William Butler Yeats

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

William Butler Yeats (pronounced "Yates") (13 June, 1865 – 28 January, 1939) was an Irish poet, dramatist, mystic and public figure. Yeats is easily the single most influential figure in early 20th century English verse. While the tides of Modernism were sweeping America, beginning in the 19th century with Whitman and Dickinson, and continuing on in the 20th by poets like Pound and Eliot, in the British Isles a more traditional approach to poetry, emphasizing rhyme and meter, continued to dominate. Yeats was the most important poet to emerge from this tradition. He is often listed alongside Keats and Shakespeare as one of the greatest poets who ever lived. Yet Yeats was also a major figure in the Modernist revolution that would take the literary tradition by storm. In this respect, Yeats is unique among poets of the 20th century, a master of the traditional poetic forms as well as one of the greatest pioneers of untraditional, modern poetry.

It is difficult to summarize Yeats' contribution to verse without slipping into hyperbole. He revitalized rhymed-and-metered poetry at a time when it was in serious danger of becoming stagnant. Like Frost in America and Hardy in England, Yeats found a way to write with a voice that was refreshingly new and colloquial while at the same time utilizing the devices of poetic form to their utmost potential. As an older man, Yeats revitalized poetry yet again, by pointing (with the help of Ezra Pound) towards an entirely new direction, and doing so with poems that are not only provocative and inventive, but hypnotically beautiful.

The young poet

When Yeats was young, his family moved first from Sandymount, County Dublin, to County Sligo, and then to London to enable his father John to further his career as an artist. At first, the Yeats children were educated at home. Their mother, who was homesick for Sligo, entertained them with stories and folktales from her native county.

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. In 1885, Yeats' first poems, as well as an essay called "The Poetry of Sir Samuel Ferguson", were published in the Dublin University Review. His early work tended towards romantic lushness best described by the title of his 1893 collection The Celtic Twilight, all which tended to celebrate the Irish countryside which Yeats had dreamed of as a child. A fine example of Yeats' early style, with its lush sounds and Romantic sentimentality, is the famous lyric "The Lake-Isle of Innisfree":

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree;

And a small cabin build there, of clay and waddles made.

Nine bean rows will I have there, a hive for the honey bee

And live alone, in the bee-loud glade.

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow

From the veils of morning to where the cricket sings

There midnight's all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow

And the evening full of the linnet's wings.

I will arise and go now, for always night and day

I hear lake-water lapping with low-sounds by the shore

While standing on the roadway, or on the pavements gray

I hear it, in the deep heart's core.

Even before he began to write poetry, Yeats had come to associate poetry with religious ideas and thoughts of sentimental elements. Describing his childhood in later years, he described his "one unshakable belief" as "whatever of philosophy has been made poetry is alone... 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' early poetry drew heavily on Irish myth and folklore and drew on the diction and coloring of pre-Raphaelite verse. His major influence in these years — and probably throughout the rest of his career as well — was Percy Bysshe Shelley. In a late essay on Shelley he 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. It appeared in Dublin University Review and was never republished. His first book publication, 100 copies paid for by his father, was the pamphlet Mosada: A Dramatic Poem (1886), which had already appeared in the same journal. The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems followed in 1889.

The long title poem, the first that he would not disown in his maturity, was based on the poems of the Fenian Cycle of Irish mythology. This poem, which took two years to complete, shows the influence of Ferguson and the Pre-Raphaelites. It introduced 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. After The Wanderings of Oisin, he never attempted another long poem. His other early poems are lyrics on the themes of love or mystical and esoteric subjects.

The Yeats family had returned to London in 1887, and in 1890 Yeats co-founded the Rhymer's Club with Ernest Rhys. This group of like-minded poets met regularly and published anthologies in 1892 and 1894. Other early collections include Poems (1895), The Secret Rose (1897) and The Wind Among the Reeds (1899).

Maud Gonne, the Irish Literary Revival and the Abbey Theatre

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

In 1889, Yeats met Maud Gonne, a young heiress who was beginning to devote herself to the Irish nationalist movement. Gonne admired Yeats' early poem The Isle of Statues and sought out his acquaintance. Yeats developed an obsession for Gonne, and she was to have a significant effect on his poetry and his life thereafter.

Two years after their initial meeting, Yeats proposed to her, but was rejected. He was to propose to Gonne a total of three more times: in 1899, 1900 and 1901. With each proposal, she rejected Yeats and finally, in 1903, married the Roman Catholic Irish nationalist John MacBride. This same 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.

