W.B. YEATS: NATIONAL POET, NATIONAL TALE

Dr. Graham Price

William Butler Yeats

Themes and Concerns Yeats: Life and times Political commitments The importance of history in Yeats’s poetry

Changing themes and preoccupations in his work

Yeats’s role as national poet. The vision of Ireland that Yeats espouses: Is it progressive or conservative?

A LIFE   1865- William Butler Yeats was born on 18 June. 1876- His family moved to England. 1877- William Yeats was sent to the Godolphin primary school. 1881- Yeats enrolled into Erasmus Smith High School. 1884- William Yeats joined the Metropolitan School of Art. 1885- He wrote his first poem and essay The Poetry of Samuel Ferguson. 1887- Yeats and his family returned to London. 1889- Yeats met Maud Gonne. 1888- Spends Christmas Day with Oscar Wilde and his family in Tite Street. Wilde read Yeats passages from “The Decay of Lying”

1890- He established the Rhymer's Club, a group of poets. 1899- Yeats co founded the Irish Literary Theatre in Dublin. 1904- The Abbey theatre opened. 1904- Yeats founded the Cuala Press with the help of his sister.    1911- The Abbey Theatre set on a tour to the United States. 1917- Yeats married George Hyde Lees. 1919- His daughter Anne was born. 1921- Their son Michael was born. 1922- His father died. 1922- He was appointed to the first Irish Senate. 1925- He was re-elected to the Senate. 1923- Yeats was honoured with Nobel Prize for Literature. 1924- A coinage committee appointed him as its chairman. 1928- Yeats took retirement from the Senate. 1934- Yeats underwent a Steinach operation. 1939- William Yeats passed away on 28 January.

“The Celtic Element in Literature”

Literature dwindles to a mere chronicle of circumstance, or passionless phantasies, and passionless meditations, unless it is constantly flooded with the passions and beliefs of ancient times….

…now a new fountain of legends, and I think, a more abundant fountain than any in Europe, is being opened, the fountain of Gaelic legends....’The Celtic movement,’ as I understand it, is principally the opening of this fountain, and none can measure of how great importance it may be to coming times, for every new fountain of legends is a new intoxication for the imagination of the world (“The Celtic Element in Literature”, in W.B. Yeats: The Major Works, ed. Edward Larrissy, p. 376-7).

INTRODUCTION:IRELAND AND MODERNITY

During the Irish Revival in the late nineteenth century, the cultural nationalist

note was ascendant as Yeats tried to conjure into being a new Ireland that

would blend the simplicity and responsiveness to the supernatural and the

esoteric that he associated with the W est of Ireland peasantry and the elegant

refinement he identified with the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy… In sum, Yeats

forged from the raw materials of Irish Rom anticism an esoteric vision of a

sufficiently powerful aesthetic quality to make him one of the twentieth

century’s most influential poets (Joe Cleary, “Introduction: Ireland and

M odernity”, in The Cambridge Companion to Modern Irish Culture, ed. by

Joe Cleary and Claire Connolly, pp. 12-13).

“Modernism and the Irish Revival”

The modern, in colonial conditions, is associated with ’foreignness’, domination and violence; it is in no sense naturalised in the course of a long process of economic and social development. It is precisely in such a situation that the culturally ‘old’ appears most intensely valuable, and becomes the object of political contestation. For while it may virtually obliterate traditional culture, such an experience of modernisation also confers an auratic significance on the remnants of the archaic. Yeats and his friends who would keep ‘Gaelic habits of mind’ (even if not themselves ‘Gaels’) are engaged in a salvage mission which ideally would transform an entire society (Emer Nolan, “Modernism and the Irish Revival”, in The Cambridge Companion to Modern Irish Culture, ed. by Joe Cleary and Claire Connolly, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005, pp. 160.)

 

Timothy Webb: Introduction

Although in his earlier years Yeats had identified himself as a Nationalist,

He habitually resisted the simplifications of propaganda and of popular rhetoric. The older Yeats was much more open to the receipt of public affairs than his younger self; yet the events of Easter 1916, of the Troubles and the Civil War, and of post-war Europe, were registered almost less, perhaps, as external realities than as part of Yeats’s own poetic and psychological life...[P]ublic events are placed and recorded but the prevailing perspective is a subjective one, and conflicts are internalised (Timothy Webb: “Introduction”, in W.B. Yeats: Selected Poems, London: Penguin Classics, 2000, pp. xl).

Timothy Webb Unlike Pound or Eliot or Joyce, he [Yeats] could not be classified as a modernist; he was neither as experimental nor as revolutionary as they were. Yet his poetry was constantly developing and changing, most significantly and most dramatically after he passed his fiftieth birthday. Yeats is a compelling poetic presence not least because he assumed so many shapes in the long process of his poetic evolution (Timothy Webb: “Introduction”, in W.B. Yeats: Selected Poems, London: Penguin Classics, 2000, pp. xl-xli).

“EASTER 1916” I have met them at close of day/Coming with vivid faces/From counter or desk among grey Eighteenth –century houses/I have passed with a nod of the head or polite meaningless words, /Or have lingered awhile and said polite meaningless words.

