Ecstasy and Peak-Experience: W. B.

Yeats, Marghanita Laski,

and Abraham Maslow

Natalie Crohn Schmitt

Comparative Drama, Volume 28, Number 2, Summer 1994, pp. 167-181 (Article)

Published by Western Michigan University

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/cdr.1994.0012

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/487932/summary

Access provided by Tulane University (2 Feb 2019 14:06 GMT)

 1
COMPABATIVE

i ama
Volume 28Summer 1994Number 2

Ecstasy and Peak-Experience:

W. B. Yeats, Marghanita Laski,
and Abraham Maslow

Natalie Crohn Schmitt

In a world beset by realism, science, and the workaday,

W. B. Yeats set about inventing a dramatic form to induce
ecstatic experience in his audience and dedicated his long dra-
matic career to that effect.1 He thought of his art, he said, as but
the putting of his faith and the evidence of his faith in words or
forms, and his faith was in ecstasy.2 He was, he felt, never so
alive as "at the moment when a room full of people share [that]
one lofty emotion."3 Ecstatic experiences, as represented in
Yeats 's plays, their attendant imagery, and their import, are here
examined in light of the phenomenological studies of such ex-
periences provided by novelist and critic Marghanita Laski and
by humanistic psychologist Abraham Maslow.
Marghanita Laski, in a frequently cited 1961 study, examined
accounts of 1 14 ecstatic experiences provided her by friends and
acquaintances and in published literary and religious works. In
her examination, which was confined to those ecstatic experi-
ences recounted as "extraordinary to the point of often seeming
as if derived from a praeternatural source," she observed that the
experiences were generally described in highly imagistic terms.
She also noted that there was a limited range of objects, events,

167
168Comparative Drama
and ideas that served to trigger them, and that such triggers were
usually a necessary though not a sufficient cause of ecstatic ex-
perience.4 She observed that what were felt to be qualities of
many of the triggers and the experience were causally con-
nected—for instance, that being on the top of a mountain could
serve to trigger ecstatic feelings of upliftedness.
Following Laski 's lead, I wish to look at Yeats 's plays—and
particularly at their repeated imagery—as such triggers in order
to make clear relationships between the images themselves and
between images and the ecstatic experience Yeats sought to
evoke. The strong correlation between Yeats 's representations of
ecstatic experience and descriptions provided by Laski 's subjects
is not surprising. Laski relied on European, primarily English,
subjects. Yeats drew his inspiration from a wide range of sources
both Eastern and Western, but in the end he chose descriptions
and images that seemed both true to him and, he hoped, moving
for his English-speaking audience.
The principal difference between the accounts of Laski 's sub-
jects and Yeats 's plays is of course that Laski 's subjects were
actually in situations that triggered their experience—on top of
a windy mountain at sunset, for instance—whereas Yeats only
provided images of such experiences. Yeats hoped that if he
could intensely realize a state of ecstasy—that is, provide a
vision or fable representing the experience of it—he could
induce it. Just as "an emotion produces a symbol," he believed,
"a symbol produces emotion."5 Seeking always to intensify the
realization, what appears in the early plays as mere verbal de-
scription often reappears in the later ones in character, action,
and setting—which of course are also images.
But it is not only Yeats 's means that we may question: his
very interest in mystical experiences is often regarded as a
considerable embarrassment. R. P. Blackmur's response to
Yeats 's mysticism continues to prevail: "the supernatural is
simply not part of our mental furniture," he said, "and when we
meet it in our reading we say: Here is debris to be swept away."6
To counter such response, I want to set Yeats 's project not only
within the context of Laski 's study but also within that of one of
the founders of humanistic psychology, Abraham Maslow (1908-
70). Maslow, strongly influenced by Laski's study, conducted his
own interviews and surveys and came away convinced that ec-
static experiences are more common than our society and, more
particularly, psychology acknowledges. Mystic transcendent ex-
periences, he argued, "lie well within the realm of nature," and
Natalie Crohn Schmitt169

