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W.B. Yeats, A Life #1
W.B. Yeats, A Life: The Apprentice Mage, 1865 - 1914
In the first authorized biography of W.B. Yeats for over fifty years, Roy Foster sheds new light on one of the most complex and fascinating lives of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Working from a great archive of personal and contemporary material, he dramatically alters traditional perceptions to illuminate the poet's family history, relationships, politics and art. From a childhood inheritance of déclassé Irish Protestantism with strong nationalist sympathies, and an exceptional and talented family background, the narrative charts Yeats's development into an original and outstanding poet. It ends in his fiftieth year with the controversies and disillusionment affecting his personal and public life at the time of the First World War. A bohemian life of uncertain finances, love-affairs, avant-garde friends and experiments with drugs and occultism prefaces his attempt to unite politics with high culture and his creation of an Irish national theatre. Constantly shifting between Dublin, Coole Park and London, with forays to America and Paris, ruthlessly constructing a public life as well as a creative reputation, Yeats's genius attracted admirers and enemies with equal passion. His story intersects with those of an engrossing cast of characters including Lady Gregory, J. M. Synge, George Moore, `AE', Ezra Pound and above all Maud Gonne - an influence eternally re-created `like the phoenix', affecting almost everything he did. The search for supernatural wisdom forms a constant thread, traced through Yeats's occult notebooks and closely related to the insecurities of his personal life. The Apprentice Mage charts the growth of a poet's mind and of an astonishing personality, both of which were instrumental in the formation of a new and radicalized Irish nationalist identity.
704 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1997
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Displaying 1 - 21 of 21 reviews
September 27, 2019
At one point, my brain suddenly decided that W.B. Yeats should be pronounced as 'Wubba Yeats'. Henceforth, at random moments, it would spontaneously fart out, in a Fred Flintstone voice, "WUBBA WUBBA YEEEEEEATS!"
This did not improve my reading experience and was clearly inappropriate for a poet best remembered as a lyricist and mystic.
Real review to come.
This did not improve my reading experience and was clearly inappropriate for a poet best remembered as a lyricist and mystic.
Real review to come.
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September 26, 2008The first volume of Irish historian Roy Foster's two-volume biography of the great poet William Butler Yeats covers the poet's life from birth to the outbreak of World War I. The subtitle 'The Apprentice Mage' refers to Yeats's obsession with magic and the occult, and his efforts to write poetry that could, like a magic spell, alter physical reality by tapping into a spiritual substratum of consciousness and destiny. This book is a history of Yeats's life more than a critique of his poetry and so deals with his dealings and relationships more than the symbols or cadences of the poems. Yeats himself emerges as a brilliant, self-absorbed, repressed elitist confounded by a powerful yet ambivalent relationship with a father who was also a talented artist and a woman - Maud Gonne - who always stayed just beyond his reach. Roy Foster feels a deep kinship with Yeats as he too has spent an accomplished professional life stressing the need to make credible an Anglo-Irish identity that could compete with the Gaelic (Catholic)Irish-Ireland identity of the Irish republican movement. The most important reason to read this book is that it will make you interested in the poems, and despite Yeats's efforts at drama, novel-writing, essays and politics he is only worthy of a two-volume 1,200 page biograohy because he was one of the greatest poets in the entire history of the English language. Ireland has produced, and still produces, as many great poets per capita as any country in the world but in the broad stretch from the Gaelic 'fili' to the postmodern present, Willie Yeats is still the best of them all.
February 20, 2013
A carefully written, fundamentally interesting study bogged down in way too much detail about feuds with people who have, historically speaking, turned out to be insignificant. Yeats, like too many writers, made enemies as easily as he made friends. The Abbey Theater years, in particular, seemed to bring out the worst in him and the other people involved.
Redeeming features: a decent treatment of Lady Augusta Gregory that gives her full credit for her accomplishments without the usual male scholar need to sneer at her. Likewise for Maud Gonne, a women in the wrong era to be who she needed to be.
Redeeming features: a decent treatment of Lady Augusta Gregory that gives her full credit for her accomplishments without the usual male scholar need to sneer at her. Likewise for Maud Gonne, a women in the wrong era to be who she needed to be.
March 21, 2019
Effective poetry is always a synthesis. While the energy of composition is driven by the poet’s emotion, its shape and structure is governed by language and received ideas. Deeply personal feelings give agency to the first draft, but the finished product must ring just as true to strangers as lifelong confidants. Politics, love life, myths and mysticism, the natural world--great poetry incorporates and harmonizes across the spheres of human experience.
