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William Butler Yeats (13 June 1865 – 28 January 1939) was an Irish
poet and dramatist and one of the foremost figures of 20th century literature. He
was a driving force behind the Irish Literary Revival, and together with Lady
Gregory and Edward Martyn founded the Abbey Theatre and served as its chief
playwright during its early years. Yeats was a pillar of the Irish literary
establishment and was an Irish Senator for two terms. In 1923, he was awarded the
Nobel Prize in Literature for what the Nobel Committee described as "his always
inspired poetry, which in a highly artistic form gives expression to the spirit of
a whole nation". Yeats is generally considered one of the few writers whose
greatest works were completed after being awarded the Nobel Prize; such works
include The Tower (1928) and The Winding Stair and Other Poems (1929).
Yeats was educated in London, but spent his childhood holidays in Sligo. He studied
painting in his youth, and from an early age was fascinated by both Irish legends
and the occult. These topics feature heavily in the first phase of his work, which
lasted roughly until the turn of the century. His earliest volume of verse was
published in 1887, and these slowly paced and lyrical poems display debts to Edmund
Spenser and Percy Bysshe Shelley, as well as to the lyricism of the Pre-Raphaelite
poets. From 1900, Yeats' poetry grew more physical and realistic. He renounced the
transcendentalism of his youth, though he remained preoccupied with physical and
spiritual existence, masks and cyclical theories of life. Over the years Yeats
adopted many different political positions, including, in the words of the critic
Michael Valdez Moses, "those of radical nationalist, classical liberal, reactionary
conservative, and millenarian nihilist".
 Life
Early
years
William Butler Yeats was born in Sandymount, County Dublin. His father, John Butler
Yeats, was a descendant of Jervis Yeats, a Williamite soldier and linen merchant
who died in 1712. Jervis' grandson Benjamin married Mary Butler, daughter of a
landed County Kildare family. At the time of his marriage, John Yeats was studying
law, but abandoned his studies to study art at Heatherley’s Art School in London.
His mother, Susan Mary Pollexfen, came from a wealthy Anglo-Irish family in County
Sligo who owned a prosperous milling and shipping business. Soon after William's
birth the family relocated to Sligo to stay with her extended family, and the young
poet came to think of the area as his childhood and spiritual home. Its landscape
became, over time, both literally and symbolically, his "country of the heart". The
Butler Yeats family were highly artistic; his brother Jack went on to be a highly
regarded painter, while his sisters Elizabeth and Susan—known to family and friends
as Lollie and Lily—became involved in the Arts and Crafts movement.
Yeats grew up in a Protestant Ascendancy at the time undergoing a crisis of
identity. While his family was broadly supportive of the changes Ireland was
experiencing, the nationalist revival of the late 19th century directly
disadvantaged his heritage, and informed his outlook for the remainder of his life.
In 1997, his biographer R. F. Foster observed that Napoleon's dictum that to
understand the man you have to know what was happening in the world when he was
twenty "is manifestly true of W.B.Y." Yeats' childhood and young adulthood were
shadowed by the marginalization of the Protestant community. The 1880s saw the rise
of Parnell and the Home rule movement, the 1890s the momentum of nationalism, while
the Fenians became prominent around the turn of the century. These developments
were to have a profound effect on his poetry, and his subsequent explorations of
Irish identity had a significant influence on the creation of his country's
biography.
