THE LIFE AND WORKS OF W.B. YEATS W.B. Yeats remains one of the most famous and respectedpoetic voices in written English. As we enter the twenty-first century hisreputation seems more than intact with a healthy readership and steady sales.Students in the now massive edu-business of academia turn regularly to hispoetry, theatre, prose and the massive volume of correspondence to fuel anendless flow of theses. And in the last fifty or so years, Yeats has also proved apowerful magnet for the talents of many highly successful artists innon-literary fields, such as music and film, with a considerable number ofcomposers and songwriters drawing on his works as sources of word, idea andinspiration. What is it that continues to appeal to such a broadconstituency of poetry reader and student? Well, there is, of course, the life itself – a tumultuous,protean incarnation that lasted a crammed 73 years from 1865-1939. This, initself a fascinating subject, is fuller than most could bear to contemplate,never mind replicate: it is a dramatic one, often very dramatic. Despite thevast public and often political dimensions of its contours – the latter notoften fully appreciated – Yeats’ life was not so much dramatic in thetraditional sense of the public, heroic adventurer or the goal-driven extrovertso redolent of the world of Empire of the nineteenth century; his is an adventurism of theinterior spaces and caverns of heart and psyche – the ‘deeps of the mind’, ashe would call it. This approach sets him up as being avant-garde in his anticipationsof the sensibilities of the Western world through the twentieth and into thetwenty-first centuries, especially in light of the rise of psychologies andmore general concerns with the ‘self’ developmental pursuits of the post-1960sWestern civilisation. The ‘working’ span of this life is also phenomenal: from thepersonal breakthrough at the age of 23 with The Lake Isle of Innisfree, thepoem which he said was the first to contain ‘my own music’, to the correctionson his deathbed of the proofs of The Death of Cuchulain fifty years later.Within this half-century is contained a body of poetry which does appear tocapture all of ‘the fury and mire of human vein’, and chances are remote that aspan of such skill, energy, insight, focus and poetic brilliance will happentoo often, if ever, again given the multimedia worlds we now live in. This world, characterised by the demands of a sound bite,frequently turns to the polished jewel of a Yeatsian line of poetry or rhetoricto add weight to interview, debate, political speech, letter to an editor orbook title. Such uses keep the work constantly in the public eye and domain. A major reason the work remains so fresh today is Yeats’constant ability to change – to, as he put it, make himself ‘anew’. Theseefforts ensured that he never fell into easy habits and the life-longexperimentation with, and use of, many forms, wedded to such technicalvirtuosity, gives us a poetic palette perhaps unmatched. The personal life as subject, in particular its immersionsin love and the subsequent immersions of love itself into poetry – oftenfailed, unconsummated or unfulfilled love – has left us a body of stunninglyachieved and felt work that speaks to readers with a universal resonanceunlikely to be dimmed where poetry is loved and appreciated. We, the generalreaders, are perhaps lucky in that Yeats felt these aches most when young andwhen in the high lyrical phase of his early works which conformed to suchmasterfully wrought traditional verse structure and rhythm. There are also the extraordinarily colourful philosophicaland meta-physical underpinnings of both the life and work. These of course havecome in for much dismissal and derisory comment throughout hislife and since (as in Auden’s well-retailed remarks that he was ‘silly likeus’), but it would be wise to understand their importance contextually. Yeats,like many before and since, needed a belief system or religion to fathommeaning. Rather than turn to conventional models, he turned with a deeply religiousspirit to what he called ‘heterogeneous orthodoxies’ and not the moreavailable or popular orthodoxies of the established churches of which some ofhis forbears were quite prominent members. What is often ignored or dismissed is that the reservoir ofoccult, magical and other hermetic lore and ritual that Yeats drew on for bothhis spiritual and poetic well-being are in fact long established and ancientWestern knowledge and wisdom systems. Yeats was not so much ‘New Age’ as wewould now term it, but a student of the some of the oldest and mostconservative initiatory systems known to Western culture, whose origins dateback to the Egyptian, Greek and Jewish mystery schools of the ancient world.These are characterised by what are known as ‘universal truths’ common to alllives and souls – the philosophia perennis or perennial wisdomthat has always been and will always be available to those