten drei?ig Jahre (1935) and supervised the translation of Georges Duthuit's Les Fauves (1949). A plethora of art books/catalogues were gifted to the artist Avigdor Arikha on London's National Gallery, Wallace, Hampton Court and Dulwich collections which Beckett knew well by the early 1930s. According to Nixon and Hulle (2013), Beckett gave away 'exhibition catalogues of painter friends' and on contemporary artists such as Louis Le Brocquy, Bram van Velde, Geer van Velde, Henri Hayden, Anne Madden, Vadim Sidur; he had at one time more than twenty catalogues/books on the artist Avigdor Arikha.Appendix 2. Visual Artists in W.B. Yeats's and Samuel Beckett's Circles. John Butler Yeats (1839-1922), the poet's father studied painting at Heatherley’s Art School (1867-8) and Slade (enrolled 1880) and trained his young children in games to ‘observe and recount’ what they had ‘seen and done’ on early walks to London’s National Gallery. He read literature to his poet-son in the studio so the links between the arts as mimetic and literary with mimesis and literary were suggested to WBY early on (See SMY cited in Roy Foster, 1997, 15). Jack B. Yeats studied painting in London art schools, before following his father into this profession. The poet's sister, Elizabeth Corbett Yeats (1868-1940) taught art in London for ten years, writing three art manuals, Brushwork (1895), Brushwork Studies of Flowers, Fruits and Animals (1898) and Elementary Brushwork Studies (1900). Susan Mary Yeats (1866-1949), the poet's other sister, studied art at Dublin Metropolitan School (1883), trained with William Morris and Co. Ltd for six years (after 1888) and became an expert in embroidery before supervising embroidery workshops at Dun Emer (founded 1902). Both sisters worked in Cuala Press publishing poetry (with illustrations), broadsides and producing literary-cum-visual artefacts. W.B. Yeats's daughter Anne Yeats (1919-2001) took lessons in brush drawing from Elizabeth Yeats (1923), studied at the RHA School, Dublin (1933-6) and School of Theatrical Design, Paris (1937); she produced sets/costumes for the Abbey Theatre (1937-41), studied at the DMS (from 1941) and illustrated poetry books by Thomas Kinsella and Louis MacNeice; one her last commissions was a luminous painting of a hawk for the foyer of the Samuel Beckett Theatre in UCD (1992). (For AY's book cover designs see NGI, Yeats Archive, Y59). Lady Augusta Gregory met W.B.Yeats (June 1894) and Coole became his summer writing residence for 35 years (1897-1932). Augusta Gregory was the poet's major correspondent (1897-1932) but she was also an amateur connoisseur of Italian art, art collector and artist; she painted watercolours in Italy, Galway and Inishere island in the 1890s. (Hill, 2011, 46- 49, 175-183 & 440). Maude Gonne, object Yeats's infatuation across five decades (1889-1953), provided illustrations, in an illuminated Celtic manuscript style, for Ella Young's Celtic Wonder Tales (1910) and The Rose of Heaven, a limited poetry/art edition of 300 copies on handmade paper by Candle Press, Dublin. Yeats noted Gonne spent ‘afternoon[s] drawing flowers’ in Colville, Normandy, with her daughter Iseult (See Jim Dyer, 'Yeats Meets the Digital Age, Full of Passionate Intensity', New York Times, 20 July 2008). Iseult Gonne (1894-1954) sketched in Normandy and was 'instructed' by Yeats in France in 'Art, poetry and literature' in 1908 (Young, 1945, 102) and he suggested (1917) she leave France to ‘study design at the Central Design School in London (CL InteLex #3328). George Hyde Lees (1892-1968), the poet's wife for just over 20 years, attended art schools in London and the south coast; she undertook sketching tours with Yeats friend Dorothy Shakespear and as a 'medium' sketched diagrams of symbols which she shared with the poet (Saddlemyer, 'George Hyde Lees: More Than a Poet’s Wife' in ed. Jeffares, 1989, 194). Althea Gyles (1868-1949) the symbolist artist studied art at Slade alongside Constance Gore-Booth (1868-1927), who enrolled in 1892 to produce watercolour landscapes as well as life drawings, and her sister Eva Gore-Booth (1870-1926) who drew illustrations for children's books. Yeats's close male friends, life-long companion and fellow art student, George Russell (1867-1935), Golden Dawn associate William Horton (1864-1919), producer of mystical symbolist drawings, and London-based companions - Edwin Ellis (1848-1916), WBY's educator in art Charles Ricketts (1866-1931), close associates Edmund Dulac (1822-1953) and Sturge