238-] English Literature
W. B. Yeats
William
Butler Yeats is widely considered to be one of the greatest poets of the 20th
century. He belonged to the Protestant, Anglo-Irish minority that had
controlled the economic, political, social, and cultural life of Ireland since
at least the end of the 17th century. Most members of this minority considered
themselves English people who happened to have been born in Ireland, but Yeats
staunchly affirmed his Irish nationality. Although he lived in London for 14
years of his childhood (and kept a permanent home there during the first half
of his adult life), Yeats maintained his cultural roots, featuring Irish
legends and heroes in many of his poems and plays. He was equally firm in
adhering to his self-image as an artist. This conviction led many to accuse him
of elitism, but it also unquestionably contributed to his greatness. As fellow
poet W.H. Auden noted in a 1948 Kenyon Review essay entitled “Yeats as an
Example,” Yeats accepted the modern necessity of having to make a lonely and deliberate
“choice of the principles and presuppositions in terms of which [made] sense of
his experience.” Auden assigned Yeats the high praise of having written “some
of the most beautiful poetry” of modern times. Perhaps no other poet stood to
represent a people and country as poignantly as Yeats, both during and after
his life, and his poetry is widely read today across the English-speaking
world.
In
1885, an important year in Yeats’s early adult life, his poetry was published
for the first time, in the Dublin University Review, and he began his important
interest in occultism. It was also the year that he met John O’Leary, a famous
patriot who had returned to Ireland after 20 years of imprisonment and exile
for revolutionary nationalistic activities. O’Leary had a keen enthusiasm for
Irish books, music, and ballads, and he encouraged young writers to adopt Irish
subjects. Yeats, who had preferred more romantic settings and themes, soon took
O’Leary’s advice, producing many poems based on Irish legends, Irish folklore,
and Irish ballads and songs. As he explained in a note included in the 1908
volume Collected Works in Verse and Prose of William Butler Yeats: “When I
first wrote I went here and there for my subjects as my reading led me, and
preferred to all other countries Arcadia and the India of romance, but
presently I convinced myself ... that I should never go for the scenery of a
poem to any country but my own, and I think that I shall hold to that
conviction to the end.”
As
Yeats began concentrating his poetry on Irish subjects, he was compelled to
accompany his family in moving to London at the end of 1886. There he wrote
poems, plays, novels, and short stories—all with Irish characters and scenes.
In addition, he produced book reviews, usually on Irish topics. In London,
Yeats met with Maud Gonne, a tall, beautiful, socially prominent young woman
passionately devoted to Irish nationalism. Yeats soon fell in love with Gonne,
and courted her for nearly three decades; although he eventually learned that she
had already borne two children from a long affair, with Gonne’s encouragement
Yeats redoubled his dedication to Irish nationalism and produced such
nationalistic plays as The Countess Kathleen (1892), which he dedicated to her,
and Cathleen ni Houlihan (1902), which featured her as the personification of
Ireland in the title role.
Gonne
shared Yeats’s interest in occultism and spiritualism. Yeats had been a
theosophist, but in 1890 he turned from its sweeping mystical insights and
joined the Golden Dawn, a secret society that practiced ritual magic. Yeats
remained an active member of the Golden Dawn for 32 years, becoming involved in
its direction at the turn of the century and achieving the coveted sixth grade
of membership in 1914, the same year that his future wife, Georgiana Hyde-Lees,
also joined the society.
Although
Yeats’s occult ambitions were a powerful force in his private thoughts, the
Golden Dawn’s emphasis on the supernatural clashed with his own need as a poet
for interaction in the physical world, and thus in his public role he preferred
to follow the example of John Keats, a Romantic poet who remained—in comparison
with Romantics William Blake and Percy Bysshe Shelley—relatively close to the
materials of life. Yeats avoided what he considered the obscurity of Blake,
whose poetic images came from mystical visions rather than from the familiar
physical world. Even so, Yeats’s visionary and idealist interests were more
closely aligned with those of Blake and Shelley than with those of Keats, and
in the 1899 collection The Wind among the Reeds he employed occult symbolism in
several poems.
