Biography

[b]On Future Of Poetry[/b][br /]
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• Technically we are in a state corresponding to the time of Dryden ... The position of the young poet today is not unlike that of the young Swift in the library of Sir William Temple. Today, we are moving away from the Victorians and on towards the modern equivalent of Pope. We are developing a poetry of statement as against the old metaphor.[br /]
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• The poetry of tomorrow will be finely articulated fact. T. S. Eliot fascinates us all because he is further on towards this consummation than any other writer.[br /]
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[b]WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS (1865 – 1939)[/b][br /]
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Dull in study, dark in complexion, unsuccessful in love, William Butler Yeats was attracted towards occultism and theosophy, and began writing plays, ballads and poetry.[br /]
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Symbolism was the highlight of his poetry. Yeats’ later poetry became increasingly realistic and philosophical, described in one of his poems :[br /]
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"I made my songs a coat,[br /]

covered with embroideries…[br /]

But now he realizes that[br /]

There is more enterprise in[br /]

Walking naked."[br /]
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Yeats was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1923. He died in 1939.[br /]
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[h2]Chronology of Life[/h2][br /]
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[b]June 13, 1865[/b] Birth of William Butler Yeats at Georgeville, Sandymount Avenue, in Dublin.[br /]
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[b]1867[/b] Family moves to London (23 Fitzroy Road, Regent’s Park). Brothers Robert and Jack and sister Elizabeth born here.[br /]
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[b]1877-80[/b] Yeats attends Godolphin School, Hammersmith, London. Spends holidays in Sligo.[br /]
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[b]1881-1883[/b] Yeats attends Erasmus Smith High School, Harcourt St., Dublin when the family moves there.[br /]
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[b]1882[/b] Family moves to Ireland View, Howth. Yeats spends holidays with uncle George Pollexfen, at Sligo. Develops adolescent passion for his cousin Laura Armstrong.[br /]
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[b]1884[/b] Refuses to attend Trinity College, Dublin. Attends instead, the Metropolitan School of Art, Dublin. Family moves to Ashfield Terrace, Harold’s cross road, Dublin.[br /]
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[b]1885[/b] Helps to fund Dublin Hermetic Society. Befriends Katherine Tynan and John O’Leary the nationalist leader.[br /]
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[b]1886[/b] Abandons art studies and begins to read Irish poets and Gaelic sagas.[br /]
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[b]1887[/b] Family returns to London (58 Eardley Crescent, Earl’s court). Yeats joins the Blavatsky lodge of the London Theosophical Society.[br /]
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[b]1888[/b] Family moves to 3 Blenheim Terrace, Bedford Park, London. Meets Oscar Wild, G B Shaw, and W E Henley.[br /]
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[b]1889[/b] Suffers of consumption. Begins study of Blake’s prophetic books.[br /]

