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The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats #3
Autobiographies: Memories and Reflections
Autobiographies consists of six autobiographical works that William Butler Yeats published together in the mid-1930s to form a single, extraordinary memoir of the first fifty-eight years of his life, from his earliest memories of childhood to winning the Nobel Prize for Literature. This volume provides a vivid series of personal accounts of a wide range of figures, and it describes Yeats's work as poet and playwright, as a founder of Dublin's famed Abbey Theatre, his involvement with Irish nationalism, and his fascination with occultism and visions. This book is most compelling as Yeats's own account of the growth of his poetic imagination. Yeats thought that a poet leads a life of allegory, and that his works are comments upon it. Autobiographies enacts his ruling belief in the connections and coherence between the life that he led and the works that he wrote. It is a vision of personal history as art, and so it is the one truly essential companion to his poems and plays. Edited by William H. O'Donnell and Douglas N. Archibald, this volume is available for the first time with invaluable explanatory notes and includes previously unpublished passages from candidly explicit first drafts.
608 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1926
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About the author
W.B. Yeats
2,039 books2,569 followersWilliam Butler Yeats was an Irish poet and dramatist, and one of the foremost figures of 20th century literature. A pillar of both the Irish and British literary establishments, in his later years Yeats served as an Irish Senator for two terms. He was a driving force behind the Irish Literary Revival, and along with Lady Gregory and Edward Martyn founded the Abbey Theatre, serving as its chief during its early years. In 1923 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for what the Nobel Committee described as "inspired poetry, which in a highly artistic form gives expression to the spirit of a whole nation." He was the first Irishman so honored. Yeats is generally considered one of the few writers who completed their greatest works after being awarded the Nobel Prize; such works include The Tower (1928) and The Winding Stair and Other Poems (1929).
Yeats was born and educated in Dublin but spent his childhood in County Sligo. He studied poetry in his youth, and from an early age was fascinated by both Irish legends and the occult. Those topics feature in the first phase of his work, which lasted roughly until the turn of the century. His earliest volume of verse was published in 1889, and those slow paced and lyrical poems display debts to Edmund Spenser and Percy Bysshe Shelley, as well as to the Pre-Raphaelite poets. From 1900, Yeats' poetry grew more physical and realistic. He largely renounced the transcendental beliefs of his youth, though he remained preoccupied with physical and spiritual masks, as well as with cyclical theories of life.
--from Wikipedia
Yeats was born and educated in Dublin but spent his childhood in County Sligo. He studied poetry in his youth, and from an early age was fascinated by both Irish legends and the occult. Those topics feature in the first phase of his work, which lasted roughly until the turn of the century. His earliest volume of verse was published in 1889, and those slow paced and lyrical poems display debts to Edmund Spenser and Percy Bysshe Shelley, as well as to the Pre-Raphaelite poets. From 1900, Yeats' poetry grew more physical and realistic. He largely renounced the transcendental beliefs of his youth, though he remained preoccupied with physical and spiritual masks, as well as with cyclical theories of life.
--from Wikipedia
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Displaying 1 - 26 of 26 reviews
January 4, 2015
Here is why I find this book interesting and valuable: In a prefatory note, Yeats writes, "...I am writing after many years and have consulted neither friend, nor letter, nor old newspaper, and describe what comes oftenest into my memory." This makes for an almost casual structure to the work and is something akin to sitting and listening to Yeats recollect as he pleases and not according to any outline or plan. The ideal reader of the book would be well-read in the history of Ireland in the late 19th and early 20th century. Lacking that, the book is still quite enjoyable and informative, and it contains passages of a singular beauty that one might only expect from a true poet writing in prose. One of the sections near the end of the book deals with Yeats winning the Nobel Prize in 1925, his traveling to Sweden to accept it, etc. I loved it that when he was informed in the middle of the night that he had been awarded the prize, he went to his cellar for a bottle of wine to open in celebration; finding none, he and his wife cooked sausages instead. How can one not appreciate a book where the author, a giant of literature, elects to include this delightful, homely detail?
January 23, 2013
Perfect, very much like Chronicles vol. 1. Or maybe it's the other way 'round and Dylan's Yeatsian. Two great, very similar books, though. Books that you never really read, you just keep revisiting. Yeats writes simply, sumptuously, clearly. Then once a page he'll give an image or metaphor that, no matter how simple it inherently is, blows yah mind.
April 9, 2015
For a poet who places so many exquisite thoughts into a small number of lines, Mr Yeats is very long-winded. I never thought it would be possible to find boring anecdotes featuring Oscar Wilde, but Yeats manages it. Very interesting, however, on the birth of modern Irish literature, the hatred of the Irish for the English as well as Yeats' own thoughts about his poetry and plays. He talks a convention of geriatric shoemakers about mysticism and seances, though. Very mixed bag but worthwhile, on the whole.
