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威廉•勃特勒•叶芝（William Butler Yeats，1865-1939）爱尔兰诗人、剧作家。 生于都柏林一个画师家庭，自小喜爱诗画艺术，并对乡间的秘教法术颇感兴趣。1884年就读于都柏林艺术学校，不久违背父愿，抛弃画布和油彩，专意于诗歌创作。1888年在伦敦结识了萧伯纳、王尔德等人。1889年，叶芝与女演员毛特、戈尼是爱尔兰民族自治运动的骨干，对叶芝一生的思想和创作影响很大。1896年，叶芝又结识了贵族出身的剧作家格雷戈里夫人，叶芝一生的创作都得力于她的支持。她的柯尔庄园被叶芝看作崇高的艺术乐园。他这一时期的创作虽未摆脱19世纪后期的浪漫主义和唯美主义的影响，但质朴而富于生气，著名诗作有《茵斯弗利岛》（1892）、《当你老了》（1896）等。1899年，叶芝与格雷戈里夫人、约翰•辛格等开始创办爱尔兰国家剧场活动，并于1904年正式成立阿贝影院。这期间，他创作了一些反映爱尔兰历史和农民生活的戏剧，主要诗剧有《胡里痕的凯瑟琳》（1902）、《黛尔丽德》（1907）等，另有诗集《芦苇中的风》（1899）、《在七座森林中》（1903）、《绿盔》（1910）、《责任》（1914）等，并陆续出版了多卷本的的诗文全集。叶芝及其友人的创作活动，史称“爱尔兰文世复兴运动”。
1917年，叶芝成婚，定居于格雷戈里庄园附近的贝力利村。此后，由于局势动荡，事故迭起，叶芝在创伤上极富于活力，他的诗已由早期的的虚幻蒙胧转而为坚实、明朗。重要诗集有《柯尔庄园的野天鹅》（1919）、《马可伯罗兹与舞者》（1920）等，内有著名诗篇《基督再临》、《为吾女祈祷》、《1916年复活节》等。
1921年爱尔兰独立，叶芝出任参议员。1923年，“由于他那些始终充满灵感的诗,它们通过高度的艺术形式了整个民族的精神”，叶芝获得诺贝尔文学奖。
1928年发表诗集《古堡》，这是他创作上进入成熟期的峰颠之作，内有著名诗篇《驶向拜占廷》、《丽达与天鹅》、《在学童之间》和《古堡》等。晚年，叶芝百病缠身，但在创作上仍然热情不减，极其活跃。重要诗集有《回梯》（1929）、《新诗集》（1938），另有散文剧《窗棂上的世界》（1934）、诗剧《炼狱》（1938）等。1939年1月28日，叶芝病逝于法国的罗格布隆。
William Butler Yeats
William Butler Yeats (1865-1939), Nobel Prize winning Irish dramatist, author and poet wrote The Celtic Twilight (1893);
Paddy Flynn is dead;....He was a great teller of tales, and unlike our common romancers, knew how to empty heaven, hell, and purgatory, faeryland and earth, to people his stories. He did not live in a shrunken world, but knew of no less ample circumstance than did Homer himself. Perhaps the Gaelic people shall by his like bring back again the ancient simplicity and amplitude of imagination.....Let us go forth, the tellers of tales, and seize whatever prey the heart long for, and have no fear. Everything exists, everything is true, and the earth is only a little dust under our feet.—ch. 1, “A Teller of Tales”
As one of the founders of the Irish Literary Revival, along with J. M. Synge (1871-1909) [whom he met in 1896], Sean O’Casey (1880-1964), and Padraig (Padraic) Colum (1881-1972) Yeats’ works draw heavily on Irish mythology and history. He never fully embraced his Protestant past nor joined the majority of Ireland’s Roman Catholics but he devoted much of his life to study in myriad other subjects including theosophy, mysticism, spiritualism, and the Kabbalah. At a young age he was reading Dante Alighieri, William Shakespeare, John Donne and the works of William Blake and Percy Bysshe Shelley, recommended by his father and inspiration for his own creativity, but fellow Irish poets Standish James O’Grady (1846-1928) and Sir William Ferguson (1818-1886) were perhaps the most influential. A devoted patriot, Yeats found his voice to speak out against the harsh Nationalist policies of the time. His early dramatic works convey his respect for Irish legend and fascination with the occult, while his later plays take on a more poetical and experimental aspect: Japanese Noh plays and modernism being major influences. While his works explore the greater themes of life in contrast to art, and finding beauty in the mundane, he also produced many works of an intimate quality especially in his later years as father and aging man of letters. We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry—“Anima Hominis,” Essays (1924). Yeats spent most of his life between Sligo, Dublin, and London, but his profound influence to future poets and playwrights and theatre, music and film can be seen the world over.
