William Butler Yeats 


WILLIAM Butler Yeats, at the age of seventy-three, stands well within
the company of the great poets. He is still writing, and the poems
which now appear, usually embedded in short plays or set into the
commentary and prefaces which have been another preoccupation of his
later years, are, in many instances, as vigorous and as subtle as the
poems written by him during the years ordinarily considered to be the
period of a poet's maturity. Yeats has advanced into age with his art
strengthened by a long battle which had as its object a literature
written by Irishmen fit to take its place among the noble literatures
of the world. The spectacle of a poet's work invigorated by his
lifelong struggle against the artistic inertia of his nation is one
that would shed strong light into any era.

The phenomenon of a poet who enjoys continued development into the
beginning of old age is in itself rare. Goethe, Sophocles, and, in a
lesser degree, Milton come to mind as men whose last works burned with
the gathered fuel of their lives. More often development, in a poet,
comes to a full stop; and it is frequently a negation of the ideals of
his youth, as well as a declination of his powers, that throws a
shadow across his final pages.

Yeats in his middle years began to concern himself with the problem of
the poet in age. He wrote in 1917, when he was fifty-two: "--A poet when he is growing old, will ask himself if he cannot keep his
mask and his vision, without new bitterness, new disappointment. . . .
Could he if he would, copy Landor who lived loving and hating,
ridiculous and unconquered, into extreme old age, all lost but the
favor of his muses. . . ." (86) Surely, he may think, now that I have found vision and mask I need not suffer any longer. Then he will remember Wordsworth, withering into eighty years, honoured and empty-witted, and climb to some waste room, and find, forgotten there by youth, some bitter crust. 

We can trace, in Yeats, the continually enriched and undeviating
course of an inspired man, from earliest youth to age. We can trace
the rectitude of the spiritual line in his prose and poetry alike. And
there is not a great deal of difference between the "lank, long-coated
figure . . . who came and went as he pleased," dramatizing himself and
his dreams in the streets of Dublin (the youth who had known William
Morris and was to know Dowson and Wilde), and the man who, full of
honors in our day, impresses us with his detachment and subtle
modernity. Yeats, the fiery young Nationalist, rolling up with his own
hands, the red carpet spread on a Dublin sidewalk "by some elderly
Nationalist softened or weakened by time, to welcome Viceroyalty," is
recognizable in the poet of advanced years who does not hesitate to
satirize certain leaders of the new Ireland.

Yeats's faith in the development of his own powers has never failed.
He wrote, in 1923, after receiving from the King of Sweden the medal
symbolizing the Nobel Prize. It shows a young man listening to a Muse, who stands young and beautiful with a great lyre in her hand, and I think as I examine it,
"I was good-looking once like that young man, but my unpractised verse
was full of infirmity, my Muse old as it were, and now I am old and
rheumatic and nothing to look at, but my Muse is young." I am even
persuaded that she is like those Angels in Swedenborg's vision, and
moves perpetually "towards the dayspring of her youth."

THE Irish literary and dramatic movement, in general belief, rose,
late in the nineteenth century, in some vague manner from the
temperament of the Irish people. As a matter of fact, Ireland in
Yeats's young manhood was as ungrateful a soil for art as any that
could be found, in a particularly materialistic time. The native
Celtic genius that Arnold had felt to be so open to the influence of
"natural magic" had been, for over a century, drawn off into politics.
The Anglo-Irish tradition, having produced in the eighteenth century
Swift, Congreve, Edgeworth, Goldsmith, Berkeley, and Burke, flowered
no more.

The Land Agitation (the struggle of the peasantry against their
landlords) and the Young Ireland and Fenian Movements (the struggle of
the Irish people against English rule) from the '40s on had absorbed
the energies and the eloquence of talented young Irishmen. Irish
writers, as Stephen Gwynn has said, having been taught by Swift that
written English could be used as a weapon against their oppressors,
never forgot their lesson. The Catholic Emancipation Bill, by the
efforts of Daniel O'Connell, was passed in 1829. In 1842 the Young
Ireland Movement was given a newspaper by Thomas Davis: the Nation,
whose motto was "to create and foster public opinion in Ireland and
make it racy of the soil." The Nation fostered, as well, a school of
Irish poets. Their audience was eager for stirring and heartening
words; the verse which spoke to it most clearly was the rhetorical and
sentimental ballad, celebrating the Irish race and inciting it to
action and solidarity. This verse, when it was not written in the
sentimental and insipid vein made famous by Tom Moore, was filled, as
has been pointed out, with the hortatory gusto of Lord Macaulay.
Versifiers used its forms with skill, and one or two--Clarence Mangan
and Sir Samuel Ferguson--touched them with real color and depth of
feeling. But there is no doubt that Irish literature, in the years
between 1848 and 1891, had fallen upon barren times.