August 14, 2020
A collection of six autobiographical works, but this is not a meaningful autobiography, it does not provide a narrative account of Yeats’ own life, it says surprisingly little about the huge political, social and cultural events to which he contributed, it gives insights into his writing without being terribly informative and it doesn’t even mention large swathes of his life and times. There are many comments on other writers and contemporaries scattered through these pages but they require in the reader a lot of knowledge about the period, certainly more that I claim. I suspect that this material has to be read in association with his other work – copious essays, articles and poetry – before it can be appreciated. On its own it is readable and frequently interesting, contains a number of gems depending on your interests, but not stimulating.
Quotes
Once after breakfast Dowden read us some chapters of the unpublished Life of Shelley, and I who had made the Prometheus Unbound my sacred book was delighted with all he read... [p95]
Living in a free world, accustomed to the gay exaggeration of the talk of equals, of men who talk and write to discover truth and not for popular instruction, ... [p96][about his father]
We should write out our thoughts in as nearly as possible the language we thought them in, as though in a letter to an intimate friend. We should not disguise them in any way, for our lives give them force as the lives of people in plays gives force to their words. Personal utterance, which had almost ceased in English literature, could be as fine an escape from rhetoric and abstraction as drama itself. But my father would hear of nothing but drama, personal utterance was only egotism. I knew it was not, but as yet did not know how to explain the difference. I tried from that on to write out my emotions exactly as they came to me in life, not changing them to make them more beautiful. ‘If I can be sincere and make my language natural, and without becoming discursive, like a novelist, and so indiscreet and prosaic,’ I said to myself, ‘I shall, if good luck or bad luck make my life interesting, be a great poet; for it will no longer be a matter of literature at all.’ Yet when I re-read those early poems which gave me so much trouble, I find little but romantic convention, unconscious drama. It is so many years before one can believe enough in what one feels even to know what the feeling is. [p105]
...I took great pleasure in certain allusions to the singer’s life one finds in old romances and ballads, and thought his presence there all the more poignant because we discover it half lost, like portly Chaucer, behind his own maunciple and pardoner upon the Canterbury roads... Elaborate modern psychology sounds egotistical, I thought, when it speaks in the first person, but not those simple emotions which resemble the more, the more powerful they are, everybody’s emotion, and I was soon to write many poems where an always personal emotion was woven into a general pattern of myth and symbol. When the Fenian poet says his heart has grown cold and callous – ‘For thy hapless fate, dear Ireland, and sorrows of my own’ – he but follows tradition, and if he does not move us deeply, it is because he has no sensuous musical vocabulary that comes at need, without compelling him to sedentary toil and so driving him out from his fellows. I thought to create that sensuous, musical vocabulary, and not for myself only, but that I might leave it to later Irish poets, much as a mediaeval Japanese painter left his style as an inheritance to his family, and I was careful to use a traditional manner and matter, yet changed by that toil, impelled by my share in Cain’s curse, by all that sterile modern complication, by my ‘originality’, as the newspapers call it, did something altogether different... My mind began drifting vaguely towards that doctrine of ‘the mask’, which has convinced me that every passionate man (I have nothing to do with mechanist, or philanthropist, or man whose eyes have no preference) is, as it were, linked with another age, historical or imaginary, where alone he finds images that rouse his energy. [p139]
‘Olive Schreiner’, he* said once to me, ‘is staying in the East End because that is the only place where people do not wear masks upon their faces, but I have told her that I live in the West End because nothing in life interests me but the mask.’ [p147. *Oscar Wilde]
A young Irish poet** who wrote excellently but had the worst manners, was to say a few years later, ‘you do not talk like a poet, you talk like a man of letters’, [**James Joyce] ... I was full of thought, often very abstract thought, longing all the while to be full of images, because I had gone to the art schools instead of a university. Yet even if I had gone to a university, and learned all the classical foundations of English literature and English culture, all the great erudition which once accepted frees the mind from restlessness, I should have had to give up my Irish subject matter, or attempt to found a new tradition. .. I knew almost from the start that to overflow with reasons was to be not quite well-born and when I could I hid them, as men hide a disagreeable ancestry; and that there was no help for it, seeing that my country was not born at all. [p148]
My father preferred a comparison to a musical instrument so strung that if we touch a string all the strings murmer faintly. There is not more desire, he said, in lust than true love, but in true love desire awakens pity, hope, affection, admiration, and, given appropriate circumstance, every emotion possible to men. [p164]
