Category: William Butler Yeats

Introduction

Poet, playwright, and Irish nationalist, he was a titan of writing who had a lasting impact on these genres. Yeats, born in 1865, continues to fascinate and inspire readers and academics.

Yeats was raised in a literary and artistically rich milieu, and his early interest in poetry and drama provided the groundwork for a career that would influence the development of contemporary Irish literature. His involvement with notables like George Bernard Shaw and Oscar Wilde in London’s cultural and creative circles in the late 19th century exposed him to various influences shaping his artistic growth.

Biography

The eminent Irish poet and playwright William Butler is a significant literary figure. He was born in Sandymount, Dublin, on June 13, 1865, and his life and work continue to inspire and enthrall readers and academics alike. The energy, inspirations, and literary accomplishments of Yeats will all be covered in this biography. He was raised in a household that highly valued reading and the arts. His mother, Susan Pollexfen, hailed from an affluent and artistic family, and his father, John Butler Yeats, was a gifted portrait painter. His relatives fostered his early love of poetry and drama.

His relocation to London in 1887 was one of the turning points in his life. He spent time there, immersing himself in the historical period’s creative and cultural scene. He joined the intellectual and talented communities and socialized with notables like Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw. His horizons were substantially expanded, and this exposure significantly impacted his artistic growth.

Early Yeats’s poetry exhibited strong Romantic and Symbolist influences. His lyrical and mystical writing style was displayed in his debut book, “The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems” (1889). He studied Celtic mythology and folklore, including it in his writing. His plays and poetry frequently center on his passion for Irish mythology and history.

Yeats was essential to the Irish Literary Revival in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In 1899, he co-founded the Irish Literary Theatre, which eventually changed its name to the Abbey Playhouse and became a hotbed of Irish theater. His engagement in the theater allowed him to pursue his passion for stagecraft and drama. Irish theater has benefited dramatically from works like “Countess Cathleen” (1892) alongside Lady Gregory and “Cathleen ni Houlihan” (1902), which were co-written.

The poetry of Yeats changed throughout time. He departed from the rich Romanticism of his early works in favor of a more sober and experienced aesthetic. He struggled with themes of aging, love, and the passage of time in collections like “The Tower” (1928) and “The Winding Stair and Other Poems” (1933), which are clear examples of this transformation. His poem “The Second Coming” (1920) captures the volatile times he lived through and is frequently cited as one of the most recognizable pieces of 20th-century poetry.

He was actively interested in politics and the Irish nationalist movement in addition to his literary endeavors. From 1922 to 1928, he was a senator in the newly created Irish Free State. His political activity and poetry were linked as he struggled with the intricacies of Irish identity and the war for independence.

Through his tremendous impact on contemporary writing and his persistent themes of mysticism, nationalism, and the human experience, he leaves behind a lasting legacy. His influence on poetry and drama is enormous, and in 1923, he was given the Nobel Prize in Literature.

In Menton, France, on January 28, 1939, William Butler Yeats passed away. Later, following his wishes, his remains were reburied in Drumcliff, County Sligo. He wrote the inscription for his tomb in the poem “Under Ben Bulben,” saying, “Cast a cold eye / On life, on death. / Horseman, pass by!”.

Famous Works

The body of work by William Butler Yeats is extensive and varied, encompassing a range of topics, literary genres, and styles. We’ll look at some of his most well-known works here:

Innisfree’s Lake Isle (1892)

Perhaps Yeats’ most widely recognized poem is this one. It reveals his close ties to the Irish countryside and his yearning for a life that is more uncomplicated and in tune using nature. In the poem, he expresses his ambition to create a tiny hut where he might live, harmonizing alongside nature on the serene island of Innisfree.

The Second Coming 1920s

The poem reflects the turmoil and unpredictability of the moment, written in the immediate aftermath of World War I and during the turbulent era of the Irish War of Independence. The song’s opening words, “Turning and turning in the widening gyre / The falcon cannot hear the falconer,” are well known for encapsulating the feeling of confusion and societal disintegration.

