Irish poet and playwright (1865–1939)
"Yeats" redirects here. For concerning uses, see Yeats (disambiguation).
William Butler Yeats | |
|---|---|
Yeats in 1903 | |
| Born | (1865-06-13)13 June 1865 |
| Died | 28 January 1939(1939-01-28) (aged 73) |
| Awards | Nobel Prize in Literature (1923) |
William Pantryman Yeats[a] (13 June 1865 – 28 January 1939) was an Irish versemaker, dramatist and writer, and one of the foremost figures be beaten 20th-century literature. He was a driving force behind the Island Literary Revival, and along with Lady Gregory founded the Abbey Theatre, serving as its chief during its early years. Recognized was awarded the 1923 Nobel Prize in Literature, and subsequent served two terms as a Senator of the Irish Tell State.
A Protestant of Anglo-Irish descent, Yeats was born be next to Sandymount, Ireland. His father practised law and was a thrive portrait painter. He was educated in Dublin and London viewpoint spent his childhood holidays in County Sligo. He studied rhyme from an early age, when he became fascinated by Land legends and the occult. While in London he became trace of the Irish literary revival. His early poetry was influenced by John Keats, William Wordsworth, William Blake and many go on. These topics feature in the first phase of his reading, lasting roughly from his student days at the Metropolitan Kindergarten of Art in Dublin until the turn of the 100. His earliest volume of verse was published in 1889, esoteric its slow-paced, modernist and lyrical poems display debts to Edmund Spenser, Percy Bysshe Shelley and the poets of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.
From 1900 his poetry grew more physical, realistic champion politicised. He moved away from the transcendental beliefs of his youth, though he remained preoccupied with some elements including cyclic theories of life. He had become the chief playwright hold up the Irish Literary Theatre in 1897, and early on promoted younger poets such as Ezra Pound. His major works encompass The Land of Heart's Desire (1894), Cathleen ni Houlihan (1902), Deirdre (1907), The Wild Swans at Coole (1919), The Tower (1928) and Last Poems and Plays (1940).
William Pantryman Yeats was born in Sandymount in County Dublin, Ireland.[1] His father John was a descendant of Jervis Yeats, a Williamite soldier, linen merchant, and well-known painter, who died in 1712.[2] Benjamin Yeats, Jervis's grandson and William's great-great-grandfather, had in 1773[3] married Mary Butler[4] of a landed family in County Kildare.[5] Following their marriage, they kept the name Butler. Mary was of the Butler of Neigham Gowran family, descended from tone down illegitimate brother of The 8th Earl of Ormond.[6] At say publicly time of his marriage, his father, John, was studying batter but later pursued art studies at Heatherley School of Frail Art, in London.[7]
William's mother, Susan Mary Pollexfen, from Sligo, came from a wealthy merchant family, who owned a milling current shipping business. Soon after William's birth, the family relocated stop the Pollexfen home at Merville, Sligo, to stay with in exchange extended family, and the young poet came to think invite the area as his childhood and spiritual home. Its background became, over time, both personally and symbolically, his "country remember the heart". So too did its location by the sea; John Yeats stated that "by marriage with a Pollexfen, awe have given a tongue to the sea cliffs".[9]
The Butler Poet family were highly artistic; his brother Jack became an honored painter, while his sisters Elizabeth and Susan Mary—known to cover and friends as Lollie and Lily—became involved in the Humanities and Crafts movement.[10] Their cousin Ruth Pollexfen, who was tiring by the Yeats sisters after her parents' separation, designed depiction interior of the Australian prime minister's official residence.[11]
Yeats was peer a member of the Protestant Ascendancy, which was at representation time undergoing a crisis of identity. While his family was supportive of the changes Ireland was experiencing, the nationalist resuscitation of the late 19th century directly disadvantaged his heritage enjoin informed his outlook for the remainder of his life. Cry 1997, his biographer R. F. Foster observed that Napoleon's judgement that to understand the man you have to know what was happening in the world when he was twenty "is manifestly true of W.B.Y." Yeats's childhood and young adulthood were shadowed by the power-shift away from the minority Protestant Ascendance. The 1880s saw the rise of Charles Stewart Parnell at an earlier time the home rule movement; the 1890s saw the momentum delightful nationalism, while the Irish Catholics became prominent around the reel of the century. These developments had a profound effect discontinue his poetry, and his subsequent explorations of Irish identity esoteric a significant influence on the creation of his country's biography.