Meets and falls in love with Maud Gonne.[br /]
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[b]1890[/b] Asked to abandon Theosophical movement. Meets Florence Farr.[br /]
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[b]1891[/b] Founding member of the Rhymer’s club and the London Irish Literary Society. Proposes to Maud Gonne but rejected.[br /]
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[b]1894[/b] Visits Paris, stays with MacGregor Mathers, and again proposes to Maud Gonne. Meets Olivia Shakespeare (Diana Vernon).[br /]
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[b]1896[/b] Moves to 18, Woburn Buildings; has affair with Diana Vernon. Meets Lady Gregory. Tours West of Ireland with Symons, visiting Aran Islands. Visits Paris with Symons to find an order of Celtic Mysteries and meets John Synge. Joins the Irish Republican Brotherhood and works to unite the various Irish political factions.[br /]
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[b]1897[/b] Spends summer at Coole Park.[br /]
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[b]1898[/b] Conceives idea of an Irish Literary Theatre with Lady Gregory and Edward Martyn.[br /]
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[b]1899[/b] Again proposes unsuccessfully to Maud Gonne in Paris.[br /]
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[b]1900[/b] Death of Yeats’ mother. Further unsuccessful proposal to Maud Gonne. Head of London branch of the Order of the Golden Dawn.[br /]
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[b]1901[/b] Again proposes to Maud Gonne but she does not yield to his request.[br /]
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[b]1902[/b] Family returns to Dublin. Meets James Joyce. Becomes President of newly founded Irish National Theatre Society.[br /]
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[b]1903[/b] In February, Maud marries Major John Macbride. Yeats’ financially successful lecture tour of USA.[br /]
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[b]1904[/b] Yeats becomes producer manager of ‘The Abbey Theatre.’[br /]
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[b]1906[/b] Becomes director of Abbey Theatre, with Lady Gregory and Syunge.[br /]
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[b]1907[/b] Yeats tours Italian Renaissance cities with Lady Gregory and her son Robert.[br /]
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[b]1908[/b] Meets Ezra Pound. Visits Maud Gonne in Paris.[br /]
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[b]1911[/b] Meets Miss Georgie Hyde Lees, whom he is later to marry, through Olivia Shakespeare. Visits Paris with Lady Gregory.[br /]
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[b]1912[/b] Visits USA with Abbey Theatre company. Lectures on Harvard University on ‘The Theatre of Beauty’. Meets Rabindranath Tagore, the Bengali poet and ‘the mystic’ stays with Maud Gonne in Normandy.[br /]
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[b]1914[/b] Sets on a lecture tour of USA.[br /]
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[b]1915[/b] Spends winter of 1914 – 1915 with Ezra Pound at stone cottage.[br /]
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[b]1916[/b] Yeats again proposes marriage to Maud Gonna.[br /]
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[b]1917[/b] Proposes marriage (unsuccessfully) to Iseult Gonne, Maud’s daughter. October 26th - marries Georgie Hyde – Lees’.[br /]
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[b]February 26, 1919[/b] Birth of daughter Anne Butler Yeats. Family moves to Ballylee.[br /]
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[b]1920[/b] American lecture tour; later goes on tour to Oxford.[br /]
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[b]August 22, 1921[/b] Son William Michael, born.[br /]
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[b]1922[/b] The Irish Civil War, during which Yeats supports the Pro-Treaty governments, under Griffith and then Cosgrave, and opposes the intransigents under de Valera.[br /]

Father dies in New York. Yeats buys 28 Marrion Square, Dublin. Appointed senator for first Irish senate (until 1928). Received D. Litt. From Trinity college, Dublin.[br /]
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[b]1923[/b] Visits Stockholm to receive Nobel Prize for Literature. De Valera orders a Republican ceasefire.[br /]
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[b]1924[/b] Develops high blood pressure. Holiday’s with wife in Sicily in November.[br /]
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[b]1926[/b] Chairman of committee to advise Minister of Finance on a new coinage.[br /]
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[b]1927[/b] Summer at Ballylee. Lung congestion and influenza in October lead to collapse.[br /]
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[b]1928[/b] Winter at Rapallo with Ezra Pound; summer in Dublin and Ballylee and completes term as senator.[br /]
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[b]1931[/b] Received D. Litt. from Oxford University. Divides time between Dublin, Coole and Oxford.[br /]
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[b]1932[/b] Lady Gregory dies. Helps to found Irish Academy of letters. Sets on a last US lecture tour. Yeats moves to final Irish home.[br /]
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[b]1933[/b] Received honorary degree from Cambridge University. Yeats interested in and writing for O’Duffy’s Irish Fascists, the Blueshirts. Hitler comes to power in Germany.[br /]
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[b]1935[/b] Meets Lady Dorothy Wellesley.[br /]
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[b]1936[/b] Seriously ill with heart problems and nephritis. Delivers BBC lecture on Modern Poetry. Visits Dublin in June.[br /]
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[b]1937[/b] Yeats gives four BBC broadcasts. Elected member of a London Club, the Athenaeum. Goes for winter to Menton and Cap Martin in the south of France.[br /]
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[b]1938[/b] Stays with Dorothy Wellesley and Edith Heald. Maud Gonne visits him at Riversdale.[br /]
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[b]January 29, 1939[/b] Dies in France; buried at Roquebrune, France. (In 1948, Yeats was reinterred in Drumcliff Churchyard, Sligo, as per his wishes.)[br /]
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[h2]Chronology of Works[/h2][br /]
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[b]A. POETRY :[/b][br /]
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[b]1885[/b] The Juvenilia. Immature early works of boyhood, not included in the collected works.[br /]
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[b]1889[/b] The Crossways including poems first published as The Wandering of Oisin and other Poems.[br /]
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[b]1893[/b] The Rose, including poems first published as The Countess Cathleen and other poems.[br /]
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[b]1899[/b] The Wind Among the Reeds.[br /]
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[b]1902[/b] Adam’s Curse and the Folly of being comforted, first published in the monthly review.[br /]
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[b]1903[/b] In the Seven Woods.[br /]
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[b]1910[/b] The Green Helmet and other poems.[br /]
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[b]1914[/b] Responsibilities.[br /]
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[b]1917[/b] The Wild Swans at Coole.[br /]
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[b]1921[/b] Michael Roberts and the Dancer.[br /]
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[b]1928[/b] The Tower.[br /]
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[b]1933[/b] The Winding Stairs and other poems, include the Poems grouped in words for music, and A woman young and old.[br /]
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[b]1935[/b] A full moon in March.[br /]
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[b]1936-1939[/b] Last poem and two plays.[br /]

