Yeats, reprinted in J. Hall and M. Steinman , eds. From the very beginning of his long literary career, his poems provided phrases which rang in the national mind and provided keys to Irish experience ' I will arise and go now, And go to Innisfree '; ' Romantic Ireland's dead and gone, It's with O'Leary in the grave ', ' A terrible beauty is born ', ' Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold '.
Yet it is the difficulties and tensions of Yeats's relationship to Irish history and Irish identity, dramatized both directly and indirectly in some of his best writing, which give his poetry much of its dynamic tension.
His huge international reputation is securely based on the mystery and grandeur of his late verse and the poignancy of his love poetry, but he first came to fame as the exotically Celtic poet of a ' new ' nationalist Ireland: almost single-handed, he made Irishness culturally fashionable. Spearheading a great cultural renaissance, he moved into his maturity as the voice of his country, memorializing her heroes, sitting as a senator in her independent parliament , dying full of years and honours.
Yet throughout his career Yeats sustained an angry, quarrelsome, ambivalent relationship with his native country; and for his first fifty years he lived more in England than Ireland, a pattern recurring at the end of his life. His early poems on Celtic and faery themes became and remained canonical, but he was attacked in Ireland for the decadence, occultism, and sensuality of his verse and the arrogant iconoclasm of his public utterances—and, indeed, his personal style.
If this seems difficult to understand now, with pilgrims guided through co. Sligo in the footsteps of his poetry and a thriving tourist industry concentrated around every Irish resonance set up by his verses, his life and background do much to explain it.
Yeats's posthumous reputation is more monumental, and less assailable, than some of his contemporaries would have expected. During the Second World War his work went out of print, and through the s Yeatsian studies were the province of a few dedicated and highly distinguished scholars—such as Cleanth Brooks , A.
Jeffares , T. Henn , and most of all Richard Ellmann. However, interest in his life was sustained by Allan Wade's edition of letters and Macmillan's publication of several volumes of prose writings organized by his widow, while Peter Allt and Russel Alspach's heroic Variorum editions of poems and plays demonstrated clearly the depth of attention that needed to be paid to Yeats's endless revisions in search of a canonical text.
From the s his philosophical interests, and the occultist underpinnings behind much of his work, began to arouse serious interest, reflected in the work of F. Wilson , Giorgio Melchiori , James Olney , and others.
His place in Irish history and political influence was examined by the new wave of Irish historians, notably Conor Cruise O'Brien and F. By the s the Yeats ' industry ' was working full-scale; the massive project of a full-scale annotated Collected Letters was under way, two scholarly Annuals of Yeats studies came into existence, and the annual Yeats summer school in Sligo set a much imitated example.
The deeply complex question of Yeatsian texts complicated by the poet's own apparent authorization of different editions in the s has sparked a long controversy about the canonical version of his poetry, and has been illuminated by the publication of scholarly editions of the much revised manuscripts behind his various collections.
Even a certain s reaction against Yeats's work, as affected by what Seamus Deane termed ' the pathology of literary Unionism ', simply added fuel to the blazing interest in his work and life. He had always been supreme among modern Irish poets and his international standing has equally been recognized as one of the great innovators of modern poetry, who developed a voice so unique as to inhibit as well as to inspire those who came after him. Early on, defending his constant poetic revisions, he had declared that he must ' re-make ' himself: in the process he helped re-make both his own country and world literature.
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You could not be signed in, please check and try again. Sign in with your library card Please enter your library card number. Search within Show Summary Details. Yeats, William Butler — William Butler Yeats — by Augustus John , The Yeats family's move to London during the poet's early childhood paralleled that of many others; it also happened at a time when, as George Bernard Shaw mordantly recalled: every Irishman who felt that his business in life was on the higher planes of the cultural professions, felt that he must have a metropolitan domicile and an international culture: that is, he felt that his first business was to get out of Ireland.
Shaw, The Matter with Ireland , , The influence of Maud Gonne A year younger than Yeats , Gonne was the daughter of an English army officer stationed at the Curragh; motherless and lonely, she adopted the cause of Ireland early on, in the form of revolutionary nationalist politics. Theatrical involvements and political disillusionment, — Significantly, however, these letters were poured out to another woman whose very different relationship to the young poet would have an almost equal effect on his life.
The invention of tradition, and ' images for the affections ', had done their work of confidence building, and Irish national rhetoric must advance beyond chauvinism and defensiveness: Even if what one defends be true, an attitude of defence, a continual apology, whatever the cause, makes the mind barren because it kills intellectual innocence; that delight in what is unforeseen, and in the mere spectacle of the world, the mere drifting hither and thither that must come before all true thought and emotion.