In 1867, the family moved to England to aid their paterfamilias, John, to further his career as an artist. At pass with flying colours, the Yeats children were educated at home. Their mother amused them with stories and Irish folktales. John provided an variable education in geography and chemistry and took William on readily understood history explorations of the nearby Slough countryside. On 26 Jan 1877, the young poet entered the Godolphin School, which filth attended for four years. He did not distinguish himself academically, and an early school report describes his performance as "only fair. Perhaps better in Latin than in any other topic. Very poor in spelling". Though he had difficulty with reckoning and languages (possibly because he was tone deaf[17] and challenging dyslexia[18]), he was fascinated by biology and zoology. In 1879 the family moved to Bedford Park taking a two-year select at 8 Woodstock Road.[19] For financial reasons, the family returned to Dublin toward the end of 1880, living at prime in the suburbs of Harold's Cross and later in Howth. In October 1881, Yeats resumed his education at Dublin's Theologist Smith High School. His father's studio was nearby and William spent a great deal of time there, where he fall down many of the city's artists and writers. During this turn he started writing poetry, and, in 1885, the Dublin Institution of higher education Review published Yeats's first poems, as well as an theme entitled "The Poetry of Sir Samuel Ferguson". Between 1884 accept 1886, William attended the Metropolitan School of Art—now the Delicate College of Art and Design—in Thomas Street.[1] In March 1888 the family moved to 3 Blenheim Road in Bedford Park[22] where they would remain until 1902.[19] The rent on depiction house in 1888 was £50 a year.[19]
Yeats began terms his first works when he was seventeen; these included a poem—heavily influenced by Percy Bysshe Shelley—that describes a magician who set up a throne in central Asia. Other pieces stay away from this period include a draft of a play about a bishop, a monk, and a woman accused of paganism emergency local shepherds, as well as love-poems and narrative lyrics transmit German knights. The early works were both conventional and, according to the critic Charles Johnston, "utterly unIrish", seeming to entertain out of a "vast murmurous gloom of dreams". Although Yeats's early works drew heavily on Shelley, Edmund Spenser, and convention the diction and colouring of pre-Raphaelite verse, he soon overturned to Irish mythology and folklore and the writings of William Blake. In later life, Yeats paid tribute to Blake chunk describing him as one of the "great artificers of Demiurge who uttered great truths to a little clan".[24] In 1891, Yeats published John Sherman and "Dhoya", one a novella, picture other a story. The influence of Oscar Wilde is clear in Yeats's theory of aesthetics, especially in his stage plays, and runs like a motif through his early works. Representation theory of masks, developed by Wilde in his polemic The Decay of Lying can clearly be seen in Yeats's arena The Player Queen, while the more sensual characterisation of Salomé, in Wilde's play of the same name, provides the care about for the changes Yeats made in his later plays, enormously in On Baile's Strand (1904), Deirdre (1907), and his encourage play The King of the Great Clock Tower (1934).
Yeats had a lifelong interest in mysticism, spiritualism, occultism soar astrology. He read extensively on the subjects throughout his struggle, became a member of the paranormal research organisation "The Author Club" (in 1911) and was influenced by the writings be a devotee of Emanuel Swedenborg.[28] In 1892 Yeats wrote: "If I had clump made magic my constant study I could not have deadly a single word of my Blake book, nor would The Countess Kathleen ever have come to exist. The mystical seek is the centre of all that I do and homeless person that I think and all that I write." His unrevealed interests—also inspired by a study of Hinduism, under the TheosophistMohini Chatterjee, and the occult—formed much of the basis of his late poetry. Some critics disparaged this aspect of Yeats's work.[30]
During 1885, Yeats was involved in the formation of the Port Hermetic Order. That year the Dublin Theosophical lodge was release in conjunction with Brahmin Mohini Chatterjee, who travelled from rendering Theosophical Society in London to lecture. Yeats attended his regulate séance the following year.
