The son of the painter John Butler Yeats, and brother of the painter Jack B. Yeats, William Butler Yeats (Dublin 1865 – Roquebrune-Cap-Martin 1939) was born into an artistic milieu belonging to Ireland’s Protestant (“Anglo-Irish”) settler class. He spent most of his life between London, Dublin, and the west of Ireland: Sligo (where he spent much of his boyhood), Coole Park (the estate of his mentor and supporter Lady Gregory at Gort near Galway), and the restored medieval keep of Thoor Ballylee (likewise at Gort). Yeats emerged as a poet on the literary scene of fin-de-siècle London, and fully shared its anti-Victorian and “decadent” poetics and its occultist interests. The family’s roots in belated pre-Raphaelitism and in the Arts and Crafts movement – their London base was the aestheticist milieu of Bedford Park – would make itself felt in the small bibliophile publishing house run by his sisters Elizabeth and Lily Yeats as part of the Dun Emer crafts studio in Dublin, later continued as the Cuala Press; many of Yeats’s writings were printed here. At the same time, Yeats expressed these values in a deliberate identification with Ireland and with a “Celtic” heritage, which he celebrated for its non-bourgeois, non-modern character – otherworldly, passionate, and anti-pragmatic. Although his verse was to change considerably over his lifetime, from swooning Symbolism in the 1890s towards rough-hewn modernism in the 1920s and 1930s, it would consistently thematize Irish types: contemporary peasants and vagrants, ancient heroes and mythical kings, and increasingly also the landowning settler class he celebrated as his own ancestry. Like his forerunner and inspiration Standish O’Grady, Yeats, an avowed elitist and an adept of eugenics later in life, felt that this colonial “Protestant Ascendancy” ancestry represented Ireland’s natural leadership, distinct from England and superior to Ireland’s native-descended population, on whose behalf he voiced his nationalist ideals.

Yeats saw it as his mission to give Irish literary culture a “national” stature by lifting it from provincialism to cosmopolitanism. Yeats’s relations with Irish cultural and political nationalism were, as a result, complex and contradictory. In the 1890s he moved to a radically separatist political stance close to Fenianism and the Irish Republican Brotherhood. His involvement in the 1898 centenary commemoration of the 1798 rebellion, and his protests against Queen Victoria’s Irish visit of 1900, endeared him to the nationalist section of the population despite his literary dandyism. However, his cultural nationalism was never a pure propagandistic tool to advance the cause of separatism. Yeats’s poetics were predicated on complexity and mixed feelings, and his cultural inspirations were never exclusively Gaelic; in their cosmopolitanism and occultist eclecticism they encompassed, besides the great theme of Ireland, Hellenistic Greece, Byzantium, Indian Upanishads, and Japanese Nō theatre. Indeed, the poems on Irish topics of the period after 1905 were often anguished indictments of the country’s slide towards modern vulgarity and his growing isolation in holding on to loftier, now outdated ideals.

Yeats’s main platform for his cultural regeneration programme was that of the theatre. With other Anglo-Irish activists of the 1890s, such as the language revivalist Douglas Hyde, Yeats felt that the vindication of Irish nationality was now primarily a cultural issue, and to that end he founded a Literary Theatre in Dublin. It was partly inspired by the new art theatres of Paris and the drama of Maeterlinck, partly by the Norwegian national theatre of Bergen and the drama of Ibsen. The symbolism of one and the naturalism of the other both provided inspiration: Yeats’s Literary Theatre adopted an anti-commercial idealism and a frugal, restrained acting style suitable for amateur actors from the ranks of nationalistically motivated Dubliners. Yeats’s venture was in time to become the Abbey Theatre, Ireland’s premier theatrical venue. It attracted the literary talents of the Anglo-Irish literati, including his protector Lady Gregory and his protégé John Synge, and the goodwill of the urban theatregoers – owing to the nationalist credentials of the acting troupe and to the “national” nature of the repertoire, which thematized “past and peasant”: the heroism of Gaelic legend and antiquity, and rustic life in the Irish countryside (evoked with respectful empathy). The high point of this honeymoon between Yeats’s theatrical mission and Irish nationalist sentiment came with the symbolical play Cathleen Ní Houlihan (1902), thematizing in mythical terms the transgenerational call for young men to come to Ireland’s aid in her plight under English oppression. Fittingly, the title role (an old crone representing the downtrodden sovereignty of Ireland) was played by Yeats’s long-wooed but elusive beloved: the radical nationalist activist Maud Gonne. From that moment on, and despite (or even: thanks to) the various scandals erupting around theatre productions, the theatre instigated by Yeats was the core of the “Irish Literary Revival” and became, for turn-of-the-century Dublin, precisely that “moral institution” and nation-building focus which Schiller had already meant a theatre to be: the concourse and crystallizing point for public opinion-making.

However, relations between Yeats’s theatre venture and nationalist opinion, until then united in their common rejection of British rule, soured from that point on. Other plays by Yeats, and by Yeats’s protégé John Synge, were seen by nativist “Irish Irelanders” as patronizing or disrespectful vis-à-vis Catholicism and/or country folk, and “decadent” in their use of continental European themes and examples. Bigoted though that criticism was in its purport, it was justified in its substance. The appeal of the Irish peasantry for Yeats was that he saw their outlook as mystical, pagan, and archaic, overlaid by the thinnest veneer of Christianity and untouched by modernity - thus, as a mystic-Romantic projecting screen for his own anti-bourgeois, anti-modern, and occultist values. It is in this light that he presented folk tales gathered from printed sources or collected by him and Lady Gregory (Fairy and folk tales of the Irish peasantry, 1888; The Celtic twilight, 1893). In the souring climate of the period after 1903 (further embittered by a rupture with Maud Gonne), Yeats gave free rein to his scorn for the petty-bourgeois morality of Irish nationalism; only grudgingly did he concede, after the 1916 Rebellion, that Irish political nationalism could attain tragic and heroic dignity. The best service Yeats could provide for his country, he felt, was to function as a censorious public conscience (it is for that reason that he accepted a senatorship in the Irish Free State in the 1920s, serving, among other things, on the committee that designed the coinage for the new country). However, the rejection of Yeats’s younger protégé Seán O’Casey by the Dublin theatre public in 1926, and the reactionary politics of the Free State, which he fruitlessly opposed in the Senate, confirmed the incompatibility between Yeats’s elitist mission to lift Irish literature to a cosmopolitan standard and the anti-cosmopolitanist nativism of Irish nationalists. The complexity of Yeats’s stance is summed up by the fact that, having founded an Irish Academy of Letters in 1932 to oppose government censorship of literary publications, he started to evince Fascist sympathies in 1933. The years after 1934 were spent largely outside Ireland.

At the same time, the symbiosis between Yeats and a sense of Irish nationality remained forceful. It was widely realized that Yeats’s literary prestige provided Ireland with considerable status in the world at large, and that Yeats’s espousal of an Irish identity was a major part of his creative originality. The Nobel Prize that Yeats received in 1923 had been a literary recognition not only of the individual poet-playwright restlessly struggling to find his modernist voice, but also of the newly independent country. His last writings, written in ailing health in the south of France, dealt with Ireland and stipulated his wish to be buried near Sligo (where he was in fact reinterred with state honours in 1948).