If Chaucer’s personages had disengaged themselves from Chaucer’s crowd, forgot their common goal and shrine, and after sundry magnifications became each in turn the centre of some Elizabethan play, and had after split into their elements and so given birth to Romantic poetry, must I reverse the cinematograph? I thought that the general movement of literature must be such a reversal, men being there displayed in casual, temporary, contact as at the Tabard door... I could not endure, however, an international art, picking stories and symbols where it pleased. Might I not, with health and good luck to aid me, create some new Prometheus Unbound, Patrick or Columcille, Oisin or Finn, in Prometheus’ stead, and instead of Caucasus, Cro-Patrick or Ben Bulben? Have not all races had their first unity from a mythology that marries them to rock and hill? We had in Ireland magnificent stories, which the uneducated classes knew and even sang, and might we not make those stories current among the educated classes, rediscovering for the work’s sake what I have called ‘ the applied arts of literature’, the association of literature, that is, with music, speech and dance, and at last, it might be, so deepened the political passion of the nation that all, artist and poet, craftsman and day-labourer, would accept a common design? Perhaps even these images, once created and associated with river and mountain, might move of themselves and with some powerful, even turbulent life, like those painted horses that trampled the rice-fields of Japan. [p167]
Metrical composition is always very difficult to me, nothing is done upon the first day, not one rhyme in its place; and when at last the rhymes begin to come, the first rough draft of a six-line stanza takes the whole day. At that time I had not formed a style, and sometimes a six-line stanza would take several days, and not seem finished even then; and I had not learnt, as I have now, to put it all out of my head before night, and so the last night was generally sleepless, and the last day a day of strain. But now I had found the happiness that Shelley found when he tied a pamphlet to a fire balloon. [p171]
Is it not certain that the Creator yawns in earthquakes and thunder and other popular displays, but toils in rounding the delicate spiral of a shell? [p202]
When Locker’s French translator Coste asked him how, if there were no ‘innate ideas’, he could explain the skill shown by a bird in making its nest, Locke replied, ‘I did not write to explain the actions of dumb creatures’, and his translator thought the answer ‘very good, seeing that he had named his book A Philosophical Essay Upon Human Understanding.’ Henry More, upon the other hand, considered that the bird’s instinct proved the existence of the Anima Mundi, with its ideas and memories. Did modern enlightenment think with Coste that Locke had the better logic, because it was not free to think otherwise? [p212]
I have described elsewhere our discovery that when we passed the door of some peasant’s cottage, we passed out of Europe as that word is understood. ‘I have longed’, she once said, ‘to turn Catholic, that I might be nearer to the people, but you have taught me that paganism brings me nearer still.’ Yet neither she nor those peasants were pagans. Christianity begins to recognize the validity of experiences that preceded its birth and were, in some sense, shard by its founders. [p299]
In using what I considered traditional symbols I forgot that in Ireland they are not symbols but realities. [p309]
I suppose we would be more popular if I could keep from saying what I think and Moore from saying what he does not think. [p320]
When I wrote verse, five or six lines in two or three laborious hours were a day’s work, and I longed for someone to interrupt me; ... [p324]
Last night there was a debate in the Arts Club on a political question. I was for a moment tempted to use arguments merely to answer something said, but did not do so, and noticed that every argument I had been tempted to use was used by somebody or other. Logic is a machine, one can leave it to itself; unhelped it will force those present to exhaust the subject, the fool is as likely as the sage to speak the appropriate answer to any statement, and if an answer is forgotten somebody will go home miserable. [p341]
Evil comes to us men of imagination wearing as its mask all the virtues. Ihave certainly known more men destroyed by the desire to have wife and child and to keep them in comfort than I have seen destroyed by drink and harlots. [p358]
The root of it all is that the political class in Ireland - the lower middle class from whom the patriotic associations have drawn their journalists and their leaders for the last ten years - have suffered through the cultivation of hatred as the one energy of their movement, a deprivation which is the intellectual equivalent to a certain surgical operation. Hence the shrillness of their voices. [p359]
In the eighteenth century Scotland believed itself religious, moral and gloomy, and its national poet Burns came not to speak of these things but to speak of lust and drink and drunken gaiety. Ireland, since the Young Irelanders, has given itself up to apologetics. Every impression of life or impulse of imagination has been examined to see if it helped or hurt the glory of Ireland or the political claim of Ireland. There was no longer an impartial imagination, delighting in whatever is naturally exciting. Synge was the rushing up of the buried fire, an explosion of all that had been denied or refused, a furious impartiality, an indifferent turbulent sorrow. His work, like that of Burns, was to say all the people did not want to have said. He was able to do that because Nature had made him incapable of a political idea. [p384]