The 1916 Easter season

The poem honors the organizers of the 1916 Easter Rising, an uprising in Ireland against British authority. Yeats struggles with the nuanced political and internal motivations of these individuals. Noting the event’s devastating effects, he famously says, “All changed, changed utterly: / A terrible beauty is born.”

The Wild Swans at Coole (1917)

Yeats frequently drew inspiration from nature, and the following poetry collection is a shining example. Swans are used in the title poem as a symbol of beauty and transcendence to reflect on the passing of time and the permanence of nature.

Sailing to Byzantium in 1928

The poem discusses the topics of aging and the pursuit of creative and spiritual satisfaction. Yeats wishes to renounce the material world and merge using Byzantium’s enduring art and culture.

Yeats’ A Vision (1925)

Although not a typical poem, it is a significant work of literature. It describes his spiritual and esoteric views, which he and his wife, Georgie Hyde-Lees, cultivated together. It explores the idea of gyres, the cyclical nature of history, and the connection between the individual and the communal unconscious.

The Tower (1928)

Poems on love, aging, politics, and the supernatural are included. One of the collection’s most notable poems is “Among School Children,” where Yeats considers his life and experiences.

The Battle with the Sea by Cuchulain (1939)

The epic poem may be found in Yeats’ final significant collection, “Last Poems.” It describes the conflict between the mythical Irish hero Cuchulain and the sea and his final demise. It analyzes bravery, mortality, and the undying Irish spirit.

The Desertion of the Circus Animals (1939)

This poem, written by Yeats at the end of his life, reflects his artistic career and the evolving themes and symbols that had interested him throughout the years. It is a moving meditation on the development of art and the passing of time.

Conclusion

A literary giant of the 20th century, William Butler Yeats profoundly impacted Irish cultural resurgence and poetry. His in-depth analysis of topics like politics, mysticism, and mortality captivates readers all over the world. It has cemented his reputation as a poet through profound insight and enduring significance.

William Butler Yeats is regarded as one of the most important representative symbolist of the twentieth century English literature who was mainly influenced by the French symbolist movement of 19th century. Symbolism as a conscious movement was born in France as a reaction against naturalism and the precision and exactitude of the ‘naturalist’ school represented by Emile Zola.

The French symbolists, led by Mallarme, condemned mere ‘exteriority’, and laid great emphasis on the treatment of the sensations or the representation of the vague, fleeting impressions that constantly pass before the mind’s eye. It meant a virtual withdrawal from the life, a concentration on its experience and its expression through the use of symbols.

Before the French movement Yeats had already experimented his poetry with symbolism and after the rise of French symbolism he was more determined and devoted to it. In order to comprehend his poetry, one has to be familiar with his own version of complex symbolism, magic, history, occultism and theosophy. Symbolism is a major way of conveying Yeats’s ideas who wants to say more than what meets the eye wants to suggest something beyond the expressed meaning. His symbolism was based upon the poetry of Blake, Shelley and Rosette. But, more than that, his symbolism was based upon his reading of books on the occult from the works of Madame Blavatsky Yeats learned that Anima Mundi, a reservoir of all that has touched mankind, may be evoked by symbols. He also became acquainted with the doctrine of correspondences, the doctrine of signatures, and the doctrine of magical in connotations and symbols which have power over spiritual and material reality.

Symbols may be of two kinds (1) Traditional and (2) Personal. Traditional symbols are such stock symbols as have been in general use. For instance, ‘rose’ is a traditional. Symbol of beauty and has been in use in poetry from the earliest times. As a majority of readers are familiar with such stock symbols their use increases the charm and pleasure of poetry without introducing any element of complexity or obscurity. Personal symbols, how-ever, are devised by the poet for his own purposes, to express the vague fleeting impressions passing through his mind, or to convey his own sense of the mystery of life. They express the poet’s experiences which are often of a mystical nature. As the readers are not familiar with such symbols, they create difficulties for them, though at the same time they add to the charm and dignity of the language.

