Yeats, William Butler (13 June 1865 – 28 January 1939)
William Butler Yeats (13 June 1865 – 28 January 1939)
B. L. Reid
Mount Holyoke College
1923 Nobel Prize in Literature Presentation Speech
Yeats: Nobel Lecture, 15 December 1923
This entry was revised from Reid’s Yeats entry in DLB 19: British Poets, 1880–1914. See also the Yeats entries in DLB 10: Modern British Dramatists, 1900–1945; DLB 98: Modern British Essayists, First Series; and DLB 156: British Short-Fiction Writers, 1880–1914: The Romantic Tradition.
BOOKS: Mosada: A Dramatic Poem (Dublin: Printed by Sealy, Bryers & Walker, 1886);
The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, 1889);
John Sherman and Dhoya, as Ganconagh (London: Unwin, 1891; New York: Cassell, 1891);
The Countess Cathleen and Various Legends and Lyrics (London: Unwin, 1892; Boston: Roberts / London: Unwin, 1892);
The Celtic Twilight (London: Lawrence & Bullen, 1893; New York & London: Macmillan, 1894; revised and enlarged edition, London: Bullen, 1902; New York: Macmillan, 1902);
The Land of Heart’s Desire (London: Unwin, 1894; Chicago: Stone & Kimball, 1894; revised edition, Portland, Maine: Mosher, 1903);
Poems (London: Unwin, 1895; London: Unwin / Boston: Copeland & Day, 1895; revised edition, London: Unwin, 1899; revised again, 1901, 1912, 1927);
The Secret Rose (London: Lawrence & Bullen, 1897; New York: Dodd, Mead / London: Lawrence & Bullen, 1897);
The Tables of the Law; The Adoration of the Magi (London: Privately printed, 1897; London: Elkin Mathews, 1904);
The Wind Among the Reeds (London: Elkin Mathews, 1899; New York & London: John Lane, 1902);
The Shadowy Waters (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1900; New York: Dodd, Mead, 1901);
Is the Order of R. R. & A. C. [Rosae Rubeae et Aureae Crucis] To Remain a Magical Order? (N.p., 1901);
Cathleen ni Hoolihan (London: Bullen, 1902);
Where There Is Nothing (New York: John Lane, 1902; London: Bullen, 1903);
Ideas of Good and Evil (London: Bullen, 1903; New York: Macmillan, 1903);
In the Seven Woods: Being Poems Chiefly of the lrish Heroic Age (Dundrum: Dun Emer Press, 1903; New York & London: Macmillan, 1903);
The Hour-Glass: A Morality (London: Heinemann, 1903);
The Hour-Glass and Other Plays (New York & London: Macmillan, 1904); republished as The Hour-Glass, Cathleen ni Houlihan, The Pot of Broth (London: Bullen, 1904);
The King’s Threshold (New York: Privately printed, 1904);
The King’s Threshold and On Baile’s Strand (London: Bullen, 1904);
Stories of Red Hanrahan (Dundrum: Dun Emer Press, 1905);
Poems, 1899–1905 (London: Bullen / Dublin: Maunsel, 1906);
The Poetical Works of William B. Yeats, 2 volumes (New York & London: Macmillan, 1906, 1907; revised, 1912);
Deirdre (London: Bullen / Dublin: Maunsel, 1907);
Discoveries; A Volume of Essays (Dundrum: Dun Emer Press, 1907);
The Unicorn from the Stars and Other Plays, by Yeats and Lady Gregory (New York: Macmillan, 1908);
The Golden Helmet (New York: John Quinn, 1908);
The Collected Works in Verse and Prose of William Butler Yeats, 8 volumes (Stratford-on-Avon: Shakespeare Head Press, 1908);
Poems: Second Series (London & Stratford-on-Avon: Bullen, 1909);
The Green Helmet and Other Poems (Dundrum: Cuala Press, 1910; New York: Paget, 1911; enlarged edition, London: Macmillan, 1912);
Synge and the Ireland of His Time (Dundrum: Cuala Press, 1911);
The Countess Cathleen, revised edition (London: Unwin, 1912);
The Cutting of An Agate (New York: Macmillan, 1912; enlarged edition, London: Macmillan, 1919);
Stories of Red Hanrahan, The Secret Rose, Rosa Alchemica (London & Stratford-upon-Avon: Bullen, 1913; New York: Macmillan, 1914);
A Selection from the Love Poetry of William Butler Yeats (Dundrum: Cuala Press, 1913);
Poems Written in Discouragement 1912–1913 (Dundrum: Cuala Press, 1913);
Responsibilities: Poems and a Play (Dundrum: Cuala Press, 1914);
Reveries over Childhood and Youth (Dundrum: Cuala Press, 1915; New York: Macmillan, 1916; London: Macmillan, 1916);
Responsibilities and Other Poems (London: Macmillan, 1916; New York: Macmillan, 1916);
The Wild Swans at Coole (Dundrum: Cuala Press, 1917; enlarged edition, London: Macmillan, 1919; New York: Macmillan, 1919);
Per Amica Silentia Lunae (London: Macmillan, 1918; New York: Macmillan, 1918);
Two Plays for Dancers (Dundrum: Cuala Press, 1919);
Michael Robartes and the Dancer (Dundrum: Cuala Press, 1920 [i.e., 1921]);
Four Plays for Dancers (London: Macmillan, 1921; New York: Macmillan, 1921);
Four Years (Dundrum: Cuala Press, 1921);
The Trembling of the Veil (London: Laurie, 1922);
Later Poems (London: Macmillan, 1922; New York: Macmillan, 1924);
Plays in Prose and Verse Written for an Irish Theatre, by Yeats and Lady Gregory (London: Macmillan, 1922; New York: Macmillan, 1924);
The Player Queen (London: Macmillan, 1922);
Plays and Controversies (London: Macmillan, 1923; New York: Macmillan, 1924);
Essays (London: Macmillan, 1924; New York: Macmillan, 1924);
The Cat and the Moon (Dublin: Cuala Press, 1924);
The Bounty of Sweden (Dublin: Cuala Press, 1925);
Early Poems and Stories (London: Macmillan, 1925; New York: Macmillan, 1925);
A Vision: An Explanation of Life Founded upon the Writings of Giraldus and upon Certain Doctrines Attributed to Kusta Ben Luka (London: Laurie, 1925); substantially revised as A Vision (London: Macmillan, 1937; New York: Macmillan, 1938);
Estrangement: Being Some Fifty Thoughts from a Diary Kept by William Butler Yeats in the Year Nineteen Hundred and Nine (Dublin: Cuala Press, 1926);
AutoBiographies Reveries Over Childhood and Youth and The Trembling of the Veil (London: Macmillan, 1926; New York: Macmillan, 1927);
October Blast (Dublin: Cuala Press, 1927);
Stories of Red Hanrahan and The Secret Rose (London: Macmillan, 1927);
The Tower (London: Macmillan, 1928; New York: Macmillan, 1928);
Sophocles’ King Oedipus: A Version for the Modern Stage by W. B. Yeats (London: Macmillan, 1928; New York: Macmillan, 1928);
The Death of Synge, and Other Passages from an Old Diary (Dublin: Cuala Press, 1928);
A Packet for Ezra Pound (Dublin: Cuala Press, 1929);
The Winding Stair (New York: Fountain Press, 1929; enlarged edition, London: Macmillan, 1933; New York: Macmillan, 1933);
Stories of Michael Robartes and His Friends: An Extract from a Record Made by His Pupils; and a Play in Prose (Dublin: Cuala Press, 1931);
Words for Music Perhaps and Other Poems (Dublin: Cuala Press, 1932);
The Winding Stair and Other Poems (London: Macmillan, 1933; New York: Macmillan, 1933);
The Collected Poems (New York: Macmillan, 1933; London: Macmillan, 1933);
Letters to the New Island, edited by Horace Reynolds (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1934; London: Oxford University Press, 1970);
The Words Upon the Window Pane (Dublin: Cuala Press, 1934);
Wheels and Butterflies (London: Macmillan, 1934; New York: Macmillan, 1935);
The Collected Plays (London: Macmillan, 1934; New York: Macmillan, 1935);
The King of the Great Clock Tower (Dublin: Cuala Press, 1934; New York: Macmillan, 1935);
A Full Moon in March (London: Macmillan, 1935);
Dramatis Persona (Dublin: Cuala Press, 1935);
Poems (Dublin: Cuala Press, 1935);
Dramatis Persona 1896–1902, Estrangement, The Death of Synge, The Bounty of Sweden (New York: Macmillan, 1936; London: Macmillan, 1936);
Nine One-Act Plays (London: Macmillan, 1937);
Essays, 1931 to 1936 (Dublin: Cuala Press, 1937);
The Herne’s Egg: A Stage Play (London: Macmillan, 1938);
The Herne’s Egg and Other Plays (New York: Macmillan, 1938);
New Poems (Dublin: Cuala Press, 1938);
The Autobiography of William Butter Yeats, Consisting of Reveries Over Childhood and Youth, The Trembling of the Veil and Dramatis Persona (New York: Macmillan, 1938); revised, with Estrangement, The Death of Synge, and The Bounty of Sweden, as Autobiographies (London: Macmillan, 1955);
Last Poems and Two Plays (Dublin: Cuala Press, 1939);
On the Boiler (Dublin: Cuala Press, 1939);
Last Poems and Plays (London: Macmillan, 1940; New York: Macmillan, 1940);
If I Were Four-and-Twenty (Dublin: Cuala Press, 1940);
The Poems of W. B. Yeats, 2 volumes (London: Macmillan, 1949);
The Collected Plays of W. B. Yeats (London: Macmillan, 1952; New York: Macmillan, 1953);
The Variorum Edition of the Poems of W. B. Yeats, edited by Peter Allt and Russell K. Alspach (New York: Macmillan, 1957);
Mythologies (London & New York: Macmillan, 1959);
Senate Speeches, edited by Donald R. Pearce (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1960);
Essays and Introductions (London & New York: Macmillan, 1961);
Explorations (London: Macmillan, 1962; New York: Macmillan, 1963);
The Variorum Edition of the Plays of W. B. Yeats, edited by Russell K. Alspach, assisted by Catherine C. Alspach (London & New York: Macmillan, 1966);
Uncollected Prose, edited by John P. Frayne and Colton Johnson, 2 volumes (New York: Columbia University Press, 1970, 1976);
Memoirs: Autobiography, first draft, transcribed and edited by Denis Donoghue (London & New York: Macmillan, 1972);
The Speckled Bird, edited by William O’Donnell (Dublin: Cuala Press, 1974); annotated edition with variant versions (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1976 [i.e., 1977]); additional section published as “Newly Identified Chapters for the 1897–98 Version of The Speckled Bird: ’The Lilies of the Lord,’” Yeats Annual, 7 (1990): 145–175;
Poems: A New Edition, revised edition, edited by Richard J. Finneran (London & New York: Macmillan, 1989);
Yeats’s Poems, edited by A. Norman Jeffares (London: Macmillan, 1989);
The Works of W. B. Yeats, 14 volumes (London & New York: Macmillan, 1989-);
The Secret Rose: Stories by W. B. Yeats–A Variorum Edition, revised edition, edited by Phillip L. Marcus, Warwick Gould, and Michael J. Sidnell (London: Macmillan, 1992).
PLAY PRODUCTIONS: The Land of Heart’s Desire, London, Avenue Theatre, 29 March 1894;
The Countess Cathleen, Dublin, Antient Concert Rooms, 8 May 1899;
Diarmuid and Grania, by Yeats and George Moore, Dublin, Gaiety Theatre, 21 October 1901;
Cathleen ni Houlihan, Dublin, St. Teresa’s Hall, 2 April 1902;
The Pot of Broth, Dublin, Antient Concert Rooms, 30 October 1902;
The Hour-Glass, Dublin, Moles worth Hall, 14 March 1903; revised version, Dublin, Abbey Theatre, 21 November 1912;
The King’s Threshold, Dublin, Molesworth Hall, 8 October 1903; revised version, Dublin, Abbey Theatre, 13 October 1913;
The Shadowy Waters, Dublin, Molesworth Hall, 14 January 1904;
Where There Is Nothing, London, Royal Court Theatre, 26 June 1904; revised as The Unworn from the Stars, by Yeats and Lady Gregory, Dublin, Abbey Theatre, 21 November 1907;
On Baile’s Strand, Dublin, Abbey Theatre, 27 December 1904;
Deirdre, Dublin, Abbey Theatre, 24 November 1906;
The Golden Helmet, Dublin, Abbey Theatre, 19 March 1908;
The Green Helmet, Dublin, Abbey Theatre, 10 February 1910;
At the Hawk’s Well, London, privately performed, 2 April 1916; Dublin, Abbey Theatre, 25 July 1933;
The Player Queen, London, King’s Hall, 25 May 1919; The Only Jealousy of Emer, Amsterdam, Hollandsche Shouwburg, produced in English, 2 April 1922; Dublin, Abbey Theatre, 9 May 1926;
The Cat and the Moon, Dublin, Abbey Theatre, 9 May 1926;
Sophocles’ King Oedipus, Dublin, Abbey Theatre, 7 December 1926;
Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus, Dublin, Abbey Theatre, 12 September 1927;
Fighting the Waves, Dublin, Abbey Theatre, 13 August 1929;
The Words Upon the Window-Pane, Dublin, Abbey Theatre, 17 November 1930;
The Dreaming of the Bones, Dublin, Abbey Theatre, 6 December 1931;
The Resurrection, Dublin, Abbey Theatre, 30 July 1934;
The King of the Great Clock Tower, Dublin, Abbey Theatre, 30 July 1934;
Purgatory, Dublin, Abbey Theatre, 10 August 1938.
