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William Butler Yeats

1865–1939

 

The first Irishman to win a Nobel Prize (in 1923), William Butler Yeats combined within himself contradictory elements of Irish life and culture, but it is from the tension of those contradictions that his greatness as a universally admired poet emerged.  Such poems as 'The Lake Isle of Innisfree' and 'Down by the Sally Gardens' won immediate appreciation, but he remained to the end of his long life a poet of increasing power and passion.

      His father, John Butler Yeats, was a painter, and Yeats was reared in a close family atmosphere where art and poetry were admired and encouraged.  As a painter, his brother JACK B. YEATS [26] took after the father, but William's interests were literary.

      His schooling was unsuccessful, and for many years he had to eke out a living as a literary journalist and editor of anthologies.  He barely scraped by until he was in his forties, but very quickly, when he was still in his teens, his exceptional talents as a poet were recognized.  The sources of his lyrical verses, which he began to publish in the late 1880s, lay in the newly discovered ancient mythology of Celtic Ireland and the landscapes of the west of Ireland.

      To these elements which would have been widely shared by many Irish artists, writers, and leaders of the day, he added his esoteric interest in the magical tradition of Europe.  His conjuring of spirits was not mere fancy, but part of an increasingly elaborate belief system.  But such was his skill as a poet that his personal symbols do not form an immediate barrier to the reader.

      Though he was born in Dublin (at Sandymount, on 13th June 1865), and lived there for long periods, and in London and Oxford, it is with the western landscapes, especially those of Sligo and Galway, that his poetry is most closely linked.

      Yeats' own people came from Sligo, which was a place of special significance to himself and his brother Jack.  He often stayed with his friend Lady Gregory at her home, Coole Park, in Galway, and tied to this sense of landscape was a sense of Ireland's mythical history.  Yeats was among the first Irish poets to draw upon the ancient literary tradition of Celtic Ireland for new purposes.  In the old Celtic myths and legends he found a depth and passion that other poets in Europe found in the mythology of ancient Greece.

      By the end of the 1890s, Yeats had been recognized as the most significant poet of modern Ireland.  For all his seemingly dreamy appearance, he was a man of wide interests and great energy.  His interest in drama led to the creation of the National Theatre, and later the Abbey Theatre.  Though his own austere and allusive plays, often in verse, were not to everyone's taste, those of his friend Lady Gregory, which were comedies of rural life as well as patriotic tragedies, were immensely popular and made the Abbey Theatre's name.

      The Abbey also provided an outlet for the genius of J.M. Synge, whose comedy The Playboy of the Western World provoked a riot in the theatre in 1907, and later for SEAN O'CASEY [55], whose plays of the Irish troubles, such as Juno and the Paycock, are classics of world literature.  For this alone Yeats would be remembered.  His own play, Cathleen Ni Houlihan, in which his friend MAUD GONNE [52] appeared in 1902, is now seen as having had a powerful effect on the imaginations of many of those who were later to be involved in the national movement.

      However, it was as a poet that Yeats made his mark on the world.  He began as a lyric poet of misty landscapes and lost love.  His early passion for the elusive Maud Gonne was one of the great love stories of Irish literature.  But she did not take 'dear Willy' too seriously, and preferred a life devoted to the politics of revolutionary Ireland.  With maturity, his poetry took on more vigorous and sombre aspects.  He was deeply affected by events such as the Easter Rising and the troubles that followed, but his later poetry combines that sense of history with a mythical dimension which transcended the merely national.

      By the 1920s he had become one of the most important poets of the century in the English language.  Abroad, Yeats was seen as a great poet, but in Ireland he was also a leading public figure.  He served two terms as a senator, appointed in part to represent the interests and opinions of the Protestant Anglo-Irish minority.  In this role he helped to design Ireland's new coinage, but he also spoke out against the introduction of censorship and legislation to remove the right to divorce, fearing that the new state would pursue a public policy dominated by Catholic social and moral precepts.  His speeches won him few admirers at the time, but are now significant for what they reveal about the evolving nature of the new Ireland; by the 1890s, public policy had come around to agreeing with Yeats.

      By the time of his death he had become, for many, one of the greatest poets of all time.  Though it was his early verse that made the greatest impact on the general audience, his later poems, in all their allusive and symbolic complexity, have come to be of central importance to Irish readers of today.  They are often passionate, yet cold, combining the elements of ice and fire in a mysterious and powerful manner.

      After a long illness, Yeats died in the south of France on 28 January 1939.  His body was later brought back for a state funeral in Drumcliffe churchyard in Sligo.  After death, his influence continued.  He had gathered together a group of fellow poets, and his ideas and ideals pervaded his generation.  Though the poets of the younger generation of the 1930s would eventually resent this, he nevertheless became an ideal even with them, through his perseverance against poverty, hardship, and literary disdain.  Yeats was an Olympian, a man out of time, a genius.