A rebel against the world of matter, Yeats learned that all material things correspond to concepts in the world of spirit, and that through the use of material object as magical symbols the specialist may summon disembodied powers,. In 1925, Yeats announced an occult system of his own (in his essay called ‘A Vision’). The main element in A Vision is Yeats’s view of history. He saw history as series of cyclical processes. He saw time made up of opposing cycles lasting tow thousand years, and he used the diagrams of opposing gyres to illustrate them, a gyre being the espial path traced out on a come. Each age was seen as the reversal of the previous age. The Second Coming conveys the terror of a coming of antithetical civilization. This poem creates its effect by its images, by disgust at prevalent anarchy, by horror at the overcoming of innocence, and by its revelation of what is to convey the image of the rough beast slouching towards Bethlehem. In his search for a compensating tradition, Yeats went first to romantic literature, and then to mysticism of one kind and another, to folklore, theosophy, spiritualism, Neo-Platonism, and finally elaborated a symbolic system of his own, based on a variety of sources, giving order and proportion to his insights. He became more and more himself, he shed his coat of mythological embroidery for a colloquial but ceremonial nakedness, a precisions, strength and symbolic density all his own.

In the collection The Tower, Yeats achieved a kind of ripeness in disillusion. The scorn so pervasive before is gone. ‘Sailing to Byzantium’ is the opening poem of this volume. The poem reflects the interest in Byzantium art felt by Yeats since his visit to Ravenna, a city whose churches contain the finest of all Byzantine mosaics. Yeats saw in Byzantine culture what he called the ‘unity of being,’ a state in which are and life inner-penetrated each other. Rejected by the cruel world of birth, generation, and death as obsolete, the poet determines to sail to a place where he will be appreciated, namely, Byzantium. He hopes that he will thus be able to defeat time, because art is timeless. He wants to sail from sensual music made by the birds-that ‘dying generation’ to the ethereal music made by the By Byzantine birds of hammered goal and goal enameling. And, yet, in spite of the favor of his resolution, this is a poem of regret, uncertainty and the rootless ness that follows rejections.

Further, his symbolism is fully and firmly grounded in Irish mythology and legend and this fact imparts to it a precision, definiteness, a clear lucidity, which the French symbolism is wanting in. Yeats’ symbols are not vague or hazy. They have well-defined forms which perceptible meet the eye. They are thus not quite obscure and indistinct.

Yeats’ symbolism has yet another characteristic quality which makes it stand apart from the French symbolism. The symbols of Yeats are all-pervasive. There are certain key-symbols round which a number of poems are arranged, and each poem that follows in succeeding order throws light on foregoing ones and illuminates their sense. For example, in The Rose Volume of verses, rose is the key-symbol. In these poems, rose symbolically stands for intellectual Beauty, beauty of woman (particularly that of Maud Gonne), austerity and also Ireland. Such symbols are not adapted suddenly on the spur of the moment but they are firmly planted in mythology and legends. Likewise, in the poem The Wild Swans at Coole, the swan is the ever-recurring symbol. Another symbol which constantly glitters in Yeats’ poetry is Helen, symbolizing destructive beauty, and the linking up of Helen with Dierdre and Maud Gonne furnishes to the poems like No Second Troy an unthinkable vastness, complexity and continuous expansiveness. As his art grew to maturity, Yeats’ symbols become more and more complex and personal. This complex nature of symbols is manifest in the poems included in The Tower and The Winding Stair group of the poems. The Tower symbol partakes of both traditional and personal character. It was a tower of real physical existence where the poet lived for some time, and at the same time it is used as a symbol of loneliness and isolation, a secluded place of retreat for the poet.