OTHER: Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry, edited by Yeats (New York: Boni & Liveright, 1888; London: Scott, 1893);
The Works of William Blake, Poetic, Symbolic, and Critical, 3 volumes, edited by Yeats and Edwin John Ellis (London: Quaritch, 1893);
Augusta, Lady Gregory, Vision and Belief in the West of Ireland, includes two essays and notes by Yeats (New York & London: Putnam, 1920);
The Oxford Book of Modern Verse, edited by Yeats (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1936; New York: Oxford University Press, 1936);
The Ten Principal Upanishads, translated by Yeats and Shri Purohit Swami (London: Faber & Faber, 1937; New York: Macmillan, 1937).
William Butler Yeats received the 1923 Nobel Prize in Literature “for his always inspired poetry, which in a highly artistic form gives expression to the spirit of a whole nation,” as the citation read. He was also a notable dramatist and an occasional writer of short fiction and essays, but his poetry remains the foundation of his fame.
Yeats was born in the Dublin suburb of Sandy-mount on 13 June 1865. He was the eldest of the four surviving children of the painter-philosopher John Butler Yeats and his wife, Susan Pollexfen Yeats. The poet was proud to belong in both strains of his blood to the Anglo-Irish Protestant minority. The Yeats line had been settled in Ireland since the seventeenth century; they began as merchants, but later generations were Trinity College scholars and Church of Ireland clergymen, Yeats’s great-grandfather having been rector of Drumcliff in County Sligo. His mother’s family were shipowners and millers in and about Sligo. The hills and lakes and fens about the busy West of Ireland seaside town became Yeats’s spiritual home in childhood and remained so all his life.
J. B. Yeats was trained for the law, but he resolved to make a living out of his gift for drawing and painting, especially for portraiture. The gift was real, but he never learned to exploit it; he could never let a painting go. He remained a delightful and indiscriminately productive failure, and poverty became a fact of life for his family. To put himself through school as a painter, J. B. Yeats carried his young family in 1868 to London, where they lived in Fitzroy Road, Regents Park, for the next seven years.
In the 1915 portion of his autobiography, Reveries over Childhood and Youth, Yeats wrote: “Indeed I remember little of childhood but its pain. I have grown happier with every year of life as though gradually conquering something in myself.” The gauzy, veiled effects of visual observation in Yeats’s writings doubtless owed something to poor eyesight: both eyes were weak, the left almost useless. Much of the time, in any case, his essential seeing was more visionary than visual. Yeats recalled hardly anything of his first London years; his early memories are obsessed with scenes and persons in Sligo, particularly his uncle George Pollexfen, horseman and astrologer, and his grandfather William Pollexfen, the “silent and fierce old man” who always reminded him of King Lear, whom as a child he confused with God and to whom he traced his lifelong “delight in passionate men.”
The boy Yeats was dreamy and introspective but by no means housebound. He rode about the Sligo countryside on a red pony and began to steep himself in the fairy lore of the local peasants. His formal education would never be better than spotty. He wrote in Reveries over Childhood and Youth: “Because I had found it difficult to attend to anything less interesting than my thoughts, I was difficult to teach.” He was so slow in learning to read that he was thought to be simple, and he remained tone deaf all his life. When he began to read, he was mystified as to why the church choir took three times as long as he did to reach the end of a hymn. Back in London, where his father pursued his endless apprenticeship, Yeats remembered Sligo “with tears.” He spent five inconsequential years at Godolphin, a day school in Hammersmith. A poor student, absentminded, he was more interested in collecting moths and butterflies than in his daily tasks. The people who interested him were his father’s friends, painters of the second rank under Pre-Raphaelite influence.
He hated London and survived spiritually on annual holiday visits to Sligo.
In 1880 the family returned to Ireland, settling first on the hill of Howth, the north horn of the crescent of Dublin Bay. Howth was a “gentle” spot (an ancient resort of fairy folk), and pursuit of such lore and of entomology occupied young William much more than his formal studies. He was now a tall, gaunt lad, dark-skinned, with black hair falling over his eyes. He rode the train into the city daily, accompanying his father, who quizzed and harangued him on the “passionate” portions from the English poets that he spent much time reading aloud. William was now enrolled in Erasmus High School in Harcourt Street. His thinking moved slowly away from amateur science and toward literature, and he began to see himself in the guise of various heroic solitaries, doomed and melancholy: Hamlet, Manfred, Athanase, Alastor. At seventeen he began to write poetry that pointed gradually toward The Wanderings, qfOisin and Other Poems (1889), lyrics and ballads founded mainly on tales, scenes, and atmospheres of Howth and Sligo, where George Pollexfen had become an affectionate confidant.
Money being short and his chances of passing entrance examinations being judged poor, Yeats was sent next not to Trinity College but to the Metropolitan School of Art nearby in Kildare Street. His talent in art was as weak as his eyes, and he never progressed beyond a primitive amateur level. In any case, his head was now full of the language of his own romantic poems and plays, Percy Bysshe Shelley and Edmund Spenser being his chief models. He had made Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound (1820) his “sacred book.” At the art school he formed a lifelong but troubled friendship with a tall young Ulsterman, George William Russell, who as poet, painter, journalist, and mystic came to stand second only to Yeats among Irishmen of genius in their generation. Russell could soon quote every word of young Yeats’s writings, which now included his first two published poems that appeared in the Dublin University Review in March 1885.
In the same year, moved by a reading of A. P. Sinnett’s Esoteric Buddhism (1883), by a general fascination with Eastern mysticism, and by an innate love for closed, secret circles, Yeats and a few friends formed a Hermetic Society in Dublin. In his autobiography he traced to his early studies in “psychical research and mystical philosophy” his first decisive movement away from the influence of his father’s humanist rationalism. He was also deeply impressed by the teaching of a visiting Bengali Brahmin, Mohini Chatterji: “It was my first meeting with a philosophy that confirmed my vague speculations and seemed at once logical and boundless.” Within this atmosphere Yeats composed a dramatic poem, Mosada, published as a pamphlet in 1886, and a half-dozen “Indian” poems such as “The Indian to His Love,” which were soft, sad matter like all his earliest work, pleasingly mellifluous but boneless in thought and rhetoric.
By contrast, Yeats was also frequenting several disputatious politically oriented societies about Dublin, and he began to play a part in their debates. Influenced in part by his new friendship with the noble old Fenian John O’Leary, recently returned from twenty years of prison and exile, a man he judged to be “of Plutarch’s people,” Yeats was rapidly turning self-consciously Celtic–nationalist and anti-English–though his base was less political than cultural and literary. It pleased him to be having his verse published in two Catholic periodicals, the Irish Monthly and the Irish Fireside, including the lyric “The Stolen Child.” Pursuing “self-possession,” he began to speak regularly at meetings of the Young Ireland Society. “From these debates,” he reflected many years later, “from O’Leary’s conversation, and from the Irish books he lent or gave me has come all I have set my hand to since.”
Near the end of Reveries over Childhood and Youth Yeats described his early dream of a nationalism that would bring together the political nerve and fervor of Catholic Ireland with “the good taste, the household courtesy and decency” of Anglo-Ireland, and his thought that “we might bring the halves together if we had a national literature that made Ireland beautiful in the memory, and yet had been freed from provincialism by an exacting criticism, an European pose.” He gave much thought to a fit style, not only for oratory but also prose and verse. He argued with his father, who favored declamation and “drama”: “We should write out our own thoughts in as nearly as possible the language we thought them in, as though in a letter to an intimate friend.” He worked hard at this simplifying discipline but found results slow to come, particularly in his poetry: “when I re-read those early poems which gave me so much trouble, I find little but romantic convention, unconscious drama. It is so many years before one can believe enough in what one feels even to know what the feeling is.”
The mystical side of Yeats’s thought also took a new turn in 1886 when a friend in Dublin took him to his first spiritualist séance. He proved a frighteningly apt subject: “my whole body moved like a suddenly unrolled watch-spring, and I was thrown backward on the wall,” and his hand banged the table with such violence that he broke the table. It was years before he dared again to tempt the spirits so directly, though when he recovered his nerve he kept it until the end.
In 1887 J. B. Yeats carried his family again to London, where they settled into a better house than they could afford in Bedford Park, a community where the Pre-Raphaelite movement was “at last affecting life.” Yeats and his brother, Jack, painted the ceiling of Yeats’s room with a map of Sligo. Their mother suffered a stroke, then another, and declined into premature senility. Times were hard, with Yeats and his father eking out pittances by hackwork. Yeats edited for Dublin and London publishers Poems and Ballads of Young Ireland (1888), including four poems of his own; a volume of William Carleton’s writings; and Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry (1888). He also contributed letters on Irish affairs to two American papers. His first poem to be published in England appeared in the leisure Hour; “The Madness of King Goll” is notable for showing already installed his lifelong mastery of a refrain: “They will not hush, the leaves a-flutter round me, the beech leaves old.” Yeats judged himself to have been at this stage “in all things Pre-Raphaelite”–meaning apparently, though not clearly, romantically elaborate, stylized, antiquarian. He continued to make and unmake his complex aesthetic. He saw himself as a young man naturally religious, needing to believe, deprived of his childhood religion by science and rationalism, forming in recoil “a new religion, almost an infallible church of poetic tradition, of a fardel of stories, and of personages, and of emotions, inseparable from their first expression, passed on from generation to generation by poets and painters with some help from philosophers and theologians.”
Early working of that religion was visible in The Wanderings of Oisin (Ossian, Usheen), completed in the summer of 1888 during a visit to Sligo. It was Yeats’s longest and most ambitious work to date, a dramatic dialogue, mostly monologue, of thirty pages, a thousand lines, in a mixture of meters, much of it rhymed in couplets. Saint Patrick quizzes the battered but unrepentant pagan Oisin, “bent, and bald, and blind, / With a heavy heart and a wandering mind,” who tells him the story of three hundred ecstatic and tortured years in Fenian fairyland with his demon lady, “white-bodied” Niamh. It was Yeats’s first decisive venture into Celtic myth, even more important for his plays to come than for his poetry. The Wanderings of Oisin is a densely romantic work, and in imagery, tone, and rhythm it remembers many masters, including Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Alfred Tennyson, and William Morris; in its role in the forming of a canon and a talent it reminds one most nearly of John Keats’s Endymion (1818). Reading it to George Pollexfen in Sligo, Yeats broke down, overcome by labor and feeling.
The long poem gave bulk and a wavering backbone to Yeats’s first published volume of verse, The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems, published in 1889 by Kegan Paul, Trench, on the strength of subscriptions mostly collected by O’Leary. The general response was approving if not ecstatic, and the book brought Yeats the obsession of a lifetime, his love for actress and activist Maud Gonne. The young woman whom George Bernard Shaw called “outrageously beautiful” appeared in Bedford Park with an introduction from O’Leary and word that The Wanderinss of Oisin had made her weep. The enchanted vagueness of the mere paragraph Yeats gave to their meeting in the autobiography suggests the power of her magic. In “The Arrow” a few years later he recalled his first vision of Gonne in the light of a window full of apple blossoms in sun: “Tall and noble but with face and bosom / Delicate in colour as apple blossom.” He thought of her in the line of heroic legendary beauty, as his Helen, his Leda, his Phoenix, his “woman Homer sung,” his “Pallas Athene in that straight back and arrogant head.” His bitter late image of her as “an old bellows full of angry wind” was a long way off, and it was regularly offset by images that remembered more fairly his early sexual starvation and the enchantment of her presence. In 1889 he was discovering the passion of her commitment to radical Irish nationalism and allowing her to lead him toward a mask that proved a bad fit, that of the politically engaged man.
Yeats continued to find friends among older men, notably now Morris, whom he soon called “my chief of men,” and William Ernest Henley, editor of the Scots Observer (later the National Observer) and a generous, contentious man of whom he wrote: “I disagreed with him about everything, but I admired him beyond words.” Henley published, often with alterations by himself, what Yeats called “my first good lyrics and tolerable essays”: prose pieces later collected in The Celtic Twilight (1893) and such poems as “A Cradle Song,” “The Man Who Dreamed of Faeryland,” and the one that became and remained his most famous, “The Lake Isle of Innis-free.” At Henley’s home he met Oscar Wilde, as yet untouched by scandal, and found him not only brilliant but warmly hospitable and openhearted.
Yeats’s fascination with the occult grew ever more intense. He frequented the theosophical fellowship of the London Lodge, amused and impressed by Madame Blavatsky’s massive “peasant” humanity and stirred by her doctrine and her discipline. As a member of the “esoteric” inner circle of devout initiates, Yeats joined in studies of oriental charts of correspondences among soul, body, planetary forms, and the musical scale. Friendship with Liddell (MacGregor) Mathers led him into the Order of the Golden Dawn, a society of “Christian cabalists” whose ritual embodied Western forms of a like symbolism. Under Mathers’s influence Yeats “began certain studies and experiences” that convinced him “that images well up before the mind’s eye from a deeper source than conscious or subconscious memory.” He was in reach, apparently, of that reservoir of the race’s accumulated emblems that he would later name Anima Mundi and Spiritus Mundi. One vision evoked by a symbol of Mathers’s stayed in Yeats’s mind for thirty years, emerging as the awful climactic image of “The Second Coming.”