In 1876, the family moved to England to aid their father, Jack, to further his
career as an artist. At first the Yeats children were educated at home. Their
mother entertained them with stories and folktales from her county of birth. Jack
provided an erratic education in geography and chemistry, and took William on
natural history explorations of the nearby Slough countryside. On 26 January 1877,
the young poet entered the Godolphin primary school, which he attended for four
years. He did not distinguish himself academically, and an early school report
describes his performance as "only fair. Perhaps better in Latin than in any other
subject. Very poor in spelling." Though he had difficulty with mathematics and
languages, he was fascinated by biology and zoology. For financial reasons, the
family returned to Dublin toward the end of 1880, living at first in the city
center and later in the suburb of Howth. In October 1881, Yeats resumed his
education at Dublin's Erasmus Smith High School. His father's studio was located
nearby and William spent a great deal of time there, and met many of the city's
artists and writers. It was during this period that he started writing poetry, and
in 1885 Yeats' first poems, as well as an essay entitled "The Poetry of Sir Samuel
Ferguson", were published in the Dublin University Review. Between 1884 to 1886,
William attended the Metropolitan School of Art—now the National College of Art and
Design—in Kildare Street. His first known works were written when he was seventeen,
and include a poem heavily influenced by Percy Bysshe Shelley which describes a
magician who set up his throne in central Asia. Other pieces from this period are a
draft of a play involving a Bishop, monk, and woman accused of paganism by local
shepherds, as well as love-poems and narrative lyrics on medieval German knights.
The early works were both conventional and according to the critic Charles Johnson
"utterly unIrish", seeming to come out of a "vast murmumurous gloom of dreams".
Although Yeats' early works drew heavily on Shelley, Edmund Spenser, and on the
diction and colouring of pre-Raphaelite verse, he soon turned to Irish myth and
folklore and the writings of William Blake. In later life, Yeats paid tribute to
Blake by describing him as one of the "great artificers of God who uttered great
truths to a little clan".
Young
poet
The family returned to London in 1887. In 1890, Yeats co-founded the Rhymers' Club
with Ernest Rhys, a group of London based poets who met regularly in a Fleet Street
tavern to recite their verse. The collective later became known as the "Tragic
Generation", and published two anthologies: first in 1892 and again in 1894. He
collaborated with Edwin Ellis on the first complete edition of William Blake's
works, in the process rediscovering a forgotten poem "Vala, or, the Four Zoas." In
a late essay on Shelley, Yeats wrote, "I have re-read Prometheus Unbound... and it
seems to me to have an even more certain place than I had thought among the sacred
books of the world."
Yeats had a life-long interest in mysticism, spiritualism, occultism, and
astrology. He read extensively on the subjects throughout his life, and was
especially influenced by the writings of Emanuel Swedenborg. As early as 1892, he
wrote: "If I had not made magic my constant study I could not have written a single
word of my Blake book, nor would The Countess Kathleen ever have come to exist. The
mystical life is the center of all that I do and all that I think and all that I
write." His mystical interests—also inspired by a study of Hinduism, under the
Theosophist Mohini Chatterjee, and the occult—formed much of the basis of his late
poetry. However, some critics have dismissed these influences as lacking in
intellectual credibility. In particular, W. H. Auden criticized this aspect of
Yeats' work as the "deplorable spectacle of a grown man occupied with the
mumbo-jumbo of magic and the nonsense of India."
Yeats's first significant poem was "The Isle of Statues," a fantasy work that took
Edmund Spenser for its poetic model. The piece appeared in Dublin University
Review, but has not since been republished. His first solo publication was the
pamphlet Mosada: A Dramatic Poem (1886), which comprised a print run of 100 copies
paid for by his father. This was followed by the collection The Wanderings of Oisin
and Other Poems (1889), which arranged a series of verse that dated as far back as
the mid-1880s. The long titular poem contains, in the words of his biographer R.M.
Foster, "obscure Gaelic names, striking repetitions an unremitting rhythm subtly
varied as the poem proceeded through its three sections".
“ We rode in sorrow, with strong hounds three,
Bran, Sgeolan, and Lomair,
On a morning misty and mild and fair.
The mist-drops hung on the fragrant trees,
And in the blossoms hung the bees.
