| 威廉·巴特勒·叶芝 | |||||
| 耶茨 | |||||
| 叶慈 | |||||
阅读叶芝 William Butler Yeats在诗海的作品!!! | |||||
叶芝
叶芝叶芝是“爱尔兰文艺复兴运动”的领袖，也是艾比剧院（Abbey Theatre）的创建者之一。1865年6月13日出生于都柏林。曾在都柏林大都会美术学院学习绘画，1887年开始专门从事诗歌创作，被诗人艾略特誉为"当代最伟大的诗人"。但叶芝一向对戏剧有浓厚的兴趣，先后写过26部剧本。1939年1月28日，在法国南部罗克布鲁纳逝世。
叶芝早年的创作仍然具有浪漫主义的华丽风格，善于营造梦幻般的氛围，例如他在1893年出版的散文集《凯尔特曙光》便属于这种风格。然而进入不惑之年后，在现代主义诗人伊兹拉·庞德等人的影响下，尤其是在其本人参与爱尔兰民族主义政治运动的切身经验的影响下，叶芝的创作风格发生了比较激烈的变化，更加趋近现代主义了。
叶芝不仅仅是艾比剧院的决策者之一，也曾担任爱尔兰国会参议员一职。他十分重视自己的这些社会职务，是爱尔兰参议院中有名的工作勤奋者。叶芝曾于1923年获得诺贝尔文学奖，获奖的理由是“以其高度艺术化且洋溢着灵感的诗作表达了整个民族的灵魂”。1934年，他和拉迪亚德·吉卜林共同获得古腾堡诗歌奖。
早年的生活和作品
叶芝出生于距离爱尔兰首都都柏林不远的山迪蒙（Sandymount）。他的父亲约翰·巴特勒·叶芝是亚麻商人杰维斯·叶芝的后裔。这位商人卒于1712年，他的孙子本杰明娶了基尔岱尔郡的望族之女玛丽·巴特勒。约翰·叶芝结婚的时候正在学习法律，但是很快他便辍学，转而学习画肖像画。他的母亲（即威廉·巴特勒·叶芝的祖母）苏珊·玛丽·波雷克斯芬来自斯莱果郡（County Sligo）上一个盎格鲁－爱尔兰裔家族。诗人出生后不久，便迁至位于斯莱果的大家族中，他本人也一直认为是斯莱果郡孕育了自己真正的童年岁月。巴特勒－叶芝家族是一个非常具有艺术气息的家族。诗人的哥哥杰克后来成为一位著名的画家，而他的两个姐妹伊丽莎白和苏珊则均参加过著名的“工艺美术运动”。
为了诗人父亲的绘画事业，叶芝的家庭后迁至伦敦。起初，叶芝和他的兄弟姐妹接受的是家庭教育。诗人的母亲由于非常思念故地斯莱果，经常给孩子们讲家乡的故事和民间传说。1877年，威廉·叶芝进入葛多芬小学（Godolphin），并在那里学习了四年。不过威廉似乎并不喜欢在葛多芬的这段经历，而且成绩也并不突出。由于经济上的困难，诗人全家于1880年底迁回了都柏林。起初住在市中心，其后搬到位于郊外的皓斯（Howth）。
在皓斯的时光是诗人重要的发展阶段。皓斯周围是丘陵和树林，相传有精灵出没。叶芝家雇了一个女仆，是一个渔人的妻子，她熟知各类乡野传奇，娓娓道来的神秘冒险全都收录在后来出版的《凯尔特黄昏》里。
1881年10月，诗人在都柏林的伊雷斯摩斯·史密斯中学（Erasmus Smith）继续他的学业。他父亲的画室就在这所学校附近，于是诗人经常在那里消磨时光，并结识了很多都柏林城的艺术家和作家。在这段时间里，叶芝大量阅读莎士比亚等英国作家的作品，并和那些比他年长许多的文学家、艺术家们讨论。他于1883年12月从这所中学毕业，其后他便开始了诗歌的创作。1885年，叶芝在《都柏林大学评论》上发表了他的第一部诗作，以及一篇题为《赛缪尔·费格森爵士的诗》的散文。从1884年到1886年，他就读于位于基尔岱尔大街的大都会艺术学校（Metropolitan School of Art），也就是如今爱尔兰国家美术与设计学院的前身。
年轻的诗人
在开始进行诗歌创作之前，叶芝便已经尝试将诗歌和宗教观念、情感结合起来。后来，他在描述自己童年生活的时候曾说过“……我认为……如果是一种强大且悲天悯人的精神构成了这个世界的宿命，那么我们便可以通过那些融合了人的心灵对这个世界的欲望的词句来更好的理解这种宿命。”
叶芝早年的诗作通常从爱尔兰神话和民间传说中取材，其语言风格则受到拉斐尔前派散文的影响。这一时期，雪莱的诗对叶芝产生了很大影响。在后来的一篇关于雪莱的文章中叶芝写道：“我重读了《解放了的普罗米修斯》。在世界上的所有伟大著作之中，它在我心里的地位比我预想得还要高得多。”
叶芝早期还受到彼时爱尔兰著名的芬尼亚组织（Fenian）领袖约翰·奥里亚雷的影响。诗人晚年曾说，奥里亚雷是他所见最“风流倜傥的老人”，“从奥里亚雷的谈话以及他借我或送我的爱尔兰书籍中，成就了我一生的志业。”在奥里亚雷的介绍下，叶芝认识了道格拉斯·海德和约翰·泰勒。前者于1893年成立盖尔语联盟（Gaelic League），致力于保存并增加爱尔兰语言的使用。
叶芝的第一首重要诗作是《雕塑的岛屿》，是一首模仿埃德蒙·斯宾塞诗作的梦幻般的作品。这首诗发表在《都柏林大学评论》上，其后没有再版。叶芝第一部公开出版的作品是一本小册子《摩沙达：戏剧化的诗》。这篇文章也同样在《都柏林大学评论》上发表过，而且只是由他的父亲出资印刷了100册。此后，他完成了叙事长诗《乌辛之浪迹》（The Wanderings of Oisin），并在1889年出版了诗集《乌辛之浪迹及其他诗作》。这是即使在叶芝风格成熟之后也仍未否定过的第一部作品，取材于爱尔兰古代勇士的传说和神话故事。为完成这首诗，诗人花费了整整两年的时间，其风格清晰的体现出费格森和拉斐尔前派对诗人的影响。这首诗在一定程度上奠定了叶芝以后诗作的主题风格：追求冥思的生活抑或追求行动的生活。这本诗集的前八首抒情诗和歌谣的主题，是源自叶芝少年时代对印度人及阿尔卡迪亚世外桃源的想象——神祗与女神、王子与公主、殿堂、孔雀与神秘的莲花等等。诗歌中流露出明显的浪漫主义和拉斐尔前派的痕迹。在《乌辛之浪迹》之后，叶芝再未创作过长诗。他的其他早期作品多半是以爱情或神秘事物为主题的抒情诗。随着叶芝的作品读者群的不断扩大，他结识了当时爱尔兰和英国的很多著名文学家，包括萧伯纳和王尔德。
叶芝的家庭于1887年重新搬回伦敦。1890年，叶芝和欧那斯特·莱斯（Ernest Rhys）共同创建了“诗人会社”（Rhymer’s Club）。这是一个由一群志同道合的诗人们组成的文学团体，成员们定期集会并于1892年和1894年分别出版过自己的诗选。叶芝的早期作品还包括诗集《诗集》、《神秘的玫瑰》和《苇间风》。事实上，“诗人会社”的文学成就并不高，叶芝几乎是唯一取得了显著成就的诗人。
昴德·冈昂、爱尔兰文艺复兴运动和艾比剧院
