W.B. Yeats: A Life I: The Apprentice Mage 1865-1914

About this book

William Butler Yeats has cast his long shadow over the history of both modern poetry and modern Ireland for so long that his preeminence is taken for granted. Now in the first authorized biography of Yeats to appear in over fifty years leading Irish historian R.F. Foster travels beyond Yeatss towering image as arguably the centurys greatest poet to restore a real sense of Yeatss extraordinary life as Yeats himself experienced it--what he saw what he did the passions and the petty squabbles that consumed him and his alchemical ability to transmute the events of his crowded and contradictory life into enduring art. In the first volume of this long-awaited biography Foster covers the poets first fifty years bringing new light to bear on Yeatss heroic and often ruthless efforts to invent himself as a poet and public figure. Drawn from a fascinating archive of personal and contemporary documents with the cooperation of surviving members of the Yeats family it dramatically alters long-held assumptions about the poets background his relationship with Maud Gonne and other women and his roles in the great cultural and political upheavals that transformed Ireland in his lifetime. A rich and entertaining account of Yeatss boyhood days amidst the talented but troubled members of the Yeats and Pollexfen clans provides important insight into the poets deep and lifelong connection to the Irish landscape his early impassioned embrace of the nationalist cause and his later retreat to the traditions of the once grand Protestant aristocracy. In his own day Yeats attracted enemies and admirers with equal passion and Foster vividly recreates the friendships love affairs and simmering rivalries that swirled about the poets circles in London Dublin and Coole Park. Complementing his meticulous scholarship with a shrewd wit and a novelists eye for detail he chronicles the romantic disappointments financial difficulties experimentation with hashish and mescal and the growing preoccupation with the occult that prefaced Yeatss attempt to unite Irish politics with high culture and his creation of an Irish national theater. Here are the poets memorable encounters with many of the most interesting people of his time including Oscar Wilde George Bernard Shaw Lady Gregory J.M. Synge Ezra Pound James Joyce and the wildly diverse leaders of the Irish independence movement. And here at last is a full accounting of the complex bond between Yeats and the incomparable Maud Gonne revealed as an influence eternally recreated like the phoenix affecting almost everything he did. Poet playwright mystic and revolutionary; lover confidant and friend. This brilliant account of the public and private lives of William Butler Yeats illuminates not only the wellspring of his artistic vision but the modern Irish identity he helped to create. It is essential reading for anyone intrigued by one of the most original and influential voices of the twentieth century.