Every now and then, when something has stirred my imagination, I begin talking to myself. I speak in my own person and dramatise myself, very much as I have seen a mad old woman do upon the Dublin quays, and sometimes detect myself speaking and moving as if I were still young, or walking perhaps like an old man with fumbling steps. Occasionally I write out what I have said in verse, ... I do not think of my soliloquies as having different literary qualities. They stir my interest, by their appropriateness to the men I imagine myself to be, or by their accurate description of some emotional circumstance, more than by any aesthetic value. When I begin to write I have no object but to find for them some natural speech, rhythm and syntax, and to set it out in some pattern, so seeming old that it may seem all men’s speech, and though the labour is very great, I seem to have used no faculty peculiar to myself, certainly no special gift. I print the poem and never hear about it again, until I find the book years after with a page dog-eared by some young man, or marked by some girl with a violet, and when I have seen that, I am a little ashamed, as though somebody were to attribute to me a delicacy of feeling I should but do not possess. What came so easily at first, and amidst so much drama, and was written so laboriously at the last, cannot be counted among my possessions. [p392]
If I had been a lyric poet only, if I had not become through this theatre the representative of a public movement, I doubt if the English committees would have placed my name upon that list from which the Swedish Academy selects its prize-winners... those dog-eared pages, those pressed violets, upon which the fame of a lyric poet depends at the last, might without it have found no strong voice. [p405]
I think when Lady Gregory’s name and John Synge’s name are spoken by future generations, my name, if remembered, will come up in the talk, and that if my name is spoken first their names will come in their turn because of the years we worked together. [p406]
When Scotland thought herself gloomy and religious, Providence restored her imaginative spontaneity by rising up Robert Burns to commend drink and the devil. I did not, however, see what was to come when I advised John Synge to go to a wild island off the Galway coast and study its life because that ‘had never been expressed in literature’. ... Burns himself could not have more shocked a gathering of Scots clergy than did he our players.. [p416]
Quotes
Once after breakfast Dowden read us some chapters of the unpublished Life of Shelley, and I who had made the Prometheus Unbound my sacred book was delighted with all he read... [p95]
Living in a free world, accustomed to the gay exaggeration of the talk of equals, of men who talk and write to discover truth and not for popular instruction, ... [p96][about his father]
We should write out our thoughts in as nearly as possible the language we thought them in, as though in a letter to an intimate friend. We should not disguise them in any way, for our lives give them force as the lives of people in plays gives force to their words. Personal utterance, which had almost ceased in English literature, could be as fine an escape from rhetoric and abstraction as drama itself. But my father would hear of nothing but drama, personal utterance was only egotism. I knew it was not, but as yet did not know how to explain the difference. I tried from that on to write out my emotions exactly as they came to me in life, not changing them to make them more beautiful. ‘If I can be sincere and make my language natural, and without becoming discursive, like a novelist, and so indiscreet and prosaic,’ I said to myself, ‘I shall, if good luck or bad luck make my life interesting, be a great poet; for it will no longer be a matter of literature at all.’ Yet when I re-read those early poems which gave me so much trouble, I find little but romantic convention, unconscious drama. It is so many years before one can believe enough in what one feels even to know what the feeling is. [p105]
...I took great pleasure in certain allusions to the singer’s life one finds in old romances and ballads, and thought his presence there all the more poignant because we discover it half lost, like portly Chaucer, behind his own maunciple and pardoner upon the Canterbury roads... Elaborate modern psychology sounds egotistical, I thought, when it speaks in the first person, but not those simple emotions which resemble the more, the more powerful they are, everybody’s emotion, and I was soon to write many poems where an always personal emotion was woven into a general pattern of myth and symbol. When the Fenian poet says his heart has grown cold and callous – ‘For thy hapless fate, dear Ireland, and sorrows of my own’ – he but follows tradition, and if he does not move us deeply, it is because he has no sensuous musical vocabulary that comes at need, without compelling him to sedentary toil and so driving him out from his fellows. I thought to create that sensuous, musical vocabulary, and not for myself only, but that I might leave it to later Irish poets, much as a mediaeval Japanese painter left his style as an inheritance to his family, and I was careful to use a traditional manner and matter, yet changed by that toil, impelled by my share in Cain’s curse, by all that sterile modern complication, by my ‘originality’, as the newspapers call it, did something altogether different... My mind began drifting vaguely towards that doctrine of ‘the mask’, which has convinced me that every passionate man (I have nothing to do with mechanist, or philanthropist, or man whose eyes have no preference) is, as it were, linked with another age, historical or imaginary, where alone he finds images that rouse his energy. [p139]
‘Olive Schreiner’, he* said once to me, ‘is staying in the East End because that is the only place where people do not wear masks upon their faces, but I have told her that I live in the West End because nothing in life interests me but the mask.’ [p147. *Oscar Wilde]
