W. B. Yeats

William Butler Yeats, 1933 photograph, author unknown. U.S. Library of Congress.

William Butler Yeats (13 June 1865 – 28 January 1939) was an Irish poet and dramatist, and one of the foremost figures in 20th century literature. He was a driving forces behind the Irish Literary Revival, and together with Lady Gregory and Edward Martyn founded Abbey Theatre, and served as its chief playwright during its early years.

Yeats was educated in London, and spent his holidays in Sligo. He studied painting in his youth, and from an early age was interested in Irish legends and the occult. These topics feature heavily in the first phase of his work, which lasted roughly until the turn of the century. His first volume of verse appeared in 1887, and his early slowly paced and lyrical poems display debts to Edmund Spenser and Percy Bysshe Shelley, as well as to the lyricism of the Pre-Raphaelite poets. From 1900, Yeats's poetry grew more physical and realistic. He renounced the transcendentalism of his youth, though he remained preoccupied with the contrast between the physical and the spiritual, as well as with cyclical theories of life. During a career that stretched from the 1880s to the late 1930s, Yeats adopted many different political masks, including, in the words of the critic Michael Valdez Moses, "those of radical nationalist, classical liberal, reactionary conservative, and millenarian nihilist".

Over time, Yeats became a respected public figure, and a pillar of the Irish literary establishment. He was co-founder of the Abbey Theatre, and served as an Irish Senator in his later years. In 1923, Yeats was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, for what the Nobel Committee described as "his always inspired poetry, which in a highly artistic form gives expression to the spirit of a whole nation". Yeats is generally considered one of the few writers whose greatest works were completed after being awarded the Nobel Prize.

Life

Early years and family

W. B. Yeats was born in Sandymount, County Dublin. His father, John Butler Yeats, was descended from Jervis Yeats, a Williamite soldier and linen merchant who died in 1712. Jervis' grandson Benjamin married Mary Butler, daughter of a landed County Kildare family. At the time of his marriage, John Yeats was studying law, but soon abandoned his studies to take up a career as a portrait painter. His mother, Susan Mary Pollexfen, came from a wealthy Anglo-Irish family in County Sligo, which owned a prosperous milling and shipping business. Soon after his birth, the family moved to Sligo to stay with their extended family, and the young poet came to think of it as his true childhood home. The Butler Yeats family were highly artistic; W. B.'s brother Jack went on to be a highly regarded painter, while his sisters Elizabeth and Susan both became involved in the Arts and Crafts movement.

Yeats grew up in a Protestant Ascendancy that was at the time undergoing a crisis of identity. While his family was broadly supportive of the changes Ireland was experiencing, the nationalist revival the late nineteenth-century directly disadvantaged his heritage, and informed his outlook for the remainder of his life. In 1997, his biographer R.F. Foster observed that Napoleon's dictum that to understand the man you have to know what was happening in the world when he was twenty "is manifestly true of W.B.Y. Yeats' childhood through to adulthood was shadowed by the marginalization of the Protestant Ascendancy in the 1870s, the rise of Parnell and the Home rule movement during the 1880s, the momentum of nationalism in the 1890s, and then the Fenians during the turn of the century. These changes were to have a profound effect on his poetry; and his subsequent explorations of Irish identity had a significant influence on the creation of his country's biography.

In 1876, the family moved to England, to enable his father to further his career as an artist. At first, the Yeats children were educated at home. Their homesick mother entertained them with stories and folktales from her county of birth. Jack provided an erratic education in geography and chemistry, and took his son on natural history explorations in the nearby Slough countryside. On 26 January, 1877, W. B. entered the Godolphin school, which he attended for four years. He did not distinguish himself academically, and an early school report described his performance as "only fair. Perhaps better in Latin than in any other subject. Very poor in spelling". Though he had difficulty with mathematics and modern languages, he was fascinated by biology and zoology. For financial reasons, the family returned to Dublin toward the end of 1880, living at first in the city centre and later in the suburb of Howth. In October 1881, Yeats resumed his education at the Erasmus Smith High School, in Dublin. His father's studio was located nearby and he spent a great deal of time there, meeting many of the city's artists and writers. He remained at the high school until December 1883. It was during this period that he started writing poetry and in 1885, Yeats's first poems, as well as an essay called "The Poetry of Sir Samuel Ferguson", were published in the Dublin University Review. From 1884 to 1886, he attended the Metropolitan School of Art (now the National College of Art and Design) in Kildare Street.

