The Revolutionary Life of W. B. Yeats

William Butler Yeats (13 June 1865 – 28 January 1939) was an Irish poet, dramatist, mystic, and public figure from Sandymount, County Dublin. He is considered one of the most influential figures of the twentieth century in literature and is regarded by some critics as among the greatest poets in the English language. Yeats is also considered a significant Irish and British literary pioneer and an irrevocable figure in Irish politics, having served as a senator for two terms.

Early Life of W. B. Yeats

William Butler Yeats was born as the son of a famous Irish portrait painter and lawyer, John Butler. His whole family were Anglo-Irish and descended from a linen merchant, Jervis Yeats, who had served in the army of King William of Orange. Yeats’ mother, Susan Mary Pollexfen, was a member of a wealthy Anglo-Irish family of County Sligo that had played a role from the end of the 17th century in controlling Ireland’s economic, political, social, and cultural aspects. The Yeats’s financial life was more than okay, having been indulged in trade and shipping. Although W.B. Yeats took massive pride in being of English descent, he was also very proud of his Irish nationality. He ensured that his playwrights and poems included the Irish culture within their pages.

In 1867, John took his wife and five children to live in England, but unable to make much of a living, he was obliged to return to Dublin in 1880. William met several of Dublin’s literary classes at his father’s studio in Dublin, where he thought of producing his first poetry and an essay on the Ulster-Scottish poet Sir Samuel Ferguson. Yeats found his early aspiration and muse in the prominent novelist Mary Shelley and the works of the English poet Edmund Spenser.

As years passed and Yeats’s work became more specialised, he drew more inspiration from Irish folklore and myths (specifically, the one that emerged from County Sligo).

Yeats’s interest in the mystery and the unknown was entirely unhindered from an early stage in his life. One of his school acquaintances, George Russell, a fellow poet and occultist, influenced his tendencies towards that path. Together with Russell and others, Yeats founded the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. It was a society for studying and practising magic and esoteric knowledge, with its secret rituals, ceremonies, and elaborate symbolism. It was Hogwarts for adults.

Yeats also stomped on to be a member of the Theosophical Society, but he went back on his decision and left shortly.

W. B. Yeats’s Works and Inspirations

In 1889, Yeats published The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems. Four years later, he kept shaking the literary world to its core by bringing forward his collection of essays entitled The Celtic Twilight, followed in 1895 by Poems, in 1897 by The Secret Rose, and in 1899 he published his poetry collection The Wind among the Reeds. Besides his poetry and essay writing, Yeats also developed a lifelong interest in all things esoteric.

Yeats came to maturity at the beginning of the twentieth century. His poetry stands at the turning point between the Victorian period and Modernism, the conflicting currents of which affected his poetry.

In essence, Yeats is considered a remarkable pioneer in traditional poetic forms while recognised as one of the most incredible gurus in modern verse, which unequivocally signifies the versatility of his works. As he got older and past the youth phase, he was influenced by aestheticism, pre-Raphaelite art, and the French Symbolist poets. He admired the fellow English poet William Blake and developed a lifelong interest in mysticism. To Yeats, poetry was the most suitable way to examine human destiny’s powerful and benevolent sources. Yeats’ idiosyncratic mystical perspective drew on Hinduism, Theosophy and Hermeticism, often more than Christianity, and in some instances, these allusions make his poetry challenging to grasp.

W. B. Yeats’s Love Life

Yeats found his first love in 1889 in Maud Gonne, a young heiress heavily involved in Irish politics and, specifically, the Irish Nationalist Movement. Gonne was the one who first admired Yeats for his poetry, and in exchange, Yeats found a muse and a delicate symphony in Gonne’s presence that made her affect his works and life.

In a shocking turn of events, Gonne rejected Yeats’s proposal when he offered to marry him the first time. But Yeats was relentless, proposing to Gonne three times in three consecutive years. Eventually, Yeats ditched the proposal idea and Gonna married the Irish nationalist John MacBride. Yeats also decided to go on a lecturing tour to America and stay there for a while. His only other affair during this period was with Olivia Shakespear, whom he met in 1896 and parted with one year later.

National Endeavours

In 1896, their mutual friend Edward Martyn introduced him to Lady Gregory. She encouraged Yeats’s nationalism and convinced him to continue writing drama. Although French symbolism influenced him, Yeats consciously focused on identifiably Irish content, and this inclination was reinforced by his involvement with a new generation of younger and emerging Irish authors.

As the demand for the political separation of Ireland from Britain grew, Yeats became more involved with fellow nationalist literati such as Seán O’ Casey, J.M.Synge, and Padraic Colum, and Yeats—among these others—was one of those responsible for the establishment of the literary movement known as the “Irish Literary Revival” (otherwise known as the “Celtic Revival”). The Revival was an essential uprising in literature for the Irish. The movement had a significant role in the foundation of the Irish Literary Theatre in 1899. Abbey Theatre (or Dublin Theatre) was established in 1904 and grew out of the Irish Literary Theatre. Shortly after, Yeats worked with William and Frank Fay, two Irish brothers with theatrical experience, and Yeats’s formidable secretary, Annie Elizabeth Fredericka Horniman, to establish the Irish National Theatre Society.

