Irish author, son of J. B. Yeats (1839–1922), a distinguished Irish artist and member of the Royal Hibernian Academy; born at Sandymount, Dublin, on the 13th of June 1865. At nine years old he went to live with his parents in London, and was sent to the Godolphin School, Hammersmith. At fifteen he went to the Erasmus Smith School in Dublin. Later he studied painting for a short time at the Royal Dublin Society, but soon turned to literature, contributing poems and articles to the Dublin University Review and other Irish periodicals. In 1888 he was encouraged by Oscar Wilde to try his fortune in London, where he published in 1889 his first volume of verse, The Wanderings of Oisin; its original and romantic touch impressed discerning critics, and started a new interest in the “Celtic” movement. The same year and the next he contributed to Mr. Walter Scott’s “Camelot Series,” edited by Ernest Rhys, Fairy and Folk Tales, a collection of Irish folklore, and Tales from Carleton, with original introductions. In 1891 he wrote anonymously two Irish stories, John Sherman and Dhoya, for Mr. Fisher Unwin’s “Pseudonym Library.” In 1892 he published another volume of verse, including The Countess Kathleen (a romantic drama), which gave the book its title, and in 1893 The Celtic Twilight, a volume of essays and sketches in prose. He now submitted his earlier poetical work to careful revision, and it was in the revised versions of The Wanderings of Usheen and The Countess Kathleen, and the lyrics given in his collected Poems of 1895 that his authentic poetical note found adequate expression and was recognized as marking the rise of a new Irish school. In the meantime he had followed The Countess Kathleen with another poetical drama, The Land of Heart’s Desire, acted at the Avenue Theatre for six weeks in the spring of 1894, published in May of that year. He contributed to various periodicals, notably to the National Observer and the Bookman, and also to the Book of the Rhymers’ Club—the English Parnasse Contemporain of the early ’nineties. With Edwin J. Ellis he edited the Works of William Blake (1893), and also edited A Book of Irish Verse (1895). In 1897 appeared The Secret Rose, a collection of Irish legends and tales in prose, with poetry interspersed, containing the stories of Hanrahan the Red. The same year he printed privately The Tables of the Law and the Adoration of the Magi, afterwards published in a volume of Mr. Elkin Mathews’s “Vigo Street Cabinet” in 1904. In 1889 he published The Wind among the Reeds, containing some of his best lyrics, and in 1900 another poetical drama, The Shadowy Waters. He now became specially interested in the establishment of an Irish literary theatre; and he founded and conducted an occasional periodical (appearing fitfully at irregular intervals), called first Beltain and later Samhain, to expound its aims and preach his own views, the first number appearing in May 1899. In the autumn of 1901 Mr. F. R. Benson’s company produced in London the play Diarmuid and Grania, written in collaboration by him and George Moore. In 1902 he published his own first original play in prose, Cathleen ni Houlihan, which was printed in Samhain in October that year. In 1903 he collected and published a volume of literary and critical essays, to which he gave the title, Ideas of Good and Evil. In the same and the following years he published a collected edition of his Plays for an Irish Theatre, comprising Where There is Nothing, The Hour-Glass, Cathleen ni Houlihan, The Pot of Broth, The King’s Threshold and On Baile’s Strand. In 1904 he also edited two volumes of Irish Representative Tales. Whether or not “Celtic” is the right word for it, Mr. Yeats’s art was quickly identified by enthusiasts with the literary side of the new Irish national movement. His inspiration may be traced in some measure to the Pre-Raphaelites and also to Blake, Shelley and Maeterlinck; but he found in his native Irish legend and life matter apt for his romantic and often elfin music, with its artful simplicities and unhackneyed cadences, and its elusive, inconclusive charm.
In 1911, after the death of his friend J. M. Synge, Yeats wrote the essay Synge and the Ireland of his Time. His fervent Irish nationalism had been tried somewhat during his encounter with a section of the Irish public at the time of the Playboy disturbances in the Abbey theatre, and was further tried when the Dublin corporation refused a building for Sir Hugh Lane’s collection of pictures. These affairs suggested to him a good deal of topical verse, especially in the most important of his later volumes, Responsibilities (Cuala Press, 1914). The volume includes the lines, familiar now in Ireland, “Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone”; and as if to dwell a little longer in the Ireland of his earlier years, he wrote an account of these in Reveries over Childhood and Youth (1915). In his poetical work, from this period, he seemed to write with Synge’s ideal of the poet in his mind, as one who “uses the whole of his personal life as his material.” The Wild Swans at Coole (1917) marks the beginning of his preoccupation with the special doctrines expounded (1918) in Per Amica Silentia Lunae, a little prose treatise which the reader who wishes to understand Mr. Yeats’s later work must study. Some of the poems in Michael Robartes and the Dancer (1920) are concerned with the events of 1916 in Ireland (the volume contains a sort of palinode to “Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone”), but the author had become more and more a poet of esoteric doctrine. In literature and on the platform he had become a champion of belief in survival after death, a subject which interested him chiefly because of the possibility it offered of necromancy and “magic.” “I have always,” he says, “sought to bring my mind close to the mind of Indian and Japanese poets, old women in Connaught, mediums in Soho.” He was one of the first to welcome the English poems of Rabindranath Tagore, for whose Gitanjali he wrote an introduction. Another late influence with him was represented by the Noh-plays of Japan, and he wrote an essay on the subject which is included in the prose collection, The Cutting of an Agate. Under the Japanese influence he wrote his plays At the Hawk’s Well (1917), and Two Plays for Dancers (1919). He married in 1917 Georgia Hyde Lees, by whom he had first a daughter and in 1921 a son.
See the section on W. B. Yeats in Poets of the Younger Generation by William Archer (1902), and for bibliography up to June 1903, English Illustrated Magazine, vol. xxix. (N.S.) p. 288. A library edition of his collected works in prose and verse was issued by Mr. Bullen from the Shakespeare Head Works, Stratford-on-Avon, in 8 vols., 1908. An elaborate critical study of Mr. Yeats’s poetry, by Forrest Reid, appeared in 1916; also, in the series “Irishmen of To-day,” W. B. Yeats: The Poet in Contemporary Ireland, by J. M. Hone; there is a good account of Yeats’s work in Ireland’s Literary Renascence, by Ernest A. Boyd (1916).
