Born in Dublin in the year 1865, William Butler Yeats would go on to become universally recognized by his peers as the greatest poet of this century writing in the English language. This recognition would come as early as 1828, a decade before his death with the publication of arguably his finest volume, The Tower. The son of one time attorney and later well known painter John Butler Yeats, W.B. Yeats was of partially Cornish and Gaelic decent, born near Dublin and raised between both England and Ireland.
Though born in Dublin and raised between England and Ireland, Yeats would develop, through his mother, a love for the west country of Ireland that would last all his life. Parts of his childhood and later vacations would be spent in County Sligo, the childhood home of both his parents.
Yeats’s childhood would be broad in education and personal experiences. Yeats would become a youth full of internal contradictions, often spawned by his desire to question all that he was taught. Spiritually, educationally, and personally, Yeats seemed to himself pulled in different directions, unable to decide on a clear path. These internal contradictions would come to shape the writer and man that he would one day become.
Much of childhood for Yeats was spent in London, where he attended the Godolphin School. At the age of fifteen, Yeats returned to Dublin and attended the Erasmus Smith School. In the tradition of his family, Yeats studied art from 1883 to 1886.
Yeats’s spiritual outlook would play a significant role in his life and his works. Born into a Protestant family, with a paternal grandfather and great-grandfather having been Anglican clergymen, religion was a constant presence in Yeats’s childhood. Yeats began to abandon the religion of his Rationalist upbringing and made a new religion out of poetic tradition. Yeats’s interest in the occult and mysticism comes about early in life, an influence which would come to partially define Yeats to his world of readers, whether accurately or inaccurately.
Yeats adult life is often divided into three periods. The first was passed in London where he belonged to a group of fin de sieclepoets. Ernest Rhys and Yeats founded the Rhymers Club, of which Yeats was not the young star, but rather overshadowed by his contemporaries, Dowson and Lionel Johnson. During this time, Yeats wrote the Celtic twilight, highly indicative of his mystical tendencies and affiliations. A period of symbolism, ornamentation, easy music, and too great facility, he dabbled in the occult and sought the answers to life he could not seem to unravel in his own mind by means of traditional explanations.
Returning to Ireland in 1896, Yeats found himself caught up in the Irish Revolution. Yeats young life would soon be drastically changed, as he would meet Lady Gregory who, in essence, would save him from himself. Rehabilitating the confidence of the young writer and providing Yeats something to work for, Lady Gregory resurrected Yeats. Together, along with J.M. Synge, they founded the Irish Literary Theater, which would become the Abbey Theater and the Irish Academy. Yeats wrote several plays for the Abbey, though the most successful and well remembered were his patriotic propaganda piece, Cathleen ni Houlihan and the tragedy Deirdre. Here we see one of Yeats’s greatest contributions to his Ireland in the founding of the Irish National Theater.
Writing and producing plays for the Abbey, the middle period of Yeats’s life would come to a close. Yeats’s work and focus would now take on a more practical value. The mysticism that had been found previously in his work would dwindle. His poetry became more based in reality, less ambiguous and more direct. This period would be the least mystical of his career.
Yeats labeled himself a socialist, one who despised the middle classes, and his ideal Ireland was divided between a hard-riding Protestant of fine artistic tastes and a devout Catholic peasantry, full of instinctive wisdom and preserving a living folklore.
The third stage of Yeats life was a diverse one, in which some of his best works would be created and he would come to push the world of Irish literature to a new realm. Becoming a member of the Irish Senate from 1922 to 1928, Yeats emerged heavily on the social scene. The mystic side of Yeats was reborn, incurring with it heavy criticism from his peers for his outlandish and deeply held beliefs. Unashamed and unafraid of the consequences, Yeats would face harsh ridicule by revealing such statements as his belief in fairies.
In 1923, Yeats would win the Nobel Prize for Literature. Yeats would continue to advance his art and poetry throughout the course of his life. Yeats was more of a revolutionary and more of a contributor to English Literature than any of his peers, and arguably one of the largest contributors in history.
W.B. Yeats was a complex man with a steady vehicle for his ideas. Yeats was a many of diverse interests and causes. Though involved in various movements, differing schools of thought, a constant search for the truth and a fight for the individuality and self-worth of Ireland, Yeats never abandoned his primary vehicle, poetry. Though he went on to write much more than simply poetry, he always came back to his first love. Yeats was a poet at his deepest, most personal level.
Yeats had the unique ability to take fantasy, mysticism ,and the unknown and use it as an analogy to examine and explain the human condition. In Yeats’s poetry is seen a message as broad and diverse as the man himself. Always questioning, constantly striving to explain and make analogous to the folklore of his native land, Yeats poetry serves as a record of Yeats’s personal struggle. Still full of internal contradictions and constantly questioning conventional knowledge, Yeats would reach the twilight of his days. More fresh now and full of ideas, Yeats would continue to lead the way for his younger counterparts.
Yeats would die at seventy-three, disillusioned with his Ireland and his life.
