The ghost of WB Yeats will loom large next month as a host of events are planned to commemorate the 150th anniversary of his birth in June 1865. His words are also finding their way into the marriage equality referendum campaign, courtesy of a group of artists who have launched their appeal for a Yes vote under the banner, one of the nicer of the campaign so far – "Tread softly because you tread on our dreams", a line adapted from Yeats's 1899 poem He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven.
Not that Maud Gonne, the object of his gentle words, trod softly in reacting to his ferocious passion for her. While they did eventually have a sexual affair it did not last. Yeats proposed to Gonne twice; after the second refusal he proposed unsuccessfully to her daughter Iseult. His tortured love life, and later marriage, waning virility and a series of affairs with younger women generated much artistic output. So too did his political journey and there will be much contemporary effort expended in linking commemoration of Yeats to the wider commemoration of the revolutionary era.
During the week, a BBC radio producer working on a documentary on Yeats asked me the obvious question – how do you explain the enduring appeal of Yeats? There are many answers. The short answer was provided after his death by TS Eliot, who described him as “one of those few whose history is the history of their own time, who are part of the consciousness of an age which cannot be understood without them”. Similarly, as pointed out by his biographer Roy Foster, Yeats had an acute sense of knowing how things would appear to people after the event, and “his best known poetry defines for many people the Irish identity which was forged in revolution . . . his own discovery of his voice is often neatly paralleled with his country’s discovery of independence”.
But such discovery also underlined much that was complex, even contradictory and lacking neatness. The cultural endeavours of his era, including the emergence of the Abbey Theatre, were invigorating but also filled with feuds and egos, and his was considerable. He grew tired with what he regarded as the pieties, hypocrisies and snobberies of the Catholic middle class and frequently returned to the theme of separating cultural purity from politics, and the plight of visionaries undermined by an ignorant rabble.
The War of Independence forced him to reconsider the place of violence in personal and political renewal. He had doubts in his own mind about the wisdom of what was done in the quest for an Irish republic and just what the tragic dignity that came with these events meant. Dislocation was another frequent theme of his career, and a sense of removal caused tension between Yeats and his close friend Lady Gregory during the War of Independence, when he visited Ireland only once but complained, “the constant bad news from Ireland kills my power of poetical work”.
Yeats was enthusiastic about being appointed to the new Irish senate in 1922. Inthe following year, when he was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature, he suggested it was “a part of Europe’s welcome to the Free State, and I am very happy that it should be so”. That appeared generous, but was also about self-regard; he was always anxious for a role that would give him definition and attention, and wanted to be at the centre of the new Free State dispensation. He was a senator until 1928, being, he said, “occasionally a politician”, but “always a man of letters”. While his 1925 speech opposing the prohibition of divorce in the Free State is well known, the full extent of his senate contributions is less appreciated. His range of preoccupations included the Irish language; compulsion, he insisted, should not be resorted to, but Irish scholarship had to be funded: “Endow creation by scholarship . . . but do not set up a pretence of people knowing a language that they do not know”.
He also addressed the subjects of law enforcement, national health insurance, prisons, discrimination against women in the civil service, the need for a child- centred approach to education, and North-South relations: “I have no hope of seeing Ireland united in my time . . . but I believe it will be won in the end and not because we fight it, but because we govern this country well.”
While he went on to flirt with extreme right-wing politics in the twilight of his career, collectively his senate speeches underline, in the words of UCD’s Anthony Roche, “the extent to which Yeats’s political conservatism is crossbred with his beginnings as a revolutionary”. Such tensions, along with his personal and artistic experiments, generated a legacy that still resonates with those negotiating the parameters of love, displacement, individual liberty, Irish identity and the politics of culture, ensuring commemoration of his life and poems will enrich the coming summer.