Yeats, William Butler (1865–1939)

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YEATS, WILLIAM BUTLER (1865–1939)

Irish poet and writer.

During World War I (1914–1918) and throughout the more immediate atrocities of Ireland's armed struggle for independence, the Irish poet William Butler Yeats pursued the three interests that had always dominated his life, mentioned in his essay "If I Were Four and Twenty" (1919): "interest in a form of literature, in a form of philosophy, and a belief in nationality." He continued to develop these concerns deep into old age with the unimpaired vigor and matchless imaginative resource that place him among the leading poets of the twentieth century.

Yeats's early occult interests (his belief that incantations and rituals enable people to be at one with supernatural powers) were called into question by the ignominious collapse of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, which he had joined as young man. Yeats was to remember his erstwhile occult colleagues in "All Souls' Night," but now he gradually turned to spiritualism and, in particular, to automatic handwriting. Yeats received invaluable help in this last enterprise from Georgina "George" Hyde-Lees, whom he married in 1917. Together, they produced the vast collection of papers that Yeats, with laborious and pained conscientiousness, finally worked into the mature version of his occult beliefs contained in the two versions of A Vision (1925, 1937).

Yeats's system, which is both individual and universal in its applications, is based on the meeting, and sometimes the conflict, of opposites. The creative individual is inspired to acknowledge his "mask" or "antiself" and so finds spiritual energy, completeness, and release by familiarizing himself with all that is contrary to his normal, everyday personality. In the poem "Ego Dominus Tuus" from The Wild Swans at Coole (1917, 1919) the poet's mystical antiself tussles with his commonsensical, commonplace being to glimpse the ecstatic, divine inspiration that is the true basis of his art.

The historical complement to such beliefs was Yeats's conviction that the passage of human events is determined by the revolutions of two interpenetrating cones or "gyres" representing respectively those increasingly outworn democratic, "objective," and Christian ideals, which he believed would soon be violently replaced by aristocratic, subjective, and pagan ones. What the visionary imagined, the nationalist saw all about him. By 1919 relations between London and Dublin were at an impasse, and Ireland was running over with members of Sinn Féin and others determined on armed hostility. Murders multiplied as physical force became the order of the day. "The Second Coming" from Michael Robartes and the Dancer (1921) is the poet's appalled response to such a state of affairs:

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Yeats's agonized reflection on political extremism and the failure of moral will goes far beyond its immediate occasion to show the occultist, nationalist, and poet's profound understanding of the universal threat of barbarism. He speaks for his time and for all time.

The plenitude of Yeats's mature genius was such that even while he stared into the abyss he could celebrate his highest and most joyous ideals in "A Prayer for My Daughter." The poet imagines himself in his newly acquired medieval home, Thor Balylee. A storm is howling as he wills for his child those traditional values of natural, patrician decorum contained in all that is "accustomed, ceremonious." These were qualities under deepening threat in Ireland, however, as two of Yeats's most pained and complex lyric sequences show.

The poems that make up "Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen" are, in Yeats's words: "a lamentation over lost peace." They are a terrifying picture of anarchy in a world lusting for degradation. In their pained embracing of shattered coherence, the poems were part of the contemporary "modernism" espoused by such colleagues as Ezra Pound (1885–1972) who also introduced Yeats to Japanese theater, which in turn was to influence his later dramaturgy. Like "Meditations in Time of Civil War," where Yeats tentatively opposed old aristocratic forcefulness to contemporary nightmare, the lyrics of "Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen" were published in The Tower (1927). This is perhaps Yeats's greatest volume. It shows the poet desperately searching amid suffering and exultation for that "Unity of Being" apparently offered by the impersonal, hieratic art extolled in "Sailing to Byzantium." Here is a permanence apparently available only to creators who have transcended the "sensual music" of the natural world.

Yeats was now the poet who, speaking both for Ireland and for the universal trauma of the early twentieth century, had been appointed to the Irish Senate and who, in 1923, received the Nobel Prize in Literature. He was, in his own words a "sixty-year-old smiling public man," but "Among School-children" denies easily complacent certainties and suggests a brief, transcendent apprehension of spiritual abundance: "O body swayed to music. O brightening glance,/How can we know the dancer from the dance?"

Nonetheless, Ireland and personal tragedy still haunted Yeats. His nation appeared to have reneged on traditional truths and to be trapped in narrow philistinism, while the death of his lifelong friend Lady Isabella Augusta Gregory (1852–1932) signaled the loss of much prized aristocratic poise. Yeats's thoughts turned increasingly to fascism and "the despotic rule of the educated classes as the only end of our troubles." Sometimes, as in "The Gyres," a defiantly bitter Yeats celebrated a vision of universal cataclysm but, as always, his thought was antithetical, a heroic recognition of opposing energies. "Byzantium" from The Winding Stair (1929), for example, is physical and even sexual in its energies as it pictures disembodied souls riding to eternity. Finally, in "The Circus Animals' Desertion," Yeats recognizes that all art, all exultation, has its origins in "the foul ragand-bone shop of the heart." It is this heroic acceptance of contraries—rapture and despair, desire and disembodied vision, body and soul—that lies behind Yeats's profound statement that "man can embody the truth but cannot know it." He experiences extremes in continuous flux. In this acceptance lies Yeats's greatness and his perennial fascination.