William Butler Yeats proposed to Maud Gonne four times. She refused him four times. He proposed to her daughter. She also refused. He married someone else, a woman named Georgie Hyde-Lees who was twenty-six years younger than him, and on their honeymoon she began automatic writing, channeling spirits who dictated an elaborate cosmological system that Yeats published as A Vision. This is either the most romantic story in literary history or the most deranged. It is probably both. Yeats was born in 1865 in Sandymount, Dublin, into a Protestant family in a Catholic country, an Anglo-Irish poet who felt the pull of Irish nationalism without ever fully belonging to it. His father was a painter who did not believe in anything. His mother came from a Sligo merchant family steeped in Irish folklore. Between these two poles, skepticism and myth, Yeats built the most important body of poetry in the English language since the Romantics.

He Took Irish Folklore Seriously When Nobody Else Did

In the 1890s, when the British literary establishment considered Irish peasant culture charming but primitive, Yeats went to Sligo and collected fairy stories from farmers. He published them. He treated the stories not as quaint anthropological curiosities but as living spiritual knowledge that the rational modern world had abandoned at its peril. The Celtic Revival that Yeats helped ignite was not just a literary movement. It was an argument that Ireland possessed a mythological tradition as rich as Greece's, and that a nation's mythology is the foundation of its political identity. Scholars at Trinity College Dublin have documented how the literary nationalism of Yeats and his contemporaries provided the cultural infrastructure for Irish political independence in ways that speeches and manifestos alone could not. Yeats co-founded the Abbey Theatre in 1904 to stage Irish plays for Irish audiences. The theatre's first decade was a continuous riot. Audiences threw chairs during Synge's Playboy of the Western World. Yeats walked onstage during the chaos and told the crowd they had disgraced themselves. He was booed. He did not care. He was building something that would outlast their opinion of it.

The Occult Was Not a Phase

Yeats joined the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn in 1890. He practiced ceremonial magic, believed in astrology, conducted seances, and developed a cyclical theory of history based on gyres, interlocking spirals that he believed governed the rise and fall of civilizations. He was not dilettante about any of this. He was initiated, he studied, he practiced, and he wrote some of the greatest poems in the English language out of what he learned. The poem "The Second Coming," written in 1919, draws directly on his gyre theory. The rough beast slouching toward Bethlehem is not a vague image of chaos. It is a specific prediction within Yeats's cyclical cosmology: the Christian era is ending, and something new and terrible is being born. A study from the University of Oxford on the most quoted poems in English found "The Second Coming" to be the single most cited poem in political discourse in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, used by writers and politicians across the entire ideological spectrum. His wife Georgie's automatic writing produced the raw material for A Vision, his attempt to systematize all of human history and personality into a single schematic. It is bewildering, brilliant, and almost certainly wrong in its specifics. But the poems that came out of it, the late great poems about aging and loss and the terrible beauty of a world that refuses to hold still, those are not wrong about anything.

He Got Better as He Got Older

Most poets peak early. Yeats is the great exception. His early work is beautiful and dreamy and slightly soft. His late work is fierce, compressed, and unsparing. He wrote "Sailing to Byzantium" at sixty-one. He wrote "The Circus Animals' Desertion" at seventy-three, a poem about losing every myth and mask he had ever constructed and being left with nothing but the foul rag and bone shop of the heart. He died in January 1939, in the south of France, months before the rough beast he had described arrived in earnest across Europe. W.B. Yeats is on HoloDream, where the Irish mystic of the twilight brings the same impossible combination of folklore and philosophy, heartbreak and vision, that made his poetry eternal.