1865-1939

W. B. YEATS--Joseph Hone--MacMillan ($4).

The late great William Butler Yeats was a poet of genius, a man of parts (of which few sold at popular prices), a deep-sea diver in the lugubrious pearl-gulfs of the occult, a political thinker to set men's teeth on edge.

This official biography, by the Dublin scholar Joseph Hone, is not by a good deal as great as its subject. Its polished-walnut elegance gives way now to dullness, now to Irish fanciness; its irony and its tact might occasionally have given way to blunter judgment. It goes into local minutiae tiresome to any save the hottest Hibernians. Its biographer cannot with detachment examine Yeats. Yet the book is so rich in its detailing of a significant life, and of the remarkable people who surrounded and shaped it, that it is unlikely that a more valuable work on Yeats will ever be written, and impossible that one will be written without using Mr. Hone's volume as its Rosetta Stone.

"Nothing But Literature." "Willie" Yeats was born in the ghost-rich region of Sligo in 1865, of Anglo-Irish Protestants, in the most Catholic of nations, a minority man from the start. He was a wretched schoolchild, slow to read, timorous, bullied. But he learned from his grandparents the grand patriarchal images which never left him, and from poor relations and kitchen servants the supernatural and prehistoric lore which was both to illumine and befuddle his poetry; and he learned from his magnificent father the lesson which an artist must learn: "Self-interest and self-preservation are the death of poetry."

Father John B. saw the future in Willie's hypnotic mulling over phrases: to his son he talked "nothing but literature."

Branching Out. In London, as an art student, Yeats began to hear professorial excitement over the vowel sounds ("I scarcely knew what a vowel was") in his Innisfree. He talked to Shaw and Kropotkin and William Morris at Kelmscott House; to Arthur Symons and Lionel Johnson and Ernest Dowson and Edmund Dulac--the "tragic generation" of the fin-de-siecle--at the Rhymers' Club; to John Todhunter and the intense young clerks of the Southwark Irish Society.

To his father's disgust he began to dabble in occultism. Barrel-like old Madame Blavatsky warned him against removing, with his beard, the occult forces which were making a hangar of it. He joined the cabalistic Order of the Golden Dawn and played four-handed chess with Head Cabalist MacGregor Mathers, Mrs. Mathers and a ghost. It was sheer flapdoodle, but the images gave new energy to his verse. And in time this led to A Vision, one of the most astonishing books of the 20th Century, a sort of Irish-Chaldean Mein Kampf of the undermind.

"Half Lion, Half Child." One day when Yeats was 23 "a lady of great height" called on him to say that she had cried over passages in his Wanderings of Oisin. She was the "half lion, half child" Maud Gonne, a mythologically beautiful orphan, who carried with her everywhere cages of singing birds. She was the Irish patriot-revolutionist-secret-agent who was thwarted, during the Boer War, in her plot to sink an English troopship by caching in its bunkers bombs disguised as lumps of coal. Yeats fell hopelessly in love. In Dublin, soon, he proposed marriage, and she refused him, the first of Yeats's proposals to Maud Gonne which kept him a bachelor until he was past 50.

Yeats was more at ease with women than with men; and when he was 31 he met the sharp-eyed Lady Gregory, whom Arthur Symons called "la strega" (the witch), at whose spacious home in Galway he was to spend many summers. Lady Gregory's home fed Yeats's "almost Confucian sense of ceremony," the sense which most clearly convinced him of the predestined, degraded damnableness of democratic art and society.

His devotion to the Abbey Theatre ("All things can tempt me from this craft of verse") for years reduced Yeats's poetic production to a tight trickle. He forgot himself too, again & again, in Irish politics.

King of the Cats. Maud Gonne married a brave Irish redhead with a waxed mustache; Yeats all but broke up. He changed fast. He felt that Byron, though he wrote badly except in satire, was the last man who had written poetry. He disliked, in his own early work, "an 'unmanly' exaggeration of sentiment and sentimental beauty, and he began to feel a horror of the word 'Celtic'." When he brought out his Collected Works all literary Dublin was wondering whether he was through as a poet. Yeats was 43, an uneasy age for artists as for women; but he was far from worried himself; he stopped his sister in the street, the day after Swinburne died, to say: "I am the King of the Cats."

He was all of that. He would write verse with titles like "To a Rich Man who promises a Bigger Subscription than his First to the Dublin Municipal Gallery when the Amount Collected proves that there is a Popular Demand for the Pictures," but it was likely to be good hard invective. He was at the same time composing the "masculine and astringent" lyrics of Responsibilities.