In A Prayer for my Daughter; the tower hints at the poet’s vision of the dark and dismal future of humanity. All these associations and suggestions associated with the tower, make it a symbol of high complexity. While they add to the richness and elegance of the poem they also add to the perplexity and bewilderment of the reader. The complexity of symbolism is no less intriguing in the Byzantium group of the poems. Such intricacy of symbols increases the obscurity of Yeats’ poetry. Yeats was a symbolist from the very outset of his poetic career up to the last, even before and after the brief spell of the French influence. As his powers attained maturity, his symbols acquired richness of associations, evocative quality and intricacy. Symbolism enabled him to make his vision and traces concrete and substantial. Only in this way he could convey to his readers a definite picture of his vague, fleeting sensations and experiences. Symbolism helped him to express the richness of man’s deeper reality, something mystical in essence.

When we slot figures neatly onto the plinths of our national pantheon, the heroic status we make often require some scrubbing before they are fit to be viewed by the public. Figures of national renown are scrubbed clean of their more radical thoughts- Martin Luther King Jr’s avowed leftism for example- in order to turn them into saints with simple stories who we can praise without wrestling with complex ideological questions.

As the Irish people raised W.B. Yeats to his exalted place in the national pantheon of artists and thinkers- can there be a higher form of worship than having bored 17 year olds learn your work by rote?- I’ve already discussed how we scrubbed him of his fascination with all things mystical and occult. But another fact about Yeats’ preoccupations has been bleached from our monuments to him and sees no mention in the rote dronings of leaving cert English teachers around the country: his sympathy for Fascism.

Fascism today is an ideological bogeyman, a word that conjures images of some of the most brutal regimes to ever wield an iron fist over countries and peoples; images of purges and secret police and genocide. Yeats lived at the dawn of the 20th century when Fascism had none of the grime and bloodstains that it wears now and when it seemed to many like an ascendant utopian ideology that would defend countries from the evils of modern decay and act as a bulwark against the spectre of communist regimes.

Yeat’s closest intellectual peers, modernists such as Ezra Pound and TS Eliot, were no strangers to fascist sympathising and Pound especially was well known for his extolling the virtues of Mussolini’s fascist regime in Italy even up to the end of the second world war when the horrors of fascism had been laid bare for the world. For a young, romantic, nationalist like Yeats, Fascism with its talk of the “national spirit” and “national myths”, would of course hold a great deal of appeal. The rituals, ceremony and elaborate symbolism so beloved of Mussolini and Hitler were reflective of and inspired by much of the same esoteric and occult work that Yeats was such a great admirer of.

Yeats found greater sympathy with the ultranationalism of fascists than he did with left wing thinkers of the time Yeats’ political interests began with Irish nationalism and the struggle for Irish independence and that is where many leaving cert essays would have you believe his political thoughts ended. But at the time nationalism was on a continuum with fascism and Yeats found greater sympathy with the ultranationalism of fascists than he did with left wing thinkers of the time, who largely wished for the destruction of the nation state as an entity. Beyond mere nationalism and a love of symbolism however, Yeats admired the racial supremacist theories of fascist. In the great “Under Bel Bulben” one can happily trip through the gorgeous flower patches of Yeats’ flowing verse without taking note of his mention of “base born products of base beds”, a sharp thorn hidden among the blossoming stanzas. This line and others betray Yeats’ enthusiasm for eugenics, a form of thinking popular at the time which suggested that “unfit” people be sterilised so that only the strongest and most capable members of society could reproduce and thus society would grow stronger and more able.

Yeats view of this new-fangled “democracy” thing that was so in vogue at the time was a dim one. He spoke, in his revered work The Second Coming of how “The best (the aristocratic upper classes) lack all conviction, while the worst (the vast majority of working class people) are filled with passionate intensity”. The same Romantic and mythical fascinations that produced such glowing and exalted verse also led Yeats to a very conservative and traditionalist view of society as something in steep decline from the glory of ancient times where the great masses must be restrained for force. In his time in the senate he was well known as a liberal advocate for divorce but on issues such as the death penalty and the use of public floggings as punishment, he was decidedly less progressive. Yeats also briefly flirted with and supported the nascent Irish fascist movement of Eoin O’Duffy and the Blueshirts although he would later come to reject their antics as a farce, while still retaining much of the substance of their ideology and their aims.

