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William Butler Yeats (June 13, 1865 – January 28, 1939), often referred to as W.B. Yeats, was an Irish poet, dramatist,mystic and public figure. Yeats was one of the driving forces behind the Irish Literary Revival and was co-founder of the Abbey Theatre.
His early work tended towards a romantic lushness and dreamlike quality best described by the title of his 1893 collection The Celtic Twilight, but in his 40s, inspired by his relationships with modernist poets such as Ezra Pound and his active involvement in Irish nationalist politics, he moved towards a harder, more modern style.
Yeats served as an Irish Senator in the 1920s. He took his role as a public figure seriously and was a reasonably hard-working member of the Seanad. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1923.
Yeats was born in Sandymount, Dublin. His father, John Butler Yeats was studying law at the time, but soon abandoned his studies to take up a career as a portrait painter. His mother, Susan Mary Pollexfen came from an Anglo-Irish family in County Sligo. Soon after his birth, Yeats moved to Sligo to stay with his extended family and he came to think of it as his true childhood home.
Eventually, the family moved to London to enable John to further his career. At first, the Yeats children were educated at home. There mother, who was homesick for Sligo, entertained them with stories and folktales from her native county. In 1877, William entered the Godolphin school, which he attended for four years. He appears not to have enjoyed the experience and did not distinguish himself academically. For financial reasons, the family returned to Dublin towards the end of 1880, living at first in the city centre and later in the suburb of Howth.
In October, 1881, Yeats resumed his education at the Erasmus Smith High School, Dublin. His father's studio was located nearby and he spent a good deal of time there, meeting many of the city's artists and writers. He remained at the High School school until December, 1883. It was during this period that he started writing poetry and in 1885, Yeats's first poems, as well as an essay called The Poetry of Sir Samuel Ferguson, were published in the Dublin University Review. From 1884 to 1886, he attended the Metropolitan School of Art (now the 1886). The poem had previously appeared in the Dublin University Review and this printing of 100 copies was paid for by his father. His next book was The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems (1889). The long title poem was based on the poems of the Fenian Cycle of Irish mythology. This poem, which took two years to complete, shows the influence of Ferguson and Tennyson. The Yeats family had returned to London in 1887, and in 1890 Yeats cofounded the Rhymer's Club with John Rhys. This was a group of like-minded poets who met regularly and published anthologies in 1892 and 1894. Other early collections include Poems (1895), The Secret Rose (1897) and The Wind Among the Reeds (1899.
Yeats's early poetry drew heavily on Irish myth and folklore and is generally pre-Raphaelite in tone, self-consciously ornate, and at times, according to unsympathetic critics, stilted. After The Wanderings of Oisin , he never attempted another long poem. His other early poems are lyrics on the themes of love or mystical and esoteric subjects.
In 1889, Yeats met Maud Gonne, a young heiress who was beginning to devote herself to the Irish nationalist movement. Gonne admired Yeats's early poem The Isle of Statues and sought out his acquaintance. Yeats developed an obsessive infatuation with Gonne, and she was to have a significant effect on his poetry and his life ever after. Two years after, he proposed to Gonne, but was rejected. In 1896, he began an affair with Olivia Shakespeare, which ended one year later. In 1899, Yeats again proposed to Gonne, and was again rejected. He proposed again in 1900 and 1901. In 1903, Maud Gonne married Irish nationalist John MacBride, and Yeats visited America on a lecture tour. Probably the most significant poetic movement of the second half of the 19th century was French Symbolism. This movement inevitably influenced Irish writers including Yeats. However, although he was influenced by his French contemporaries, Yeats consciously focused on an identifiably Irish content. Also in 1896, he was introduced to Lady Gregory by their mutual friend Edward Martyn and Lady Gregory encouraged Yeats's nationalism and convinced him to continue focusing on writing drama. Together with Gregory and Martyn and other writers including John M. Synge, Sean O'Casey, Padraic Colum and James Stephens, Yeats was one of those responsible for the establishment of the literary movement known as the Irish Literary Revival (otherwise known as the Celtic Revival).
Apart from these writers, much of the impetus for the Revival came from the work of scholarly translators who were aiding in the discovery of both the ancient sagas and Ossianic poetry and the more recent folk song tradition in Irish. One of the most significant of these was Douglas Hyde later the first President of Ireland, whose Love Songs of Connacht was widely admired.