1889年，叶芝结识了昴德·冈昂小姐。她是一位热衷于爱尔兰民族主义运动的女性。冈昂小姐非常仰慕叶芝早年诗作《雕塑的岛屿》，并且主动和叶芝结识。叶芝深深的迷恋上了这位小姐，而这个女人也极大的影响了叶芝以后的创作和生活。经过两年的密切交往后，叶芝向冈昂小姐求婚，却遭到拒绝。其后，他又共计向她求婚三次，分别是再1889年、1900年和1901年，均遭到了拒绝。尽管如此，叶芝对冈昂小姐仍然魂牵梦萦，并以她为原型创作了剧本《凯丝琳女伯爵》。在剧中，凯丝琳将灵魂卖给了魔鬼，好让她的同胞免于饥荒，最后上了天堂。此剧直到1899年才得以上演，引发了宗教及政治上的诸多争议。终于，在1903年，冈小姐嫁给了爱尔兰民族运动政治家约翰·麦克布莱德。在这一年，叶芝动身去美国进行了一场漫长的巡回演讲。这段时期他和奥莉薇亚·莎士比亚有过短暂的恋情。他们在1896年结识，却在一年之后分手。
也正是在1896年，叶芝结识了奥古斯塔·格雷戈里夫人，介绍人是他们共同的朋友爱德华·马丁。格雷戈里夫人鼓励叶芝投身民族主义运动，并进行戏剧的创作。尽管叶芝受到法国象征主义的影响，但显然他的创作具有清晰而独特的爱尔兰风格。这种风格在叶芝与爱尔兰年轻一代的作家的交往中得到强化。叶芝和格雷戈里夫人、马丁以及一些其他爱尔兰作家共同发起了著名的“爱尔兰文艺复兴运动”（或称“凯尔特文艺复兴运动”）。
除了作家们的文学创作外，学院派的翻译家们对古代传奇故事、盖尔语诗歌以及近代的盖尔语民歌的翻译和发掘工作也对爱尔兰文艺复兴运动起到了巨大的促进作用。代表人物是后来成为爱尔兰总统的道格拉斯·海德，他编纂的《康诺特省的情歌》倍受推崇。
这场运动最不朽的成就之一便是艾比剧院的成立。1889年，叶芝、格雷戈里夫人、马丁和乔治·摩尔创立的“爱尔兰文学剧场”（Irish Literary Theatre）。这个团体仅仅存在了两年，而且并不成功。在两位拥有丰富戏剧创作经验的爱尔兰兄弟威廉·费依和弗兰克·费依以及叶芝不计报酬的秘书安妮·伊丽莎白·弗莱德里卡·霍尔尼曼（一位曾经于1894年参与过萧伯纳《武器与人》在伦敦首演的富有的英国女人）的鼎力协助下，这个团体成功打造了一个崭新的爱尔兰国家戏剧界。在著名剧作家约翰·米林顿·辛参与进来以后，这个团体甚至在都柏林靠戏剧演出赚到了不少钱，并于1904年12月27日修建了艾比剧院。在剧院的开幕之夜，叶芝的两部剧作隆重上映。从此以后一直到去世，叶芝的创作生涯始终和艾比剧院相关。他不仅仅是剧院的董事会成员之一，同时也是一位高产的剧作家。
在1902年，叶芝资助建立了丹·埃默出版社，用以出版文艺复兴运动相关的作家作品。这个出版社在1904年更名为库拉出版社。出版社存在至1946年，一直由叶芝的两个姐妹经营，总共出版了70本著作，其中的48本是叶芝自己写的。1917年的夏天叶芝和当年的冈小姐重逢，并且向她的养女求婚，但是遭到了拒绝。九月份，他改向一位英国女人乔治·海德里斯求婚，她答应了。两人在当年的10月20日结婚。不久，叶芝买下了位于库尔公园附近的巴列利塔，并很快将其更名为“图尔巴列利塔”。叶芝余生中的大部分夏季都是在这里度过的。1919年2月24日，叶芝的长女安·叶芝在都柏林出生。安继承了母亲的智慧、宁静与友善，以及父亲不凡的艺术天赋，后来成为一位画家。
神秘主义的影响
叶芝一生都对神秘主义和唯灵论有浓厚的兴趣。1885年，叶芝和一些朋友创立了“都柏林秘术兄弟会”（Dublin Hermetic Order）。这个组织在6月16日召开了第一次集会，叶芝是领袖。同年，都柏林的神智学会馆在通灵法师婆罗门·摩西尼·莎特里的组织下正式开放，叶芝于次年参加了他的第一次降神会。后来，叶芝沉溺于神秘主义和通灵术之中不能自拔。1900年，他甚至成为“金黎明秘术兄弟会”的领袖。他于1890年参加了这个组织。在结婚以后，叶芝夫妇曾经尝试过风靡一时的无意识写作。
叶芝的神秘主义倾向在他的名诗《丽达与天鹅》中体现得尤为明显。这首短诗从希腊神话中取材，讲述得是宙斯幻化成天鹅与美女丽达结合并生下两个女儿的故事（一是著名的海伦，引发了特洛伊战争；一是克吕泰涅斯特拉，希腊军队统率阿迦门农的妻子）。这一母题在西方文学艺术作品中曾反复出现。关于叶芝创作这首名作的初衷，西方评论界曾有过各种不同的诠释和解读，有的认为是“历史变化的根源在于性爱和战争”，有的则认为是“历史是人类的创造力和破坏力共同作用的结果”。西方主流的文学史将《丽达与天鹅》作为象征主义诗歌里程碑式的作品。
在叶芝的神秘主义思想形成过程里，凯瑟琳·泰楠的影响不可谓不大。泰楠是一位才华横溢的女诗人，叶芝早年和她过从甚密。正是在泰楠的影响下，叶芝频繁的参加各类神秘主义组织的活动。泰楠一生都很仰慕叶芝的才华，而叶芝却在后来逐渐疏远了她。
叶芝的神秘主义倾向受印度宗教的影响很显著，他晚年甚至亲自将印度教《奥义书》译成英文。通灵学说和超自然的冥思则成为叶芝晚期诗歌创作的灵感来源。一些批评家曾抨击叶芝诗作中的神秘主义倾向，认为其缺乏严谨和可信度。W·H·奥登就曾尖锐的批评晚年的叶芝为“一个被关于巫术和印度的胡言乱语侵占了大脑的可叹的成年人的展览品”。然而正是在这一时期，叶芝写出了他一生中很多最不朽的作品。若想理解叶芝晚年诗作的奥妙，就必须要了解他于1925年出版的《灵视》一书的神秘主义思维体系。今天，人们通过阅读这本书来理解叶芝后期的诗作，却不把它当作一本宗教或哲学的著作。
向现代主义的转变
1913年，叶芝在伦敦结识了年轻的美国诗人伊兹拉·庞德。事实上，庞德来伦敦有一部分便是为了结识这位比他年纪稍长的诗人。庞德认为叶芝是“唯一一位值得认真研究的诗人”。从1913年到1916年，每年冬天叶芝和庞德都在亚士顿森林（Ashdown Forest）的一个乡间别墅中度过。这段时间里庞德担任叶芝名义上的助手。然而当庞德未经叶芝的允许擅自修改了他的一些诗作，并将其公开发表在《诗》杂志上后，两位诗人的关系便开始恶化了。庞德对叶芝诗作的修改主要体现出他对维多利亚式的诗歌韵律的憎恶。然而很快两位诗人都开始怀念双方共事、互相学习的日子。尤其是庞德从欧内斯特·费诺罗萨的寡妇处学到的关于日本能乐的知识为叶芝即将创作的贵族风格的剧作提供了灵感。叶芝创作的第一部模仿了日本能乐的剧作是《鹰之井畔》。他于1916年1月将这部作品的第一稿献给庞德。
叶芝通常被认为是20世纪最重要的用英文写作的诗人之一。然而，不同于大多数现代主义诗人在自由体诗领域不断做出尝试，叶芝是传统诗歌形式的大师。现代主义对叶芝诗作风格的影响主要体现在：随着时间的推移，诗人逐渐放弃早期作品中传统诗歌样式的写作，语言风格也越来越冷峻，直接切入主题。这种风格上的转变主要体现在他的中期创作中，包括作品集《七片树林》、《责任》和《绿盔》