I am an outspoken fan of Yeats and will forever maintain that his work stands among not only the best of Irish verse, but the best English language poetry period. It is precisely for this reason that I reject the squeaky clean image of him wheeled out on his 150th anniversary this year and wish instead to see Yeats warts and all, fairies and fascist tendencies intact. For in order to perceive all the nuances of his work we must delve into all the nooks and crannies of the man himself, even the darkest and most blood soaked ones.

Yeats believed that art and politics were intrinsically linked and used his writing to express his attitudes toward Irish politics, as well as to educate his readers about Irish cultural history. From an early age, Yeats felt a deep connection to Ireland and his national identity, and he thought that British rule negatively impacted Irish politics and social life. His early compilation of folklore sought to teach a literary history that had been suppressed by British rule, and his early poems were Odes to the beauty and mystery of the Irish countryside. This work frequently integrated references to myths and mythic figures, including Oisin and Cuchulain. As Yeats became more involved in Irish politics—through his relationships with the Irish National Theatre, the Irish Literary Society, the Irish Republican Brotherhood, and Maud Gonne—his poems increasingly resembled political manifestos. Yeats wrote numerous poems about Ireland’s involvement in World War I, “A Meditation in Time of War”, Irish nationalists and political activists, “In Memory of Eva Gore Booth and Con Markiewicz”, and the Easter Rebellion. Yeats believed that art could serve a political function: poems could both critique and comment on political events, as well as educate and inform a population.

Yeats’s devotion to mysticism led to the development of a unique spiritual and philosophical system that emphasized the role of fate and historical determinism, or the belief that events have been preordained. Yeats had rejected Christianity early in his life, but his lifelong study of mythology, Theosophy, spiritualism, philosophy, and the occult demonstrate his profound interest in the divine and how it interacts with humanity. Over the course of his life, he created a complex system of spirituality, using the image of interlocking gyres (similar to spiral cones) to map out the development and reincarnation of the soul. Yeats believed that history was determined by fate and that fate revealed its plan in moments when the human and divine interact. A Tone of historically determined inevitability permeates his poems, particularly in descriptions of situations of human and divine interaction. The divine takes on many forms in Yeats’s poetry, sometimes literall, sometimes abstractly. In other poems, the divine is only gestured to (as in the sense of the divine in the Byzantine mosaics in “Sailing to Byzantium”. No matter what shape it takes, the divine signals the role of fate in determining the course of history.

Yeats started his long literary career as a romantic poet and gradually evolved into a modernist poet. When he began publishing poetry in the 1880s, his poems had a lyrical, romantic style, and they focused on love, longing and loss, and Irish myths. His early writing follows the conventions of romantic verse, utilizing familiar rhyme schemes, metric patterns, and poetic structures. Although it is lighter than his later writings, his early poetry is still sophisticated and accomplished. Several factors contributed to his poetic evolution: his interest in mysticism and the occult led him to explore spiritually and philosophically complex subjects. Yeats’s frustrated romantic relationship with Maud Gonne caused the starry-eyed romantic idealism of his early work to become more knowing and cynical. Additionally, his concern with Irish subjects evolved as he became more closely connected to nationalist political causes. As a result, Yeats shifted his focus from myth and folklore to contemporary politics, often linking the two to make potent statements that reflected political agitation and turbulence in Ireland and abroad.

Finally, and most significantly, Yeats’s connection with the changing face of literary culture in the early twentieth century led him to pick up some of the styles and conventions of the modernist poets. The modernists experimented with verse forms, aggressively engaged with contemporary politics, challenged poetic conventions and the literary tradition at large, and rejected the notion that poetry should simply be lyrical and beautiful. These influences caused his poetry to become darker, edgier, and more concise. Although he never abandoned the verse forms that provided the sounds and rhythms of his earlier poetry, there is still a noticeable shift in style and tone over the course of his career.