Yeats, W.B.

(William Butler), 1865-1939

McAuley, Jenny . ProQuest Biographies ; Ann Arbor   Ann Arbor: ProQuest. (2009)

ProQuest document link

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(1865-1939), poet and dramatist, is widely acknowledged to be among both the greatest and the most complex
figures in modern Irish literature. His career spanned the epochs of late Romanticism, and the high Modernism of
the early twentieth century, covering also some of the most turbulent episodes and periods of Ireland's history.
Yeats's highly-refined, formally-sophisticated poetic style, and his committed sense of the social function of the
artist, have continued to inspire the poets of many countries. His engagements with the occult, and with esoteric
philosophies can, however, be mystifying to some readers; and his ultimately extremely elitist, individualistic
politics have also tended to prove controversial.
The product of a traditionally Protestant, 'Ascendancy' (or Anglo-Irish) background, Yeats was born in Dublin on 13
June 1865, the eldest of four surviving children who included his sisters Lily and Lollie, with whom he co-founded
the Cuala Press in 1904. His father, John Butler Yeats, claimed descent from the noble Norman clan of the Butlers,
while his mother, Susan, was from an English family, the Pollexfens, members of which had settled in the Irish
county of Sligo during the 1830s, and established a successful shipping firm. At the time of William's birth, John
Butler Yeats was still a practising barrister, but in 1867 he gave up this profession in order to pursue a career as an
artist. The same year he moved his family to London, where he considered he would find the best opportunities of
achieving his ambition, gaining access to the circles of such prominent Irish émigrés as Lady Wilde. The young
Yeats divided the rest of his time as a child between England and Ireland, attending the Godolphin School,
Hammersmith, and subsequently Erasmus Smith High School, while also spending periods with his Pollexfen
relations in Sligo.
A shy and awkward child, Yeats seems not to have been a successful pupil at his schools, where he was also a
target for bullies. His childhood -- and most of his adult life -- was most of all overshadowed, however, by the
influence of his passionately supportive, but also sometimes domineering father, who was determined that he
would realise what he regarded as the family's strong creative potential. Having taught his eldest son to read as a
small child, John Butler Yeats also introduced him to the intellectual and political concepts that came to inform his
entire career. Central to these was the cause for Irish Home Rule, at this period being agitated for by 'Fenian'
activists in both Ireland and England. By the time Yeats reached his mid teens, his family was again based in
Dublin, where he accompanied his father to meetings of the Contemporary Club, a group of artists and intellectuals
who included the Irish nationalist journalist John O'Leary, a veteran of the mid-century 'Young Ireland' movement. It
was O'Leary who provided the first significant boosts to Yeats's career as a poet, helping him to place pieces in
Irish and American periodicals.
Yeats had begun writing poetry seriously in the early 1880s, his first published work being some lyric verses that
appeared in the Dublin University Review, a magazine founded by the Irish Protestant nationalist C.H. Oldham in
1885. During this year, Yeats abandoned studies at the Metropolitan School of Art in order to write, though his
keen, often fastidious visual sensibility would survive in not only his poetry but also his dramatic works, with their
meticulously detailed directions regarding scenery and other visual effects. To this period belongs his most
famous lyric, 'The Lake Isle of Innisfree' (1887), the three stanzas of which encompass such essential elements of
his entire art as his preference for first-person speakers, his acute senses of place and atmosphere, and his