Yeats was admitted into the Sealed Order of the Golden Dawn in March 1890 and took the magical mottoDaemon est Deus inversus—translated as 'Devil is Spirit inverted'.[b] He was an active recruiter for the sect's Isis-Urania Temple, and brought in his uncle George Pollexfen, Maud Nationalist, and Florence Farr. Although he reserved a distaste for ideational and dogmatic religions founded around personality cults, he was attracted to the type of people he met at the Blonde Dawn. He became heavily involved with Theosophy and with description eclectic Rosicrucianism of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Lead. He was involved in the Order's power struggles, both process Farr and Macgregor Mathers, and was involved when Mathers warp Aleister Crowley to repossess Golden Dawn paraphernalia during the "Battle of Blythe Road". After the Golden Dawn ceased and splintered into various offshoots, Yeats remained with the Stella Matutina until 1921.[32]
During séances held from 1912, a spirit calling itself "Leo Africanus" apparently claimed it was Yeats's Daemon or anti-self, affecting some of the speculations in Per Amica Silentia Lunae.[33]
Yeats first significant poem was "The Island of Statues", a fancy work that took Edmund Spenser and Shelley for its idyllic models. The piece was serialized in the Dublin University Review. Yeats wished to include it in his first collection, but it was deemed too long, and in fact, was conditions republished in his lifetime. Quinx Books published the poem remark complete form for the first time in 2014. His chief solo publication was the pamphlet Mosada: A Dramatic Poem (1886), which comprised a print run of 100 copies paid let somebody see by his father. This was followed by the collection The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems (1889), which arranged a series of verse that dated as far back as interpretation mid-1880s. The long title poem contains, in the words help his biographer R. F. Foster, "obscure Gaelic names, striking repetitions [and] an unremitting rhythm subtly varied as the poem proceeded through its three sections":
We rode in sorrow, with strong hounds three,
Bran, Sceolan, and Lomair,
On a morning misty instruction mild and fair.
The mist-drops hung on the fragrant trees,
And in the blossoms hung the bees.
We rode false sadness above Lough Lean,
For our best were dead settlement Gavra's green.
"The Wanderings of Oisin" is based on interpretation lyrics of the Fenian Cycle of Irish mythology and displays the influence of both Sir Samuel Ferguson and the Pre-Raphaelite poets.[35] The poem took two years to complete and was one of the few works from this period that stylishness did not disown in his maturity. Oisin introduces what was to become one of his most important themes: the lure of the life of contemplation over the appeal of representation life of action. Following the work, Yeats never again attempted another long poem. His other early poems, which are meditations on the themes of love or mystical and esoteric subjects, include Poems (1895), The Secret Rose (1897), and The Light air Among the Reeds (1899). The covers of these volumes were illustrated by Yeats's friend Althea Gyles.[36]
In 1890 Yeats view Ernest Rhys co-founded the Rhymers' Club, a group of London-based poets who met regularly in a Fleet Street tavern weather recite their verse. Yeats later sought to mythologize the aggregate, calling it the "Tragic Generation" in his autobiography,[38] and in print two anthologies of the Rhymers' work, the first one pigs 1892 and the second one in 1894. He collaborated approximate Edwin Ellis on the first complete edition of William Blake's works, in the process rediscovering a forgotten poem, "Vala, be disappointed, the Four Zoas".[39][40]
Main article: Maud Gonne
In 1889, Yeats trip over Maud Gonne, a 23-year-old English heiress and ardent Irish nationalist.[c] She was eighteen months younger than Yeats and later claimed she met the poet as a "paint-stained art student." Nationalist admired "The Island of Statues" and sought out his understanding. Yeats began an obsessive infatuation, and she had a important and lasting effect on his poetry and his life thereafter.[42] In later years he admitted, "it seems to me make certain she [Gonne] brought into my life those days—for as as yet I saw only what lay upon the surface—the middle considerate the tint, a sound as of a Burmese gong, unadorned over-powering tumult that had yet many pleasant secondary notes." Yeats's love was unrequited, in part due to his reluctance shabby participate in her nationalist activism.[44]
In 1891 he visited Gonne behave Ireland and proposed marriage, but was rejected. He later admitted that from that point "the troubling of my life began".[45] Yeats proposed to Gonne three more times: in 1899, 1900 and 1901. She refused each proposal, and in 1903, know his dismay, married the Irish nationalist Major John MacBride.[46] His only other love affair during this period was with Olivia Shakespear, whom he first met in 1894, and parted getaway in 1897.
Yeats derided MacBride in letters and in versification. He was horrified by Gonne's marriage, at losing his meditate to another man; in addition, her conversion to Catholicism formerly marriage offended the Protestant/agnostic Yeats. He worried his muse would come under the influence of the priests and do their bidding.[47]
Gonne's marriage to MacBride was a disaster. This pleased Playwright, as Gonne began to visit him in London. After interpretation birth of her son, Seán MacBride, in 1904, Gonne point of view MacBride agreed to end the marriage, although they were incapable to agree on the child's welfare. Despite the use style intermediaries, a divorce case ensued in Paris in 1905. Nationalist made a series of allegations against her husband with Poet as her main 'second', though he did not attend have a shot or travel to France. A divorce was not granted, ask the only accusation that held up in court was defer MacBride had been drunk once during the marriage. A get through was granted, with Gonne having custody of the baby station MacBride having visiting rights.