A young Irish poet** who wrote excellently but had the worst manners, was to say a few years later, ‘you do not talk like a poet, you talk like a man of letters’, [**James Joyce] ... I was full of thought, often very abstract thought, longing all the while to be full of images, because I had gone to the art schools instead of a university. Yet even if I had gone to a university, and learned all the classical foundations of English literature and English culture, all the great erudition which once accepted frees the mind from restlessness, I should have had to give up my Irish subject matter, or attempt to found a new tradition. .. I knew almost from the start that to overflow with reasons was to be not quite well-born and when I could I hid them, as men hide a disagreeable ancestry; and that there was no help for it, seeing that my country was not born at all. [p148]
My father preferred a comparison to a musical instrument so strung that if we touch a string all the strings murmer faintly. There is not more desire, he said, in lust than true love, but in true love desire awakens pity, hope, affection, admiration, and, given appropriate circumstance, every emotion possible to men. [p164]
If Chaucer’s personages had disengaged themselves from Chaucer’s crowd, forgot their common goal and shrine, and after sundry magnifications became each in turn the centre of some Elizabethan play, and had after split into their elements and so given birth to Romantic poetry, must I reverse the cinematograph? I thought that the general movement of literature must be such a reversal, men being there displayed in casual, temporary, contact as at the Tabard door... I could not endure, however, an international art, picking stories and symbols where it pleased. Might I not, with health and good luck to aid me, create some new Prometheus Unbound, Patrick or Columcille, Oisin or Finn, in Prometheus’ stead, and instead of Caucasus, Cro-Patrick or Ben Bulben? Have not all races had their first unity from a mythology that marries them to rock and hill? We had in Ireland magnificent stories, which the uneducated classes knew and even sang, and might we not make those stories current among the educated classes, rediscovering for the work’s sake what I have called ‘ the applied arts of literature’, the association of literature, that is, with music, speech and dance, and at last, it might be, so deepened the political passion of the nation that all, artist and poet, craftsman and day-labourer, would accept a common design? Perhaps even these images, once created and associated with river and mountain, might move of themselves and with some powerful, even turbulent life, like those painted horses that trampled the rice-fields of Japan. [p167]
Metrical composition is always very difficult to me, nothing is done upon the first day, not one rhyme in its place; and when at last the rhymes begin to come, the first rough draft of a six-line stanza takes the whole day. At that time I had not formed a style, and sometimes a six-line stanza would take several days, and not seem finished even then; and I had not learnt, as I have now, to put it all out of my head before night, and so the last night was generally sleepless, and the last day a day of strain. But now I had found the happiness that Shelley found when he tied a pamphlet to a fire balloon. [p171]
Is it not certain that the Creator yawns in earthquakes and thunder and other popular displays, but toils in rounding the delicate spiral of a shell? [p202]
When Locker’s French translator Coste asked him how, if there were no ‘innate ideas’, he could explain the skill shown by a bird in making its nest, Locke replied, ‘I did not write to explain the actions of dumb creatures’, and his translator thought the answer ‘very good, seeing that he had named his book A Philosophical Essay Upon Human Understanding.’ Henry More, upon the other hand, considered that the bird’s instinct proved the existence of the Anima Mundi, with its ideas and memories. Did modern enlightenment think with Coste that Locke had the better logic, because it was not free to think otherwise? [p212]
I have described elsewhere our discovery that when we passed the door of some peasant’s cottage, we passed out of Europe as that word is understood. ‘I have longed’, she once said, ‘to turn Catholic, that I might be nearer to the people, but you have taught me that paganism brings me nearer still.’ Yet neither she nor those peasants were pagans. Christianity begins to recognize the validity of experiences that preceded its birth and were, in some sense, shard by its founders. [p299]
In using what I considered traditional symbols I forgot that in Ireland they are not symbols but realities. [p309]
I suppose we would be more popular if I could keep from saying what I think and Moore from saying what he does not think. [p320]
When I wrote verse, five or six lines in two or three laborious hours were a day’s work, and I longed for someone to interrupt me; ... [p324]
Last night there was a debate in the Arts Club on a political question. I was for a moment tempted to use arguments merely to answer something said, but did not do so, and noticed that every argument I had been tempted to use was used by somebody or other. Logic is a machine, one can leave it to itself; unhelped it will force those present to exhaust the subject, the fool is as likely as the sage to speak the appropriate answer to any statement, and if an answer is forgotten somebody will go home miserable. [p341]
Evil comes to us men of imagination wearing as its mask all the virtues. Ihave certainly known more men destroyed by the desire to have wife and child and to keep them in comfort than I have seen destroyed by drink and harlots. [p358]
