William Butler Yeats

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William Butler Yeats
1865-1939

He was born in Dublin. His father was a lawyer and a well-known portrait painter. Yeats was educated in London and in Dublin, but he spent his summers in the west of Ireland in the family's summer house at Connaught. The young Yeats was very much part of the fin de siècle in London; at the same time he was active in societies that attempted an Irish literary revival. His first volume of verse appeared in 1887, but in his earlier period his dramatic production outweighed his poetry both in bulk and in import. Together with Lady Gregory he founded the Irish Theatre, which was to become the Abbey Theatre, and served as its chief playwright until the movement was joined by John Synge. His plays usually treat Irish legends; they also reflect his fascination with mysticism and spiritualism. The Countess Cathleen (1892), The Land of Heart's Desire (1894), Cathleen ni Houlihan (1902), The King's Threshold (1904), and Deirdre (1907) are among the best known.

After 1910, Yeats's dramatic art took a sharp turn toward a highly poetical, static, and esoteric style. His later plays were written for small audiences; they experiment with masks, dance, and music, and were profoundly influenced by the Japanese Noh plays. Although a convinced patriot, Yeats deplored the hatred and the bigotry of the Nationalist movement, and his poetry is full of moving protests against it. He was appointed to the Irish Senate in 1922. Yeats is one of the few writers whose greatest works were written after the award of the Nobel Prize. Whereas he received the Prize chiefly for his dramatic works, his significance today rests on his lyric achievement. His poetry, especially the volumes The Wild Swans at Coole (1919), Michael Robartes and the Dancer (1921), The Tower (1928), The Winding Stair and Other Poems (1933), and Last Poems and Plays (1940), made him one of the outstanding and most influential twentieth-century poets writing in English. His recurrent themes are the contrast of art and life, masks, cyclical theories of life (the symbol of the winding stairs), and the ideal of beauty and ceremony contrasting with the hubbub of modern life.

source: nobleprize.org

Read more about "Yeats" in The Cambridge Introduction to W.B. Yeats

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Yeats's Poetry

Yeats's Poetry

Yeats is the greatest poet in the history of Ireland and probably the greatest poet to write in English during the twentieth century; his themes, images, symbols, metaphors, and poetic sensibilities encompass the breadth of his personal experience, as well as his nation’s experience during one of its most troubled times. Yeats’s great poetic project was to reify his own life—his thoughts, feelings, speculations, conclusions, dreams—into poetry: to render all of himself into art, but not in a merely confessional or autobiographical manner; he was not interested in the common-place. (The poet, Yeats famously remarked, is not the man who sits down to breakfast in the morning.) His elaborate iconography takes elements from Irish mythology, Greek mythology, nineteenth-century occultism (which Yeats dabbled in with Madame Blavatsky and the Society of the Golden Dawn), English literature, Byzantine art, European politics, and Christian imagery, all wound together and informed with his own experience and interpretive understanding.

His thematic focus could be sweepingly grand: in the 1920s and ’30s he even concocted a mystical theory of the universe, which explained history, imagination, and mythology in light of an occult set of symbols, and which he laid out in his book A Vision (usually considered important today only for the light it sheds on some of his poems). However, in his greatest poems, he mitigates this grandiosity with a focus on his own deep feeling. Yeats’s own experience is never far from his poems, even when they seem obscurely imagistic or theoretically abstract, and the veil of obscurity and abstraction is often lifted once one gains an understanding of how the poet’s lived experiences relate to the poem in question.

No poet of the twentieth century more persuasively imposed his personal experience onto history by way of his art; and no poet more successfully plumbed the truths contained within his “deep heart’s core,” even when they threatened to render his poetry clichéd or ridiculous. His integrity and passionate commitment to work according to his own vision protect his poems from all such accusations. To contemporary readers, Yeats can seem baffling; he was opposed to the age of science, progress, democracy, and modernization, and his occultist and mythological answers to those problems can seem horribly anachronistic for a poet who died barely sixty years ago. But Yeats’s goal is always to arrive at personal truth; and in that sense, despite his profound individuality, he remains one of the most universal writers ever to have lived.

source: sparknotes.com