W. B. Yeats

William Butler Yeats is widely regarded as the greatest poet writing in English in the twentieth century. Irish by birth and passion, he began as a late Romantic dreamer of fairies, Celtic legends and the misty “Celtic Twilight”, and remade himself in middle age into a modern poet of extraordinary power, writing in a hard, passionate, rhetorical, intimately personal style about love, politics, history, old age, death and the soul. His poems — “The Lake Isle of Innisfree”, “When You Are Old”, “Easter, 1916”, “The Second Coming”, “Sailing to Byzantium”, “Leda and the Swan”, “Among School Children”, “Byzantium”, “The Circus Animals’ Desertion” — are among the most quoted in the language. He was also a playwright, founder of Dublin’s Abbey Theatre, a leader of the Irish Literary Revival, an occultist, a senator of the new Irish Free State and, in 1923, the first Irish winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Life

Dublin, Sligo and London

Yeats was born on 13 June 1865 at Sandymount, Dublin, into a Protestant Anglo-Irish family; his father, John Butler Yeats, was a gifted, impractical portrait painter, and his brother Jack became Ireland’s greatest painter. The family moved between London and Dublin, but the boy’s imaginative home was Sligo, in the west of Ireland, where his mother’s family, the Pollexfens, lived, among mountains, lakes and peasants who told stories of the fairies. He studied at art school in Dublin, became interested in mysticism, theosophy and the occult, and joined the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn in London. His early poems — The Wanderings of Oisin (1889), The Rose, The Wind Among the Reeds (1899) — are dreamy, musical, symbolist, steeped in Irish myth: “I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree, / And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made… And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow.”

Maud Gonne

In 1889 he met Maud Gonne, a tall, beautiful, fiery English-born actress and Irish revolutionary, and fell in love with her — “the troubling of my life began.” She inspired many of his poems (“When You Are Old”, “No Second Troy” — “Why, what could she have done, being what she is? / Was there another Troy for her to burn?”) and refused his repeated proposals; in 1903 she married the nationalist John MacBride, an unhappy marriage.

The Irish Literary Revival

With Lady Augusta Gregory, whose house at Coole Park in County Galway became his summer refuge, and the playwright J. M. Synge, Yeats led the movement to create a national literature in English drawing on Gaelic legend and peasant life. In 1904 they founded the Abbey Theatre in Dublin. His plays include Cathleen ni Houlihan (1902), in which Ireland appears as an old woman calling young men to die for her (“Did that play of mine send out / Certain men the English shot?” he later wondered), and plays on the hero Cuchulain. The riots over Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World (1907) and Dublin’s philistinism embittered him.

The modern style

From about 1910, influenced in part by Ezra Pound, who served as his secretary, Yeats’s poetry grew harder, barer, more colloquial and more personal (Responsibilities, 1914). The Easter Rising of 1916, when Irish republicans seized Dublin and were defeated and executed, transformed his view of the people he had dismissed as petty shopkeepers. In “Easter, 1916” he names the executed leaders, including MacBride, and concludes:

I write it out in a verse — MacDonagh and MacBride And Connolly and Pearse Now and in time to be, Wherever green is worn, Are changed, changed utterly: A terrible beauty is born.

In 1917, aged fifty-two, after a last proposal to Maud and then to her daughter Iseult, he married Georgie Hyde-Lees, twenty-five, who on their honeymoon began automatic writing, producing messages from “instructors” that Yeats developed into the cosmological system of A Vision (1925): history and personality move in cycles of interpenetrating “gyres” (cones), with each civilisation lasting about two thousand years and the phases of the moon governing types of human being. He bought a ruined Norman tower, Thoor Ballylee, near Coole, which became a central symbol. They had two children.

The great poems

His greatest work came in his fifties and sixties: The Wild Swans at Coole (1919), Michael Robartes and the Dancer (1921), The Tower (1928) and The Winding Stair (1933). “The Second Coming” (1919), written after the war and the Russian Revolution, is the most quoted poem of the century:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity… And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

“Sailing to Byzantium” (1926) opens “That is no country for old men” and longs to escape the dying body — “a dying animal” — into “the artifice of eternity”, to become a golden bird singing to the emperors of Byzantium “Of what is past, or passing, or to come.” “Leda and the Swan” turns the rape of Leda by Zeus into the violent annunciation of Greek history. “Among School Children”, written after visiting a school as a senator, ends with one of his most famous questions: “O body swayed to music, O brightening glance, / How can we know the dancer from the dance?”

In 1922 the Irish Free State was established after the war of independence, followed by civil war (“Meditations in Time of Civil War”); Yeats served as a senator (1922–28), speaking on divorce and copyright, and in the 1930s flirted with authoritarian politics, writing marching songs for the Blueshirts, an Irish fascist movement — an episode that has troubled critics. In old age he wrote with fierce, sexual, raging energy (“The Wild Old Wicked Man”, the Crazy Jane poems) and with clear-eyed self-scrutiny (“The Circus Animals’ Desertion”: “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”). He died in France on 28 January 1939; his body was moved after the war to Drumcliff churchyard in Sligo, as he had requested in “Under Ben Bulben”, under the epitaph he wrote: “Cast a cold eye / On life, on death. / Horseman, pass by!”

Ideas and art

Myth and symbol. Yeats built his poetry on symbols — the rose, the tower, the gyre, Byzantium, the swan, the dancer — drawn from Irish legend, the occult, Neoplatonism, Blake and his own system. Nation. He wanted a literature that would give Ireland a soul; he was a cultural nationalist ambivalent about the violence of politics. The mask. He believed the poet makes himself by adopting a mask, an anti-self: “We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.” Form. He mastered traditional forms — ottava rima, the ballad, the sonnet — and made them carry modern speech, rhetorical grandeur and intimate thought.

Legacy

W. H. Auden’s elegy “In Memory of W. B. Yeats” (1939) — “Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry… Earth, receive an honoured guest: / William Yeats is laid to rest” — is itself famous. Yeats’s lines (“things fall apart”, “a terrible beauty”, “no country for old men”, “slouching towards Bethlehem”) have given titles to novels by Chinua Achebe, Cormac McCarthy and Joan Didion. Seamus Heaney inherited his place as Ireland’s great poet.

In conversation

• “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold” — for any collapse of order.
• “A terrible beauty is born” — when sacrifice or catastrophe transforms ordinary people.
• “No country for old men” — a world that belongs to the young (and the title of McCarthy’s novel).