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containment of shimmering, ethereal imagery and diction within tightly, but subtly, disciplined formal and metrical
structures. At the same time, he had begun cultivating what became lifelong interests in folklore, and in mystical
spirituality and transcendental philosophy, fuelled especially by readings in , and , as well as in more recent studies
such as A.P. Sinnett's The Occult World (1881), an account which related the supposed abilities of Western
spiritual mediums and mystics to the characteristic beliefs and practices of certain Indian and Tibetan religous
communities.
Around 1885, Yeats and some friends set up their own Dublin Hermetic Society, the mission of which was to seek
meanings for human life and society from beyond the 'materialist' scope of conventional political and scientific
thought. It was also during the late 1880s that Yeats began to produce the articles on Irish folk beliefs in ghosts,
witchcraft, and fairies that formed the basis of such later studies as The Celtic Twilight (1893). When his family
moved back to London in 1887, he joined the Theosophical Society, which had been recently founded by . Central
to 's teachings was an idea of the world as conditioned by conflicts of eternally-opposed, and not exclusively
material, elements, all existing in a continual state of flux. While convinced that the human race could only realise
its potential by recognising and embracing the paranormal forces in the world around it, however, did not favour
what she considerered to be such dangerous occult practices as seances. Yeats's own keennness to pursue
practical psychic investigations led him into clashes with this mentor, and, though she initally consented to his
and others' formation of an 'Esoteric Section' for the controlled conduct of such experiments within the Society,
she would ask him to leave it in 1890.
Yeats had also already become involved with the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. Formed in 1888, this was
one of various secret, occultist societies that had begun to proliferate across Europe in the closing decades of the
nineteenth century, and especially among the milieux of bohemian artists and intellectuals frustrated by the
prevailing commercial and materialist ethos of the period. Its members shared with the Theosophists the belief
that spiritual truths could be divined through engagement with non-material extra-sensory strata of existence and
experience. Unlike the Theosophists, however, they attempted directly to access spiritual and other immaterial
energies for the control and manipulation of natural and material objects (including people) by performing magical
rituals based on the esoteric knowledge that they believed to be hidden in such ancient texts as the Hebrew
Kabbalah. The Order taught that such knowledge was only to be arrived at through a rigorous series of initiations
demanding assidious magical study, as well as ritual observances.
Yeats was initiated into the Order of the Golden Dawn on 7 March 1890, taking the ritual name 'Demon Est Deus
Inversus', and thus beginning an association that would endure until at least the early 1920s. As has explained in
his influential study, W.B. Yeats: The Man and the Masks (1948; revised 1978), Yeats discovered in the Order a
sense of fellowship with like-minded creatives and intellectuals, while through ritual uses of objects and
incantations he gained insights into 'the power of word or symbol to evoke a reality otherwise inaccessible' that
would crucially inform his contribution to the development of the Symbolist movement in early twentieth-century
European literature. In addition, and like others involved with such secret societies then and since, the previously
timid, sexually-inhibited young poet found in the Order a sense of power over his environment and circumstances
that in turn fostered an increase in social and sexual confidence.
Beyond his attendances at the studiedly secretive meetings of the Order of the Golden Dawn, Yeats was
establishing himself as a significant, and even iconic, presence in more public, literary spheres. Tall and dark, and
given to such romantic embellishments of dress as velvet cloaks and flowing silk cravats, he cut a strikingly
handsome and dramatic figure and became a favourite subject for portraitists, who over the years included John
Singer Sargent and Augustus John -- as well as John Butler Yeats. In 1890, Yeats became one of the founding
members of the Rhymers' Club, a group of young poets who met to read and discuss their work at the Cheshire
Cheese pub on Fleet Street. United by a desire to recover English poetry from the commercialised, sentimentalist
rut in which they considered it had stuck, and to restore to it the formal discipline of earlier ballad and troubadour
verse, these poets most notably included such figures as and , while among more occasional attendees at
meetings were and . The Rhymer to whom Yeats became closest was , whom he admired for his refined aesthetic