The root of it all is that the political class in Ireland - the lower middle class from whom the patriotic associations have drawn their journalists and their leaders for the last ten years - have suffered through the cultivation of hatred as the one energy of their movement, a deprivation which is the intellectual equivalent to a certain surgical operation. Hence the shrillness of their voices. [p359]
In the eighteenth century Scotland believed itself religious, moral and gloomy, and its national poet Burns came not to speak of these things but to speak of lust and drink and drunken gaiety. Ireland, since the Young Irelanders, has given itself up to apologetics. Every impression of life or impulse of imagination has been examined to see if it helped or hurt the glory of Ireland or the political claim of Ireland. There was no longer an impartial imagination, delighting in whatever is naturally exciting. Synge was the rushing up of the buried fire, an explosion of all that had been denied or refused, a furious impartiality, an indifferent turbulent sorrow. His work, like that of Burns, was to say all the people did not want to have said. He was able to do that because Nature had made him incapable of a political idea. [p384]
Every now and then, when something has stirred my imagination, I begin talking to myself. I speak in my own person and dramatise myself, very much as I have seen a mad old woman do upon the Dublin quays, and sometimes detect myself speaking and moving as if I were still young, or walking perhaps like an old man with fumbling steps. Occasionally I write out what I have said in verse, ... I do not think of my soliloquies as having different literary qualities. They stir my interest, by their appropriateness to the men I imagine myself to be, or by their accurate description of some emotional circumstance, more than by any aesthetic value. When I begin to write I have no object but to find for them some natural speech, rhythm and syntax, and to set it out in some pattern, so seeming old that it may seem all men’s speech, and though the labour is very great, I seem to have used no faculty peculiar to myself, certainly no special gift. I print the poem and never hear about it again, until I find the book years after with a page dog-eared by some young man, or marked by some girl with a violet, and when I have seen that, I am a little ashamed, as though somebody were to attribute to me a delicacy of feeling I should but do not possess. What came so easily at first, and amidst so much drama, and was written so laboriously at the last, cannot be counted among my possessions. [p392]
If I had been a lyric poet only, if I had not become through this theatre the representative of a public movement, I doubt if the English committees would have placed my name upon that list from which the Swedish Academy selects its prize-winners... those dog-eared pages, those pressed violets, upon which the fame of a lyric poet depends at the last, might without it have found no strong voice. [p405]
I think when Lady Gregory’s name and John Synge’s name are spoken by future generations, my name, if remembered, will come up in the talk, and that if my name is spoken first their names will come in their turn because of the years we worked together. [p406]
When Scotland thought herself gloomy and religious, Providence restored her imaginative spontaneity by rising up Robert Burns to commend drink and the devil. I did not, however, see what was to come when I advised John Synge to go to a wild island off the Galway coast and study its life because that ‘had never been expressed in literature’. ... Burns himself could not have more shocked a gathering of Scots clergy than did he our players.. [p416]
April 29, 2020
After reading this I'm so impressed with WBY and his achievements. However, I'm still left wondering about his love affair with Maude Gonne; but those questions I have will likely remain unanswered; a mystery for the ages.
This book was part of my ODWG Readathon 2020. ODWG stands for Old Dead White Guys, the target of so much ire and irrationality in our current literary world. In spite of their horrible reputation, I find that ODWG's quite frequently have some very insightful and inspiring stories to tell, so I still read them. Not only do I read them, but these days I seek them out purposely. Why? For the same reason I embraced punk fashion in 1978: because I like to shock and upset the rigid little minds of the uptight, stodgy and hopelessly narrow minded dump-puppets.
Mind you, I'm not exclusively reading only ODWG works; I also read books written by women, living persons and authors of non-white ethnicity, However, they must be quality and catch my interest in some way; I'm not an identity-based reader. If you are an identity based reader and intend to scold me for not being more inclusive in my reading habits, I have a suggestion: grab a hammer and head for the nearest beach; proceed to use the hammer to pack sand up you ass until it's quite full, then fuck off and die. Also, keep in mind that your scolding will likely have the opposite effect and in 2021 I will read only ODWG works, so maybe just keep it to yourself and mind your own fucking business for once.
This book was part of my ODWG Readathon 2020. ODWG stands for Old Dead White Guys, the target of so much ire and irrationality in our current literary world. In spite of their horrible reputation, I find that ODWG's quite frequently have some very insightful and inspiring stories to tell, so I still read them. Not only do I read them, but these days I seek them out purposely. Why? For the same reason I embraced punk fashion in 1978: because I like to shock and upset the rigid little minds of the uptight, stodgy and hopelessly narrow minded dump-puppets.