The Variorum Edition of the Poems of W. B. Yeats, (including all the above poems) edited by Peter Allt and Russell K. Alspach.[br /]
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[b]B. PLAYS[/b][br /]
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[b]1886[/b] Mosada - a dramatic poem.[br /]
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[b]1892[/b] The Countess Cathleen.[br /]
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[b]1894[/b] The land of heart desire.[br /]
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[b]1900[/b] The Shadowy Waters.[br /]
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[b]1919[/b] Two plays for Dancer.[br /]
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[b]1921[/b] Four plays of Dancer.[br /]
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[b]1922[/b] Plays in Prose and Verse, written for the Irish Theaters.[br /]
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[b]1934[/b] The king of the great clock tower.[br /]
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[b]1938[/b] The Herne’s Egg.[br /]
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[b]1952[/b] The collected plays of W. B. Yeats.[br /]
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[b]1893[/b] The Celtic Twilight.[br /]
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[b]1897[/b] The Secret Rose.[br /]
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[b]1925[/b] A vision - first edition.[br /]
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[b]1934[/b] The letters of the New Island.[br /]
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[b]1937[/b] A vision - revised and enlarged edition.[br /]
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[b]1940[/b] Letters on Poetry from W. B. Yeats to Dorothy Wellesley.[br /]
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[b]1954[/b] The letters of W. B. Yeats, edited by Allen Wade.[br /]
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[b]1955[/b] Autobiography.[br /]
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[b]1959[/b] Mythologies.[br /]
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[b]1961[/b] Essays and Introductions.[br /]
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[b]1962[/b] Explorations.[br /]
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[b]1883[/b] The poems of William Blake, ed.[br /]
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[b]1893[/b] Irish Fairy and Folk Tales, ed.[br /]
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[b]1895[/b] A book of Irish Verse, selected by W. B. Yeats.[br /]
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[b]1913[/b] Gitanjali of Tagore, introduced by W. B. Yeats.[br /]
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[b]1932[/b] An Indian Monk, written by Purohit Swami and introduced by W. B. Yeats.[br /]
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[b]1936[/b] Oxford Book of English Verse, selected and introduced by W. B. Yeats.[br /]
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[b]1937[/b] The ten principal Upanishads, translated by Yeats and Purohit Swami.[br /]
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[b]On Ireland And Irish Literature:[/b][br /]
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[b]•[/b] Behind Ireland fierce and militant is Ireland poetic, picturesque, passionate, remembering, idyllic, fanciful, always patriotic.[br /]
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[b]•[/b] Chance and Destiny have between them woven two-thirds of all history, and of the history of Ireland well nigh the whole. The literature of a nation, on the other hand, is spun out of its heart. If you would know Ireland - body and soul - you must read its poems and stories. They came into existence to please nobody but the people of Ireland.[br /]
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[b]On Writing[/b][br /]
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[b]•[/b] If we had no other symbols but the tumult of the sea, the rusted gold of the thatch, the redness of the quicken-berry, and had never known the rhetoric of the platform and of the newspaper, we could do without laborious selection and rejection; but, even then, though we might do much that would be delightful, that would inspire coming times, it would not have the manner of the greatest poetry.[br /]
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[b]•[/b] The creations of a great writer are little more than the moods and passions of his own heart, given surnames and Christian names, and sent to walk the earth.[br /]
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[b]On Poet[/b][br /]
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[b]•[/b] A poet writes always of his personal life, in the his finest work out of its tragedy, whatever it be, remorse, lost love, or mere loneliness; he never speaks directly as to someone at the breakfast table, there is always a phantasmagoria.[br /]
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[b]•[/b] If we understand our own minds, and the things that are striving to utter themselves through our minds, we move others, not because we have understood or thought about those others, but because all life has the same root.[br /]
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[b]•[/b] He must go on perfecting earthly power and perception until they are so subsidized that divine power and divine perception descend to meet them, and the song of earth and the song of heaven mingle together.[br /]
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[b]•[/b] Though a poet may govern his life by his enthusiasms, he must, when he sits down at his desk, but use them as the potter the clay.[br /]
