Happy Birthday W.B!
This year marks the 150th Anniversary of the birth of the great Irish poet and playwright William Butler Yeats. Why Yeats Matters is a question that is continually being asked a century and a half after his birth, and we simply have to look around to see that the answer to this question lies around us. For instance, in the recent Irish referendum on gay marriage, Yeats poem He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven was read and it provided a lovely analogy for the right to equality and humanity. Poetry and literature lifts us to great heights of human emotion. The fact that Yeats’ poems can still do this is testament to Yeats himself as a master poet, but also importantly to the power of words and art on our souls.
He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven
Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half-light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.
Professor Ronan McDonald from the Global Irish studies department at The University of NSW suggests that “W.B. Yeats was a titan of twentieth-century literature and one of the greatest lyric poets of all time. His 1923 Nobel Prize citation applauded his ‘always inspired poetry, which in highly artistic form gives expression to the spirit of a whole nation’. But, however rooted in the Ireland of his birth, Yeats is a figure of global importance. Some aspects of his career are still controversial: his abiding interest in spiritualism and the occult, his oligarchical politics, his flirtation with fascism”.
Who was WB Yeats? William Butler Yeats was an Irish poet who was born in Sandymount in June 1865 and lived to 1939. He came from a Protestant family who were quite successful, made up of merchants and barristers from Sligo in Ireland. He spent some of his time in England being educated but was educated in Ireland as well. He did not necessarily identify with his Protestant background, nor could he really identify with the Catholic Irish either because of the religious differences, and perhaps because he was part of the Protestant elite. What he believed was that Ireland needed to feel a connection to its heritage regardless of background and religious difference. Yeats also thought that a connection was needed to past and present Irish tradition, which included contemporary voices such as his own and what he was interested in was an authentic Anglo-Irish literature based on Irish Myths and Legends. Yeats was also instrumental in creating the Abbey Theatre in Dublin and his contribution to Irish literature and to literature in general cannot be overstated.
Yeats is still hugely influential today and his work inspires other artistic productions such as The Waterboy’s tenth studio album An Appointment with Mr Yeats which are songs based on the poetry of Yeats.
Enjoy the poetry and enjoy the song and let’s help celebrate the life of W.B. Yeats. Happy Birthday W.B.!
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