Poet and playwright, born near Dublin, Ireland. Educated at schools in London and Dublin, he became an art student, then turned to writing. A leader of the Irish Literary Revival, he is a major voice of modern Irish poetry in English. In 1888 he published The Wanderings of Oisin, a long narrative poem that established his reputation. The Celtic Twilight, a book of peasant legends, appeared in 1893. With his patron, Lady Gregory, he founded the Irish Literary Theatre in 1899, and was a director of the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, from 1904. He wrote nearly 30 plays, including The Countess Cathleen (1892), The Land of Heart's Desire (1894), and Cathleen ni Houlihan (1903). He adopted a more direct style with Responsibilities (1914), which also marks a switch to contemporary subjects. The symbolic system described in A Vision (1925) informs many of his best-known poems, which appeared in The Tower (1928), The Winding Stair (1929), and A Full Moon in March (1935). Much of his best poetry is inspired by personal longing, notably his unrequited love for the revolutionary Maud Gonne and for a mythical Irish Golden Age. He received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1923, and also became a senator of the Irish Free State (19228). His Collected Poems were published in 1950.
William Butler Yeats (IPA: /jeɪts/) (13 June 1865 – 28 January 1939) was an Irish poet, dramatist, mystic and public figure, brother of the artist Jack Butler Yeats and son of John Butler Yeats. Yeats, though born to an Anglo-Saxon Protestant mother and father, was perhaps the primary driving force behind the Irish Literary Revival and was co-founder of the Abbey Theatre. Yeats also served as an Irish Senator.
Early life and work
When Yeats was young, his family moved first from Sandymount, County Dublin, to County Sligo, and then to London to enable his father John to further his career as an artist.
In 1877, William entered the Godolphin school, which he attended for four years.
In October 1881, Yeats resumed his education at the Erasmus Smith High School in Dublin (The High School, Dublin).
It was during this period that he started writing poetry and in 1885, Yeats' first poems, as well as an essay called "The Poetry of Sir Samuel Ferguson", were published in the Dublin University Review.
Yeats' early work tended to focus on the Romantic style, based on Irish lore, Best described by the title of his 1893 collection The Celtic Twilight. In his 40s, inspired by his relationships with modernist poets such as Ezra Pound and his involvement in Irish nationalist politics, he moved towards a harder, more modern style.
The young poet
Even before he began to write poetry, Yeats had come to associate poetry with religious ideas and thoughts of sentimental elements.
Yeats' early poetry drew heavily on Irish myth and folklore and drew on the diction and coloring of pre-Raphaelite verse.
Yeats' first significant poem was The Isle of Statues, a fantasy work that took Edmund Spenser for its poetic model.
The long title poem, the first that he would not disown in his maturity, was based on the poems of the Fenian Cycle of Irish mythology.
The Yeats family had returned to London in 1887, and in 1890 Yeats co-founded the Rhymer's Club with Ernest Rhys.
Maud Gonne, the Irish Literary Revival and the Abbey Theatre
In 1889, Yeats met Maud Gonne, a young heiress who was beginning to devote herself to the Irish nationalist movement. Yeats developed an obsession with Gonne, and she was to have a significant effect on his poetry and his life ever after.
Two years after their initial meeting, Yeats proposed to her, but was rejected. With each proposal, she rejected Yeats and finally, in 1903, married the Roman Catholic Irish nationalist Major John MacBride. This same year Yeats left for an extended stay in America on a lecture tour.
Also in 1896, he was introduced to Lady Gregory by their mutual friend Edward Martyn, and she encouraged Yeats' nationalism and convinced him to continue focusing on writing drama. Although he was influenced by French Symbolism, Yeats consciously focused on an identifiably Irish content and this inclination was reinforced by his involvement with a new generation of younger and emerging Irish authors.
Together with Lady Gregory and Martyn and other writers including J M Synge, Sean O'Casey, and Padraic Colum, 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 creative 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 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 group of founders was also able, along with J M Synge, to acquire property in Dublin and open the Abbey Theatre on 27 December 1904. Yeats continued to be involved with the Abbey up to his death, both as a member of the board and a prolific playwright.
In 1902, Yeats helped set up the Dun Emer Press to publish work by writers associated with the Revival. From then until its closure in 1946, they press, which was run by the poet's sisters, produced over 70 titles, 48 of them books by Yeats himself. Yeats spent the summer of 1917 with Maude Gonne, and proposed to Gonne's daughter, Iseult, but was rejected.