We rode in sadness above Lough Lean,
For our best were dead on Gavra's green. ”
"The Wanderings of Oisin" is based on the lyrics of the Fenian Cycle of Irish
mythology, and displays the influence of both Sir Samuel Ferguson and the
Pre-Raphaelite poets. The poem took two years to complete, and was one of the few
works from this period that he did not disown in his maturity. Oisin introduces
what was to become one of his most important themes; the appeal of the life of
contemplation over the appeal of the life of action. Following the work, Yeats
never again attempted another long poem. His other early poems are meditations on
the themes of love or mystical and esoteric subjects, and include Poems (1895), The
Secret Rose (1897), and The Wind Among the Reeds (1899).
During 1885, Yeats was involved in the formation of the Dublin Hermetic Order. The
society held its first meeting on 16 June, with Yeats acting as its chairman. The
same year, the Dublin Theosophical lodge was opened in conjunction with Brahmin
Mohini Chatterjee, who traveled from the Theosophical Society in London to lecture.
Yeats attended his first séance the following year. He later became heavily
involved with the Theosophical Society, and with hermeticism, in particular the
eclectic Rosicrucianism of the Golden Dawn. During séances held from 1912, a spirit
calling itself "Leo Africanus" apparently claimed to be Yeats's Daemon or
anti-self, inspiring some of the speculations in Per Amica Silentia Lunae. He was
admitted into the Golden Dawn in March 1890, and took the magical motto Daemon est
Deus inversus—translated as Devil is God inverted or A demon is a god reflected. He
was an active recruiter for the sect's Isis-Urania temple, and brought in his uncle
George Pollexfen, Maud Gonne, and Florence Farr. Although he reserved a distaste
for abstract and dogmatic religions founded around personality cults, he was
attracted to the type of people he met at the Golden Dawn. He was involved in the
Order's power struggles, both with Farr and Macgregor Mathers, most notably when
Mathers sent Aleister Crowley to repossess Golden Dawn paraphernalia during the
"Battle of Blythe Road." After the Golden Dawn ceased and splintered into various
offshoots, Yeats remained with the Stella Matutina until 1921.
Maud
Gonne
In 1883, Yeats met Maud Gonne, then a twenty-three year old heiress and ardent
Nationalist. Gonne was eighteen months younger than Yeats and later claimed she met
the poet as a "paint-stained art student." Gonne had admired "The Isle of Statues"
and sought out his acquaintance. Yeats developed an obsessive infatuation with her
beauty and outspoken manner, and she was to have a significant and lasting effect
on his poetry and his life ever after. Looking back in later years, he admitted "it
seems to me that she brought into my life those days—for as yet I saw only what lay
upon the surface—the middle of the tint, a sound as of a Burmese gong, an
over-powering tumult that had yet many pleasant secondary notes." Yeats' love
remained unrequited, in part due to his reluctance to participate in her
nationalist activistism. His only other love affair during this period was with
Olivia Shakespeare, whom he had first met in 1896, and parted with one year later.
In 1895, he visited Gonne in Ireland and proposed marriage, but was rejected. He
later admitted that from that point "the troubling of my life began." Yeats
proposed to Gonne three more times: in 1899, 1900 and 1901. She refused each
proposal, and in 1903, to his horror, married the Irish nationalist Major John
MacBride.
Yeats' friendship with Gonne persisted, and in Paris in 1908 they finally
consummated their relationship. "The long years of fidelity rewarded at last" was
how another of his lovers described the event. Yeats was less sentimental and later
remarked that "the tragedy of sexual intercourse is the perpetual virginity of the
soul." The relationship did not develop into a new phase after their night
together, and soon afterwards Gonne wrote to the poet indicating that despite the
physical consummation, they could not continue as they had been: "I have prayed so
hard to have all earthly desire taken from my love for you & dearest, loving
you as I do, I have prayed & I am praying still that the bodily desire for me
may be taken from you too." By January 1909, Gonne was sending Yeats letters
praising the advantage given to artists who abstain from sex. Nearly twenty years
later, Yeats recalled the night with Gonne in his poem "A Man Young and Old":
“ My arms are like the twisted thorn
And yet there beauty lay;
The first of all the tribe lay there
And did such pleasure take;
She who had brought great Hector down
And put all Troy to wreck. ”
In 1908, Yeats was introduced to Lady Gregory by their mutual friend Edward Martyn.