When Edwin Ellis, a friend of his father’s, invited him to join in a study of the prophetic books of William Blake, Yeats accepted happily. Ellis was a spirited and humorous scholar, a poet, and a man with Yeats’s own gift for mysterious visions. The transcribing of the poems and the editors’ extended commentary occupied much of four years, ending in 1891. When Quaritch brought out the work in 1893, Yeats received no cash, only thirteen sets of the three elegant volumes; but he felt himself sufficiently rewarded by his steeping in Blake’s symbolic system and his verse, and by much instruction in the craft of poetry from Ellis and Blake, including a decisive negative insight: “I had learned from Blake to hate all abstraction.”
While Yeats’s speculative thought was growing bolder and more expansive, his aesthetic thought was turning harder, more concentrated, more empirical and exacting. His romantic instinct, deep in character and temperament, sustained his leaning to the Pre-Raphaelite, the Celtic, to soft feeling and lush textures; at the same time he began to ask harder things of his art: sharper outlines, tighter structures, simpler, more natural diction, a firmer grounding in familiar experience. Romantic and classical impulses contended in Yeats’s spirit all his life. The great poetry of his maturity expresses a brilliant peacemaking, a control of opposites in tense counterpoise.
Yeats was trying to find a way to marry art to life. Being Irish, and personally and ethnically ambitious, he was churning complex elements of art and history, polity, nationhood, art and egotism, personality, and selfhood. He wanted to be at once timely and timeless, personal and impersonal, representative. He struggled to express “those simple emotions which resemble the more, the more powerful they are, everybody’s emotion,” and he was “soon”–in fact always–”to write many poems where an always personal emotion was woven into a general pattern of myth and symbol.” He sought an art of largeness, significance, but also of wholeness, of “Unity of Being”; myth and symbol seemed to offer a terrain, a climate, an understood gen-eralness in which to situate the particular.
Soon he began to suspect that humans find such wholeness as they are to be granted in this life (or in any other life) in dividedness: in imperfection, opposition, in what he later called comprehensively “the antinomies.” Yeats’s mind began “drifting vaguely,” as he put it, toward master images that would be permanent counters in his thought: the “Mask” or “anti-self” and “the Daimon,” shapes that emblematized his conviction that humans must find their troubled peace in conflict, in endless stress. Imperfection was a condition of being, a definition of humanity. It is the role of the Daimon or “Gate-keeper” to bring the creature and his will to that strenuous confrontation. Yeats put it all together in the most shattering of his statements: “We begin to live when we have conceived life as tragedy.”
Loving costume and theater, Yeats often dressed the poet in these years–in a flowing loose tie, a brown velveteen jacket, and an old Inverness cape abandoned by his father twenty years earlier. Loving cabals and exclusiveness, he joined the Welshman Ernest Rhys in 1891 in founding the Rhymers’ Club, which for some years met often in an upper room of an old inn in the Strand, the Cheshire Cheese: “We read our poems to one another and talked criticism and drank a little wine.” The shifting membership included Lionel Johnson, Ernest Dowson, John Davidson, Richard Le Gallienne, Edwin Ellis, Arthur Symons, and Wilde, several of whom he would later group as “The Tragic Generation.” Johnson and Symons were Yeats’s closest comrades. He noticed that when he began to talk his “philosophical ideas” to the Rhymers, “a gloomy silence fell upon the room.”
In the same interval Yeats was founding in London the Irish Literary Society and in Dublin the National Literary Society. In Dublin in the summer of 1891 he spent all possible time with Gonne; he proposed marriage and was sweetly refused. He had been feeling that the time was ripe for doing something fundamental about Irish culture, “that Ireland would be like soft wax for years to come,” and the downfall and death of Ireland’s great hero in Westminster, Charles Stewart Parnell, whose coffin ship Yeats met at Kingstown pier in October, brought his Irish resolutions to a point. First and most personally, he wanted to create an Irish theater, and he wanted it to perform The Countess Kathleen (later Cathleen), his first stage play, with which he had been wrestling, with Gonne in mind as both mythic heroine and principal actress.
But his general ambition was much grander: to lift the whole level of Irish thought and discourse, to give it both poetry and solidity. He assigned his Irish literary clubs, for example, the task of creating a “standard of criticism,” an Arnoldian current of true and fresh ideas. Revolted alike by Protestant crassness and Catholic self-deceiving sentiment, sick of “convivial Ireland with the traditional tear and smile,” of belonging to “a race intemperate of speech, declamatory, loose, and bragging,” he wished to attack those vulgarities and to offer the race higher motives, more adult consciousness, and an answerable style, beginning with what he called “the applied arts of literature”: literature rising out of myth and popular lore and in close touch with music, speech, dance, and painting, gradually moving a whole culture toward Unity of Being.
Yeats traveled about Ireland founding branches of the National Literary Society, surprised at his own readiness in argument and persuasive powers. Notable men came to his support: O’Leary, Russell, Douglas Hyde, Standish O’Grady. But his dream had been all too grand, and it remained for a corollary movement, Hyde’s Gaelic League, to effect real change in the texture of Irish life. Indeed, it was ten years before the hardening of Yeats’s aesthetic worked any real change in his own style. When Fisher Unwin brought out “The Countess Kathleen and Various Legends and Lyrics in 1892, his “fitful Danaan rhymes” still brooded richly in fairyland and legendary Ireland, choosing to “sing of old Eire and the ancient ways,” to find subjects in fragments of “Eternal beauty wandering on her way.” The beauty is real, and the volume contains a half-dozen first-rate neo-romantic lyrics: “The Lake Isle of Innisfree,” “When You Are Old,” “The Man Who Dreamed of Fairyland,” “The Two Trees,” and “Who Goes with Fergus?” Yeats’s drenched nostalgia for a life that never was gave the volume its pitch and tone. “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” enchanted many people, and critics praised its mastery of vowel sounds–at a time when, as Yeats noted, he hardly knew what a vowel was. He kept his own respect for the poem as “my first lyric with anything in its rhythm of my own music,” and he recognized the hesitantly transitional place of such poems in the forming of his style: “I had begun to loosen rhythm as an escape from rhetoric, and from that emotion of the crowd that rhetoric brings, but I only understood vaguely and occasionally that I must for my special purpose use nothing but the common syntax.”
For Yeats the remainder of the 1890s was a period of mixed purposes, divided energies, though hardworking and productive. His deepest personal tendencies, to sensuality and mysticism, colored all he did. “Sex and the dead,” he wrote much later, were the only fit subjects for a serious mind. Yeats was happier, easier, more personally attractive with women than with men, and by 1895 he was on terms of sympathetic intimacy with several active, handsome young women. Katharine Tynan, the talented daughter of a Wicklow farmer, had been his good comrade in Ireland for ten years. In 1890 he had been first enthralled by the mastery of gesture, the low thrilling voice, and the “incomparable” sense of rhythm of a beautiful young minor actress, Florence Fair. He made her his intimate friend and his model for the “ideal” effects he sought in stage performances: a stylized, poetical art, physically restrained, almost static, directing all attention to the beauty of language. Olivia Shakespear, whose daughter Dorothy married Ezra Pound, was another beautiful and intelligent young woman, caught like Farr in an unsatisfactory marriage. It is probable that both became Yeats’s lovers, and certain that they remained his dear friends as long as they lived.
Gonne probably never became his mistress, but she remained his enchantress, at once scattering and concentrating his energies, moving him constantly to poetry. In Dublin she refused to be his “hostess” as she refused to be his wife. She said her “social life” was to be in Paris, where she frequented a Boulangist coterie of political journalists and schemed to turn French opinion against the common enemy, England. She lived and even traveled in a menagerie of dogs, monkeys, and birds that included a full-grown Donegal hawk. Yeats made himself her willing cavalier in Ireland, England, and France, seeing her off with her cages of birds and beasts. Together they were a famous and amazing sight, both tall, sweeping in vestment and gesture, too preoccupied with their own impassioned chatter to notice the sensation they caused.
A woman from a calmer world, whom he met in 1896, offered Yeats the most serviceable friendship of his life. Isabella Augusta Persse, Lady Gregory, was a chunky little brown woman of forty-five, widow of a distinguished British Foreign Service officer. Attracted to Yeats, fifteen years her junior, she offered indispensable mothering and sistering. Her house, Coole Park near Gort in the West of Ireland, was an ancient family estate, stuffed with the trophies of generations of wealth, travel, and accomplishment, with an avenue of arching limes, extensive woodlands, and a small lake whose swans Yeats made illustrious. The snob in Yeats, his deep-seated grand seigneur instincts, rose swiftly to the appeal of this paradigm of aristocratic Anglo-Irishry. Lady Gregory saw that he was needy and unwell. She housed and fed him, taking him about the countryside to share in the collecting of folklore upon which both were already embarked. Until his marriage in 1917 Yeats spent parts of every year at Coole.
For his important atmospheric acquaintance with the French symbolists and decadents Yeats was indebted chiefly to Symons, learned in their language and lore. In February 1894 Yeats made his first trip to Paris, staying with the unregenerate cabalist Mathers and his wife, a sister of Henri Bergson’s, and seeing as much as possible of Gonne. Symons took him to call upon Paul Verlaine, whose English was sufficient for conversation; and with Gonne he saw a performance of a famous period piece premiering that year, the Axël of Jean-Marie Mathias Philipe-Auguste, Comte de Villiers de l’Isle-Adam. Yeats’s French was primitive, but Gonne’s was good enough to carry him through the play, which Yeats at once installed among his “sacred books” as a guide to what Joseph Hone calls “a dramatic art where symbol replaces character, events are allegories and words keep more than half their secrets to themselves.”
At London’s Avenue Theatre in March 1894 occurred the first performance of a Yeats play, The Land of Heart’s Desire, a harmless bit of fairy fluff, which was brought on as a curtain-raiser to Shaw’s new comedy Arms and the Man. Yeats’s piece went well enough to survive Shaw’s long run, and in the first weeks he haunted the theater, watching the workings onstage narrowly. In Ave (1911) George Moore preserved Yeats’s restless lowering figure in long cloak, sombrero, and flowing tie, all black.
Being penniless, fond of his uncle and his second-sighted servant Mary Battle, and anxious to add to his stock of folktales, Yeats paid a visit to George Pollexfen in the summer that was stretched to half a year. He and his uncle made many experiments with magic and symbolism and emerged with intensified convictions. Yeats “knew” himself “face to face with the Anima Mundi described by Platonic philosophers.” Two years earlier he had defended his occult studies against O’Leary’s misgivings: “The mystical life is the centre of all that I do and all that I think and all that I write.… I have always considered myself a voice of…a greater renaissance–the revolt of the soul against the intellect–now beginning in the world.” He summed up the facts of his case and their psychology in his autoBiography “I had not taken up these subjects willfully, nor through love of strangeness, nor love of excitement, nor because I found myself in some experimental circle, but because unaccountable things had happened even in my childhood, and because of an ungovernable craving. When supernatural events begin, a man first doubts his own testimony, but when they repeat themselves again and again, he doubts all human testimony.”
Yeats was thirty when he first took up quarters of his own, rooms in the Temple connected by that passageway to rooms of Symons’s that were his real avenue into the Continental literature of the 1890s. Symons helped him to read Villiers and Verlaine and Stéphane Mallarmé, and they affected the tone and rhythm of both his verse and his prose, though the great influence on his prose was still Walter Pater, to whom he had been led by Johnson. Soon, Yeats moved to two rooms in Woburn Buildings in Bloomsbury; eventually, he occupied most of the house, and it became his London place for many years.
Fisher Unwin brought out Poems (1895), including Yeats’s two plays and the lyrics that still pleased him from his first two volumes. The book was a success and was reprinted fourteen times down to 1929, bringing Yeats a steady small annual royalty. Over the years he constantly revised these poems, some to the point of transformation, but he never abjured them. “Early Yeats” was the best poetry in English in late-Victorian times; but they were bad times. Early in 1896 the periodical Savoy, with Yeats’s friends Symons and Aubrey Beardsley as editor and art editor, picked up the fallen banners of the Yellow Book and continued the war of the decadents upon the moral and aesthetic stuffiness of entrenched Victorianism. Yeats’s prose and verse appeared often in the Savoy.
In the summer of 1896 Yeats took Symons on a visit to Ireland. Their party was soon joined by Symons’s ribald friend Moore and Moore’s cranky, God-haunted friend Edward Martyn. They traveled the West Country and the Aran Islands, and at Coole Park near Gort they met Martyn’s neighbor Lady Gregory. Unknowingly, Yeats had collected the directorate of his coming theater movement, lacking only its resident genius, John Millington Synge. He discovered the playwright a few months later under the eaves of his hotel in Paris, where Yeats had gone to consult with Mathers and Gonne about designing a ritual for an Order of Celtic Mysteries that he hoped to found. He dreamed of setting up the sanctum of the order in an enchanted spot, an abandoned castle that filled a little island in Lough Key. For ten years, he wrote in “Hodos Chameliontos” (book 3 of The Trembling of the Veil, 1922), his “most impassioned thought” was of the philosophy of his Order. He foresaw that “invisible gates would open” as they had done for Blake, Emanuel Swedenborg, and Jakob Böhme; then, he thought, he must turn “difficult, obscure.”
Hampered by penury, exhaustion, and trouble with his eyes, Yeats worked in London and, invited by Lady Gregory, at Coole on the Marmorean tales of “The Secret Rose (1897) and the Stories of Red Hanrahan that were added to the text of The Celtic Twilight in 1902. Working “with laborious care and studied moderation of style,” he was avoiding the bourgeois and aiming at high and low, at an “aristocratic” literature with its feet in folklore. “The noble and the beggarman” would hold hands in his art for the rest of his life, as they did in his plan for an Irish theater as an instrument of national culture.