Also in 1896, he was introduced to Lady Gregory by their mutual friend Edward Martyn. She encouraged Yeats' nationalism and convinced him to continue focusing on writing drama. Although he was influenced by French Symbolism, Yeats consciously focused 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, Martyn and other writers including John Millington 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 (otherwise 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.

One of the enduring achievements of the Revival was the setting up of the Abbey Theatre. In 1899 Yeats, Lady Gregory, Martyn and George Moore founded the Irish Literary Theatre. This survived for about two years but was not successful. However, working together with William and Frank Fay, two Irish brothers with theatrical experience, and Yeats' unpaid-yet-independently wealthy secretary Annie Elizabeth Fredericka Horniman (a wealthy Englishwoman who had previously been involved in the presentation of George Bernard Shaw's Arms and the Man in London in 1894) the group established the Irish National Theatre Society.

This group of founders was also able, along with J M Synge, to acquire property in Dublin and open the Abbey Theatre on 27 December, 1904. Yeats' play Cathleen Ni Houlihan and Lady Gregory's Spreading the News were featured on the opening night. Yeats continued to be involved with the Abbey up to his death, both as a member of the board and a prolific playwright.

In 1902, Yeats helped set up the Dun Emer Press to publish work by writers associated with the Revival. This became the Cuala Press in 1904. From then until its closure in 1946, the press, which was run by the poet's sisters, produced over 70 titles, including 48 books by Yeats himself. Yeats spent the summer of 1917 with Maud Gonne, and proposed to Gonne's daughter, Iseult, but was rejected.

In September, he proposed to Georgie Hyde-Lees, was accepted, and the two were married on October 20. Their marriage was successful, though she was twenty-six and he was fifty-two at the time. Around this time he also bought Ballylee Castle, near Coole Park, and promptly renamed it Thoor Ballylee. It was his summer home for much of the rest of his life.

Mysticism

Yeats had a life-long interest in mysticism, spiritualism, and astrology. In 1885, he and his friends formed the Dublin Hermetic Order. This society held its first meeting on June 16, with Yeats as the chair. The same year, the Dublin Theosophical lodge was opened with the involvement of Brahmin Mohini Chatterjee. Yeats attended his first séance the following year. Later, Yeats became heavily involved with hermeticist and theosophical beliefs, and in 1900 he became head of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, which he had joined in 1889. After his marriage, he and his wife dabbled with a form of automatic writing, Mrs. Yeats contacting a spirit guide she called "Leo Africanus."

Yeats' mystical inclinations, informed by Hindu religion (Yeats translated The Ten Principal Upanishads (1938) with Shri Purohit Swami), theosophical beliefs and the occult, formed much of the basis of his late poetry, which some critics attacked as lacking intellectual or philosophical insights.

Modernism

In 1913, Yeats met American poet Ezra Pound. Pound traveled to London 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' secretary. The relationship got off to a rocky start when Pound arranged for the publication in the magazine Poetry of some of Yeats' verse with Pound's own unauthorized alterations.

These changes reflected Pound's distaste for Victorian prosody, a style for which Yeats, as a poet born late into the Victorian era, was partially responsible. Pound, like Yeats himself, had once been enamored with the Victorian poets, particularly Swinburne and Rossetti, and Yeats' early style is considered to be an apotheosis of the late Victorian tradition. Yeats, however, like Pound, had grown dissatisfied with the aridity of the Victorian style which, as Yeats moved into middle age, had grown stale and hollow, full of allusions and symbols with no animating purpose. During their time together, Pound's influence, and particularly their joint research into the form of Japanese Noh plays, translations of which Pound had obtained from Ernest Fenollosa's widow, would prove revolutionary, and would provide Yeats with a model for attenuated style of his plays which would go on to influence the pithy, mature poems of his late career. The first of Yeats' "modern" plays modeled on Noh was At the Hawk's Well, the first draft of which he dictated to Pound in January 1916.

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, and he would have been immortalized as a master poet even if he had never lived to meet Pound or join the modernist movement. However, many critics agree that Yeats' greatest contribution to poetry would only emerge in his late career, when he had become a thoroughly modern old man. The impact of modernism on Yeats' work can be seen in the increasing abandonment of the more conventionally poetic diction of his early work in favor of the more austere language and more direct approach to his themes that increasingly characterizes the poetry and plays of his middle period, comprising the volumes In the Seven Woods, Responsibilities, and The Green Helmet.

