William Butler Yeats

Yeats accomplished the feat, rare among poets, of deepening and perfecting his complex styles as the years advanced. His later writings are generally acknowledged to be his best. They were influenced by Georgie Hyde-Lees, his wife from 1917, who claimed to have a medium's gift for automatic writing. Partly a product of this spiritualist activity, A Vision (1925) is an elaborate attempt in prose to explain the arcane mythology, symbolism, and philosophy that Yeats used in much of his work. In a series of diagrams, Yeats collaborated with his wife's mysterious “communicators” to describe cyclical patterns of cosmic force called the Gyres. Personality types were categorized according to mystic rules based on lunar phases, and history was viewed as an unending process of apocalypse and rebirth. The systems of A Vision structure much of Yeats's later work, notably the poems of Michael Robartes and the Dancer (1921), The Tower (1928), and The Winding Stair and Other Poems (1933).

Yeats had long been interested in such theories. He employs the Celtic myth of a world-destroying boar in “The Valley of the Black Pig” (1899); in “He Bids His Beloved Be at Peace” (1899), the agent of destruction has been transformed into “Shadowy Horses ... of Disaster”. This cataclysm would, he wrote in 1902, “quench all things in ancestral Darkness again”. Such ideas are expressed most explicitly in “The Second Coming” (1921):

Yeats's attitude to the coming disaster moved between terror and delight. In 1902 he had read the work of German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, whose idea of the superman (Übermensch), a figure beyond ordinary human morality, became an important part of Yeats's poetic vision. In “Lapis Lazuli” (1938), Yeats's version of such a being takes the form of the carved figures of two old Chinese men. He opens the poem with an oddly comic visualization of modern warfare:

The speaker moves from the violent futility of human conflict to the superior vantage point of the two carved figures. While witnessing this carnage, they maintain a lofty detachment typical of Nietzsche's ideal: “On all the tragic scene they stare”, Yeats writes, but “[t]heir ancient glittering eyes are gay.” This strange, cold quality is an important factor in much of his late poetry. The percussive language of “Leda and the Swan” (1928) suggests the amoral brutality of the controlling forces of the universe:

The voracious sexual power of the swan gestures towards the notion of superiority that Yeats saw in the relentless power of the Gyres. It also indicates the erotic charge present in his fascination with these superhuman forces.

Continually revising his work, Yeats recounted episodes from his life in Autobiographies (published posthumously, 1955) and Dramatis Personae (1936). Two later collections are A Full Moon in March (1935) and Last Poems and Two Plays (1939). The former collection bears the signs of his brief flirtation with Irish fascism late in his life. In “Three Songs to the Same Tune” (1935), a fascist marching song, the brutal refrain is “Down, down, hammer them down, / Down to the tune of O'Donnell Abu”.

Yeats received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1923. He died in Roquebrune, France, on January 28, 1939, and in 1948 his body was taken to Sligo, Ireland, so that he could be laid to rest in the place where he had spent so much of his childhood.