Essays and Introductions , , The Irish revolution and its aftermath, — Yeats's distancing from conventional nationalism, his disillusionment with modern Irish life, and his apparent absorption into the English establishment, should all be borne in mind as the background to his response to the shattering Irish rising of Easter That is no country for old men. The young In one another's arms, birds in the trees, —Those dying generations—at their song, The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas, Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
We, who seven years ago Talked of honour and of truth, Shriek with pleasure if we show The weasel's twist, the weasel's tooth. 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. The s Yeats's failing health makes the febrility and energy of his work during his last decade all the more remarkable.
Those masterful images because complete Grew in pure mind, but out of what began? A mound of refuse or the sweepings of a street, Old kettles, old bottles and a broken can, Old iron, old bones, old rags, that raving slut Who keeps the till. Now that my ladder's gone, I must lie down where all the ladders start, In the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart. Posthumous reputation Yeats is now seen as one of a handful of Irish writers whose influence and example helped create twentieth-century modernist literature in the English language; but unlike that of James Joyce or Samuel Beckett not to mention Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw , his life remained intimately intertwined with the biography of his country.
Sources W. Yeats, Autobiographies The collected letters of W. Yeats , ed. Kelly and others, [3 vols. The Gonne—Yeats letters, — , ed. MacBride White and A. Jeffares Mikhail, W. Yeats : interviews and recollections Jeffares, ed. Yeats : the critical heritage Yeats Foster, The apprentice mage, — , vol. Yeats : a life. Foster, The arch-poet, — , vol. Murphy, Prodigal father : the life of John Butler Yeats, — Murphy, Family secrets : William Butler Yeats and his relatives Ellmann, Yeats : the man and the masks , 2nd edn Frayne and C.
Johnston, eds. Yeats , 2 Yeats, Lady Gregory, and J. Synge , ed. Saddlemyer Gregory, Lady Gregory's journal , ed. Murphy, 2 vols. Harper, ed. Archives Boston College, John J. Burns Library, family corresp. Harvard U. NL Ire. Ransom HRC , papers. Leeds, Brotherton L. Reading L. BL , letters to G. Chesterton, Add. MSS B fol. BL , corresp. MS Sturge Moore, Add. BL , Society of Authors file, Add. JRL , letters to Katharine Tynan. NL Scot. NYPL , Berg collection, corresp.
NYPL , corresp. TCD , corresp. Wellcome L. Yale U. Likenesses H. Paget, oils, , Ulster Museum, Belfast. Rothenstein, pencil drawing, , U. Yeats, watercolour drawing, , NG Ire. Gyles, ink drawing, , BM. Yeats, oils, , NG Ire. AE [G. Russell], drawing, , NG Ire. Strang, chalk drawing, , FM Cam. Strang, drawing, , NG Ire. John, etching, after a portrait, , NG Ire. John, etching, , NPG.
John, oils, , Man. City Gall. John, oils, , Tate collection; related pencil drawing, Tate collection. John, pencil and wash drawing, , NPG.
Lady K. Orpen, pen-and-ink caricature, , NPG. Coburn, photogravure, , NPG. Power, bronze bust, , U. Spicer-Simson, bronze medallion, , NG Ire. O'Sullivan, drawing, , NG Ire. Coster, photographs, , NPG. Opffer, chalk drawing, , NPG. Power, bronze bust, , NG Ire. Power, plaster bust, , NG Ire. Beerbohm, caricature, drawing, AM Oxf. Beerbohm, ink and watercolour caricature, NG Ire. Beresford, photographs, NPG.
Kernoff, pastel and tempera drawing, U. Rothenstein, pen-and-ink drawing, U. Russell, two charcoal drawings, NG Ire. Spicer-Simson, bronze medallion, NPG. Yeats Stuart, Henry Francis Montgomery — , novelist and poet. Oxford University Press. Sign in to annotate. Delete Cancel Save. Close Save. Columbia University, New York. University of California, Bancroft Library, Berkeley.
British Museum, London. National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh. Trinity College, Dublin. Bodleian Library, Oxford. John Rylands University Library of Manchester. Huntington Library, San Marino, California. Hulton Archive, Getty Images, London. Teachers' notes. By using this site, you agree we can set and use cookies. For more details of these cookies and how to disable them, see our cookie policy. Sign up for our e-newsletter. Search our website. Yeats About W. Yeats Teachers' notes. The Collected Poems of W.
Yeats Macmillan, National Poetry Month. Materials for Teachers Teach This Poem. Poems for Kids. Poetry for Teens. Lesson Plans. Resources for Teachers. Academy of American Poets. American Poets Magazine. Poets Search more than 3, biographies of contemporary and classic poets. Yeats — Related Poets. Walt Whitman. Robert Louis Stevenson.
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