His indispensable supporter, early and late, was Lady Gregory. She collected money and patrons to launch the Irish Literary Theatre, the germ of the Abbey, in the autumn of 1898 with Yeats, Moore, and Martyn as directors. The first bill was to be composed of The Countess Cathleen and Martyn’s strong realist play The Heather Field. During early stages of rehearsal and promotion affairs were hectic, with the officious Moore clashing with the doctrinaire Yeats. The two sniped at each other, wittily and extravagantly, for the rest of their lives. Yeats’s play, in which his heroine sells her soul to “demons” to preserve the peasants from starvation, opened on 8 May 1899 and ran into trouble with the church on grounds of rumored heresy. The performances went forward, but with such tumultuousness as to provide the university student James Joyce with an Irish-symptomatic episode for A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916).
Yeats closed out the nineteenth century with the most Victorian and Pre-Raphaelite of his collections, The Wind Among the Reeds (1899). These poems have a cameo effect: small, shapely, stylized–beautifully formed and spoken but soft, unreal, manneristic. Yeats seemed to be demonstrating how easily and expertly he could write “early Yeats.” The poems fall into suites of related attitudes, the titles of which read like captions for serial illustrations, as if one were turning the pages of an old parlor emblem book. But there is nothing absurd or cheap about these rich conventions. The best poems are two in which Yeats moved through and past the convention into the stereotyping of full myth. “The Cap and Bells” is a piece of pure Pre-Raphaelite medievalism, controlled by primary colors and sharp outlines and acidified by wit: the lady finally succumbs to the emblems of the jester’s ridiculousness, his cap and bells. “The Song of Wandering Aengus” is an unforgettable brief visionary poem that conveys a lifetime of obsessed enchantment by a magical telescoping of time and a surrealistic linking of images.
In the first years of the new century Yeats was constantly and somewhat erratically busy. He shifted publishers restlessly before settling on A. H. Bullen, a scholarly and bibulous friend of his family’s. He moved back and forth between London and Dublin and spent most of his summers at Coole. Gonne’s French machinations had collapsed in spectacular circumstances, and she had settled back into Dublin and the new Sinn Fein movement. When Yeats spoke of marriage, she discouraged him: both of them had better things to do, she argued. It was “a miserable love affair,” he wrote in Dramatis Persona (1935), and he might as well have been offering his heart “to an image in a milliner’s window, or to a statue in a museum.”
His other major preoccupation was with the new theater and the series of poetico-mythical short plays he was trying to write for it. The Shadowy Waters (1900) was followed in 1901 by Diarmuid and Grania, fruit of a quarrelsome collaboration with Moore, produced in October but never published by either author. Cathleen ni Houlihan, in which Lady Gregory had helped with dialogue and style, was performed in April 1902 with Gonne a great success in the title part, an old woman who embodies “Ireland herself.” Yeats thought she “made Cathleen seem like a divine being fallen into our mortal infirmity.” The Pot of Broth and The Hour-Glass were produced in 1902 and 1903, respectively.
By this time Yeats’s group had joined hands with two young Dublin workingmen, the brothers Frank and Willie Fay, brilliant amateur actor-producers, and the company had metamorphosed into the Irish National Theatre. By now Synge too was on the scene, having at last obeyed Yeats’s instruction to get out of Paris and dig down to his own Irish roots. The National Theatre’s early polity was clumsily “democratic,” with all members of the company discussing and voting on all questions of casting and production. After months of squabbling, Yeats, Synge, and Lady Gregory took control as a governing troika.
With his wife now dead and his sons leading independent lives, J. B. Yeats decided to return to Dublin, and he and his daughters took a house in Dundrum on the south side of the city. Yeats’s sisters, Lily and Lollie, had trained in fine textiles and printing in Morris’s Kelmscott workshops, and in Dundrum they settled into Dun Emer Industries. The family had been still in London, however, when John Quinn, a rising young New York corporation lawyer, came abroad for his first whirlwind visit in the late summer of 1902. Quinn was Irish-American, prosperous, and acquisitive. J. B. and Jack Yeats showed him about London and showed examples of their own work. Quinn bought a dozen paintings and commissioned others. In Dublin, Quinn met Yeats and most of his friends, bought paintings, books, and manuscripts, and crossed to the West, where he met the Moore-Martyn-Gregory enclave. He proposed to Yeats an American lecture tour and offered also to secure American copyrights by getting out small private editions of new works by the Irish writers. He even effected a temporary reconciliation between Yeats and Moore, who had been involved in another wrangling “collaboration.” But Yeats tired of the struggle and dictated a five-act “tragedy” on their common theme to Lady Gregory, called Where There Is Nothing (produced in London in 1904 and later rewritten and retitled The Unicorn from the Stars, 1907).
A better play, his strongest to date, the little Cuchulain play On Baile’s Strand (produced in Dublin in 1904), was combined with a dozen recent lyrics in the summer of 1903 to form In the Seven Woods. It was the first volume in the eventually long and distinguished list of handprinted books to come from Lollie Yeats’s Dun Emer Press (later Cuala Press). The little book seemed a poor show for four years’ work, but considering the manifold forms of Yeats’s busyness one wonders, as he often wondered, how he found any time for mere verse. Nor did metrical composition come easy. A lyric commonly began with a few words or phrases or a couple of sentences of the flattest kind of prose; and the shaping of that germ into a half-dozen half-perfected lines needed a hard day of work. The real validation of the volume lay in the quality of the poems. The old softness lingered, but here Yeats took the first steps toward the imposing and exhilarating poetry of his maturity, audible in a new hardness and economy and the sound of an identifiable daily world.
No doubt Yeats’s world had changed, as well as his sense of it. Beardsley, Dowson, Johnson, and Wilde were all dead, and the 1890s had passed in fact and in spirit; Queen Victoria was gone at last; the Boer War had shaken a great many complacencies. The general air was tenser, dryer, troubled, more soberly empirical, at once less confident and more soberly resolute. Quinn had introduced Yeats to “that strong enchanter” Friedrich Nietzsche, and he had been reading him with fascination, finding in Nietzsche’s terms Dionysiac and Apollonian names for his own sense of the soul’s two primary “movements”: to transcend form, to create form. “Apollonian” would be one way to describe the new economical shapeliness in Yeats’s poems.
Yeats’s new manner was clearest in three poems in which Gonne is at last addressed as a real presence, still a goddess but more than a dream. If one’s beloved is an incarnated Diana, one can expect real shafts in one’s heart, as in the tiny poem “The Arrow.” “The Folly of Being Comforted” employs the dialogue structure that became a favorite form. In answer to a kind friend who “comforts” with advice of “patience,” noting that his love is losing her first beauty, “Heart cries, ‘No, / I have not a crumb of comfort, not a grain. / Time can but make her beauty over again.’” “Adam’s Curse” rein-vokes an evening in London when Yeats, Gonne, and her almost equally beautiful sister had talked of poetry and the beauty of women and the general curse of being human, caught in labor, time, mutability. The tone and much of the language are familiar from early Yeats, but this poetry is tighter; the luxuriousness is gone. The scene feels actual, the rhythm is that of a mind moving, and the language sounds like real talk. Perhaps his work in the theater was making a difference.
Quinn had organized his promised American lecture tour, and Yeats gave four months to the enterprise in the fall and winter of 1903–1904. He appeared at most of the major American colleges and universities and at many clubs and societies, especially those of a “Hibernian” cast. Quinn judged he had been the most impressive Irishman to conduct a “mission” to America since Parnell. Exhausted but also exhilarated, he returned with a good deal of money in his purse, badly needed. Until he was fifty Yeats regularly earned less than £200 in a year.
In the preceding winter Yeats had been stunned by the news of Gonne’s marriage in Paris to John MacBride, an event that he later preserved in “Reconciliation” as “the day / When, the ears being deafened, the sight of the eyes blind / With lightning, you went from me.” He had easily forgiven her when she produced a beautiful illegitimate daughter, Iseult (who usually passed as her niece), credited by many to him but actually fathered by her French coconspirator Lucien Millevoye; but this marriage was something else. Yeats was not only staggered by it as a fatally separating fact, but insulted, angered, and frightened that the woman who had repeatedly refused him should give herself to a brute. MacBride was an Irishman of courage who had led an Irish brigade against the British in the Boer War, but as a civilian he was a man of no standing or achievement and of crude, even depraved behavior, “a drunken vainglorious lout,” as Yeats still called him in “Easter 1916” in the act of forgiving him as a hero who had helped create the “terrible beauty” of the Easter Rising. Yeats saw the marriage as a disaster not only to himself but to Gonne. In that he was right; the union was soon dissolved by legal separation–on grounds considered unspeakable–after producing a son, Sean MacBride, who became a statesman of international eminence.
In the Irish National Theatre things were going better. An English admirer and fellow cabalist, A. E. F. Horniman, a woman of moderate wealth, had offered to “give” Yeats a theater: to provide a building and an annual subsidy of £800 for what became the famous Abbey Theatre. On Baile’s Strand went into rehearsal, and Yeats was also preparing two other plays, The King’s Threshold and Deirdre. He did not want his Theatre of Beauty to lack matter. Yeats was absorbing the lesson, important to his lyrics as well as to his plays, that for conviction poetic speech needed to be simplified and braced by common idiom.
Synge’s rough, loving, satirical Irish visions had caused trouble in the theater from the beginning, and Yeats had defended him stoutly when In the Shadow of the Glen (1903) and The Well of the Saints (1905) were attacked. Yeats was lecturing in Scotland late in January 1907 when the premiere of Synge’s comic masterpiece The Playboy of the Western World brought on a week of “riots” in the Abbey, with offended and defensive Irishmen drowning out the lines with hisses, boos, and stamping, and the players eventually turning upon them to join the general slanging match. Called home by a telegram from Lady Gregory, Yeats threw open the theater to debate the issues of the play and the question of whether the theater was to be silenced by a vulgar censorship. Taking the stage in full evening dress, he harangued the generally hostile crowd. The play, he said, was not a travesty upon Irish morality but a celebration of Irish vitality and imaginativeness. Interrupted often by shouted questions and objections, he explained his aspiration for the theater as an instrument to articulate and enrich the national life.
In the spring of 1907 Yeats joined Lady Gregory and her son, Robert, for his most elegant holiday to date, a tour of several weeks among the cities of northern Italy: Venice, Florence, Milan, Urbino, Ferrara, and Ravenna. He returned with his head full of new and permanent images of beauty and vitality accomplished by a union of aristocracy and genius that made it all the harder to tolerate the crassness and petty passions of Dublin. But the race was his own, and he did not mean to repudiate it. He wrote to Horniman: “I understand my own race and in all my work…I have thought of it.…I shall write for my own people–whether in love or hate of them matters little–probably I shall not know which it is.”
Theater business filled his days; he was writing little poetry. In the fall of 1907 he was systematically revising his published prose and verse for “The Collected Works in Verse and Prose to be published by A. H. Bullen, supported by a subsidy of £1500 from Horniman. For his elegant edition Bullen ordered portraits of the poet by his father and by John Singer Sargent, Antonio Man-cini, Augustus John, and Yeats’s old friend Charles Shannon. Yeats enjoyed the company of these men of the world, particularly that of the madcap John, and he was fascinated to see their different images of him. At forty-two he was young for a collected edition and looked a good deal younger. Enemies and envious rivals wondered if he intended to lay down his pen. Bullen’s eight handsome volumes came out in 1908 under the Shakespeare Head imprint.
Another preoccupation and a constant grief was the illness of Synge, a victim of the then-incurable Hodgkin’s disease, as yet undiagnosed. Yeats visited him often, particularly to discuss the text of Synge’s masterly play Deirdre of the Sorrows, not quite finished when he died at thirty-seven in March 1909. He had made Yeats his literary executor and begged him to polish the play for production, and Yeats humbly did so.
Gonne had moved back to France and was living nonpolitically in a house on a bluff above the sea at Colville in Normandy with her little son; young Iseult, already heartbreakingly lovely, was being educated in a convent. Yeats crossed to see them whenever he was free. To that old passion grown ruminant, forgiving, and a bit autumnal are owed the best poems in The Green Helmet and Other Poems (1910) from Lollie Yeats’s newly named Cuala Press. For the first time fairyland is missing, and the simplifying and empiricizing tendencies in Yeats’s style continue and intensify. Several of the Gonne poems express a reflection in Yeats’s journal: that she had never really understood what he was trying to do and say in Ireland, but her very incomprehension had stirred him productively in art and life, to prove and explain himself. “Words” reasons that way but turns the irony bitter at the end: had she ever met his mind, he “might have thrown poor words away / And been content to live.” In “A Woman Homer Sung” the note of middle age, of loss and forgiveness, is sounded frankly, then gives way to ecstatic recollection of the old enchantment.
In Yeats’s friendships, this period was one of losses and new acquisitions. Late in 1907 his father at sixty-seven crossed to New York on the strength of a purse made up by friends in Ireland. Thereafter he could never quite bring himself to return, and he stayed until his death in 1922, surviving on the generosity of Quinn and on occasional small fees for pictures, articles, or lectures. He sent back to his son a stream of letters, sometimes several in a day, full of news, ideas, argument. George Pollexfen died in Sligo in the autumn of 1910. Synge was a dreadful loss to the Abbey, as was Horniman, who angrily withdrew her support (amounting in all to £10,000) when the theater, under Lennox Robinson, alone among theaters in the United Kingdom, failed to close on the day of the death of Edward VII. In England, Yeats’s acquaintance in social, artistic, and political circles was wide and influential, including Prime Minister H. H. Asquith, Mrs. Patrick Campbell, Shaw, Robert Bridges, Wyndham Lewis, and Pound.