1923年叶芝荣获诺贝尔文学奖，由瑞典国王亲自颁奖。他在两年之后发表了一首短诗《瑞典之丰饶》，以表达感激之情。1925年，叶芝出版了一本呕心沥血的散文作品《灵视》，其中他推举柏拉图、布列塔诺以及几位现代哲学家的观点来证实自己的占星学、神秘主义及历史理论。
政治生涯
叶芝通过庞德结识了很多年轻的现代主义者，这使得他中期的诗作已经远离了早期的《凯尔特曙光》时的风格。他对政治的关注也已经不再局限于文艺复兴运动早期他所醉心的文化政治领域。在叶芝早期的作品中，他灵魂深处的贵族立场体现无余。他将爱尔兰平民的生活理想化，并且有意忽视这个阶层贫穷孱弱的现实。然而一场由城市中的下层天主教徒发起的革命运动迫使叶芝不得不改变自己的创作姿态。
叶芝新的政治倾向在《1913年9月》这首诗中得到了体现。这首诗抨击由詹姆斯·拉尔金领导的著名的1913年都柏林大罢工。在《1916年复活节》中，诗人反复吟诵：“一切都已改变/彻底改变/一种恐怖的美却已诞生”。叶芝终于意识到复活节起义的领袖们的价值就在于他们卑微的出身和贫困的生活。
整个1920年代和1930年代初期，叶芝无可避免的受到他的国家以及整个世界动荡局势的影响。1922年，叶芝进入爱尔兰参议院。在他的参议员生涯中，叶芝最主要的成就之一就是曾担任货币委员会的主席。正是这一机构设计了爱尔兰独立之后的第一批货币。在1925年，他热心的倡导离婚的合法化。1927年，叶芝在他的诗作《在学童中间》里如此描述作为一名公众人物的自己：“一位花甲之年的微笑的名人”。1928年，由于健康问题，叶芝从参议院退休。
叶芝的贵族阶级立场以及他和庞德之间的密切关系使得这位诗人和墨索里尼相当接近。他曾在许多场合表达过对这位法西斯独裁者的仰慕。他甚至写过一些歌颂法西斯主义的赞歌，尽管这些作品从未发表过。然而当巴布罗·聂鲁达于1937年邀请他到马德里时，叶芝在回信中表明他支持西班牙革命，反对法西斯主义。叶芝的政治倾向非常暧昧。他不支持民主派，在晚年却也有意疏远纳粹和法西斯主义。然而纵观叶芝的一生，他从未真正接受或赞同过民主政治。同时，他深受所谓“优生运动”的影响。
晚年的生活和创作
进入晚年后，叶芝逐渐不再如中年时一样直接触及和政治相关的题材，而是开始以一种更加个人化的风格写作。他开始为自己的家人儿女写诗，有的时候则描绘自己关于时间流逝、逐渐衰老的经历和心绪。收录在他最后一部诗集中的作品《马戏团动物的大逃亡》生动的表现了他晚期作品的灵感来源：“既然我的阶梯已经消失/ 我必须平躺在那些阶梯攀升的起点”。
1929年之后，叶芝搬离了图尔巴列利塔。尽管诗人一生中的很多回忆都在爱尔兰国土之外，他还是于1932年在都柏林的近郊租了一间房子。晚年的叶芝非常高产，出版了许多诗集、戏剧和散文，许多著名的诗作都是在晚年写成的，包括一生的颠峰之作《驶向拜占庭》。这首代表性的诗作体现了叶芝对古老而神秘的东方文明的向往。1938年，叶芝最后一次来到艾比剧院，观赏他的剧作《炼狱》的首映式。同年，他出版了《威廉·巴特勒·叶芝的自传》。
晚年的叶芝百病缠身，在妻子的陪伴下到法国休养。然而最终还是于1939年1月28日在法国曼顿（Menton）的“快乐假日旅馆”逝世。他的最后一首诗作是以亚瑟王传说为主题的《黑塔》。逝世之后，叶芝起初被埋葬在罗克布罗恩（Roquebrune）。1948年9月，人们依照诗人的遗愿，将他的遗体移至他的故乡斯莱果郡。他的坟墓后来成了斯莱果郡的一处引人注目的景点。他的墓志铭是诗人晚年作品《班磅礴山麓下》的最后一句：“投出冷眼/ 看生，看死/ 骑士，策马向前！”叶芝生前曾说斯莱果是一生当中对他影响最深远的地方，所以他的雕塑和纪念馆也将地址选在这里。
叶芝的主要作品
1886年 — 《摩沙达 》
1888年 — 《爱尔兰乡村的神话和民间故事集》
1889年 — 《乌辛之浪迹及其他诗作》
1891年 — 《经典爱尔兰故事》
1892年 — 《凯丝琳女伯爵及其他传说和抒情诗》
1893年 —《凯尔特曙光》
1894年 —《心灵的欲望之田》
1895年 — 《诗集》
1897年 — 《神秘的玫瑰》
1899年 — 《苇间风 》
1903年 —《善恶之观念》
1903年 — 《七重林中》
1907年 — 《发现 》
1910年 — 《绿盔及其他诗作 》
1913年 — 《挫折的诗歌》
1914年 — 《责任 》
1916年 — 《青春岁月的幻想曲》
1917年 — 《库利的野天鹅 》
1918年 — 《宁静的月色中 》
1921年 — 《迈可·罗拔兹与舞者》
1921年 — 《四年》
1924年 — 《猫和月光》
1925年 — 《灵视》
1926年 — 《疏远》
1926年 — 《自传》
1927年 — 《十月的爆发》
1928年 — 《塔楼》
1933年 — 《回梯与其他诗作》
1934年 — 《剧作选集》
1935年 — 《三月的满月》
1938年 — 《新诗》
1939年 — 《最后的诗及两部剧作》（死后出版）
1939年 — 《气锅中》（死后出版）
1923年获诺贝尔文学奖，主要诗集有《芦苇中的风》、《责任》、《塔》等。
Yeats was born and educated in Dublin, but spent his childhood in Sligo. He studied poetry in his youth, and from an early age was fascinated by both Irish legends and the occult. Those topics feature in the first phase of his work, which lasted roughly until the turn of the century. His earliest volume of verse was published in 1889, and those slowly paced and lyrical poems display debts to Edmund Spenser and Percy Bysshe Shelley, as well as to the lyricism of the Pre-Raphaelite poets.
