Romantic Ireland

William Butler Yeats' influence on Irish culture, politics and literature.

The story of William Butler Yeats or Willie, as his family called him, began on the 13 June 1865 at 5 Sandymount Dublin, he was the first child of John Yeats and Susan Pollexfen. The protestant middle class background into which he was bore is an unlikely one for the-would be national poet. Despite this background he had his fair share of hardships owing largely to his fathers insistence on being a painter despite his qualifications as a Barrister. This instable profession meant that the Yeatses had to two and fro between London (where John had his studio), Dublin and Sligo (where the young Willie would holiday with his wealthy Pollexfen relatives). Sligo was to become Willies spiritual home, the place he would make his

“Rapturous discovery of his own country as the new temple of his muse”
-Mac Liammoir & Boland p 18
and as a child he delighted hearing stories of fairies and such, whilst frolicking in the Sligo landscape which included his would-be tomb (Ben Bulben). Here he developed an interest in Irish folklore and this comes through in his first published poem The Wanderings of Oisin:

“I go to the Fenians…To chaunt the war songs that roused them of old”.
-Collected Poems

Another curious and even more esoteric interest than Celtic Mythology that the Young Yeats developed was his obsession with The Occult, or theosophy. For Yeats his experiments with the  occult were

“as much a matter of the poetic imagination as a persuit of the supernatural”
-multitext.ucc.ie/d/William_Butler_YEats

It was from this imaginative background the Young Yeats was to flourish.



Upon the return of John to Dublin in 1880 his father hopped Willie would apply to Trinity university, as was the family tradition. The young Yeats felt he would not pass the entrance exams and instead attended the Metropolitan Schol of Art which equally pleased the painter in John (though it was Jack who would become the painter in the family). He joined the energetic Contempary Club and met such key personalities like George Russell and Douglas Hyde

“who was to become as significant a figure in the pattern of Ireland’s destiny as Yeats himself” s-P26 Mac Liammoir & B

It was also through this he would meet the Fenian leader John O’ Leary who was one of the first people to realizes Yeats‘ genius. O’ Leary saw his Celtic writing as a thing to be encouraged in a soul searching Ireland where the GAA was only beginning to fill an Identity void. It was his encouragement that enticed Yeats to abandon art and devote himself to writing. O’ Leary used his contacts to get Yeats’ poems printed in the Gael which was the weekly magazine of the fledgling GAA. Such was the old man’s influence Yeats remarked O’Leary was the “Handsomest old man” he had ever seen and that

“From O’Leary’s conversations and from the Irish books he lent or gave me has come all I have set my hands to since”. -s WBY and his Circle p14
It was a cumilation of O’ Leary’s influence with his childhood pride in the Sligo Mythology that his commitment to the cause of Irish National Identity stemmed. Soon after meeting his [O‘Leary] acquaintance he published “Irish Fairy tales” and poems similar in the tone to “The Wanderings of Oisin” paying homage to Celtic roots emerged. Such was his influence that Yeats joined the IRA before the Parnellite split. His emersion into the quagmire of then Irish politics was strengthened by the arrival of Maud Gonne into his life. Gonne came to Yeats with a letter of introduction from O’ Leary and he was smitten from the moment he clapped eyes on her. He wrote to his companion Katharine Tynan

“She is very good-looking….I sympathise with her love of the national idea…”s -A letter to K. Tynan datd March 21, 1889 (letters to K.Tynan)


She was to become the source of inspiration and bain of his life until after proposing to her four times (and once to her daughter) unsuccessfully he married Georgie Hyde-Lees. Frustrated passion meant he was to be wielded as a nationalist tool by her. He wrote the play Cathleen Ni Houllachain with her in mind to play the lead actress. which although stereotyping the Irish peasant was a very nationalistic work. A critic Stephen Gwynn wrote after seeing it that he went home

“asking myself if such plays should be produced unless one was prepared for people to go out to shoot and be shot” s-Stephen Gwynn p376 A critical Heritage

Yeats himself would later ponder in The Man &the Echo “did that play of mine send out certain men the English shot?” -s The man and the Echo Collected poems




Despite this early involvement with the extreme wing of Nationalism he himself felt that he should not be promoting Nationalist propaganda but rather he as a poet and Irishman should strive to find a unique Irish Brand of writing that would be separate from the “sharp distinctiveness of Irish politics”, politics which would be “softened in the beneficial glow of culture”,s- WBY A critical Introduction p98 and make Ireland a more cultured place for it a banner Irishmen could all stand beneath and be proud of. Such a brand scholars of later Yeats would remark

“He did Ireland a service we cannot calculate..His works spoke to the Irishman first and the rest of the world last” - BBC Broadcaster LAG Strong 421 AC Heritage

A banner protestants too could stand under( being himself from such a background) Ireland was a hotpot of politics during Yeats’ lifetime i.e. the rise and fall of the Home Rule bill after 1912, the 1913 strike and lockout, the 1916 rising, the War of Independence but to name a few. If ever there was a life time for him to pitch his idea of an Irish literature his was the lifetime.



