SOURCE: “Verlaine and Yeats's A Dialogue of Self and Soul,” in Papers on Language and Literature, Vol. 7, No. 3, Summer, 1971, pp. 272–78.

In the following essay, Revard explores the influence of Verlaine and the French Symbolists on William Butler Yeats's “A Dialogue of Self and Soul.”

It is usually recognized that Yeats was interested in the French Symbolist poets during his London residence in the 1890s and that this interest was stimulated by his friend, Arthur Symons, then at work on his book, The Symbolist Movement in Literature. Yet, because Yeats could read little French and because of the complexity and obscurity of these particular poets, direct influence is usually denied. Yeats, however, has recorded in his autobiography his fascination with the French Symbolists, noting that Symons read Mallarmé and Verlaine to him, both in French and in the translations Symons was working on.¹ Yeats, himself involved in working out...