From 1900, Yeats' poetry grew more physical and realistic. He largely renounced the transcendental beliefs of his youth, though he remained preoccupied with physical and spiritual masks, as well as with cyclical theories of life. Over the years Yeats adopted many different ideological positions, including, in the words of the critic Michael Valdez Moses, "those of radical nationalist, classical liberal, reactionary conservative and millenarian nihilist".
Early year
William Butler Yeats was born in Sandymount, County Dublin, Ireland. His father, John Butler Yeats, was a descendant of Jervis Yeats, a Williamite soldier and linen merchant who died in 1712. Jervis' grandson Benjamin married Mary Butler, daughter of a landed County Kildare family. At the time of his marriage, John Yeats was studying law, but abandoned his studies to study art at Heatherley’s Art School in London. His mother, Susan Mary Pollexfen, came from a wealthy Anglo-Irish family in County Sligo who owned a prosperous milling and shipping business. Soon after William's birth the family relocated to Sligo to stay with her extended family, and the young poet came to think of the area as his childhood and spiritual home. Its landscape became, over time, both literally and symbolically, his "country of the heart". The Butler Yeats family were highly artistic; his brother Jack went on to be a highly regarded painter, while his sisters Elizabeth and Susan—known to family and friends as Lollie and Lily—became involved in the Arts and Crafts movement.
Yeats grew up in a Protestant Ascendancy at the time undergoing a crisis of identity. While his family was broadly supportive of the changes Ireland was experiencing, the nationalist revival of the late 19th century directly disadvantaged his heritage, and informed his outlook for the remainder of his life. In 1997, his biographer R. F. Foster observed that Napoleon's dictum 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' childhood and young adulthood were shadowed by the marginalization of the Protestant community. The 1880s saw the rise of Parnell and the Home rule movement, the 1890s the momentum of nationalism, while the Fenians became prominent around the turn of the century. These developments were to have a profound effect on his poetry, and his subsequent explorations of Irish identity had a significant influence on the creation of his country's biography.
In 1876, the family moved to England to aid their father, John, to further his career as an artist. At first the Yeats children were educated at home. Their mother entertained them with stories and folktales from her county of birth. John provided an erratic education in geography and chemistry, and took William on natural history explorations of the nearby Slough countryside. On 26 January 1877, the young poet entered the Godolphin primary school, which he 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 subject. Very poor in spelling." Though he had difficulty with mathematics and languages, he was fascinated by biology and zoology. For financial reasons, the family returned to Dublin toward the end of 1880, living at first in the city center and later in the suburb of Howth. In October 1881, Yeats resumed his education at Dublin's Erasmus Smith High School. His father's studio was located nearby and William spent a great deal of time there, and met many of the city's artists and writers. It was during this period that he started writing poetry, and in 1885 Yeats' first poems, as well as an essay entitled "The Poetry of Sir Samuel Ferguson", were published in the Dublin University Review. Between 1884 to 1886, William attended the Metropolitan School of Art—now the National College of Art and Design—in Kildare Street. His first known works were written when he was seventeen, and include a poem heavily influenced by Percy Bysshe Shelley which describes a magician who set up his throne in central Asia. Other pieces from this period are a draft of a play involving a Bishop, a monk, and a woman accused of paganism by local shepherds, as well as love-poems and narrative lyrics on medieval German knights. The early works were both conventional and according to the critic Charles Johnson "utterly unIrish", seeming to come out of a "vast murmurous gloom of dreams". Although Yeats' early works drew heavily on Shelley, Edmund Spenser, and on the diction and colouring of pre-Raphaelite verse, he soon turned to Irish myth and folklore and the writings of William Blake. In later life, Yeats paid tribute to Blake by describing him as one of the "great artificers of God who uttered great truths to a little clan".
Young poet
The family returned to London in 1887. In 1890, Yeats co-founded the Rhymers' Club with Ernest Rhys, a group of London based poets who met regularly in a Fleet Street tavern to recite their verse. The collective later became known as the "Tragic Generation" and published two anthologies: first in 1892 and again in 1894. He collaborated with Edwin Ellis on the first complete edition of William Blake's works, in the process rediscovering a forgotten poem "Vala, or, the Four Zoas." In a late essay on Shelley, Yeats wrote, "I have re-read Prometheus Unbound... and it seems to me to have an even more certain place than I had thought among the sacred books of the world."
Yeats had a life-long interest in mysticism, spiritualism, occultism, and astrology. He read extensively on the subjects throughout his life and was especially influenced by the writings of Emanuel Swedenborg. As early as 1892, he wrote: "If I had not made magic my constant study I could not have written a single word of my Blake book, nor would The Countess Kathleen ever have come to exist. The mystical life is the center of all that I do and all that I think and all that I write." His mystical interests—also inspired by a study of Hinduism, under the Theosophist Mohini Chatterjee, and the occult—formed much of the basis of his late poetry. However, some critics have dismissed these influences as lacking in intellectual credibility. In particular, W. H. Auden criticized this aspect of Yeats' work as the "deplorable spectacle of a grown man occupied with the mumbo-jumbo of magic and the nonsense of India."