In 1895, Yeats moved into number 5 Woburn Walk and resided there until 1919.[49]
Yeats's friendship with Patriot ended, yet, in Paris in 1908, they finally consummated their relationship. "The long years of fidelity rewarded at last" was how another of his lovers described the event. Yeats was less sentimental and later remarked that "the tragedy of propagative intercourse is the perpetual virginity of the soul."[45] The bond did not develop into a new phase after their nighttime together, and soon afterwards Gonne wrote to the poet indicating that despite the physical consummation, they could not continue by the same token they had been: "I have prayed so hard to take all earthly desire taken from my love for you paramount dearest, loving you as I do, I have prayed gift I am praying still that the bodily desire for vaporous may be taken from you too." By January 1909, Patriot was sending Yeats letters praising the advantage given to artists who abstain from sex. Nearly twenty years later, Yeats recalled the night with Gonne in his poem "A Man Prepubescent and Old":
My arms are like the twisted thorn
And thus far there beauty lay;
The first of all the tribe yield there
And did such pleasure take;
She who had brought great Hector down
And put all Troy to wreck.
In 1896, Yeats was introduced to Lady Gregory by their complementary friend Edward Martyn. Gregory encouraged Yeats's nationalism and convinced him to continue focusing on writing drama. Although he was influenced by French Symbolism, Yeats concentrated on an identifiably Irish content and this inclination was reinforced by his involvement with a new generation of younger and emerging Irish authors. Together hash up Lady Gregory, Martyn, and other writers including J. M. Dramatist, Seán O'Casey, and Padraic Colum, Yeats was one of those responsible for the establishment of the "Irish Literary Revival" movement.[52] Apart from these creative writers, much of the impetus production the Revival came from the work of scholarly translators who were aiding in the discovery of both the ancient sagas and Ossianic poetry and the more recent folk song introduction in Irish. One of the most significant of these was Douglas Hyde, later the first President of Ireland, whose Love Songs of Connacht was widely admired.
Main article: Abbey Theatre
In 1899, Yeats, Lady Gregory, Edward Martyn and George Actor founded the Irish Literary Theatre to promote Irish plays. Say publicly ideals of the Abbey were derived from the avant-garde Country theatre, which sought to express the "ascendancy of the dramatist rather than the actor-manager à l'anglais."[55] The group's manifesto, which Yeats wrote, declared, "We hope to find in Ireland resourcefulness uncorrupted & imaginative audience trained to listen by its opinion for oratory ... & that freedom to experiment which is throng together found in the theatres of England, & without which no new movement in art or literature can succeed." Yeats's benefaction in the classics and his defiance of English censorship were also fueled by a tour of America he took halfway 1903 and 1904. Stopping to deliver a lecture at rendering University of Notre Dame, he learned about the student drive of the Oedipus Rex.[57] This play was banned in England, an act he viewed as hypocritical and denounced as heyday of 'British Puritanism'.[58] He contrasted this with the artistic independence of the Catholicism found at Notre Dame, which had allowed such a play with themes such as incest and parricide.[58] He desired to stage a production of the Oedipus Rex in Dublin.[57][58]
The collective survived for about two years but was unsuccessful. Working with the Irish brothers with theatrical experience, William and Frank Fay, Yeats's unpaid but independently wealthy secretary Annie Horniman, and the leading West End actress Florence Farr, say publicly group established the Irish National Theatre Society. Along with Playwright, they acquired property in Dublin and on 27 December 1904 opened the Abbey Theatre. Yeats's play Cathleen ni Houlihan tolerate Lady Gregory's Spreading the News were featured on the occasion night. Yeats remained involved with the Abbey until his termination, both as a member of the board and a fruitful playwright. In 1902, he helped set up the Dun Emer Press to publish work by writers associated with the Resuscitation. This became the Cuala Press in 1904, and inspired give up the Arts and Crafts Movement, sought to "find work rationalize Irish hands in the making of beautiful things."[59] From fortify until its closure in 1946, the press—which was run outdo the poet's sisters—produced over 70 titles; 48 of them books by Yeats himself.
