241- ] English Literature
W. B. Yeats
Politics
Yeats
was an Irish nationalist, who sought a kind of traditional lifestyle
articulated through poems such as 'The Fisherman'. But as his life progressed,
he sheltered much of his revolutionary spirit and distanced himself from the
intense political landscape until 1922, when he was appointed Senator for the
Irish Free State.
In
the earlier part of his life, Yeats was a member of the Irish Republican
Brotherhood. In the 1930s, Yeats was fascinated with the authoritarian,
anti-democratic, nationalist movements of Europe, and he composed several
marching songs for the Blueshirts, although they were never used. He was a
fierce opponent of individualism and political liberalism and saw the fascist
movements as a triumph of public order and the needs of the national collective
over petty individualism. He was an elitist who abhorred the idea of mob-rule,
and saw democracy as a threat to good governance and public order. After the
Blueshirt movement began to falter in Ireland, he distanced himself somewhat
from his previous views, but maintained a preference for authoritarian and
nationalist leadership.
Marriage
to Georgie Hyde-Lees
By
1916, Yeats was 51 years old and determined to marry and produce an heir. His
rival, John MacBride, had been executed for his role in the 1916 Easter Rising,
so Yeats hoped that his widow, Maud Gonne, might remarry. His final proposal to
Gonne took place in mid-1916. Gonne's history of revolutionary political
activism, as well as a series of personal catastrophes in the previous few
years of her life—including chloroform addiction and her troubled marriage to
MacBride—made her a potentially unsuitable wife; biographer R. F. Foster has
observed that Yeats's last offer was motivated more by a sense of duty than by
a genuine desire to marry her.
Yeats
proposed in an indifferent manner, with conditions attached, and he both
expected and hoped she would turn him down. According to Foster, "when he
duly asked Maud to marry him and was duly refused, his thoughts shifted with
surprising speed to her daughter." Iseult Gonne was Maud's second child
with Lucien Millevoye, and at the time was twenty-one years old. She had lived
a sad life to this point; conceived as an attempt to reincarnate her
short-lived brother, for the first few years of her life she was presented as
her mother's adopted niece. When Maud told her that she was going to marry,
Iseult cried and told her mother that she hated MacBride. When Gonne took
action to divorce MacBride in 1905, the court heard allegations that he had
sexually assaulted Iseult, then eleven. At fifteen, she proposed to Yeats. In
1917, he proposed to Iseult but was rejected.
That
September, Yeats proposed to 25-year-old Georgie Hyde-Lees (1892–1968), known
as George, whom he had met through Olivia Shakespear. Despite warnings from her
friends—"George ... you can't. He must be dead"—Hyde-Lees accepted,
and the two were married on 20 October 1917. Their marriage was a success, in
spite of the age difference, and in spite of Yeats's feelings of remorse and
regret during their honeymoon. The couple went on to have two children, Anne
and Michael. Although in later years he had romantic relationships with other
women, Georgie herself wrote to her husband, "When you are dead, people
will talk about your love affairs, but I shall say nothing, for I will remember
how proud you were."
During
the first years of marriage, they experimented with automatic writing; she
contacted a variety of spirits and guides they called "Instructors"
while in a trance. The spirits communicated a complex and esoteric system of
philosophy and history, which the couple developed into an exposition using
geometrical shapes: phases, cones, and gyres. Yeats devoted much time to
preparing this material for publication as A Vision (1925). In 1924, he wrote
to his publisher T. Werner Laurie, admitting, "I dare say I delude myself
in thinking this book my book of books."
Nobel
Prize
In
December 1923, Yeats was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature "for his
always inspired poetry, which in a highly artistic form gives expression to the
spirit of a whole nation". Politically aware, he knew the symbolic value
of an Irish winner so soon after Ireland had gained independence, and
highlighted the fact at each available opportunity. His reply to many of the
letters of congratulations sent to him contained the words: "I consider
that this honour has come to me less as an individual than as a representative
of Irish literature, it is part of Europe's welcome to the Free State."
Yeats
used the occasion of his acceptance lecture at the Royal Academy of Sweden to
present himself as a standard-bearer of Irish nationalism and Irish cultural
independence. As he remarked, "The theatres of Dublin were empty buildings
hired by the English travelling companies, and we wanted Irish plays and Irish
players. When we thought of these plays we thought of everything that was
romantic and poetical because the nationalism we had called up—the nationalism
every generation had called up in moments of discouragement—was romantic and
poetical." The prize led to a significant increase in the sales of his
books, as his publishers Macmillan sought to capitalise on the publicity. For
the first time he had money, and he was able to repay not only his own debts
but those of his father.
Old
age
By
early 1925, Yeats's health had stabilised, and he had completed most of the
writing for A Vision. Dated 1925, it actually appeared in January 1926, when he
almost immediately started rewriting it for a second version. He had been
appointed to the first Irish Senate in 1922, and was re-appointed for a second
term in 1925. Early in his tenure, a debate on divorce arose, and Yeats viewed
the issue as primarily a confrontation between the emerging Roman Catholic
ethos and the Protestant minority. When the Roman Catholic Church weighed in
with a blanket refusal to consider their anti position, The Irish Times
countered that a measure to outlaw divorce would alienate Protestants and
"crystallise" the partition of Ireland. In response, Yeats delivered
a series of speeches that attacked the "quixotically impressive"
ambitions of the government and clergy, likening their campaign tactics to
those of "medieval Spain." "Marriage is not to us a Sacrament,
but, upon the other hand, the love of a man and woman, and the inseparable
physical desire, are sacred. This conviction has come to us through ancient
philosophy and modern literature, and it seems to us a most sacrilegious thing
to persuade two people who hate each other... to live together, and it is to us
no remedy to permit them to part if neither can re-marry." The resulting
debate has been described as one of Yeats's "supreme public moments",
and began his ideological move away from pluralism towards religious
confrontation.