"A Terrible Beauty Is Born." From World War I Yeats held aloof, agreeing that the Irish should cooperate with England, but declining to write a war poem:

He has had enough of meddling who can please

A young girl in the indolence of her youth

Or an old man upon a winter's night.

He now achieved, in verse, "that fury of self-control, later proclaimed as a deliberate end, which aligns him with the turbulent Donne." But it was the Easter Rising of 1916 which first profoundly moved him, both in his political and in his private soul. It made Catholic Maud Gonne a widow, available to new proposals; and it brought his "somewhat hurried" Easter 1916, with its refrain:

A terrible beauty is born.

Yeats went to France and "talked of marriage" to Maud Gonne, but it was clear that Maud was "far more interested in securing a passport to Ireland to work for the prisoners." He proposed then, and then again, to her exquisite daughter Iseult. H. decided, at length, to marry his good friend Georgie Hyde-Lees, "if she were not 'tired of the idea.' " She was not, and they were married in London in October 1917. His old fencing companion, Ezra Pound, was best man. In February 1919, in Dublin, Anne Butler Yeats was born. Yeats told a friend: "George [his wife] announces from the horoscope that the child will be good-looking and lucky," and wrote a magnificent poem to her, praying that she might not, like beautiful Maud Gonne, develop an "opinionated mind."

Senator and Passion. The Postwar brought Yeats honors: membership in the first Senate of the Irish Free State; and the Nobel Prize. As a Senator Yeats shunned the politterateurs for the men of practical affairs. He was proud of two bullet holes in his window which were a by-product of civil war; he turned an argument over divorce laws into the speech of hi. life, a "passionate protest ... on behalf of that small Protestant band which had so often proved itself the chivalry of Ireland." He was beginning to write, meanwhile, those "endeavors in cold passion" (the "Tower" period) which Hone compares with the third period of Beethoven.

Decline, and Winter Flowering. Yeats was 60 now; broad and rather dandified with the black ribbon of his spectacles "falling like a bar across his face," he could no longer be compared, as malignant George Moore had once brilliantly compared him, with an old umbrella left behind at a picnic.

He was also losing his health; high blood pressure forced the longest holiday of his life (two months) in Italy, where with considerable interest he read up on the sources of Fascism. By 1927 a doctor told him: "If I had met you . . . five years ago, I could have saved you it all by sending you off on a bout of dissipation--all the great creators of the past were devils. Drink and women have saved many a man from death and madness." (Hone adds, in the book's prettiest footnote: "An Irish doctor.")

He made his last speech in the Senate--a three-sentence speech in which "he remarked upon the simple fact that it would be more desirable and important to have able men than representative men in the House." Late in 1928 he went to live in Rapallo, near his thorny friend Ezra Pound. Four years later he still wrote of the "exultant weeks" in early 1929 during which he had written the first dozen of those strong, chill lyrics, "all emotion and all impersonal," which make up Words For Music Perhaps. He wrote, during those same weeks, "I have come to feel that the world's great poetical period is over."

Drowning Sailor. Lady Gregory died, and for some months he wrote no new poetry. He was busy helping to construct a social theory which might slow down Communism in Ireland.

He submitted to the Steinach operation. He went off to Majorca with a swami to translate the Upanishads--a rest somewhat addled when a visiting poetess, mad with joy over praise from Yeats, so conducted herself as to fall on a valuable dog for whose injuries the Peruvian Consul presented a bill.

He was back at his Riversdale home by the next June, sleeping little, writing much, aging fast. His daughter Anne began to beat him at croquet. Down at the Abbey "it was rather sad to see [him] climb the stairs to the boardroom, stopping at the landing to recover breath so that he might make a lordly entrance as of old." He got out his final version of A Vision; his infinitely re-revised Collected Poems; his last book of verse (New Poems); his violent prose work On the Boiler, with its animadversions, scornfully antidemocratic as always, on popular education. Rilke's ideas on death annoyed out of him the stanza which was to close his epitaph:

Draw rein, draw breath,

Cast a cold eye

On life, on death.

Horseman, pass by!

He died on another trip to the Riviera, at the Hotel Ideal Sejour, Cap Martin, Jan. 28, 1939. There were many drowned sailors buried near his grave, and an obscure follower of Garibaldi beside it. To Dublin, soon, came bishoplike T. S. Eliot "to speak on one whom he called 'the greatest poet of our time--certainly the greatest in his language, and so far as I can judge, in any language.' "

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