WB YEATS: HIS LIFE AND TIME

BY

THOMAS CURTIS

W.B YEATS was a Irish poet, dramatist, and prose writer, one of the greatest English-language poets of the 20^th century. His father had a good job he was a Barrister and then became a portrait painter and his mother was the daughter of a prosperous merchant in Sligo. Though Yeats parents he became familiar with various Anglo-Irish Protestant families. Yeats would have been expected to identify with his protestant tradition—which represented a powerful minority among Irelands predominantly Roman Catholic population –but he didn’t .He was separated from both historical traditions available to him in Ireland from the Roman Catholics because he could not share their faith, and from the Protestants, because he felt repelled by their concern for material success. Yeats best hope, he felt, was to cultivate a tradition more profound than either the catholic or the Protestant- the tradition of a hidden Ireland that existed largely in the anthropological evidence of its surviving customs, beliefs, and holy places, more Pagan than Christian.

In (1867) by the time Yeats was two him and his family moved to London, but he spent most of his childhood and school holidays in Sligo with his grandparents. This country- its scenery, folklore, and supernatural legend- would color Yeats work and form the setting of many of his poems. In (1880) his family moved back to Dublin where he attended the high school. In (1883) he attended the metropolitan school of art in Dublin where the most important part of his education was in meeting other poets and artists

Meanwhile, Yeats was beginning to write his first publication, two brief lyrics, appeared in Dublin University Review in 1885. When his family moved back to London in 1887, Yeats started up the new life of a professional writer. He joined the Theosophical Society, whose mysticism appealed to him because it was a form of imaginative life far removed from the workaday world. The age of science was repelled to Yeats; he was a visionary, and he insisted upon surrounding himself with poetic images. He began a study of prophetic books of William Blake, the Swedenborgian, and the alchemical

Yeats quickly became involved in the literary life of London. He made good friends with William Morris and W.E. Henley, and he was one of the founders of Rhymers Club whose members included his friends Lionel Johnson and Arthur Symons. In 1889 Yeats met Maud Gonne an Irish beauty ardent and brilliant. From that moment as he wrote "The troubling of my life began." "He fell in love with her, but his love was hopeless. Maud Gonne liked and admired him, but she was not in love with him. Her passion was lavished upon Ireland; she was an Irish patriot, a rebel and a rhetorician commanding in voice and in person. When Yeats joined in the Irish nationalist cause he did so partly from conviction but mostly for love of Maud. When Yeats play Cathleen ni Hooligan was first performed in Dublin in 1902 she played the title role.

After the rapid decline and death of the controversial Irish leader Charles Stewart Parnell in 1891, Yeats felt that Irish political life lost its significance. The vacuum left by politics might be filled, he felt by literature, art, poetry, drama, and legend. The Celtic Twilight (1893), a volume of essays was Yeats first effort toward this end but progress was slow until 1898 when he met Augusta Lady Gregory an aristocrat who was to become a playwright and his close friend. She was already collecting old stories, the lore of the west of Ireland. Yeats found that this lore chimed with his feeling for ancient ritual for pagan beliefs never entirely destroyed by Christianity. He felt that if he could treat it in a strict and high style he would create a genuine poetry while in personal terms moving towards his own identity. From 1898 Yeats spent his summers at Lady Gregory home Coole Park County Galway and he eventually purchased a ruined Norman castle called Thoor Ballylee in the Neighborhood. Under the name of the Tower this structure would become a dominant symbol in many of his latest and best poem.

In 1899 Yeats asked Maud Gonne to marry him but she decline. Four years later she married Major John Mac Bride an Irish soldier-one of the rebels later executed by the British government for their part in the Easter Rising of 1916. Meanwhile Yeats devoted himself to literature and drama believing that poems and plays would engender a national unity capable of transfiguring the Irish nation. He and along with others was one of the originators of the Irish Literary Theatre which gave its first performance in Dublin in 1899 with Yeats play The Countess Cathleen. To the end of his life Yeats remained a director of this theatre which became the Abbey Theatre in 1904. In the crucial period from 1899 to 1907 he managed the theatre’s affairs encouraged its playwrights (notably John Millington Synge) and contributed many of his own plays. Among the latter that became part of the Abbey Theatre’s repertoire are The Land of Hearts Desire (1894) Cathleen ni Houlihan (1902) The Hour Glass (1902) The Kings Threshold (1904) On Bailes Strand (1905) and Deirdre (1907).

