W.

B Yeats (1865-1939)
Biography
• Born in: Dublin, Ireland in 1865.
• Moved to London along with his family in 1876.
• Influenced by: Percy Bysshe Shelley & Edmund Spenser
• Driving force behind the Celtic Revival/Irish Literary Renaissance.
• 1889: Met Maud Gonne (Got rejected many times). [described her beauty in No Second Troy]
• 1890: joined Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn & founded Rhymers’ Club
• collaborated with the likes of Lady Gregory, Edward Martyn and George Moore to establish The
Irish Literary Theatre for the purpose of performing Irish and Celtic plays.
• 1894: became acquainted with Olivia Shakespeare, a British novelist and playwright. The two
began an affair even though Olivia was married at that time. The affair came to an end in 1897.
• Later proposed Gonne’s daughter Iseult (Rejected).
• 1904: Founded the Abbey Theatre/ National Theatre of Ireland.
• 1913: Yeats wrote the preface for the English translation of Rabindranath Tagore's
‘Gitanjali’ (Song Offering), the seminal work which earned Tagore the Nobel Prize in literature
that year.
• 1917: 51 years old Yeats married 25 years old Georgie Hyde Less.
• 1922: he was appointed Senator for the Irish Free State, a position he held for six years.
• 1923: Become first Irishman awarded Noble Prize.
• The Nobel Committee described as "his always inspired poetry, which in a highly artistic form
gives expression to the spirit of a whole nation".
• Died on: January 28, 1939, at the age of 73, at the Hôtel Idéal Séjour, in Menton, France.

Works
1. The Wanderings of Oisin, and Other Poems (1889)
• Based on: Irish Saga
• Books: 3
• Celebrates ancient Irish heroes such as Oisin and St. Patrick
• Quote
- You who are bent, and bald, and blind,
With a heavy heart and a wandering mind,

2. The Lake Isle of Innisfree (1890)

• twelve-lines poem comprising three quatrains
• Quotes
- I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made;
- While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
I hear it in the deep heart's core.

3. The Celtic Twilight (1893)

4. Song of Wandering Aengus (1899)
• first printed under the title “A Mad Song in 1897 in The Sketch
• describes Aengus’ quest to find a girl he once saw in his youth.
• Talks about: institution of love & fishing
• Quotes
- It had become a glimmering girl/With apple blossom in her hair
 - I went out to the hazel wood, /Because a fire was in my head,
- Golden apple of sun / silver apple of the moon
• Adaptation
- Ray Bradbury has titled one of his short story collections – Golden Apples of the Sun – after
the last line of a W.B. Yeats poem “The Song of Wandering Aengus”.

5. In Memory of Major Robert Gregory (1919)

• Elegy on the death of Major Robert Gregory, son of Lady Augusta Gregory.
• Stanzas: 12
• People Mentioned: Lionel Johnson, John Synge, George Pollexfen (his uncle), Philip Sidney
• Quotes
• Lionel Johnson comes the first to mind,
that loved his learning better than mankind.
though courteous to the worst… A little nearer to his thought / A measureless consummation
that he dreamed.
• And that enquiring man John Synge comes next,
that dying chose the living world for text
and never could have rested in the tomb…
but that, long travelling,
in a most desolate stony place,
towards nightfall upon a race
passionate and simple like his heart.
• And then I think of old George Pollexfen,
In muscular youth well known to Mayo men
For horsemanship at meets or at racecourses, … By opposition, square and trine;
Having grown sluggish and contemplative
• Our Sidney and our perfect man,
Could share in that discourtesy of death.
• A fitter welcome; but a thought
Of that late death took all my heart for speech.
6. The Second Coming (1920)
• Published in: The Dial
• Lines: 22 lines
• About: the destruction cause by WWI
• First stanza: describes a world of chaos, confusion, and pain.
• The second: longer stanza imagines the speaker receiving a vision of the future, but this vision
replaces Jesus's heroic return with what seems to be the arrival of a grotesque beast.
• Plot
- Flying around and around in a widening spiral, a falcon can no longer hear the call of its
owner. Things are breaking down, and their foundation is giving way. Pure destruction and
lawlessness have spread across the world, and so has a tidal wave darkened by blood. All the
rituals of innocence have been swallowed by this tide. The best people aren't motivated to act,
but the worst people are impassioned and eager.
- Some kind of revelation has to happen soon, and the Second Coming itself must be close.
Excitedly, the speaker exclaims: "The Second Coming!" But just as the speaker says this, a
vision comes to the speaker from the world's collective unconscious. The speaker sees a barren
desert land, where a creature with a man's head and a lion's body is coming to life. Its
expression is, like the sun, empty and without pity. Its legs are moving slowly, and all around
it fly the shadows of disturbed desert birds. Everything becomes dark again, but the speaker
knows something new: two thousand years of calm have been irreversibly disrupted by the
 shaking of a cradle. The speaker asks: what beast, whose time has finally come, is dragging
itself towards Bethlehem, where it will be born.
• Quotes
- Turning and turning in the widening gyre/ The falcon cannot hear the falconer;/ Things fall
apart; the centre cannot hold;
- And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, / Slouches towards Bethlehem to be
born?
- When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi/ Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the
desert
• Adaptation
- Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (title) is drawn from a poem by W. B. Yeats “Second
coming”.

