Ireland is not a big country. But in terms of its contribution to world literature, it punches far above its weight. In fact, you could make the argument (people do) that in the twentieth century it produced both the greatest poet and the greatest novelist in the English language. We’ve already talked about Bloomsday and the celebration of Joyce’s Ulysses. This post focuses on W.B. Yeats, a favourite of ours for decades. We are lucky enough to be here in Dublin while the National Library of Ireland has a wonderful exhibition on about Yeats and his family (we’ve been twice!).
Early Life
William Butler Yeats was born on 13 June 1865 in Sandymount, a suburb of Dublin. But shortly after his birth the family moved to Sligo, where his mother, Susan Mary Pollexfen, came from. The area was to have a profound effect on him, and became his spiritual home. His siblings were important artists too. His brother Jack was a painter (there are some fine paintings of his in the Hugh Lane Gallery and the National Gallery of Ireland, both in Dublin, and one of them is our featured image). And his sisters, Elizabeth and Susan, were part of the Arts & Crafts movement. The family spent time in London, but by the age of 16 Yeats was back in Dublin attending the Erasmus Smith High School. He was not a distinguished student, perhaps hindered by the fact that he was dyslexic. That said, his best subject seems to have been Latin! He began writing poetry as a teenager.
Throughout his life he interested himself in mysticism, spiritualism (both popular at the time), and mythology, especially Irish mythology. He’s one of the forces behind the collection of traditional Celtic stories. In his mid-twenties he was initiated into the Golden Dawn, a mystical society whose influence was to remain with him his whole life. And, quite apart from their influence on his poems, he wrote many studies of fairies, ghosts, and even Gaelic love songs. One collection of his writing on Irish myth and folklore is almost 500 pages long. Some critics feel that his later poetry, especially influenced by his deepening interest in mysticism, is less accomplished than the work of his youth and middle age.
Poetry
One of our favourite poems from his early years is ‘The Stolen Child’, based on an Irish myth, but already showing the depth of feeling that he could achieve with traditional material. The last stanza in particular captures beautifully the tension between the familiar and the lure of the strange, the human and the supernatural:
Away with us he's going, The solemn-eyed: He'll hear no more the lowing Of the calves on the warm hillside Or the kettle on the hob Sing peace into his breast, Or see the brown mice bob Round and round the oatmeal chest. For he comes, the human child, To the waters and the wild With a faery, hand in hand, For the world's more full of weeping than he can understand.
]Yeats’ most famous poem, perhaps, ‘The Second Coming’, came out in 1921. Although he meant it to be a poem about that particular historical moment, its first verse recurs regularly in quotation as an apt portrait of the contemporary world:
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Politics
One of the more problematic aspects of Yeats’ life was his persistent attraction to authoritarianism. He liked a number of nationalist movements in the early twentieth century, disliked democratic governments, and went so far as to praise Mussolini. He served in the first Irish senate in 1922, where he played an important role in the new Irish republic. A Protestant, he warned that an attempt to impose Catholic teachings as law would result in a wedge driven between north and south. (Boy was he right!) He retired from the Senate in 1928 because of ill health.
He was a fierce supporter of Ireland developing its own literary identity. Indeed, he founded the Irish Literary Society in 1892 and in 1899 co-founded the Irish Literary Theatre, both as venues for Irish writers. That theatre became in 1904 the Abbey Theatre. On opening night, 27 December 1904, one of the plays performed was Yeats’ On Baile Strand. (Yeats was a prolific playwright, composing more than twenty of them. In fact, his Nobel prize citation in 1923 focused on his plays.) His strong love of Irish literature appears in ‘Under Ben Bulben’:
Irish poets learn your trade Sing whatever is well made Scorn the sort now growing up All out of shape from toe to top. ... Cast your mind on other days That we in coming days may be Still the indomitable Irishry.
Death
Yeats died in France on 28 January 1939. Some years later his body, buried in France, was moved to St Columba’s Church, Drumcliff, County Sligo. That’s a place he refers to at the end of ‘Under Ben Bulben’, with its famous final order:
Under bare Ben Bulben's head
In Drumcliff churchyard Yeats is laid,
An ancestor was rector there
Long years ago; a church stands near
By the road an ancient Cross.
No marble, no conventional phrase,
On limestone quarried near the spot
By his command these words are cut:
Cast a cold eye
On life, on death.
Horseman, pass by!