The Yeats-Pound coalition seemed odd, but it was important to both men. Yeats described Pound as “a headlong rugged nature,” and he was charmed, amused, and instructed by the energetic, untidy, and irreverent young American. He also respected Pound’s mind, seething with wide half-learning–classical, oriental, medieval, Continental, “modern.” Pound was the most generously helpful man of his time to other artists; to Yeats he was an unlikely but necessary angel, an astringent influence, pulling him down to earth, urging clarity and directness in imagery and language, opening doors to broader, stranger cultures but wishing them controlled within a frame of history and common sense.
Late in 1910 Yeats’s financial problems were eased somewhat by a crown pension of £150 a year, awarded after representations by Lady Gregory, Edmund Gosse, and Augustine Birrell. Once he had satisfied himself that the grant implied no promise of political loyalty, Yeats accepted it gratefully.
Yeats was lecturing often in England and Ireland, raising funds to replace Horniman’s former capital. He formed a close friendship with the brilliant young stage designer Gordon Craig and brought his work into Abbey productions. Audiences in Dublin were shrinking, owing in part to Yeats’s stubborn loyalty to the works of Synge and to the manner of his Theatre of Beauty; but the company was a success in England, and they were invited to make their first American tour in the fall and winter of 1911–1912. Yeats went with the players but quickly returned, to be replaced, as arranged, by Lady Gregory, and she bore the brunt of riotous receptions from American Irishmen in New York, Boston, and Philadelphia who re-created the Dublin Playboy of the Western World disorders of 1907.
Back home, Yeats was working at a new play, The Player Queen (performed in 1919), rewriting The Countess Cathleen once more as a kind of stylized masque, and doing a “translation” of Oedipus Rex with a better Greek scholar at his elbow, trying to turn the Jebb version into good stage talk. In London he befriended the Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore, helped him with translations into English, and wrote an introduction to his Gitanjali (1912). He was still close to Shakespear, and in Devon she introduced him to Georgiana Hyde-Lees, who became Mrs. “George” Yeats in 1917.
With Robinson in charge of the Abbey and moving it gradually toward a more popular realistic and contemporary taste, Yeats was freer to think and write than he had been for a dozen years. The thirty-one poems of his 1914 collection, Responsibilities, show the gusto with which he had been using his time after a long fallow period. He summed up his own sense of the matter quite simply in a letter to his father in August 1913: “I thought your letter about ‘portraiture’ being ‘pain’ most beautiful and profound.…Of recent years instead of ‘vision,’ meaning by vision the intense realization of a state of ecstatic emotion symbolized in a definite imagined region, I have tried for more self portraiture. I have tried to make my work convincing with a speech so natural and dramatic that the hearer would feel the presence of a man thinking and feeling.”
Many of the poems of this volume show the concentration with which Yeats was mining his daily thought and feeling. Several poems treat one of his lifelong persons, the Fool: outcasts, road-wandering figures–filthy, passionate, old or deformed, crack-pated but in touch with wild wisdom. “The Three Hermits,” for example, is a ballad-like bit of tight-metered anarchy, bitter and funny. Two of the old men talk sense, but the poem centers upon the third, whose only speech is song, apocalyptic rhapsody: “While he’d rummaged rags and hair, / Caught and cracked his flea, the third, / Giddy with his hundredth year, / Sang unnoticed like a bird.” “The Witch” and “The Peacock” are a pair of explosive little poems set back to back in a dimeter anapestic rhythm; bare, epigrammatic, poised in easy tension, they are fundamental middle Yeats.
Whenever he was writing poetry with concentration, Yeats noticed, sooner or later it turned into love poetry. “To a Child Dancing in the Wind” and “Two Years Later” are addressed to Iseult Gonne; then a suite of five turn helplessly to Gonne, ruminating the old obsession with a passion that is more complex than ever. “Fallen Majesty” is a brief elegiac recollection of Gonne’s early beauty and its effect on men: “a thing…that seemed a burning cloud.” “Friends” is written to praise Gonne, Shakespear, and Lady Gregory, “three women that have wrought / What joy was in my days.” Developing a single death-wishing metaphor, “That the Night Come” makes peace with the sorest fact of the relationship with Gonne: that she had preferred a violent political life to his love: “She lived in storm and strife, / Her soul had such desire / For what proud death may bring / That it could not endure / The common good of life.”
Near the end of Responsibilities stands a pair of enigmatical poems on which Yeats’s note is little help. “The Dolls,” sardonically humorous, may be among other things a parody upon the Virgin Birth. “The Magi” Yeats explains only as a vision he saw in an actual blue sky. The vision is hauntingly intense and clear visually and cast in a single driving sentence. The poem shows what Yeats’s mature passion could do with Pre-Raphaelite material. One of the most splendidly simple and explicit of Yeats’s great short poems, “A Coat,” tells the whole story of the career of his style and tells how he intends to work forward from his fiftieth year. The poet compares his early style to “a coat / Covered with embroideries / Out of old mythologies,” but others have imitated him and worn the coat “in the world’s eyes / As though they’d wrought it.” Thus, the poet concludes, “let them take it, / For there’s more enterprise / In walking naked.”
In the winter of 1912–1913, when Yeats was ill and out of sorts in London, the athletic Pound taught him to fence. In the following autumn the two settled into Stone Cottage at Coleman’s Hatch in rural Sussex and worked together on Japanese Noh materials in the notebooks of the scholar Ernest Fenollosa, whose widow had made Pound her husband’s literary executor. Yeats worked also at his verse and on lectures for another American tour, forthcoming in the new year with a guarantee of £500. The tour was a success, and it also put an end to the estrangement with Quinn that had embarrassed their many mutual friends (in 1909 the two had quarreled bitterly, apparently over a mistress of Quinn’s). Yeats found his old father healthy and happy but in debt. He paid off the debts and at Quinn’s suggestion worked out an arrangement for Quinn to buy Yeats’s manuscripts as available and remit the sums toj. B. Yeats for his use.
As he had been doing all his life, Yeats looked toward a system that would form for “a churchless mystic” a satisfying religion, a composite myth of personality and history, a diagram of the soul’s movement in time and the symbols of the motives that impelled it. In the United States and Canada, as in London, he attended the séances of any promising spiritualist medium. In spring 1914 he traveled with Gonne and Everard Feilding of the Psychical Research Society to Mirabeau, near Poitiers, to investigate reports of a “bleeding” oleograph of the Sacred Heart. Results were inconclusive, but the process was fascinating and to Yeats deadly serious.
With Maud and Iseult Gonne nursing the wounded in French hospitals, Yeats spent the first autumn of World War I in Coole, finishing Reveries over Childhood and Youth, which he brought to Dublin to read to Lily Yeats. At Coole and in London he worked at the first of his “Plays for Dancers,” At the Hawk’s Well (performed in 1916), inspired by Pound’s exposition of the Noh. The form, Greek Japanese, drew Yeats powerfully for its union of the arcane and aristocratic and the primitive and fabulous. Being terse, symbolic, and pictorial, it was a final astringency of his ideal of “poetic” theater. With settings and transitions evoked by the folding and unfolding of a cloth and the beating of a drum, such plays hardly required scenery or even a theater; they could be played in a drawing room or a barn. In fact, the play was tried out in Lady Maud Cunard’s drawing room.
Cunard lobbied for a knighthood for Yeats, which he refused; he was grateful but unable to reconcile the image with his lifelong definition of himself as an Irish patriot. He wrote to Lily Yeats: “I do not wish anyone to say of me ‘only for a ribbon he left us.’” At about the same time he joined in Pound’s successful plea for a crown grant of £100 to James Joyce, harried and hard up in Zurich.
The Easter Rising in Dublin in April 1916 took nearly everyone by surprise. Yeats in England complained that he had not been consulted. He had known several of the rebel leaders personally: Padraic Pearse, Thomas MacDonagh, Joseph Plunkett, James B. Connolly, and Constance Gore-Booth, now the Countess Markiewicz. The rising, its quick and bloody suppression by English troops, and especially then the agonizing serial executions of the leaders, stirred Irishmen to the heart. With his accumulated disillusionment, Yeats had been half-consciously cutting his ties to Ireland; now his old affection welled up again in a flood, stirred by an enterprise that he saw as brave and mad. Two weeks after Easter he wrote Lady Gregory of “the heroic, tragic lunacy of Sinn Fein.” He quickly composed the memorial that became one of his best-known poems after “The Lake Isle of Innisfree,” the incantatory “Easter 1916,” with its famous refrain, “A terrible beauty is born.”
When he read the poem to Gonne in Normandy, she thought it too esoteric, not nearly hard enough in the revolutionary way. John MacBride had been one of the sixteen men executed after the rising, and her new legal freedom encouraged Yeats to propose marriage once more; but she was feeling a strong call back to Irish politics, and she would not listen to him. Yeats returned to London and completed a little book of philosophical speculations, Per Arnica Sikntia Lunae (1918), and another “Play for Dancers,” The Dreaming of the Bones (performed in 1931). Then, in the summer of 1917, he went back to Normandy, and this time he proposed not to Gonne but to her daughter, Iseult, one-third his age; she refused. Yeats got passports for the family and saw them back to London, but there Gonne was forbidden to go to Ireland under provisions of the Defense of the Realm Act.
Yeats was clearly determined to marry before it was too late, and he now thought again of Hyde-Lees, merely half his age. She accepted his proposal, and they were married in simple style in London in October 1917 with Pound as best man. Other friends viewed the general hustle with some amusement, Charles Shannon, for example, remarking: “it all seems very sudden and suggests that she is furniture for the Castle.” The Castle, renamed Thoor Ballylee by Yeats and soon to become a central emblem in his poetry, was an old stone structure in Norman style on the bank of a stream near Gort, a square pile of four big superimposed rooms connected by a winding stone stairway, with one cottage attached and another ruinous one in an orchard beyond a road that crossed the bridge at the base of the tower–all formerly part of Lady Gregory’s demesne. Yeats had coveted it for a long time, and he had been able to buy it from a public board a few months earlier for £35. “George,” as Yeats immediately renamed his wife, was humorous, high-spirited, both intelligent and levelheaded, and moreover already considerably learned in his own magical systems.
Soon after his marriage, indeed during the honeymoon, Yeats’s mystical thought received a sudden strange intensification. After trying and succeeding at automatic writing, his young wife suddenly began speaking in tongues–began to babble at great length, in a state that seemed half sleep, half trance, of arcane matters in a voice not her own. These “teachers” or “communicators” seemed to be speaking directly to the hoarded content of Yeats’s mind, trying to clarify it (in perverse moods to confuse it), to supply it with order and symbols. When the flabbergasted poet offered to spend the rest of his life in organizing the early script, the “unknown writer” responded: “No, we have come to give you metaphors for poetry.”
“Ego Dominus Tuus” forms one of these “systematic” grand tropes or master metaphors. It is a poem of the kind that Yeats said he had composed in part illustratively, as “texts for exposition.” It is true that he did intend to go on and treat the ideas discursively in prose; but the poems are also tropaic precipitates of ideas held long in solution. “Ego Dominus Tuus,” for example, is a didactic-dramatic formulation of the principles of Mask and Daimon that had moved in Yeats’s mind for twenty-five years; and the dialogue structure incarnates the oldest and deepest of his convictions, that of the bifurcation of personality and of its life in time.
One of the most compact definitions of the Mask, or anti-self, runs as follows: “Nations, races, and individual men are unified by an image, or bundle of related images, symbolical or evocative of the state of mind, which is of all states of mind not impossible, the most difficult to that man, race, or nation; because only the greatest obstacle that can be contemplated without despair rouses the will to full intensity.” The Daimon is a sort of benign but exacting hovering genius, “personifying spirits…Gates and Gate-keepers,” whose function is to force people to confront the antinomy, to “bring our souls to crisis, to Mask and Image.…They have but the one purpose, to bring their chosen man to the greatest obstacle he may confront without despair.” He put the matter tersely in A Vision: “All the gains of man come from conflict with the opposite of his true being.” It is this principle of Mask or conflicting Image summoned by Daimon that underlies Yeats’s statement in Per Arnica Silentia Lunae: “We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.” The statement continues: “Unlike the rhetoricians, who get a confident voice from remembering the crowd they have won or may win, we sing amid our uncertainty; and, smitten even in the presence of the most high beauty by the knowledge of our solitude, our rhythm shudders.” The true poet, that is, will be one who has “begun to live” because he has “conceived life as tragedy,” who is “no longer deceived, whose passion is reality.”
A half-dozen of these speculative “systematic” poems, at once “texts for exposition” and digests of long thinking, are grouped at the end of Yeats’s 1919 edition of The Wild Swans at Coole. They vary in form and mood, but all are marked by profound thought, a reined-in excitement of feeling, a sometimes weird lumi-nousness in imagery, and a general sophisticated humorousness. Central to the whole enterprise is “The Phases of the Moon,” which was incorporated in A Vision in 1925. It is a grand example of the “metaphors for poetry” coming from the “reedthroated whisperers,” their most fundamental and one of their earliest communications.
