WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS

[1865-1939]

William Butler Yeats was born in Sandymount, Dublin. His father's family, of English stock, had been in Ireland for at least 200 years; his mother's, the Pollexfens, hailing originally from Devon, had been for some generations in Sligo, in the west of Ireland. Yeats's family was distinguished in the arts; J. B. Yeats, his father, who had abandoned the law to take up painting, was a well-known painter, Yeats himself wanted to be a painter. His father as a painter made a somewhat precarious living. The Yeatses were in London from 1874 until 1881, and Yeats attended the Godolphin School, Hammersmith, London (1877-81), where he was teased and beaten for being Irish and delicate. He at last managed to earn some respect by his prowess at high-diving. In 1881 the Yeatses returned to Ireland¡ªto Howth, a few miles from Dublin. On leaving Erasmus High School in Dublin in 1883, Yeats started to attend the Metropolitan School of Art, Dublin, where his father was a master, and it was here he met a mystic poet AE (Geroge Russell). But he soon left the art school to concentrate on poetry. It was apparent that his medium was not the brush but the pen. His first two published poems appeared in the Dublin University Review in 1885. And The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems was published in 1889.

    Yeats's father was a religious skeptic, but he believed in the "religion of art." Yeats himself, religious by temperament but unable to believe in Christian orthodoxy, sought all his life for traditions of esoteric thought that would compensate for a lost religion. This search led him to various kinds of mysticism, to folklore, theosophy, spiritualism, and Neo-Platonism¡ªnot in any strict chronological order, for he kept returning to and reworking earlier aspects of his thought. In 1890 Yeats joined the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn (a Rosicrucian society) and in 1893 after a ritual examination he was inducted into a higher order of the Golden Dawn. He retained the membership until his later years. In middle life he elaborated a symbolic system of his own, based on a variety of sources, which enabled him to strengthen the pattern and coherence of his poetic imagery. The student of Yeats is constantly coming up against this willful and sometimes embarrassing esotericism which he cultivated sometimes playfully, sometimes earnestly, sometimes treating it as though it were a body of truths and sometimes as though it were a convenient language of symbols. Modern scholarship has traced most of Yeats's mystical and quasi-mystical ideas to sources that were common to Blake and Shelley and which sometimes go far back into pre-Platonic beliefs and traditions. But his greatness as a poet lies in his ability to communicate the power and significance of his symbols, by the way he expresses and organizes them, even to readers who know nothing of his system.

    Yeats's childhood and young manhood were spent between Dublin, London, and Sligo, and each of these places contributed something to his poetic development. In London in the 1890s he met the important poets of the day, and in 1891 was one of the founders of the Rhymers' Club, whose members included Lionel Johnson, Ernest Dowson, and many other characteristic figures of the 90s. The Club specialized in the latest aestheticism and imitated the Pre-Raphaelites. Naturally, here he acquired ideas of poetry which were vaguely Pre-Raphaelite: he believed, in this early stage of his career, that a poet's language should be dreamy, evocative, and ethereal. But the affectations of the moment could not hold him. His devotion to Ireland was so intense that he returned to live in the wildest of its counties, to integrate himself with the problems of his own land, and express a life that had never been given full expression. From the countryside around Sligo he got something much more vigorous and earthly¡ªa knowledge of the life of the peasantry and of their folklore. In Dublin he was influenced by the currents of Irish nationalism and, while often in disagreement with those who wished to use literature for crude political ends, he nevertheless learned to see his poetry as a contribution to a rejuvenated Irish culture. With collaboration of a few others, Yeats was responsible for the renascence of culture in Ireland; he helped to establish not only the Gaelic League but also the Irish Literary Theater. It was to be a communal adventure based upon native material. To further this aim Yeats wrote dramas and lyrics centering about Irish legendry. He re-created folklore, published eloquent essays, and perfected a poetry of vague music and delicate nostalgia.

    The three influences of Dublin, London, and Sligo did not develop in chronological order¡ªhe was going to and fro between these places throughout his early life¡ªand we sometimes find a poem based on Sligo folklore in the midst of a group of dreamy poems written under the influence of the Rhymers' Club or an echo of Irish nationalist feeling in a lyric otherwise wholly Pre-Raphaelite in tone. We can distinguish quite clearly, however, the main periods into which Yeats's poetic career falls. He began in the tradition of self-conscious romanticism which he learned from the London poets of the 1890s. Spenser and Shelley, and a little later Blake, were also important influences. About the same time he was writing poems (e.g., "The Stolen Child") deriving from his Sligo experience, with a quiet precision of natural imagery, country place names, and themes from folklore. The the influences of Standish O'Grady, George Sigerson, Douglas Hyde, Thomas Davis, James Clarence Mangan, Sir Samuel Ferguson, William Morris, and John O'Leary strengthened his pride in the ancient Irish literature. Naturally, even when he plays with Neo-Platonic ideas, he can link them with Irish heroic themes and so give a dignity and a style to his imagery not normally associated with this sort of poetic dreaminess. Thus the heroic legends of old Ireland and the folk traditions of the modern Irish countryside provided Yeats with a stiffening for his early dreamlike imagery, which is why even his first, "90s" phase is productive of interesting poems.