study of them like that of any other human experience is well

within the realm of psychology.7 Like Laski, then, Maslow
sought to naturalize ecstatic experience, and to this end he called
it "peak-experience."
Maslow's larger goal was to examine not sickness and mal-
functioning, with which he thought psychology was too much
preoccupied, but the higher reaches of human nature and its ulti-
mate possibilities and aspirations. Through such examination,
Maslow came to champion peak-experience with the argument
that those he called "self-actualizers"—i.e., people who seem to
fulfill their potential, to live life to the full—have more such
experiences and that any person in the peak-experience takes on
temporarily many of the characteristics of self-actualizing indi-
viduals.8 Accordingly, he sought to allow or encourage the
experience by providing emotionally involved and approving
accounts of them.9 Yeats's plays in the main consist of just such
involved and approving accounts or of accounts of events in
which, tragically, the central character fails to achieve peak-
experience. By means of these Yeats sought actually to induce
ecstatic experience.
Both Yeats and Maslow were swimming against the current
of the cultural politics of their time—Yeats against theater's
realism and against science, organized religion, and what he felt
increasingly to be the emotional deadness of the middle class,
and Maslow against the business will, organized religions, which
denied the value of peak-experiences, and contemporary psychol-
ogy, which he found to be mechanistic, positivistic, reductionis-
tic, "too desperately attempting to be value-free."10 While
Yeats's project has always been regarded as decidedly peculiar,
Maslow's "peak-experience" has come into psychological par-
lance, and study in such experience continues.11
I begin my examination of the means to ecstatic experiences
provided by the plays with a description of those things antitheti-
cal to such experience because that is where Yeats began. Laski
observed that just as there are objects, events, and ideas that
trigger ecstatic experiences, there are also those antithetical to
such experiences. She called these "antitriggers." They generally
consist in anything inalienably associated with ordinary social
life.12 In the beginning, Yeats had a clearer idea of how to repre-
sent these than he had of how to represent ecstatic experiences,
and much of the early plays are taken up with what his visionary
figures are seeking to get away from: the life of reason, the state,
organized religion, business (and busyness), the world of appear-
170Comparative Drama
anees, domesticity (including marriage), comfort, security, order-
liness, obedience—what one of his characters calls "a little round
of deeds and days," "how to live a long time."13 The later plays
do not contain images of these antitriggers—not in the setting,
characters, or actions—for such images are, after all, antithetical
to Yeats's project. He relocated the action to a bare playing
space without decoration and to a language, action, and acting
style equally spare. He always separated us from the everyday
world by his use of myth, and later he added the separating
strangeness of masks, music, dance, and verse. He even removed
us from the surface of particular names and sometimes let the
chorus speak the emotion to make it more intimate, less attached
to the particular surface attributes of any one person.
Ecstasy for Yeats was "the impossible joy."14 In The King's
Threshold, Shanahan's heart is said to burst with joy. Martin, in
The Unicorn from the Stars, describes the joy as that of a thou-
sand years crushed into a moment.15 Experiencing it, the charac-
ters in many of the plays laugh. That joy Yeats also represented
as paradisiacal afterlife, battle, dance, song, and sex. Increas-
ingly, the joy took on a darker, more complex coloration. Some-
times Yeats called it tragic ecstasy, in part because it is an
experience of loss of comfort, security, and domesticity, in part
because, as he came to accept, it is temporary, and in part
because it includes the knowledge of the unity of all things
including the tragic. It is tragedy, Yeats believed, not the
depiction of joy, that provides the greatest artistic representation
of ecstatic experience. Tragedy, he said, is "the moment of exal-
tation, of excitement, of dreaming."16 It provides "not joy, as we
[commonly] understand that word, but ecstasy, which is from the
contemplation of things vaster than the individual and imper-
fectly seen."17 The ultimate tragedy for a character in a play may
paradoxically afford us with an ecstatic experience.
As Yeats was profoundly concerned with the pattern of
drama that would effect ecstasy, so he was also with its rhythm.
Increasingly, he wrote his drama in verse and included music
and dance, all supplying a rhythmical experience for his audi-
ence. Yeats furthermore added the suggestion of the rhythm of
hoofbeats, waves, drum taps, clashing swords, and tolling bells.
Barbara Lex, among others, has commented on the importance
of patterned repetitive acts, like drumming, in inducing altered
states of consciousness, such rhythmic acts hypothesized to
induce right brain dominance.18 Yeats himself commented on the
efficacy of rhythm in altering states of consciousness. Its pur-
Natalie Crohn Schmitt171