Young poet

William Butler Yeats, 1900, portrait by John Butler Yeats

Even before he began to write poetry, Yeats had come to associate poetry with religious ideas and sentiments. Recalling his childhood, he described his "one unshakable belief" as "whatever of philosophy has been made poetry is alone permanent... I thought... that if a powerful and benevolent spirit has shaped the destiny of this world, we can better discover that destiny from the words that have gathered up the heart's desire of the world." Yeats's early poetry drew heavily on Irish myth and folklore, as well as on the diction and colouring of pre-Raphaelite verse. The Yeats family returned to London in 1887, and in 1890 he co-founded the Rhymers' Club with Ernest Rhys. The Club was comprised of a group of London based poets who gathered regularly in a Fleet Street tavern to recite their own verse to each other. The group later became known as the "Tragic Generation", and they published anthologies in 1892 and 1894.

Major poetic influences in these years—and throughout his career—were William Blake and Percy Bysshe Shelley. Yeats later paid tribute to Blake by remarking the old poet was "one of the great artificers of God who uttered great truths to a little clan". Together with Edwin Ellis he worked on the first complete edition of Blake's works, and revived a forgotten poem, Vala, or, the Four Zoas. In a late essay on Shelley, Yeats wrote, "I have re-read Prometheus Unbound... and it seems to me to have an even more certain place than I had thought among the sacred books of the world."

Yeats' first significant poem was "The Isle of Statues", a fantasy work that took Edmund Spenser for its poetic model. The piece appeared in Dublin University Review, but has not since been republished. His first solo publication was the pamphlet Mosada: A Dramatic Poem (1886), which comprised a print run of 100 copies paid for by his father. This was followed by the collection The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems (1889), which arranged a series of verse that dated as far back as the mid-1880s. The long titular poem contains, in the words of his biographer R.M. Foster, "obscure Gaelic names, striking repetitions [and] an unremitting rhythm subtly varied as the poem proceeded through its three sections".

We rode in sorrow, with strong hounds three,
Bran, Sgeolan, and Lomair,
On a morning misty and mild and fair.
The mist-drops hung on the fragrant trees,
And in the blossoms hung the bees.
We rode in sadness above Lough Lean,
For our best were dead on Gavra's green.

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A 1907 engraving of Yeats.

The "The Wanderings of Oisin" is based on the lyrics of the Fenian Cycle of Irish mythology, and further shows the influence of both Ferguson and the Pre-Raphaelites. The poem took two years to complete, was one of the few works from this period that he did not disown in his maturity. Oisin introduces what was to become one of his most important themes; the appeal of the life of contemplation vs. the appeal of the life of action. Following the work, Yeats never again attempted another long poem. His other early poems are meditations on the themes of love or mystical and esoteric subjects, and include Poems (1895), The Secret Rose (1897), and The Wind Among the Reeds (1899).