Yeats's first significant poem was "The Isle of Statues," a fantasy work that took Edmund Spenser for its poetic model. The piece appeared in Dublin University Review, but has not since been republished. His first solo publication was the pamphlet Mosada: A Dramatic Poem (1886), which comprised a print run of 100 copies paid for 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 the mid-1880s. The long titular poem contains, in the words of 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, Sgeolan, and Lomair,
On a morning misty and mild and fair.
The mist-drops hung on the fragrant trees,
And in the blossoms hung the bees.
We rode in sadness above Lough Lean,
For our best were dead on Gavra's green.
"The Wanderings of Oisin" is based on the lyrics of the Fenian Cycle of Irish mythology and displays the influence of both Sir Samuel Ferguson and the Pre-Raphaelite poets. The poem took two years to complete and was one of the few works from this period that he did not disown in his maturity. Oisin introduces what was to become one of his most important themes: the appeal of the life of contemplation over the appeal of the 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 Wind Among the Reeds (1899).
During 1885, Yeats was involved in the formation of the Dublin Hermetic Order. The society held its first meeting on 16 June, with Yeats acting as its chairman. The same year, the Dublin Theosophical lodge was opened in conjunction with Brahmin Mohini Chatterjee, who traveled from the Theosophical Society in London to lecture. Yeats attended his first séance the following year. He later became heavily involved with the Theosophical Society and with hermeticism, particularly with the eclectic Rosicrucianism of the Golden Dawn. During séances held from 1912, a spirit calling itself "Leo Africanus" apparently claimed to be Yeats's Daemon or anti-self, inspiring some of the speculations in Per Amica Silentia Lunae. He was admitted into the Golden Dawn in March 1890 and took the magical motto Daemon est Deus inversus—translated as Devil is God inverted or A demon is a god reflected. He was an active recruiter for the sect's Isis-Urania temple, and brought in his uncle George Pollexfen, Maud Gonne, and Florence Farr. Although he reserved a distaste for abstract and dogmatic religions founded around personality cults, he was attracted to the type of people he met at the Golden Dawn. He was involved in the Order's power struggles, both with Farr and Macgregor Mathers, but was most notably involved when Mathers sent 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.
Maud Gonne
Maud Gonne ca. 1900.In 1889, Yeats met Maud Gonne, then a twenty-three year old heiress and ardent Nationalist. Gonne was eighteen months younger than Yeats and later claimed she met the poet as a "paint-stained art student." Gonne had admired "The Isle of Statues" and sought out his acquaintance. Yeats developed an obsessive infatuation with her beauty and outspoken manner, and she was to have a significant and lasting effect on his poetry and his life thereafter. Looking back in later years, he admitted "it seems to me that she [Gonne] brought into my life those days—for as yet I saw only what lay upon the surface—the middle of the tint, a sound as of a Burmese gong, an over-powering tumult that had yet many pleasant secondary notes." Yeats' love remained unrequited, in part due to his reluctance to participate in her nationalist activism. His only other love affair during this period was with Olivia Shakespeare, whom he had first met in 1896, and parted with one year later. In 1895, he visited Gonne in Ireland and proposed marriage, but was rejected. He later admitted that from that point "the troubling of my life began." Yeats proposed to Gonne three more times: in 1899, 1900 and 1901. She refused each proposal, and in 1903, to his horror, married the Irish nationalist Major John MacBride.
A 1907 engraving of Yeats.Yeats' friendship with Gonne persisted, and 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 sexual intercourse is the perpetual virginity of the soul." The relationship did not develop into a new phase after their night together, and soon afterwards Gonne wrote to the poet indicating that despite the physical consummation, they could not continue as they had been: "I have prayed so hard to have all earthly desire taken from my love for you & dearest, loving you as I do, I have prayed & I am praying still that the bodily desire for me may be taken from you too." By January 1909, Gonne 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 Young and Old":
My arms are like the twisted thorn
And yet there beauty lay;
The first of all the tribe lay 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 mutual friend Edward Martyn. Gregory encouraged Yeats' 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 with Lady Gregory, Martyn, and other writers including J. M. Synge, Sean O'Casey, and Padraic Colum, Yeats was one of those responsible for the establishment of the "Irish Literary Revival" movement Apart from these creative writers, much of the impetus for 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 tradition 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.
Abbey Theatre
In 1899, Yeats, Lady Gregory, Martyn, and George Moore established the Irish Literary Theatre for the purpose of performing Celtic and Irish plays. The ideals of the Abbey were derived from the avant-garde French theatre, which sought to express the "ascendancy of the playwright rather than the actor-manager à l'anglais." The group's manifesto, which Yeats himself wrote, declared "We hope to find in Ireland an uncorrupted & imaginative audience trained to listen by its passion for oratory... & that freedom to experiment which is not found in the theaters of England, & without which no new movement in art or literature can succeed."
The collective survived for about two years and was not successful. However, working together with two Irish brothers with theatrical experience, William and Frank Fay, Yeats' unpaid-yet-independently wealthy secretary Annie Elizabeth Fredericka Horniman, and the leading West End actress Florence Farr, the group established the Irish National Theatre Society. This group of founders was able, along with J.M. Synge, to acquire property in Dublin and open the Abbey Theatre on 27 December 1904. Yeats's play Cathleen Ní Houlihan and Lady Gregory's Spreading the News were featured on the opening night. Yeats continued to be involved with the Abbey until his death, both as a member of the board and a prolific playwright. In 1902, he helped set up the Dun Emer Press to publish work by writers associated with the Revival. This became the Cuala Press in 1904, and inspired by the Arts and Crafts movement, sought to "find work for Irish hands in the making of beautiful things." From then until its closure in 1946, the press—which was run by the poet's sisters—produced over 70 titles; 48 of them books by Yeats himself.
William Butler Yeats, 1933. Unknown photographer. U.S. Library of Congress.In 1913, Yeats met the young American poet Ezra Pound. Pound had traveled to London at least partly to meet the older man, whom he considered "the only poet worthy of serious study." From that year until 1916, the two men wintered in the Stone Cottage at Ashdown Forest, with Pound nominally acting as Yeats' secretary. The relationship got off to a rocky start when Pound arranged for the publication in the magazine Poetry of some of Yeats's verse with Pound's own unauthorised alterations. These changes reflected Pound's distaste for Victorian prosody. A more indirect influence was the scholarship on Japanese Noh plays that Pound had obtained from Ernest Fenollosa's widow, which provided Yeats with a model for the aristocratic drama he intended to write. The first of his plays modeled on Noh was At the Hawk's Well, the first draft of which he dictated to Pound in January 1916.