pose, he said, "is to prolong the moment of contemplation, the

moment when we are both asleep and awake, which is the one
moment of creation."19 This rhythmic effect is enhanced by word
repetition evident even in the quotation I have just provided in
which the word "moment" is repeated three times.
The ecstatic experience is one of great beauty. In the early
plays this beauty is pre-Raphaelite: it is represented by those that
weave a dance by the four rivers in a mountain garden, heaven,
a place of pale lights and pale women, where time is an endless
song—and Yeats's language highly decorative. In later plays the
beauty is a more astringent one, more suited to tragedy; it is
represented by fierce, pale, proud, amorous women and by love
in which hatred is mixed. Flowers, a trigger mentioned by
Laski 's subjects, are throughout notably absent (as are any olfac-
tory triggers). And the trees are austere: thorns and crabs with a
harsh wholesome savor, and spare stripped hazels. They tend to
be solitary as are the sea and mountain birds used to the same
effect. The setting described may be rocky and bare.
Yeats intended the plays themselves to be the primary ob-
jects of beauty. Laski found art to be the second most common
trigger of ecstatic experience after nature.20 For Yeats it was the
most important. "Poetry," he said, "is a revelation of a hidden
life, [and] painting, poetry, and music [may be] the only means
of conversing with eternity left to man on earth"21—that experi-
ence of eternity, as we shall see, central to ecstatic experience.
The plays represent ecstasy, and progressively more so, as an
intense experience: as turbulence, a "frenzy of the mind."22
Those in the throes of the experience have "wild thought that
overruns the measure," "unheard-of passion," or they are
"drunken with a dizzy light."23 Physical characteristics concomi-
tant with the intensity described in the plays are staring eyes,
trembling limbs, and shivering, these frequently associated with
coition. The intensity of the experience is sometimes represented
by "flame," "a fiery moment," "hair that is the colour of burn-
ing," "a torch inside [the] head."24 The sea described is full of
waves and wool white foam.25
Increasingly, Yeats felt not only that the ecstatic experience
is an intense one but that it is triggered by crisis. "The sense of
spiritual reality comes whether to the individual or to crowds,"
he said, "from some violent shock, and that idea has the support
of tradition."26 The convention of drama as a representation of a
once in a lifetime highly dramatic action served Yeats's purpose:
conflict, battle, and murder figure largely, and so does sex. Laski
172Comparative Drama

observed that the structure of the experience, as many people

reported it, is that of tumescence and release,27 the structure not
only of sex but of the conventional dramatic pattern Yeats em-
ployed.
That the characters in Yeats's plays have their intellect out,
their reason grown dim,28 is expression of the intensity of the
experience but also expression of the fact that in it, as Dectora
in The Shadowy Waters puts it, "the world drifts away."29 Yeats
described the sensation thus: I "felt my memories, my hopes, my
thoughts, my will, everything I held to be myself, melting
away."30 What "melts away," neurobiologists conjecture, is left
brain dominance.31 Laski described the sensation as a surrender
to the experience, a feeling of being overcome, of being inside
someone or something else.32 In some of Yeats's early plays that
something else is the great fisher's net, or a woman's hair un-
wound and unbound.
The feeling of loss, of the world drifting away, Laski
observed, is accompanied by a gain, a sense of enlargement,
also expressed in terms of liquidity, ever-widening water33—in
Yeats's plays, "the waste places of the great sea," "great
waters." Or, as Yeats said elsewhere, "our minds expand con-
vulsively or spread out slowly like some moon-brightened
image-crowded sea."35 Laski reported this feeling of liquidity
experienced as a gush or flow of liquid inside oneself as in a
spring.36 Yeats asked rhetorically, "Is not ecstasy some fulfill-
ment of the soul in itself, some slow or sudden expansion of it
like an overflowing well?"37 And so it is in At the Hawk's Well
or in The Hour-Glass, where it is described as a "cloudy thun-
derous spring."38 Wind, in Yeats's plays as among Laski's re-
spondents, figures feelings of psychic enlargement.39
The ecstatic experience in the plays is generally described as
one of being uplifted, of exaltation, represented imagistically by
a high head, a high heart, by being on a mountain top, by the
flight of birds, especially eagles (everywhere noted for the height
to which they fly), or in feeling oneself to be quite bird-like,
and, in the early plays, as ascension to heaven, sometimes asso-
ciated with light from on high. Laski observed that "up-feelings
are the most common of the quasi-physical feelings recorded in
[her] texts and appear in half of them," these frequently associ-
ated with light.40
Ecstatic experience also entails sensations of fearlessness,
power, and freedom. "As if safety mattered or anything but the
exaltation of the heart," exults Martin in The Unicorn from the
Natalie Crohn Schmitt173