Early Years and Education
William Butler Yeats was born on 13 June 1865 in the seaside village of Sandymount in County Dublin, Ireland. His mother, Susan Mary Pollexfen (1841-1900) was the daughter of a wealthy family from County Sligo. Susan’s father’s political loyalties, that Ireland should remain under the British crown, were in direct opposition to her husband’s John Butler Yeats (1839-1922) who was sympathetic to the Nationalists and Home Rulers. When they married he was studying to become a lawyer, but soon gave that up to follow his dreams of becoming an artist, of which he became a well known portrait painter. In 1907 he moved to New York City where he died in 1922.
Yeat’s mother Susan was the first to introduce him and his two sisters Susan Mary (Lily) (1866-1949) and Elizabeth Corbet (Lolly) (1868-1940) to the Irish folktales he would grow to love so much. His younger brother Jack Butler Yeats (1871-1957) like his father would also become an accomplished artist. At the age of two young William’s father decided to move the family to London, England to study art. There William attended the Godolphin School in Hammersmith before the family moved back to Dublin. There William attended Erasmus Smith High School and spent much time at his father’s nearby art studio. Pursuing his own interests in the arts, in 1884 he enrolled in the Metropolitan School of Art in Dublin for two years, during which some of his first poems were printed in the Dublin University Review. Yeats’ verse play Mosada, a Dramatic Poem was published privately in 1886.
Poetry: full of his nature and his visions
Fresh from school and in his early twenties now, I was full of thought, often very abstract thought, longing all the while to be full of images, because I had gone to the art school instead of a university.”—from his memoir Four Years (1887-1891) (1921). The Yeats were now living in London in Bedford Park where Yeats’ aesthetic sensibility was oftentimes offended by the ubiquitous red brick, however their home was the lively gathering place for their many writer and artist friends to discuss politics, religion, literature, and art. Around this time Yeats met George Bernard Shaw and William Ernest Henley, editor of London’s The National Observer who became a friend and mentor. He also met many of the other up-and-coming authors and poets of his generation and writes of one in his memoir “My first meeting with Oscar Wilde was an astonishment. I never before heard a man talking with perfect sentences, as if he had written them all over night with labour and yet all spontaneous.” (ibid). In the year 1890 he and Ernest Rhys founded the London-based Rhymers Club. Yeats’ pre-Raphaelite inspired The Wanderings of Usheen [Oisin] and other Poems was published in 1889, which included “The Ballad of Moll Magee”, the traditional Irish song “Down By The Salley Gardens” and “The Stolen Child”.
Yeats was often homesick for Ireland, of which his poem “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” was one of the results,
I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
I hear it in the deep heart's core.
Though he visited Sligo almost every summer, he also kept a busy schedule in London: when he was not attending lectures or meetings with the Club, he spent time in the British Museum of Natural History doing research for such collaborations as Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry (1888), Irish Fairy Tales (1892), and A Book of Irish Verse (1895). He was often shy around women but made the acquaintance of many who became friends including poet Katharine Tynan (1861-1931) and Madame Blavatsky (1831-1891), founder of the Theosophical Society of which Yeats joined in 1888. A year later he met his muse and source of unrequited love; poet, feminist, actress, and revolutionary Maud Gonne (1865-1953).
The Abbey Theatre and Beyond
In 1894 Yeats met friend and patron Lady Augusta Gregory (1852-1932) of Coole Park and thus began their involvement with The Irish Literary Theatre which was founded in 1899 in Dublin. (It would become the Abbey Theatre in 1904). As its chief playwright, one of the first plays to be performed there was Yeats’ Cathleen ni Houlihan, with Gonne in the title role. The Abbey Theatre, also known as the National Theatre of Ireland, opened in December of 1904 and became the flagship for leading Irish playwrights and actors. Yeats’ On Baile’s Strand was one of its first productions. Of his many dramatic and successful works to follow, The Countess Cathleen (1892), The Land of Heart’s Desire (1894) and The King’s Threshold (1904) are among his best known. When Synge died in 1909 Yeats helped to finish his manuscript for Deirdre of the Sorrows. In 1911 the Abbey Theatre embarked on a tour of the United States.