In his early work, Yeats' aristocratic pose led to an idealisation of the Irish peasant and a willingness to ignore poverty and suffering. However, the emergence of a revolutionary movement from the ranks of the urban Catholic lower-middle class made him reassess his attitudes. His new direct engagement with politics can be seen in the poem September 1913, with its well-known refrain "Romantic Ireland's dead and gone / It's with O'Leary in the grave." The poem is an attack on the Dublin employers who were involved in the 1913 Dublin Lockout of workers in support of James Larkin's attempts to organise the Irish labour movement. In the refrain of "Easter 1916" ("All changed, changed utterly / A terrible beauty is born"), Yeats faces his own failure to recognise the merits of the leaders of the Easter Rising, due to his attitude towards their humble backgrounds and lives.
Marriage to Georgie
By 1916, Yeats was 51 years old and determined to marry and produce an heir. His final proposal to Maud Gonne took place in the summer of 1916. In his view, Gonne's history of rabid revolutionary political activism, as well as a series of personal catastrophes in the previous few years of her life, including chloroform addiction and a troubled marriage to John MacBride—an Irish revolutionary who was later executed by British forces for his role in the 1916 Easter Rising—made her an unsuitable wife. Biographer R.F. Foster has observed that Yeats's last offer was motivated more by a sense of duty than by a genuine desire to marry Gonne. Yeats made his proposal in an indifferent manner, with conditions attached, and both expected and hoped to be turned down. According to Foster "when he duly asked Maud to marry him, and was duly refused, his thoughts shifted with surprising speed to her daughter". Iseult Gonne was Maud's second child with Lucien Millevoye, and at the time was twenty-one years old. She had lived a sad life to this point. Iseult had been conceived as an attempt to reincarnate her short lived brother, and for the first few years of her life was presented as her mother's adopted niece. She was molested by her stepfather when she was eleven, and later worked as a gunrunner for the Irish Republican Army. At fifteen she proposed to Yeats. A few months after the poet's approach to Maude, he proposed to Iseult, but was rejected. Reflecting in later years, Yeats referred to the period as his "second puberty" and asked a friend "who am I, that I should not make a fool of myself".
Yeats photographed in 1923.That September, Yeats proposed to twenty-four-year-old George (Georgie) Hyde-Lees (1892-1968), whom he had met through occult circles. Despite warning from her friends—"George... you can't. He must be dead"—Hyde-Lees accepted, and the two were married on October 20. Their marriage was a success, in spite of the age difference, and in spite of Yeats's feelings of remorse and regret during their honeymoon. Around this time George wrote to her husband "When you are dead, people will talk about your love affairs, but I shall say nothing, for I will remember how proud you were". The couple went on to have two children, Anne and Michael.
During the first years of his marriage, he and George engaged in a form of automatic writing, which involved George contacting a variety of spirits and guides, which they termed "Instructors". The spirits communicated a complex and esoteric system of characters and history which they developed during experiments with the circumstances of trance and the exposition of phases, cones, and gyres. Yeats devoted 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 in thinking this book my book of books".
Nobel Prize
In December 1923, Yeats was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature, and was determined to make the most of the occasion. He was aware of the symbolic value of an Irish winner so soon after Ireland had gained independence, and sought to highlight the fact at each available opportunity. His reply to the many of the letters of congratulations sent to him contained the words: "I consider that this honor has come to me less as an individual than as 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 present himself as a standard-bearer of Irish nationalism and Irish cultural independence. As he remarked, "The theatres of Dublin were empty buildings hired by the English traveling companies, and we wanted Irish plays and Irish players. When we thought of these plays we thought of everything that was romantic and poetical, because the nationalism we had called up—the nationalism every generation had called up in moments of discouragement—was romantic and poetical." The prize led to a significant increase in the sales of his books, as his publishers Macmillan sought to capitalise on the publicity. For the first time he had money, and he was able to repay not only his own debts, but those of his father.
Old age
Memorial statue of William Butler Yeats located in Sligo, Ireland.By the spring of 1925, Yeats had published "A Vision", and his health had stabilised. He had been appointed to the first Irish Senate in 1922, and was re-appointed for a second term in 1925. Early in his tenure a debate on divorce arose, and Yeats viewed the issue as primarily a confrontation between the emerging Catholic ethos and the Protestant minority. When the 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 "crystallize" the partition of Northern Ireland. In response, Yeats delivered a series of speeches in which he attacked the "quixotically impressive" ambitions of the government and clergy, likening their campaign tactics to that 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 sacred. This conviction has come to us through ancient philosophy and modern literature, and it seems to us a most sacrilegious thing to persuade two people who hate each other...to live together, and it is to us no remedy to permit them to part if neither can re-marry." The resulting debate has been described as one of Yeats' "supreme public moments", and began his ideological move away from pluralism towards religious confrontation. His language became more forceful; the Jesuit Father Peter Finlay was described by Yeats as a man of "monstrous discourtesy", and he lamented that "It is one of the glories of the Church in which I was born that we have put our Bishops in their place in discussions requiring legislation". During his time in the senate, Yeats further warned his colleagues: "If you show that this country, southern Ireland, is going to be governed by Roman Catholic ideas and by Catholic ideas alone, you will never get the North...You will put a wedge in the midst of this nation". He memorably said of his fellow Irish Protestants, "we are no petty people".
In 1924, he chaired a coinage committee charged with _select_ing a set of designs for the first currency of the Irish Free State. Aware of the symbolic power latent in the imagery a young state's currency, he sought a form that was "elegant, racy of the soil, and utterly unpolitical". When the house finally decided on the artwork of Percy Metcalfe, Yeats was pleased, though he regretted that compromise had lead to "lost muscular tension" in the finally depicted images. He retired from the Senate in 1928 due to ill health.
Towards the end of his life—and especially after the Wall Street Crash and Great Depression, which led some to question whether democracy would be able to cope with deep economic difficulty—Yeats seems to have returned to his aristocratic sympathies. During the aftermath of the First World War, he became skeptical about the efficacy of democratic government, and anticipated political reconstruction in Europe through totalitarian rule. His later association with Pound drew him towards Mussolini, for whom he expressed admiration on a number of occasions. He wrote three 'marching songs'—never used—for the Irish General Eoin O'Duffy's 'Blueshirts'. However, when Pablo Neruda invited him to visit Madrid in 1937, Yeats responded with a letter supporting the Republic against Fascism, and he distanced himself from Nazism and Fascism in the last years of his life.
