What do you think?
Rate this book
W. B. Yeats: The Man and the Milieu
In the first full-scale biography of William Butler Yeats in more than 45 years, Keith Alldritt radically alters the traditional portrait of one of the greatest and most beloved poets of the 20th century. Placing Yeats within the context of his times, he reveals the determined careerist, shrewd manipulator, and political operator behind Yeats' familiar image as a dreamer, idealist and mystic. 16-page photo insert.
388 pages, Hardcover
First published April 29, 1997
1 person is currently reading
13 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
Read
November 11, 2014Yeats has long been one of my favorite poets, but I had never really figured out the details of his complex life. This book helped. It is perhaps not an in-depth portrait, but it certainly sets him in context, illuminating the many projects Yeats got off the ground, and the many conflicts he was involved in. I also did not realize the extent of Yeats' early poverty and how he ignored it when pursuing friendships and what he saw as his work. Moving between London, Dublin and Sligo (the home of his grandparents in the west of Ireland), he kept many irons in the fire until finally his many literary activities attracted patrons and money enough to live on.
Keith Alldritt also makes sense of the volatile Irish history of the day and touches on Yeats' many loves. Yeats' sisters are very interesting, keeping the Cuala Press going until Lolly's death. After which time, Yeats' widow, George Hyde Lees Yeats, operated it for some years.
Keith Alldritt also makes sense of the volatile Irish history of the day and touches on Yeats' many loves. Yeats' sisters are very interesting, keeping the Cuala Press going until Lolly's death. After which time, Yeats' widow, George Hyde Lees Yeats, operated it for some years.
October 11, 2014
Yeats The Man And The Milieu, Keith Alldritt
Famous books - especially biographies - can sometimes have unintended consequences for other books. Roy Foster's completist, justly celebrated, genuinely magnificent two-volume life of Yeats is one such book. Volume 1 ('The Apprentice Mage') arrived in 1997, the same year as this attempt by Keith Alldritt to approach Yeats as necessarily a product of complex artistic, social, cultural, political, and, yes, romantic/sexual relationships. And, of course, the success of Foster's work - the sheer scale of it - has relegated Alldritt's to the status of all but a footnote in Yeatsian studies. Which is ironic enough given the relative dearth of new biographical studies of Yeats to that point in the wake of Richard Ellmann's classic (if surely now idiosyncratically problematic) 'The Man and the Masks' (1948, revised 1979). Yet now the dust has settled on Foster's ground-shifting, benchmark re-telling of Yeats it turns out there is much to admire in Alldritt's less ambitious narrative.
Alldritt's writing doesn't have the richness and academic superstar depth of Foster's. On the other hand, perhaps mindful of Ellmann's failings, the relative flatness of his prose means there's little in the way between reader and subject, and no risk from too much personal creative imagination or view being brought to bear. His literary research is sound and methodical, as you'd expect, but it's also enlivened and rounded out with genuine character by his sourcing of Yeatsian tales in conversations with people who knew him, with other experts, and, crucially, with Anne Yeats, the great man's daughter. This balance has the general effect of making Alldritt's book intensely readable. It's a quick 388 pages and, though there are points where skipping several years with a brief gloss feels like a definite 'plot-device' (you can sometimes feel the author's slightly embarrassed regret as he makes the move), this doesn't detract much from a sense of rounded accomplishment. It's still a generous biography - in scope and in detail - and the almost exclusive focus on 'milieu' delivers plenty of fascination and delight, as any good evocation of the extraordinary life and times of Yeats ought to.
Yeats the practicing poet - poetry itself - is treated with due reverence but firmly backgrounded as we see Yeats the man surrounded by family and friends, coteries, cliques, and convocations, taking part in all manner of 'scenes', in a slow-swirling dance through his 72 years. The effect is like watching a wide-angled long shot in a skillfully-conceived period piece through one particular lens: it's definitely a constructed history yet the emotional sweep of historical drama is more than just established and carries us along well in its flow. There's room still for sharp observation though, particularly in the form of exquisite little treasures of perfect, dagger-blow exchange amongst those in Yeats' circles. This beauty from Lady Gregory on Maud Gonne being a case in point, and worth the price of admission alone:
"I don't wish her any harm, but God is unjust if she dies a quiet death."