7. The Tower (1920)

• first major collection as Nobel Laureate after receiving the Nobel Prize in 1923
• speaker is compared to Homer
• Yeats laments his lost love for Maude Gonne, and ruminates on how to reconcile the difference
between his youthful spirit and his aging body.

8. Easter 1916 (1921)

• Talks about: The Easter Rising of Ireland in 1916
• balances critique of the rebellion and its political extremism with admiration for the rebels'
dedication and bravery.
• Allusion
- That woman  Constance Gore - Booth Markievicz
- His helper and friend  Thomas MacDonagh
- This man Padraic Pearse
- Drunken, vainglorious lout  MacBride (husband of Maud Gonne)
• Quotes
- I have met them at close of day
Coming with vivid faces
From counter or desk among grey
Eighteenth-century houses.
- That woman's days were spent
in ignorant good-will,
her nights in argument
until her voice grew shrill.
- Are changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.
- Too long a sacrifice
can make a stone of the heart.
o when may it suffice?
9. No Second Troy (1921)
• Lines: 12
• Published in 1921 in the collection titled The Green Helment and Other Poems
• short lyric is half criticism and half tribute to that Irish Revolutionary lady, who worked
devotedly to the cause of Irish freedom struggle with her husband MacBride.
• Describes Maud Gonne’s beauty as exceptional & destructive similar to Helen of Troy
• Quotes
- Why should I blame her that she filled my days?
 with misery, or that she would of late
- With beauty like a tightened bow, a kind
that is not natural in an age like this,
being high and solitary and most stern?
why, what could she have done, being what she is?
was there another troy for her to burn?
10. A Vision (1925)
• Given the theory of Gyres
• has been compared to Eureka: A Prose Poem, the final major work of Edgar Allan Poe

11. Among School Children

• Form: ottava rima
• Stanzas: 8
• emphasizes the poet's new role as a senator, a possible mentor. This is undercut, however, by the
poet lustfully imagining what the woman he loves looked like when she was the age of these
children.
• Plato: the world as unreal, a mere reflection of ideas
• Aristotle: talked about Alexander the great
• Pythagoras: talking about great musicians and how they are hearing the sound of other planets

12. Leda and the Swan

• Referred to: future ruin of Troy and the murder of Agamemnon
• Lines: 14 (Petrarchan sonnet)
• Retells the classic Greek myth in which Leda, a human woman, is impregnated by the god Zeus
while he is in the form of a swan. This conception results in the birth of Helen of Troy, who grows
up to cause the legendary Trojan War—an event that, in turn, becomes the catalyst for the Golden
Age of Greece and the dawn of modern history.
• Quotes
- A sudden blow: the great wings beating still
Above the staggering girl,
- Did she put on his knowledge with his power
Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?