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sensibilities and impressive learnedness (the Winchester and Oxford-educated Johnson was a gifted classicist).
Having previously been unable to meet the entry requirements for Trinity College, Dublin, which then demanded
proficiency in classical languages, Yeats gained from a valuable grounding in the major literature and philosophies
of Western antiquity, while he in turn influenced 's thought on Irish culture and politics, as , a sympathetic
Englishman, became increasingly attached to the Irish nationalist cause. It was also who introduced Yeats to his
cousin, the novelist , who in 1896 became Yeats's first serious lover.
Yeats had published his first verse collection, The Wanderings of Oisin, in 1889. Its title piece was a retelling of the
legendary adventures of an Irish hero lured by fairies to Tir na n Og, or the Land of Youth. Having enjoyed immortal
youth for three hundred years, Oisin returns to an Ireland where the high deeds and hedonistic enjoyments of the
pagan, Fenian people have been ended by their conversion to Christianity by St Patrick. Oisin himself is
immediately stricken by the full effects of three hundred years of ageing -- a feature of the original Celtic narrative
that has led some critics to cite it as a possible source for 's The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890). Although
structured as a colloquy between Oisin and St Patrick, the poem is dominated by long passages of narrative, in
which Oisin recounts episodes including encounters with Niamh, his fairy bride, whose long hair and flowing white
vestments are evoked with a luxuriant diction that recalls contemporary Art Nouveau representations of ideal or
allegorical female figures. This characterisation of Niamh, however, is rooted in an older Irish literary tradition --
that of the aisling, a dream vision poem in which ideal desires are embodied in the form of a supernaturally
beautiful woman.
For Yeats, such a woman existed in his own life, 1889 having also been the year in which he met the dynamic and
imposingly beautiful actress and political activist , with whom he remained obsessed for almost another twenty
years. Like , was an English sympathiser in the Irish Home Rule cause, and was committed to developing an
authentically national art and literature for Ireland. She was in particular at the forefront of efforts to establish a
national theatre, in which cause Yeats began enthusiastically to participate from the late 1890s. His first
significant contribution to Irish theatre was his one-act verse drama The Land of Heart's Desire, which shared a
billing with 's Arms and the Man when it opened in 1894. Like Oisin, the play drew upon the rural Irish fairy lore that
Yeats recorded in The Celtic Twilight (1893). Its central character is Mary, a newly married peasant girl who
indulges fantasies of being led away by the fairies to a land of endless plenty and eternal youth. Her disapproving
parents-in-law and a local priest attempt to recall her to her duties as a good Catholic wife, but even they are
initially deceived by the innocent appearance of a strange, singing child who arrives in Mary's home, and lures her
soul away to the fairy lands.
The late 1890s saw Yeats based largely in London, where, having previously lived with his parents, he acquired a
residence of his own in 1895. Spurred by astrological intimations that a newly transformative epoch was about to
begin in Ireland, he was energetic in assisting the organisation of centenary commemorations of the 1798 rebellion
during this period. His poetic output had also continued steadily to increase at this time. In Crossways (1889), he
dealt again with the theme of abduction by fairies as release from mortal sorrows in 'The Stolen Child'; this
collection also included his popular lyric 'Down by the Salley Gardens,' the two quatrain stanzas of which convey
their speaker's regret at having wasted his youth in refusal to 'take love easy'. This volume was followed by The
Rose (1893). Dedicated to , this work alluded in its title, and in its opening invocation 'To the Rose Upon the Rood
of Time', to the ancient emblem of the mystical rose that would take on a variety of meanings throughout Yeats's
work. Also collected in this volume were the much-loved lyrics, 'The Lake Isle of Innisfree' and 'When You are Old',
as well as Yeats's forthright manifesto of his mission as a national poet, 'To Ireland in the Coming Times'. Having
invoked the names of such inspirational figures as and , he went on to assert, regarding the often cryptic-seeming
character of his own work:
In the face of the enthusiastic, sentimental followings that poems such as 'Innisfree' would attract, Yeats would
continue to insist that the true meanings of his poetry were accessible only to readers with the aesthetic and
intellectual insights necessary to elucidate their symbolism -- though the lasting popularity of the early lyrics, and
especially of his collected Poems (1895), had its value to him in the income it provided for the rest of his career.