The year 1891 brought Parnell's death. The tragic end of a leader
intensely hated and loved, and the loss of much political hope
thereby, threw the national consciousness violently back on itself.
Yeats has described the situation (he was twenty-six at the time).
"Nationalist Ireland was torn with every kind of passion and
prejudice, wanting so far as it wanted any literature at all,
Nationalist propaganda disguised as literature. All the past had been
turned into a melodrama with Ireland the blameless hero, and poet,
novelist and historian had but one object, to hiss the villain, and
only the minority doubted the greater the talent the greater the hiss.
It was all the harder to substitute for that melodrama a nobler form
of art, because there had been, however different in their form,
villain and victim."

At the breakup of the Catholic State in the wars of the seventeenth
century "Irish laws and customs, the whole framework of the Gaelic
civilization, had been annihilated. Music, literature, and classical
learning, loved by even the poorest of the Irish, had been driven into
hiding, with only 'hedge-schoolmasters' and wandering bards to keep
them from oblivion." During the years when the Nation was coming to be
the literary force behind Irish Nationalism, traditional Gaelic
survived in the minds of Gaelic-speaking peasants. Elsewhere it had
disappeared, and from these minds and memories it was rapidly fading.
After generations of poverty and oppression, the orally transmitted
songs and histories had become fragmentary. Few educated Irishmen knew
them, since no educated Irishman knew Gaelic. The Irish language was
forbidden in the national schools, and the sons of Anglo-Irish
landlords and rectors who passed through Trinity College in Dublin
learned English culture and English literature. Standish James O'Grady
had published his Bardic History in 1880, but, since O'Grady was a
champion of the aristocracy, the book made little impression on the
partisan-minded country as a whole. When, in 1894, an Irish landlord
with literary ambitions, Edward Martyn, said to another of the same
class, George Moore, "I wish I knew enough Irish to write my plays in
Irish," Moore replied, "I thought nobody did anything in Irish but
bring turf from the bog and say prayers." And Yeats has testified in
an essay on the Irish Dramatic Movement: "When we began our work we
tried to get a play in Gaelic. We could not even get a condensed
version of the dialogue of Oisin and St. Patrick."

WHERE so much of the spirit of art had to be revivified, so many of
its forms repaired, and so tight a mould of fanaticism broken, a man
was needed who had in himself some of the qualities of the fanatic--a
man who was, above all else, an artist, capable of making an
occasional compromise with a human being, but incapable of making one
with the informing essence of his art. New light and air had to be let
into the closed minds and imaginations of a people made suspicious and
hysterically provincial through persecution and disaster. It was
impossible to weld the opinions of factions, but all could be drawn
into "one net of feeling." A man of sensibility, however, was not
enough. Not only insight and imagination, but ruthlessness, fervor,
disinterestedness, and a capacity for decision and action, were
required.

William Butler Yeats first appears, in the memories of his
contemporaries, as a rarefied human being: a tall, dark-visaged young
man who walked the streets of Dublin and London in a poetic hat,
cloak, and flowing tie, intoning verses. The young man's more solid
qualities were not then apparent to the casual observer. But it was
during these early years that Yeats was building himself, step by
step, into a person who could not only cope with reality but bend it
to his will. He tells, in one of his autobiographies, of his
determination to overcome his young diffidence. Realizing that he was
"only self-possessed with people he knew intimately," he would go to a
strange house "for a wretched hour for schooling's sake." And because
he wished "to be able to play with hostile minds" he trained out of
himself, in the midst of harsh discussion, the sensitive tendency "to
become silent at rudeness."