According to R.F. Foster’s staggering first volume of a two-volume biography, Yeats understood this from a relatively young age, and prosecuted his ambitions accordingly. Foster strives to present the unified Yeats, a man who at once pursues multiple serious lives, all ultimately in the service of a single purpose. Each page of this biography reveals a meticulously woven fabric of of Yeats’ occultist, political, literary, family, social, and sexual lives. The level of attention to detail from primary sources is at first overwhelming, but with time, the reader adjusts to the steady and diverse letters written by a large cast of characters.
Foster’s scope in this first volume is not the Yeats childhood or his education. Instead, the book covers nearly half a century; pretty much everything he does prior to a late marriage. Much of the book is thus devoted to the Abbey Theater and his collaborations with Isobella Augusta (aka Lady Gregory), who functions as his principal patron, work-spouse, co-researcher into theatrical writer, and occasional amanumensus (Yeats suffered from terrible eyesight). Foster’s history of the Abbey Theater seems to culminate in John Synge’s Playboy of the Western World, which in this biography seems to eclipse in significance and impact every other play at the Abbey, including those by Yeats himself. Not being an expert in drama myself, I am inclined to take Foster’s word for it, but Yeats’ own reflections after Synge’s early death at 37 buttress the case.
I was fascinated with how Foster handles Yeats’ relationship to the occult. By and large, he sticks to reporting the facts available, which include Yeats’ dalliance with theosophy, his involvement (and leadership) with the Order of the Golden Dawn, his reliance on astrological forecasting, his frequenting of seances, and and overall tendency to filter his life and experiences through a lens of superstition.
Though Foster does not label it as such. Occasionally one gets the hint of a sneer from Foster, who regularly debunks to Yeats’ latest paranormal “discoveries” (.e.g ghost photography), but he explicitly connects how strongly his occult enthusiasms correlate with periods of literary productivity.
Which is not to say correlation equals causation--my statement, not Foster’s. Foster lets his reader’s imagination fill in the blanks, so the skeptic can snicker at Yeats’ gullibility and the fellow traveller can marvel at Yeats’ tireless search. Yhe most cynical view is that Yeats believed little of it himself, and leveraged a turn-of-the-century interest in occult to accumulate social power, forge alliances, manipulate or outflank rivals, and build a cult of personality. Yeats-as-Machiavelli has its weaknesses as a thesis, though Foster is unafraid to show the poet at his most ruthless. In particular, Yeats extracts a small fortune from occult connection and theater patron Annie Horniman by carefully managing her ego, all while minimizing her role and influence. Once she figures out how badly she’s been used, her letters of furious grievance are painful if unintentionally hilarious.
Foster’s larger interest in this volume is Ireland itself. Keen to probe the nature and significance of Yeats’ nationalism, Foster minutely parses every aspect of Yeats’ life to show how it relates to the development of an independent Irish state. Yeats’ shift from middle-class bourgeois Protestest to his later identification with Ireland’s aristocracy clashes with his youthful association with Sinn Fein radicalism, his poetry’s debt to political rebellion and self-sacrifice, and above all, his lifelong love for Maud Gonne, the radical political operative, rabble-rouser, and fellow occult power-user.
Above all Foster’s book is worth the time commitment. Not just for those interested in the poetry of Yeats, but for anyone interested in life as a grand experiment.
According to R.F. Foster’s staggering first volume of a two-volume biography, Yeats understood this from a relatively young age, and prosecuted his ambitions accordingly. Foster strives to present the unified Yeats, a man who at once pursues multiple serious lives, all ultimately in the service of a single purpose. Each page of this biography reveals a meticulously woven fabric of of Yeats’ occultist, political, literary, family, social, and sexual lives. The level of attention to detail from primary sources is at first overwhelming, but with time, the reader adjusts to the steady and diverse letters written by a large cast of characters.