Most
of Yeats’s poetry, however, used symbols from ordinary life and from familiar
traditions, and much of his poetry in the 1890s continued to reflect his interest
in Irish subjects. During this decade he also became increasingly interested in
poetic techniques. He befriended English decadent poet Lionel Johnson, and in
1890 they helped found the Rhymers’ Club, a group of London poets who met to
read and discuss their poems. The Rhymers placed a very high value on
subjectivity and craftsmanship and preferred sophisticated aestheticism to
nationalism. The club’s influence is reflected in the lush density of Yeats’s
poetry of the times, culminating in The Wind among the Reeds (1899). Although
Yeats was soon to abandon that lush density, he remained permanently committed
to the Rhymers’ insistence that a poet should labor “at rhythm and cadence, at
form and style”—as he reportedly told a Dublin audience in 1893.
The
turn of the century marked Yeats’s increased interest in theatre, an interest
influenced by his father, a famed artist and orator who loved highly dramatic
moments in literature. In the summer of 1897 the author enjoyed his first stay
at Coole Park, the County Galway estate of Lady Augusta Gregory. There he
devised, with Lady Gregory and her neighbor Edward Martyn, plans for promoting
an innovative, native Irish drama. In 1899 they staged the first of three
annual productions in Dublin, including Yeats’s The Countess Kathleen, and in
1902 they supported a company of amateur Irish actors in staging both George
Russell’s Irish legend “Deirdre” and Yeats’s Cathleen ni Houlihan. The success
of these productions led to the founding of the Irish National Theatre Society
with Yeats as president. After a wealthy sponsor volunteered to pay for the
renovation of Dublin’s Abbey Theatre as the company’s permanent home, the
theatre opened on December 27, 1904. It included plays by the company’s three
directors: Lady Gregory, John M. Synge, and Yeats, who was represented that
night with On Baile’s Strand, the first of his several plays featuring heroic
ancient Irish warrior Cuchulain.
During
the first decade of the 20th century Yeats was extremely active in the
management of the Abbey Theatre company. At this time he also wrote 10 plays,
and the simple, direct style of dialogue required for the stage became an
important consideration in his poems as well. He abandoned the heavily
elaborated style of The Wind Among the Reeds in favor of conversational rhythms
and simpler diction. This transformation in his poetic style can be traced in
his first three collections of the 20th century: In the Seven Woods (1903), The
Green Helmet and Other Poems (1910), and Responsibilities (1914). Several poems
in those collections use style as their subject. For example, in “A Coat,”
written in 1912, Yeats derided his 1890s poetic style, saying that he had once
adorned his poems with a coat “covered with embroideries / Out of old
mythologies.” The poem concludes with a brash announcement: “There’s more
enterprise / In walking naked.” This departure from a conventional 19th-century
manner disappointed his contemporary readers, who preferred the pleasant
musicality of such familiar poems as “The Lake Isle of Innisfree,” which he
wrote in 1890.
Simplification
was only the first of several major stylistic changes. In “Yeats as an
Example?” an essay in Preoccupations: Selected Prose 1968-1978, the prominent
Irish poet Seamus Heaney commended Yeats for continually altering and refining
his poetic craftsmanship. “He is, indeed, the ideal example for a poet
approaching middle age,” Heaney declared. “He reminds you that revision and
slog-work are what you may have to undergo if you seek the satisfaction of
finish; he bothers you with the suggestion that if you have managed to do one
kind of poem in your own way, you should cast off that way and face into
another area of your experience until you have learned a new voice to say that
area properly.”
Eventually,
Yeats began experimenting as a playwright; in 1916, for instance, he adopted a
deliberately esoteric, nonrealistic dramatic style based on Japanese Noh plays,
a theatrical form to which he had been introduced by poet Ezra Pound. These
plays were described by Yeats as “plays for dancers.”
While
Yeats fulfilled his duties as president of the Abbey Theatre group for the
first 15 years of the 20th century, his nationalistic fervor was less evident.
Maud Gonne had moved to Paris with her husband, exiled Irish revolutionary John
MacBride, and the author was left without her encouragement. But in 1916 he
once again became a staunch exponent of the nationalist cause, inspired by the
Easter Rising, an unsuccessful, six-day armed rebellion of Irish republicans against
the British in Dublin. MacBride, who was now separated from Gonne, participated
in the rebellion and was executed afterward. Yeats reacted by writing “Easter,
1916,” an eloquent expression of his complex feelings of shock, romantic
admiration, and a more realistic appraisal.
