William Butler Yeats

William Butler Yeats (June 13, 1865 – January 28, 1939) was an Irish poet, dramatist, mystic and public figure. Yeats was one of the driving forces behind the Irish Literary Revival and was co-founder of the Abbey Theatre.

Politics

Thanks in part to his exposure to the work of the younger modernists he met through Pound, the poetry of Yeats' middle period moved away from the Celtic Twilight mood of the earlier work. His political concerns also moved away from the arena of cultural politics in which he was so involved during the early years of the Revival. In his early work, Yeats' essentially aristocratic pose led to an idealisation of the Irish peasant and a corresponding willingness to ignore the very real poverty and suffering that was the daily lot of that class. However, the emergence of a revolutionary movement from the ranks of the urban Catholic lower-middle class left him little choice but to reassess his attitudes.

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Yeats' new direct engagement with politics can be seen in the poem September 1913, with its well-known refrain "Romantic Ireland's dead and gone,/It's with O'Leary in the grave." This poem is an attack on the Dublin employers who were involved in the famous 1913 lockout of workers who supported James Larkin's attempts to organise the Irish labour movement. In Easter 1916, with its equally famous refrain "All changed, changed utterly:/A terrible beauty is born", Yeats faces his own failure to recognise the merits of the leaders of the Easter Rising because of their apparently humble backgrounds and lives.

Related Topics:
1913 - James Larkin - Easter Rising

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Yeats was appointed to the Irish Senate (Seanad Éireann) in 1922 and one of his main achievements as a Senator was to chair the coinage committee that was charged with selecting a set of designs for the first coinage for the Irish Free State. He also spoke against proposed anti-divorce legislation in 1925. His own characterisation of himself as a public figure is captured in the line "A sixty-year-old smiling public man" in the 1927 poem "Amongst School Children". He retired from the Seanad in 1928 because of ill health. During his time as a senator Yeats warned his colleagues "If you show that this country, Southern Ireland, is going to be governed by Catholic ideas and by Catholic ideas alone, you will never get the North . . . You will put a wedge in the midst of this nation".

Related Topics:
1922 - Coinage - Irish Free State - 1925 - 1927 - 1928 - Catholic - North

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Yeats' essentially aristocratic attitudes and his association with Pound tended to draw him towards Mussolini, for whom he expressed admiration on a number of occasions. He also wrote some 'marching songs' (which were never used) for General Eoin O'Duffy's 'Blueshirts', a quasi-fascist political movement. However, when Pablo Neruda invited him to visit Madrid in 1937, Yeats responded with a letter supporting the Republic against Fascism. Yeats' politics are ambiguous: no friend of the Left (or democracy), he distanced himself from Nazism and Fascism in the last few years of his life. Nevertheless, it is unlikely that he ever reconciled himself to democracy in any meaningful sense. He was also deeply involved in the eugenics movement.

Related Topics:
Mussolini - Eoin O'Duffy - Blueshirts - Pablo Neruda - Madrid - 1937 - Fascism - Eugenics

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