Yeats had a life-long interest in mysticism, spiritualism, occultism and astrology. He read extensively on these subjects throughout his life, and was especially influenced by the writings of Emanuel Swedenborg. He had written as early as 1892: "If I had not made magic my constant study I could not have written a single word of my Blake book, nor would The Countess Kathleen ever have come to exist. The mystical life is the centre of all that I do and all that I think and all that I write." These mystical inclinations, informed by the writings of Swedenborg and by study of Hindu religion under under the Theosophist Mohini Chatterjee, as well as the occult, and above all the system of A Vision, formed much of the basis of his late poetry, which some critics have dismissed as lacking in intellectual credibility. W. H. Auden criticized his late stage as the "deplorable spectacle of a grown man occupied with the mumbo-jumbo of magic and the nonsense of India". Nevertheless, he wrote much of his most enduring poetry during this period. In 1885, he helped form the Dublin Hermetic Order. The society held its first meeting on 16 June, with Yeats in the chair. The same year, the Dublin Theosophical lodge was opened with the involvement of Brahmin Mohini Chatterjee, who came from the Theosophical Society in London to lecture. Yeats attended his first séance the following year. Later, Yeats became heavily involved with the Theosophical Society and with hermeticism, in particular the eclectic Rosicrucianism of the Golden Dawn. During séances held from 1912, a spirit calling itself "Leo Africanus" apparently claimed to be Yeats's Daemon or anti-self, inspiring some of the speculations in Per Amica Silentia Lunae.

Yeats was admitted into the "Golden Dawn" in March 1890, taking the magical motto Daemon est Deus inversus translated as Devil is God inverted or A demon is a god reflected. He was an active recruiter for the Golden Dawn's Isis-Urania temple, and brought in his uncle George Pollexfen, Maud Gonne, and Florence Farr. He became involved in the Order's power-struggles both with Farr on one hand, and with Macgregor Mathers on the other, most notably when Mathers sent Aleister Crowley to repossess Golden Dawn paraphernalia in "the Battle of Blythe Road". After the Golden Dawn ceased to be and splintered into various offshoots, he remained with the Stella Matutina until 1921.

Adulthood

Maud Gonne ca. 1900.

In 1886, Yeats met Maud Gonne, then a tall, twenty-two year old heiress and ardent Irish Nationalist. Gonne was eighteen months younger than Yeats, and later claimed she met the poet as a "paint-stained art student". Gonne admired "The Isle of Statues" and sought out his acquaintance. Yeats developed an obsessive infatuation with her beauty and outspoken manner, and she was to have a significant effect on his poetry and his life ever after. Reflecting in later years he said "it seems to me that she brought into my life those days—for as yet I saw only what lay upon the surface—the middle of the tint, a sound as of a Burmese gong , an over-powering tumult that had yet many pleasant secondary notes." v Two years after their meeting, he visited Gonne in Ireland and proposed marriage, but was rejected. He later admitted that from that point "the troubling of my life began". Yeats proposed to Gonne three more times: in 1899, 1900 and 1901. She refused each proposal, and in 1903 married the Irish nationalist Major John MacBride. Her friendship with Yeats persisted however, and in Paris in 1908 they eventually spent one night together. "The long years of fidelity rewarded at last" was how another of the poet's lovers described the event. Yeats was less sentimental and later remarked that "the tragedy of sexual intercourse is the perpetual virginity of the soul." That year Yeats left for an extended stay in America on a lecture tour. His only other affair during this period was with an Olivia Shakespear, whom he met in 1896, and parted with one year later.

W.B. Yeats photographed in Dublin on 24 January, 1908

In 1908, he was introduced to Lady Gregory by their mutual friend Edward Martyn. Gregory encouraged Yeats's nationalism, and convinced him to continue focusing on writing drama. Although he was influenced by French Symbolism, Yeats concentrated on an identifiably Irish content and this inclination was reinforced by his involvement with a new generation of younger and emerging Irish authors. Together with Lady Gregory and Martyn and other writers including J.M. Synge, Sean O'Casey, and Padraic Colum, Yeats was one of those responsible for the establishment of the literary movement known as the "Irish Literary Revival"—also known as the "Celtic Revival". Apart from these creative writers, much of the impetus for the Revival came from the work of scholarly translators who were aiding in the discovery of both the ancient sagas and Ossianic poetry and the more recent folk song tradition in Irish. One of the most significant of these was Douglas Hyde, later the first President of Ireland, whose Love Songs of Connacht was widely admired.

A poster for the opening run at the Abbey Theatre; two plays by Yeats featured.