One of the enduring achievements of the Revival was the setting up of the Abbey Theatre. In 1899, Yeats, Lady Gregory, Martyn and George Moore founded the Irish Literary Theatre. This was not successful and survived for about two years. However, working together with two Irish brothers with theatrical experinece, William and Frank Fay. and Yeats' unpaid secretary Annie Elizabeth Fredericka Horniman, a wealthy Englishwoman who had previously been involved in the presentation of George Bernard Shaw's Arms and the Man in London in 1894, the founders of Irish Literary Theatre along with John Millington Synge established the Irish National Theatre Society, acquired a premises and opened the Abbey on December 27, 1904.
Yeats spent the summer of 1917 with Maud Gonne, and proposed to Gonne's daughter, but was rejected. In September, he proposed to George Hyde-Lees, was accepted, and the two were married on the 20th of October.
He was highly interested in mysticism and spiritualism, and attended his first séance in 1886. Later, Yeats became heavily involved with hermeticist and theosophical beliefs, and in 1900 he became head of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, which he had joined in 1890.
All his life, Yeats maintained friendships with a number of poets and literary figures; for a time in 1913, Ezra Pound served as Yeats's secretary. Yeats was also known and respected by Oscar Wilde, John Millington Synge, T.S. Eliot, and Virginia Woolf, among others.
Yeats' middle period saw him abandon the pre-Raphaelite character of his early wrk and attempt to turn himself into a Landor-style social ironist. Critics who admire his middle work might characterize it as supple and muscular in its rhythms and sometimes harshly modernist, while others find these poems barren and weak in imaginative power. Yeats' later work found new imaginative inspiration in the mystical system he began to work out for himself under the influence of spiritualism. In many ways, this poetry is a return to the vision of his earlier work. The opposition between the worldly-minded man of the sword and the spiritually-minded man of God, the theme of The Wanderings of Oisin, is reproduced in A Dialogue Between Self and Soul.
Yeats is generally conceded to be one of twentieth century's key English-language poets. Yet, unlike most modernists who experimented with vers libre, Yeats was a master of the traditional verse forms. His most important collections of poetry started with The Green Helmet (1910) and Responsibilities (1914). In imagery, Yeats's poetry became sparer, more powerful as he grew older. The Tower (1928), The Winding Stairs (1929) and New Poems (1938) contained some of the most potent images in twentieth-century poetry; his Last Poems are also conceded to be amongst his best.
Yeats's mystical inclinations, informed by Hindu Theosophical beliefs and the occult, formed much of the basis of his late poetry, which some critics have attacked as lacking in intellectual credibility. W. H. Auden criticizes his late stage as the "deplorable spectacle of a grown man occupied with the mumbo-jumbo of magic and the nonsense of India". The metaphysics of Yeats's late works must be read, for better or for worse, in relation to Yeats's system of esoteric fundamentalities in A Vision (1925), which is read today primarily for its value shed on his late poetry rather than for any rigorous intellectual or philosophical insights.
Some critics claim that Yeats spanned the transition from the nineteenth century into twentieth-century modernism in poetry much as Pablo Picasso did in painting. Others question whether late Yeats really has much in common with modernists of the Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot variety. Modernists read the well-known poem The Second Coming as a dirge for the decline of European civilization in the mode of Eliot, but later critics have pointed out that this poem is an expression of Yeats' apocalyptic mystical theories, and thus the expression of a mind shaped by the 1890s.
Yeats, after suffering from a variety of illnesses for a number of years, died in France in January, 1939, eight months before the German invasion of Poland. Soon afterward, Anglo-American poet W. H. Auden composed the poem In Memory of W. B. Yeats. The well known opening lines of the final section of this poem read simply: "Earth receive an honored guest: / William Yeats is laid to rest.". Yeats was first buried at Roquebrune, until his body was moved to Drumecliff, Sligo in September, 1948. His grave is a famous attraction in Sligo. The stone reads a line from one of his poems: "Cast a cold eye on life, on death, horsemen pass by". Of this location, Yeats said, "the place that has really influenced my life most is Sligo." The town is also home to a statue and memorial building in Yeats's honour.
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