“The Cat and the Moon” is equally magical but tighter, playful in a less solemn way. Black Minnaloushe dances in the grass while the moon overhead goes about its deterministic business: “The cat went here and there / And the moon spun round like a top.” The cat cannot comprehend the influence, but his “animal blood” is “troubled,” his body is moved, and his pupils flick like a camera lens in unconscious response to the heavenly manipulation; he “lifts to the changing moon / His changing eyes.”
The “systematic” poems of The Wild Swans at Coole constituted less than a third of the volume. The famous title poem expresses a theme that invades a half-dozen poems, that coming-on of age that Yeats lamented all his life. He later pointed out the comedy in the fact that he had begun to “curse” old age in The Wanderings of Oisin, written when he was just past twenty. In “The Wild Swans at Coole” the voice mourning antiquity at fifty feels rather slack with self-pity, but its biographical absurdity by no means robs the idea of power in the volume as a whole. It takes a tonic form in resolute moods in which the poet vows to sustain a dynamic old age. He would not “wither into eighty years, honoured and empty-witted,” as he wrote cruelly of Wordsworth in Per Arnica Silentia Lunae; his models would be men who stayed passionate and creative to the end, he would “dine at journey’s end / With Landor and with Donne.”
The love poems form the largest group in the volume, turning helplessly about Maud Gonne, with interpolations of Iseult Gonne. Mother and daughter were closely joined in “To a Young Girl,” for example. The theme of love blends several times with the theme of age, as in “Broken Dreams,” and the old obsession began to be linked to Yeats’s “systematic” ideas and images.
“In Memory of Major Robert Gregory,” written for Lady Gregory’s son, who had been killed in Italy, is one of Yeats’s greatest poems. W. H. Auden, no uncritical admirer of Yeats, described it as a work that “restored the occasional poem to life in English”–and set out to rival it in “In Memory of W. B. Yeats.” Yeats organizes the poem in twelve numbered stanzas, in iambics, mostly pentameter, resembling ottava rima but rhymed in two couplets and four lines of brace rhyme. The structure combines two major modes of Yeats’s mature verse: the poem of the movement of the mind, thought itself in dynamics; and the poem of recall and summation, roll-calling, summoning a series of remembered figures for address and celebration.
When their first child, Anne Butler Yeats, was born in Dublin in February 1919, George Yeats’s horoscope for her predicted “good looking and lucky.” Soon they were able to take the baby to Ballylee, where repairs to the cottage, with handmade furnishings in a homely massive country style, had made the place barely habitable in warm dry weather. The ceremonious Yeats promptly composed the long poem “A Prayer for My Daughter,” which is most notable for a newly bitter view of Gonne: “Have I not seen the loveliest woman born / Out of the mouth of Plenty’s horn, / Because of her opinionated mind / Barter that horn and every good / By quiet natures understood / For an old bellows full of angry wind?” The tower of Ballylee still lacked a sound roof; to finance further repairs, Yeats undertook a third American tour in the winter and spring of 1919–1920, leaving Anne with his sisters and taking his wife along to meet his father and American friends.
Overshadowed as it is by its grander neighbors, The Wild Swans at Coole of 1919 and The Tower of 1928, Yeats’s small 1921 volume, Michael Robartes and the Dancer, includes poems of high distinction. The new poems are marked in manner by an ever-more-confident and natural ease of movement, and in matter by a nonchalant induction of ideas, emblems, and even the cant terminology of his forming system. In the gaudy comedy of “Solomon and the Witch,” for example, Solomon, described as one “who understood / Whatever has been said, sighed, sung, / Howled, miau-d, barked, brayed, belled, yelled, cried, crowed,” discusses with Sheba their lovemaking of the preceding night, so intense that Sheba had cried out in a voice not her own. Solomon thinks the voice must have been that of a voyeur-cockerel, crowing because he thought the completeness of their union signaled the end of the world. “Yet the world stays,” Sheba points out. Yes, says Solomon, they have made a distinguished failure–not supernal, but not bad for mortals: the cockerel “thought it worth a crow.” Sheba exclaims: “O! Solomon! Let us try again.”
“The Second Coming” moves with an equally confident mastery, but here the vision is sweeping and apocalyptic, the rhetoric formal, grand, full of power, the structure that of two stately violent blank-verse paragraphs. Yeats is dramatizing his cyclical theory of history: that whole civilizations, like men but on far grander scale, live in antinomy, every culture “perning” or wheeling in a “gyre” of about two thousand years, undergoing birth, life, and death and preparing all the while the life of its opposing successor–two cultures in immense rhythmical alternation “living each other’s death, dying each other’s life.” The critical period of the “interchange of tinctures,” when one era struggles to die and its “executioner” struggles to be born, will be violent and dreadful.
The Yeatses spent most of 1920 and 1921 in Oxford, away from the Black and Tan violence in Ireland. Yeats led a busy social life, worked at his poetry and memoirs, and moved deeper into his system. A son, William Michael Yeats, was born in August 1921. Yeats’s Four Plays for Dancers in the Noh style came out in October of that year. In December came the treaty with England, establishing an Irish Free State in the South but excluding, with heavy consequences, the six counties of Ulster in the North, carefully gerrymandered to ensure a Protestant majority and attached to England. In early 1922 J. B. Yeats died in New York at eighty-two.
Yeats wished to bring up his children in Ireland, and in early 1922 George Yeats found a house at 82 Merrion Square, an elegant address and close to everything that mattered in central Dublin. But Yeats feared that the political situation was “a whirlpool of hate.” Die-hard Republicans led by Eamon De Valera scorned the “Partition” Treaty and the Provisional Government of Arthur Griffith and Michael Collins, raised an army of Irregulars, and in April set off civil war that was small in scale but murderous in style and detail. The family was able to spend the spring and summer of 1922 at Ballylee, idyllically happy with the place but mildly troubled by visits from detachments of the ragtag contending armies. Finally, the Republicans blew up the bridge at the base of the tower, having given Yeats time to take the children to the top room.
In the fall Yeats was chosen one of the sixty members of the new Irish Senate, a largely honorary body, though some of its debates concerned issues of importance. Yeats had always taken his politics seriously, and he was pleased now to have a share in what he called “the slow exciting work of creating institutions–all coral insects but with some design of the ultimate island.” He had long mistrusted the whimsicality and vulgarity of democracy, and his votes usually supported the more-conservative Government Party. The Irregulars were burning the houses of senators, and the Merrion Square house had an armed guard to whom Yeats lent the detective stories to which he had grown addicted. Civil war came to an end in 1923.
For Yeats the crowning event of 1923, probably of his life, was the award of the Nobel Prize in Literature, an official international homage proclaiming him, for the moment, the world’s most distinguished man of letters. “I covet honour,” he wrote in his autobiography. It pleased him that the first congratulatory telegram to reach him came from Joyce. Yeats and his wife traveled to Stockholm for the presentation early in December. With his deep drawing to ceremony, elegance, and distinction, he loved every minute of the affair, dinners, toasts, speeches, applause, rooms full of royalty and eminence in full dress. He was gratified to be told later that the royal family had preferred him to every other Nobel Prize winner because he “had the manners of a courtier.”
Yeats kept an amplified diary of the Nobel events which he titled The Bounty of Sweden (1925) and eventually incorporated into his autobiography. Although he favored his lyric poetry highest of his own work, he felt glumly that his verse would always be known only to “a meagre troop” and that his work in the theater had made him known as “the representative of a public movement” and brought him the Nobel award; hence, he chose “The Irish Theatre” as the subject for his lecture before the Swedish Academy. He spoke without notes and let his voice follow the track of his reverie. The cash value of the prize, £7500, the largest sum ever to reach him in a lump, was enough, invested, to provide a strong hedge against old age.
As Yeats neared sixty he looked robust, almost portly, but in fact his health was turning fragile. Shortness of breath and high blood pressure sent him to Sicily, Capri, and southern Italy for three months in the winter of 1924–1925. He returned anxious to resume his Senate duties and particularly to argue the Protestant case for a liberalization of divorce in a forthcoming debate. He was agitated by the problem of how to unite Gaelic nationalism, more prickly and defensive than ever with the coming of independence, with the aristocratic and intellectual instincts of the old Protestant ascendancy.
At the Abbey Theatre, Yeats had become a sort of honorary chairman of the board. He still read every play before production, attended all meetings, and cast a deciding vote when so moved; and he continued to write for the theater, though more slowly. His major energies in this period were concentrated toward two forthcoming capital works, the philosophical prose of A Vision and his great verse collection The Tower.
When A Vision came out in a private edition from Werner Laurie at the end of 1925, causing very little stir, Yeats was already making notes toward a revision. At the tower in the spring and summer of 1926 he was writing some of the greatest poems of his life. One of his many letters of these years to Shakespear combined two of the already fused themes of the coming volume: “as always happens, no matter how I begin, it becomes love poetry before I am finished with it.…One feels at moments as if one could with a touch convey a vision– that the mystic way and sexual love use the same means–opposed yet parallel existences.” His other major theme, the encroachment of age, was also a property of both life and art. In October, Yeats developed “congestion” of the lungs, with high fever and delirium. He and his wife crept off to Spain, but there he suffered hemorrhages from the lungs. Moving slowly toward the Pounds in Rapallo, Yeats was ill again for weeks in Cannes. In Rapallo he soaked in the sun and slowly recovered; in the evenings he walked with Pound.
Michael and Anne Yeats had been placed in school in Switzerland, and, as Yeats had been warned to winter in the sun henceforward, he and his wife reluctantly decided to sell 82 Merrion Square and engaged a flat of their own in Rapallo for the coming winter. In the spring of 1928 they were back in Dublin, and in the summer Yeats completed his Senate service, having decided not to seek reelection. The Tower was out and a quick success, selling two thousand copies in its first month. When he reread it, Yeats wrote Shakespear, he was “astonished at its bitterness”; yet, as he recognized, “that bitterness gave the book its power and it is the best book I have written.”
Age and vision dominate the opening poem, “Sailing to Byzantium,” set in four tight ottava rima stanzas. The old speaker cries his sad curse upon a land where creatures of teeming biological life, unaware that they are “dying generations” and obsessed with the “sensual music” of the flesh, pay no courtesy to “monuments of unageing intellect.” Accepting in stanza 2 the fact that an old man is “a tattered coat upon a stick,” a scarecrow, “unless / Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing / For every tatter in its mortal dress,” the speaker has willed his own exile, to a place that Yeats thought approached, in history, Unity of Being.
In the great third stanza the old man addresses illuminated spirits who are at once creatures of the purgative Condition of Fire of A Vision and manmade Christian icons, artifacts, themselves “monuments of unageing intellect”; he implores them to spin (“perne”) his purgation from flesh and time: “Consume my heart away; sick with desire / And fastened to a dying animal / It knows not what it is; and gather me / Into the artifice of eternity.” Finally, he envisions his coming transfiguration into the immortal passiveness of supreme art, then retransfigured into prophetic song.
The longer title poem treats old age in a wider range of tones that are powerful but perhaps imperfectly unified. In setting and in some aspects of structure “The Tower” recalls the Robert Gregory elegy: it too calls a roll, but of figures who are fabricated or semilegendary; and it ends with a long testamentary flourish. The three numbered sections are quite different in length and shape, but all are more or less colloquial in movement. Throughout, the aging poet speaks in propria persona, and he makes another poem in which the drama is the movement of the mind.
“Meditations in Time of Civil War” is a cycle of seven poems of ordinary lyric length, separately titled and varying in form. Yeats wrote the poems at Ballylee in 1922, at the height of Ireland’s brief but savage civil strife, and the title is precise. He arranges his meditations in an order that moves in general from comparative peacefulness through violence and emerges in wild apocalyptic vision–though all three moods are implicitly present all the time. “Ancestral Houses” evokes the life of the great house, “the inherited glory of the rich,” but it soon wonders whether its proper emblem is “the abounding glittering jet” of the garden fountain, or something like a gyre, importing disorder and imperma-nence: “some marvellous empty sea-shell flung / Out of the obscure dark of the rich streams.”
Similarly, the second poem, “My House,” describes the tower in detail, then settles in the study where a peaceful thinker arrives at images of violence. He suspects that he in his turn will leave to his heirs “befitting emblems of adversity” found in contemplation: not peace but a sword. A real sword forms the emblem of meditation in “My Table”: lying on his study table a great Samurai sword “curved like new moon,” given to Yeats in America in 1920 by a young Japanese admirer, Junzo Sato. The artifact is perfect, and Yeats reflects that the culture that produced it was said to have possessed Unity of Being. Yet, Yeats knows that perfect works are produced only by men in temporal torture: “only an aching heart / Conceives a changeless work of art.”
“My Descendants” explores the mysteries of lineage. Having, as he feels, inherited “a vigorous mind / From my old fathers,” Yeats “dreams” of passing on that strength to his own children: “leave a woman and a man behind / As vigorous of mind.” But experience has proved the mutability of things, and he wonders if his children will not turn out ordinary failing folk “through natural declension of the soul, / Through too much business with the passing hour, / Through too much play, or marriage with a fool?” The last stanza accepts the overarching power of the gyres, counts the blessings of friendship (Lady Gregory) and love (George Yeats), and takes sad comfort in the survival of the emblematic house.