In 1899, Yeats, Lady Gregory, Martyn, and George Moore established the Irish Literary Theatre. This survived for about two years and was not successful. However, working together with two Irish brothers with theatrical experience, William and Frank Fay, Yeats's unpaid-yet-independently wealthy secretary Annie Elizabeth Fredericka Horniman, and the leading West End actress Florence Farr, the group established the Irish National Theatre Society. This group of founders was able, along with J.M. Synge, to acquire property in Dublin and open the Abbey Theatre on 27 December, 1904. Yeats's play Cathleen Ní Houlihan and Lady Gregory's Spreading the News were featured on the opening night. Yeats continued to be involved with the Abbey up until to his death, both as a member of the board and a prolific playwright. In 1902, he helped set up the Dun Emer Press to publish work by writers associated with the Revival. This became the Cuala Press in 1904, and inspired by the arts and crafts movement, sought to "find work for Irish hands in the making of beautiful things". From then until its closure in 1946, the press, which was run by the poet's sisters, produced over 70 titles; 48 of them books by Yeats himself.

In 1913, Yeats met the young American poet Ezra Pound. Pound had traveled to London at least partly to meet the older man, whom he considered "the only poet worthy of serious study". From that year until 1916, the two men wintered in the Stone Cottage at Ashdown Forest, with Pound nominally acting as Yeats's secretary. The relationship got off to a rocky start when Pound arranged for the publication in the magazine Poetry of some of Yeats's verse with Pound's own unauthorised alterations. These changes reflected Pound's distaste for Victorian prosody. In particular, the scholarship on Japanese Noh plays that Pound had obtained from Ernest Fenollosa's widow provided Yeats with a model for the aristocratic drama he intended to write. The first of his plays modeled on Noh was At the Hawk's Well, the first draft of which he dictated to Pound in January 1916.

In his early work, Yeats's aristocratic pose led to an idealisation of the Irish peasant and a willingness to ignore poverty and suffering. However, the emergence of a revolutionary movement from the ranks of the urban Catholic lower-middle class made him reassess his attitudes. His new direct engagement with politics can be seen in the poem September 1913, with its well-known refrain "Romantic Ireland's dead and gone / It's with O'Leary in the grave." The poem is an attack on the Dublin employers who were involved in the 1913 Dublin Lockout of workers in support of James Larkin's attempts to organise the Irish labour movement. In Easter 1916, with its equally famous refrain "All changed, changed utterly / A terrible beauty is born", Yeats faces his own failure to recognise the merits of the leaders of the Easter Rising, due to his attitude towards their humble backgrounds and lives.

By 1916, Yeats was 51 years old and determined to marry and produce an heir. His final proposal to Maud Gonne was in the summer of 1916. Gonne had suffered a series of personal catastrophes in the previous few years, including chloroform addiction and a troubled marriage to John McBride—a drunken gunman who was excuted by British forces for his role in the 1916 Easter Rising. Biographer R.F. Foster has observed that Yeats' last offer was motivated more by a sense of duty than by a genuine desire to marry Gonne. Yeats made his proposal in an indifferent manner, with conditions attached, and both expected and hoped to be turned down. According to Foster "when he duly asked Maud to marry him, and was duly refused, his thoughts shifted with surprising speed to her daughter". Iseult Gonne was Maud's second child with Lucien Millevoye, and at the time was twenty-one years old. She had lived a sad life to this point. She was conceived as an attempt to reincarnate her short lived brother, and for the first few years of her life was presented as her mother's adopted niece. Iseult was molested by her father when she was eleven, and later worked as a gunrunner for the IRA. At fifteen she proposed to Yeats. A few months after the poet's approach to Maude, he proposed to Iseult, but was rejected. Reflecting in later years, Yeats referred to the period as his "second puberty" and asked a friend "who am I, that I should not make a fool of myself". That September, he proposed to twenty-four-year-old George (Georgie) Hyde-Lees, whom he knew through occult circles. Despite warning from her friends—"George ... you can't. He must be dead"—Hyde-Lees accepted, and the two were married on October 20. Their marriage was successful, despite the age difference, and Yeats' feelings of remorse and regret during the honeymoon. Around this time time George wrote to her husband "When you are dead people will talk about your love affairs, but I shall say nothing, for I will remember how proud you were". The couple went on to have two children, Anne and Michael.