Stars.AX And the Swineherd in A Full Moon in March faces his

inevitable death with the same intrepidity. It is, said Yeats, "an
energy so noble, so powerful, that we laugh aloud and mock, in
the terror or the sweetness of our exaltation, at death and obliv-
ion."42
Yeats also represented the ecstatic experience, particularly in
the early plays, as death. Maslow too described the experience as
like a dying. "As if," said Maslow, "the most poignant living had
a paradoxical something of eager or willing dying in it."43 Laski
had reports of ecstasy being triggered by being in extremist But
while Shanahan on the King's threshold is dying of starvation,
which does seem, in part, to trigger his ecstatic experience, Yeats
otherwise never seemed to recommend deprivation or asceticism
as a trigger. To the contrary, his heroes represent life at the full.
Death seems to be a metaphor for a radical change of state:
"What else can death be," Yeats asked, "but the beginning of
wisdom and power and beauty?"45 It is an experience of eternity.
For Yeats, death was also representative of the loneliness of
the ecstatic experience. The setting for ecstatic experience in the
plays is frequently an isolated one, the open sea, the wide shore,
a bare windy mountain or hilltop, or a place where there are
ruins—desolate places. The character having the experience is
psychologically isolated. Such feelings of desolation may be
represented by the wind that "blows over the lonely of heart"
and by solitary birds—mountain birds and sea birds.46 They are
also manifest in the time of day: sunset, night closing in, or mid-
night when the old year dies. It is odd that Yeats wanted a room
full of people to share the one lofty emotion that he always
represented as one of solitude. He certainly never sought to build
group solidarity through ecstatic experience.
Ecstatic experience is commonly associated with feelings of
mystical knowledge. Illumination, representing such knowledge,
figures prominently in Yeats's plays as well as in accounts of
Laski 's subjects. Laski sensibly observed that one can indeed see
more in the light than in the dark, as one can see more from a
mountain top than from a valley.47 In the plays, Yeats's images
of illumination include the shining country, women with pale
foreheads, glistening light, and white spirits, white riders, white
swans, the white unicorn, and, most especially, the moon. Laski
observed that for some reason light in ecstasies reported by her
subjects was never any color other than white.48 At first Yeats
tried to use stage lighting for such illumination but abandoned
the attempt. The lighting available at the Abbey Theatre surely
174Comparative Drama
could not have begun to suggest the psychic illumination he
intended.
Ecstasy, according to Yeats, provides the experience of hav-
ing "touched and felt and seen a disembodied thing."49 And the
plays are full of the supernatural: man-headed birds, saints, and
the dead. Both Laski and Maslow regarded sensations of the
supernatural, often reported as part of the ecstatic experience, as
"overbelief," belief in more than is warranted by the evidence or
in what cannot be verified.50 This Yeats was never willing to do.
He was unwilling to separate the images from the emotional state
that called them forth. "Whether it is we or the vision that create
the pattern, who set the wheel turning, it is hard to say," he re-
marked.51 He expressed the same idea in many ways: "As I write
the words, ? select,' I am full of uncertainty, not knowing when
I am the finger, when the clay."52 Perception and creation were
not for Yeats unalterably opposed. Drama is a fine medium to
express their confluence, for, as Mircea Eliade observed, drama
can "demolish barriers between dream and present reality, open
windows upon worlds inhabited by the gods, the dead, and the
spirits."53
Increasingly, in Yeats's representation of ecstatic experience,
it is the earth itself that is supernatural. "All about us," he said,
"there seems to start up a precise inexplicable teeming life, and
the earth becomes once more, not in rhetorical metaphor, but in
reality, sacred."54 Accordingly, the Saint in The Cat and the
Moon instructs the lame man to "Bow to what is before you,
bow to what is behind you."55 And within the plays, nature is the
most frequent trigger: the birds, the sea, and the wind (or the
Sidhe) all take on supernatural powers of their own in the incan-
tatory verse: "O wind, O salt wind, O sea wind."56 "If one flies
to the wilderness, is not that clear light that falls about the soul
when all irrelevant things have been taken away, but life that has
been about one always, enjoyed in all its fullness at length?"
Yeats asked rhetorically.57 Similarly, Maslow observed that the
peak-experience provides the sense that the world is not merely
existent but also "sacred," that "everything is miraculous."58
Both Maslow and Laski commented that it is fairly common
for those having had an ecstatic experience to report afterward
a generalized love toward everything and everybody and, notably,
toward what is otherwise repulsive to them.59 The Queen in A
Full Moon in March adores the Swineherd even because he is
"foul in his rags, his origin, his speech."60
Maslow remarked that in the peak-experience the whole uni-
Natalie Crohn Schmitt175

