Selected Poetry [antikvár]

INTRODUCTION William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) was the eldest son ofjohn Butler Yeats, whose family probably came to Ireland from Yorkshire at the end of the seventeenth century. It was intended that John Butler Yeats should follow his father's and grandfather's example and enter the Church of Ireland; but when an undergraduate he turned sceptic and, after trying the law, became an artist. He moved his household several times between Dublin and London, and as money was often scarce, his children spent a good deal of time in Sligo, in the west of Ireland, where Mrs. Yeats's parents, the Pollexfens, were well-to-do merchants. W. B. Yeats went to the Godolphin School in Hammersmith, and later to the High School in Dublin. He then studied at the School of Art in Dublin, where a fellow student, George Russell (AE), became his friend and shared his interest in mystic religion and the supernatural. He began to write poetry in his late teens with his father's enthusiastic encouragement. His poetry began by echoing Shelley and Spenser and the pre-Raphaelites. His aims were to write for an Irish audience and about Ireland — to re-create a specifically Irish literature. At first he drew upon the fairy and folk tales which he had heard in the West of Ireland, and which he subsequently traced in printed material. In the poems of The Rose he began to use material from the Gaelic legends, the Cuchulain saga and the tales of the Fianna, which he read in nineteenth-cen-tury translations. He was active in creating the movement known as the Irish Literary Renaissance. After Parnell's death ini89i there seemed an opportunity to draw youthful national feeling to a movement with a non-political aim, and so he xiii V i