Yeats's gravestone in Drumcliff, County Sligo.After undergoing the Steinach operation in 1934, when aged 69, he found a new vigour evident from both his poetry and his intimate relations with younger women. During this time Yeats was involved in a number of romantic affairs with, among others, the poet and actress Margot Ruddock, and the novelist, journalist and sexual radicalist Ethel Mannin. As in his earlier life, Yeats found erotic adventure conducive to his creative energy, and despite age and ill-health he remained a prolific writer. In 1936, he undertook editorship of the Oxford Book of Modern Verse, 1892–1935. Having suffered from a variety of illnesses for a number of years, he died at the Hôtel Idéal Séjour, in Menton, France on 28 January 1939. He was buried after a discreet and private funeral at Roquebrune-Cap-Martin. Yeats and George had often discussed his death, and his express wish was to be buried quickly in France with a minimum of fuss. According to George "His actual 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 in Sligo". In September 1948, Yeats's body was moved to Drumcliffe, County Sligo, on the Irish Naval Service corvette L.E. Macha. His epitaph is taken from the last lines of "Under Ben Bulben", one of his final poems:
Cast a cold Eye
On Life, on Death.
Horseman, pass by.
Style
W.B. Yeats is generally considered to be one of the twentieth century's key English-language poets. He can be considered a Symbolist poet in that he used allusive imagery and symbolic structures throughout his career. Yeats chooses words and puts them together so that in addition to a particular meaning they suggest other meanings that seem more significant. His use of symbols is usually something physical which is used both to be itself and to suggest other, perhaps immaterial, timeless qualities. Yet, unlike most modernists who experimented with free verse, Yeats was also a master of the traditional verse forms. The impact of modernism on his work can be seen in the increasing abandonment of the more conventionally poetic diction of his early work in favor of the more austere language and more direct approach to his themes that increasingly characterises the poetry and plays of his middle period, comprising the volumes In the Seven Woods, Responsibilities and The Green Helmet. His later poetry and plays are written in a more personal vein, and the works written in the last twenty years of his life include mention of his son and daughter, as well as meditations on the experience of growing old. In his poem, "The Circus Animals' Desertion", he describes the inspiration for these late works:
Now that my ladder's gone
I must lie down where all the ladders start
In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart
During 1929, he stayed at Thoor Ballylee, near Gort in County Galway (where Yeats had his summer home since 1919) for the last time. Much of the remainder of his life was lived outside of Ireland, although he did lease Riversdale house in the Dublin 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 see the premier of his play Purgatory. His Autobiographies of William Butler Yeats was published that same year.
While Yeats's early poetry drew heavily on Irish myth and folklore, his later work was engaged with more contemporary issues, and his style underwent a dramatic transformation. His work can be divided into three general periods. The early poems are lushly pre-Raphaelite in tone, self-consciously ornate, and at times, according to unsympathetic critics, stilted. Yeats began by writing epic poems such as The Isle of Statues and The Wanderings of Oisin. After Oisin, he never attempted another long poem. His other early poems are lyrics on the themes of love or mystical and esoteric subjects. Yeats' middle period saw him abandon the pre-Raphaelite character of his early work and attempt to turn himself into a Landor-style social ironist. Critics who admire his middle work might characterize it as supple and muscular in its rhythms and sometimes harshly modernist, while others find these poems barren and weak in imaginative power. Yeats' later work found new imaginative inspiration in the mystical system he began to work out for himself under the influence of spiritualism. In many ways, this poetry is a return to the vision of his earlier work. The opposition between the worldly-minded man of the sword and the spiritually-minded man of God, the theme of The Wanderings of Oisin, is reproduced in A Dialogue Between Self and Soul.
Some critics claim that Yeats spanned the transition from the nineteenth century into twentieth-century modernism in poetry much as Pablo Picasso did in painting. Others question whether late Yeats really has much in common with modernists of the Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot variety. Modernists read the well-known poem "The Second Coming" as a dirge for the decline of European civilization in the mode of Eliot, but later critics have pointed out that this poem is an expression of Yeats' apocalyptic mystical theories, and thus the expression of a mind shaped by the 1890s. His most important collections of poetry started with The Green Helmet (1910) and Responsibilities (1914). In imagery, Yeats's poetry became sparer, more powerful as he grew older. The Tower (1928), The Winding Stairs (1929), and New Poems (1938) contained some of the most potent images in twentieth-century poetry; his Last Poems are conceded by most to be amongst his best.
Yeats's mystical inclinations, informed by Hindu Theosophical beliefs and the occult, formed much of the basis of his late poetry, which some critics have judged as lacking in intellectual credibility. W. H. Auden criticizes his late stage as the "deplorable spectacle of a grown man occupied with the mumbo-jumbo of magic and the nonsense of India". The metaphysics of Yeats's late works must be read in relation to his system of esoteric fundamentalities in A Vision (1925).
His 1920 poem, "The Second Coming" is one of the most potent sources of imagery about the twentieth century.
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned.
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
For the anti-democratic Yeats, 'the beast' referred to the traditional ruling classes of Europe, who were unable to protect the traditional culture of Europe from materialistic mass movements. The concluding lines refer to Yeats' belief that history was cyclic, and that his age represented the end of the cycle that began with the rise of Christianity.
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
Note
^ The Nobel Prize in Literature 1923. Nobelprize.org. Retrieved on 3 June 2007.
^ Frenz, Horst (Edit.). The Nobel Prize in Literature 1923. "Nobel Lectures, Literature 1901–1967", 1969. Retrieved on 23 May 2007.
^ a b c Moses, Michael Valdez. "The Poet As Politician". Reason, February, 2001. Retrieved on 03 June 2007.
^ a b c Obituary. "W.B. Yeats Dead". The New York Times, 30 January 1939. Retrieved on 21 May 2007.
^ "John Butler Yeats". Retrieved on 12 October 2007.
^ The Collected Poems (1994), p. vii.
^ Gordon Bowe, Nicola. "Two Early Twentieth-Century Irish Arts and Crafts Workshops in Context". Journal of Design History, Vol. 2, No. 2/3 (1989). pp. 193–206.
^ Foster (1997), p. xxviii.
^ Foster (1997), p. xxvii.
^ Foster (1997), p. 24.
^ Hone (1943), p. 28.
^ Foster (1997), p. 25.
^ Hone (1943), p. 33.
^ Foster (1997), p. 37.
^ Paulin, Tom. Taylor & Francis, 2004. "The Poems of William Blake". Retrieved on 3 June 2007.
^ Hone (1943), p. 83.
^ Alford, Norman. "The Rhymers' Club: Poets of the Tragic Generation". Nineteenth-Century Literature, Vol. 50, No. 4, March 1996. pp. 535-538.
^ Lancashire, Ian. "William Blake (1757–1827)". Department of English, University of Toronto, 2005. Retrieved on 03 June 2007.
^ Yeats (1900), p. 65.
^ Burke, Martin J. "Daidra from Philadelphia: Thomas Holley Chivers and The Sons of Usna". Columbia University, 7 October 2005. Retrieved on 15 July 2007.