The result of this training began to be apparent before Yeats was
thirty. George Moore has recorded how, on meeting him in London
(having been badly impressed by his "excessive" getup at a casual
meeting some years before), he thought to worst Yeats easily in
argument. The real metal of his opponent soon came into view. "Yeats
parried a blow on which I had counted, and he did this so quickly and
with so much ease that he threw me on the defensive in a moment. 'A
dialectician,' I muttered, 'of the very first order'; one of a
different kind from any I had met before."

This intellectual energy, this "whirling" yet deeply intuitive and
ordered mind, with its balancing streak of common sense, had come to
Yeats through a mixed inheritance. The Yeats blood, perhaps Norman,
had been Anglo-Irish for centuries, and it is notorious that English
families transplanted to Ireland often become more Irish than the
native stock. Yeats's paternal grandfather and great-grandfather had
been Protestant rectors, in County Down and County Sligo respectively,
and there had been eighteenth-century soldiers and government
officials on this side of the family. Yeats's mother was a Pollexfen;
her stock was Cornish--that is to say, English-Celtic. Her father,
William Pollexfen, a lonely strong man whom Yeats as a child loved and
feared ("I wonder if the delight in passionate men in my plays and
poetry is more than his memory"), had settled in Sligo as a shipowner,
after a career as master of ships. Yeats spent several of his
childhood years and many of his adolescent summers near the town of
Sligo, and from that Western countryside, so full of the beauties of
lake, mountain, and sea, and from its people, who still had Gaelic in
their speech and legends in their memory, he drew the material of his
early poetry.

Yeats has told of the deep emotional reserves in his Sligo-born
mother, "whose actions were unreasoning and habitual like the
seasons." From his father, John Butler Yeats, a man of original mind
who had been trained in the law but turned to painting and to the
pre-Raphaelite enthusiasms current in the '70s and '80s, Yeats early
heard that "intensity was important above all things." The father's
passion for Blake, Morris, and Rossetti soon was shared by the son.
Yeats had some English schooling; he later was an art student in
Dublin. During this period he became a Nationalist. The elder Yeats
had friends among Unionists and Nationalists alike, and, well
acquainted with the liberal English thought of his time,
enthusiastically espoused the cause of Home Rule. His son's
Nationalism was both intellectual and emotional. He became the friend
of John O'Leary, an old Fenian who had returned to Dublin after
imprisonment and exile for youthful conspiracies; and Maude Gonne, a
great beauty and successful agitator, was also an influence helping to
channel his youthful ardor toward the more heroic and mystic side of
the Nationalist movement. In both of these people Yeats felt
imaginative and courageous character which transcended political
bigotry and dogma. At no time, from the beginning of his career
onward, did he for a moment yield to the hard letter of Irish
politics. It was the spirit in those politics he wished to strengthen
and make serviceable. His ends, and the means to bring about his ends,
were always clear in his mind. "We cannot move the peasants and the
educated classes in Ireland by writing about politics or about Gaelic,
but we may move them by becoming men of letters and expressing primary
truths in ways appropriate to this country."

His art was poetry, and, almost from the first, he used that art as a
tool, his avowed purpose being to rid the literature of his country
from the insincere, provincial, and hampering forms of "the election
rhyme and the pamphlet."

THE music of Yeats's early poetic efforts was in part derived from
Morris and Shelley. The earliest poems, published in the Dublin
University Review in 1886, paid youth's tribute to romantic subjects
and foreign landscape: Spain, India, Arcadia. The poems in The
Wanderings of Oisin, published in 1889, celebrated Irish landscape as
well. Actual Sligo place names appeared in them, and, along with
imaginary words put into mouths of legendary Irish figures, Yeats had
built poems on the single line of a song, or around a few words heard
from peasants. Sligo continued to be the home of his imagination
during the next ten years, when he was much away from Ireland, working
as a journalist in London. His best-known early poem, "The Lake Isle
of Innisfree," came to his mind in a London street, and expressed his
homesick memory of an islet in Lough Gill, a lake near the town of
Sligo.