We do still catch glimpses of Yeats the dreamer, Yeats the lonely man; but like Yeats himself in such circumstances Alldritt quickly moves us past this aspect of the poetic soul, finding good company in familiar, reassuring places with the usual well-known cast of Victorian, Edwardian and Modernist luminaries who shaped the era. That sense of Yeats generally being in the right place at the right time in the right company is a constant. His centrality to small gatherings and groupings of talent and energy that would later come to define their times is newly astonishing in Alldritt's telling. And just as freshly remarkable is how the poet - when he's young and old, radical and established as 'great', in Ireland or in England, in Europe or in America - seems to have an unerring knack of simultaneously being at the heart of the action yet sufficiently out of harm's way when it matters most. For sure he loved making the odd speech where he might shake his fist at the rioting Catholic crowd at the Abbey or in the Senate, but Yeats is a canny operator and, in the end, has a politician's instinct for staying away from serious trouble when it will best serve both his art and the peace of heart he clearly derives from his friendships and, in late life, his family and an unexpected posy of younger lovers.
Otherwise, all the expected features of Yeats Country are here and the guidebook well peopled. George Yeats is still an enigmatic, quietly amazing saintly presence, John Quinn is still a surprising patron for two generations of genuinely great writers. Lady Gregory remains the most human of benefactors. And it's striking again in this light just how many of Yeats' poems are titled with, dedicated or addressed to, the names of his friends and enemies. It seems clear he can only usefully meet the grand externals of his days on the landscape of deeply felt personal connection. And the equation he arrives at internally is what makes the poems come alive beyond their age.
Indeed, in this area lies the part of Alldritt's book most worth praising. All the major cultural and political players - O'Leary, De Valera, Wilde, Shaw, Kipling, Gonne, Joyce, Pound, Eliot and a hundred more - are well represented and adequately portrayed. But the book doesn't quite revolve around them, nor is exactly driven forward via their influential parallel biographies as these intersect with our hero's. Instead we get Yeats at the relative centre of something that at times feels like a vortex of connection and at others more like a stilled mandala where notions of centre and edge are appropriately blurred. Big personalities and events dominate other biographies and have established the pattern for how we tend to view Yeats (for better and worse). Here these are mediated throughout - in a way that seems important and rings crucially true - by a host of others of, perhaps, smaller historical significance which yet help round out the evocation of Yeats' life as one lived fundamentally in relationship. The nuance and shade this affords to the colours and feeling tones of Alldritt's biography isn't just a matter of making sure all the micro, local, and passing details of interest are in there: it's the subtlety that knows, finally, that lives are not lived (even by people as biographically self-aware as Yeats) in large camera sweeps made alive to history. What we get instead is something refreshingly low-key and realistic, more like a quiet Steadicam that follows Yeats everywhere he goes, day to day, year to year, sorrow to sorrow, documenting how he draws his sense of self and world from his milieu and, in that way, becomes central in making a world that endures for us in the politics and art of our own times.
As we encounter the elements of that world which represent origins for us, as well as those that represent continuity with a deeper past Yeats himself saw primarily in terms of personalities, it's never less than intimate. Whether amongst remarkably complex grown-ups or amongst school children, the admirable, recognizable ordinariness of features of Yeats' life as accounted for by Alldritt never makes him appear small. The epoch-turning episodes survive, the formidable nature of his work as a poet endures unaffected, and his status as a Titan of the age we are trying too hard to escape is surely the more confirmed.
Famous books - especially biographies - can sometimes have unintended consequences for other books. Roy Foster's completist, justly celebrated, genuinely magnificent two-volume life of Yeats is one such book. Volume 1 ('The Apprentice Mage') arrived in 1997, the same year as this attempt by Keith Alldritt to approach Yeats as necessarily a product of complex artistic, social, cultural, political, and, yes, romantic/sexual relationships. And, of course, the success of Foster's work - the sheer scale of it - has relegated Alldritt's to the status of all but a footnote in Yeatsian studies. Which is ironic enough given the relative dearth of new biographical studies of Yeats to that point in the wake of Richard Ellmann's classic (if surely now idiosyncratically problematic) 'The Man and the Masks' (1948, revised 1979). Yet now the dust has settled on Foster's ground-shifting, benchmark re-telling of Yeats it turns out there is much to admire in Alldritt's less ambitious narrative.
Alldritt's writing doesn't have the richness and academic superstar depth of Foster's. On the other hand, perhaps mindful of Ellmann's failings, the relative flatness of his prose means there's little in the way between reader and subject, and no risk from too much personal creative imagination or view being brought to bear. His literary research is sound and methodical, as you'd expect, but it's also enlivened and rounded out with genuine character by his sourcing of Yeatsian tales in conversations with people who knew him, with other experts, and, crucially, with Anne Yeats, the great man's daughter. This balance has the general effect of making Alldritt's book intensely readable. It's a quick 388 pages and, though there are points where skipping several years with a brief gloss feels like a definite 'plot-device' (you can sometimes feel the author's slightly embarrassed regret as he makes the move), this doesn't detract much from a sense of rounded accomplishment. It's still a generous biography - in scope and in detail - and the almost exclusive focus on 'milieu' delivers plenty of fascination and delight, as any good evocation of the extraordinary life and times of Yeats ought to.