Gregory encouraged Yeats' nationalism, and convinced him to continue focusing on
writing drama. Although he was influenced by French Symbolism, Yeats concentrated
on an identifiably Irish content and this inclination was reinforced by his
involvement with a new generation of younger and emerging Irish authors. Together
with Lady Gregory, Martyn, and other writers including J.M. Synge, Sean O'Casey,
and Padraic Colum, Yeats was one of those responsible for the establishment of the
"Irish Literary Revival" movement Apart from these creative writers, much of the
impetus for the Revival came from the work of scholarly translators who were aiding
in the discovery of both the ancient sagas and Ossianic poetry and the more recent
folk song tradition in Irish. One of the most significant of these was Douglas
Hyde, later the first President of Ireland, whose Love Songs of Connacht was widely
admired.
Abbey
Theatre
In 1899, Yeats, Lady Gregory, Martyn, and George Moore established the Irish
Literary Theatre for the purpose of performing Celtic and Irish plays. The ideals
of the Abbey were derived from the avant-garde French theatre, which sought to
express the "ascendancy of the playwright rather than the actor-manager à
l'anglais." The group's manifesto, which Yeats himself authored, declared "We hope
to find in Ireland an uncorrupted & imaginative audience trained to listen by
its passion for oratory... & that freedom to experiment which is not found in
the theaters of England, & without which no new movement in art or literature
can succeed."
The collective survived for about two years and was not successful. However,
working together with two Irish brothers with theatrical experience, William and
Frank Fay, Yeats' unpaid-yet-independently wealthy secretary Annie Elizabeth
Fredericka Horniman, and the leading West End actress Florence Farr, the group
established the Irish National Theatre Society. This group of founders was able,
along with J.M. Synge, to acquire property in Dublin and open the Abbey Theatre on
27 December 1904. Yeats's play Cathleen Ní Houlihan and Lady Gregory's Spreading
the News were featured on the opening night. Yeats continued to be involved with
the Abbey up until to his death, both as a member of the board and a prolific
playwright. In 1902, he helped set up the Dun Emer Press to publish work by writers
associated with the Revival. This became the Cuala Press in 1904, and inspired by
the Arts and Crafts movement, sought to "find work for Irish hands in the making of
beautiful things." From then until its closure in 1946, the press—which was run by
the poet's sisters—produced over 70 titles; 48 of them books by Yeats himself.
In 1913, Yeats met the young American poet Ezra Pound. Pound had traveled to London
at least partly to meet the older man, whom he considered "the only poet worthy of
serious study." From that year until 1916, the two men wintered in the Stone
Cottage at Ashdown Forest, with Pound nominally acting as Yeats' secretary. The
relationship got off to a rocky start when Pound arranged for the publication in
the magazine Poetry of some of Yeats's verse with Pound's own unauthorised
alterations. These changes reflected Pound's distaste for Victorian prosody. A more
indirect influence was the scholarship on Japanese Noh plays that Pound had
obtained from Ernest Fenollosa's widow, which provided Yeats with a model for the
aristocratic drama he intended to write. The first of his plays modeled on Noh was
At the Hawk's Well, the first draft of which he dictated to Pound in January
1916.
In his early work, Yeats' aristocratic pose led to an idealisation of the Irish
peasant and a willingness to ignore poverty and suffering. However, the emergence
of a revolutionary movement from the ranks of the urban Catholic lower-middle class
made him reassess his attitudes. His new direct engagement with politics can be
seen in the poem September 1913, with its well-known refrain "Romantic Ireland's
dead and gone / It's with O'Leary in the grave." The poem is an attack on the
Dublin employers who were involved in the 1913 Dublin Lockout of workers in support
of James Larkin's attempts to organise the Irish labour movement. In the refrain of
"Easter 1916" ("All changed, changed utterly / A terrible beauty is born"), Yeats
faces his own failure to recognise the merits of the leaders of the Easter Rising,
due to his attitude towards their humble backgrounds and lives.