In 1917 Yeats published several volumes of poetry during this period, notably poems (1895) and The Wind Amoung the Reeds (1899) which are typical of his early verse in their dreamlike atmosphere and their use of Irish folklore and legend but in the collections In the Seven Woods (1903) and The Green Helmet (1910) Yeats slowly discarded Pre-Raphaelite colors and rhythms of his early verse and purged it of certain Celtic and esoteric influences. The years from 1909 to 1914 mark a decisive change in his poetry. The otherworldly ecstatic atmosphere of the early lyric has cleared and the poems in Responsibilities: Poems and Play (1914) show a tightening and hardening of his verse line a more sparse and resonant imagery and a new directness with which Yeats confronts reality and and its imperfections.

In 1913 Yeats spent some months at Stone Cottage Sussex with the American poet Ezra Pound acting as his secretary. Pound was then editing translations of Japan and Yeats was greatly excited by them. The no drama provided a framework of drama designed for a small audience of initiates a stylized intimate drama capable of fully using the resources offered offered by masks, mime, dance and song and conveying-in contrast to the public theatre-Yeats own recondite symbolism. Yeats devised what he considered an equivalent of the no drama in such play as Four Plays for Dancers (1921). At the Hawk`s Well (first performance 1916) and several others.

In 1917 Yeats asked Iseult Gonne, Maud Gonne`s daughter to marry him. She refused. Some weeks later he proposed to miss George Hyde-lees and accepted; they were married in 1917. A daughter, Anne Butler Yeats born in 1919 and a son William Michael Yeats in 1921.

In 1922 on the foundation of the Irish Free State, Yeats excepted an invitation to become a member of the new Irish Senate: he served for six years. In 1923 he was awarded the Noble Prize for Literature. Now a celebrated figure he was indisputably one of the most significant modern poets. In 1936 his Oxford Book of Modern Verse, 1892-1935, a gathering of the poems he loved was published. Still working on his last plays he completed The Herne`s Egg, his most raucous work in 1938. Yeats last two verse collections New Poems and Last Poems and Two poems appeared in 1938 and 1939 respectively. In `these books many of his previous themes are gathered up and rehandled with an immense technical range; the age poet was using ballad rhythms and dialogue structure with undiminished energy as he approached his 75^th year.

Yeats died in January 1939 while abroad. Final arrangements for his buried in Sligo was thwarted when World War 2 began in autumn of 1939. In 1948 his body was finally taken back to Sligo and buried in a little protestant churchyard at Drumcliffe as he specified in "Under Ben Bulben" in his Last Poems under his epitaph: "Cast a cold eye On life, on death. Horse, pass by"

Had Yeats ceased to write at age 40 he would probably now be valued as a minor poet writing in a dying Pre-Raphaelite tradition that had drawn renewed beauty and poignancy for a time from the Celtic revival. There is no precedent in literary history for a poet who produces his greatest work between the ages of 50 and 75. Yeast’s work of this period takes its strength from his long and dedicated apprenticeship to poetry; from his experiments in a wide range of forms of poetry, drama, and prose and from his spiritual growth and gradual acquisition of personal wisdom which he incorporated into the framework of his own mythology.

Yeat’s mythology from which arises the distilled symbolism of his great period is not always easy to understand nor did Yeats intend its full meaning to be immediately apparent to those unfamiliar with his thought and the tradition in which he worked. His own cyclic view of history suggested to him a recurrence and convergence of images, so that they become multiplied and enriched; and this progressive enrichment may be traced throughout his work. Among Yeast’s dominant images are Lead and the Swan; Helen and the burning of Troy; the Tower in its many forms; the sun and moon; the burning house; cave, thorn tree, and well; eagle, heron, sea gull, and hawk; blind man, lame man, and beggar; unicorn and phoenix; and horse, hound, and boar. Yet these traditional images are continually validated by their alignment with yeast’s own personal experience, and it is this that gives them their peculiarly vital quality. In yeast’s verse they are often shaped into a strong and proud rhetoric and into the many poetic tones of which he was the master. All are informed by the two qualities which Yeats valued and which he retained into old age—passion and joy. Short Questions

Bibliography

Question 2. What skills did you learn? The experience of completing a special study topic introduced me into the following skills of the historian

1. I have learnt new techniqes on Microsoft word E.g how to use footnotes how to justify text

I learnt the basics of historical writing like how

2. I have learnt to locate the books in the local library
3. I have learnt how to search for information though the internet

Question 3.

1.Why did this topic merit study ?

This topic merit study because Yeats was one of the greatest poets of the 20^th century and while his work

is famous and he is barely mentioned in the Leaving Cert course .

BIAS

We learned in history class that its very difficult to write the history of anything. Most of the time it can be A history

The is the definite and it is very hard to find the definite history this is because of bias and subjectivity

While doing my research I became aware of that to read one book being one sided

The way I saw the difficulty was by reading widely from books, the internet and Encarta.