Yeats the practicing poet - poetry itself - is treated with due reverence but firmly backgrounded as we see Yeats the man surrounded by family and friends, coteries, cliques, and convocations, taking part in all manner of 'scenes', in a slow-swirling dance through his 72 years. The effect is like watching a wide-angled long shot in a skillfully-conceived period piece through one particular lens: it's definitely a constructed history yet the emotional sweep of historical drama is more than just established and carries us along well in its flow. There's room still for sharp observation though, particularly in the form of exquisite little treasures of perfect, dagger-blow exchange amongst those in Yeats' circles. This beauty from Lady Gregory on Maud Gonne being a case in point, and worth the price of admission alone:
"I don't wish her any harm, but God is unjust if she dies a quiet death."
We do still catch glimpses of Yeats the dreamer, Yeats the lonely man; but like Yeats himself in such circumstances Alldritt quickly moves us past this aspect of the poetic soul, finding good company in familiar, reassuring places with the usual well-known cast of Victorian, Edwardian and Modernist luminaries who shaped the era. That sense of Yeats generally being in the right place at the right time in the right company is a constant. His centrality to small gatherings and groupings of talent and energy that would later come to define their times is newly astonishing in Alldritt's telling. And just as freshly remarkable is how the poet - when he's young and old, radical and established as 'great', in Ireland or in England, in Europe or in America - seems to have an unerring knack of simultaneously being at the heart of the action yet sufficiently out of harm's way when it matters most. For sure he loved making the odd speech where he might shake his fist at the rioting Catholic crowd at the Abbey or in the Senate, but Yeats is a canny operator and, in the end, has a politician's instinct for staying away from serious trouble when it will best serve both his art and the peace of heart he clearly derives from his friendships and, in late life, his family and an unexpected posy of younger lovers.
Otherwise, all the expected features of Yeats Country are here and the guidebook well peopled. George Yeats is still an enigmatic, quietly amazing saintly presence, John Quinn is still a surprising patron for two generations of genuinely great writers. Lady Gregory remains the most human of benefactors. And it's striking again in this light just how many of Yeats' poems are titled with, dedicated or addressed to, the names of his friends and enemies. It seems clear he can only usefully meet the grand externals of his days on the landscape of deeply felt personal connection. And the equation he arrives at internally is what makes the poems come alive beyond their age.
Indeed, in this area lies the part of Alldritt's book most worth praising. All the major cultural and political players - O'Leary, De Valera, Wilde, Shaw, Kipling, Gonne, Joyce, Pound, Eliot and a hundred more - are well represented and adequately portrayed. But the book doesn't quite revolve around them, nor is exactly driven forward via their influential parallel biographies as these intersect with our hero's. Instead we get Yeats at the relative centre of something that at times feels like a vortex of connection and at others more like a stilled mandala where notions of centre and edge are appropriately blurred. Big personalities and events dominate other biographies and have established the pattern for how we tend to view Yeats (for better and worse). Here these are mediated throughout - in a way that seems important and rings crucially true - by a host of others of, perhaps, smaller historical significance which yet help round out the evocation of Yeats' life as one lived fundamentally in relationship. The nuance and shade this affords to the colours and feeling tones of Alldritt's biography isn't just a matter of making sure all the micro, local, and passing details of interest are in there: it's the subtlety that knows, finally, that lives are not lived (even by people as biographically self-aware as Yeats) in large camera sweeps made alive to history. What we get instead is something refreshingly low-key and realistic, more like a quiet Steadicam that follows Yeats everywhere he goes, day to day, year to year, sorrow to sorrow, documenting how he draws his sense of self and world from his milieu and, in that way, becomes central in making a world that endures for us in the politics and art of our own times.
As we encounter the elements of that world which represent origins for us, as well as those that represent continuity with a deeper past Yeats himself saw primarily in terms of personalities, it's never less than intimate. Whether amongst remarkably complex grown-ups or amongst school children, the admirable, recognizable ordinariness of features of Yeats' life as accounted for by Alldritt never makes him appear small. The epoch-turning episodes survive, the formidable nature of his work as a poet endures unaffected, and his status as a Titan of the age we are trying too hard to escape is surely the more confirmed.
December 5, 2009
A decent compilation of the events of Yeats life and those around him with not a jot of literary criticism but an attempt to contextualize many of his works by personal and political issues affecting him.
Best for those who are already familiar with Yeats' poetry and some of the basic criticism.
Best for those who are already familiar with Yeats' poetry and some of the basic criticism.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews