William Butler Yeats: Love And Revival

Love and Revival

William Butler Yeats

1865–1939

by Dilyana Ilieva

1067A

`A poet's life is an experiment in living,' wrote W B Yeats, and his own life was a heady mix of Irish nationalism, politics and the occult, overlapping love-affairs, passionate friendships and extraordinary poems.

As a master of the themes of nation, love and art, WB Yeats left a rich artistic legacy to Ireland and the world.

Arguably the most significant poet of the twentieth century, Yeats lived at a pivotal period in Irish history and his poetry is inextricably linked to the struggle for national self-definition, both artistically and politically.

A little about Yeats’ life : he was born in 1865 to an artistic family, so he inherited the visual creativity of his

This other world is beyond the grasp of most humans and is free of the limitations of our mortal world. It is the world of Faeries, the Good People, the Sidhe, the Tuatha De Danann. It is a world which over time we have lost the capacity to see but one which can be revealed if we learn how to look.

The poem “Into the Twilight,” written in 1893 is an homage to Ireland, or “mother Eire.”

Let’s talk about Yeats’ work.

Unusually, many of Yeats's greatest poems were written in old age, emphasising his ability to reinvent himself as a poet at the same time as he explored the key continuities of his life - his themes of nation, love and art itself.

There was no gentle beauty in the three poems by Yeats that appeared in The Atlantic in January 1939, the month the poet died.

All of them are brutal pieces of deathbed reckoning.

In “Man and the Echo,” the poet stands in front of a blank cliff face, racked by guilt over his role in the 1916 Easter Rising:

I lie awake night after

With a wealthy sponsor volunteering to pay for the renovation of Dublin's Abbey Theatre as a permanent home for the company, the theatre opened on December 27, 1904, and included plays by the company's three directors: Lady Gregory, John M. Synge (whose 1907 production "The Playboy of the Western World" would spark controversy with its savage comic depiction of Irish rural life), and Yeats, who was represented that night with On Baile's Strand, the first of his several plays featuring heroic ancient Irish warrior Cuchulain.

As a logic consequence Yeats became the first Irishman following independence to win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1923, and he is today remembered as one of the greatest poets---from any country---of the 20th century.

Late in November 1938 Yeats and his wife George left London for the French Riviera. She was Georgie when she married him in 1917 when he was 52 and she was 25, but George to Yeats. They stayed at the Hôtel Idéal Séjour in Menton. Their son Michael joined them. The poet’s health was in decline and a local doctor prescribed morphine. Yeats died peacefully at about two o’clock on a Saturday afternoon, aged 73. He was buried two days later by a local Anglican clergyman in a hasty private ceremony at Roquebrune. Yeats had told George that when the time came he wanted to be buried there and then a year later, when the newspapers