During the first years of his marriage, he and his wife George engaged in a form of automatic writing, which involved George contacting a variety of spirits and guides, which they termed "Instructors". The spirits communicated a complex esoteric system of character and history based upon spiral gyres and symbolised by the phases of the moon. Yeats devoted much time to preparing this material for publication as A Vision (1925). In 1924, he wrote to his publisher T. Werner Laurie admitting: "I dare say I delude myself in thinking this book my book of books".

Later life

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Yeats as depicted on the IR£20 Series B Banknote of Ireland

In December 1923, Yeats was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature, and used the occasion of his acceptance lecture at the Royal Academy of Sweden to present himself as the standard-bearer Irish nationalism and Irish cultural independence. "The theatres of Dublin were empty buildings hired by the English travelling companies, and we wanted Irish plays and Irish players. When we thought of these plays we thought of everything that was romantic and poetical, because the nationalism we had called up—the nationalism every generation had called up in moments of discouragement—was romantic and poetical."

Memorial statue in Sligo, Ireland.

Yeats was appointed to the first Irish Senate in 1922, and was re-appointed in 1925. One of his main achievements as a Senator was to chair the coinage committee that was charged with selecting a set of designs for the first currency used by the Irish Free State, as well as the costumes of Irish judges. He spoke out against proposed anti-divorce legislation in 1925. His characterisation of himself as a public figure is captured in the line "A sixty-year-old smiling public man" in the 1927 poem "Among School Children". He retired from the Senate in 1928 because of ill health. During his time in the senate Yeats warned his colleagues "If you show that this country, southern Ireland, is going to be governed by Roman Catholic ideas and by Catholic ideas alone, you will never get the North...You will put a wedge in the midst of this nation". As the Seanad was almost entirely Catholic, many were offended by his remarks.

Despite these views, towards the end of his life—and especially after the Wall Street Crash and Great Depression, which led some to question whether the democracies would be able to cope with their economic difficulties—Yeats seems to have returned to his aristocratic sympathies. Following the aftermath of the First World War, he became sceptical about the efficacy of democratic government, and anticipated political reconstruction in Europe through totalitarian rule. His later association with Pound drew him towards Mussolini, for whom he expressed admiration on a number of occasions. He wrote three 'marching songs'—never used—for the Irish General Eoin O'Duffy's 'Blueshirts', a quasi-fascist political movement. However, when Pablo Neruda invited him to visit Madrid in 1937, Yeats responded with a letter supporting the Republic against Fascism, and he distanced himself from Nazism and Fascism in the last few years of his life. According to W.J. McCormack, Yeats joined the Eugenics Society in November 1936. From the 1950s to the 1970s, his son Michael Yeats served as a member of the Irish Seanad.

Yeats's gravestone in Drumecliff, Co Sligo.

Yeats' later poetry and plays are written in a more personal vein. His subjects included his son and daughter, and the experience of growing old. Yeats himself, in the poem "The Circus Animals' Desertion", published in his final collection, describes the inspiration for these late works in the lines "Now that my ladder's gone / I must lie down where all the ladders start / In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart".

In 1929, he stayed at Thoor Ballylee for the last time. Much of the remainder of his life was spent outside of Ireland, but he did lease Riversdale house in the Dublin suburb of Rathfarnham in 1932. He wrote prolifically through his final years, and published poetry, plays, and prose. In 1938, he attended the Abbey for the final time to see the premier of his play Purgatory. His Autobiographies of William Butler Yeats was published that same year.