His
language became more forceful; the Jesuit Father Peter Finlay was described by
Yeats as a man of "monstrous discourtesy", and he lamented that
"It is one of the glories of the Church in which I was born that we have
put our Bishops in their place in discussions requiring legislation."
During his time in the Senate, Yeats further warned his colleagues, "If
you show that this country, southern Ireland, is going to be governed by Roman
Catholic ideas and by Catholic ideas alone, you will never get the North... You
will put a wedge in the midst of this nation." He memorably said of his
fellow Irish Protestants, "we are no petty people".
In
1924 he chaired a coinage committee charged with selecting a set of designs for
the first currency of the Irish Free State. Aware of the symbolic power latent
in the imagery of a young state's currency, he sought a form that was
"elegant, racy of the soil, and utterly unpolitical". When the house
finally decided on the artwork of Percy Metcalfe, Yeats was pleased, though he
regretted that compromise had led to "lost muscular tension" in the
finally depicted images. He retired from the Senate in 1928 because of ill
health.
Towards
the end of his life—and especially after the Wall Street crash of 1929 and
Great Depression, which led some to question whether democracy could cope with
deep economic difficulty—Yeats seems to have returned to his aristocratic
sympathies. During the aftermath of the First World War, he became sceptical
about the efficacy of democratic government, and anticipated political
reconstruction in Europe through totalitarian rule. His later association with
Pound drew him towards Benito Mussolini, for whom he expressed admiration on a
number of occasions. He wrote three "marching songs"—never used—for
the Irish General Eoin O'Duffy's Blueshirts.
At
the age of 68 he was 'rejuvenated' by the Steinach operation which was
performed on 6 April 1934 by Norman Haire. For the last five years of his life
Yeats found a new vigour evident from both his poetry and his intimate
relations with younger women. During this time, Yeats was involved in a number
of romantic affairs with, among others, the poet and actress Margot Ruddock and
the novelist, journalist and sexual radical Ethel Mannin. As in his earlier
life, Yeats found erotic adventure conducive to his creative energy, and,
despite age and ill-health, he remained a prolific writer. In a letter of 1935,
Yeats noted: "I find my present weakness made worse by the strange second
puberty the operation has given me, the ferment that has come upon my
imagination. If I write poetry it will be unlike anything I have done." In
1936, he undertook editorship of the Oxford Book of Modern Verse, 1892–1935.
From 1935 to 1936 he travelled to the Western Mediterranean island of Majorca
with Indian-born Shri Purohit Swami and from there the two of them performed
the majority of the work in translating the principal Upanishads from Sanskrit
into common English; the resulting work, The Ten Principal Upanishads, was
published in 1938.
Death
He
died at the Hôtel Idéal Beauséjour in Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, near Menton,
France, on 28 January 1939, aged 73. He was buried after a discreet and private
funeral at Roquebrune. Attempts had been made at Roquebrune to dissuade the
family from proceeding with the removal of the remains to Ireland due to the
uncertainty of their identity. His body had earlier been exhumed and
transferred to the ossuary. Yeats and his wife, George, had often discussed his
death and his express wish was that he be buried quickly in France with a
minimum of fuss. According to George, "His actual words were 'If I die,
bury me up there [at Roquebrune] and then in a year's time when the newspapers
have forgotten me, dig me up and plant me in Sligo.'" In September 1948,
Yeats's body was moved to the churchyard of St Columba's Church, Drumcliff,
County Sligo, on the Irish Naval Service corvette LÉ Macha. The person in
charge of this operation for the Irish Government was Seán MacBride, son of
Maud Gonne MacBride, and then Minister of External Affairs.
He
died at the Hôtel Idéal Beauséjour in Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, near Menton,
France, on 28 January 1939, aged 73. He was buried after a discreet and private
funeral at Roquebrune. Attempts had been made at Roquebrune to dissuade the
family from proceeding with the removal of the remains to Ireland due to the
uncertainty of their identity. His body had earlier been exhumed and
transferred to the ossuary. Yeats and his wife, George, had often discussed his
death and his express wish was that he be buried quickly in France with a
minimum of fuss. According to George, "His actual words were 'If I die,
bury me up there [at Roquebrune] and then in a year's time when the newspapers
have forgotten me, dig me up and plant me in Sligo.'" In September 1948,
Yeats's body was moved to the churchyard of St Columba's Church, Drumcliff,
County Sligo, on the Irish Naval Service corvette LÉ Macha. The person in
charge of this operation for the Irish Government was Seán MacBride, son of
Maud Gonne MacBride, and then Minister of External Affairs.
His
epitaph is taken from the last lines of "Under Ben Bulben", one of
his final poems:
Cast
a cold Eye
On
Life, on Death.
Horseman,
pass by!
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