Marriage to
Georgie
By 1916, Yeats was 51 years old and determined to marry and produce an heir. His
final proposal to Maud Gonne took place in the summer of 1916. In his view, Gonne's
history of rabid revolutionary political activism, as well as a series of personal
catastrophes in the previous few years of her life, including chloroform addiction
and a troubled marriage to John McBride—a drunken gunman later executed by British
forces for his role in the 1916 Easter Rising—made her an unsuitable wife.
Biographer R.F. Foster has observed that Yeats's last offer was motivated more by a
sense of duty than by a genuine desire to marry Gonne. Yeats made his proposal in
an indifferent manner, with conditions attached, and both expected and hoped to be
turned down. According to Foster "when he duly asked Maud to marry him, and was
duly refused, his thoughts shifted with surprising speed to her daughter". Iseult
Gonne was Maud's second child with Lucien Millevoye, and at the time was twenty-one
years old. She had lived a sad life to this point. Iseult had been conceived as an
attempt to reincarnate her short lived brother, and for the first few years of her
life was presented as her mother's adopted niece. She was molested by her
step-father when she was eleven, and later worked as a gunrunner for the Irish
Republican Army. At fifteen she proposed to Yeats. A few months after the poet's
approach to Maude, he proposed to Iseult, but was rejected. Reflecting in later
years, Yeats referred to the period as his "second puberty" and asked a friend "who
am I, that I should not make a fool of myself". That September, he proposed to
twenty-four-year-old George (Georgie) Hyde-Lees (1892-1968), whom he had met
through occult circles. Despite warning from her friends—"George ... you can't. He
must be dead"—Hyde-Lees accepted, and the two were married on October 20. Their
marriage was a success, in spite of the age difference, and in spite of Yeats's
feelings of remorse and regret during their honeymoon. Around this time George
wrote to her husband "When you are dead people will talk about your love affairs,
but I shall say nothing, for I will remember how proud you were". The couple went
on to have two children, Anne and Michael.
During the first years of his marriage, he and George engaged in a form of
automatic writing, which involved George contacting a variety of spirits and
guides, which they termed "Instructors". The spirits communicated a complex and
esoteric system of characters and history which they developed during experiments
with the circumstances of trance and the exposition of phases, cones, and gyres.
Yeats devoted much time to preparing this material for publication as A Vision
(1925). In 1924, he wrote to his publisher T. Werner Laurie admitting: "I dare say
I delude myself in thinking this book my book of books".
In December 1923, Yeats was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature, and was
determined to make the most of the occasion. He was aware of the symbolic value of
an Irish winner so soon after Ireland had gained independence, and sought to
highlight the fact at each available opportunity. His reply to the many of the
letters of congratulations sent to him contained the words: "I consider that this
honor has come to me less as an individual than as a representative of Irish
literature, it is part of Europe's welcome to the Free State." Yeats used the
occasion of his acceptance lecture at the Royal Academy of Sweden to present
himself as a standard-bearer Irish nationalism and Irish cultural independence. As
he remarked, "The theatres of Dublin were empty buildings hired by the English
traveling companies, and we wanted Irish plays and Irish players. When we thought
of these plays we thought of everything that was romantic and poetical, because the
nationalism we had called up—the nationalism every generation had called up in
moments of discouragement—was romantic and poetical." The prize lead to a
significant increase in the sales of his books, as his publishers Macmillan sought
to capitalise on the publicity. For the first time he had money, and he was able to
repay not only his own debts, but those of his father.