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[b]On Literature[/b][br /]
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[b]•[/b]I hated and still hate with an ever-growing hatred the literature of the point of view. I wanted, if my ignorance permitted, to get back to Homer.[br /]
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[b]On Poetic Language[/b][br /]
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[b]•[/b] Not to find one’s art by the analysis of language or amid the circumstances of dreams but to live a passionate life, and to express the emotions that find one thus in simple rhythmical language. The words should be the swift natural words that suggest the circumstances out of which they rose.[br /]
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[b]•[/b] I tried to make the language of poetry coincide with that of passionate, normal speech. I wanted to write in whatever language comes most naturally when we soliloquize, as I do all day long, upon the events of our own lives or of any life where we can see ourselves for the moment.[br /]
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[b]•[/b] Words are always getting conventionalized to some secondary meaning. It is one of the works of poetry to take the truants in custody and bring them back to their right senses.[br /]
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[b]•[/b] We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.[br /]
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[b]On Future Of Poetry[/b][br /]
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[b]•[/b] Technically we are in a state corresponding to the time of Dryden ... The position of the young poet today is not unlike that of the young Swift in the library of Sir William Temple. Today, we are moving away from the Victorians and on towards the modern equivalent of Pope. We are developing a poetry of statement as against the old metaphor.[br /]
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[b]•[/b] The poetry of tomorrow will be finely articulated fact. T. S. Eliot fascinates us all because he is further on towards this consummation than any other writer.[br /]
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[b]His Own Poetry[/b][br /]
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[b]•[/b] EARLY YEARS : All seems confused incoherent inarticulate.[br /]
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[b]•[/b] MIDDLE YEARS: ‘I often wonder if my talent will ever recover from the heterogeneous labor of these last few years… I cry out vainly for liberty and have ever less and less of the inner life.[br /]
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[b]•[/b] MATURE YEARS: ‘You need not be troubled about my poetical faculty. I was never so full of new thoughts for verse though all thoughts quite unlike the old ones. My work has got more masculine. It has more salt in it.’[br /]
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[b]•[/b] LATER YEARS: All art is an endeavor to condense out of the flying vapors of the world an image of human perfection, and for its own not for art’s sake.’[br /]
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[b]•[/b] I had three interests: interest in a form of literature, in a form of philosophy, and a belief in nationality. None of these seemed to have anything to do with the other, but gradually my love of literature and my belief in nationality came together[br /]
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[b]•[/b] When I follow back my stream to its source I find two dominant desires: I wanted to get rid of irrelevant movement - the stage must become still that words might keep all their vividness - and I wanted vivid words.[br /]
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[b]On Mysticism[/b][br /]
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[b]•[/b] Mysticism has been in the past & probably ever will be one of the great powers of the world & it is bad scholarship to pretend the contrary. You may argue against it but you should no more treat it with disrespect than a perfectly cultivated writer would treat (say) the Catholic Church or the Church of Luther no matter how much he disliked them.[br /]
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[b]General[/b][br /]
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[b]•[/b] I balanced all, brought all to mind,[br /]

The years to come seemed waste of breath,[br /]

A waste of breath the years behind,[br /]

In balance with this life, this death.[br /]
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[b]•[/b] Man can embody truth but he cannot know it.[br /]
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[b]•[/b] The intellect of man is forced to choose[br /]

Perfection of the life, or of the work,[br /]

And if it take the second must refuse[br /]

A heavenly mansion, raging in the dark.[br /]
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[b]•[/b] I wonder anybody does anything at Oxford but dream and remember, the place is so beautiful. One almost expects the people to sing instead of speaking. It is all . . . like an opera.[br /]
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[b]•[/b] But I, being poor, have only my dreams;[br /]

I have spread my dreams under your feet;[br /]

Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.[br /]
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[b]•[/b] I hate journalists. There is nothing in them but tittering jeering emptiness. They have all made what Dante calls the Great Refusal. . . . The shallowest people on the ridge of the earth.[br /]
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