William Butler Yeats 1865 - 1939

William Butler Yeats 1865 - 1939

William Butler Yeats was born in Dublin into an Anglo-Irish Protestant family; this fact was very important, because usually "Irishness" was connected with Catholicism. His father, John Butler Yeats, was a painter, and this influenced William's education and his first artistic experiences.

His first works were influenced by the so-called 'Celtic Revival': he was interested by the old Celtic tradition and mythology. Another important source of inspiration was William Blake. He later was also involved in the revival of Irish Theatre.

In 1889 he met the beautiful Irish revolutionary Maud Gonne and immediately fell in love with her (She refused to marry him several times). After an American tour, Yeats met another decisive ure in his life, the London-based American poet Ezra Pound.

Yeats, who was an Anglo-Irish, had never got involved in Irish politics, despite his interest in Irish nationalism, but he suddenly experienced political enthusiasm with the Easter Risings of 1916. The following year, having been refused yet again by Maud Gonne, he married Georgie Hyde-Lees, who later bore him two children.

His wife, who was a spiritualist medium, convinces Yeats that was possible to be in contact with the spirit world. The result was his prose work A Vision, where he assumes that everything in the world is interrelated: history, theology, art, and biography.

Yeats sees history as formed by a series of opposite cycles, each cycle lasting about 2.000 years. Each age is the opposite of the previous one. Each cycle has a circular development, like a climbing spiral, or gyre. This theory is represented by a cone penetrating another cone, the point of the cone touching the base of the previous one. The gyre symbolizes the course of both mankind and history.

Texts:

● The Second Coming