In England he not only was drawn into the end-of-the-century literary
movement, but played an active part in shaping it. With Ernest Rhys he
founded, in London, the Rhymers Club, to which Lionel Johnson, Ernest
Dowson, and Arthur Symons belonged. He knew Wilde and was published by
W. E. Henley in the National Observer. Yeats went to Paris in 1894, at
a time when Villiers de l'Isle-Adam's Axel was exerting its power over
the young for the first time. This poem, "the swan song of
romanticism," a mixture of Gothic gloom, Rosicrucian occultism, and
Symbolist poetry, was to influence more than one generation of young
writers. "Axel or its theme," Yeats wrote thirty years later, "filled
the minds of my Paris friends. I was in the midst of one of those
artistic movements that have the intensity of religious revivals in
Wales and are such a temptation to the artist in his solitude. I have
in front of me an article which I wrote at that time, and I find
sentence after sentence of revivalist thoughts that leave me a little
ashamed." Contact with such enthusiasm, however, did much to confirm
Yeats's own belief in the importance of standing out for l'art pour
l'art. He had been exposed, at exactly the proper moment in his young
career, to literary excitement heightened into a kind of religious
fervor. He brought back seeds of this stimulation to Ireland: to a
soil which had lain fallow for a long time.

Meanwhile, in Ireland, an interest in Gaelic was growing. Douglas
Hyde, a brilliant student at Trinity in Dublin, had learned Gaelic and
had begun to translate Gaelic songs and legendary material into the
beautiful Tudor English still spoken in the West. Gaelic idiom had
been brought over into this speech, and Yeats immediately recognized
the language, English yet un-English, in which he wished to write. His
poetry soon took to itself not only Gaelic effects of alliteration and
assonance, but Gaelic effects of rhythm: that "gapped music" so
delicate that it seems to come from the rise and fall of intonation in
the Irish voice.

Many Irish people, particularly the young (as Joyce has testified),
were haunted by the harp-like fluidity of these songs, and
imaginatively stirred by the traditional symbols, the heroic Druid
figures Yeats revived. But political societies and the press turned
against his aesthetic purposes. The poems in The Wind among the Reeds
(1899) were termed "affected," "un-Irish," "esoteric," "pagan," and
"heretical." Yeats in later years was to admit a "facile charm, a too
soft simplicity," in his early work. He soon began to clear his style
of its symbolic trappings, to make it austere, flexible, resonant--an
instrument of great lyric and dramatic range. Had he clung to the
early style, with its long swing, almost like incantation, its heavy
imagery, he would have limited himself unduly. Coming when they did,
however, these evocations of Celtic beauty, heroism, and strangeness
wakened, as more severe music could not then waken, Ireland's ears to
the sound of its own voice speaking its own music.

YEATS had the good fortune to form, in the late '90s, one of the most
important friendships of his life. He met Lady Gregory when his need
for a staying influence was crucial. He had not entirely escaped the
results of the romantic violence let loose (more into their personal
lives than into their poetry) by the poets of the decade, in their
revolt against respectable bourgeois strictures. He has indicated the
nature of his own crisis in Dramatis Personae. "When I went to Coole
[Lady Gregory's estate in Galway] the curtain had fallen upon the
first act of my drama. . . . I must have spent the summer of 1897 at
Coole. I was involved in a miserable love-affair. . . . Romantic
doctrine had reached its extreme development. . . . My nerves had been
wrecked."

Lady Gregory, whom Yeats met through Arthur Symons and Edward Martyn
(Martyn's demesne, Tillyra, adjoined Coole), was a woman of much
cultivation and generosity of spirit. Yeats had lost the power to
impose upon himself regular habits of work. Lady Gregory, who was
later to write out the Irish legends in the simple speech of the
peasants of her countryside, took him from cottage to cottage
collecting folklore. Coole and its environs were to give the mature
Yeats a background for his later work, as Sligo had given him a scene
for his earlier. With his technical apprenticeship and his most
excessive enthusiasms behind him, Yeats turned away from the
middle-class culture of Dublin to the people of Galway farms and
villages, "Folk is our refuge from vulgarity." Once he had regained "a
tolerable industry," his grasp on reality was further strengthened by
the struggle to found what was to become the Abbey Theatre. To this
task he and Lady Gregory, with the help of Edward Martyn and George
Moore, now applied themselves.

