Yeats, William Butler

Yeats, William Butler (1865–1939), Irish poet and dramatist, awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1923. With Lady Gregory he was the founder of the modern Irish dramatic movement, and as a director of the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, where all except his earliest plays were first produced, from its foundation in 1904 until his death, he did much to ensure the integrity of the emerging national drama in spite of political and financial pressures. He also encouraged new playwrights, among them Synge and O'Casey, even when the theatre's repertoire moved away from the aims demonstrated in his own plays. The earliest of these were poetic dramas in the style of Maeterlinck—The Countess Cathleen (1892), The Land of Heart's Desire (1894), and Cathleen ni Houlihan (1902); the last-named was written in collaboration with Lady Gregory, who was also part-author of The Pot of Broth (1902) and of two poetic plays dramatically more powerful than the earlier ones—The King's Threshold (1904) and The Unicorn from the Stars (1908). In the first, the function of poetry and of the poet is the major theme; the second is a bold piece of speculative thinking, based on a mystical experience. Other plays of this period were on subjects taken from the heroic legends of Ireland—On Baile's Strand (1904), Deirdre (1907), and The Green Helmet (1908). The Shadowy Waters (1911) is again a poetic play in which, as in his earlier works, the theme is remote and the experience it presents, though universal, is not revealed in terms of actual contemporary life. It was followed by The Hour-Glass (1914), written in verse and so performed at the Abbey; for later productions elsewhere Yeats rewrote it in prose, owing to the difficulty of finding verse-speakers who met with his approval. There are also two versions of The Only Jealousy of Emer (1919), the second, in prose, being entitled Fighting the Waves. Together with At the Hawk's Well (1917), The Dreaming of the Bones (1919), and Calvary (1920), the first version formed part of the ‘four plays for dancers’ in which extreme simplicity of design and setting is matched by a brevity of expression akin to that of the nō play of Japan. In his last plays this plainness and severity, characteristic also of his poetry after 1916, reaches fulfilment, and the underlying thought makes stricter demands than ever upon the intelligence and imagination of the audience. This is most clearly shown in The Player Queen (1922), The Words upon the Window Pane (1934), and Purgatory (1938). Yeats also made new versions of Sophocles' Oedipus the King (1928) and Oedipus at Colonus (1934). In his last play, The Death of Cuchulain (1939), he reverted once more to the legends of Celtic Ireland, always one of his main preoccupations.