verse seems to be an integrated and unified whole: "dichotomies,

polarities, and conflicts of life tend to be transcended or re-
solved."61 For Yeats this unitive feeling is not to be distinguished
from the knowledge of the union of all things. In the later plays,
"wisdom," as Yeats called such knowledge to differentiate it
from the knowledge gained by means of reason, is not knowl-
edge of the supernatural per se but of this union of all things,
including opposites (natural and supernatural, for instance) and
of oneself with them. In the later plays, this union of opposites
includes that of one figure and another, of one and many, now
and then, here and there, tragedy and ecstasy, sacred and pro-
fane, beautiful and ugly, choice, chance and fate, and finally,
perception and creation: "Art, in its highest moments," Yeats
said, "is not a deliberate creation, but the creation of intense
feeling, of pure life."62 The unity of all things is demonstrated in
the multivalence of the images. The images are continually re-
peated but in new configurations so that they seem to converge;
in Purgatory, for instance, a dead woman becomes a burnt tree
and her living son.
Eliade observed that trees and birds are regarded as connect-
ing earth and sky and in that sense they are unitive symbols.63
Similarly Yeats used the place where land meets sea as such a
unitive symbol, and likewise he used times of day and seasons—
sunset, the hour before dawn, midnight, March when the old year
dies—all times of the day or year that connect day and night,
one season with another, or one year with another.
Laski noted that the ecstatic frequently believes that he has
been united or re-united with another point in time, almost
invariably past time. In such cases, she said, ecstasy is almost
always triggered by an object, event, or idea that can be seen as
far older than the life of a man or of mankind.64 Thus mountains,
the sea, and ruins were frequent triggers of such experience
among Laski's subjects and are similarly frequent in Yeats's
plays. Trees and birds similarly serve as unitive symbols be-
cause, while they do not live forever, Laski observed that we
think of them as perpetually renewable65 (or at least we did
before Rachel Carson's Silent Spring). The full moon served
Yeats in the same way. The musical instruments in the plays, in
both the images and the sounds they provide, are age-old—drum,
gong, cymbals, zither, flute, harp—and are replete with magical
and symbolical powers. Yeats's egg, mythical unicorn, and
masks are similarly unitive symbols. And the plays are all set in
the past or in some mythical time, or include figures from some
176Comparative Drama

