Yeats 2015: commemorating Ireland’s greatest poet, WB Yeats, 1865-1939
I look forward this year to celebrating the 150th anniversary of the birth of the great Irish poet, William Butler Yeats. Literary anniversaries come and go, but this Yeats anniversary is a big one for me. Why? I have three broad reasons for giving Yeats 2015 special attention.
The first reason is a personal one in that I have retained a lifelong interest in, and enthusiasm for, the work of WB Yeats. Like most people of my generation, I first encountered his poems at school, but it was at University that I fell under their spell. My copy of Yeats’s collected Poems is dated January 1974, when I was a student of History and Literature at University College Cork. I recall buying it at our local bookshop in Waterford with a book token given to me by my parents for Christmas 1973. It has accompanied me on my travels around the world this past 40 years, sustaining water damage and much wear and tear along the way. This Christmas, it has been rebound in preparation for Yeats 2015.
I have many fond memories of my travels with Yeats and have lectured on him in India, Australia, Belgium, Malaysia, Thailand, England, Scotland and Germany. Last year, I inaugurated what I intend will be an annual Yeats lecture at our Embassy in London. The wide international interest in the work of Yeats, and the other leading Irish writers of the 20th century, is an asset when it comes to promoting Ireland around the world.
Two experiences from my time in India stand out in my memory. First, as a young diplomat, I was invited to deliver a keynote address on Yeats at the All-India English Teachers’ Conference in New Delhi in 1982. There were 1,500 teachers in attendance, which remains comfortably the largest audience I have ever addressed! The other keynote speaker that day was the then Indian Education Minister, Karan Singh, who amazed me with his ability to quote large chunks of Yeats by heart.
On another occasion, I was invited to lunch at the home of a distinguished Indian lady, Mrs Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit, who was the sister of the first Indian Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru. Mrs Pandit had been India’s Ambassador in London (with a second accreditation to Dublin), Moscow and the UN in New York. When she discovered that I was Irish, Mrs Pandit launched into a spontaneous recitation of ‘the Lake Isle of Inisfree’ and ‘When you are old’. Mrs Pandit explained that she had memorized Yeats’s poems while she was imprisoned with her brother during India’s struggle for independence and she had never forgotten them. It was then that I fully grasped the global scope of Yeats’s reputation and influence!
My second reason for being interested in Yeats’s life and work is the light it sheds on a key era in Ireland’s modern history. Yeats was born into a country that was still reeling from the effects of the catastrophic Great Famine. By the time he died in 1939, it had been transformed into an independent State. Between the late 1880s and the 1930s, Yeats was in some way involved with practically every major Irish event and movement. He immersed himself in various Irish literary societies and staked a claim to be numbered among those patriotic poets who ‘sang to sweeten Ireland‘s wrong.’ In the early years of the 20th century, he wrote an influential nationalist play, Cathleen Ní Houlihan and became co-founder of Ireland’s national theatre, the Abbey. By 1913, however, a disenchanted Yeats, who had been offended by public criticism of Synge’s Playboy of the Western World, declared that ‘Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone.’ Just a few years later, however, the Easter Rising revived Yeats’s enthusiasm for Ireland and thus began his most intensive creative engagement with Irish affairs. He wrote powerful poems about 1916, the war of independence and the Irish civil war, which, especially in the case of the Easter Rising, undoubtedly influence the way in which we look at those seminal Irish events.
In 1923, Yeats was appointed to the Senate of the Irish Free State and played a part in the design of Ireland’s new coinage. In ‘Among School Children’, he could justly call himself ‘a sixty year-old smiling public man.’ Disenchantment set in again during the 1920s and 1930s and Yeats developed an enthusiasm for the Anglo-Irish tradition epitomised by Swift, Berkeley, and Burke, something he had ostentatiously rejected as a younger man. This put him at odds with many Irish nationalists. In one of the last poems Yeats ever wrote, Under Ben Bulben, Yeats declared that ‘ancient Ireland knew it all’, thus echoing the Celtic enthusiasms of his youth.
My third reason for revering Yeats is a literary one. His poetry has stood the test of time. It contains wonderful lines and powerful insights. Lines like ‘And pluck till time and times are done/The silver apples of the moon,/ The golden apples of the sun’ and ‘Tread softly because you tread on my dreams’ embed themselves in the memory. The lyrical poems Yeats wrote during the 1890s, such as ‘The lake Isle of Innisfree’, are still among the most popular in the English language.
If Yeats had stopped writing in 1900, he would have been regarded as an important late-romantic poet with some memorable lyrics to his credit. But he didn’t stop in 1900. Instead he became a modern poet, producing complex poems that are the equal of anything written during the 20th century. Yeats may well be unique in the English language in being a great 19th century poet and a great 20th century poet.
His post-World War 1 poems contain many powerful lines – ‘How can we know the dancer from the dance?’ and 'caught in the cold snows of a dream.’ The tone of his work is boldly contemporary.
‘That is no country for old men. The young
In one another’s arms, birds in the trees
-Those dying generations-at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.’
In Kuala Lumpur in 2003, I attended a major international conference at which the then South African President Thabo Mbeki delivered a keynote address, which consisted of an extended meditation on Yeats’s poem ‘The Second Coming’.
‘Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.’
This must be one of the most frequently quoted 20th century poems. Recently, when I put the words, ‘The Second’ into the Google search engine, ‘The Second Coming’ was listed first, ahead of ‘The second Sex’ and ‘The Second World War’. That’s praise indeed!
At the Embassy, we will be involved in a range of activities to mark Yeats 2015. For example, I will be speaking about Yeats at the Newbury Festival on 12 May.
For those interested in Yeats 2015, I recommend the website, www.Yeats2015.com, which will have updates and details on the full range of commemorative activities.
Daniel Mulhall is Ireland’s Ambassador in London.