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The poems of his last nineteenth-century collection, The Wind Among the Reeds (1899), were still more insistent in
privileging an ideal, non-material world of mystical experience above mere created nature. By contrast with such
other late nineteenth-century poets as , whose 'Pied Beauty' celebrated variety in nature, Yeats showed a
consistent distaste for grotesque or irregular forms or conditions (including those caused by simple ageing or
disability), which, for him, told only of the transience and imperfection of the material world. This 1899 collection
also contained 'He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven', the intricately-patterned, two-stanza poem which, alongside
'The Lake Isle of Innisfree', has become the most admired and reproduced of all Yeats's verse writings.
The plans of Yeats, and others for an Irish national theatre came to fruition in 1899, when the Irish Literary Theatre,
Dublin (renamed the Abbey Theatre in 1904), was inaugurated with Yeats's one-act verse drama The Countess
Cathleen. Set in Ireland during a time of famine, the play drew upon Irish folk accounts of people's exchanging their
own souls for those of loved ones taken by fairies, in its focus upon an aristocrat (the titular Countess) who
pledges her soul to the Devil in order to redeem starving peasants who have sold their own souls for food. The play
provoked outrage among Catholic nationalist commentators, who considered its representation of Irish peasants
as willing to forego their spiritual salvation in exchange for material comfort as not only blasphemous, but also
insulting and unpatriotic. Such responses disgusted Yeats, who from this period came increasingly to feel that
Ireland's best hopes of cultural regeneration lay not with its Catholic middle and working classes, but with the
Anglo-Irish Ascendancy that had held such powerful sway over the politics and culture of eighteenth-century
Ireland, and had brought -- as he believed -- such purity and elegance to its literature and architecture.
This shift in Yeats's perspective upon national identity was due partly to the beginning of his long association with
, a fellow collector of Irish folklore who became an important patron and mentor to him. In 1897 he spent the first
of many summers on 's Galway estate, Coole Park, where he collaborated with her in researching local folk beliefs
and superstitions, while also benefiting from her superior knowledge of the Irish language (which Yeats, despite
several attempts, was never able to master). With the beginning of the twentieth century, he distanced himself
further from the mainstream nationalist movement, which he considered had become contaminated by Catholic
religious dogma, and by what he perceived as the philistine, materialistic aspirations of the Catholic middle class
in particular. His rage at these elements of Irish society would reach its height in 1907, when 's The Playboy of the
Western World was denounced by nationalists as unpatriotic. There were other causes behind Yeats's
disenchantment with nationalist politics, bound up as these had been with his infatuation for . Having been
dismayed to discover, in 1898, that had since 1887 been the mistress of Lucien Millevoye, a French politican with
whom she had had two children, Yeats was further frustrated in 1903 when she married Major John MacBride of
the Irish Republican Brotherhood. With the failure of her marriage to MacBride, who was abusive towards her,
finally agreed to an affair with Yeats during 1908. Accounts suggest, however, that actual sexual relations between
them were unsatisfactory to both, and they soon returned to their former, ambiguous footing, with Yeats going on
to take mistresses including the actress Florence Farr.
Throughout the early 1900s and 1910s, Yeats continued his endeavours for the Abbey Theatre, with plays including
a collaboration with , Cathleen ni Houlihan (1902); and On Baile's Strand (1904), the first of a series of dramas
featuring the hero Cuchullain. In 1904, he helped his sisters to establish the Cuala Press, from which he published
many of his own subsequent volumes, each of which proclaimed their Irish origin in their decorations and
bibliographic information. Having already found important models in French Symbolist authors such as , Yeats
began to absorb further influences from beyond Ireland that would crucially inform his later works. During 1907 he
travelled to the Italian city of Ravenna, famed for its gold-encrusted Byzantine church mosaics. As he would later
explain in A Vision, Yeats found in such artworks the unity of creative vision and social function that he sought in
his own work, believing that 'in early Byzantium, maybe never before or since in recorded history, religious,
aesthetic and practical life were one, that architect and artificers [. . .] spoke to the multitude and the few alike'. He
found further inspiration in traditional Japanese Noh drama, a form in which masks, music and mythic allusions
featured heavily. Yeats was convinced of the rich possibilities that Noh theatre offered for western Symbolist
artists by the young , whom he employed as a secretary over three successive winters, from 1913. The highly

