I was involved in a miserable love-affair. Romantic doctrine had reached its extreme development. My nerves had been wrecked. Lady Gregory, whom Yeats met through Arthur Symons and Edward Martyn Martyn's demesne, Tillyra, adjoined Coole , was a woman of much cultivation and generosity of spirit.
Yeats had lost the power to impose upon himself regular habits of work. Lady Gregory, who was later to write out the Irish legends in the simple speech of the peasants of her countryside, took him from cottage to cottage collecting folklore.
Coole and its environs were to give the mature Yeats a background for his later work, as Sligo had given him a scene for his earlier. With his technical apprenticeship and his most excessive enthusiasms behind him, Yeats turned away from the middle-class culture of Dublin to the people of Galway farms and villages, "Folk is our refuge from vulgarity.
Yeats knew that nothing was read in Ireland but "prayer books, newspapers, and popular novels. They were a potential audience, in the primary sense of that word. He had already formed in Dublin the National Literary Society, with the intention of giving "opportunity to a new generation of critics and writers to denounce the propagandist verse and prose that had gone by the name of Irish literature.
He had written plays, but had no stage, unless it were the stage of small halls, where they could be presented. Against him were ranged the entrenched powers of the commercial theatre, the Church, and the press, the last two informed with the special Irish fear of "humiliation" and misinterpretation, bred from Ireland's peculiar political situation.
His own plays caused mild trouble. Synge's Playboy , presented in , brought on a week of riots and emptied the Abbey Theatre for months. But Yeats held out, against an enraged Dublin and an intimidated company. By the public had learned how to listen to imaginative drama with appreciation, to satiric plays without resentment. The Irish Dramatic Movement had come through, at the cost of great energy and courage expended by its founders.
Yeats then turned away from the "popular" theatre, and began to write plays which could be presented in a room by a few amateurs and musicians, plays which could carry his special music and dramatic formality with the least theatrical machinery.
If we grant naturalness, sincerity, and vigor to Yeats's late style, we still have not approached its secret. Technical simplicity may produce, instead of effects of tension and power, effects of bleakness and poorness. What impresses us most strongly in Yeats's late work is that here a whole personality is involved. A complex temperament capable of anger and harshness, us well as of tenderness , and a powerful intellect, come through; and every part of the nature is released, developed, and rounded in the later books.
The early Yeats was, in many ways, a youth of his time: a romantic exile seeking, away from reality, the landscape of his dreams. By degrees—for the development took place over a long period of years—this partial personality was absorbed into a man whose power to act in the real world and endure the results of action responsibility the romantic hesitates to assume was immense.
Yeats advanced into the world he once shunned, but in dealing with it he did not yield to its standards. That difficult balance, almost impossible to strike, between the artist's austerity and "the reveries of the common heart,"—between the proud passions, the proud intellect, and consuming action,—Yeats finally attained and held to.
It is this balance which gives the poems written from roughly on from Responsibilities , published in that year, to poems published at present their noble resonance. Technically, the later style is almost lacking in adverbs—built on the noun, verb, and adjective. Its structure is kept clear and level, so that emotionally weighted words, when they appear, stand out with poignant emphasis.
The Wild Swans at Coole opens:—. Equipped with this instrument, Yeats could put down, with full scorn, his irritation with the middle-class ideals he had hated from youth:—. On the other hand he could celebrate Irish salus, virtus , as in the poem "An Irish Airman Foresees His Death," and in the fine elegies on the leaders of the Easter Rebellion. And Yeats came to be expert at the dramatic presentation of thoughts concerning love, death, the transience and hidden meaning of all things, not only in the form of a philosopher's speculation, a mystic's speech, or a scholar's lonely brooding, but also and this has come to be a major Yeatsian effect in the cracked and rowdy measures of a fool's, an old man's, an old woman's song.
The Tower and The Winding Stair contain long meditations— some "in time of civil war"—upon his life, his times, his ancestors, his descendants; upon the friends and enemies of his youth. The short plays, composed on the pattern of the Japanese No drama, which Ezra Pound had brought to Yeats's attention,— Four Plays for Dancers , Wheels and Butterflies , The King of the Great Clock Tower ,—Yeats made the vehicle for the loveliest of his later songs, for all his later development of pure music:—.
The opening song in the play Fighting the Waves illustrates the variety of stress, the subtlety of meaning, of which Yeats became a master:—. From youth on, Yeats has thought to build a religion for himself. Early "bored with an Irish Protestant point of view that suggested, by its blank abstraction, chlorate of lime," he eagerly welcomed any teaching which attested supersensual experience, or gave him a background for those thoughts which came to him "from beyond the mind.
At that time, when religious belief and man's awe before natural mysteries were rapidly breaking up, the wreckage of the supernatural had been swept into mediums' shabby parlors and into the hands of quacks of all kinds. Many men of Yeats's generation took refuge in the Catholic Church. But Yeats kept to his own researches. He had experimented, when an adolescent, with telepathy and clairvoyance, in the company of his uncle, George Pollexfen, a student of the occult.
He later studied the Christian Cabala and gradually built up, from his own findings and from the works of Blake, Swedenborg, and Boehme, his theories of visionary and spiritual truth.
But he was never, as Edmund Wilson has pointed out, a gullible pupil. He invariably tried to verify phenomena. And to-day, when we know more than we once knew concerning the meaning of man-made symbols, the needs of the psyche, and the workings of the subconscious, Yeats's theories sound remarkably instructed and modernly relevant. His Anima Mundi closely resembles Jung's universal or racial unconscious, and even his conceptions of Image and Anti-Image, the Mask and its opposite, are closely related to psychological truth.
Of late years, after a lifetime spent at efforts to break up the deadening surface of middle-class complacency, Yeats has drawn nourishment from the thought of the relation of eighteenth-century Anglo Irish writers to their society. These men—Swift, Berkeley, Grattan—had behind them, he believes, a social structure capable of being an aid to works of imagination and intellect. The ideal of the artist built into his background, sustaining it and sustained by it, Yeats has termed "Unity of Being.
In age, he shows no impoverishment of spirit or weakening of intention. He answers current dogmatists with words edged with the same contempt for "the rigid world" of materialism that he used in youth.
He is now content to throw out suggestions that are not, perhaps, for our age to complete, as it is not for our age fully to appreciate a man who reiterates: "If we have not the desire of artistic perfection for an art, the deluge of incoherence, vulgarity, and triviality will pass over our heads. Skip to content Site Navigation The Atlantic.
Popular Latest. The Atlantic Crossword. Sign In Subscribe. Yeats made his debut as a poet in , but in his earlier period his dramatic production outweighed his poetry. His plays are often based on Irish legends and are full of mysticism and spiritualism. After his plays became more experimental and poetic. The later plays contained new elements, such as masks, dance and music, and were influenced by the Japanese Noh theatre tradition. During the last 20 years of his life, he reverted increasingly to poetry.
Yeats was awarded the Nobel Prize in and died in at the age of seventy-three. The Collected Poems of W. Yeats Macmillan, National Poetry Month. Materials for Teachers Teach This Poem. Poems for Kids. Poetry for Teens. Lesson Plans. Resources for Teachers. Academy of American Poets.
American Poets Magazine. Poets Search more than 3, biographies of contemporary and classic poets. Yeats — Related Poets. Walt Whitman.
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