13. Sailing to Byzantium (1926)

• Rhyme Scheme: Ottava Rima
• about the difficulty of keeping one’s soul alive in a fragile, failing human body. The speaker, an
old man, leaves behind the country of the young for a visionary quest to Byzantium, the ancient
city that was a major seat of early Christianity. There, he hopes to learn how to move past his
mortality and become something more like an immortal work of art.
• Quote
- That is no country for old men.
- O sages standing in God's holy fire / As in the gold mosaic of a wall,”
- But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make / Of hammered gold and gold enamelling”
- O sages standing in God's holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
- Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
- An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
- Of what is past, or passing, or to come
14. Coole Park and Ballylee (1931)
• six stanza poem that’s divided into sets of eight lines, known as octets.
• The poem takes the reader through the scenery of Coole Park and Ballylee, connecting the natural
landscapes to the changing face of Ireland as a whole. Yeats, who is very likely the speaker in the
poem, expresses his sadness over the changes he sees happening and the loss of better times,
more romantic (and Romantic), times. The details in this poem are vague and specific. He
references rooms, experiences, and sights that are very clear in his own mind but combine
together to form a landscape of emotion for the reader to interpret.
• Quotes
- We were the last Romantics – chose for theme Traditional sanctity and loveliness;
- Sound of a stick upon the floor
- Under my window-ledge the waters race,
Otters below and moor-hens on the top,
- Though mounted in that saddle Homer rode
Where the swan drifts upon a darkening flood.

Eastern works
◦ The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems (London: Kegan Paul, 1889)
◦ 'The Way of Wisdom', The Speaker (14 April 1900), pp.40-1
◦ King of the Great Clock Tower - reply to Tagore’s The King of the Dark Chamber
◦ Preface to Rabindranath Tagore, Gitanjali (London: India Society, 1913)
◦ Preface to Rabindranath Tagore, The Post Office (London: Macmillan, 1914)
◦ Introduction to Shri Purohit Swami, An Indian Monk (London, Macmillan, 1932)
◦ The Winding Stair and Other Poems (London: Macmillan, 1933)
◦ Introduction to Bhagwan Shri Hamsa, The Holy Mountain (London: Faber & Faber,
1934), translated by Shri Purohit Swami
◦ Shri Purohit Swami and W. B. Yeats, The Ten Principal Upanishads (London: Faber &
Faber, 1937)
◦ Autobiographies (London: Macmillan, 1955)
 Rhymers’ Club/Decadent of 1890s
• a group of London-based male poets
• founded in 1890 by W. B. Yeats and Ernest Rhys.
• met at the London pub 'Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese' in Fleet Street & in the 'Domino Room' of the
Café Royal.
• later called the "Tragic Generation."
Members
• W.B Yeats
• T.W Rolleston
• Ernest Rhys
• Ernest Dowson
• Lionel Johnson
• Francis Thompson
• Richard Le Gallienne
• John Gray (inspiration for Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray)
• Arthur Symons (wrote Symbolist Movement in Literature)

Abbey Theatre
• Also known as National Theatre of Ireland
• Founders: Lady Gregory, Edward Martyn & W. B. Yeats
• First opening to the public on 27 December 1904, and despite losing its original building to a
fire in 1951, it has remained active to the present day.
• Rebuilt: 1966
• closely associated with the Irish Literary Revival/Irish Literary Renaissance-- a revival of
interest in Ireland's Gaelic heritage and the growth of Irish nationalism from the middle of the
19th century.