Yeats knew that nothing was read in Ireland but "prayer books,
newspapers, and popular novels." He also knew that the Irish had been
trained, by politics and the Church, to listen. They were a potential
audience, in the primary sense of that word. He had already formed in
Dublin the National Literary Society, with the intention of giving
"opportunity to a new generation of critics and writers to denounce
the propagandist verse and prose that had gone by the name of Irish
literature." He now wanted a literary theater. He had written plays,
but had no stage, unless it were the stage of small halls, where they
could be presented.

Against him were ranged the entrenched powers of the commercial
theatre, the Church, and the press, the last two informed with the
special Irish fear of "humiliation" and misinterpretation, bred from
Ireland's peculiar political situation. "But fight that rancor I
must." He fought it for more than ten years, not only for the sake of
his own plays, but for the plays of other Irish dramatists,
particularly Synge. His own plays caused mild trouble. Synge's
Playboy, presented in 1904, brought on a week of riots and emptied the
Abbey Theatre for months. But Yeats held out, against an enraged
Dublin and an intimidated company. By 1912 the public had learned how
to listen to imaginative drama with appreciation, to satiric plays
without resentment. The Irish Dramatic Movement had come through, at
the cost of great energy and courage expended by its founders. Yeats
then turned away from the "popular" theatre, and began to write plays
which could be presented in a room by a few amateurs and musicians,
plays which could carry his special music and dramatic formality with
the least theatrical machinery.

"WE should write out our thoughts," Yeats has said, "in as nearly as
possible the language we thought them in, as though in a letter to an
intimate friend." And again: "If I can be sincere and make my language
natural, and without becoming discursive, like a novelist, and so
indiscreet and prosaic, I shall, if good or bad luck make my life
interesting, be a great poet; for it will no longer be a question of
literature at all."

If we grant naturalness, sincerity, and vigor to Yeats's late style,
we still have not approached its secret. Technical simplicity may
produce, instead of effects of tension and power, effects of bleakness
and poorness. What impresses us most strongly in Yeats's late work is
that here a whole personality is involved. A complex temperament
(capable of anger and harshness, us well as of tenderness), and a
powerful intellect, come through; and every part of the nature is
released, developed, and rounded in the later books. The early Yeats
was, in many ways, a youth of his time: a romantic exile seeking, away
from reality, the landscape of his dreams. By degrees--for the
development took place over a long period of years--this partial
personality was absorbed into a man whose power to act in the real
world and endure the results of action (responsibility the romantic
hesitates to assume) was immense. Yeats advanced into the world he
once shunned, but in dealing with it he did not yield to its
standards. That difficult balance, almost impossible to strike,
between the artist's austerity and "the reveries of the common
heart,"--between the proud passions, the proud intellect, and
consuming action,--Yeats finally attained and held to. It is this
balance which gives the poems written from (roughly) 1914 on (from
Responsibilities, published in that year, to poems published at
present) their noble resonance. "I have had to learn how hard is that
purification from insincerity, vanity, malignance, arrogance, which is
the discovery of style."

Technically, the later style is almost lacking in adverbs--built on
the noun, verb, and adjective. Its structure is kept clear and level,
so that emotionally weighted words, when they appear, stand out with
poignant emphasis. The Wild Swans at Coole (1919) opens: --


The trees are in their autumn beauty,
The woodland paths are dry,
Under the October twilight the water
Mirrors a still sky; 
Upon the brimming water among the stones
Are nine and fifty swans.

Equipped with this instrument, Yeats could put down, with full scorn,
his irritation with the middle-class ideals he had hated from youth: 

What need you, being come to sense,
But fumble in a greasy till
And add the halfpence to the pence
And prayer to shivering prayer, until
You have dried the marrow from the bone;
For men were born to pray and save:
Romantic Ireland's dead and gone,
It's with O'Leary in the grave.

Was it for this the wild geese spread
The grey wing upon every tide;
For this that all that blood was shed,
For this that Edward Fitzgerald died
And Robert Emmet and Wolfe Tone,
All that delirium of the brave?
Romantic Ireland's dead and gone,
It's with O'Leary in the grave

On the other hand he could celebrate Irish salus, virtus, as in the
poem "An Irish Airman Foresees His Death," and in the fine elegies on
the leaders of the 1916 Easter Rebellion.