who look for it.This lifelong search was no fad for it required years of dedicated reading andstudy and was also a direct response and resistance to the rise of empiricism,rationalism (and realism in art and literature) in mid- and late-nineteenthcentury Europe. When these resistances were embodied in a young man who grewup in Sligo in the landscape and Celtic-based culture of the West of Ireland,then it is perfectly understandable that for a poet with such sensibilities,experiential truth holds more sway than any other, and certainly more thanthose systems on the rise throughout his youth via the works of Darwin, Tyndalland Huxley, whom he abhorred. These lifelong beliefs gave rise to missionary impulseswhich were given full rein in his native country’s battle forself-determination, to which he would add his considerable passion and talents.He saw an opportunity for an independent Ireland to embrace beliefs compatiblewith his own, which he believed were merely dormant and in need of reactivationand which would make Ireland a leading nation in the world. This impulse saw him join in the growing political andartistic ferment which would give rise to a successful separatist movement notjust on political but also on cultural levels. Yeats became a leading figure inthe birth of a new Ireland; he also helped to promote the work of writers suchas Joyce and Synge (his ‘Go west, young man’ edict that was the making of thewriter) O’Casey. He co-founded the world’s first subsidised national theatre,the Abbey Theatre, and his own 26 plays remain influential among aficionados,though their experimental qualities have prevented popular embrace. The eventual establishment of the new Ireland and thepolitical realities on which it was founded saw little room for artists likeYeats and he shrank from it after a brief period of public office as a Senator.However, his stature as a world literary figure was confirmed after his winningof the Nobel Prize in 1923, the first Irishman to win it. He would spend the latter years of his life and career inretreat from the kind of dominant world order he had battled so hard to staveoff since his youth. This final period, spent in long and brilliant reflection,produced an astonishing late flowering and contains some of his most accessibleand memorable poems as well as more difficult but rarely forgettable work. Notes by John Kavanagh John Kavanagh from Sligo, Ireland is an award winning poet,playwright, screenwriter and song-writer. He has been a Director of the YeatsSociety for twelve years. His poetry collections to date from Salmon books are‘Etchings’ and ‘Half Day Warriors’. He is at work on a third. He has recentlywritten and recorded ‘Words For Music’, a musical album of Yeats’poems put to music featuring some of Ireland’s top musicians. Jim Norton, one of Ireland’s leading actors, workedextensively in Irish Theatre, TV and radio before coming to London. His manyWest End credits include Comedians, The Changing Room, Bedroom Farce and Chorusof Disapproval. For Naxos AudioBooks he has also recorded A Portrait of theArtist As A Young Man, Dubliners, Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. Active on bothsides of the Atlantic, he has become particularly associated with the plays ofConor McPherson, playing a leading role in the world premieres of many plays,including The Weir and Port Authority. He has since also recorded PortAuthority for Naxos AudioBooks. Denys Hawthorne’s long and distinguished career hasencompassed extensive work in theatre, television and film, both in England andIreland. Drama has included Shakespeare and Chekhov, as well as manycontemporary plays, while he has been seen in popular TV series includingInspector Morse and Father Ted, and The Russia House and Emma on the widescreen. Throughout, radio performance has been a constant theme, notably indrama and poetry. Nicholas Boulton studied at the Guildhall School of Musicand Drama, winning the BBC Carleton Hobbs Award for Radio in 1993. Since thenhe has been heard in numerous productions for BBC Radio 4 and the WorldService. Work for Naxos includes Cecil in Lady Windermere’s Fan and mostrecently Mozart in The Life and Works of W A Mozart. Film work includesShakespeare in Love and Topsy Turvy. Theatre credits include Platonov for theAlmeida, Henry V for the RSC and Arcadia for the Theatre Royal Haymarket. He isalso a cutting edge House Music DJ. Marcella Riordan began her career at The Abbey School inDublin and has worked in theatres all over Ireland and the UK, including DruidTheatre and Lyric (Belfast). She has worked extensively on BBC Radio and RTE inDublin. Her previous work on James Joyce text includes playing Gerty McDowellin Anthony Burgess’s Blooms in Dublin (BBC/RTE), Zoe in Ulysses (RTE) and MollyBloom for Naxos AudioBooks’ recording of Ulysses. She was awarded Best Actressfor her portrayal of Nancy Gulliver in a BBC Radio adaptation of JenniferJohnston’s The Old Jest.