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Image Credit: Screen Shot from the National Library of Ireland

While conducting research on W.B. Yeats I encountered this fascinating online exhibition from the National Library of Ireland that raised interesting questions for me about the relationship between visual rhetoric and literary archives.  Like many other graduate students teaching rhetoric while writing a dissertation on literature, I often wonder about the interconnections between the two fields and what ideas crossover and what do not.  Yeats, in many ways, seems like the perfect place to start to blur lines between the rhetorical, the literary, the visual and the auditory.  Navigating this website, I was struck by the extent to which the virtual museum brings together these fields and makes visible Yeats’s complicatedly interdisciplinary and multi-sensory career.

This exhibition includes virtual rooms recreating spaces that Yeats inhabited, display cases with clickable first editions and manuscripts, videos with scholarly commentators discussing Yeats’s biography and works and images of various artifacts displayed in the collection. One of the advantages of the online exhibition is that the viewer can virtually turn pages of documents that would otherwise be static in the display cases.  In this manner, I was able to leaf through a few pages of a first edition without having to visit the archive.

Image Credit: Screen Shot from the National Library of Ireland

The exhibit also displays a few instances of visual literary criticism, such as a compelling chart that tracks the composition of Yeats’s The Tower.  By clicking on the icon of a single poem, the display highlights a line tracking the publication history.  Three poems—“Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen,” “Leda and the Swan” and “Sailing to Byzantium”— are linked to auditory commentary on Yeats’s extensive revision process. 

Image Credit: Screen Shot from the National Library of Ireland

In many respects, the strategies of this exhibition are similar to those in Yeats’s broadsides.  In these broadsides, published by the Cuala Press, Yeats included visual prints, poetic text and sheet music to combine different sensory experiences in works that were, on several levels, blurring the tenuous lines between rhetoric and art.