Mind you, I'm not exclusively reading only ODWG works; I also read books written by women, living persons and authors of non-white ethnicity, However, they must be quality and catch my interest in some way; I'm not an identity-based reader. If you are an identity based reader and intend to scold me for not being more inclusive in my reading habits, I have a suggestion: grab a hammer and head for the nearest beach; proceed to use the hammer to pack sand up you ass until it's quite full, then fuck off and die. Also, keep in mind that your scolding will likely have the opposite effect and in 2021 I will read only ODWG works, so maybe just keep it to yourself and mind your own fucking business for once.
October 5, 2012
This is one of those books you want to chip away at. It's not really an autobiography, but an anthology of autobiographical essays, bits from journals, speeches, etc. That means Yeats assumes that any one reading these pieces will already have a vested interest in and familiarity with his subjects. He refers to contemporary people and political situations that average readers simply won't be familiar with. And his discussions of the various Theosophical initiatives are infused with metaphors and symbols that can be hard to follow. So if a reader wants to learn about WBY, best to start elsewhere.
However, this is the writing of the man himself. It's wonderful. And it is still relevant. I wish politicians on both sides of the aisle would heed his warnings. Yeats laments the fact that the cause for Irish nationalism is whipped up more by hatred of the British than by a considered, logical approach to self-government. And he regrets that political leaders rely on the easy tactics of inciting the mob: "The greater the enemy, the greater the hatred, and therefore the greater seems the power. They would give a nation the frenzy of a sect."
Indeed!
However, this is the writing of the man himself. It's wonderful. And it is still relevant. I wish politicians on both sides of the aisle would heed his warnings. Yeats laments the fact that the cause for Irish nationalism is whipped up more by hatred of the British than by a considered, logical approach to self-government. And he regrets that political leaders rely on the easy tactics of inciting the mob: "The greater the enemy, the greater the hatred, and therefore the greater seems the power. They would give a nation the frenzy of a sect."
Indeed!
September 12, 2019
It takes a special amount of ego to write an autobiography of 500 pages, and having now read Yeats’ views on his life and himself, I am thoroughly less impressed with him as a whole and wish I had stuck with just his poetry.
He notes how he was constantly failing his lessons in his younger years, and I do not doubt that to be the case as I found many of his paragraphs to be utterly pointless, rambling and devoid of a single transition of thought.
He notes how he was constantly failing his lessons in his younger years, and I do not doubt that to be the case as I found many of his paragraphs to be utterly pointless, rambling and devoid of a single transition of thought.
August 30, 2014
Er... well, this is awkward. I love Yeats's Celtic Twilight. I love his poetry. I love his collections of Irish folklore. I haven't tried reading his plays yet. I thought I would give his autobiography a chance. I made it some 50 or 55 pages in before finally giving up. Sorry, Yeats, but your childhood really wasn't all that exciting...
April 18, 2009
Why don't college professors tell you that Yeats believed in magic when they have you read his poems? Kind of important. Don't ya think?
January 10, 2023
En la medida en que van pasando los años, decrece el interés por lo que le ocurre. Sin embargo, la selección de los episodios de si infancia y juventud son narrados con tal calidad narrativa que es fácil imaginar por qué significaron tanto en su proceso de conversión a poeta.
El libro carga con un pecado fundamental: no motiva a leer sus poemas, Aunque sí sus otros dos tomos autobiográficos.
El libro carga con un pecado fundamental: no motiva a leer sus poemas, Aunque sí sus otros dos tomos autobiográficos.
April 16, 2025
Not really an autobiography, except for the first part about his childhood. More a compilation of musings about Irish politics and other famous literary people he knew. Apparently Yeats was married and had children, but there is hardly a word about them in all of this. I feel like I learned less about W. B.Yeats and more about the world he lived in. Not what I expected or was hoping for.
January 12, 2026
The beginning with the childhood of Yeats and the end speaking on his Nobel prize win are great. The center, which mostly talks about Yeats' interest in the occult is less so, gets clogged and loses the narrative voice of the other parts. Interesting that there's more a focus on Lady Gregory and Synge than Yeats' own wife and children.
July 25, 2021
It made me suddenly feel the compelling need to study the classics, learn Latin, and "get a real education".
