Yeats Biography

ELT 42 : 2 1999 the complexity of the period, is a welcome addition to much recent scholarship that examines modernism through the sometimes distorting lens of post-structuralist theory. Tate's book is engagingly written, thoroughly researched, and alive to the importance of historical detail. Students and scholars interested in the literary and cultural history of modernism will find her work to be a valuable contribution to the criticism of the period. Lisa Colletta Claremont Graduate University Yeats Biography Roy Foster. W. B. Yeats: A Life I. The Apprentice Mage, 1865-1914. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. xxxi + 640 pp. Cloth $35.00 Paper $19.95 COVERING THE PERIOD from his birth in 1865 to the 1914 publication of Responsibilities, the collection of poems that made clear William Butler Yeats's stature as a major poet, this first volume of the official biography by the eminent Irish historian Roy Foster traces with scholarly precision and narrative flair the years of Yeats's apprenticeship . Here we see the poet busy (breathtakingly busy) not only learning his craft, but pushing the cause of Irish nationalism (persistently and sometimes radically), seriously pursuing occult studies, founding a theater movement, keeping it afloat and, through it all, manipulating public opinion in support of his myriad activities. We also see him, more privately, pursuing Maud Gonne, inventing and reinventing himself as lover and friend over the years, and, in the face of her persistent refusal of sexual intimacy (though there seems to have been an exception in 1908), finding more physically satisfying relationships with Olivia Shakespear, Florence Farr and Mabel Dickinson. Richard Ellmann's dazzling Yeats: The Man and the Masks (1948) has long been the biography . There are others, good, though more conventional, most notably A. Norman Jeffares's W B. Yeats: Man and Poet, 1949 (revised as W. B. Yeats: A New Biography, 1989). Now, next to Ellmann's psychological portrait of a Yeats whose thought owed so much to the powerful influence of his father John Butler Yeats (JBY) and his efforts to detach himself from it, we have a political and professional Yeats, with emphasis on the practical aspects of how the young poet, with determination and calculation, made a place for himself. Conor Cruise O'Brien was the first to set the image of a Yeats engaged in Irish nationalist causes and adept at working political chan188 book Reviews neis to his advantage, against earlier portraits of the poet as politically maladroit, constantly retreating from failure in the public realm to poetry , his proper sphere. O'Brien's controversial 1965 "Passion and Cunning : An Essay on the Politics of W. B. Yeats" (rpr. 1988 in Passion and Cunning: Essays on Nationalism, Terrorism and Revolution) paved the way for a post-colonial Yeats (whose implications are now being tested by David Lloyd, DecÃ-an Kiberd, Jahan Ramazani and others) as well as for this new biographical Yeats. In an early letter, Yeats's friend and fellow-poet Katherine Tynan accused him of burying himself in "'bookish things' to the exclusion of all else." "But," observes Foster, '"bookish things' could be a battering-ram into the real world." The problem for Yeats's biographers (as it was for Yeats himself) has always been reconciling the often contradictory nature of his multitudinous activities. Ellmann stated the challenge this way: We are given [by critics, friends and biographers] the nervous romantic sighing through the reeds of the 'eighties and 'nineties and the worldly realist plain-speaking in the 'twenties; we have the businessman founding and directing the Abbey Theatre in broad day, the wan young Celt haunting the twilight , the occultist performing nocturnal incantations; we can choose between the dignified Nobel Prize winner and Senator of the Irish Free State and their successors, the libidinous old man and the translator of the Upanishads. These portraits are not easily reconcilable.... They are evidence of what Jeffares calls "the ceaseless clash of contradictory elements" in Yeats's character. And all is complicated by the fact that Yeats wrote so much about himself, especially in the Autobiography, that "disingenuous masterpiece," in Foster's phrase. Foster is well aware of the seductions of Yeats's self-accounts, accounts...