And Yeats came to be expert at the dramatic presentation of thoughts
concerning love, death, the transience and hidden meaning of all
things, not only in the form of a philosopher's speculation, a
mystic's speech, or a scholar's lonely brooding, but also (and this
has come to be a major Yeatsian effect) in the cracked and rowdy
measures of a fool's, an old man's, an old woman's song. The Tower
(1928) and The Winding Stair (1929) contain long meditations-- some
"in time of civil war"--upon his life, his times, his ancestors, his
descendants; upon the friends and enemies of his youth.

The short plays, composed on the pattern of the Japanese No drama,
which Ezra Pound had brought to Yeats's attention,--Four Plays for
Dancers (1921), Wheels and Butterflies (1934), The King of the Great
Clock Tower (1935),--Yeats made the vehicle for the loveliest of his
later songs, for all his later development of pure music:--

Come to me, human faces, 
Familiar memories; I have found hateful eyes
Among the desolate places, 
Unfaltering, unmoistened eyes.

Folly alone I cherish 
I choose it for my share, 
Being but a mouthful of air I am content to perish.
I am but a mouthful of sweet air.

The opening song in the play Fighting the Waves illustrates the
variety of stress, the subtlety of meaning, of which Yeats became a
master,

A woman's beauty is like a white
Frail bird, like a sea-bird alone
At day-break after a stormy night
Between two furrows of the ploughed land;
A sudden storm and it was thrown
Between dark furrows of the ploughed land.
How many centuries spent
The sedentary soul
In toil of measurement
Beyond eagle and mole,
Beyond hearing or seeing,
Or Archimedes' guess,
To raise into being
That loveliness?

A strange unserviceable thing,
A fragile, exquisite pale shell,
That the vast troubled waters bring
To the loud sands before day has broken.
The storm arose and suddenly fell
Amid the dark before day has broken.
What death? what discipline?
What bonds no man could unbind,
Being imagined within
The labyrinth of the mind,
What pursuing or fleeing
What wounds, what bloody press
Dragged into being 
This loveliness?

FROM youth on, Yeats has thought to build a religion for himself.
Early "bored with an Irish Protestant point of view that suggested, by
its blank abstraction, chlorate of lime," he eagerly welcomed any
teaching which attested supersensual experience, or gave him a
background for those thoughts which came to him "from beyond the
mind." "Yeats likes parlor magic," George Moore maliciously remarked,
in the '90s. At that time, when religious belief and man's awe before
natural mysteries were rapidly breaking up, the wreckage of the
supernatural had been swept into mediums' shabby parlors and into the
hands of quacks of all kinds. Many men of Yeats's generation took
refuge in the Catholic Church. But Yeats kept to his own researches.
He had experimented, when an adolescent, with telepathy and
clairvoyance, in the company of his uncle, George Pollexfen, a student
of the occult. He later studied the Christian Cabala and gradually
built up, from his own findings and from the works of Blake,
Swedenborg, and Boehme, his theories of visionary and spiritual truth.
But he was never, as Edmund Wilson has pointed out, a gullible pupil.
He invariably tried to verify phenomena. And to-day, when we know more
than we once knew concerning the meaning of man-made symbols, the
needs of the psyche, and the workings of the subconscious, Yeats's
theories sound remarkably instructed and modernly relevant. His Anima
Mundi closely resembles Jung's universal or racial unconscious, and
even his conceptions of Image and Anti-Image, the Mask and its
opposite, are closely related to psychological truth.

Of late years, after a lifetime spent at efforts to break up the
deadening surface of middle-class complacency, Yeats has drawn
nourishment from the thought of the relation of eighteenth-century
Anglo Irish writers to their society. These men--Swift, Berkeley,
Grattan--had behind them, he believes, a social structure capable of
being an aid to works of imagination and intellect. The ideal of the
artist built into his background, sustaining it and sustained by it,
Yeats has termed "Unity of Being." He has striven all his life to give
Ireland a sense of what such a society can be, and to make himself an
artist worthy of the energy which built "the beautiful humane cities."

In age, he shows no impoverishment of spirit or weakening of
intention. He answers current dogmatists with words edged with the
same contempt for "the rigid world" of materialism that he used in
youth.