As a successful poet and playwright now, in 1903 Yeats went on his first lecture tour of the United States, and again in 1914, 1920, and 1932. Yeats and his sisters started the Cuala Press in 1904, which would print over seventy titles by such authors as Ezra Pound, Rabindranath Tagore, Elizabeth Bowen, Jack and John Yeats, and Patrick Kavanagh, before it closed in 1946. At the age of forty-six, in 1911, Yeats met Georgie (George) Hyde Lees (1892-1968) and they married on 20 October, 1917. They had two children; Anne (born 1919) and for whom he wrote “A Prayer for My Daughter”;
May she be granted beauty and yet not
Beauty to make a stranger's eye distraught,
Or hers before a looking-glass, for such,
Being made beautiful overmuch,
Consider beauty a sufficient end,
Lose natural kindness and maybe
The heart-revealing intimacy
That chooses right, and never find a friend.
Michael was born on 22 August 1921, for whom Yeats wrote “A Prayer for My Son”;
Bid a strong ghost stand at the head
That my Michael may sleep sound,
Nor cry, nor turn in the bed
Till his morning meal come round;
And may departing twilight keep
All dread afar till morning's back.
George shared Yeats’ interest in mystical and esoteric subjects and introduced him to automatic writing. With her assistance he wrote A Vision (1925), Yeats’ attempt at explanation for his elaborate philosophy and use of symbolism in his poetry.
Later Years and on to Under bare Ben Bulben's head
The same year that the Easter Rising occurred, of which some of his friends had participated and which prompted his poem “Easter” (Sept. 1916)” the first volume of Yeats’ autobiography Reveries over Childhood and Youth (1916) was published, the second following in 1922 titled The Trembling of the Veil. In 1917 Yeats bought the Norman tower ‘Thoor Ballylee’ near Coole Park in Galway for his summer home; “The Wild Swans at Coole” was published in 1919. The same year civil war broke out in Ireland, Yeats received an Honorary degree from Trinity College, Dublin (1922). He was elected to the Irish senate the same year, where he served for six years before resigning to due to failing health. In December of 1923 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature and continued to work on his essays, poetry and the poetry anthology Oxford Book of Modern Verse 1892-1935 (1936). In 1933, Yeats participated in his first of many BBC radio broadcasts. He was also living in his home ‘Riversdale’ at Rathfarnham, near Dublin when not spending winters in warmer climes.
At the age of seventy-three William Butler Yeats died, on 28 January 1939, in Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, France. He was first buried there then as were his wishes, in 1948 re-interred “under bare Ben Bulben’s head” in Drumcliff churchyard, County Sligo, Ireland. His gravestone is inscribed with the epitaph Cast a cold Eye, On Life, On Death. Horseman.pass by! A bronze sculpture of Yeats by Rowan Gillespie stands on Stephen Street overlooking Sligo town and features snippets from his poetry. His last poem written was “The Black Tower” in 1939.
Hope and Memory have one daughter and her name is Art, and she has built her dwelling far from the desperate field where men hang out their garments upon forked boughs to be banners of battle. O beloved daughter of Hope and Memory, be with me for a little.—from “This Book”, The Celtic Twilight (1893)
Other Works include;
Poems (1895),
The Secret Rose (1897),
The Wind Among the Reeds (1899),
Diarmuid and Grania (1901),
The Pot of Broth (1902),
In The Seven Woods (1903),
Where There Is Nothing (1904),
Collected Works in Prose and Verse (1906),
The Green Helmet and Other Poems (1910),
Responsibilities: Poems and A Play (1914),
At the Hawks Well (1917),
Michael Robartes and the Dancer (1920),
Four Plays for Dancers (1921),
The Tower and Other Poems (1928),
Words for Music, Perhaps (1932),
The Winding Stair and Other Poems (1933),
A Full Moon in March (1935),
Dramatis Personae (1935),
Essays 1931-1936 (1937),
New Poems (1938), and
Last Poems (1939). |
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