William Butler Yeats

William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) was born in Dublin. His father was a lawyer and a well-known painter. Yeats got his education in London and in Dublin, but he spent his summers in the west of Ireland in the family's summer house in County Sligo. The young Yeats was active in societies that attempted an Irish literary revival. His first volume of verse appeared in 1887, but in this earlier period his dramatic production outweighed his poetry both in bulk and in importance. With Lady Gregory he founded the Irish Theatre, which was later to become the Abbey Theatre. Serving as its chief playwright (until John Millington Synge joined the movement), his plays usually dealt with Irish legends; they also reflect his fascination with mysticism and spiritualism. The Countess Cathleen (1892), The Land of Heart's Desire (1894), Cathleen ní Houlihan (1902), The King's Threshold (1904), and Deirdre (1907) are amongst the best known.

From 1910 onwards, Yeats's work took a sharp turn toward a highly poetical, static, and esoteric style of literature. His later plays were written for smaller audiences; they utilised masks, dance, and music, and were deeply influenced by the Japanese Noh plays. Although a commited patriot, Yeats deplored the hatred and the prejudice of the Nationalist movement, and his poetry is full of obvious protests against it. He was appointed to the Irish Seanad (Senate, the lower House of the Dáil, the Irish Parliament) in 1922. Yeats is one of few writers whose greatest works were written after the award of a Nobel Prize. While he received the Prize essentially for his dramatic works, his significance today rests on his lyric achievement. His poetry, especially the volumes The Wild Swans at Coole (1919), Michael Robartes and the Dancer (1921), The Tower (1928), The Winding Stair and Other Poems (1933), and Last Poems and Plays (1940), made him one of the exceptional and most influential twentieth-century poets writing though English. His repeated themes are the contrast of art and life, masks, cyclical theories of life, and the ideal of beauty and ceremony contrasting with the activity of modern life.

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Quotes:

"I think you can leave the arts, superior or inferior, to the conscience of mankind."

"Designs in connection with postage stamps and coinage may be described, I think, as the silent ambassadors on national taste."

"You know what the Englishman's idea of compromise is? He says, some people say there is a God. Some people say there is no God. The truth probably lies somewhere between these two statements."

"I am of a healthy long lived race, and our minds improve with age."

"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."

"It is most important that we should keep in this country a certain leisured class. I am of the opinion of the ancient Jewish book which says "there is no wisdom without leisure."

"This melancholy London--I sometimes imagine that the souls of the lost are compelled to walk through its streets perpetually. One feels them passing like a whiff of air."

"Englishmen are babes in philosophy and so prefer faction-fighting to the labour of its unfamiliar thought."

"We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry."

"The only business of the head in the world is to bow a ceaseless obeisance to the heart."

"I agree about Shaw--he is haunted by the mystery he flouts. He is an atheist who trembles in the haunted corridor."

"Man can embody truth but he cannot know it."

"I wonder if 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."

"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."

"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."

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