‘If a powerful and benevolent spirit has shaped the destiny of this world we can better discover that destiny from the words that have gathered up the heart’s desire of the world.’ Yeats found them in English, in Ireland. The publication in 1889 of William Butler Yeats’s first book of poetry, The Wanderings of Oisin, was a seminal moment, not only in Irish literature but in Irish political history. The Gaelic League, started in 1893 by Douglas Hyde, had as its express purpose the continuation of the Celtic tradition in the language of Gaelic. Yeats, whose first book was based on the ancient Fenian cycle, would from then on bring Irish mythology to the Irish people in the English language: the language in which, Yeats pointed out, ‘modern Ireland thinks and does its business.
Roy Foster’s essential, magisterial, two-part biography of Yeats, The Apprentice Mage and The Arch-Poet, weaves from poetry, personality and history a tale of creation – not only of a poet but of a literature
and a society. Yeats was born in 1865 (his brother Jack is the celebrated painter) to John Butler Yeats, the son of rectors in the Church of Ireland, and to Susan Pollexfen, whose shipbuilding family came from Sligo. It was she who filled his head with the strange visions and the folklore of the area – which is perhaps why Joyce said of him, ‘He had a surrealist imagination few painters could match.’ As Foster
shows us, Yeats learned early that art is what matters. His father, a solicitor, gave up his practice to study painting in London. Yeats went, not very happily, to Godolphin School (now Godolphin and Latymer) in Hammersmith, where, bizarrely, he became the best high diver in the school. He returned to Dublin, studied art and finally, in one of literature’s luckiest volte-face, decided on poetry. In Yeats, as Foster tells us, all the great gifts combine: ‘the feeling for syllable and rhythm’ that is essential to what Eliot called ‘the auditory imagination’, the visual sensibility of the trained painter; and the alchemist’s power to transform language, so that it steals us away, with otherworld words, to the ‘Land of Heart’s Desire’.
In Irish literature Yeats resembles a tidal wave. The tide was not only poetical. In 1904, Yeats set up the National Theatre of Ireland, the Abbey Theatre, with Lady Gregory. In his Nobel speech to the Swedish Academy in 1923, he chose as his subject, not poetry, but the Irish dramatic movement. ‘I would not be here were I not the symbol of that movement. When we thought of the plays we would like to perform we thought of what was romantic and poetical, for the nationalism we had called up – like that every generation had called up in moments of discouragement – was romantic and poetical.’
Well, up to a point. Yeats, the artist who claimed the ‘romantic and poetical’ for Irish nationalism, also, with his genius for spotting genius in others, brought to the Abbey Theatre Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World and O’Casey’s The Plough and the Stars. The Abbey audience was possibly the most hypersensitive in history. The plays were provocative. They rioted, frequently. Yeats fought back. He harangued them from the stage – ‘You have disgraced yourselves, again’ – and he persevered. This strength of character and courage in the face of prejudice, which was noted by Eliot, is fundamental to his astonishing achievements. As a senator he was to endeavour to get a ‘bill of divorcement’ through the Irish Senate. He failed. The fact that he tried at all is astonishing. Finally, he refused to allow himself
to be destroyed by the agony of his unreciprocated, lifelong obsession with Maude Gonne, an obsession that would have felled lesser men.
She exploded into his life in 1889 just after the publication of The Wanderings of Oisin. Foster charts her tempestuous journey through the life of the poet. She was young, twenty-two, tall, with ‘flaming’ hair, but it was her passion that ‘began all the trouble of my life’. She took possession of his soul – when the soul is lost to a woman, all is lost – and she inspired some of the greatest love poetry ever written. He had found the love of his life; she had found a poet for the cause. She was magnificent, brave and dangerous, with a fanatical love of Ireland – although not Irish herself – and was twice imprisoned for her activities. She described the British Empire as ‘the outward symbol of Satan in the world’. Understatement was not her thing. Yeats wrote of her, ‘She lived in storm and strife,/Her soul had such desire/For what proud death may bring/That it could not endure/ The common good of life,’. And therein lies the pity. Her fanaticism swept away much that was good in her life. His enduring love, expressed in poems of genius, gave us the strange poetry of the exultant, broken heart.
She married Sean MacBride, a revolutionary as extreme as she – Foster tells us they spent part of their honeymoon ‘allegedly reconnoitering assassination attempts for an impending Royal visit to Gibraltar’. The confirmation of their marriage was, Yeats said, ‘like lightning through me’. Their union was a disaster and they separated after five years. Sean MacBride was executed with the leaders of the 1916 rebellion.
In his fifties Yeats married Georgie Hyde-Lees, with whom he had two adored children, Anne and Michael. He was ‘capable of experience’ and, in embracing life with passion and courage in both the
private and the public spheres, he did what no poet has ever done before or since: he wrote some of his greatest work in his sixties and seventies. ‘Maturing as a poet,’ Eliot wrote, means ‘maturing as a whole man . . . out of his [Yeats’s] intense experience he now expressed universal truths. An artist by serving his art with his entire integrity, is at the same time rendering the greatest service he can to his country and to the whole world.’ Ireland owes him.
William Butler Yeats is buried in the Sligo he loved, beneath ‘bare Ben Bulben’s head’. His epitaph reads, as he requested: ‘Cast a cold eye/On life, on death./Horseman, pass by.’