The Widening Gyre, and 100 Years of Yeats

UT and the "Island of Saints and Scholars"

So it was indeed a very pleasant surprise to learn that the Harry Ransom Center at The University of Texas at Austin has made it a top priority to acquire the collections of so many of the most famous Irish heavy hitters, from Jonathan Swift and Oscar Wilde to James Joyce and Samuel Beckett.

You don't even have to be dead to be appreciated in the Lone Star State. Joseph O'Connor, Anne Enright, Colm Toibín and many other living, breathing scribes continue to uphold this tradition thanks in no small part to the excellent literary taste and aggressive acquisitional activity of the Harry Ransom Center, which holds the collections of all of the aforementioned and several other Irish literary giants too.

But no Irish name carries more weight than Yeats, whose collection here on campus is also formidable. Much of the Yeats collection was acquired by the Ransom Center in the late 1960s from London collections. It consists of 11 boxes and one gallery folder as well as a collection of 844 letters. Among materials by Yeats, are manuscripts for more than 50 works and a collection of 844 letters, many written to other well-known artists, musicians and critics of the time.

Early Life

Yeats was born in Dublin in 1865 to John Butler Yeats and Susan Pollexfen. His father began his career as an aspiring lawyer, much to the delight of his high-society wife, whose mercantile family enjoyed significant standing in their hometown of Sligo in the northwest of Ireland.

Two years into the marriage, however, John Butler Yeats quit the legal profession to become a full-time artist, a move that was not taken well either by his wife or her well-to-do family. To make matters worse for Yeats' mother, all six of her children followed in their father's bohemian footsteps, rejecting respectable professional careers for painting, embroidery, poetry and literature.

Yeats and the Theater

W.B. Yeats won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1923. Facing some stiff competition - including Thomas Hardy and Maxim Gorky - he had in fact been nominated seven times previously. He was the first Irish person to receive the honor, and the judges noted their decision was based on his "always inspired poetry, which in a highly artistic form gives expression to the spirit of a whole nation."

At 58, Yeats was known primarily for his poetry by the time he received the honor, but he began his artistic career in the world of drama and theater. He co-founded the Irish Theatre, which later became the infamous Abbey Theatre, with fellow playwright Lady Gregory. Yeats' productions were heavily inspired by ancient Irish legends and folklore combined with broader mystic and spiritual themes. The Countess Cathleen (1892), The Land of Heart's Desire (1894), Cathleen ni Houlihan (1902), The King's Threshold (1904) and Deirdre (1907) are among some of his best known plays.

His theatrical work was also rife with mystical and spiritual themes inspired by time he spent in London as a young man during the fin de siècle era. As the industrial age brought rapid change as well as greater interest in science over otherworldly pursuits, Yeats became part of a movement celebrating mysticism, symbolism and spiritualism.

He took these broader themes back to his native Ireland - weaving his interest in Gaelic folklore and the ancient customs of Ireland into the political and social themes that were to become significant in his later career. Through his devotion to legends - many of which survived only through the oral storytelling tradition - Yeats helped preserve much classic Irish folklore that might have been all but forgotten.

Yeats and Poetry

Indulge me dear reader once more as I reminisce about my adolescent disdain for the Nobel Prize-winning artistic giant who helped put the small island of Ireland on the literary map. In high school we were mostly exposed to Yeats' poetry, rather than his theater where, as mentioned, his stories of the ancient heroes and legends from Irish folklore bored us to tears.

Leis an scéal a dheanamh níos measa (to make matters worse), another theme dominated his poems that frustrated us even more: his love for an admittedly badass woman, the Irish revolutionary hero and actor Maud Gonne. Sadly for the young poet, Gonne was not at all interested in him as a suiter though.

Yeats proposed to Gonne six times over the course of his life. She turned him down six times. At one point he married her daughter in an effort to get closer to his true love. Not cool. He wrote countless poems to her, to no avail. In one such love poem to Gonne, titled "He Wishes His Beloved Were Dead," Yeats wrote:

Were you but lying cold and dead,
And lights were paling out of the West,
You would come hither, and bend your head,
And I would lay my head on your breast;
And you would murmur tender words,
Forgiving me, because you were dead.

Needless to say, these weren't the kinds of themes we were all that capable of grasping.

Gonne Girl Gone

Twenty years later, I'll admit I have matured enough to feel so much more from Yeats' poetry than I ever could have when I was still mostly obsessed with UK pop band Blur and saving up enough money to buy a Motorola mobile phone the size of a toaster. Art - especially poetry and prose - is most valuable when it challenges the reader to reexamine their own preconceived notions of the human condition.

Yeats' endlessly futile pages of unrequited love poems to Gonne provide much more of a nuanced understanding of the trials and tribulations of love than, dare I say, Shakespeare's sonnets, where love grows on trees that bear fruit all year round. It's almost as if 1609's quarto was composed entirely using ChatGPT when compared to Yeats' deep accounts of sadness and despair for the woman he couldn't have.

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