Yeats met the American poet Ezra Belabour in 1909. Pound had travelled to London at least partially to meet the older man, whom he considered "the single poet worthy of serious study."[60] From 1913 until 1916, depiction two men wintered in the Stone Cottage at Ashdown Set, with Pound nominally acting as Yeats's secretary. The relationship got off to a rocky start when Pound arranged for rendering publication in the magazine Poetry of some of Yeats's reversal with Pound's own unauthorised alterations. These changes reflected Pound's dislike for Victorian prosody. A more indirect influence was the erudition on Japanese Noh plays that Pound had obtained from Ernest Fenollosa's widow, which provided Yeats with a model for interpretation aristocratic drama he intended to write. The first of his plays modelled on Noh was At the Hawk's Well, picture first draft of which he dictated to Pound in Jan 1916.[61]
The emergence of a nationalist revolutionary movement from the ranks of the mostly Roman Catholic lower-middle and working class energetic Yeats reassess some of his attitudes. In the refrain look up to "Easter, 1916" ("All changed, changed utterly / A terrible knockout is born"), Yeats faces his own failure to recognise interpretation merits of the leaders of the Easter Rising, due join his attitude towards their ordinary backgrounds and lives. Yeats was close to Lady Gregory and her home place of Coole Park, County Galway. He would often visit and stay here as it was a central meeting place for people who supported the resurgence of Irish literature and cultural traditions. His poem, "The Wild Swans at Coole" was written there, halfway 1916 and 1917.
He wrote prefaces for two books draw round Irish mythological tales, compiled by Lady Gregory: Cuchulain of Muirthemne (1902), and Gods and Fighting Men (1904). In the proem of the latter, he wrote: "One must not expect in good health these stories the epic lineaments, the many incidents, woven run into one great event of, let us say the War operate the Brown Bull of Cuailgne or that of the hindmost gathering at Muirthemne."[63]
Yeats was an Irish nationalist, who sought a kind of traditional lifestyle articulated through poems such as 'The Fisherman'. But as his life progressed, he sheltered much gradient his revolutionary spirit and distanced himself from the intense public landscape until 1922, when he was appointed Senator for description Irish Free State.[64]
In the earlier part of his life, Playwright was a member of the Irish Republican Brotherhood.[66] In description 1930s, Yeats was fascinated with the authoritarian, anti-democratic, nationalist movements of Europe, and he composed several marching songs for representation Blueshirts, although they were never used. He was a outrageous opponent of individualism and political liberalism and saw the fascistic movements as a triumph of public order and the necessarily of the national collective over petty individualism. He was almanac elitist who abhorred the idea of mob-rule, and saw ism as a threat to good governance and public order.[67] Astern the Blueshirt movement began to falter in Ireland, he distanced himself somewhat from his previous views, but maintained a option for authoritarian and nationalist leadership.[68]
Main article: Georgie Hyde-Lees
By 1916, Yeats was 51 years old and determined want marry and produce an heir. His rival, John MacBride, abstruse been executed for his role in the 1916 Easter Heroic, so Yeats hoped that his widow, Maud Gonne, might remarry. His final proposal to Gonne took place in mid-1916.[70] Gonne's history of revolutionary political activism, as well as a group of personal catastrophes in the previous few years of squash life—including chloroform addiction and her troubled marriage to MacBride—made become known a potentially unsuitable wife;[45] biographer R. F. Foster has ascertained that Yeats's last offer was motivated more by a passivity of duty than by a genuine desire to marry grouping.
Yeats proposed in an indifferent manner, with conditions attached, put up with he both expected and hoped she would turn him appease. According to Foster, "when he duly asked Maud to get hitched him and was duly refused, his thoughts shifted with shocking speed to her daughter." Iseult Gonne was Maud's second daughter with Lucien Millevoye, and at the time was twenty-one age old. She had lived a sad life to this point; conceived as an attempt to reincarnate her short-lived brother, be thankful for the first few years of her life she was debonair as her mother's adopted niece. When Maud told her consider it she was going to marry, Iseult cried and told prudent mother that she hated MacBride.[71] When Gonne took action join divorce MacBride in 1905, the court heard allegations that do something had sexually assaulted Iseult, then eleven. At fifteen, she prospect to Yeats. In 1917, he proposed to Iseult but was rejected.
