Yeats, W. B.

Poet, dramatist, essayist, Nobel laureate (in 1923), folklorist, mystic, and statesman, William Butler Yeats (1865–1939) was the eldest born (on 13 June 1865) of painter John Butler and Susan Mary Pollexfen Yeats. Educated in public schools in London and Dublin, he enrolled in art school (in 1884) and in the next two years cofounded the Dublin Hermetic Society and began publishing his first poetry in the Dublin University Review (1885–1886). A close friend of young poets such as AE (George Russell), Yeats was also a familiar of such literary friends of his father's as playwright John Todhunter, Blake scholar Edwin Ellis, and Fenian exile John O'Leary, and so became a central figure in the Irish literary revival of the late nineteenth century. As an editor of folklore and Poems and Ballads of Young Ireland (1888) and, with Ellis, The Works of William Blake (1893), Yeats grew in reputation as a man of letters as well as a poet. The first collected edition of his Poems (1895) began to establish a canon in its selections from The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems (1889) and from a work dedicated to Maud Gonne, The Countess Kathleen and Various Legends and Lyrics (1892). The love poetry of The Wind among the Reeds (1899) conflated Gonne with other women, the Sidhe (fairies), and Ireland personified. He collaborated with Lady Gregory on peasant comedies, including Cathleen Ni Houlihan (1902), and they joined with John Millington Synge to found the Abbey Theatre.

By 1908, with the publication of the eight-volume Collected Works in Verse and Prose to confirm his productivity as a writer, Yeats had begun to leave behind the mannerisms of the Celtic Twilight for a new combative and concrete poetic tone appropriate to the public man he had become. The shift is progressive from the poems of The Green Helmet (1910) and Responsibilities (1916) to The Wild Swans at Coole (1919) and Michael Robartes and the Dancer (1921), which brought to national attention a series of rebellion poems, including "Easter 1916," as Yeats was called to service in the Irish Free State Senate in 1922. His ideal "theatre of beauty" had given place to the realism of Synge and Sean O'Casey at the Abbey, and he began writing for private audiences several "plays for dancers" influenced by the Japanese theatre of the Noh. As the First World War erupted, Yeats emerged as the preeminent modern poet. His greatest achievements, The Tower (1928) and The Winding Stair (1933), were succeeded by a new aesthetic as he introduced the concept of "tragic joy" to conclude a life's work in New Poems (1938) and Last Poems and Two Plays (1939), published at the Cuala Press by his wife George (m. 1917) and sister Elizabeth Corbet Yeats (1868–1940). He died in France on 28 January 1939.

Taken as a whole, Yeats's influence on English-language poetry has been enormous. No other twentieth-century writer, except James Joyce, has commanded so high a place in Irish letters. As the greatest Irish poet, Yeats casts a giant shadow. For Austin Clarke (1896–1974), who was probably Yeats's nearest rival in the 1930s, Yeats remained an exemplar and obsession long after 1939. The Belfast-born poet Louis MacNeice (1907–1963) wrote one of the best seminal studies of Yeats's poetry; more recently, Derek Mahon (1941– ) shows Yeats to be a salutary influence, as does Thomas Kinsella (1928– ), who served as codirector of the Cuala Press during its short revival in the 1970s. Ireland's greatest living poet, Seamus Heaney (1939– ), has also written usefully on Yeats's permanent value as a lyric bard of any nation, likening and preferring him to Wordsworth. Yeats's international reputation as a major poet and man of letters is therefore sustained by a legacy of emulation, though some of his political mythmaking has been challenged by revisionists in Ireland and elsewhere.

SEE ALSO Arts: Modern Irish and Anglo-Irish Literature and the Arts since 1800; Drama, Modern; Gonne, Maud; Literary Renaissance (Celtic Revival); Literature: Anglo-Irish Literature in the Nineteenth Century; Poetry, Modern; Primary Documents: "Easter 1916" (1916)

Bibliography

Foster, R. F. W. B. Yeats: A Life. Vol. 1, The Apprentice Mage. 1997. Vol. 2, The Arch-Poet, 1915–1939. 2003.

Heaney, Seamus. Preoccupations: Selected Prose, 1969–1978. 1980.

Heaney, Seamus. The Redress of Poetry. 1995.

Jeffares, A. Norman. W. B. Yeats: A New Biography. 1988.

McCormack, William J. Ascendancy and Tradition in Anglo-Irish Literary History from 1789 to 1939. 1985.

MacNeice, Louis. The Poetry of W. B. Yeats. 1941.

Yeats, W. B. Autobiographies. 1955.

Wayne K. Chapman