Although strongly nationalist in belief, Yeats could not participate in the violence of the 1916 Easter Rising.

He reflected on that violence in his poem Easter 1916:

We know their dream; enough
To know they dreamed and are dead;
And what of excessive love
Bewildered them till they died?
I write it out in a verse-
MacDonagh and MacBride
And Connolly and Pearse
Now and in time to be,
Wherever green is worn,
Are changed, changed utterly;
A terrible beauty is born.

Having set up a name for himself, Yeats was welcomed by many critics and literary audiences1. Yeats met Georgiana (Georgie) Hyde-Lees in 1911, and soon after, she fell in love with her and got married in 1917. She was only 25 years old, and Yeats was over 50 then. They had two children named Anne and Michael. She greatly supported his work and shared his fascination with the mystics. Around this time, Yeats bought Ballylee Castle near Coole Park and promptly renamed it Thoor Ballylee. It was his summer residence for much of his life until nearly his death. After his marriage, he and his wife dabbled with a form of automatic writing, Mrs Yeats, contacting a spirit guide she called “Leo Africanus.”

Politics

Yeats’s poetry was adapted into a Celtic Twilight mood in his earlier work. Still, soon enough, it became heavily affected by the surrounding livelihood and became a mirror of the struggle of the classes in Britain and no longer became about the mystics. Thrown in the plethora of cultural politics, Yeats’s aristocratic pose led to an idealisation of the Irish peasant and a willingness to ignore poverty and suffering. However, soon after, the emergence of a revolutionary movement from the urban Catholic lower-middle-class9+9* ranks made him reassess his attitudes.

In 1922, the Free State Government appointed him a Senator in Dáil Éireann. He went head to head against the Catholic Church on many occasions over the subject of divorce. He imposed that the Catholic community disregarded the position of the non-Catholic population on such subjects and many others. He feared that the Catholic attitude would run rampant and that they would consider themselves the supreme religion in everything. The Catholics and the Protestants significantly saw his efforts.

In his later life, Yeats questioned whether Democracy was the right way forward. He became interested in Benito Mussolini’s Fascist movement. He also wrote some ‘marching songs’ never used for General Eoin O’Duffy’s Blueshirts, a quasi-fascist political movement. In these years, he also had a string of affairs, although he and Georgie remained married to each other.

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 [the Protestants] … You will put a wedge amid this nation.” As his fellow senators were virtually all Catholics, they were offended by these comments.

Yeats’s politics and ideologies were controversial, to say the least, and very ambiguous. He distanced himself from Nazism and fascism in the last few years of his life and kept his stances to his own.

W. B. Yeats’s Legacy

At the turn of the 19th century, Yeats represented an outpost with a front line that moved far forward of the stubbornest and most traditional idealism. When pragmatism tried to make a poet a leisure worker, Yeats’s efforts to reverse the world and break the norm deserve admiration.

In 1923, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. He was the first Irishman to win this prize and be honoured for what the Nobel Committee described as “inspired poetry, which in a highly artistic form gives expression to the spirit of a whole nation.”

Here is one of the examples of his unique works. The poem The Second Coming by Yeats was written in 1920. The poem simply begins with the image of a falcon flying away from its human master in fear of being shot. In medieval times, people used falcons or hawks to catch ground-level animals. In this image, however, the falcon has lost itself by flying too far away. This lost falcon refers to the collapse of the traditional European social arrangements when Yeats wrote. The poet uses symbolism; the falcon getting lost symbolises the fall of civilisation and the chaos that will follow.

There is one more strong image of The Second Coming: it is sphinx. The poet takes the violence which has taken over society as a sign that “the Second Coming is at hand.” He imagines a sphinx in the desert; we are to think this is a mythical animal. This animal, and not Christ, is what is coming to fulfil the prophecy from the Biblical Book of Revelation. The sphinx here symbolises the beast, the devil who will come to our world to spread chaos, evil, destruction and death.

W. B. Yeats’s Death

In 1929, he stayed at Thoor Ballylee for the last time. Much of his life was outside Ireland, but he did lease a house, Riversdale, in the Dublin suburb of Rathfarnham from 1932. He wrote prolifically through the final years of his life, publishing poetry, plays and prose. In 1938, he attended the Abbey for the last time to see the premiere of his play Purgatory. The Autobiographies of William Butler Yeats was published in that same year.

After suffering from a variety of illnesses for several years, Yeats died at the Hôtel Idéal Séjour in Menton, France, on 28 January 1939, at age 73. The last poem he wrote was the Arthurian-themed The Black Tower.

Yeats wished to be buried in Drumecliff, his hometown in County Sligo. He was first buried at Roquebrune, but then his body was exhumed and moved there in September 1948. His grave is considered a famous attraction in Sligo, which many people visit. The epitaph on his tombstone is the last line in one of his poems, Under Ben Bulben and reads, “Cast a cold eye on life, on death; horsemen, pass by!”. The County also has a statue and memorial building in Yeats’s honour.