But Yeats was an unlikely candidate to fill this void; Douglas Hyde would argue only the Irish language could fill the gap. His earliest works of folklore while received well in Ireland was regarded as quaint by serious literature critics (though many found it easy to condemn a young writer with esoteric Irish writing). Even his supporters regarded him as “in the Shellian vein” merely an imitator. As a school boy he was weak and regarded as slow. Irelands rock the literary world with a new Irish literature? Mrs Gregory notes in her Diary Yeats meeting with his first ever publisher after winning the noble prize he quipped

“Mr. Putnam you were my first publisher, and you told me I did not know how to spell. And I still do not know how to spell”. -s Lady Gregories Diaries Dated 20th June 1927

Some say his application for Professor of English at Trinity University had to be turned down because of a misspelling of ‘professor’ on the application.



On moving to London to be with his father he founded the Rhymers club in a bid to bring the Irish writers of London together. The following year he founded the Irish Literary Society in London and played a part in it’s sister Dublin branch established in 1892.

His Dublin Literary Society soon grew in numbers and patrons enabling to set up the National Irish theatre on Abby Street (later renamed the abbey theatre) under patronage from Mrs. A Horniman and support from his dear friend Lady Gregory. Around this time he dedicated much of his time to the theatre he became increasingly frustrated with the poor receptions his contemporary plays caused in particular O’ Casey’s The Plough and the Stars. Which caused riots, Yeats was so disappointed at this he personally climbed onto the stage to condemn their actions

“Is this to be an ever reoccurring celebration of Irish Genius? Synge first and the O’ Casey?”s -p129 WBYIrish Biographies David Ross
It is in this feeling of frustration that he penned September 1913 after the Irish public refused to raise the funds to build an art gallery.
“What need you being come to sense…Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone it’s with [John] O’Leary in the grave” s -Collected Poems

Despite Yeats’ best efforts through the theatre and his discovery of Synge “who if it had not been for Yeats would never have written anything but board-school English” he felt the Irish public were uncompromising in helping create his Cultural Irish dream. Were all his hopes and efforts in vain? Dead, with O’ Leary in the grave? He moved back to London in disgust where he was offered a state pension. His disgust did not push him so far as he could not turn down a Knighthood and English poet Laureate on the grounds of being an Irishman. 1916 would mark a U-turn in his thinking.



“It would seem to the single-minded imagination, that the rising of the Volunteers 1916, was a direct answer to the melancholy challenge of Yeats’ September 1913 poem” s p84 WBY Mac Liammóir & Boland

The martyrs deaths of those executed were proof enough to Yeats that the Fenian blood flowed still in Irish veins. He returned to Ireland from London as if disappointed he had missed the rising. He plunged enthusiastically into his poetry at this stage and penned Easter 1916, an almost grovelling apology for his lack of faith. Hardly a young man at this stage and an asthmatic his work was disrupted by ill-health and he was advised to spend the winters in warmer climates. His stays in Italy as Fascism and nationalistic pride swelled only led to strengthen his own pride in his country and his work benefited. The Abbey theatre offered Dublin the most exciting plays in the first quarter of the new centurary, he became a senator for the new Cosgrave government and aside from aiding the design of the new states coinage he gave an emotive Senate speech condemning the narrow-mindedness of the “book-balancing” conservative way of thinking regarding divorce and the message it sent out

“If you show that this county is going to be governed by Catholic ideas and Catholic ideas alone, you will never get the north. You will create an impassable barrier between North and South” s - A Senate speech www.oireachtas.ie

In 1923 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature for his newfound flair and was awarded an honorary doctorate by both Queens University Belfast and UCD. He himself was becoming an umbrella of pride for both north and south. Oxford University would later offer him a third doctorate and he turned down a position in Harvard University.

On his deathbed the dyslexic, slow learning Willie Yeats could look back having succeeded in his nationalistic aims R.F Foster wrote he did “more than anyone else to draw the attention of the outside word to the separate existence of Ireland” but not only this he had managed to create an Irish Literature using the English language during a period which is now regarded as that of the Irish Literary Revival. His friend George Russell (AE) summed up his achievements in a post-humus article, stating were it not for Yeats:
“The country would be intellectual non-existent as far as the rest of the world is concerned”

-Doctor William Butler Yeats, Senator, Nobel, Laureate died in Roquebrune in the South of France on the 28th of January 1936. As were his wishes his body was returned to Sligo, Ireland were he was re-interred. His headstone bears his own epitaph:
“Cast a cold eye
On life on Death
Horseman, pass by!” s -Under Ben Buben, Collected Poems