Old
age
By the spring of 1925, Yeats had published "A Vision", and his health had
stabilised. He had been appointed to the first Irish Senate in 1922, and was
re-appointed for a second term in 1925. Early in his tenure a debate on divorce
arose, and Yeats viewed the issue as primarily a confrontation between the emerging
Catholic ethos and the then Protestant establishment. When the Catholic church
weighed in with a blanket refusal to consider their anti position, the Irish Times
countered that a measure to outlaw divorce would alienate Protestants and
"crystallize" the partition of Northern Ireland. In response, Yeats delivered a
series of speeches in which he attacked the "quixotically impressive" ambitions of
the government and clergy, likening their campaign tactics to that of "medieval
Spain". "Marriage is not to us a Sacrament, but, upon the other hand, the love of a
man and woman, and the inseparable physical desire, are sacred. This conviction has
come to us through ancient philosophy and modern literature, and it seems to us a
most sacrilegious thing to persuade two people who hate each other...to live
together, and it is to us no remedy to permit them to part if neither can
re-marry." The resulting debate has been described as one of Yeat's "supreme public
moments", and began his ideological move away from pluralism towards religious
confrontation. His language became more forceful; the Jesuit Father Peter Finlay
was described as by Yeats as a man of "monstrous discourtesy", and he lamented that
"It is one of the glories of the Church in which I was born that we have put our
Bishops in their place in discussions requiring legislation. During his time in the
senate, Yeats further warned his colleagues: "If you show that this country,
southern Ireland, is going to be governed by Roman Catholic ideas and by Catholic
ideas alone, you will never get the North...You will put a wedge in the midst of
this nation".
In 1924, he chaired a coinage committee charged with selecting a set of designs for
the first currency of the Irish Free State. Aware of the symbolic power latent in
the imagery a young state's currency, he sought a form that was "elegant, racy of
the soil, and utterly unpolicial". When the house finally decided on the artwork of
Percy Metcalfe, Yeats was pleased, though he regretted that compromise had lead to
"lost muscular tension" in the finally depicted images. He retired from the Senate
in 1928 due to ill health.
Towards the end of his life—and especially after the Wall Street Crash and Great
Depression, which led some to question whether democracy would be able to cope with
deep economic difficulty—Yeats seems to have returned to his aristocratic
sympathies. During the aftermath of the First World War, he became skeptical about
the efficacy of democratic government, and anticipated political reconstruction in
Europe through totalitarian rule. His later association with Pound drew him towards
Mussolini, for whom he expressed admiration on a number of occasions. He wrote
three 'marching songs'—never used—for the Irish General Eoin O'Duffy's
'Blueshirts'. However, when Pablo Neruda invited him to visit Madrid in 1937, Yeats
responded with a letter supporting the Republic against Fascism, and he distanced
himself from Nazism and Fascism in the last years of his life.
After undergoing the Steinach operation in 1934, when aged 69, he found a new
vigour evident from both his poetry and his intimate relations with younger women.
During this time Yeats was involved in a number of romantic afairs with, among
others, the poet and actress Margot Ruddock, and the novelist, journalist and
sexual radicalist Ethel Mannin. As in his earlier life, Yeats found erotic
adventure conducive to his creative energy, and despite age and ill-health he
remained a prolific writer. In 1936, he undertook editorship of the Oxford Book of
Modern Verse, 1892–1935. Having suffered from a variety of illnesses for a number
of years, he died at the Hôtel Idéal Séjour, in Menton, France on 28 January 1939.
He was buried after a discreet and private funeral at Roquebrune-Cap-Martin. Yeats
and George had often discussed his death, and his express wish was to be buried
quickly in France with a minimum of fuss. According to George "His actual words
were 'If I die bury me up there and then in a year's time when the newspapers have
forgotten me, dig me up and plant me in Sligo". In September 1948, Yeats's body was
moved to Drumcliffe, County Sligo, on the Irish Naval Service corvette L.E. Macha.
His epitaph is taken from the last lines of "Under Ben Bulben", one of his final
poems:
“ Cast a cold eye
on life, on death.