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stylised and ritualistic conventions of the Noh theatre would be first adopted by Yeats in At the Hawk's Well (1916),
a Cuchullain play structured around a debate between figures representing mature caution and youthful
impulsiveness.
Having made the first of a series of tours of the United States over 1903 and 1904, Yeats was fast consolidating
his international reputation. From his Bloomsbury base, he had become a central figure within the English literary
establishment, as well as in high society life (though he would decline a knighthood offered in 1915). Privately,
however, from around 1915 he found himself confronting new challenges on emotional and political levels alike
with the eventual fading of the passion for that had fuelled so much of his most successful earlier work, and with
the declaration of an Irish Republic by the insurgents who led the Easter Rising of 1916. The Rising, and the civil
war that followed it until Irish Home Rule was finally attained in 1922 (though only with the partition that left
Northern Ireland still under British rule), threw Yeats's political attitudes and his sense of poetic purpose into a
turmoil that, in the event, proved richly productive. His poem 'Easter 1916' was his supreme expression of the
ambivalence of his response to an event that had initially shocked him with its violence, but in the lasting impact
of which he could also discern 'a terrible beauty', despite his horror at the draconian punishments meted out by the
British to the leaders of the insurgency.
's husband having been executed for his part in the Rising, Yeats made a final, unsuccesful proposal of marriage to
her during 1916, before transferrring his affections to Iseult Gonne, Maud's twenty-two-year-old daughter by
Millevoye. After Iseult, too, rejected a proposal of marriage from him during the summer of 1917, Yeats took the
sudden step, in October of the same year, of marriage to Bertha Georgie ('George') Hyde-Lees. Herself aged only
twenty-five, George was the niece of , and had become close to Yeats during 1915, bonding with him over a shared
interest in psychic phenomena. It was this that saved their marriage from an early disintegration (threatened by
Yeats's continued feelings for Iseult Gonne), when George produced 'automatic' writings that convinced Yeats of
her worth to him not only sexually and emotionally, but also as a support to his creativity.
Yeats's creative renewal had already become apparent, however, in his 1917 collection The Wild Swans at Coole,
the autumnal-toned title (and opening) piece of which is a middle-aged speaker's meditation upon the contrast
between the continuing, self-renewing life of the swan population on the old Ascendancy estate, and the changes
he is experiencing in his individual, human life. The poem also displays a new artistic maturity, taking the plainer,
conversational tone that during the 1900s and 1910s had replaced the partly-declamatory, partly-dreamy registers
of Yeats's nineteenth-century output. Its simple grace and beauty of diction and imagery derives most particularly
from the poet's focus upon a limited range of objects for description, invoking only birds, sky, water, trees and
stones. Written during years that also saw him begin his prose Autobiographies, this collection also developed the
retrospective, at times almost documentary, manner that had first begun to emerge in Yeats's 1914 collection,
Responsibilities. This volume contained 'The Grey Rock', in which Yeats paid tribute to his 'Companions of the
Cheshire Cheese' (many of whom, including , had succumbed to the various fates that led him to refer to them as
the 'tragic generation'), and in The Wild Swans at Coole Yeats included 'In Memory of Major Robert Gregory', a
sequence of reminiscences of various literary and Ascendancy characters.
From 1922, Yeats, his wife, and their two children Michael and Anne, divided their time between a Dublin home, and
Thoor Ballylee, a semi-ruined Norman tower near to Coole Park that Yeats had had restored sufficently to make it
habitable. This latter location, along with his new experiences of marriage and fatherhood, provided the major
inspiration to Yeats's great 1928 collection, The Tower, although it was in 'Blood and the Moon', a poem from The
Winding Stair and Other Poems (1933) that Yeats would make his strongest statement of what Thoor Ballylee
meant to him, as an Ascendancy poet who claimed literary kinship with the great Irish writers of the eighteenth
century:
Not only was the tower an obviously phallic emblem of the ageing poet's belated experience of his own biological
fertility; its inner spiral staircase also represented for him a state of tension suggestive of his sense of his moment
in Irish history. Yeats had first begun to develop his emblem of the spiral form in Michael Robartes and the Dancer
(1921), a collection in which he had articulated his hopeful and fearful responses to the arrival of his children, and