The
Easter Rising contributed to Yeats’s eventual decision to reside in Ireland
rather than England, and his marriage to Hyde-Lees in 1917 further strengthened
that resolve. Earlier, in an introductory verse to Responsibilities, he had
asked his ancestors’ pardon for not yet having married to continue his Irish
lineage: “Although I have come close on forty-nine, / I have no child, I have
nothing but a book.” With marriage came another period of exploration into
complex and esoteric subjects for Yeats. He had long been fascinated by the
contrast between a person’s internal and external selves—between the true
person and those aspects that the person chooses to present as a representation
of the self. Yeats had first mentioned the value of masks in 1910 in a simple
poem, “The Mask,” where a woman reminds her lover that his interest in her
depends on her guise and not on her hidden, inner self. Yeats gave eloquent
expression to this idea of the mask in a group of essays, Per Amica Silentia
Lunae (1918): “I think all happiness depends on the energy to assume the mask
of some other life, on a re-birth as something not one’s self.” This notion can
be found in a wide variety of Yeats’s poems.
Yeats
also continued to explore mysticism. Only four days after the wedding, his
bride began what would be a lengthy experiment with the psychic phenomenon
called automatic writing, in which her hand and pen presumably served as
unconscious instruments for the spirit world to send information. Yeats and his
wife held more than 400 sessions of automatic writing, producing nearly 4,000
pages that Yeats avidly and patiently studied and organized. From these
sessions Yeats formulated theories about life and history. He believed that
certain patterns existed, the most important being what he called gyres,
interpenetrating cones representing mixtures of opposites of both a personal
and historical nature. He contended that gyres were initiated by the divine
impregnation of a mortal woman—first, the rape of Leda by Zeus; later, the
immaculate conception of Mary. Yeats found that within each 2,000-year era,
emblematic moments occurred at the midpoints of the 1000-year halves. At these
moments of balance, he believed, a civilization could achieve special
excellence, and Yeats cited as examples the splendor of Athens at 500 B.C.,
Byzantium at A.D. 500, and the Italian Renaissance at A.D. 1500.
Yeats
further likened these historical cycles to the 28-day lunar cycle, contending
that physical existence grows steadily until it reaches a maximum at the full
moon, which Yeats described as perfect beauty. In the remaining half of the
cycle, physical existence gradually falls away, until it disappears completely
at the new moon, whereupon the cycle begins again. Applying this pattern both
to historical eras and to individuals' lives, Yeats observed that a person
completes the phases as he advances from birth to maturity and declines toward
death. Yeats elaborated the scheme by assigning particular phases to specific
types of personality, so that although each person passes through the many
phases during a lifetime, one provides an overall characterization of the
individual’s entire life. Yeats published his intricate and not completely
systematic theories of personality and history in A Vision (1925; substantially
revised in 1937), and some of the symbolic patterns (gyres, moon phases)
provide important background to many of the poems and plays he wrote during the
second half of his career.
During
these years of Yeats’s esoterica Ireland was rife with internal strife. In 1921
bitter controversies erupted within the new Irish Free State over the partition
of Northern Ireland and over the wording of a formal oath of allegiance to the
British Crown. These issues led to an Irish civil war, which lasted from June
1922 to May 1923. Yeats emphatically sided with the new Irish government. He
accepted a six-year appointment to the senate of the Irish Free State in
December 1922, a time when rebels were kidnapping government figures and burning
their homes. In Dublin, where Yeats had assumed permanent residence in 1922
(after maintaining a home for 30 years in London), the government even posted
armed sentries at his door. As senator, Yeats considered himself a
representative of order amid the chaotic new nation’s slow progress toward
stability. He was now the “sixty-year-old smiling public man” of his poem
“Among School Children,” which he wrote after touring an Irish elementary
school. He was also a world-renowned artist of impressive stature, having
received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1923.
Yeats’s
poems and plays produced during his senate term and beyond are, at once, local
and general, personal and public, Irish and universal. At night the poet could
“sweat with terror” (a phrase in his poem “Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen")
because of the surrounding violence, but he could also generalize those
terrifying realities by linking them with events in the rest of the world and
with all of history. The energy of the poems written in response to these
disturbing times gave astonishing power to his collection The Tower (1928),
which is often considered his best single book, though The Wild Swans at Coole
(1917; enlarged edition, 1919), Michael Robartes and the Dancer (1921), The
Tower, The Winding Stair (1929); enlarged edition, 1933), and Words for Music
Perhaps and Other Poems (1932), also possess considerable merit.