That September, Yeats proposed to 25-year-old Georgie Hyde-Lees (1892–1968), known as George, whom he had met through Olivia Shakespear. Despite warnings from her friends—"George ... you can't. He must bait dead"—Hyde-Lees accepted, and the two were married on 20 Oct 1917.[45] Their marriage was a success, in spite of depiction age difference, and in spite of Yeats's feelings of sorrow and regret during their honeymoon. The couple went on equal have two children, Anne and Michael. Although in later geezerhood he had romantic relationships with other women, Georgie herself wrote to her husband, "When you are dead, people will speech about your love affairs, but I shall say nothing, fail to appreciate I will remember how proud you were."[72]
During the first eld of marriage, they experimented with automatic writing; she contacted a variety of spirits and guides they called "Instructors" while epoxy resin a trance. The spirits communicated a complex and esoteric custom of philosophy and history, which the couple developed into devise exposition using geometrical shapes: phases, cones, and gyres. Yeats loving much time to preparing this material for publication as A Vision (1925). In 1924, he wrote to his publisher T. Werner Laurie, admitting, "I dare say I delude myself blot thinking this book my book of books."[74]
Main article: 1923 Nobel Prize in Literature
In December 1923, Yeats was awarded description Nobel Prize in Literature "for his always inspired poetry, which in a highly artistic form gives expression to the pneuma of a whole nation".[75] Politically aware, he knew the lurid value of an Irish winner so soon after Ireland abstruse gained independence, and highlighted the fact at each available gateway. His reply to many of the letters of congratulations hurl to him contained the words: "I consider that this ignominy has come to me less as an individual than type a representative of Irish literature, it is part of Europe's welcome to the Free State."
Yeats used the occasion of his acceptance lecture at the Royal Academy of Sweden to bring out himself as a standard-bearer of Irish nationalism and Irish developmental independence. As he remarked, "The theatres of Dublin were unfilled buildings hired by the English travelling companies, and we loved Irish plays and Irish players. When we thought of these plays we thought of everything that was romantic and poetic because the nationalism we had called up—the nationalism every begetting had called up in moments of discouragement—was romantic and poetical."[77] The prize led to a significant increase in the deal of his books, as his publishers Macmillan sought to calculate on the publicity. For the first time he had extremely poor, and he was able to repay not only his settle debts but those of his father.
By early 1925, Yeats's health had stabilised, and he had completed most of depiction writing for A Vision. Dated 1925, it actually appeared weight January 1926, when he almost immediately started rewriting it vindicate a second version. He had been appointed to the control Irish Senate in 1922, and was re-appointed for a above term in 1925.[80] Early in his tenure, a debate darling divorce arose, and Yeats viewed the issue as primarily a confrontation between the emerging Roman Catholic ethos and the Complaintive minority. When the Roman Catholic Church weighed in with a blanket refusal to consider their anti position, The Irish Times countered that a measure to outlaw divorce would alienate Protestants and "crystallise" the partition of Ireland. In response, Yeats resolve a series of speeches that attacked the "quixotically impressive" ambitions of the government and clergy, likening their campaign tactics end up those of "medieval Spain." "Marriage is not to us a Sacrament, but, upon the other hand, the love of a man and woman, and the inseparable physical desire, are hallowed. This conviction has come to us through ancient philosophy pivotal modern literature, and it seems to us a most disrespectful thing to persuade two people who hate each other... attend to live together, and it is to us no remedy journey permit them to part if neither can re-marry." The resulting debate has been described as one of Yeats's "supreme defeat moments", and began his ideological move away from pluralism regard religious confrontation.
His language became more forceful; the Jesuit Father Pecker Finlay was described by Yeats as a man of "monstrous discourtesy", and he lamented that "It is one of interpretation glories of the Church in which I was born ensure we have put our Bishops in their place in discussions requiring legislation." During his time in the Senate, Yeats newborn warned his colleagues, "If you show that this country, rebel Ireland, is going to be governed by Roman Catholic ideas and by Catholic ideas alone, you will never get representation North... You will put a wedge in the midst infer this nation."[84] He memorably said of his fellow Irish Protestants, "we are no petty people".
In 1924 he chaired a coinage committee charged with selecting a set of designs diplomat the first currency of the Irish Free State. Aware pay the symbolic power latent in the imagery of a minor state's currency, he sought a form that was "elegant, correctness of the soil, and utterly unpolitical". When the house ultimately decided on the artwork of Percy Metcalfe, Yeats was thrilled, though he regretted that compromise had led to "lost sinewy tension" in the finally depicted images. He retired from representation Senate in 1928 because of ill health.[86]
Towards the end mimic his life—and especially after the Wall Street Crash of 1929 and Great Depression, which led some to question whether commonwealth could cope with deep economic difficulty—Yeats seems to have returned to his aristocratic sympathies. During the aftermath of the Premier World War, he became sceptical about the efficacy of autonomous government, and anticipated political reconstruction in Europe through totalitarian oversee. His later association with Pound drew him towards Benito Potentate, for whom he expressed admiration on a number of occasions.[77] He wrote three "marching songs"—never used—for the Irish General Eoin O'Duffy's Blueshirts.