The Ghost Club

• a paranormal investigation and research organization, founded in London in 1862
• Writer associated: Charles Dickens, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Frederick Bligh Bond & W.B
Yeats (Only imp fact for NET)
• dissolved in the 1870s following the death of Dickens
• club was revived on All Saints Day 1882 by the medium Stainton Moses and Alaric Alfred Watts
 Previous Year Questions
• Michael Roberts’s anthology Faber Book of Modern Verse (1936) canonized modern poetry
and poets for quite some decades. The collection begins with the poems of Conrad Aiken. Roberts
omitted the Georgian poets in his anthology. Yet Yeats, Eliot and Pound find a place in the Faber
Book of 1936.
• The following lines are matched with the respective poems in which they appear:
 “I leant upon a coppice gate …” - “The Darkling Thrush” by Thomas Hardy
 “A sudden blow: the great wings beating still ...” - “Leda and the Swan” by W. B. Yeats
 “Among twenty snowy mountains …” - “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” by Wallace
Stevens
 “I know what the caged bird feels, alas! ...” - “Sympathy” by Paul Laurence Dunbar
• The future ruin of Troy and the murder of Agamemnon are referred to by W. B. Yeats in “Leda and
Swan”.
• A sudden blow: the great wings beating still Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed by the
dark webs, her nap caught in his bill, He holds her helpless breast upon his breast ... These lines
are from “Leda and Swan” (1924), a sonnet by Yeats.
• The Tower by W. B. Yeats and The Waste Land by T. S. Eliot were published in the 1920s.
• W. B. Yeats collaborated with Purohit Swami in translating the Ten Principal Upanishads into
English.
• “Sailing to Byzantium” by W. B. Yeats repudiates the sensual world in favour of “the artifice of
eternity”.
• These following images are part of W.H. Auden’s poem “In Memory of W.B. Yeats”.
 “Mercury sinking in the mouth of the dying day”
 “Wolves running through evergreen forests”
 “Silence invading the suburbs”
• The chronological order in which the following elegies appeared is “Lycidas”, Adonais, “Thyrsis”
and “In Memory of W B Yeats”.
• ‘The parish of rich women, physical decay, / Yourself…’ - These lines make W. B. Yeats appear silly
in W. H. Auden’s view.
• The title Things Fall Apart is drawn from a poem by W. B. Yeats “Second coming”.
• "In the deserts of the heart/ Let the healing fountain start, / In the prison of his days, / Teach the
free man how to praise" are lines from "In Memory of W. B. Yeats" by Auden.
• In a poem written In Memory of Major Robert Gregory, Lady Gregory’s son, W.B. Yeats
mentions an Irish writer, J. M. Synge who had found his inspiration “In a most desolate stony place”
that he came “Towards nightfall upon a race/ passionate and simple like his heart.”
• Ray Bradbury has titled one of his short story collections – Golden Apples of the Sun – after the last
line of a W.B. Yeats poem “The Song of Wandering Aengus”.
• The chronological order of the lifetime of the following writers is W. B. Yeats, T. S. Eliot, Nadine
Gordimer and Seamus Heaney.
• Lady Gregory, W. B. Yeats and J. M. Synge were associated with the Irish Dramatic Movement.
• “He disappeared in the dead of winter ...” - “In Memory of W. B. Yeats” by Auden
• The year 1939 proved to be a crucial year for two important writers in England: For Yeats who died
and for Auden who left England for the U. S.
• Harold Bloom wrote influential commentaries on such poets as Shelley, Blake and Yeats, published
works such as The Anxiety of Influence, A Map of Misreading, Poetry and Repression
and The Western Canon. He also asserted that most literary criticism is but slightly disguised
religion. He is, arguably, the most widely known and contrarian among his American peers in the
English Academy.
• “We were the last Romantics” appears in a poem by W.B. Yeats. (Coole Park and Ballylee, 1931)
• The following lines are from the poems of W. B. Yeats.
 “Sound of a stick upon the floor" - "Coole Park and Ballylee, 1931"
 "Hade's bobbin bound in mummy cloth" – “Byzantium”
 "With beauty like a tightened bow" - "No Second Troy"
 "A tattered coat upon a stick" - "Sailing to The Byzantium”
• W. B. Yeats employs Ottava Rima in his poem "Among School Children".
• A poem “Among School Children” by Yeats from Under the Tower Collection that opens with
the lines: I walk through the long schoolroom questioning; A kind old nun in a white hood replies;
The children learn to cipher and to sing …
• “Consume my heart away; sick with desire/ And fastened to a dying animal.” The above lines are
taken from “Sailing to Byzantium” by Yeats.
• Yeats developed his theory of ‘gyres’ in his book A Vision (1925).
• The right chronological sequence is: The Scottish Chaucerian – The University Wits – The
Transitional Poets – The Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood – The Rhymers’ Club.
• W. B. Yeats’s "Easter 1916" is a response to a major political uprising.
• That woman's days were spent in ignorant good-will, Her nights in argument Until her voice
grew shrill” (W. B. Yeats: “Easter 1916”). The poet referring to Constance Gore - Booth Markievicz