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Yeats, William Butler | Article View | |
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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:
And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight's all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet's wings.
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.