Politics

The poetry of W.B. Yeats' middle period moved away from the Celtic Twilight mood of the earlier work. His political concerns moved away from cultural politics. In his early work, Yeats' aristocratic pose led to an idealization 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.

Yeats' 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." This poem is an attack on the Dublin employers who were involved in the famous 1913 lockout of workers who supported James Larkin's attempts to organize the Irish labor movement. In Easter 1916, with its equally famous refrain "All changed, changed utterly:/A terrible beauty is born", Yeats faces his own failure to recognize the merits of the leaders of the Easter Rising because of their humble backgrounds and lives.

Yeats was appointed to the Irish Senate (Seanad Éireann) in 1922. 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 coinage for the Irish Free State (and the costumes of Irish judges). He also spoke against proposed anti-divorce legislation in 1925. His own characterization 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 Seanad in 1928 due to ill health.

During his time as a senator 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 they were virtually all Catholics, they were offended by these comments.

Yeats' essentially aristocratic attitudes and his association with Pound tended to draw him towards Mussolini, for whom he expressed admiration on a number of occasions. He also wrote some 'marching songs' (which were never used) for 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. Yeats' politics are ambiguous: no friend of the Left (or democracy), he distanced himself from Nazism and Fascism in the last few years of his life. He was involved in the eugenics movement.

Later life and work

In his later poetry and plays, Yeats wrote in a more personal vein. His subjects included his son and daughter and the experience of growing old. In the poem "The Circus Animals' Desertion", published in his final collection, Yeats 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 outside Ireland, but he did lease a house, Riversdale in the Dublin suburb of Rathfarnham from 1932. He wrote prolifically through the final years of his life, publishing poetry, plays and prose. In 1938, he attended the Abbey for the last time to see the premier of his play Purgatory. The Autobiographies of William Butler Yeats was published that same year.

After suffering from a variety of illnesses for a number of years, Yeats died at the Hôtel Idéal Séjour, in Menton, France on 28 January, 1939, at age 73. The last poem he wrote was the Arthurian-themed The Black Tower.

Yeats was first buried at Roquebrune, until, in accordance with his final wish, his body was disinterred and moved to Drumecliff, County Sligo in September, 1948, on the corvette Irish Macha. His grave is a famous attraction in Sligo. His epitaph, which is the final line from one of his last poems, Under Ben Bulben is "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." The town is also home to a statue and memorial building in Yeats' honor.

Works

1886 — Mosada
1888 — Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry
1889 — The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems
1891 — Representative Irish Tales
1891 — John Sherman and Dhoya
1892 — Irish Faerie Tales
1892 — The Countess Kathleen and Various Legends and Lyrics
1893 — The Celtic Twilight
1894 — The Land of Heart's Desire
1895 — Poems
1897 — The Secret Rose
1899 — The Wind Among the Reeds
1900 — The Shadowy Waters
1902 — Cathleen ni Houlihan
1903 — Ideas of Good and Evil
1903 — In the Seven Woods
1907 — Discoveries
1910 — The Green Helmet and Other Poems
1912 — The Cutting of an Agate
1913 — Poems Written in Discouragement
1914 — Responsibilities
1916 — Reveries Over Childhood and Youth
1917 — The Wild Swans at Coole
1918 — Per Amica Silentia Lunae
1921 — Michael Robartes and the Dancer
1921 — Four Plays for Dancers
1921 — Four Years
1922 — Later Poems
1924 — The Cat and the Moon
1925 — A Vision
1926 — Estrangement
1926 — Autobiographies
1927 — October Blast
1928 — The Tower
1929 — The Winding Stair
1933 — The Winding Stair and Other Poems
1934 — Collected Plays
1935 — A Full Moon in March
1938 — New Poems
1939 — Last Poems and Two Plays (posthumous)
1939 — On the Boiler (posthumous)

References
ISBN links support NWE through referral fees

Print

Foster, R. F. (1996). W. B. Yeats: A Life, Vol. I: The Apprentice Mage. Oxford UP. ISBN 0192880853.
Foster, R. F. (2003). W. B. Yeats: A Life,Vol. II: The Arch-Poet 1915-1939. Oxford UP. ISBN 0198184654
Igoe, Vivien (1994). A Literary Guide to Dublin. Methuen. ISBN 0413691209.
Longenbach, James (1988). Stone Cottage: Pound, Yeats, and Modernism. Oxford UP. ISBN 0195066626.
Ryan, Philip B. (1998). The Lost Theatres of Dublin. The Badger Press. ISBN 0952607611.

External links

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