past time, and since "it is always ourselves that we [are to] see
upon the stage,"66 we are to experience union with this past time.
The ecstatic experience is expressed as an experience of eter-
nity. At first Yeats represented it as literally eternal, as eternal
paradise: thus the heroes in the early plays die into eternity. The
action of the plays consists of the movement toward that death.
Later Yeats accepted the experience of eternity as momentary,
the "glitter on the beetle's wing," something infinitely short, "a
brief forgiveness between opposites,"67 often sexual union. He
even came to regard the momentariness of the experience as
essential to its beauty: "What can they know of love that do not
know/ She builds her nest upon a narrow ledge/ Above a windy
precipice?"68 He consequently represented paradise as fullness of
life, having come to believe that "there is perhaps no final happy
state except in so far as men may gradually grow better; escape
may be for individuals alone who know how to exhaust their
possible lives, to set, as it were, the hands of the clock racing
. . . and putting aside calculating scruples be ever ready to
wager all upon the dice."69
At the same time that Yeats accepted the brevity of the
experience and shortened his plays accordingly, he intensified
the representation of it in part by such compression. He reduced
the plays to only the action in which ecstasy is experienced or,
for his characters, is denied, and he insisted that his actors keep
this intensity contained.70
In addition to those triggers representing the quality of the
experience, Yeats represented visionary heroes. The plays are
replete with figures from some Irish heroic age who model that
experience and who are designed thus to call forth "our own
heroism, our own sanctity, our own desire."71 In 1904, Yeats
wrote that he sought "to rediscover an art of the theatre that shall
be joyful, fantastic, extravagant, whimsical, beautiful, resonant,
and altogether reckless."72 His heroes are no less: they are
passionate, fearless, independent, lonely, proud, generous, joyful,
whimsical, extravagant, and willing to take risks "to set the
hands of the clock racing." (Thus Yeats frequently represented
the mystical experience as taking place on a journey or quest—in
At the Hawk's Well, for instance, or in A Full Moon in March.)
By means of his plays, Yeats sought to provide the experi-
ence of the "old disturbed exalted life"73 he believed had been
more freely accessible to people in past times. "The supreme
dream of the alchemist," Yeats said, is "the transmutation of the
weary heart into a weariless spirit."74 Yeats sought to be that
Natalie Crohn Schmitt111

alchemist, to transmute ecstatic experience into a rhythmic pat-

tern of images that would in turn "give all men high hearts,"
thereby making a better race.75
Maslow was involved in the same euthenic project. His
claims for peak-experiences, but under the mantle of science,
were no less than Yeats's. Such experiences, he thought, because
they are perceived as end experiences, validate living. Those
experiencing them are more integrated, more focused, more fully
functioning, more creative, more self-determined and thus more
idiosyncratic, more generous—because better able to perceive
reality apart from their own needs—and more accepting of their
own mortality because they see themselves as part of a reality
both large and coherent. The person in Maslow's peak-experi-
ence, thus temporarily self-actualized and self-validated, is very
like Yeats's visionary hero.
That the experience is both one of the unity of all things and
one of the sanctity of the earth Maslow thought a good thing. He
would have accepted Yeats's project as one with his own.
University of Illinois at Chicago

NOTES

1 I have argued this at length in "Ecstasy and Insight in Yeats," British Journal of
Aesthetics, 2 (1971), 257-67.

2 W. B. Yeats, The Letters of W. B. Yeats, ed. Allan Wade (New York: Macmillan,
1955), p. 583.

3 W. B. Yeats, The Variorum Edition of the Plays, ed. Russell K. Alspach (New
York: Macmillan, 1969), p. 415.

4 Marghanita Laski, Ecstasy in Secular and Religious Experiences (London: Cresset

Press, 1961), pp. 5, 206, 370.

5 W. B. Yeats, The Autobiography (New York: Macmillan, 1969), p. 330.

6 R. P. Blackmur, "The Later Poetry of W. B. Yeats," in The Permanence of Yeats,
ed. James Hall and Martin Steinmann (New York: Crowell-Collier, 1961), pp. 38-39.

