One of the foremost poets of the English language, W.B. (William Butler) Yeats was born in County Dublin, Ireland, on June 13, 1865, [2] He took an early liking to poetry and was fascinated by both Irish legends and the occult.
William was home-schooled until he was nearly 12, where his mother spiced the lessons with stories and Irish folktales.
When finances drove his family back to Dublin, in 1880, Yeats entered Erasmus Smith High School[6]. After school, at his father’s nearby art studio, William met many of the city’s artists and writers. Soon he started writing poetry, too, and his first poems – mostly slow-paced, lyrical poems – were published in the Dublin University Review in 1885. Although Yeats’ early works drew heavily on traditional English poets, he soon turned to Irish myth and folklore and the rather mystical writings of William Blake.
The family returned to London in 1887, where Yeats’ earliest volume of verse was published (1889). The rise of Irish nationalism in the 1890’s profoundly affected his poetry; and his explorations of Irish identity, in turn, significant influenced that sense of identity.[3]
In 1889, Yeats met Maud Gonne, a 23-year-old heiress and ardent Nationalist.[7] He was infatuated with her beauty and boldness, and she had a lasting effect on his poetry.[8] (Eventually, he proposed, but she refused.)
In 1896, Yeats met Lady Gregory who encouraged his nationalism and convinced him to focus on writing plays. Together with Lady Gregory and others, Yeats helped establish the “Irish Literary Revival” movement[9] and, in 1899, the Irish Literary Theatre, to perform uniquely Irish and Celtic plays.[10]
Although an Irish Nationalist at heart, he distanced himself from politics until 1922, when he was appointed Senator for the Irish Free State.[11]
In December 1923, Yeats was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, which significantly increased the sales of his books. For the first time he had money, and he was able to repay both his own debts and those of his father.[12]
He died in France on January 28, 1939.[2] According to his wish, he was buried quickly in France, with a minimum of fuss. However, his wife wrote, he actually said, “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.”[13] So, in September 1948, Yeats’ body was moved to Drumcliffe, County Sligo,
His epitaph bears the last lines of one of his final poems, “Under Ben Bulben”-
Cast a cold Eye
On Life, on Death.
Horseman, pass by!
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So why should we bother reading Yeats?
W.B. Yeats may well be one of the key poets of modern English. He chose his words carefully, and then crafted them together so that they convey a simple, obvious meaning, yet resonate with other, more abstract thoughts. Because his words often suggest more than their simple meanings, we can say that they become symbols-in his poems, they stand for more than their simple meanings.[14]
Yeats was a master of traditional poetic forms.[15] Yet, as he matured, he increasingly abandoned the stuffy poetic diction of the Victorian era for tighter, more austere language. You can see this new style emerge in his “middle” period, as in his poems In the Seven Woods, Responsibilities and The Green Helmet.[16]
In his later poems, written after 1900, Yeats’ moved on again, from Irish myth and folklore, to create some of the most powerful poems, poems rich with physical images, in the English language.
And that’s why I read Yeats.
His imagery became even more spare, more powerful, as he grew older. The Tower (1928), The Winding Stair (1929), and New Poems (1938) contained some of the most potent images in twentieth-century poetry.
His later poetry and plays also show more personal reflections, including how he felt about growing old.[17] In his poem, “The Circus Animals’ Desertion”, he describes the inspiration for these late works:
Now that my ladder’s gone
I must lie down where all the ladders start
In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.[18]
Yeats’ well-known poem “The Second Coming“ (1920) might be lamenting the decline of European civilization, but it also conjures his mystical, apocalyptic theories, of his earlier days (or his mother’s old tales). Undisputedly, it contains some of English literature’s most potent images –
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned.
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.[19]
(Rather sounds like one of our modern political conventions, doesn’t it?)
By “widening gyre“, Yeats means an historical cycle of about 2000 years-his ‘vision’ that predicted that the world would return to a state of anarchy about 2000 years after the birth of Christ. (Now it really sounds like modern politics.) Yeats’ believed that history was cyclic (that it moved in cycles), and that his age closed the cycle that began with the rise of Christianity.
Some see the words “the best” in this poem as the traditional European ruling classes, powerless to save their culture from the materialistic, mass movements of the 20th Century. The concluding lines also refer to the coming of a new order (or disorder):
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
[Now] Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?[20]
Let me wrap up with some of poems that Yeats wrote to his favorite women:
In this next poem, notice how Yeats’ language, so simple, so fluid, conjures a young man looking at a pretty girl in a pub. If the second 2 lines seem a bit simplistic, well, watch for the kicker in the last line:
A Drinking Song
Wine comes in at the mouth
And love comes in at the eye;
That’s all we shall know for truth
Before we grow old and die.