Mysticism
Yeats had a life-long interest in mysticism, spiritualism, occultism and astrology. Yeats read extensively on these subjects all through his life, being especially impressed and influenced by the writings of Swedenborg. Yeats attended his first séance the following year. Later, Yeats became heavily involved with hermeticism and theosophical beliefs. After his marriage, he and his wife dabbled with a form of automatic writing, Mrs. Yeats contacting a spirit guide she called "Leo Africanus".
Yeats' mystical inclinations, informed by the writings of Swedenborg and Hindu religion (Yeats translated The Ten Principal Upanishads (1938) with Shri Purohit Swami), theosophical beliefs and the occult, formed much of the basis of his late poetry, which some critics attacked as lacking intellectual or philosophical insights, though he himself wrote in 1892, 'If I had not made magic my constant study I could not have written a single word of my Blake book, nor would The Countess Kathleen ever have come to exist. The mystical life is the centre of all that I do and all that I think and all that I write.'"
The Golden Dawn
Yeats was admitted into the Golden Dawn in March 1890, taking the name Festina Lente, but after attaining Adeptus Minor, he changed it to Demon est Deus inversus (D.E.D.I. for shorthand) translated as Devil is the reverse of God, this name being taken from the writings of Madame Blavatsky in which she discussed that "...even that divine Homogeneity must contain in itself the essence of both good and evil."
Yeats was an active recruiter for the Golden Dawn's Isis-Urania temple, bringing in George Pollexfen (his uncle) and Florence Farr.
Modernism
In 1913, Yeats met American poet Ezra Pound. In particular, the scholarship on Japanese Noh plays that Pound had obtained from Ernest Fenollosa's widow provided Yeats with a model for the aristocratic drama he intended to write.
Yeats is generally considered to be one of the twentieth century's key English-language poets. Yet, unlike most modernists who experimented with free verse, Yeats was a master of the traditional verse forms.
Politics
The poetry of W.B.
Yeats' new direct engagement with politics can be seen in the poem September 1913, with its well-known refrain "Romantic Ireland's dead and gone,/It's with O'Leary in the grave." In Easter 1916, with its equally famous refrain "All changed, changed utterly:/A terrible beauty is born", Yeats faces his own failure to recognise the merits of the leaders of the Easter Rising because of their humble backgrounds and lives.
Yeats was appointed to the first Irish Senate Seanad Éireann in 1922 and re-appointed in 1925.
During his time as a senator Yeats 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".
Yeats' essentially aristocratic attitudes and his association with Pound tended to draw him towards Mussolini, for whom he expressed admiration on a number of occasions.
From the 1950s to the 1970s his son, Michael Yeats became a member of the Irish Seanad.
Later life and work
His later poetry and plays, Yeats wrote in a more personal vein. Yeats himself, in the poem "The Circus Animals' Desertion", published in his final collection, describes the inspiration for these late works in the lines "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".
After suffering from a variety of illnesses for a number of years, Yeats died at the Hôtel Idéal Séjour, in Menton, France on 28 January 1939, aged 73.
Soon afterward, Yeats was first buried at Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, until, in accordance with his final wish, his body was moved to Drumcliffe, County Sligo in September, 1948, on the Irish Naval Service corvette L.E. Of this location, Yeats said, "the place that has really influenced my life most is Sligo."
Works
1886 — Mosada 1888 — Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry 1889 — The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems 1891 — Representative Irish Tales 1891 — John Sherman and Dhoya 1892 — Irish Faerie Tales 1892 — The Countess Kathleen and Various Legends and Lyrics 1893 — The Celtic Twilight 1894 — The Land of Heart's Desire 1895 — Poems 1897 — The Secret Rose 1899 — The Wind Among the Reeds 1899 — The Song of The Old Mother 1900 — The Shadowy Waters 1902 — Cathleen ni Houlihan 1903 — Ideas of Good and Evil 1903 — In the Seven Woods 1904 — The King's Threshold 1907 — Discoveries 1910 — The Green Helmet and Other Poems 1912 — The Cutting of an Agate 1913 — Poems Written in Discouragement 1914 — Responsibilities 1916 — Reveries Over Childhood and Youth 1916 — Easter 1916 1917 — The Wild Swans at Coole 1918 — Per Amica Silentia Lunae 1921 — Michael Robartes and the Dancer 1921 — Four Plays for Dancers 1921 — Four Years 1922 — Later Poems 1924 — The Cat and the Moon 1925 — A Vision 1926 — Estrangement 1926 — Autobiographies of William Butler Yeats 1927 — October Blast 1928 — The Tower 1929 — The Winding Stair 1933 — The Winding Stair and Other Poems 1934 — Collected Plays 1935 — A Full Moon in March 1938 — New Poems 1939 — Last Poems and Two Plays (posthumous) 1939 — On the Boiler (posthumous)See Category:Works by Yeats
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