7 Abraham H. Maslow, Religions, Values, and Peak-Experiences (New York: Viking

Press, 1971), pp. 45, 18.

8 Abraham H. Maslow, Toward a Psychology of Being (New York: D. Van

Nostrand, 1968), p. 97.

9 "I can see that I gradually began to assume that the nonpeaker was a weak peaker
rather than a person lacking the capacity altogether. I was, in effect, trying to fan his
178Comparative Drama
slumbering fire into open flame by my emotionally involved and approving accounts of
other people's strong experiences, as a tuning fork will set off a sympathetic piano wire
across the room" (Maslow, Religions, Values, and Peak-Experiences, p. 86).
'"Ibid., p. 11.
11See most dictionaries of psychology and the Encyclopedia of Psychology, ed.
Raymond J. Corsini (New York: John Wiley, 1984), II, 489-90, and various issues of the
Journal of Humanistic Psychology.

12Laski, Ecstasy in Secular and Religious Experiences, p. 176.

13Domesticity includes cows, dogs, lawns, apple trees, and valley-keeping birds.
Page references for plays here and subsequently are to The Collected Plays of W. B. Yeats
(New York: Macmillan, 1966): The Land of Heart's Desire, p. 36; The Unicorn from the
Stars, p. 227.

14Yeats, Letters, p. 454.

15Yeats, The Unicorn from the Stars, p. 234.
16W. B. Yeats, Essays and Introductions (New York: Macmillan, 1968), pp. 242-43.
17Yeats, 7"Ae Autobiography, p. 319.
18For a discussion of right brain dominance see Barbara W. Lex, "The Neurobiology
of Ritual Trance," in The Spectrum of Ritual: A Biogenetic Structural Analysis, ed.
Eugene G. d'Aquili, Charles D. Laughlin, Jr., et al. (New York: Columbia Univ. Press,
1979), pp. 122-30.

19Yeats, Essays and Introductions, p. 159.

20Laski, Ecstasy in Secular and Religious Experiences, p. 187.
21Quoted in "John Eglington and Spiritual Art," in Literary Ideals in Ireland, ed.
John Eglington (pseudonym for William Kirkpatrick Magee) (London: T. Fisher Unwin,
1899), p. 36.

22Yeats, The Hour-Glass, p. 198.

23Yeats, 7"Ae King's Threshold, p. 72; The Shadowy Waters, pp. 98, 100.
24Yeats, The Unicorn from the Stars, pp. 233, 243; 7"Ae Shadowy Waters, pp. 96,
99. Shivering also appears in Laski's and Maslow's accounts; Laski, Ecstasy in Secular
and Religious Experiences, pp. 81, 217, Maslow, Religions, Values, and Peak-Experi-
ences, p. 34.

25Yeats, The Hour-Glass, p. 208; On Baile's Strand, p. 175; The Green Helmet, p.
150; The Only Jealousy of Emer, p. 187. For waves in Laski, see Ecstasy in Secular and
Religious Experiences, p. 84.

26Yeats, Notes to The Resurrection, The Variorum Edition of the Plays of W. B.

Yeats, p. 935.

27Laski, Ecstasy in Secular and Religious Experiences, p. 77.

28Yeats, The King's Threshold, p. 80; The Hour-Glass, p. 198.
Natalie Crohn Schmitt179

29Yeats, The Shadowy Waters, p. 109.

30W. B. Yeats, Mythologies (New York: Macmillan, 1969), p. 277.
31See Lex, "The Neurobiology of Ritual Trance," pp. 125-30.
32Laski, Ecstasy in Secular and Religious Experiences, p. 70.
33IHd., pp. 83,221.
34Yeats, The Shadowy Waters, p. 96; The King's Threshold, p. 82.
35Yeats, Essays and Introductions, p. 245.
36Laski, Ecstasy in Secular and Religious Experiences, p. 67.
37Yeats, The Autobiography, p. 319.
38Yeats, The Hour-Glass, p. 211.
39Laski, Ecstasy in Secular and Religious Experiences, p. 221.
40Ibid., p. 67 and discussion on pp. 72-73.
41Yeats, The Unicorn from the Stars, p. 232.
42Essays and Introductions, p. 322.
43Maslow, Toward a Psychology of Being, p. 112.
44Laski, Ecstasy in Secular and Religious Experiences, pp. 255-56.
45Yeats, Mythologies, p. 115. "The knowledge of reality," which one gains in
ecstatic experience, is, Yeats says, "always in some measure a secret knowledge. It is a
kind of death" (The Autobiography, p. 326).