Having suffered from a variety of illnesses for a number of years, Yeats died at the Hôtel Idéal Séjour, in Menton, France on 28 January, 1939, aged 73. He was buried after a discreet and private funeral at Roquebrune-Cap-Martin. Yeats and George had often discussed his death, and his express wish was to be buried quickly, with minimum fuss. According to George "His actual words were 'If I die bury me up there [at Roquebrune] and then in a year's time when the newspapers have forgotten me, dig me up and plant me in sligo". In September 1948, Yeats' body was moved to Drumcliffe, County Sligo, on the Irish Naval Service corvette L.E. Macha. His epitaph is taken from final line of "Under Ben Bulben", one of his last poems, and reads "Cast a cold eye / on life, on death / Horseman, pass by!" Of this location, Yeats said, "the place that has really influenced my life most is Sligo." Today, Sligo town is home to a statue and a memorial building erected in the poet's honour.

Poetic style

Yeats is generally considered to be one of the twentieth century's key English-language poets. Yet, unlike most modernists who experimented with free verse, Yeats was a master of the traditional verse forms. The impact of modernism on Yeats's work can be seen in the increasing abandonment of the more conventionally poetic diction of his early work in favour of the more austere language and more direct approach to his themes that increasingly characterises the poetry and plays of his middle period, comprising the volumes In the Seven Woods, Responsibilities and The Green Helmet.

Sources

• Cleeve, Brian (1972). W.B. Yeats and the Designing of Ireland's Coinage. New York: Dolmen Press. ISBN 0-85-105221-5
• Foster, R. F. (1997). W. B. Yeats: A Life, Vol. I: The Apprentice Mage. New York: Oxford UP. ISBN 0-19-288085-3.
• Foster, R. F. (2003). W. B. Yeats: A Life, Vol. II: The Arch-Poet 1915–1939. New York: Oxford UP. ISBN 0-19-818465-4.
• Igoe, Vivien (1994). A Literary Guide to Dublin. London: Methuen Publishing. ISBN 0-413-69120-9.
• Hone, Joseph (1943). W.B. Yeats, 1865–1939. New York: Macmillan Publishers. OCLC: 35607726
• Longenbach, James (1988). Stone Cottage: Pound, Yeats, and Modernism. New York: Oxford UP. ISBN 0-19-506662-6.
• Ryan, Philip B. (1998). The Lost Theatres of Dublin. Wiltshire: The Badger Press. ISBN 0-9526076-1-1.
• Yeats, W. B. (1900). "The Philosophy of Shelley's Poetry", in Essays and Introductions, 1961. New York: Macmillan Publishers. OCLC 362823

Further reading

• Brown, Terence (2001). The Life of W. B. Yeats. Blackwell Publishers. ISBN 0-631-18298-5.
• Ellmann, Richard (1978). Yeats: The Man and the Masks. W W Norton. ISBN 0-393-07522-2.
• Jeffares, A Norman ((1984). A New Commentary on the Poems of W. B. Yeats. Stanford UP. ISBN 0-8047-1221-2.
• Jeffares, A Norman (1949). W B Yeats: Man and Poet. Yale UP. ISBN 0-31-215814-9
• Jeffares, A Norman (1989). W B Yeats: A New Biography. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. ISBN 0-374-28588-8.
• King, Francis (1978). The Magical World of Aleister Crowley. New York: Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, ISBN 0-69-810884-1
• King, Francis (1989). Modern Ritual Magic: The Rise of Western Occultism. ISBN 1-85327-032-6.
• W.J. McCormack (2005). Blood Kindred: The Politics of W.B.Yeats and His Death. Pimilico ISBN 0-712-66514-5.
• Pritchard, William H. (1972). W. B. Yeats: A Critical Anthology. Penquin. ISBN 0-14-08-0791-8.

External links

• Large collection of Yeats's poetry
• The Yeats Summer School, Sligo
• The National Library of Ireland's exhibition, Yeats: The Life and Works of William Butler Yeats
• Selected Poetry of W.B.Yeats
• 'Yeats' 'Leda and the swan': an images coming of age
• Works by William Butler Yeats at Project Gutenberg
• Poetry by W.B. Yeats on Bibliomania
• Gallery of Locations of Yeats's Poems
• The Yeats theater, an introduction to his life and work
• 'W. B. Yeats and A Vision' provides outline and analysis of Yeats's esoteric system

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