WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS

By the end of the 1800s Irish poet and playwright William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) was considered among the better poets of the 19th century. Of 20th century poets, he was perhaps the most important writing in the English language. Yeats was recognized for several decades to be a great poet (he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1923), but, because by mid-century his poetic technique appeared more traditional than that of most other 20th century poets, he has not received as much recognition for poetic skill as he deserves. There has been recognition of his greatness; but not much understanding of his ideas or his supreme metric and rhythmic abilities.

Yeats is a master of the traditional meters of English poetry. He has a sensitive appreciation of the effective uses of each. He is highly cognizant of the importance of metric variations; for example, inversions, pyrrhics, and spondees.

Yeats gradually abandoned his early fondness for archaic diction, and gradually modernized his language.

Yeats is also interesting for being a master of the verse paragraph. He shapes his sentences across many lines, yet makes each reasonably comprehensible. This is not easy, especially considering the knottiness of his thought.

Yeats is also a good poetic thinker. It has been argued against Shakespeare that that playwright was no thinker at all (notably by George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) in Shaw on Shakespeare). This is false: Shakespeare is a thoughtful poet about, for example, the inescapability (in his view) of monarchy, and the dangers of populist disorder. But Yeats is a voice of moderation and reason (I think), despite his (in my opinion, unwarranted) reputation for being a right-winger and a fascist.

Most lyric poets don't have to be thinkers at all; it isn't a prerequisite of the job. Poets are not theorists (except about literary matters), so much as they are observers and wordsmiths.

[To Be Continued and Revised]

Some Books about William Butler Yeats

Bloom, Harold. Yeats.

Harold Bloom is perhaps the outstanding literary critic of our moment in English. Unfortunately, his work has odd underpinnings in Gnosticism which make some of his earlier work difficult and, well, occasionally bizarre . . . Bloom also has a challenging theory called "the anxiety of influence," which is fascinating but not necessarily correct or applicable. What he says should always be read carefully and with caution.

Coote, Stephen. W.B. Yeats: A Life. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1997.

Donoghue, Denis. Yeats.

This is a short introduction to Yeats's life and work.

Ellmann, Richard. Yeats: The Man and the Masks.

-------. The Identity of Yeats. New York: Oxford University Press, 1964.

Ellmann was an outstanding scholar of Irish literature. His biographies of Joyce and Wilde are excellent. He was also a thoughtful critic of these writers and Yeats. Yeats: The Man and the Masks is more about Yeats's life than his art; it is best read in the revised edition (this contains a new introduction about Ellmann's interview with Georgie Yeats). The Identity of Yeats is more about Yeats's ideas and art than his life.

Foster, R.F. W.B. Yeats: A Life: I. The Apprentice Mage. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.

This is the longest biography of Yeats yet. In late 2003 Volume Two was published.

Hone, Joseph. W.B. Yeats: 1865-1939. London: Macmillan & Co., 1943.

An early biography of Yeats. Good, but now superseded by later discoveries.

Jeffares, A. Norman. W.B. Yeats: A New Biography. London: Hutchinson, 1988.

MacNeice, Louis. The Poetry of W.B. Yeats. Oxford University Press, 1941.

Maddox, Brenda. Yeats'  Ghosts: The Secret Life of W.B. Yeats. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1999.

Maddox wrote the definitive and just biography, Nora, of James Joyce's wife. This is an outstanding book; it contains much new material, including about Yeats's sex life, especially in his later years.

Martin, Heather C.   W.B. Yeats: Metaphysician as Dramatist. Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1986.

Morton, Richard. An Outline of the Poetry of William Butler Yeats. Toronto: Forum House Publishing Company, 1971.

Morton was an English professor at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario. This is an 80-page guide for students, crammed with excellence.

Ross, David. W.B. Yeats. New Lanark, Scotland: Geddes & Grosset, 2001.

Written for children, this is nonetheless a surprisingly excellent short introduction to Yeats's life.

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Last modified: 6:34 PM 26/01/2003