The Poet As Politician.

• Author: Moses, Michael Valdez
• Position: New biography of W.B. Yeats examines broader context of poet's life - Critical Essay

The ideological odyssey of W.B. Yeats

In December 1923, William Butler Yeats, the first Irish writer to be awarded the Nobel Prize for literature, seized upon the occasion of his lecture to the Royal Academy of Sweden to present his literary career in political terms. Noting with irony that an English committee had almost certainly forwarded his nomination to the academy, Yeats cast himself as a standard-bearer of Irish nationalism and a champion of Ireland's cultural independence.

"The theatres of Dublin," he recounted in his speech on "The Irish Dramatic Movement," "were empty buildings hired by the English travelling companies, and we wanted Irish plays and Irish players. When we thought of these plays we thought of everything that was romantic and poetical, because the nationalism we had called up--the nationalism every generation had called up in moments of discouragement--was romantic and poetical."

Yeats had reason to regard himself as a political figure of national, even international, importance. He was at the time of this address a senator of the newly established Irish Parliament. Moreover, he spoke not long after the conclusion of a violent guerrilla war waged by the Irish Republican Army against British imperial rule in Ireland and a subsequent civil war, fought between the newly formed army of the Irish Free State and a breakaway wing of IRA irregulars, over the terms of the peace treaty that concluded the Anglo-Irish War of 1919-21. While Yeats could not boast of having fought in the streets against the British, he nonetheless used the occasion of his literary success to claim, retrospectively, a leading role in the national campaign that led to Irish independence in 1922.

One of the many splendid qualities of Terence Brown's recent biography, The Life of W.B. Yeats, is its critical appreciation of the poet's extraordinary cultural accomplishments within the broader context of a brilliantly rendered political and social history of modern Ireland. Brown's Yeats is the consummate late romantic and modernist artist, arguably the greatest lyric poet to write in English in the 20th century and one of the most innovative playwrights of his age. (The magnitude of Yeats' poetic achievement has tended to overshadow his accomplishments as a dramatist. More's the pity. He was quite possibly the most original avant-garde Irish dramatist before Beckett.) Brown, Professor of Modern English Literature in Trinity College, Dublin, is by no means the only biographer of late to take on the life of W.B. Yeats. While neither as comprehensive nor as authoritative as Roy Foster's projected two-volume W.B. Yeats: A Life, the first installment of which has appeared, nor as salacious as Brenda Maddox's recent Yeats's Ghosts: The Secret Life of W.B. Yeats, Brown's book is nonetheless the finest single-volume biography of the Irish poet since the publication of Richard Ellmann's seminal Yeats: The Man and the Masks in 1948.

If the Yeats that Brown portrays is every inch the literary titan, he is also a man of unusual personal complexity immersed in the political, cultural, and religious controversies of the day, a figure who, despite his own occasional championing of l'art pour l'art, struggled to imbue his poems, plays, essays, and stories with political and religious, even cosmic, significance. In the course of a poetic career that stretched from the 1880s to the late 1930s, Yeats adopted many different political masks, including those of radical nationalist, classical liberal, reactionary conservative, and millenarian nihilist. Brown's biography offers us the chance to revisit an era in which the range of political options and ideas was considerably wider than in our own day. If the poetic appeal of extremist politics was more palpable, Brown's book and Yeats' life remind us that grave risks attend the heightened drama and aesthetic appeal of an illiberal era. If we sometimes lament the colorlessness of our modern politician s, whose programs and ideologies are as predictable as their neckwear, we might nonetheless be grateful that in our day no genius in the throes of divine madness lights our way to paradise.

In his Autobiographies, Yeats recalled an Anglo-Irish Protestant childhood set against the backdrop of Fenian (Irish nationalist) violence and the "outrages" of the Land War, agrarian agitations aimed at reforming the neo-feudal system of land tenure in Ireland. Yeats was born in Dublin in 1865, but his earliest memories are of London, and even they are haunted by the specter of violence. In one recollection, a servant warns him that the town will be blown up, and he thereafter "goes to sleep in terror." His earliest recorded memory of the power of poetry harks back to his boyhood days in Ireland and concerns a (presumably Catholic) stable boy who introduces the future Nobel laureate to a book of "Orange rhymes," that is, a popular book of anti-Catholic and anti-Fenian political verse. Yeats recalls that shortly after his first exposure to poetry he was told of "a rumor of a Fenian rising, that rifles had been served out to the Orangemen; and presently, when I began to dream of my future life, I thought I wou ld like to die fighting the Fenians."

But as a young man Yeats would reject the typically pro-British and pro-Unionist views of most Anglo-Irish Protestants and come to share the ardent nationalism of the Fenians. He counted among his closest friends and mentors the...