46Yeats, The Land of Heart's Desire, p. 46. Solitary birds in the plays are eagles,
crows, gannets, curlews, gulls, and herons.

47Laski, Ecstasy in Secular and Religious Experiences, p. 221.

48Ibid., p. 72.
49Yeats, Essays and Introductions, p. 239.
50Laski, Ecstasy in Secular and Religious Experiences, pp. 20-21; the term is from
William James, TAe Varieties of Religious Experience (1902; rpt. New York: Macmillan,
1968), p. 398.

51Yeats, Mythologies, p. 341.

52Ibid., p. 366.
53Mircea Eliade, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques ofEcstasy, trans. Willard R. Trask
(Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1970), p. 511.

54Yeats, Notes to The Words Upon the Window Pane, in 7"Ae Variorum Edition of
180Comparative Drama
the Plays, p. 970.

55Yeats, 7"Ae Cat and the Moon, p. 302.

56Yeats, At the Hawk's Well, p. 138.
57W. B. Yeats, Explorations, selected by Mrs. W. B. Yeats (New York: Macmillan,
1962), p. 153.

58Maslow, Religions, Values, and Peak-Experiences, pp. x-xi.

59Ibid., p. 64; Laski, Ecstasy in Secular and Religious Experiences, p. 271.
60Yeats, A Full Moon in March, p. 393.
61Maslow, Religions, Values, and Peak-Experiences, p. 65.
62Yeats, Explorations, p. 152.
63Eliade, Shamanism, pp. 269-74 and passim.
64Laski, Ecstasy in Secular and Religious Experiences, pp. 106, 219-20.
65Ibid., p. 220.
66Yeats, Essays and Introductions, p. 241.
61 Quoted by Cecil Salkeld, a friend of Maud Gonne, in J. M. Hone, W. B. Yeats,
1865-1939 (New York: Macmillan, 1943), p. 349; Yeats, On Baile's Strand, p. 170.
68W. B. Yeats, "The Two Kings," in The Variorum Edition of the Poems of W. B.
Yeats, ed. Peter AlIt and Russell K. Alspach (New York: Macmillan, 1987), p. 285.
69Notes to Yeats, The Resurrection, in The Variorum Edition of the Plays, p. 935:
"Eternity is the possession of one's self, as in a single moment." Yeats here approvingly
quotes Villiers de l'lsle-Adam quoting Thomas Aquinas (Explorations, p. 37). Maslow
observes that in the peak-experience people feel themselves to be disoriented in time and
space or even lacking all consciousness of time and space. Phrased positively, he says,
their experience is that of universality and eternity. "The conception of heaven that
emerges from the peak-experiences is one which exists all the time all around us, always
available to step into for a little while at least" (Religions, Values, and Peak-Experiences,
pp. 63, 66).

70"I have never 'produced' a play in verse without showing the actors that the
passion of the verse comes from the fact that the speakers are holding down violence or
madness—'down Hysterica passio.' All depends on the completeness of the holding
down, on the stirring of the beast underneath" (Letter to Dorothy Wellesley, in A.
Norman Jeffares, A Commentary on the Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats [Stanford: Stan-
ford Univ. Press, 1968], p. 410).

71Yeats, Explorations, p. 196.

72Ibid., p. 169.
73Yeats, The Unicorn from the Stars, p. 227.
74Yeats, Mythologies, p. 269.
Natalie Crohn Schmitt181

75 The Unicorn from the Stars, p. 225. Yeats romanticized the poor and women.
Along with Martin in The Unicorn from the Stars, he thought that because the poor had
nothing, they could see heaven as we cannot. Women, he thought, were more capable of
self-abandon than men.