Essay on William Butler Yeats

In order to approach the given discussion topic it is necessary to define approximately the period in which Yeats’s early work can be found. It is widely accepted amongst his biographers that Yeats’s literary career began in March 1885 when he published the two poems Song of the Faeries and Voices in an issue of the Dublin University Review. Much more difficulties occur when one wants draw a line to the end of this early period. Various attempts, each of them coherent in its approach, have recently been made. For this essay, it seems appropriate to follow critics like Alasdair Macrae1, who point out a major shift in Yeats’s style at some stage from 1900 to 1910. In regard of this line of criticism the final year of the artist’s early oeuvre is identified with 1902 when Cathleen ni Houlihan premiered at the new-found Abbey Theatre. This event marks the completion of Yeats’s apprenticeship as an artist in all three major literary genres. It was followed by a transitional stage which included the decisive meeting of the American Modernist poet Ezra Pound and the tragic death of his close friend John Millington Synge in 1909.

Only a few artists left such an extended corpus of autobiographic writing through which their work can be attained. Therefore, the works Autobiographies (1914) and Essays & Introductions (1938) supply this essay with the needed theoretical background to trace Yeats’s patriotism as well as aestheticism in the time from 1885-1902. Every literary genre is represented with a specific sample to show the application of the developed theories. In some cases contemporary critics are used as references to underline statements. Yeats was a Man of the Mask, but he was also a Man of Unity. George Bornstein points out this consistent duplicity:

A lifelong if sometimes ambivalent Romantic, Yeats saw literature and politics as intertwined, even when he opposed the reduction of literature to mere opinion. For him “Romantic Ireland” meant the that large-minded attitude beyond the mere calculation of economic or political advantage that he saw in the present, an attitude for him incarnated in his sometime Fenian mentor John O’Leary.2