    It was Irish nationalism that first sent Yeats in search of a consistently simpler and more popular style. He tells in one of his autobiographical essays how he sought for a style in which to express the elemental facts about Irish life and aspirations. This led him to the concrete image, as did Hyde's translations from Gaelic folk song, in which "nothing . . . was abstract, nothing worn-out." But other forces were also working on him. He began to feel more and more that his earlier poetic styles could not speak for the whole self. Looking back in 1906, he found that he had mistaken the poetic ideal, "Without knowing it, I had come to care for nothing but impersonal beauty. . . . We should ascend out of common interests, the thoughts of the newspapers, of the market place, but only so far as we can carry the normal, passionate, reasoning self, the personality as a whole (The Collected Works in Verse and Prose of William Butler Yeats, VIII. 16-17)." The result of the abandonment of "impersonal beauty," and of the desire to "carry the normal passionate, reasoning self" into his poetry, is seen in the volume of collected poems, In the Seven Woods (1903) and The Green Helmet and Other Poems (1910). One can see immediately how Yeats here combines the colloquial with the formal, which is characteristic of his "second period."

    By this time Yeats had met the beautiful actress and violent Irish nationalist Maud Gonne (1866-1953), with whom he was desperately in love for many years, but who persistently refused to marry him. This affair is reflected in many of the poems throughout his life, although after his marriage with Georgie Hyde-Lees (1917) the poems relating to Gonne decrease in number. He had also met Lady Gregory (1852-1932), Irish writer and promoter of Irish literature, in 1896 and she invited him to spend the following summer at her country house, Coole Park, in Galway. Yeats spent many holidays with Lady Gregory and discovered the attractiveness of "the country house ideal," seeing in an aristocratic life of elegance and leisure in a great house a method of imposing order on chaos and a symbol of the Neo-Platonic dance of life. He expresses this view many times in his poetry¡ªe.g., at the end of "A Prayer for My Daughter"¡ªand it became an important part of his complex of attitudes. The middle classes, with their Philistine money-grubbing, he detested, and for his ideal characters he looked either below them, to peasants and beggars, or above them, to the aristocracy, for each of these had their own traditions and lived according to them.

    Meanwhile, at fifty Yeats turned against his own idiom. Freeing himself from shadowy waters and a wavering music, he dealt with actualities; his lines became subtler and, at the same time, more precise. Even when he employed mythological themes, he changed them from remote fantasies into the semblance of an immediate experience. In complete contrast to his early Pre-Raphaelite leanings, when he "hid his face amid a crowd of stars," he began to express his delight "in the whole man¡ªblood, imagination, intellect, running together." Yeats continued to pursue that delight "in the whole man" and express it in some of the richest poetry of the period. He who had loved "symbols, popular beliefs, and old scraps of verse that made Ireland romantic to herself" declared that "the new Ireland, overwhelmed by responsibility, begins to long for psychological truths." His intellectual power increased. Yeats was responding in his own way to the change in poetic taste represented in the poetry and criticism of Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot immediately before World War I. A gift for epigram had already begun to emerge in his poetry: in the volume entitled The Wild Swans at Coole (1919) he has a poem citing Walter Savage Landor (the 19th-century poet who wrote some fine lapidary verse) and John Donne as masters. To the precision, and the combination of colloquial and formal, which he had achieved early in the century, he now added a "metaphysical" as well as an epigrammatic elements, and this is seen in the later poems of his third period. The language became more and more straightforward. He also continued his experiments with different kinds of rhythm. At the same time he was continuing his search for a language of symbols and pursuing his esoteric studies. Mrs. Yeats proved so sympathetic to his imaginative needs that the automatic writing which she produced (believed by Yeats to have been dictated by spirits, but apparently faked by her to help her husband) gave him the elements of a symbolic system which he later worked out in his book A Vision (1925, 1937) and which he used in all sorts of ways in much of his later poetry. The system was both a theory of the movements of history and a theory of the different types of personality, each movement and type being related in various complicated ways to a different phase of the moon. Some of Yeats's poetry is unintelligible without a knowledge of A Vision; but the better poems, such as the two on Byzantium, can be appreciated without such knowledge by the experienced reader who responds sensitively to the patterning of the imagery reinforced by the incantatory effect of the rhythms. Some recent criticism scorns attempts by those who are not experts in the background of Yeats's esoteric thought to discuss his poetry and insists that only a detailed knowledge of Yeats's sources can yield his poetic meaning; but while it is true that some particular images do not yield all their significance to those who are ignorant of the background, it is also true that too literal a paraphrase of the symbolism in the light of the sources robs the poems of their power by reducing them to mere exercises in the use of a code.

    The Tower (1928) and The Winding Stair (1933) represent the mature Yeats at his very best¡ªa realist-symbolist-metaphysical poet who with an uncanny power over words. These volumes represent his fourth and greatest period. Here, in his poems of the 1920s and 1930s, winding stairs, spinning tops, "gyres," spirals of all kinds, are important symbols; not only are they connected with Yeats's philosophy of history and of personality, but they also serve as a means of resolving some of those contraries that had arrested him from the beginning. Life is a journey up a spiral staircase; as we grow older we cover the ground we have covered before, only higher up; as we look down the winding stair below us we measure our progress by the number of places where we were but no longer are. The journey is both repetitious and progressive; we go both round and upward. Through symbolic images of this kind Yeats explores the paradoxes of time and change, of growth and identity, of love and age, of life and art, of madness and wisdom.

    In his fifth and final period Yeats returned to the turbulence of life from which he had tried to escape until he wrote the Byzantium poems. Yeats's return to life, to "the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart," is one of the most impressive final phases of any poet's career. In his very last letter he wrote: "When I try to put all into a phrase I say, 'Man can embody truth but he cannot know it.' . . . The abstract is not life and everywhere draws out its contradictions. You can refute Hegel but not the Saint or the Song of Sixpence." He left a body of verse which, in variety and power, makes him beyond question the greatest 20th-century poet of the English language. He spent much of his time during his last years in southern Europe. He died, after a brief illness, at Roquebrune, near Nice, January 28, 1939, and he was reentombed at Drumcliffe churchyard in 1949.