Yeats, William Butler

I

Introduction

Yeats, William Butler (1865-1939), Irish poet and dramatist, and Nobel laureate, who was a leader of the Irish Renaissance and one of the foremost writers of the 20th century.

II

Early Development

Yeats was born in Dublin on June 13, 1865, the son of the noted Irish painter John Butler Yeats. He was schooled in London and Dublin, where he studied painting, and took his holidays in County Sligo, which inspired his enthusiasm for Irish tradition. He also pursued a parallel interest in subjects such as Hinduism, theosophy, and occultism. With his school friend Charles Johnson, he formed the Dublin Hermetic Society in June 1885 to promote the study of Asian religions. When, in 1887, he moved with his family to London, Yeats visited the leading theosophist and medium Helena Blavatsky, and the following year he became a member of the Esoteric Section of the Theosophical Society. On a visit to Dublin in 1888, he attended a seance in which, he claimed, evil spirits possessed his body and hurled it against a wall. He did not repeat the experience for some years. From 1890 he was a member of the occult Order of the Golden Dawn, which fuelled his fascination with the mystic symbols of Rosicrucianism and cabbalism. Such activities gave his thinking an emphasis on magic and apocalypticism that would remain a constant feature of his work.

As early as 1895, he asked of his friend, Florence Farr, “has the magical Armageddon begun at last?” During this time, he wrote lyrical, symbolic poems on pagan Irish themes, such as those in The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems (1889) and The Rose (1893), in the romantic, melancholy tone he believed characteristic of the ancient Celts. The work of this period has an ethereal quality: the language of a poem such as “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” (1893) is composed in terms of soft nostalgia, each stanza forming one long, languorous sentence:

His work with Edwin Ellis on an edition of the poems of William Blake amplified his interest in the links between poetry and the occult. He even decided—on the flimsiest of evidence—that Blake was of Irish descent. In tune with these themes, Yeats also wrote The Celtic Twilight (1893) and The Secret Rose (1897), two collections of short stories on Irish subjects. On a visit to Ireland in 1889 he met the beautiful Irish patriot Maude Gonne, whom he loved unrequitedly for the rest of his life. He also proposed to her daughter, Iseult, in 1917. Maude Gonne inspired much of his early work and drew him into the Irish nationalist movement for independence.

III

Irish Literary Revival

In 1891 Yeats was one of the founding members of the London Irish Literary Society, and the next year, helped form the National Literary Society in Dublin. The society planned to establish a series of lending libraries, and to issue books in the Irish language, but was beset by internal quarrels. Yeats returned to Ireland in 1896, and joined the Irish Republican Brotherhood, an explicitly political independence movement. He became a close friend of the nationalist playwright Lady Isabella Augusta Gregory, whom he often visited at her estate at Coole Park and with whom he travelled in Italy. Yeats, Lady Gregory, and like-minded literary figures such as George Moore and Edward Martyn established a company of largely English actors to stage new plays on Irish themes. These plays reflect the mystical concerns of his poetry. The Countess Cathleen (1892) tells the story of an Irish noblewoman who sells her soul to the Devil rather than let the local peasants starve. The Land of Heart's Desire (1894) is a romantic piece dealing with abduction by fairies. Like the fairy people of “The Stolen Child” (1889), these figures are not the picturesque characters of children's fiction, but powerful, amoral entities dwelling on the fringes of Irish peasant culture. They offer release from drudgery, but this is “maddening freedom and bewildering light” which few humans can bear.

A generous bequest from Annie Horniman (a philanthropist and member of the Golden Dawn) allowed the company to found what became in 1904 the famous Abbey Theatre, dedicated to reviving Irish national drama. In his period as its manager (1904-1910), Yeats established the Abbey as a centre of the Irish literary revival called the Irish Renaissance. Yeats's range as a playwright is remarkable: The Pot of Broth (1904) is a whimsical peasant comedy; Cathleen ni Houlihan (1902), a nationalist prose drama (with Maude Gonne in the title role); and Deirdre (1907), a verse tragedy. Although the movement aimed to regenerate Irish culture by heightening awareness of native mythology and literature, it met with great opposition from many Dubliners. When the company staged The Playboy of the Western World (1907) by John Millington Synge, the audience rioted, incensed by its unidealized portrayal of the Irish peasantry. Yeats, frustrated by these events, eventually withdrew from the popular theatre to produce small-scale productions for private audiences.

Yeats also wrote short plays on the Celtic legendary hero Cuchulain, combined as Four Plays for Dancers (1921). They were strongly influenced by the Noh drama of the Japanese court, some of which was being translated in 1913 by the American poet Ezra Pound, who was living with Yeats in Sussex and working as his secretary. These pieces were designed more for coterie audiences in aristocratic drawing rooms than for the middle-class public in commercial Dublin theatres. The language of these plays, spoken by masked actor-dancers, is sparse and ritualistic:

At the Hawk's Well (1917)

In these later plays Yeats returned poetry to the theatre, from which it had long been absent, and created poetic dramas as spare and pregnant with mysterious meaning as the images of a dream. His last plays, sparse, brooding pieces such as Purgatory (1939), are chamber works in a formal, liturgical language that nevertheless evokes apocalyptic and monstrous events: in 1937, Yeats wrote that his characters were all in the process of “holding down violence or madness”.

IV

Disillusionment and Change

In 1908 an eight-volume Collected Works in Verse and Prose was published, and Yeats felt that, as a poet, he had gone out of fashion. When, after leaving the Abbey Theatre, he made a full return to poetry, with works such as The Green Helmet and Other Poems (1910), Yeats strove to abandon his earlier self-conscious softness and facility. Ireland became less idealized: it was a “fool-driven land” and a “blind, bitter land”. He began to write poems on public, modern subjects such as “At the Abbey Theatre” and “To a Poet...”. By the time of The Wild Swans at Coole (1919) Yeats had moved away from the nervous rhythms and misty images of his earlier symbolism and adopted a more steely tone that employed a more physical and corporeal vocabulary. His work became clearer, leaner, and more aware of the forces of sexuality and violence, aiming for a tone that in “The Fisherman” (1919) is described as “cold/And passionate as the dawn”.

By the end of the 19th century, Yeats was an isolated and embittered figure in the Irish nationalist movement. As he grew older, his attitude to the politics of independence became more ambivalent. “To a Shade” (1914) advises Charles Stewart Parnell, the politician who nearly secured Home Rule for Ireland in the 1890s, to remain in the tomb. In “Easter 1916” (1921), a poem that refers to the Easter Rising, an uprising against British rule in Dublin, he reflects on this attitude, one suspended between celebration and horror: in the action of the rebels and their violent suppression by the British government, Yeats wrote, “a terrible beauty is born”. The leaders, 15 of whom were executed, quoted Yeats's Cathleen ni Houlihan to their supporters: in a later poem he asked “Did that play of mine send out / Certain men the English shot?” Despite his misgivings, Yeats served in the Senate of the new Irish Free State from 1922 to 1928.