Horseman, pass by! ”
Poetic
style
Yeats is generally considered to be one of the twentieth century's key
English-language poets. Yet, unlike most modernists who experimented with free
verse, Yeats was also a master of the traditional verse forms. The impact of
modernism on his work can be seen in the increasing abandonment of the more
conventionally poetic diction of his early work in favor of the more austere
language and more direct approach to his themes that increasingly characterises the
poetry and plays of his middle period, comprising the volumes In the Seven Woods,
Responsibilities and The Green Helmet. His later poetry and plays are written in a
more personal vein, and the works written in the last twenty years of his life
include mention of his son and daughter, as well as meditations on the experience
of growing old. In his poem, "The Circus Animals' Desertion", he describes the
inspiration for these late works:
“ Now that my ladders gone
I must lie down where all the ladders start
In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart ”
During 1929, he stayed at Thoor Ballylee for the last time. Much of the remainder
of his life was lived outside of Ireland, although he did lease Riversdale house in
the Dublin suburb of Rathfarnham in 1932. He wrote prolifically through his final
years, and published poetry, plays, and prose. In 1938, he attended the Abbey for
the final time to see the premier of his play Purgatory. His Autobiographies of
William Butler Yeats was published that same year.
While Yeats's early poetry drew heavily on Irish myth and folklore. His later work
was engaged with more contemporary issues, and his style underwent a dramatic
transformation. His work can be divided into three general periods. The early poems
are lushly pre-Raphaelite in tone, self-consciously ornate, and at times, according
to unsympathetic critics, stilted. Yeats began by writing epic poems such as The
Isle of Statues and The Wanderings of Oisin. After Oisin, he never attempted
another long poem. His other early poems are lyrics on the themes of love or
mystical and esoteric subjects. Yeats' middle period saw him abandon the
pre-Raphaelite character of his early work and attempt to turn himself into a
Landor-style social ironist. Critics who admire his middle work might characterize
it as supple and muscular in its rhythms and sometimes harshly modernist, while
others find these poems barren and weak in imaginative power. Yeats' later work
found new imaginative inspiration in the mystical system he began to work out for
himself under the influence of spiritualism. In many ways, this poetry is a return
to the vision of his earlier work. The opposition between the worldly-minded man of
the sword and the spiritually-minded man of God, the theme of The Wanderings of
Oisin, is reproduced in A Dialogue Between Self and Soul.
Some critics claim that Yeats spanned the transition from the nineteenth century
into twentieth-century modernism in poetry much as Pablo Picasso did in painting.
Others question whether late Yeats really has much in common with modernists of the
Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot variety. Modernists read the well-known poem The Second
Coming as a dirge for the decline of European civilization in the mode of Eliot,
but later critics have pointed out that this poem is an expression of Yeats'
apocalyptic mystical theories, and thus the expression of a mind shaped by the
1890s. His most important collections of poetry started with The Green Helmet
(1910) and Responsibilities (1914). In imagery, Yeats's poetry became sparer, more
powerful as he grew older. The Tower (1928), The Winding Stairs (1929) and New
Poems (1938) contained some of the most potent images in twentieth-century poetry;
his Last Poems are conceded by most to be amongst his best.
Yeats's mystical inclinations, informed by Hindu Theosophical beliefs and the
occult, formed much of the basis of his late poetry, which some critics have judged
as lacking in intellectual credibility. W. H. Auden criticizes his late stage as
the "deplorable spectacle of a grown man occupied with the mumbo-jumbo of magic and
the nonsense of India". The metaphysics of Yeats's late works must be read in
relation to his system of esoteric fundamentalities in A Vision (1925).
His 1920 poem, "The Second Coming" is one of the most potent sources of imagery
about the twentieth century.
“ 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. ”
For the anti-democratic Yeats, 'the best' referred to the traditional ruling
classes of Europe, who were unable to protect the traditional culture of Europe
from materialistic mass movements. For later readers, 'the best' and 'the worst'
have been redefined to fit their own political views. The concluding lines refer to
Yeats' belief that history was cyclic, and that his age represented the end of the
cycle that began with the rise of Christianity.
“ And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born? ”
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William Butler
Yeats - Manifestor - Biography