Foster’s scope in this first volume is not the Yeats childhood or his education. Instead, the book covers nearly half a century; pretty much everything he does prior to a late marriage. Much of the book is thus devoted to the Abbey Theater and his collaborations with Isobella Augusta (aka Lady Gregory), who functions as his principal patron, work-spouse, co-researcher into theatrical writer, and occasional amanumensus (Yeats suffered from terrible eyesight). Foster’s history of the Abbey Theater seems to culminate in John Synge’s Playboy of the Western World, which in this biography seems to eclipse in significance and impact every other play at the Abbey, including those by Yeats himself. Not being an expert in drama myself, I am inclined to take Foster’s word for it, but Yeats’ own reflections after Synge’s early death at 37 buttress the case.
I was fascinated with how Foster handles Yeats’ relationship to the occult. By and large, he sticks to reporting the facts available, which include Yeats’ dalliance with theosophy, his involvement (and leadership) with the Order of the Golden Dawn, his reliance on astrological forecasting, his frequenting of seances, and and overall tendency to filter his life and experiences through a lens of superstition.
Though Foster does not label it as such. Occasionally one gets the hint of a sneer from Foster, who regularly debunks to Yeats’ latest paranormal “discoveries” (.e.g ghost photography), but he explicitly connects how strongly his occult enthusiasms correlate with periods of literary productivity.
Which is not to say correlation equals causation--my statement, not Foster’s. Foster lets his reader’s imagination fill in the blanks, so the skeptic can snicker at Yeats’ gullibility and the fellow traveller can marvel at Yeats’ tireless search. Yhe most cynical view is that Yeats believed little of it himself, and leveraged a turn-of-the-century interest in occult to accumulate social power, forge alliances, manipulate or outflank rivals, and build a cult of personality. Yeats-as-Machiavelli has its weaknesses as a thesis, though Foster is unafraid to show the poet at his most ruthless. In particular, Yeats extracts a small fortune from occult connection and theater patron Annie Horniman by carefully managing her ego, all while minimizing her role and influence. Once she figures out how badly she’s been used, her letters of furious grievance are painful if unintentionally hilarious.
Foster’s larger interest in this volume is Ireland itself. Keen to probe the nature and significance of Yeats’ nationalism, Foster minutely parses every aspect of Yeats’ life to show how it relates to the development of an independent Irish state. Yeats’ shift from middle-class bourgeois Protestest to his later identification with Ireland’s aristocracy clashes with his youthful association with Sinn Fein radicalism, his poetry’s debt to political rebellion and self-sacrifice, and above all, his lifelong love for Maud Gonne, the radical political operative, rabble-rouser, and fellow occult power-user.
Above all Foster’s book is worth the time commitment. Not just for those interested in the poetry of Yeats, but for anyone interested in life as a grand experiment.
October 14, 2019
I have been carrying Yeats' "Collected" around with me for 50 years now. When I was young I marked up so much of it -- trying to explain obscure references to Irish mythology and history -- that there are some poems now that feel almost unreadable.
If I had read this biography back in the day when I was marking up these poems, the Collected would be black with marginalia. In this volume we have the young Yeats who was constantly posing, studying his own image in the world of letters. He was deeply involved in Irish politics and much of his passion -- personal and political -- was measured by history, even in the moment he was living it. He was deeply involved in the occult -- and Foster does an admirable job taking all that very seriously (I'm not sure I could have), and the influence of it all on the poems makes some of that obscurity so much clearer.
Foster is taking his time in this gigantic undertaking, and that allows him to give interesting portraits of the writers and other people around Yeats. It is an immersion in the history of that moment in English and Irish letters.
If I had read this biography back in the day when I was marking up these poems, the Collected would be black with marginalia. In this volume we have the young Yeats who was constantly posing, studying his own image in the world of letters. He was deeply involved in Irish politics and much of his passion -- personal and political -- was measured by history, even in the moment he was living it. He was deeply involved in the occult -- and Foster does an admirable job taking all that very seriously (I'm not sure I could have), and the influence of it all on the poems makes some of that obscurity so much clearer.
Foster is taking his time in this gigantic undertaking, and that allows him to give interesting portraits of the writers and other people around Yeats. It is an immersion in the history of that moment in English and Irish letters.
November 15, 2023
This is pretty much what it claims to be, an exhaustive biography of Yeats. Foster is an historian, author of an excellent general history of Ireland, but seems to know his poesie just as well. This really is huge (this first volume is more than five hundred pages, and the second is even longer, and doubly long for its gigantic pages) and leaves pretty much nothing out; indeed, the thorough tracking of Yeats' finances and living situations, not to mention every point of his business career in the Irish theatre, are sometimes tiring, but this serves its role very well. For those wanting a shorter read I'd probably recommend Ellmann's book on Yeats, which presents itself as a biography but is in fact rather a thorough study of Yeats' esoteric philosophy and poetical style. Foster's book is seemingly written for readers who already know this book, and expands on it, even providing many more outlines of when/how various poems were written.
