Yeats Poet and activist

William Butler Yeats was born in 1865, in Sandymount, Dublin.  He became one of the greatest poets of the 20^th Century, and possibly the greatest Irish poet.  He was born into the Anglo Irish ascendancy class, though not to the richest or grandest of its ranks.  His mother’s family, the Pollexfens were merchants, and in former times adventurers and seafarers, based in Sligo. His father was descended from an Anglo Irish soldier and there was an artistic streak running in the Yeats family. His father, John Yeats, was an artist and the family spent time in London and in Ireland.  Yeats was educated mostly in London. For some time the family lived in Bedford Park, a suburb of North London, which housed artists and socialists.
He did not do very well at formal education but his literary talent was there from an early age.  He had a passionate interest in the various “spiritual” movements of the 19^th century, Theosophy, Dublin Hermetic Order and Irish mythology.  He had little interest in the conservative Anglicanism of his class, preferring to seek wisdom through unconventional paths.
In 1889, he met the woman he loved, for many years, she was an English heiress called Maud Gonne.  Although she was the daughter of a British soldier, Gonne identified with the Irish and dedicated herself to working for the Irish poor. Yeats was liberal minded in some way but at heart he was something of a romantic reactionary,  who believed that the Irish upper class (with whom he identified) and the peasantry had more in common with each other than they had with the middle classes. However, politically he sympathized with the Irish literary revival and the move for Home Rule and complete independence of the British connection.  He grew to dislike the Irish well to do trading classes, for many reasons, including their lack of culture.  However, particularly when the 1913 Lock Out happened, causing terrible distress among the Irish working class, already one of the poorest in Europe, he had distaste for their lack of compassion.  He had real sympathy with the poor, but was not a radical in his solutions to labor questions.

Maud Gonne was more radical - but she had certain sympathy with right wing movements in France, and had had an affair with Lucien Millevoye, a right wing journalist. He supported the movement to get back the province of Alsace Lorraine from Germany, for France.   Maud was very unconventional for a Victorian woman and led her own life, with her own moral code.  Generally Victorian upper and middle class women were virgins until they married.  However she became Millevoye’s lover and had 2 children by him but their births were kept secret -and Yeats did not realize she was already involved with another man.  She felt that he was not radical enough in his nationalism, and that it was better for his poetry that he should not marry.  Yeats turned to another woman - Olivia Shakespear - a minor novelist, who became his good friend and mistress for a couple of years in the 1890s. But he continued to love Maud for many years, and called his relationship with her “the troubling of my life”.  Even when they disagreed, he had a passionate loyalty to her.

His early poetry was “Celtic Twilight”, romantic and ornate, using love and themes from Irish Mythology. As time went on, he began to involve other themes, such as political ones and more earthy imagery… I will discuss more of his poetry and later life in the next part of the blog.