Another
important element of poems in both these collections and other volumes is
Yeats’s keen awareness of old age. Even his romantic poems from the late 1890s
often mention gray hair and weariness, though those poems were written while he
was still a young man. But when Yeats was nearly 60, his health began to fail
and he was faced with real, rather than imaginary, “bodily decrepitude” (a
phrase from “After Long Silence”) and nearness to death. Despite the author’s
often keen awareness of his physical decline, the last 15 years of his life
were marked by extraordinary vitality and an appetite for life. He continued to
write plays, including Sophocles' King Oedipus and Sophocles' Oedipus at
Colonus (translations performed with masks in 1926 and 1927) and The Words upon
the Window Pane (1934), a full-length work about spiritualism and the 18th
century Irish writer Jonathan Swift. In 1929, as an expression of gaiety after
recovering from a serious illness, he also wrote a series of brash, vigorous
poems narrated by a fictitious old peasant woman, Crazy Jane. His pose as “The
Wild Old Wicked Man” (the title of one of his poems) and his poetical
revitalization was reflected in the title of his 1938 volume New Poems.
As
Yeats aged, he saw Ireland change in ways that angered him. The Anglo-Irish
Protestant minority no longer controlled Irish society and culture, and with
Lady Gregory’s death in 1932 and the abandonment of the Coole Park estate,
Yeats felt detached from the brilliant achievements of the 18th Anglo-Irish
tradition. According to Yeats’s unblushingly antidemocratic view, the greatness
of Anglo-Irishmen such as Jonathan Swift, philosopher George Berkeley, and
statesman Edmund Burke, contrasted sharply with the undistinguished commonness
of contemporary Irish society, which seemed preoccupied with the interests of
merchants and peasants. He laid out his unpopular opinions in late plays such
as Purgatory (1938) and the essays of On the Boiler (1939).
But
Yeats offset his frequently brazen manner with the personal conflicts expressed
in his last poems. He faced death with a courage that was founded partly on his
vague hope for reincarnation and partly on his admiration for the bold heroism
that he perceived in Ireland in both ancient times and the 18th century. In
proud moods he could speak in the stern voice of his famous epitaph, written
within six months of his death, which concludes his poem “Under Ben Bulben”:
“Cast a cold eye / On life, on death. / Horseman, pass by!” But the bold
sureness of those lines is complicated by the terror-stricken cry that
“distracts my thought” at the end of another late poem, “The Man and the Echo,”
and also by the poignantly frivolous lust for life in the last lines of
“Politics,” the poem that he wanted to close Last Poems: “But O that I were
young again / And held her in my arms.”
Throughout
his last years, Yeats’s creative imagination remained very much his own,
isolated to a remarkable degree from the successive fashions of modern poetry
despite his extensive contacts with other poets. Literary modernism held no
inherent attraction for him except perhaps in its general association with
youthful vigor. He admired a wide range of traditional English poetry and
drama, and he simply was unconcerned that, during the last two decades of his
life, his preference for using rhyme and strict stanza forms would set him
apart from the vogue of modern poetry. Yeats’s allegiance to poetic tradition
did not extend, however, to what he considered an often obscure, overly learned
use of literary and cultural traditions by T.S. Eliot and Pound. Yeats deplored
the tremendous enthusiasm among younger poets for Eliot’s The Waste Land,
published in 1922. Disdaining Eliot’s flat rhythms and cold, dry mood, Yeats
wanted all art to be full of energy. He felt that the literary traditions
furnishing Eliot with so many allusions and quotations should only be included
in a poem if those traditions had so excited the individual poet’s imagination
that they could become poetic ingredients of the sort Yeats described in “The
Tower”: “Poet’s imaginings / And memories of love, / Memories of the words of
women, / All those things whereof / Man makes a superhuman / Mirror-resembling
dream.”
Yeats
wanted poetry to engage the full complexity of life, but only insofar as the
individual poet’s imagination had direct access to experience or thought and
only insofar as those materials were transformed by the energy of artistic
articulation. He was, from first to last, a poet who tried to transform the
local concerns of his own life by embodying them in the resonantly universal
language of his poems. His brilliant rhetorical accomplishments, strengthened
by his considerable powers of rhythm and poetic phrase, have earned wide praise
from readers and, especially, from fellow poets, including W.H. Auden (who
praised Yeats as the savior of English lyric poetry), Stephen Spender, Theodore
Roethke, and Philip Larkin. It is not likely that time will diminish his
achievements.