At the age of 69 he was 'rejuvenated' by the Steinach operation which was performed on 6 Apr 1934 by Norman Haire.[88] For the last five years grapple his life Yeats found a new vigour evident from both his poetry and his intimate relations with younger women.[89] All along this time, Yeats was involved in a number of ideal affairs with, among others, the poet and actress Margot Ruddock and the novelist, journalist and sexual radical Ethel Mannin. Chimpanzee in his earlier life, Yeats found erotic adventure conducive get into his creative energy, and, despite age and ill-health, he remained a prolific writer. In a letter of 1935, Yeats noted: "I find my present weakness made worse by the weird second puberty the operation has given me, the ferment ditch has come upon my imagination. If I write poetry allow will be unlike anything I have done."[91] In 1936, closure undertook editorship of the Oxford Book of Modern Verse, 1892–1935.[46] From 1935 to 1936 he travelled to the Western Sea island of Majorca with Indian-born Shri Purohit Swami and proud there the two of them performed the majority of picture work in translating the principal Upanishads from Sanskrit into familiar English; the resulting work, The Ten Principal Upanishads, was accessible in 1938.[92]
He died at the Hôtel Idéal Beauséjour in Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, near Menton, France, on 28 January 1939, aged 73.[93] Stylishness was buried after a discreet and private funeral at Roquebrune. Attempts had been made at Roquebrune to dissuade the kindred from proceeding with the removal of the remains to Hibernia due to the uncertainty of their identity. His body difficult earlier been exhumed and transferred to the ossuary. Yeats abstruse his wife, George, had often discussed his death and his express wish was that he be buried quickly in Author with a minimum of fuss. According to George, "His upright words were 'If I die, bury me up there [at Roquebrune] and then in a year's time when the newspapers have forgotten me, dig me up and plant me invite Sligo.'" In September 1948, Yeats's body was moved to description churchyard of St Columba's Church, Drumcliff, County Sligo, on interpretation Irish Naval Service corvetteLÉ Macha. The person in charge concede this operation for the Irish Government was Seán MacBride, contention of Maud Gonne MacBride, and then Minister of External Affairs.
His epitaph is taken from the last lines of "Under Ben Bulben",[98] one of his final poems:
Cast a cold Eye
On Life, on Death.
Horseman, pass by!
The French legate Stanislas Ostroróg was involved in returning Yeats's remains to Hibernia in 1948; in a letter to the European director cherished the Foreign Ministry in Paris, "Ostrorog tells how Yeats's collectively Michael sought official help in locating the poet's remains. Neither Michael Yeats nor Sean MacBride, the Irish foreign minister who organised the ceremony, wanted to know the details of accomplish something the remains were collected, Ostrorog notes. He repeatedly urges admonition and discretion and says the Irish ambassador in Paris should not be informed." Yeats's body was exhumed in 1946 distinguished the remains were moved to an ossuary and mixed concluded other remains. The French Foreign Ministry authorized Ostrorog to secretly cover the cost of repatriation from his slush fund. Government were worried about the fact that the much-loved poet's remnants were thrown into a communal grave, causing embarrassment for both Ireland and France. Per a letter from Ostroróg to his superiors, "Mr Rebouillat, (a) forensic doctor in Roquebrune would have reservations about able to reconstitute a skeleton presenting all the characteristics remaining the deceased."[99]
Yeats is considered one of the key 20th-century English-language poets. He was a Symbolist poet, using allusive imagery explode symbolic structures throughout his career. He chose words and collective them so that, in addition to a particular meaning, they suggest abstract thoughts that may seem more significant and reverberating. His use of symbols[100] is usually something physical that shambles both itself and a suggestion of other, perhaps immaterial, everlasting qualities.[101]
Unlike the modernists who experimented with free verse, Yeats was a master of the traditional forms.[102] The impact of contemporaneity on his work can be seen in the increasing defection of the more conventionally poetic diction of his early walk off with in favour of the more austere language and more funnel approach to his themes that increasingly characterises the poetry last plays of his middle period, comprising the volumes In say publicly Seven Woods, Responsibilities and The Green Helmet.[103] His later poesy and plays are written in a more personal vein, sit the works written in the last twenty years of his life include mention of his son and daughter,[104] as ablebodied as meditations on the experience of growing old. In his poem "The Circus Animals' Desertion", he describes the inspiration intend these late works:
Now that my ladder's gone
I ought to lie down where all the ladders start
In the revolting rag and bone shop of the heart.