Moore (1870-1944) all drew, painted, wrote or lectured about paintings, or illustrated or designed books, some including the poet's own collections.After Samuel Beckett visited Jack B. Yeats's studio (1930) he made repeated visits in the 1930s and later recorded that he 'used to go to the painter's 'at homes' in Fitzwilliam Square....He'd... bring out a painting and put it on the easel for me or anyone to look at...We didn't talk very much'. Beckett noted 'his paintings were wonderful. He used to say that he was completely impervious to influence. I think he thought he was the only painter. He said all the painting must have some 'ginger of life' in it...' (SBL1, 18 & 65 & JK Interview with SB, 10 November 1989, in Knowlson, 1996, 164-5). Just after James Joyce (1929) purchased two of Jack Yeats's paintings, Porter Boats/The River Liffey and Salmon Leap, Leixlip (Dublin Bay), which left W.B.Yeats reporting that 'Joyce says that he & Jack have the same method' (CL InteLex, #5252), Beckett, having found Low Tide (1935) 'overwhelming', borrowed ?30 to acquire A Morning (1934-5) and purchased Corner Boys (1910), c.1930-44, and Regatta Evening (1944). Beckett met Bram van Velde (1895-1981) the Dutch painter, who had absorbed expressionism in Munich and Bremen (1922) before settling in Paris to periodically exhibit in the Salon des Indépendents (1928-41) and his brother Geer van Velde (1898-1977) in Paris (1937-8). Beckett obtained two paintings by Geer and purchased Bram van Velde's Sans titre/Composition 1937 (1937), which he paid for on the 'stuttering system' of instalments from 1940, lent to an exhibition in Berne and still displayed in his study in 1971. He also owned Geer van Velde paintings, L'Imprevue and Composition (89 cm x 116 cm) (See SBL2, 187, n.2; SBL4, 471, n. 2; SBL1, 679-681 & Knowlson, 1971, 50). Beckett purchased a painting from the Polish-Jewish painter Jankel Adler in 1939 (SBL1, 657), received a ''fumage" painting (oil, candle burns and soot on canvas) from the Austrian artist Wolfgang-Paalen (SBL1, 658, n.9) and paintings by the French-based, painter-friend, Henri Hayden (1883-1970), much influenced by Cezanne and Cubism (c.1917-22), who became a Roussillon neighbour when Beckett hid from the Gestapo during the war and who returned to paint the area in canvases Beckett called 'magnificent work' in the late 1950s before Beckett was 'delighted' to introduce him to London's Waddington Galleries in 1958 (Knowlson, 1996, 488 ; SBL3, 107). A robbery of Beckett's house at Ussy left him noting (1961) that his only prize possessions were books and a painting by Henri Hayden (SBL4, 749). From Avigdor Arikha (1923-2010), whose paintings Beckett admired for 'acuity of vision, sureness of execution', he acquired The Golden Calf (1956) and donated the painting to the Beckett Collection at the University of Reading and this admiration was shared with Robert Hughes(SBL4, 333, n2 & 577). The writer also obtained a small sculpture by the Russian artist Vadim Sidur (1924-1986), The Crippled One, and termed it a 'powerful and moving work, a speechlessness of indignation and compassion' and placed it on his study window-sill in the Boulevard St Jacques (SBL4, 409 & 409, n. 1). Louis Le Brocquy sent Beckett an aquatint Image of Beckett in 1981 which Beckett termed 'moving in its ghostliness' (SBL4, 553) and the photographer John Minihan claims the writer owned a sculpture by the photographer Brassai (Appendix 8).Artworks in appendix 3 & 4 are not reproduced here for copyright reasons Appendix 3. Artworks Owned by W.B. Yeats and Samuel Beckett Appendix 4. Artworks by Artists in W.B. Yeats's and Samuel Beckett's Circles Appendix 5. John Minihan (Beckett's Photographer) StatementJohn Brown: How did you come to meet and photograph Samuel Beckett? Did he express any viewso photography in general of having his photograph taken? John Minihan: Samuel Beckett I first met at the Hyde Park Hotel London, 1980. I had been wanting to photograph him since 1969. In the years leading up to our meeting, I knew you just don't photograph Beckett; you offer him something. At that stage in 1980 I had been photographing my hometown Athy, Co. Kildare for 18 years with a sequence on the wake of Katy Tyrrell. Sam expressed a wish to see the photographs. Samuel Beckett was very keyed-up about photography and spoke to me about the Hungarian artist/photographer Brassai who he knew in Paris and they lived quite close to each other. 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