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3. William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)
Life
If there are two great giants in English poetry in the first half of the
twentieth century, one must be Thomas Hardy while the other, William Butler
Yeats, an Irishman.
W. B. Yeats, poet and dramatist, was born into a
Protestant family in Dublin on June 13, 1865. His father was a portrait
painter; his mother was the daughter of a prosperous merchant in Sligo
County, where old Irish ways were still of strong influence. When Yeats was
two years old, the family moved to London for several years and went back to
Dublin in 1880. Dublin, Sligo and London had their different influences on
Yeats respectively. In 1885, Yeats got his first collection of poems
published in the Dublin University Review. In 1887, he went back to London
and became acquainted with
William Morris and Oscar Wilde. In 1894, he was
introduced to modern French poetry, especially the Symbolism. In 1896, Yeats
met
Lady Augusta Gregory and John Millington Synge. In this period, he got
familiar with the Irish ancient myths, legends and Gaelic poetry through
translation. In 1899, he published another volume of lyrics, The Wind
Among the Reeds.
In 1904, Yeats became President of the Irish National
Dramatic Society and founded the Abbey Theatre, later the Irish National
Theatre, with Lady Gregory. Five years later, he met Maud Donne whom he
loved all his life. In an American tour with the Abbey troupe in 1911, Yeats
met Ezra Pound, who was 20 years younger than him but influenced him
decisively on his poetic creation. Pound introduced him to the
Japanese Noh
plays and then Yeats began to write plays for dancers. In 1914, he published
Responsibilities.
The
Easter Rising broke out in 1916 and Yeats wrote many
poems on the subject when it was going on in Ireland and also later in his
life. In 1917, he married Georgia Hyde-Lees and in the same year published
The Wild Swans at Coole.
In 1923, Yeats was awarded the Nobel Prize for
Literature. In the following years till his death, he published a prose work
on philosophy, A Vision (1926), his greatest single volume, The Tower
(1928), the collection, The Winding Stair (1933) and another dance
play, A Fall Moon in March, and so on.
He died on Jan. 28, 1939 in France and in September 1948, the
body was taken to Drumcliffe Churchyard near Sligo.
Poems
The literary career of Yeats can be roughly divided into 3
phases. The first phase began in 1883 until the publication of The Wind
Among the Reeds. The early poems of Yeats showed their influence by
Spencer, Shelly, Blake and the Pre-Raphaelites in London. His poems were
often shadowed by gentle and beautiful illusions. But the poems of Yeats and
the ninetieth century English romanticists differ in their subject. Yeats
was interested in ancient Irish myths and legends, for example, “To the Rose
Upon the Rood of Time”.
Yeats was one of the founders of the Abbey Theatre and also
wrote the first play The Countess Cathleen for it in 1908. The Abbey
Theatre was a part of the nationalist movement in Ireland, aiming at an
Irish literary revival. Yeats wrote all together 26 verse plays for the
Abbey Theatre and was considered as one of the leaders of Irish Literary
Renaissance.
In addition, in this period, his hopeless love for Maud
Gonne inspired the poet to create some of his most memorable love poems,
such as “The Rose of the World”, in which Yeats compared Maud to Helen of
Troy:
Who dreamed that beauty passes like a dream?
For these red lips, with all their mournful pride,
Mournful that no new wonder may betide,
Troy passed away in one high funeral gleam,
And Usna's children died.
We and the labouring world are passing by:
Amid men's souls, that waver and give place
Like the pale waters in their wintry race,
Under the passing stars, foam of the sky,
Lives on this lonely face.
Bow down, archangels, in your dim abode:
Before you were, or any hearts to beat,
Weary and kind one lingered by His seat;
He made the world to be a grassy road
Before her wandering feet.
However, although sympathetic with the nationalist movement,
Yeats always stood aloof from revolutionary activities and remained himself
in the literary world.
The second phase began from after the publication of
The Winds Among the Reeds to 1925, when A Vision was published for the
first time.
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