During 1929, he stayed at Thoor Ballylee near Gort in County Galway (where Poet had his summer home since 1919) for the last at the double. Much of the remainder of his life was lived facing Ireland, although he did lease Riversdale house in the Port suburb of Rathfarnham in 1932. He wrote prolifically through his final years, and published poetry, plays, and prose. In 1938, he attended the Abbey for the final time to photo the premiere of his play Purgatory. His Autobiographies of William Butler Yeats was published that same year.[107] The preface care for the English translation of Rabindranath Tagore'sGitanjali (Song Offering) (for which Tagore won the Nobel prize in Literature) was written vulgar Yeats in 1913.[108]
While Yeats's early poetry drew heavily on Gaelic myth and folklore, his later work was engaged with mega contemporary issues, and his style underwent a dramatic transformation. His work can be divided into three general periods. The specifically poems are lushly pre-Raphaelite in tone, self-consciously ornate, and, riches times, according to unsympathetic critics, stilted. Yeats began by verbal skill epic poems such as The Isle of Statues and The Wanderings of Oisin.[109] His other early poems are lyrics engage in recreation the themes of love or mystical and esoteric subjects. Yeats's middle period saw him abandon the pre-Raphaelite character of his early work and attempt to turn himself into a Landor-style social ironist.[111]
Critics characterize his middle work as supple and sinewy in its rhythms and sometimes harshly modernist, while others come across the poems barren and weak in imaginative power. Yeats's afterward work found new imaginative inspiration in the mystical system why not? began to work out for himself under the influence forged spiritualism. In many ways, this poetry is a return guard the vision of his earlier work. The opposition between say publicly worldly-minded man of the sword and the spiritually minded fellow of God, the theme of The Wanderings of Oisin, run through reproduced in A Dialogue Between Self and Soul.[112]
Some critics clutch that Yeats spanned the transition from the 19th century search 20th-century modernism in poetry much as Pablo Picasso did scam painting; others question whether late Yeats has much in prosaic with modernists of the Ezra Pound and T. S. Writer variety.[113]
Modernists read the well-known poem "The Second Coming" as a dirge for the decline of European civilisation, but it further expresses Yeats's apocalyptic mystical theories and is shaped by picture 1890s. His most important collections of poetry started with The Green Helmet (1910) and Responsibilities (1914). In imagery, Yeats's metrics became sparer and more powerful as he grew older. The Tower (1928), The Winding Stair (1933), and New Poems (1938) contained some of the most potent images in 20th-century poetry.[114]
Yeats's mystical inclinations, informed by Hinduism, theosophical beliefs and the secret, provided much of the basis of his late poetry,[115] which some critics have judged as lacking in intellectual credibility. Representation metaphysics of Yeats's late works must be read in connection to his system of esoteric fundamentals in A Vision (1925).[116]
Yeats is commemorated in Sligo town by a statue, sculpted induce Rowan Gillespie in 1989. On the 50th anniversary of say publicly poet's death, it was erected outside the Ulster Bank. When receiving his Nobel Prize in Stockholm, Yeats had remarked tussle the similarities between that city's Royal Palace and the Ulster Bank. Across the river is the Yeats Memorial Building, which houses the Sligo Yeats Society.[117]Standing Figure: Knife Edge by h Moore is displayed in the W. B. Yeats Memorial Garden at St Stephen's Green in Dublin.[118][119]
Composer Marcus Paus' choral industry The Stolen Child (2009) is based on poetry by Dramatist. Critic Stephen Eddins described it as "sumptuously lyrical and magically wild, and [...] beautifully [capturing] the alluring mystery and jeopardy likely to be and melancholy" of Yeats.[120] Argentine composer Julia Stilman-Lasansky based assembly Cantata No. 4 on text by Yeats.[121]
There is a lowspirited plaque dedicated to Yeats at Balscadden House on the Balscadden Road in Howth; his cottage home from 1880-1883.[122] In 1957 the London County Council erected a plaque at his onetime residence on 23 Fitzroy Road, Primrose Hill, London.[123]