Yeats, William Butler

Yeats, William Butler (1865–1939), the greatest modern Anglo‐Irish poet. Yeats's father was an artist and (chronically insolvent) landowner; his mother's family were Sligo merchants. He was brought up in London, Dublin, and Sligo. His first poems were published in the 1880s; thereafter he drew extensively on Gaelic literature and Sligo folklore. Yeats became active in advanced nationalist politics after the Parnell split and tried to mobilize nationalist literary groups as the basis for a national artistic revival. This culminated in the foundation of the Irish Literary Theatre (subsequently the Abbey). He quarrelled with clericalists, and subsequently with nationalists, over the moral and political role of theatre, and was criticized for accepting a crown pension in 1910. He served in the Irish Free State Senate 1922–8.

Yeats is the source of much historical controversy, due to his habit of assimilating Irish events into his personal mythology and the tendency of some admirers to adopt his perspective uncritically. (His images of the Parnell split, the relationship between the Irish literary revival and the rising of 1916, and the nature of the Anglo‐Irish aristocracy have attracted particular attention.) Some commentators praise him as a defender of liberty, emphasizing his insistence on artistic self‐determination, resistance to censorship, and opposition to Catholic church influence over the Irish Free State; others emphasize the elitism displayed in his occult activities, his later cult of the aristocracy, and the frequently expressed admiration for fascism which led him to support the Blueshirts in the 1930s. Yeats is perhaps best seen as part of a tradition of ‘patriotic Tory’ Irish Protestant intellectuals, including Isaac Butt and Standish O'Grady, who presented themselves as defenders of Irish agrarian and spiritual values against English Whig materialism and Roman clerical legalism.

Patrick Maume