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William Butler Yeats |
William Butler Yeats was a mystic, enchanted and inspired by the changes that were going on around him in turn-of-the-century Ireland. The boy who grew up Protestant in England became an Irish patriot. The young poet who wrote like Shelley grew into an old modernist, a friend of Pound, and a man who chose the simple references of the real world. He was deeply in love with Maud Gonne throughout his life, but he could not fully commit to her primitive and often violent nationalism. He finally married someone else.
Yeats believed the mind could communicate with other worlds beyond time and reason, and with his new wife he engaged for years in automatic writing and the magical ceremonies of the cult of the Golden Dawn. When he was sixty-nine he had a vasectomy, and credited that with renewed creative energy and a vigorous new sex life with younger women. He won the Nobel Prize in 1923, and accepted it, as no other man might have dared, on behalf of “Irish Literature”.
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Immortal Poets: Their Lives and Verse, by Christopher Burns |