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to the Irish Troubles and subsequent civil war, during which he was alike appalled by the Republicans' destruction
of so many 'big houses', and by the activities of the mercenary 'Black and Tan' forces deployed by the British
government. In the Michael Robartes poem 'The Second Coming', a 'spiralling' out of control is conveyed in the
opening lines: 'Turning and turning in the widening gyre / The falcon cannot hear the falconer'. The image of the
gyre had emerged from one of Yeats and his wife's automatic writing sessions in 1917, in which it was graphically
represented. The drawing showed two cones, the point of each penetrating the other, with both being imagined as
spinning in spiral motions. As explains, in a useful discussion in The Man and the Masks, the symbol of the gyre,
as well as conveying an obvious sexual meaning, 'provided Yeats with a splendid image to represent the
antinomies which had always been present in his mind'.
The Tower was further informed by Yeats's election to the Senate of the new Irish Free State in 1923, and his
characteristically ambivalent feelings about his active involvement in the cultural development of the nation. In
poems such as 'Meditations in Time of Civil War', and 'The Stare's Nest by My Window', Ireland is viewed as being
in a state of transition -- or of initiation -- the painful, though possibly necessary, stages of which can reveal only
limited meaning to the people experiencing them most directly. The same Ireland is evoked in the enigmatically
impressionistic prose of in the same period, her novel The Last September being in effect another statement of the
idea conveyed in Yeats's lines (from 'The Stare's Nest'), 'A man is killed, or a house burned, / Yet no clear fact to be
discerned'. In both The Tower and The Winding Stair Yeats developed his imagery of Byzantium to most
magnificent, and most critically-admired, effect, in 'Sailing to Byzantium' (The Tower), and 'Byzantium' (The
Winding Stair). Both pieces feature images of spiralling gyres that, in other poems, signify tensions and
ambiguities. However, in the culture where, as Yeats imagined, ethics and aesthetics might be alike served by the
artist's creation, confusions and contradictions become vital to the dynamics of the creative work. Accordingly, the
very word 'complexity' provides, in its repetition, a major structuring motif of the 1930 poem 'Byzantium'.
Although his health had begin to fail, Yeats remained energetically active as a public figure, consistently incurring
the disapproval of the Catholic Church and the conservative press not only for such blatantly erotic writings as his
sonnet 'Leda and the Swan', but also for the outspokenly individualist principles in which he had, by this period,
been most importantly inspired by . It has been for just such views that Yeats has also attracted most criticism
from later twentieth-century liberals -- his membership of the Eugenics Society, and his brief enthusiasm for
Fascism having proved most notorious. It was during travels in Italy in the late 1920s that Yeats became attracted
by the ideals of Mussolini, which appealed to his view of the superiority of government 'by the few' to more
democratic political models. Back in Ireland, an initial enthusiasm followed for the newly-formed 'blueshirt'
movement there (described by R.F. Foster as 'proto-fascist'), an enthusiasm expressed in some marching songs
that Yeats wrote for use by its members. He was soon repelled by what he saw as this strictly conservative (and
overtly Catholic) movement's inherent anti-intellectualism, and altered the songs to make them no longer suitable
for blueshirt use. His subsequent, occasional expressions of what his major biographer R.F. Foster has described
as 'ill-advised approval' of aspects of Third Reich Nazism have, however, left stubborn blots upon his reputation
among some later critics -- though Foster has also stressed Yeats's continued and firmly-held libertarian views,
finding him also innocent of anti-Semitism.
In his final collections, New Poems (1938) and Last Poems and Two Plays (1939), Yeats defied his own failing
physical energies with verses that in many instances deployed the jaunty, jig-like metres of traditional Irish folk
song with a self-consciously plain-spoken, and even vulgar, diction. Many critics have noted how, in old age, the
poet who had spent his youth in asserting the value of the ideal over the material and physical became
increasingly given to advocating sensual experience, in preference to the spiritual or transcendent (a shift in
perspective that some have ascribed to the treatment for impotence that Yeats underwent during 1934). In poems
such as those that made up the 'Crazy Jane' sequence, Yeats's deliberately irreverent tone and risqué subject
matter also represented his defiance of the increasingly repressive Catholic establishment attitudes that, at this
period, were driving so many Irish writers to pursue their careers overseas -- while his youthful, esoteric interests
were, in fact, to be rekindled in this period, through friendship with the Indian sage Shri Purohit Swami. Yeats's last