^ Ellmann, Richard (1948). "Yeats: The Man and the Masks". (New York) Macmillan. p. 94.
^ Mendelson, Edward (Ed.) "W. H. Auden". The Complete Works of W.H. Auden: Prose, Volume II, 1939–1948, 2002. Retrieved on 26 May 2007.
^ Foster (1997), pp. 82-85.
^ Alspach, Russell K. "The Use by Yeats and Other Irish Writers of the Folklore of Patrick Kennedy". The Journal of American Folklore, Volume 59, No. 234, December, 1946. pp. 404-412.
^ Nally, Claire V. "National Identity Formation in W. B. Yeats's 'A Vision'". Irish Studies Review, Volume 14, Issue 1, February 2006. pp. 57–67.
^ Daemon est Deus inversus is taken from the writings of Madame Blavatsky in which she claims that "...even that divine Homogeneity must contain in itself the essence of both good and evil", and uses the motto as a symbol of the Astral Light.
^ Foater (1997), p. 103.
^ Cullingford, Elizabeth. "How Jacques Molay Got Up the Tower: Yeats and the Irish Civil War". ELH, Volume 50, No. 4, 1983. pp. 763-789.
^ Gonne claimed they first met in London three years earlier. Foster notes how Gonne was "notoriously unreliable on dates and places (1997, p. 57)
^ Foster (1997), p. 57.
^ Uddin Khan, Jalal. "Yeats and Maud Gonne: (Auto)biographical and Artistic Intersection". Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics, 2002.
^ Foster (1997), pp. 86-87.
^ "William Butler Yeats". BBC Four. Retrieved on 20 June 2007.
^ a b c d e Cahill, Christopher. "Second Puberty: The Later Years of W. B. Yeats Brought His Best Poetry, along with Personal Melodrama on an Epic Scale". The Atlantic Monthly, December 2003.
^ a b Ó Corráin, Donnchadh. "William Butler Yeats". University College Cork. Retrieved on 15 July 2007.
^ Foster (1997), p. 394.
^ Corcoran, Neil. After Yeats and Joyce: Reading Modern Irish Literature. (Oxford), Oxford University Press, 1997. p. viii
^ Foster (2003), pp. 486, 662.
^ Foster (1997), p. 183.
^ Text reproduced from Yeats' own handwritten draft.
^ Foster (1997), p. 184.
^ "Irish Genius': The Yeats Family and The Cuala Press". Trinity College, Dublin, 12 February 2004. Retrieved on 2 June 2007.
^ Monroe, Harriet (1913). "Poetry". (Chicago) Modern Poetry Association. p. 123.
^ Sands, Maren. "The Influence of Japanese Noh Theater on Yeats". Colorado State University. Retrieved on 15 July 2007.
^ Foster (2003), p. 59–66.
^ Mann, Neil. "An Overview of A Vision". "The System of W. B. Yeats’s A Vision". Retrieved on 15 July 2007.
^ Foster (1997), p. 286.
^ Foster (2003), pp. 105, 383.
^ Mann, Neil. "Letter 27 July 1924". "The System of W. B. Yeats’s A Vision". Retrieved on 24 April 2008.
^ Foster (2003), p. 245.
^ Foster (2003), pp. 246-247.
^ Foster (2003), pp. 228–239.
^ Foster (2003), p. 293.
^ a b c Foster (2003), p. 294.
^ Foster (2003), p. 296.
^ "Seanad Resumes: Debate on Divorce Legislation Resumed". Seanad Éireann, Volume 5, 11 June, 1925. Retrieved on 26 May 2007.
^ a b Foster (2003), p. 333.
^ Foster (2003), p. 468.
^ "The Life and Works of William Butler Yeats". National Library of Ireland. Retrieved on 15 July 2007.
^ Foster (2003), pp. 504, 510-511.
^ Foster (2003), p. 651.
^ Foster (2003), p. 656.
^ Powell, Grosvenor E. "Yeats's Second "Vision": Berkeley, Coleridge, and the Correspondence with Sturge Moore". The Modern Language Review, Vol. 76, No. 2, April, 1981. p. 273.
Source
Cleeve, Brian (1972). W.B. Yeats and the Designing of Ireland's Coinage. New York: Dolmen Press. ISBN 0-85-105221-5
Foster, R. F. (1997). W. B. Yeats: A Life, Vol. I: The Apprentice Mage. New York: Oxford UP. ISBN 0-19-288085-3.
Foster, R. F. (2003). W. B. Yeats: A Life, Vol. II: The Arch-Poet 1915–1939. New York: Oxford UP. ISBN 0-19-818465-4.
Igoe, Vivien (1994). A Literary Guide to Dublin. London: Methuen Publishing. ISBN 0-413-69120-9.
Hone, Joseph (1943). W.B. Yeats, 1865–1939. New York: Macmillan Publishers. OCLC: 35607726
Longenbach, James (1988). Stone Cottage: Pound, Yeats, and Modernism. New York: Oxford UP. ISBN 0-19-506662-6.
Ryan, Philip B. (1998). The Lost Theatres of Dublin. Wiltshire: The Badger Press. ISBN 0-9526076-1-1.
"The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats" (1994). (London) Wordsworth Poetry Library. ISBN 978-1-85326-454-2.
Yeats, W. B. (1900). "The Philosophy of Shelley's Poetry", in Essays and Introductions, 1961. New York: Macmillan Publishers. OCLC 362823
Further reading
Brown, Terence (2001). The Life of W. B. Yeats. Blackwell Publishers. ISBN 0-631-18298-5.
Ellmann, Richard (1978). Yeats: The Man and the Masks. W W Norton. ISBN 0-393-07522-2.
Jeffares, A Norman ((1984). A New Commentary on the Poems of W. B. Yeats. Stanford UP. ISBN 0-8047-1221-2.
Jeffares, A Norman (1949). W B Yeats: Man and Poet. Yale UP. ISBN 0-31-215814-9
Jeffares, A Norman (1989). W B Yeats: A New Biography. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. ISBN 0-374-28588-8.
King, Francis (1978). The Magical World of Aleister Crowley. New York: Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, ISBN 0-69-810884-1
King, Francis (1989). Modern Ritual Magic: The Rise of Western Occultism. ISBN 1-85327-032-6.
W. J. McCormack (2005). Blood Kindred: The Politics of W. B. Yeats and His Death. Pimilico ISBN 0-712-66514-5.
Pritchard, William H. (1972). W. B. Yeats: A Critical Anthology. Penguin. ISBN 0-14-08-0791-8.
Menon, Dr.V. K. Narayana, Development of William Butler Yeats
Vendler, Helen (2004). Poets Thinking: Pope, Whitman, Dickinson, Yeats, Harvard University Press
Vendler, Helen (2007). Our Secret Discipline: Yeats and Lyric Form, Harvard University Press