August 28, 2025
It’s always very hard to explain to others what is good about biography, when it is good. While there’s lots here you might not know, nothing is individually mindblowing, there’s no revelation that Maud Gonne was on the grassy knoll or whatever. But just as you kind of have to take people on trust when they tell you to read a thousand pages on LBJ’s early life, so too I ask you to take me (and, to be fair, basically every major Irish cultural figure from the 1990s) on trust when I tell you:
wow
, this is fucking good.
September 17, 2018
This book was amazing. I would highly recommend it to anyone who wants an in-depth look at the first part of Yeats' life. Foster's research and attention to detail is admirable; it is a brilliant tale, interweaving Yeats' life, Dublin's literary history, and the history of Ireland. Having said this, it did take me a long time to read it and I would not recommend it to someone hoping for a light read to gain a surface knowledge of Yeats' life. It was a difficult read but I am so glad that I chose to read this book.
January 1, 2024
Roy Foster must have visited yeats grave where the lapidary exhortation is horseman pass by. Not only did Foster stop the horse, but he dismounted and spent about a decade investigating yeats' seven decade life. Not a kiss or a ride or a spat with friends colleague or adversary is skipped over. Riveting how a life can be re-run like playing an old vhs tape. If yeats read it, what would he say? He's dead so it doesn't matter and that's what makes Fosters running commentary of a life fully lived so compelling. It takes a while to get used to that level of detail 2 years per chapter, but it does draw you in eventually. But we're only up to 1914 with this volume one. There's the best 25 years to come yet. Another 500 pages.
March 25, 2024
He's nowhere near as lovable as Wilde came across in the Ellman biography but I suppose it makes sense. Wilde spoke (and lived) in unending glib aphorisms and wrote fantastical farcical dialogue, Yeats spoke with profound and (sometimes silly) mystic force and created the most perfectly distilled poetry in history. Wilde was a better person, Yeats a better artist.
Hooooooly moly though, I won't be reading volume two for awhile, this was dense.
Hooooooly moly though, I won't be reading volume two for awhile, this was dense.
July 15, 2020
Remarkable read with wonderful adverbs and adjectives. Occasional biting Irish humor help keep things moving along. Can't wait for Volume 2
August 25, 2020
An academic biography.By that i mean that every detail of the forebears, life, and culture WBY is among is copiously noted and covered.
May 22, 2021
A mighty comprehensive biography on the first part of a mighty complex individual.
May 20, 2014
Although this book was quite an eye-opener as I previously knew little about Yeats I did find it a little bit of an overload. There seemed to be an enormous amount of detail, all referenced and catalogued, and it felt like a lot of repetition as he revised and re-revised his own work. I felt that I was missing the forest because of the wood. This means this is probably a wonderful source for those who are Studying Yeats and know much of the background. A bit of a struggle for me but what impressed me was the seances and beliefs in fairies as well as the backbiting and scrapping within the Abbey theatre which sounds like a really bad AmDram society. Not exactly a fawning biography, this is a warts and all story.
June 30, 2016
I have abandoned this book because I have lost my copy. If I find it I will take it up again. It was difficult but I was going to read it and I am disappointed that this is not going to happen. I only had vol 1 of a two vol work.
May 30, 2016
I was prompted to read this after seeing Foster interviewed by Bob Geldof in his terrific BBC programme about Yeats. It is authoritative and rewarding. As so often though it reminds me that it is that art more than the artist which merits attention.
September 13, 2008
Presumes a solid knowledge of Irish history. This is an historian's take on Yeats, rather than that of a literary critic. Follows the thread of Yeats' life rather than coming at it through the poems.
May 15, 2011
This is scintillating. A mine of information on a much loved poet and author. It is packed full of history, as well as being an absorbing autobiography.
April 18, 2014
Volume 1 of Foster's thick biography is thorough. Boy, is it thorough. Reading it is like running in sand. Uphill.
October 21, 2015
Stupendous first volume of Foster's excellent biography of W.B. Yeats.
December 17, 2025
Yeats and his gentle head.
Displaying 1 - 21 of 21 reviews