The fifth and sixth poems evoke the war directly. In “The Road at My Door” Yeats is visited first by a Republican soldier and then by a Free State officer, and in both cases he is astonished at their nonchalant courage, “cracking jokes of civil war.” Shamed by his sedentary trade, the poet-philosopher returns to his drab solitude, “caught / In the cold snows of a dream.” The gloom of “The Stare’s Nest by My Window” is still more bitter and comprehensive. The tower is failing as a shelter of the troubled spirit, and bees and starlings nest in the cracks of the masonry–a metaphor of the Irish state. The refrain line, inviting the honeybees to “come build in the empty house of the stare,” forms a despairing prayer for the return of sweetness.
The final lyric, “I See Phantoms of Hatred and of the Heart’s Fullness and of the Coming Emptiness,” is another of Yeats’s poems of the movement of the mind. Three separate visions are framed by an opening and a closing stanza that carry the poet’s narrative of objective and subjective movement. From his tower top the poet looks out upon a swirling mist that shrouds the landscape under the light of a moon shaped like Sato’s sword. A puff of wind scatters the mist into “glimmering fragments” that drive the mind into phantasmagoria.
The outrage and disgust that dominate “Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen” seem to stem mainly from the guerrilla warfare of the Black and Tan terror, though the images are shockingly applicable to the all-Irish warfare that ensued. The fourth of the great ottava rima stanzas, for example, cites specific Black and Tan atrocities but at the end makes its image from a kind of timeless and nonspecific Irish malice and lust for blood. It is a poem of heartbreak, rage, and despair, and the poet does not spare himself in the general destructiveness: “The swan has leaped into the desolate heaven: / That image can bring wildness, bring a rage / To end all things, to end / What my laborious life imagined.”
The Tower is full of complex fusions, as in “Two Songs from a Play” (The Resurrection, performed in 1934), set in a pair of two-stanza lyrics. Here the birth-death-rebirth of Dionysus, ushering in the Antithetical Greco-Roman era, blends, conflicts, alternates with the birth-death-resurrection of Christ and his Primary Christian age. Then, in his great final stanza, Yeats abruptly dismisses all his elaborate cyclically, throws over it the fabric of his overarching romantic humanism, accepts the fatality of failure, and asserts the primacy of passion.
In “Leda and the Swan” the fusion is literal and carnal and stranger still. In his notes Yeats poised this poem and “Two Songs from a Play” as poems of Annunciation, of God bringing his spiritual and sexual news to man. There is no Christian matter in “Leda and the Swan”; Yeats turns entirely to pagan myth, and the news Zeus brings to Leda is that of the birth of the classical age. For Yeats myth was a branch of history, and in “Leda and the Swan” he was proposing the reality, the carnality of a mythical event. The poem is intensely, magnificently sensual (his typist refused, in tears, to copy it).
“Among School Children” is perhaps Yeats’s most perfect union of simplicity and loftiness, of passion and control, of personal life as fact and emblem. In fact, the
poem is “about” unity, about the relation of the singular to the plural, the universal, of person to person and to race, of youth to age and to immortality, of part to part and to whole. The action is basically simple: W. B. Yeats, an Irish senator in an Arnoldian function, visits an elementary school and allows his mind to follow the progress of what he sees and thinks.
The big house in Merrion Square was sold in the summer of 1928, and in the following healthy, happy winter the Yeatses took up their own flat in Rapallo. Through Pound, Yeats formed new friendships with Gerhart Hauptmann and George Antheil, the modernist pianist and composer, who helped stimulate him to a surprising number of new song-like poems. Having been genuinely disturbed by his own bitterness in The Tower, he was trying to write “more amiable” poetry. At Rapallo he also wrote “A Packet for Ezra Pound” and “The Great Wheel,” which introduce the second, corrected A Vision (1937) and tell for the first time, with her permission, the story of George Yeats’s communications with the spirit instructors. To their great sorrow the Yeatses had now abandoned Thoor Ballylee; it was simply too demanding in Yeats’s state of health. He was ill throughout the winter of 1929–1930, coughing up blood in London and nearly dying in Rapallo of what was finally diagnosed as Malta fever. As he slowly recovered, he resumed work on A Vision and returned to his central visionary manner in such poems as the second “Byzantium.” At sixty-five his formerly gray-brindle hair had become a great shock of pure white. Elegantly dressed and ceremonious in manner, he was a highly distinguished figure.
In Dublin, Yeats kept a regular salon “evening” on Mondays, receiving old and new friends and especially pleased by visits from the rising young. To stay in reach of Lady Gregory in her old age and ill health, Yeats risked the winter of 1930–1931 in a furnished house above the Bay of Killiney, south of Dublin. He was working toward a new Collected Poems (1933). “Months of rewriting,” he wrote to Shakespear; “What happiness!” In May, Yeats was made an honorary D.Litt. of Oxford University. With Lady Gregory visibly failing, Yeats virtually lived at Coole in the winter and spring of 1931–1932. He reread Balzac and Shelley and added poems to his raffish “CrazyJane” series; then, “to exorcise that slut…whose language has become unendurable,” he worked at anticipatory elegiac verse that would express his feeling for Lady Gregory, who died on 22 May.
In the autumn of 1932 Yeats made his last American lecture tour. His health held up; he enjoyed himself; and he made money for himself as well as, £700 for the theater from Depression America. Money was needed for settling into another house, Riversdale, which George Yeats had found in the suburban village of Rathfarnham, giving easy access to the city and far enough out to discourage “most interviewers and the less determined travelling bores.” The “little creeper-covered farm-house” was a modest two-story eighteenth-century structure set in four acres beautifully planned and tended by the previous tenant, with fruit trees, flower and vegetable gardens, and lawns including a velvety croquet ground where Yeats liked to perform. Two rooms were combined to make a long light drawing room and study, with walls of lemon yellow lined with books and pictures. Yeats thought it the perfect place for his last years.
The Winding Stair and Other Poems of 1933 includes sixty-four poems in a wide range of form and tone. The volume opens with the beautiful romantic rhapsody “In Memory of Eva Gore-Booth and Con Markiewicz,” addressing the horse-riding Gore-Booth sisters of his Sligo youth, remembered as “Two girls in silk kimonos, both / Beautiful, one a gazelle,” but now “withered old and skeleton-gaunt” with time and political passion. The poem ends in an ecstasy of acceptance and defiance of tragic reality in which Yeats does not separate his own history from theirs.
The emblems of the tower and Sato’s sword keep recurring in this volume. In the tiny poem “Symbols” the tower carries its usual connotations of withdrawal, contemplation, and arcane study, and the sword blade is violently active, “all-destroying.” Yeats is both the tower’s “blind hermit” and the “wandering fool” who carries the sword. But the tower is also the house of the marriage bed, and the phallic sword’s housing is the feminine “gold-sewn silk” of the scabbard. So the final couplet couples the coupling of all the emblems: “Gold-sewn silk on the sword-blade / Beauty and fool together laid.”
In “Blood and the Moon” Yeats abruptly alters the symbolic value of the tower, making it “my symbol” and emblematic of a self that is specifically Irish, involved in historical time and in the conflicting spiritual values that divide real personalities. “Quarrel in Old Age” of this volume describes Dublin offhandedly as “this blind bitter town,” and “Remorse for Intemperate Speech” puts in capsule form the compacted bitterness that Yeats had long seen as genetic in Irish character: “Great hatred, little room, / Maimed us from the start.” In “Blood and the Moon” his scene is contemporary Ireland, against which he erects his roofless tower: “In mockery of a time / Half dead at the top.” Yeats’s verse swoops and soars with his mind: “I declare this tower is my symbol; I declare / This winding, gyring, spiring treadmill of a stair is my ancestral stair; / That Goldsmith and the Dean, Berkeley and Burke have travelled there.”
The strange spectral roll-calling “All Souls’ Night,” written at Oxford in 1920 but then preserved to stand as epitaph to The Tower (1928) and to A Vision (1925, 1937), introduced a “mummy” image, used three times in the poem and repeatedly thereafter. Yeats was apparently fascinated by contemporary excavations in Egypt, yielding not only human mummies but edible mummified grain (in “Conjunctions” he wrote, “If Jupiter and Saturn meet, / What a crop of mummy wheat!”), and these images, surviving from an ancient stargazing culture, stayed in his mind as metaphors of cosmic secrecy and recurrence, of time past but come again: “Wound in mind’s wandering / As mummies in the mummy-cloth are wound.”
A note of 1930 at Portofino shows that the mummy image was fundamental to the conception of “Byzantium,” the second of the two great poems on that sacred place of Unity of Being: “Describe Byzantium as it is in the system towards the end of the first Christian millennium. A walking mummy, flames in the street corners where the soul is purified, birds of hammered gold singing in the golden trees.” In theme and in structure the poem counterpoises the most inclusive antinomies: human and superhuman, body and spirit, entrapment and transcendence. The great dome of Santa Sophia, a perfected monument to a timeless faith, rises above the “unpurged” forms of quotidian living: “A starlit or a moonlit dome disdains / All that man is, / All mere complexities, / The fury and the mire of human veins.” In stanza 2 Yeats calls up the death-freed spirit and uses the wrapping of the mummy to create a “perning” action in which the figure spinning in transcendence “unwinds” the complexities of its earthly life: “For Hades’ bobbin bound in mummy-cloth / May unwind the winding path.”
The third stanza places transcendence in art, calling back the inspired artifact that sang the end of “Sailing to Byzantium.” Here that “miracle, bird or golden handiwork” has power in its perfection to “scorn aloud” the untidiness of mortal forms, “all complexities of mire and blood.” Stanza 4 loops back to imagine the actual beginning of the body’s transfiguration, as the dancing figure begins to perne its bobbin of spirit time, the mummy-wound figure that will be empowered to unwind mortal time.
Still, it is humanity that has the last word in the poem. In the gorgeous imaginings of the final stanza the dolphins of myth, traditional porters of the soul, swim in to the shore bearing “spirit after spirit” to its purgation. The “golden smithies of the Emperor” will work their transfiguring will; but the spirits do keep coming: “Those images that yet / Fresh images beget.”
Words for Music Perhaps (1932) runs to twenty-five poems, most of them short and song-like but not uniformly simple. Yeats’s Crazy Jane (originally Cracked Mary) was modeled upon a bitter-tongued old country woman of his acquaintance, much given to haranguing her neighbors, a figure who could have come straight out of Synge (or Shakespeare). She dominates the first seven of the lyrics, the most staggering of which is “Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop.” Meeting her upon the road, the bishop reproves her bluntly for her loose life: “Those breasts are flat and fallen now, / Those veins must soon be dry; / Live in a heavenly mansion, / Not in some foul sty.” She rails back uncowed: ‘”Fair and foul are near of kin, / And fair needs foul,’ I cried.” Her harridan language, as it becomes more dignified, rounds into fundamental Yeatsian doctrine, dismissing ceremonious gentility in favor of a deep instinctual wisdom that senses sublime ironies (covertly Christian): the nearness of loftiness to lowness, the necessity of suffering to sanctity.
In Yeats’s remaining years his Irish life centered in Riversdale, and when health allowed, he spent more and more time in England, drawn particularly to the houses of new women friends, Lady Gerald Wellesley, Ethel Man-nin, and Edith Shackleton Heald, and as always seeing much of Shakespear in London. National and international politics agitated his mind in grandiloquent, sardonic, irresponsible ways. Troubled as always by “the sexual torture,” perhaps complicated now by problems of potency, Yeats abruptly decided in the spring of 1934 to cross to London and undergo the Steinach glandular “rejuvenation” operation. An apparent consequence of the operation, or of its optimistic psychology, was an ebullience and fertility in his writing that lasted as long as his body. The half-wild metaphysics of his “Supernatural Songs” and The King of the Great Clock Tower (1934), in which Salome dances with the severed head of St. John in her hands, were immediate products. He worked also, often while “resting” in bed, at the Dramatis Persona (1935) section of his memoirs, centering on Lady Gregory; at proofs of the revised A Vision; and at the editing of his cranky and controversial The Oxford Book of Modern Verse (1936). Yeats’s seventieth birthday in June 1935 was much celebrated in Ireland.
The small volume of 1935, A Full Moon in March, is late Yeats and essential Yeats. At the end as at the beginning of his career, Yeats’s instinct turned to balladry and song, and one sign of that was a long list of spectral, mummy-thought refrains, often weirdly detached from the matter at hand. The opening poem, “Parnell’s Funeral,” reaches back forty-five years to recall the death of the great leader in the scene that had always made Yeats (and Joyce) think of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s denunciation of the Irish people as a pack of hounds forever pulling down one or another noble stag. In this poem the refrain effect is not outright but evoked in the incremental repetition of the image of salutary eating of the hero’s heart.
The twelve “Supernatural Songs” occupy most of the short volume. The most astonishing of these mummy matters is the first, “Ribh at the Tomb of Baile and Ailinn.” The legendary lovers, “purified by tragedy” and thereby “transfigured” into “pure substance,” make love on top of their own tomb on the anniversary of their death and of their first embrace; their performance validates Swedenborg’s vision: “For the intercourse of angels is a light / Where for its moment both seem lost, consumed.” By that light the ninety-year-old monk Ribh reads his Christian breviary.
The four couplets of “The Four Ages of Man” compose a gnomic biography, a spiritual history, of Yeats and of Everyman: “He with body waged a fight, / But body won; it walks upright.” When he struggles with his heart, “Innocence and peace depart,” and when he struggles with his mind, “His proud heart he left behind.” Finally, the poet concludes, “Now his wars on God begin; / At stroke of midnight God shall win.”
