Context
William Butler Yeats was born in Dublin in 1865 to a chaotic, artistic
family. His father, a portrait painter, moved the family to London when
Yeats was two, and William spent much of his childhood moving between the
cold urban landscape of the metropolis and the congenial countryside of
County Sligo, Ireland, where his mother's parents lived. An aesthete even
as a boy, Yeats began writing verse early, and published his first work in
1885. In 1889, Yeats met the Irish patriot, revolutionary, and beauty Maud
Gonne. He fell immediately in love with her, and remained so for the rest
of his life; virtually every reference to a beloved in Yeats's poetry can
be understood as a reference to Maud Gonne. Tragically, Gonne did not
return his love, and though they remained closely associated (she
portrayed the lead role in several of his plays), they were never
romantically involved. Many years later, Yeats proposed to her
daughter--and was rejected again.
Yeats lived during a tumultuous time in Ireland, during the political rise
and fall of Charles Stuart Parnell, the Irish Revival, and the civil war.
Partly because of his love for the politically active Maud Gonne, Yeats
devoted himself during the early part of his career to the Literary
Revival and to Irish patriotism, seeking to develop a new religious
iconography based on Irish mythology. (Though he was of Protestant
parentage, Yeats played little part in the conflict between Catholics and
Protestants that tore Ireland apart during his lifetime.) He quickly rose
to literary prominence, and helped to found what became the Abbey Theatre,
one of the most important cultural institutions in Ireland, at which he
worked with such luminaries as Augusta Gregory and the playwright John
Synge. In 1923, Yeats was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.
One of the most remarkable facts about Yeats's career as a poet is that he
only reached his full powers late in life, between the ages of 50 and 75.
Indeed, after reaching his height, he sustained it up until the very end,
writing magnificent poems up until two weeks before his death. The normal
expectation is that a poet's powers will fade after forty or fifty; Yeats
defied that expectation and trumped it entirely, writing most of his
greatest poems--from the crushing power of The Tower to the eerie
mysticism of the Last Poems--in the years after he won the
Nobel Prize, a testament to the force and commitment with which he devoted
himself to transforming his inner life into poetry. Because his work
straddles the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Yeats is stylistically
quite a unique poet; his early work seems curiously modern for the
nineteenth century, and his late work often seems curiously un-modern for
the 1930s. But Yeats wrote great poems in every decade of his life, and
his influence has towered over the past six decades; today, he is
generally regarded as the greatest poet of the twentieth century.