September 30, 2024
Being and nothingness
September 17, 2025
This book is a collection of autobiographies, and a few published journals, written & published by Yeats in his lifetime. The bulk of the collection is the trilogy, Reveries Over Childhood And Youth, Trembling of the Veil, and Dramatis Personae, which together cover the first thirty or so years of Yeats' life; the rest are a series of shorter biographical essays and journalistic aphorisms. Yeats is a supremely good writer of prose, utterly smooth & full of highly-charactered maximalist descriptions that would make his idol Balzac proud but, while having a excellent gift for character portraits and evocations of atmosphere, he tends to have very little to say beyond his literal memories. The most interesting volume, Trembling of the Veil, has some interesting discussions of the 'tragic generation' of Victorian poets, such as Lionel Johnson, and a frantic cabbalistic analysis of Oscar Wilde's 'fall' as the cosmological trigger for the horrors of the 20th century (Yeats wrote these in the 20s at the height of Irish political violence) that is developed into a wild mystical reverie in Dramatis Personae; the Trembling Of The Veil is also sprinkled with a large number of apt judgements of writers Yeats knew as a youth, and a tantalizingly small but very insightful number of comments on his own youthful poetic genesis. The rest of the book features some relatively uninteresting journal collections (aside from a brief account of the death of John Synge), while the Bounty of Sweden is mostly interesting for the Nobel Prize Lecture appended to the end, which is a good basic overview of the Irish theatrical revival.
While I prefer RF Foster's thoroughly detailed (and good) biography of the poet, this book is probably the most enjoyable way to learn the basic details of Yeats' upbringing and formative years as a writer. That said, I think you'd have to be a Yeats mega-fan to begin with in order to want to read this book.
While I prefer RF Foster's thoroughly detailed (and good) biography of the poet, this book is probably the most enjoyable way to learn the basic details of Yeats' upbringing and formative years as a writer. That said, I think you'd have to be a Yeats mega-fan to begin with in order to want to read this book.
April 4, 2015
This book is not so much an intended autobiography as it is a collection of autobiographical writings that cover a large portion of the great poet's life. As such, there is some repetition of incidents, but they are individually and collectively instructive as there are nuances revealed about the writer in his reactions and opinions at the stage of life when the comments were penned. The same can be said about the friends, acquaintances and family members mentioned in the writings. An evolutionary portrait of Yeats emerges from the network of writings, illuminating for the careful and critical reader. While I would have appreciated more introspective comments about his own poetry, such as the geneses of the particular poems and the personal significance of the the symbols and archetypes used, I gained a great deal of insight into the poet as man, which allows me to re-read the poems with a new appreciation of the mind and intellect behind them.
July 7, 2023
Had a little attack of A.D.D while reading this and had to just not read for a while. This is a good read. You get a picture of Ireland and Irish issues during Yeats's time. A couple hilarious incidents and fascinating characters. I laughed a little too hard at other little kids calling Yeats "Doctor Death" or if not that something like that because because he was so sickly and pale as a child. Some of the content was lost to me for just being a little boring and too long ago to have much relevance, but if you love Yeats, you won't mind this one. Was happy he included one of my favorite Tennyson lines from In Memoriam "man may rise on stepping-stones of his dead selves to higher things."
January 14, 2011
Mr. Yeats definitely lived in some interesting times. It's probably a good thing to know something about Ireland from that time to better appreciate the book but one can still enjoy it for what it is. My only wish was that he would of talked more about his involvement with the Golden Dawn. He touched on meeting Mathers and being involved with him and some of his own experiments but that's it.
April 18, 2022
Did not enjoy it at all. It's a collection of half-baked autobiographies. All in different style and tone. The chapter on Dramatis Personas was interesting as it deals with George Moore, whose autobiography I read last week. The bounty of Sweden and his lecture given to Royal Academy of Sweden was also interesting
August 28, 2021
Reading Yeats was recommended by Fadiman and Major in their "New Lifetime Reading Plan". Previously, I knew nothing about him. Now I know something about him. I've gained knowledge and I should be happy. But ...
December 10, 2012
an excellent collection of work to cobble together to make an autobiography. worth reading just for the journal extracts 2/3 of the way in.
Read
January 23, 2013reading sections for literature class
December 9, 2016
Love this poet
September 25, 2021
Jesusssssss this was boooooooooring. essential to knowing the poetry but I see why we remember yeats as a poet and not a prose writer
April 4, 2023
The first 200 pages showed promise and then it wandered off into a dull reverie that I couldn't be bothered with. Not to be recommended
April 19, 2017
It is done--and it only took me more than a month.
Dear lord, I'm exhausted.
I don't think I will be picking another book from the Open Library in the near future.
Even though it is turning my back and shoulders into an always aching remembrance, I prefer having ten physical books to read from than virtual ones.
Dear lord, I'm exhausted.
I don't think I will be picking another book from the Open Library in the near future.
Even though it is turning my back and shoulders into an always aching remembrance, I prefer having ten physical books to read from than virtual ones.
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