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plays, however, stand as darker expressions of his pessimism about the current state and achievements of the
new Irish republic, with Purgatory (1939) drawing upon the ghostly motifs prevalent in both Irish folklore and
Japanese Noh theatre in its bleak account of an old man's failure to appease the ancestral spirits that haunt his
ruined mansion.
Yeats died on 28 January 1939, whilst staying at Roquebrune in the south of France. The recipient of the Nobel
Prize for Literature (in 1923), and an eminent critic as well as poet (he had edited the Oxford Book of Modern Verse
in 1936, and was an authority on and ), Yeats was mourned across Europe and America as the pre-eminent Irish
man of letters of his generation, with tributes including 's poem on hearing of his death ('In Memory of W.B. Yeats').
Yeats's body was originally buried at Roquebrune, but following the end of the Second World War, it was reinterred
at Drumcliff, Sligo, with leading figures from Irish literature and politics in attendance. His importance to a
subsequent generation of Irish poets would be marked by the appearance of 's The Poetry of W.B. Yeats (1941),
one of the first full-length studies of Yeats, while some critics have also seen foreshadowings of in such late plays
as Purgatory. Beyond Ireland, his Wanderings of Oisin was an important early inspiration to , who also came to
share Yeats's occult and astrological preoccupations; while 's poetry of the mid-1950s period during which she met
and married Hughes would be steeped in the influence of the later works of Yeats -- whose former Bloomsbury
residence became 's own last home during 1962.
The critical establishment, however, was slow to appraise Yeats's ongoing cultural importance, following the
emergence of Joseph Hone's 1948 biography (W.B. Yeats. 1865-1939; completed in consultation with Yeats's
widow), and 's Yeats: The Man and the Masks (1948), which for decades remained the definitive account, and is
still regarded as a classic of biography. Yeats's own memoirs were published in 1955 as Autobiographies, offering
a wealth of anecdotes of the 1890s London literary scene, as well as Yeats's own explanations of his mystical and
spiritual beliefs; this volume included the previously-published autobiographical works Reveries Over Childhood
and Youth (1914), and The Trembling of the Veil (1922). It would only be with the celebrations of Yeats's centenary
in 1965 that he came under the lasting, sustained focus that has since given rise to a vast body of critical
literature. Most controversial of the centenary appraisals was 's essay 'Passion and Cunning: The Politics of W.B.
Yeats'. First published in The Excited Reverie, ed. and K.G.W. Cross (1965) this accused Yeats of elitism and
authoritarianism, and prompted an ongoing debate in which later contributions would include Elizabeth
Cullingford's Yeats, Ireland and Fascism (1981) and Grattan Freyer's W.B. Yeats and the Anti-Democratic Tradition
(1981). More recently, a collection of essays edited by Jonathan Allison, Yeats's Political Identities (1996), has
brought together a range of reponses to these and other political issues in Yeats's work from commentators
including R.F. Foster and , as well as and Cullingford.
The aspect of Yeats's life and work that intrigued his early scholarly critics perhaps most, though, was his
occultism -- this being central to 's study, in which it is suggested that readers of Yeats must themselves 'pass
through a kind of initiation' into his unpublished ideas on magic and mysticism in order fully to appreciate his
poetry and drama. The 1970s saw the appearance of two works that remain frequently cited: George Mills Harper's
monograph, Yeats's Golden Dawn (1974); and Yeats and the Occult (1975), a collection of essays edited by Harper,
which includes a discussion of Yeats and . A different view of Yeats was taken in an earlier critical study from this
decade, 's Yeats (1970), which related Yeats to the tradition of English Romanticism, 'rather than to any of the
esoteric traditions', linking him with figures including and in his quest for 'Unity of Being' (though such a reading of
English Romanticism has itself become problematic for many critics).
With such a large volume of Yeats criticism now available, students are fortunate in also having a wide selection of
guides not only to the poet and his historical background, but also to the main debates that have developed around
these. Among many serviceable introductory studies is Edward Malins and John Purkis's A Preface to Yeats
(1994), which provides especially concise, yet comprehensive, information on the Irish historical context; while
The Cambridge Companion to W.B. Yeats (2006; Marjorie Howes and John Kelly, eds.) features fuller discussions
of Yeats in relation to topics such as Romanticism, Modernism, occultism, gender and postcolonialism, and is also
a valuable source of ideas for further reading. By far the most significant recent contribution to Yeats studies,

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however, and one that is likely to remain standard for some time, is R.F. Foster's W.B. Yeats: A Life. Comprised of
two substantial volumes -- The Apprentice Mage (1997) and The Arch-Poet (2003) -- this takes a specifically
historical view of Yeats's character and career, which, Foster argues, raises many of the same interpretative issues
that face historians of Ireland as a whole in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Foster is also the
author of the richly informative, article-length entry on Yeats in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. His
recent important work on Yeats complements the major critical editions that have been emerging since the mid
1980s. These include The Collected Letters of W.B. Yeats, under the general editorship of John Kelly for the Oxford
University Press (1986- ); and an ongoing fourteen-volume Palgrave edition of the Collected Works, the general
editors of which are Richard J. Finneman and George Mills Harper. Accessible reading editions of Yeats's major
works in prose and poetry include Writings on Irish Folklore, Legend, and Myth, ed. for Penguin Twentieth-Century
Classics (1993), and 's usefully-annotated Macmillan paperback edition of Yeats's Poems (1989).
, 2009
 

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Publication title: ProQuest Biographies

Publication date: 2009

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