I lift the glass to my mouth,
I look at you, and I sigh.
Or, in this poem, picture a conversation between a man and a young lady. She, like the woman for whom Yeats wrote this poem, might be bristling with intellectual fervor, with ideas that she wants the world to hear. In the first stanza, he admires one of her strong features, and tells the woman (and us) why men will never see past her physical beauty to listen to her ideas. In fact, Yeats wrote this poem for Lady Anne Gregory, with whom he founded an Irish theater (see above)… and so he titled it-
For Anne Gregory
‘Never shall a young man,
Thrown into despair
By those great honey-coloured
Ramparts at your ear,
Love you for yourself alone
And not your yellow hair.’
In the second stanza, she replies that she can disguise her beauty so that men will take her seriously. (Of course, the narrator seems unable to imagine a modern woman’s argument that the look of a woman’s face has no bearing on the power of her mind. But we’ll deal with that in stanza 3.) In the poem, the woman answers-
‘But I can get a hair-dye
And set such colour there,
Brown, or black, or carrot,
That young men in despair
May love me for myself alone
And not my yellow hair.’
Our speaker never argues with her … I picture him simply shaking his head and saying,
I heard an old religious man
But yesternight declare
That he had found a text to prove
That only God, my dear,
Could love you for yourself alone
And not your yellow hair.’
What might Yeats be suggesting about how men (at least of his time) regard women who enter politics … or the executive suite?
And finally, here is another poem probably written for or about the love of his life, Maude (see above). Whatever else you may accomplish in your life or fail to, he tells her, it took you away from me, and let me draw a picture of the chance at love that you missed-
When You Are Old
When you are old and grey and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;
Notice that the poet has pictured her in old age, sitting by a fireplace, nodding off as older people sometimes do (or as all of us do after Thanksgiving dinner). When that happens, he says, take out this poem-there is something that I want you to recall-
How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim Soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;
There were many men, he reminds her, who loved your “outer self”…the mage that you showed the world, that lightness, that gaiety. But only I (he says) saw the deepness in your soul, and I love(d) you for that. And now, he concludes, now that it’s what most would call “too late” –
And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.
Notice how Yeats’ narrator lifts us, his reader, from the glowing bars of logs dying in the fireplace, to the abstract concept of Love (which he personifies, giving this abstract concept a name) picturing it as able to walk or pace – but look where Love can go–it can pace across the tops of mountains, and reach the stars.
In 1923 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature as the first Irish writer so honored[1] for what the Nobel Committee described as “inspired poetry, which … gives expression to the spirit of a whole nation.”
Notes
- 1. The Nobel Prize in Literature 1923. Nobelprize.org. Retrieved on 3 June 2007.
- 2. Obituary. “W.B. Yeats Dead”. The New York Times, 30 January 1939. Retrieved on 21 May 2007.
- 3. Foster, R. F. (1997). W. B. Yeats: A Life, Vol. I: The Apprentice Mage. New York: Oxford UP. ISBN 0-19-288085-3 p. xxvii
- 4. Foster, R. F. (2003). W. B. Yeats: A Life, Vol. II: The Arch-Poet 1915-1939. New York: Oxford UP. ISBN 0-19-818465-4
- 5. Hone, Joseph (1943). W.B. Yeats, 1865-1939. New York: Macmillan Publishers. OCLC: 35607726, p. 28
- 6. Ibid, 33
- 7. Gonne claimed they first met in London three years earlier. Foster(1997, 57) notes that Gonne was “notoriously unreliable on dates and places” .
- 8. Uddin Khan, Jalal. “Yeats and Maud Gonne: (Auto)biographical and Artistic Intersection”. Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics, 2002.
- 9. Corcoran, Neil. After Yeats and Joyce: Reading Modern Irish Literature. (Oxford), Oxford University Press, 1997. viii
- 10. Foster (2003), 486; 662
- 11. http://news.stanford.edu/news/2001/april18/foster-418.html
- 12. Foster (2003), 246-247
- 13. Foster (2003), 651
- 14. Gale Research International. Twentieth Century Literary Criticism 116. Gale Cengage Learning, 2002. 303
- 15. Finneran, Richard. Yeats: An Annual of Critical and Textual Studies 1995. University of Michigan Press, 1997. 82
- 16. Logenbach, James. Stone Cottage: Pound, Yeats, and Modernism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988. 13-14
- 17. Seiden, Morton. William Butler Yeats. Michigan State University Press, 1962. 179
- 18. O’Neill, Michael. Routledge Literary Sourcebook on the Poems of W.B. Yeats. Routledge, 2003. ISBN 0-415-23475-1, p. 6
- 19. O’Neill, 58
- 20. O’Neill, 61