In the winter of 1935–1936 Yeats stayed in Palma de Mallorca with Shri Purohit Swami, resting but also working with the Indian scholar on a translation of the Upanishads. All went well at first, but then Yeats became seriously ill with a dropsical condition attended by pain, breathlessness, and edema. His bad heart was growing worse, but he kept making remarkable recoveries, and he continued to work, often in bed and often from four in the morning until noon or later.
Beginning in October 1936 Yeats presided over a series of broadcasts for the BBC on the subject of modern poetry, his own and others’. He worked fanatically to secure the precise oral effects he heard in his head, whether he or another was doing the reading. The enterprise occupied Yeats intermittently for a year, and he expanded his trips to London to include visits of some length with his English friends, particularly his women friends. In October 1938 he lost another of his dearest, Shakespear. In August he had made what would be his last public appearance in Ireland when he spoke briefly to the audience at the Abbey following the curtain of his one-act play Purgatory.
The Yeatses returned to the Riviera for the winter of 1938–1939, taking rooms in a hotel at Cap Martin. For the most part it was a happy time, with good friends nearby. Yeats was able to visit and be visited, but his doctor told him his heart was in grave condition. On 4 January 1939 he wrote to Lady Elizabeth Pelham: “I know for certain that my time will not be long.” Yet, in the same letter he described himself as “happy, and I think full of an energy…I had despaired of,” and he talked of the work he intended to do next. He died in the afternoon of 28 January 1939. Yeats was buried first in Roquebrune, as he had suggested should he die in France. But nine years later he was given his first choice when his body was carried on an Irish naval vessel back to Ireland for reinterment, with full ceremonies, in Drumcliff churchyard near Sligo.
Last Poems (1939), including fifty-seven poems written between 1933 and 1939, was one of the strangest and strongest of his collections. The dominant notes are those of resignation, defiance, sensuality, and prophecy, all familiar in his poetry; what is new is the intensity and extravagance. He had written Shakespear in 1929 that he wanted his late poetry to be “all emotion and all impersonal.” Poems would rise out of personal action and feeling, hence be emotional, passionate, and they would achieve coldness, impersonality by making the self not an ego but an archetype, a human case–perhaps, now, that of the “foolish, passionate man” who does his thinking “in a marrow-bone.” Several of the late poems lay out that program explicitly.
In “Why Should Not Old Men Be Mad?” Yeats addresses the “craziness” of his late poems in direct autobiographical terms; he has earned his craziness by heartbreak. He recalls the fate of Iseult Gonne, then that of her mother: “A girl that knew all Dante once / Live to bear children to a dunce; / A Helen of social welfare dream, / Climb on a wagonette to scream.”
The sexual theme is given an exquisitely spectral and elegiac form in the seven ballad-songs that make up the suite of “The Three Bushes.” The first narrative song tells the whole story in eleven stanzas. A lady deeply in love, mindful of her lover’s need but kept chaste by “shame,” sends her chambermaid to the lover, having ordered him to keep his room unlit: ‘“So you must lie beside him / And let him think me there. / And maybe we are all the same / Where no candles are, / And maybe we are all the same / That strip the body bare.’ I 0 my dear, 0 my dear.” This love by proxy goes on for a year, then the lover is killed by a fall from his horse, and the lady seeing it happen falls dead herself. The chambermaid lives on and tends the graves, planting two rose trees that blend into one. Before she dies, she tells the story to her priest, and he, being “a good man” who “understood her case,” orders her buried next to the lovers under her own rose tree. The three bushes intertwine so that “…now none living can. / When they have plucked a rose there, / Know where its roots began.”
In these late poems Yeats’s mind ran much upon the past, trying to call back before his eye the things that mattered most in his memory. The title of one such poem, “Beautiful Lofty Things,” evokes the general mode of feeling. The only action in the poem is recollection. Yeats simply calls up and caresses a series of five dearly remembered images of noble being; for example, “Maud Gonne at Howth station waiting a train, / Pallas Athene in that straight back and arrogant head.”
“The Municipal Gallery Revisited” developed the same motive in an ampler, more formal mode. Yeats sent copies of the poem to a group of Irish-Americans who had contributed to a fund intended to ensure his comfort in old age. It is one more roll-calling poem, set in seven of his favorite ceremonial stanzas, the ottava rima. In this elegy the feeling is at first temperate as Yeats’s eye roams the walls in the ordinary way of gal-lerygoers; but then the eye begins to pick out those images he had held in his heart of hearts, and emotion suddenly collects in an unbidden spasm: “Heart-smitten with emotions I sink down, / My heart recovering with covered eyes; / Wherever I had looked I had looked upon / My permanent or impermanent images.”
The rest of the poem is listing and reflection: Robert Gregory, Lane, Hazel Lavery, Lady Gregory, Synge. Mancini’s portrait of Lady Gregory inspires two stanzas and more. The final fifteen lines, centering on his father’s portrait of Synge, join again the trinity of the theater he had named in his Stockholm speech as embodiments of an ideal union of loftiness and simplicity: ‘John Synge, I and Augusta Gregory thought / All that we did, all that we said or sang / Must come from contact with the soil, from that / Contact everything Antaeus-like grew strong./…/You that would judge, do not judge alone / This book or that, come to this hallowed place / Where my friends’ portraits hang and look thereon; / Ireland’s history in their lineaments trace; / Think where man’s glory most begins and ends, / And say my glory was I had such friends.”
William Butler Yeats chose lines from “Under Ben Bulben” to be his epitaph, but “The Circus Animals’ Desertion” serves that purpose better. There he called the roll of his career as poet and dramatist, subsuming the work of more than fifty years in a design of antinomy: abstract opposed to concrete, symbol to passion.
Letters
Letters on Poetry from W. B. Yeats to Dorothy Wellesley (London, New York & Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1940);
Some Letters from W. B. Yeats to John O’Leary and His Sister, edited by Allan Wade (New York: New York Public Library, 1953);
W. B. Yeats and T Sturge Moore: Their Correspondence, 1901–1937, edited by Ursula Bridge (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1953);
Letters of W. B. Yeats to Katharine Tynan, edited by Roger McHugh (Dublin: Clonmore & Reynolds, 1953; London: Burns, Oates & Washbourne, 1953; New York: Macmillan, 1953);
Ah, Sweet Dancer: W. B. Yeats and Margot Ruddock, A Correspondence, edited by McHugh (London & New York: Macmillan, 1970);
The Correspondence of Robert Bridges and W. B. Yeats, edited by Richard J. Finneran (London: Macmillan, 1977);
Theatre Business: The Correspondence of the First Abbey Theatre Directors: William Butler Yeats, Lady Gregory, and jf. M. Synge, edited by Ann Saddlemyer (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1982);
The Collected Letters of W. B. Yeats, 4 volumes, edited by John Kelly (Oxford: Clarendon Press / New York: Oxford University Press, 1986–2005);
The Gonne-Yeats Letters 1893–1938, edited by Anna MacBride White and A. Norman Jeffares (New York: Norton, 1993).
Interviews
E. H. Mikhail, ed., W. B. Yeats: Interviews and Recollections, 2 volumes (London: Macmillan, 1977; New York: Barnes & Noble, 1977).
Bibliographies
Allan Wade, A Bibliography of the Writings of W. B. Yeats, revised and edited by Russell K. Alspach (London: Hart-Davis, 1968);
K. P. S. Jochum, W. B. Yeats: A Classified Bibliography of Criticism, Including Additions to Allan Wade’s Bibliography of the Writings of W. B. Yeats and a Section on the Irish Literary and Dramatic Revival (Urbana, Chicago & London: University of Illinois Press, 1978).
Biographies
Joseph M. Hone, W. B. Yeats, 1865–1939 (London: Macmillan, 1942);
Richard Ellmann, Yeats: The Man and the Masks (New York: Macmillan, 1948);
William M. Murphy, The Yeats Family and the Pollexfens of Sligo (Dublin: Dolmen Press, 1971);
Micheal MacLiammóir, with Eavan Boland, W. B. Yeats and His World (New York: Viking, 1972);
A. Norman Jeffares, W. B. Yeats: A New Biography (London: Hutchinson, 1988; New York: Farrar, Straus &Giroux, 1989);
Alasdair D. F. Macrae, W. B. Yeah: A Literary Life (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995);
Keith Alldritt, W. B. Yeats: The Man and the Milieu (New York: Clarkson Potter, 1997);
R. F. Foster, W. B. Yeats: A Life, 2 volumes (Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press, 1997, 2003);
Terence Brown, The Life of W. B. Yeats: A Critical Biography (Maiden, Mass.: Blackwell, 1999);
Brenda Maddox, Yeats’s Ghosts: The Secret Life of W. B. Yeats (New York: HarperCollins, 1999).
References
James Lovic Allen, Yeats’s Epitaph: A Key to Symbolic Unity in His Life and Work (Washington, D.C.: University Press of America, 1982);
Harold Bloom, Yeats (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970);
Bloom, ed., William Butler Yeats (New York: Chelsea House, 1986);
Curtis B. Bradford, Yeats at Work (Carbondale & Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1965);
Yug Mohit Chaudhry, Yeah, the Lrish Literary Revival, and the Politics of Print (Cork, Ireland: Cork University Press, 2001);
David R. Clark, Yeats at Songs and Choruses (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1983);
Elizabeth Butler Cullingford, Gender and History in Yeats’s Love Poetry (Cambridge & New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993);
Cullingford, ed., Yeats, Poems, 1919–1935: A Casebook (London: Macmillan, 1984);
Rob Doggett, Deep-Rooted Things: Empire and Nation in the Poetry and Drama of William Butler Yeah (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006);
Denis Donoghue, William Butler Yeah (New York: Viking, 1971);
Una Mary Ellis-Fermor, The Irish Dramatic Movement (London: Methuen, 1954);
Richard Ellmann, Eminent Domain: Yeah Among Wilde, Joyce, Pound, Eliot, and Auden (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967);
Ellmann, The Identity of Yeats (New York: Oxford University Press, 1954);
Edward Engelberg, The Vast Design: Patterns in W. B. Yeats’s Aesthetic, second edition, expanded (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1988);
Christine Finn, Past Poetic: Archaeology in the Poetry of W. B. Yah and Seamus Heaney (London: Duckworth, 2004);
Richard J. Finneran, ed., Critical Essays on W. B. Yeats (Boston: G.K. Hall, 1986);
Deborah Fleming, ed., Learning the Trade: Essays on W. B. Yeats and Contemporary Poetry (West Cornwall, Conn.: Locust Hill Press, 1993);
Ian Fletcher, W. B. Yeats and His Contemporaries (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1987);
Monk Gibbon, The Masterpiece and the Man: Yeah As I Knew Him (New York: Macmillan, 1959);
Oliver St. John Gogarty, William Butler Yeats, A Memoir (Dublin: Dolmen Press, 1963);
Richard Greaves, Transition, Reception and Modernism in W. B. Yeats (Basingstoke, U.K. & New York: Pal-grave, 2002);
James Hall and Martin Steinmann, eds., The Permanence of Yeah (New York: Collier, 1961);
Marjorie Howes and John Kelly, eds., The Cambridge Companion to W. B. Yeats (Cambridge & New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006);
A. Norman Jeffares and A. S. Knowland, A Commentary on The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeah (Stanford, Cal.: Stanford University Press, 1968); revised and expanded as A New Commentary on the Poems of W. B. Yeats (Stanford, Cal.: Stanford University Press, 1984; London: Macmillan, 1984);
Jeffares, ed., Selected Criticism of W. B. Yah (London: Macmillan, 1964);
Edward Larrissy, Yeats the Poet: The Measures of Difference (New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1994);
Maud Gonne MacBride, A Servant of the Queen (Dublin: Golden Eagle, 1950);
Phillip L. Marcus, Yah and Artistic Power (Syracuse, N.Y: Syracuse University Press, 2001);
Marcus, Yeah and the Beginning of the Lrish Renaissance (Ithaca, N.Y: Cornell University Press, 1970);
Liam Miller, ed., The Dolmen Press Yah Centenary Papers, 30 volumes (Dublin: Dolmen Press, 1965–1968);
James Olney, The Rhizome and the Flower: The Perennial Philosophy, Yeah and Jung (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980);
Stephen Maxfield Parrish, ed., A Concordance to the Poems of W. B. Yeats, programmed by James Allan Painter (Ithaca, N.Y: Cornell University Press, 1963);
Benjamin L. Reid, The Man from New York: John Quinn and His Friends (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968);
Reid, William Butler Yeats: The Lyric of Tragedy (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1961);
Lennox Robinson, Ireland’s Abbey Theatre: A History 1869–1951 (London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1951; Port Washington, N.Y: Kennikat Press, 1968);
Jon Stallworthy, Between the Lines: Yeah s Poems in the Making (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963);
Stallworthy, Visions and Revisions in Yeah’s Last Poems (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969);
Deirdre Toomey, ed., Yeah and Women, second edition (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997);
Helen H. Vendler, Yeah’s “Vision” and the Later Plays (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1963);
John Butler Yeats, Letters to His Son, W. B. Yeah, and Others, edited, with a memoir, by Joseph Hone (London: Faber & Faber, 1944).
Papers
The largest collection of William Butler Yeats’s papers is that in the National Library of Ireland, Dublin. Other important collections are at the New York Public Library, Colby College, Cornell University, Harvard University, the University of Texas, the University of Kansas, Boston University, the University of Southern Illinois, the University of Chicago, the University of California (Berkeley), the University of California at Los Angeles, the Huntington Library, Grinnell College, and the University of Reading. The State University of New York, Stony Brook, has copies of papers in the National Library collection and in that of Senator Michael Butler Yeats.