 

“EASTER 1916” That woman’s days were spent in ignorant good will,/Her nights in argument/Until her voice grew shrill…/This man kept a school/And rode our winged horse…/This other man I had dreamed/A drunken vain glorious lout./He had done most bitter wrong/To some who are near my heart./Yet I number him in the song.

“EASTER 1916” All changed, changed utterly:/A terrible beauty is born.

“The Second Coming” 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.

“EASTER 1916” Hearts with one purpose alone/Through summer and winter seem/Enchanted to a stone/To trouble the living stream/The horse that comes from the road/The rider, the birds that range/From cloud to tumbling cloud

“EASTER 1916” Was it needless death after all? / For England may keep faith/ For all that is done and said/ We know their dream; enough/ To know they dreamed and are dead.

“EASTER 1916” I write it out in a verse-/MacDonagh and MacBride/And Connolly and Pearse/Now and in time to be, /Whenever green is worn, /Are changed, changed utterly:/A terrible beauty is born.

INVENTING IRELAND The poem speaks, correspondingly, with two voices, and sometimes enacts in single phrases (“terrible beauty”) their contestation. The sanction for the first voice from bardic tradition was strong: but the force of the second was becoming more apparent to Yeats who increasingly defined freedom in terms of self-expression. He was abandoning the rather programmatic nationalism of his youth for a more personal version of Irish identity… Dining with society personages in England when news broke of the Rising, Yeats must have felt himself marginal to the event: and his poem becomes his subsequent attempt to insert himself back into history, to regain control and to earn the right to perform that final bardic naming. Ironically, by the time the poet has won himself that right, he can no longer enjoy it. History has taken fire as virtue, but it has taken fire in someone else’s head (Declan Kiberd, Inventing Ireland: The Literature of the Modern Nation, London: Vintage, 1996, pp. 213- 217).

“NINETEEN HUNDRED AND NINETEEN”

Many ingenious lovely things are gone/That seemed sheer miracle to the multitude, /Protected from the circle of the moon.

“NINETEEN HUNDRED AND NINETTEN”

We too had many pretty toys when young:/A law indifferent to blame or praise, / To bribe or threat; habits that made old wrong/Melt down, as it were wax in the sun’s rays; Public opinion ripening for so long/We thought it would outlive all future days/O what fine thought we had because we thought/ That the worst rogues and rascals had died out.

“HEROIC STYLES” Irish culture became the new property of those who were losing their grip on the Irish land. The effect of these re-writings was to transform the blame for the drastic condition of the country from the Ascendancy to the Catholic middle-classes or to their English counterparts. From Lecky to Yeats and forward to F.S.L. Lyons we witness the conversion of Irish History into a tragic theatre in which the great Anglo-Irish protagonist—Swift, Burke, Parnell—are destroyed in their heroic attempts to unite culture of intellect with the emotion of the multitude (Seamus Deane, “Heroic Styles: The Tradition of an Idea”, Derry, 1985, pp. 7-8).

“MEDITAIONS IN TIME OF CIVIL WAR”

We had fed the heart on fantasies, /The heart’s grown brutal from the fare, /More substance in our enmities/Than in our love; O honey bees, Come build in the empty house of the stare.

 

“WRITING OUT (OF CHAOS”

[T]he poem plays upon historiographic desire—the desire to use temporal markers as a means of constructing order in the present—by continually frustrating that desire, revealing that the old, particularly nationalist and imperialist modes for ordering time must be cast aside before new histories of Ireland may be articulated in this transitional period (Bob Doggett, “Writing Out (of) Chaos: Constructions of History in Yeats’s ‘Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen’ and Meditations in Time of Civil War’, in Twentieth Century Literature, 47.2, pp. 144).

“NINETEEN HUNDRED AND NINETEEN”

He who can read the signs nor sink unmanned/ Into the half-deceit of some intoxicant/ From shallow wits; who knows no work can stand,/Whether health, wealth or peace of mind were spent…Man is in love and loves what vanishes,/What more is there to say.

 

“NINETEEN HUNDRED AND NINETEEN”

To end all things, to end/What my laborious life imagined, even/The half imagined, the half written page; O but we dreamed to mend/Whatever mischief seemed to afflict mankind, but now/That winds of winter blow/ Learn that we were crack-pated when we dreamed.

“YEATS ESSAY” I think that our Irish movements have always interested me in part, because I see in them the quarrel of two traditions of life, one old and noble, one new and ignoble: One undying because it satisfies our conscience though it seemed dying and one about to die because it is hateful to our conscience, although it seemed triumphant throughout the world. In Ireland wherever the Gaelic tongue is still spoken, and to some little extent where it is not, the people live according to a tradition of life that existed before the world surrendered to the competition of merchants and to the vulgarity that has been founded on it (W.B. Yeats, “A postscript to a forthcoming work of essays by various writers’, in Uncollected Prose, ed. By J. Frayne and C. Johnson, London: Macmillan, 1975), vol. II, pp. 2.45).

 

AUTBIOGRAPHIES “No mind can engender till divided in two” (W.B. Yeats, Autobiographies, Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1955, pp. 345).

“NINETEEN HUNDRED AND NINETEEN And that if our works could/ But vanish with our breath/ That were a lucky death, / For triumph can but mar our solitude